Glory's People Read online

  How will my homeworld meet the Terror when it comes, Amaya wondered. Should I even care?

  I must, she thought.

  Duncan said, “Ready? We have a schedule to keep.”

  “Lead, Master and Commander,” she said.

  2. An Orbit Of Yamato

  Glory passed in low orbit over Yamato’s Inland Sea, so called by the Yamatan colonists because it was separated from the Great Ocean by the coastlines of the planet’s three continental islands. It was a sea far more vast than the Japanese Inland Sea of Earth from which it drew its name. Everything was on a larger scale on Planet Yamato. The seas were larger and emptier, the islands were near continents, mountainous and varied. Yet the planet, being less dense, massed only eighty-seven percent Earth normal.

  Yamato had been discovered by a Japanese probe in the decade of the Jihad, and migration had been planned well in advance of the full horror that exploded from the mountains of Asia Minor. The colonists of Yamato prided themselves on their historic--and fortunate--foresight.

  Whether the legends of the Monogatari no Hachiman were true or not, the fact was that three voyages of the Hachiman succeeded in populating the island-continents Honshu, Kyushu, and Takeda. A thousand years after Lander’s Day, the population of Yamato stood at 200,000,000. By any standard, Yamato was one of the more successful colonies of Earth’s Age of the Exodus.

  On Kyushu the colonists had concentrated their heavy manufacturing and their flourishing space program. Once each seventh orbit, the Gloria Coelis overflew the Kyushu City spaceport. It was there that Anya and Duncan had been requested to land their sled. From the spaceport they had then been flown, rather ostentatiously in Cybersurgeon Dietr Krieg’s opinion, by the Yamatans to the planetary capital, Yedo. It was a sophisticated display, and intended to be so. A show, Krieg thought, designed to impress the people of the Gloria Coelis.

  It had succeeded. But Glory, herself, impressed the colonists far more. The last call of the Hachiman had taken place six hundred planetary years ago, and save for old tri-d photographic images and many beautiful (but inaccurate) screens and paintings, there had been nothing to prepare the people of Yamato for the reality of the ancient artifact now orbiting their world.

  The vast ship glistened in the warm light of the G8 star. Her skylar sails were furled on her twenty-kilometer spars, exposing her monofilament rigging to throw spears of light with each change in the angle of the soft light from Amaterasu.

  It pleased Yamatan sensibilities that seen from Earth, their sun was a part of the constellation Cetus, or in their language, Ku-jira, the Whale. Two of Yamato’s three moons, Oda and Toyotomi, were white. Tokugawa’s methane atmosphere shone with a creamy yellow light. With their pelagic primary, they seemed suitable companions for the beautiful Goldenwing that had brought hundreds of thousands of aesthetically trained Yamatans onto their rooftops in a festival mood.

  Already celebrating the approaching Cherry Blossom Front moving north on Honshu, the folk of Yamato had greeted the arrival of Glory with street theater, Noh performances and origami festivals. Orbiting Yamato once each ninety-eight minutes, Glory displayed herself differently on each successive pass.

  Her hull was of woven monomolecular fabric stretched over a titanium frame as fragile and delicate as the skeleton of a bird. The observation domes of her “weather” decks glittered like great diamonds in the yellow light of Amaterasu. There were dozens of smaller transparencies in the ship’s thousand upper compartments, placed under the nine masts so that the Wired Starmen could observe the sails and the work of the “monkeys”--the cybernetic organisms who performed the more dangerous tasks in the rig. These transparencies flashed diamantine in the shifting light.

  Mizzens and foremasts extended ten kilometers from deck to topmast, mainmasts twice that. At the moment, the hove-to ship was being conned by the junior syndics: the Astroprogrammer, Broni Ehrengraf; Damon Ng, the Rigger; and the one-time Supernumerary and present Theoretical Mathematician, young Buele. Broni and Buele had joined the ship in the Luyten Stars.

  Damon Ng, the present watch-keeper, had initialized the cameras on board to make images for the Sailing Directions. Wired sailors never lost an opportunity to add to the Directions.

  Dietr Krieg, the Cybersurgeon, was unoccupied by duties to the ship. While in orbit, Dietr became Supernumerary, and neither he nor the cats of Mira’s pride--no one knew precisely how many there were--had specific duties to perform. This gave the physician time to return to his endless attempts to communicate directly with Mira.

  At this moment Dietr was engaged in a task that both consumed and distressed him, and had ever since he had surgically altered the matriarch of Glory’s pride, connecting her (for good or ill) to the mainframe computer.

  Mira, the ten-year-old queen, sat still as an Egyptian statue on the Cybersurgeon’s worktable. She did this willingly, but somehow with an attitude that expressed weary contempt for Dietr and his inability to communicate with her kind in any meaningful way.

  The radio link Dietr had installed in the cat’s small skull showed only in the hair-thin antenna that made wireless linkage between animal and ship’s computer possible. Nine shiptime years had passed since Krieg performed the surgery. In that time he had repeated the procedure on many of Mira’s kittens. Until he had discovered, thanks to Buele and much to his own chagrin, that the electronic link was no longer vital. Somehow, whether by accident or design, Mira’s offspring had developed the ability to communicate with Glory without further physical intervention by the surgeon.

  Mira and her pride would have been, Dietr often thought, a Terrestrial animal-breeder’s nightmare. Her first litter had resulted from an artificial insemination performed by the Cybersurgeon on his first voyage aboard Glory. The newer members of her pride were the result of random matings among siblings and, in some cases, matings with Mira herself.

  Dietr puzzled over the variety that resulted from so small a gene pool, and he puzzled even more over the strange capabilities of the pride. How did Mira succeed in passing to her offspring the faculties Dietr Krieg thought he alone had the ability to bestow? And why did a ten-year-old queen, who should have been showing the signs of advancing feline middle age, have the physique of a cat just rounding into full maturity? How long would Mira and her kittens live?

  More profound questions remained to be answered. How did Mira and her pride sense the presence of what the syndics of the Gloria Coelis had come to know, chillingly, as the Terror? How did the cats sense--no, it was more precise than that--how did they perceive the force, whatever it was, that had taken life so savagely during the ill-considered attempt to hijack Glory by the bitter people of Nimrud? Without the cats, Glory's syndics would be dead--along with their would-be conquerors--and the Gloria Coelis would be a splintered, scattered wreck drifting between the stars.

  Dietr regarded the cat attentively. There had been a time when Mira and her responses to the doctor’s “modification” would have been simply exhibits in Dietr Krieg’s medical collection. Dietr was aboard the Goldenwing not because he had ever had a calling to become a Wired Starman, but because the time dilation of near-lightspeed gave a man of science the ability to spread--to elongate--his normal span of years, sampling the science of many worlds.

  It had not worked exactly that way. Dietr had sampled many colonial sciences, but few had been the equal of the Terrestrial science he had left light-years and centuries behind. During his tenure as medical syndic aboard Glory, the ship’s wake extended from Sol to Aldrin to the Wolf Stars to Barnard’s Star to Epsilon Indi to Voerster in the Luyten Stars to Ross 248. Nowhere had he found the medical miracles he had been seeking. Instead he had performed them.

  He stared at Mira, who stared back. “And I don’t know how I did it,” he said aloud. “Why won’t you speak to me?”

  Mira’s tail gave a single lash. Somehow he knew that was a message of understanding. Not a caring message. He had been around Glory’s pride long enough to know they ca
red nothing for human ambitions. Theirs was a far more basic world. Perhaps the word was natural. Whatever it was, it lay out there beyond Dietr’s human capabilities.

  “You have taught me humility, you little monster,” he said. “Who would have imagined it?” The Cybersurgeon was not a humble man.

  He used to joke with Duncan, who had a far closer bond with Mira and her get than Dietr, that since he had made Mira what she was, the queen should at least be grateful. Duncan usually replied with some variation on the question: “First you had better discover exactly what she is, don’t you think?”

  As Master and Commander of Goldenwing Gloria Coelis, Duncan needed to know. To a human in Deep Space it was a need as vital as air. If the Terror had a purpose, Duncan believed, it was to consume life. Or perhaps, Dietr thought, it was to teach humankind that it does not belong out here, light-years from Earth.

  Mira arched her back and growled in disagreement; her tail went expressively erect.

  “Damn you, Mira, you do read me. Why can’t I understand you?” He pulled the drogue from his skull and flung it at the rewinding receptacle. Mira stretched, pulled at the fabric of the table with her foreclaws, and trilled at him. He had a fleeting impression of Buele, the so-called idiot savant from Voerster, exchanging--information?--with the cat. With many of the cats.

  Mira leaped from the table to the wall nearest the open valve into the plenum. With another, and dismissive, flick of her tail, she was gone.

  Dietr sat staring at the spot the animal had abandoned. It was near to impossible to conduct reasonable experimental science with an animal who had free will and sentience equal to that of a human being.

  But by God, he thought suddenly. I did read her for a moment. And without the drogue. Was that a breakthrough? It was humbling that the most brilliant medical student ever at Heidelberg now orbited a Japanese planet eleven light-years from Earth, ready to beg for help, and consumed with jealousy of an adolescent lumpen from a world of quarreling Afrikaners--because the lowborn boy could communicate with a colony of near-to-feral cats and the brilliant medic could not. Where was the justice in that?

  With a sigh, he re-stowed his data-collecting gear. Useless, most of it, he thought dourly. He stowed it neatly because that was his habit. When he had done, he headed for the plenum himself. A view of the beautiful planet below the Goldenwing made one feel more important, more competent.

  The terminator lay briefly on 123 degrees west longitude before sweeping onward across the vast expanse of the Inland Sea. Between 120 west and 160 east only scattered small islands, the tops of ancient seamounts risen from the deep sea, broke the surface of the ocean.

  A deepening twilight lay on the western coast of Honshu, the largest of the Yamatan islands and the domain of the Minamoto family, whose daimyo was also the first daimyo of all Planet Yamato. From the Gloria Coelis, orbiting inverted at a height of 239 kilometers, the city of Yedo shone like a pile of gemstones. Thin beads of light extended to the north, south, and east--roads and outlying towns and villages binding Yedo to the smaller communities scattered in profusion across the island-continent. Over the Fuji Mountains and covering most of the eastern coast, a pattern of spring storms formed complex circular cloud formations that were occasionally illuminated by flashes of violet lightning.

  Broni Ehrengraf, confined to the microgravity aboard Glory by the limitations of an artificial heart, floated on her back in the still air of the vast ob-deck. Like Duncan Kr, she was enchanted by the spatial views through the transparent carapace.

  On Broni’s bosom rested one of Mira’s large sons, a black tomcat whom Broni had named Clavius, in honor of a beached Starman whom she had known and honored on her homeworld of Voerster. Whenever she played her balichord, she remembered Black Clavius.

  Broni was a Voertrekkersdatter, daughter of a planetary ruler, the Voertrekker-praesident of Voerster. Her birth had destined her for a loveless political marriage, and her rheumatic heart had condemned her to an early death. The arrival of the Gloria Coelis at Voerster had changed all that--and a great many other things as well.

  Damon Ng, the Rigger, recently relieved on watch by Buele, appeared beside Broni out of the dimness below.

  “Another seaworld,” Damon said. “Duncan must be pleased.”

  Their commander’s affinity for oceans was the subject of many conversations among the junior Starmen aboard Glory.

  In silent companionship the young man and young woman watched the apparent movement of the planet above their heads. The terminator slipped past the western coast of the island-continent of Kyushu. The lights of coastal towns and villages grew dim as the planet rotated and Glory moved on. The deep darkness of night lay on the face of a largely empty planetary ocean.

  At the horizon the syndics could see the burgeoning glow of Moon Hideyoshi. It burst from the sea and climbed precipitously toward the zenith.

  The planet’s satellites were named for the three warlords who unified ancient Japan: Oda Nobunaga, the rustic daimyo (of whom the people of Old Japan had said: “He grew the rice”), Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the peasant general (“He made the paste”) and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the warrior aristocrat (“He ate the cake”). Minamoto no Kami, the ninety-year-old Shogun of Yamato, was descended from the same stock as the legendary Tokugawa.

  The first moon to rise from the sea was the nearest, a mere 260,000 kilometers from Yamato. Moon Oda, at 1,700,000 kilometers mean distance, would rise more slowly. And Ieyasu, the largest and most distant at 2,500,000 kilometers, would rise more slowly still to flood the sea with yellow light. Hideyoshi, thought Broni, like the peasant he was, had leapt into the sky to begin his race for the far horizon.

  Damon, who came from a tree-canopied world where the sky was seldom seen, was always impressed by swiftly moving celestial objects. “How fast it is,” he said.

  “He, Damon. How fast he is. Yamatan colonists speak of celestial objects as masculine. Duncan says we are to get it right. Small things are important to colonists. Duncan says we must be correct.” To take the edge off her Afrikaner tendency to haughtiness, Broni said, “I have been studying with Glory. Do you know why they named him for Hideyoshi?” She took care to pronounce the name correctly, accenting the next to last syllable as Glory’s computer assured her the Yamatans did. She repeated the parable of the rice cakes.

  “Tokugawa Ieyasu’s family ruled ancient Japan as Shoguns for more than three hundred years,” she finished approvingly.

  As the daughter of a ruler and politician, Broni Ehrengraf appreciated the difficulty of the achievement.

  “Weird people,” the Rigger murmured.

  The two young syndics were silent as Glory moved swiftly through the night sky of Yamato. Hideyoshi silvered the sea and made a spangled path across the water. A coastline appeared below. “What is that?” Damon asked. Damon had qualities, but being an attentive student of Glory's lessons was not one of them.

  “Kai. It is ruled by a family who claims to be descended from Takeda Shingen, the Mountain Lord,” Broni said. “There is a legend that Shingen was killed during a siege of one of Tokugawa’s castles because he returned to the same spot every night to hear an enemy soldier play the flute. I rather like that story. I think I like Takeda Shingen, too.”

  “And Oda? You are going to tell me about Oda, aren’t you?” Damon said with a grin.

  “You should know these things,” Broni said primly. The cat on her breast gave a low trill of agreement.

  “Oda was a great warrior but a very bad man. He died of overconfidence. That’s what Glory says. Of overconfidence, and full of arrows, on top of a burning temple.”

  “I hope that’s not an omen for us,” Damon said with one of the sudden mood switches for which he was famous aboard Goldenwing Glory.

  Glory's orbital track crossed Yamato’s equator and dipped into the southern hemisphere. In the dark before the approaching dawn terminator could be seen a half dozen of the artificial satellites in orbit around Yamato. Beyond, despi
te the glow of dawn on the horizon, the starfields were bright. On Yamato the stars shone in daylight. Amaterasu provided only half the illumination of Sol at Earth.

  At latitude -18° Glory passed over a scattering of small, empty islands. Like much of the sea-girt land on the planet, they were volcanic. At -43° Glory passed from night into day high above still more empty ocean. To the south the syndics could now see the edges of the Southern Ice Cap that reached in this season to latitude 40 south.

  On Yamato, a planet not greatly changed from the Pangaea stage, the poles were covered by caps that could reach, in winter, almost to 50 south. Cold Oda now rode high in the lightening sky.

  The water below averaged a depth of nine thousand meters. The dark seas beneath the polar caps were the nurseries for the myriad sea diatoms that were the only indigenous sea life on Yamato. The fish-eating Terrestrial Japanese who had settled on Yamato had swiftly developed a taste for the microscopic plants of their sea. They were not precisely fish, but the colonists of Yamato ate them with relish. As far as anyone knew, an intelligent animal had never been found in the seas of Yamato, nor was one likely to be. The chances were, Glory declared, should such an animal exist, it would be eaten without remorse.

  Glory's orbit carried her north again, across a wilderness of stormy southern ocean. She recrossed the equator at longitude ten west and overflew the island-continent of Honshu to the shores of the Inland Sea. As the Gloria Coelis passed once again over the coast of Ieyasu, the city of Yedo below was awakening.

  Dietr Krieg appeared in the ob-deck. He had brought with him a handheld video receiver. On the tiny screen the Wired Starmen could watch the appearance of Duncan and Amaya on the plaza before their luxurious guest quarters in one of Yedo’s tallest ryokans.

  The streets, even at this early hour, were jammed with cheering people. Many waved paper flags bearing a sea-creature that they imagined to be the national insignia of Thalassa--for Duncan Kr--and silhouettes of big-breasted women in aggressive New Earther stances for Anya Amaya.