Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

  GLORY’S PEOPLE

  ALFRED COPPEL

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 1996 by Alfred Coppel All rights reserved.

  Cover art by David Mattingly. Edited by David G. Hartwell

  A Tor Book. Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com

  ISBN: 0-812-52395-4

  The Goldenwing Cycle

  1. Glory

  2. Glory’s War

  3. Glory’s People

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

  --William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming”

  Prologue: What Rough Beast?

  SETI’s begging signals were heard long ago.

  Before the Jihad, Earth’s Hubble Telescope imaged a bulge of energy a thousand light-years long and half a thousand wide as it burst from a dark disk in an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. Ecstatic Terrestrial astronomers theorized that they had identified a black hole, three billion times the mass of the sun.

  At the turn of the Twenty-Second Century, in an interval between the religious wars, a second, smaller, but equally intense, phenomenon is imaged by the Lunar Observatory near Tau Vulpecula. Again the astronomers hypothesize that they are observing the birth of a black hole--nearby, a mere three thousand light-years from Earth.

  But this time the theorists are wrong. What they see is the opening of a Gateway and a transit. There is something new amid the galaxies of the Local Group.

  The Intruder is implacable, a predator, a creature of an environment where there is neither space nor time. It finds in this young universe an endless well of life and energy, free for the taking. It assumes the aspect of Red Sprites to suck dry the planetary storms common on the planets of Tau Vulpecula. And it listens to the faint outbound signals from SETI, a program, a fad long ago abandoned.

  By the Earth year 2200, the Intruder has depopulated the aquatic planets of the Virgo Cluster and is moving toward the source of the SETI transmissions. For many years it has drifted across interstellar distances at an Einsteinian pace. But it can move much faster--as fast as it wishes, for it knows nothing of time or distance.

  By the time the Third Millennium is half done, Earth’s great Goldenwings have populated the planets of the Near Stars.

  The intruder has discovered the narcotic effect of powerful emotions, powerful fears. It now hunts beings who can travel at only near-relativistic speed in a construct of gossamer webs and skylar wings.

  It stalks Glory.

  PART I

  A samurai with no group and no horse is not a samurai at all.

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

  1. Yedo

  Goldenwing Syndic Duncan Kr awoke from an oppressive dream. The room sensors reacted to his waking and increased the illumination in the chamber to a soft glow. From beyond the electronic door there came the softly feminine syllables of a newsreader describing, in classical Japanese, yesterday’s ceremonial events.

  Duncan, a tall and angular man too large for the bed in which he had spent the night, swung his bare feet to the elegantly tatami-matted floor and drew in several breaths of the heavy, richly scented air. His recently acquired (and out of date) Japanese limited his understanding, but he surmised that the newsreader was informing her listeners about the extraordinary arrival in the Tau Ceti System. She used the New General Catalog astronomical name instead of the local Amaterasu--the Sun Goddess. Probably as a gesture of politeness toward Glory's people. The girl assured her viewers that the visit of the syndics to Planet Yamato, long awaited and fortuitously coinciding with the approach from the south of the Cherry Blossom Front, would not be a disappointment to the citizens of the city of Yedo.

  Duncan heard a sharp clap of command as Amaya turned off the holo projector in her room. Glory's Sailing Master was already up and exercising in her part of the suite. Their hosts had expected Amaya to share Duncan’s bed and they had been embarrassed when Duncan explained that Amaya was neither his wife nor his concubine, and that Broni Ehrengraf, the other human female aboard the orbiting ship, would not be making the shuttle flight down to Yedo.

  The domain patriarchs of the welcoming committee (there had been no women in the formal delegation), had rather sheepishly apologized. “It has always been our understanding that Wired Starmen live in delightful promiscuity, Kr-san. Have we been misinformed?”

  Apparently, Duncan discovered, the Wired Starmen of Goldenwing Hachiman, the ship that had deposited the first clan of colonists on Yamato, had indeed been delightfully promiscuous. Yamato’s great chronicle of the voyage from Earth--the Monogatari no Hachiman--was a seething tale of battles, sexual and dynastic conflicts and misadventures. After reading the Monogatari sent to Glory by radio, Duncan found himself wondering how that first load of colonists had survived the adventure.

  The legend was bloody and, given the customary ethics of Goldenwing syndics, unusual to say the least. The chronicle described a number of occasions when colonists were awakened from cold-sleep to serve-the needs of the samurai syndics who sailed Hachiman. On Yamato there were still many descendants of the children begotten in space by the Hachiman syndics.

  The Hachiman had been unusual in that it made three voyages between Yamato and Earth before vanishing into legend and the vastness of Deep Space.

  Duncan and his crew--Amaya, Broni Ehrengraf, Damon Ng, Buele the prodigy, and Neurocybersurgeon Dietr Krieg--had had seven months of uptime to receive, decode and study the broadcasts from Yamato. Amaya, a Centauri feminist, and Broni Ehrengraf, the descendant of Afrikaner Voertrekkers, had found the sexual history described by the descendants of Yamato’s First Arrivers a chronicle of hilariously boastful tall tales. But Dietr Krieg refused to be dubious. “Not all syndics are as Spartan as we,” he said slyly, “and not everyone has had the benefit of your ball-breaker upbringing, Sailing Master.”

  Dietr delighted in reminding Anya Amaya that she had been sold by the New Earth Eugenics Authority to the Goldenwing Glory syndicate precisely because she had been unwilling (actually she had been unable) to produce female offspring through the strict New Earth protocol of in vitro fertilization. Dietr, with rough syndic humor, claimed to attribute Anya’s sterility to her feminist upbringing.

  “Someday, Duncan,” Amaya often said, “I am going to kill or castrate that Kraut son of a bitch.”

  Duncan stood and walked to the shoji screen covering the transparent wall. He slid the wood-and-paper construct aside and stood looking down through perfectly clear glass at the city of Yedo. Like a reincarnation of the ancient Japanese capital built by Tokugawa Ieyasu, Yedo was a city of many tiled roofs, walled courtyards and sand gardens. The old mingled with the very new in what Glory’s computer described as “the Japanese style.”

  The ryokan in which he and Amaya had been housed soared a thousand meters above the streets of Yedo--a city that covered the low coastal hills on which the First Arrivers and their multitude of clansmen and retainers had, over centuries of local time, built their Domain capital.

  The sky was clouded and a warm rain was falling. It was early spring in Yamato’s equatorial zone. Duncan could see no fewer than four squalls on the broad, copper-tinged ocean to the southeast. Lightning, like threads of gold, streaked the shadowy cloud towers and danced like faerie fire over the surface of the sea.

  To the north lay the Fuji Mountains, a massively broad-shouldered range with perpetually snow-covered heights. It was in the Fujis that Yamato most resembled the ancient Homeland. Great coniferous forests of iron-hard wood from the Fujis provided the planet
with most of its building material--a resource that made the Domain of Honshu the wealthiest on the planet.

  On Yamato the Domains took the names of the continental islands that comprised their territory. The Japanese had fought civil wars for a thousand years on the home planet. They had no intention of continuing that tradition on Yamato. Land distribution was made soon after Lander’s Day more than a millennium and a half ago, and the distribution remained in effect to the present. Honshu was the family domain of the Minamoto clan. The other continental islands were ruled by other ancient clans. Of particular interest to Duncan was Kai, governed by the Yoshi, an ambitious family of entrepreneurial newcomers (who had arrived on Yamato aboard Goldenwing Musashi years after the original settlers debarked from the Hachiman). Hokkaido was ruled by the Genji, impoverished descendants of a blue-blooded family whose holdings were covered with ice for nine of the thirteen Yamatan year months.

  Duncan looked for his clothes and failed to find them. In the wardrobe, instead, were a half-dozen replicas of his skinsuit, the ordinary shipboard attire when syndics were not naked. The skinsuits were all tailored in beautiful silk fabrics. A number of overgarments, created in the manner of the ceremonial samurai surcoats worn by the “industrial class” Japanese of Yedo, hung beside the skinsuits.

  The Yamatans, who wore gray jumpsuits when not indulging in ceremonial splendor, had been careful to provide their visitors with syndics’ skinsuits and not Yamatan apparel. It was apparent that the Yamatans were observant and meticulous people. Their hosts seemed determined to treat the Wired Ones among them with great politeness and generosity.

  Today he and Anya would meet the senior daimyo, Minamoto no Kami, the ninety-year-old ruler of Yamato, now celebrating his sixtieth year as Shogun. Their guide and sponsor was a young man less than one-third the Shogun’s age, the daimyo’s nephew, according to Glory's database. Minamoto Kantaro was Lord Mayor of Yedo and clearly a politician favored by the ruler. He was also a man of considerable sophistication. He was going to need it, Duncan thought.

  As Duncan stepped through the portal field into the ofuro, his presence triggered a flood of steaming water into the sunken tub and a holograph of a young girl dressed in a translucent kimono in the center of the tiled shower area. She smiled and bowed, asking, in charmingly accented spacial Anglic, if he required her services as assistant in his bath.

  Before he could reply, the girl’s attention was caught by Amaya stepping through the force-field, dressed only in sweat.

  “I will bathe the Master and Commander, thank you,” Amaya said, deliberately reverting to the old and traditional title used by syndics to refer to their Captains.

  The holograph of the ofuro girl smiled, bowed and vanished.

  “Now you have confused our hosts,” Duncan Kr said. “They already think you are my concubine.”

  “I am broadening their chauvinist horizons,” Amaya said, stepping gingerly into the hot bath. She lowered herself into the water, laid back her head to wet her thick, dark hair, and found a seat under water.

  “This is pure heaven,” she said. “I had no idea people actually lived like this.”

  Duncan stepped into the steaming bath and breathed in the slightly salty scent of the water. On Yamato all water was laden with mineral salts. He crossed the deep pool with a single stroke and returned to take a seat next to Anya Amaya.

  “What are you thinking, Duncan?” Amaya asked.

  He smiled. “It is rather like microgravity.”

  She stretched, drew a deep breath and allowed her body to float. Her breasts surfaced like rising islands. She ran a fingertip over her nipples. They rose and hardened. Duncan wondered if their hosts were watching--learning, as was said to be their way, by observation. Judging from the Monogatari, there was little the folk of Yamato needed to be taught about sex.

  “Get out,” Amaya said.

  “What?”

  “Get out and I’ll soap you. What’s the Earth aphorism Dietr is so fond of? When in Rome ... that one.”

  Duncan rose obediently from the bath. Captain he might be, but like all the men of Glory, he tended to defer to Amaya in matters of pleasure. In order to distance herself from her coldly feminist upbringing, Anya had made a study of pleasing herself by pleasing men. Duncan guessed that the Yamatans would approve of that.

  He sat on a tile stool beside the steaming ofuro while Anya covered him with faintly sea-smelling soap. The Sailing Master was wonderfully skilled at male-female contact.

  When she had done and had washed the soap off his angular body with a cool spray, she took his place on the stool and let him wash her in turn. Amaya’s body was that of a trained and conditioned athlete. Her feminine parts were small and responsive.

  “Enough,” Duncan said.

  Amaya sighed. “Yes, Master and Commander.”

  They returned to the tub for a final dip and then rose to stand in the air-dryers until their skins glowed.

  In the bedroom, Duncan selected a silken skinsuit. It was sea blue and worked with almost invisible silver threads. “Have you something like this in your room, Sailing Master?” he asked.

  “Much grander,” Amaya said as her naked backside vanished though the force-field into her part of the suite.

  In minutes she was back, in a scarlet skinsuit with an overkimono of scarlet and gold silk. She had caught her hair in a long chignon with a golden comb. Rare metals were not rare on Yamato, Duncan thought. That, at least, was a promising development.

  “Come look at this,” Duncan said, and led the way to the window wall facing north. He opened a panel, exposing a keyboard. He used the keyboard to produce an image of the night sky of Yamato on the window.

  The constellations of this portion of Near Space were familiar. Despite the eleven light-years between Amaterasu and Sol, the skies were Earthlike. Sirius A dominated the deep sky and Orion the Hunter looked much the same as he looked from Earth. The two ringed gas giants of Tau Ceti’s outer system, Toshie and Honda, named for ancient Tokugawa vassals, were still in the dark blue sky. Stars and planets often shone in daylight on Yamato, easily overcoming the dim light of the yellow G8 star the natives called Amaterasu.

  “Kantaro-san gave me a key to the scanner,” Duncan said.

  “To what purpose, Duncan?” Amaya had a tendency to distrust men. It was bred into her Centauri genes.

  “I suspect he may know why we have come.”

  “How remarkable. Zen understanding a mere few parsecs from the Land of the Dragonfly.”

  “Don’t sneer at these people, Anya. They’ve come closer than anyone in space to lightspeed travel. You remember why we are here.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Look.” Duncan manipulated the keyboard to recall the eleventh hour of full dark last night, a time when none of Yamato’s three moons was in the sky. A bright point of light swept across the sky.

  “There. Did you follow it?”

  “It was Glory?”

  “Yes. But did you notice the Trojan points?”

  Amaya frowned at the projected image. “Run it again.” Duncan repeated the display. At the moment when Glory's tiny image could be framed in the center of the observing field, he froze the image. “There. Leading and trailing. What do you see?” A hundred twenty degrees ahead and a hundred twenty degrees behind Glory could be seen dim points of light.

  “Yes. Satellites?”

  “Warships, I think. There are several in synchronous orbit as well. These people are frightened.”

  “Not of us, surely.”

  “I don’t know yet. But I am encouraged.”

  “Oh. God, Duncan,” Amaya said tremulously. “Must we return to that so soon?”

  Duncan laid his hands on her silken shoulders. “Have we a choice, Anya?”

  The truth was, he thought, that all the crew was in what the psychiatrists called denial. The memory of the battle they and the people from the Twin Planets had fought both with and against one another, and finally, terrif
yingly, against the force they had come to think of as “the Terror,” lived just below the level of human perception.

  Did Glory's cats, Mira’s pride, feel the same way? On the voyage from Ross 248 to Tau Ceti the cats had been secretive and withdrawn--occupied, Amaya said, with cats’ business. Duncan hoped with all his being that the beasts were not withdrawing from their human partners. Without them, the Terror could burst from nowhere, ready to devour souls. He used the religious term deliberately, in a reversion to his childhood on the dour Calvinist seaworld of Thalassa.

  “We have come for help, Anya. And to give warning.” Amaya ran a hand over the beautiful silk brocade she wore. “If only we could forget, Duncan. If only we could live like this.” Duncan put his hand on her head, fingers resting on the drogue socket that marked her completely and forever as a Wired Star-man and a Goldenwing syndic.

  “I know,” Amaya whispered. “I know.”

  Duncan extinguished the visual interface on the window wall. “Then let’s be diplomats, Sailing Master,” he said.

  Amaya looked through the wall at the mountainous northern horizon. There had been nothing like the Fuji range on New Earth. As the first of the colony worlds NE had repeated most of the mistakes made by the collectivist states of Earth, levelling mountains, relocating rivers, changing the weather, regimenting the people. The result had been tragic. Life on New Earth was regimented, constrained, an ultimate expression of the ancient war between the genders. The first expeditions to the bleak new world had been heavily staffed by angry women and “sensitized” men. A crash program of artificial aids to procreation had resulted in men being relegated to sperm producers. The gender experiments had not prospered. Finally, in extremis, the power to rule had been surrendered to the militant feminists who remodeled NE’s government into a school for survival without joy or pleasure.