The old man frowned, his distaste for the Lord of Kai writ on his lined face. The Shogun’s intelligence resources on Planet Yamato were extensive, and Minamoto no Kami was by now reasonably certain that Yoshi was one of the daimyos who had contributed to the shame in Yedo.
A man who would lend himself to such a scheme with so little accurate knowledge concerning what a political murder at this time might precipitate was an undoubted fool--but he was far more than that. He was a menace to the best interests of Yamato.
The Shogun spoke with the full authority of his office. “The people of Kai have historically been calm and thoughtful men, Lord Yoshi. While they are descendants of the people of the second Goldenwing, they have almost always conducted themselves with calm wisdom ...”
“Almost, Minamoto-sama?” The daimyo’s voice grew thin at the slight to his family.
“Almost,” Minamoto repeated evenly.
Yoshi Eiji had blundered into the Shogun’s presence without serious thought. On the island-continent of Kai, a well-oiled governmental-industrial machine had made the Yoshi family rich. Minamoto no Kami, an aristocrat to his fingertips, thought that was reward enough for a daimyo descended from the people of the Goldenwing Musashi. At ninety-some, Minamoto no Kami was unlikely to change his mind. At times, the Shogun thought, it appeared that Yoshi Eiji would never be content until he achieved his own Nagashino.
He motioned impatiently to cut off further discussion. “I don’t care to get into a lawyers’ argument about ethics and the good of Planet Yamato,” Minamoto declared.
“We are envied, Shogun,” Yoshi said clumsily, “is for the rewards received because of our service to the state.”
“No doubt,” Minamoto said wearily. “I would be the last to deny that the domain of Kai has served the bakufu.” The Shogun used the archaic term deliberately, for its effect on a parvenu. “I will grant that you are serving Yamato now by being here at great inconvenience to your interests.” He had difficulty in controlling the irony in his tone. I am getting too old for this, he thought. Soon let it be Kantaro’s time. “But it is unseemly for us to try to entice the Starmen to go in harm’s way without support.”
“I am only considering the possibilities, Shogun,” Yoshi Eiji said stiffly. “What would be best for Yamato.”
The old man regarded Yoshi Eiji narrowly. “What other possibilities have you also considered, Yosh?” The sudden use of the familiar diminutive was not an endearment. On Yamato children and inferiors were addressed in that manner. Yoshi retreated swiftly.
He had almost decided that it was worthwhile risking a challenge to the old man’s authority. Yoshi rethought that precipitously.
Minamoto no Kami was certainly a very old man. And on the homeworld, a Shogun had been nearly a god. Here in Tau Ceti space, matters were different. The lords of Yamato lived under the rule of the Minamoto Shoguns because to attempt some other way was to risk the internecine strife and bloodshed no Earth colony could afford.
Blood could be shed on Yamato. But there were ways, means and methods that did not risk the destruction of the state. That was why ninjas still existed. Yoshi studied the Shogun guardedly. How much did the old man know? Sometimes it seemed Minamoto no Kami was an aging dodderer. At other times he seemed a dark, ancient demon.
“I only hoped to suggest a course of action, Shogun,” Yoshi said. He sat on the tatami-covered fabric deck, and as he spoke he bent deeply from the waist over his spread thighs; his fingertips, extended, touched the floor in a manner customarily used by women and, very occasionally, by samurai wishing to show submission.
Minamoto no Kami inclined his head in acknowledgment. The Lord of Kai knew his proper body language. He should. The Yoshi, lowborn but highly placed, were all experts in the protocol of dealing with their social and political superiors.
But never mistake the gestures for the reality, Minamoto no Kami told himself. This man spreads trouble wherever he goes. Even here aboard this vast, ancient ship.
When Eiji had excused himself and made his way hastily out of the shogunal compartment (he was still having great difficulty getting about either in zero-G or in the gravity field generated by the pack he wore under his hakama), Minamoto no Kami spoke aloud. “You heard, Kantaro-san?”
Kantaro appeared from a dilating fabric valve leading into the adjoining compartment. On his shoulder rode a small, ruddy cat. One Minamoto no Kami had not seen before. This one lacked the hair-thin wire antenna that many of the others aboard the Goldenwing displayed. Yet it sat firmly anchored to the padding in the shoulder of Kantaro’s broad-shouldered surcoat. The small head was very close to Kantaro’s ear and it seemed for one curious moment that the cat was speaking to him.
“I see you have found a neko to be your companion, nephew,” Minamoto no Kami said curiously.
Kantaro ran his knuckles over the small beast’s breast. “I believe she chose me, Shogun,” he said.
“She?”
“Definitely she,” Kantaro said. His face showed a momentary puzzlement. “I knew it at once. I don’t know how I knew it--I am not an expert in feline anatomy.”
“And does she speak with you?” Minamoto no Kami asked the question half-smiling. The cats were a peculiar delight aboard the Goldenwing. They moved about the ship like furry birds. Starman Amaya explained that they had all been born in space, and were completely at home in null gravity. She also suggested that if one listened in the right way, the small beasts would speak with you. Though what she actually meant by “speak” was not clear to the old Shogun. But their presence pleased. Clearly, Kantaro was captivated by the graceful creature riding on his shoulder.
Kantaro shrugged. “She speaks, I think, in her way.”
“And has she a name, your neko?” Minamoto no Kami asked. It was odd, he thought, that he had called Kantaro into the compartment to discuss the matter of Yoshi, but had fallen easily into a discussion of the cat.
“I call her Hana, Shogun.” He caressed the small, alert head and was rewarded with an almost inaudible purr.
“Flower,” the Shogun said. “It suits her.”
Kantaro lifted Hana from his shoulder and handed her gently to his uncle, who cradled her against his breast. “But she is not mine, uncle.” He smiled. “I suspect no one owns these cats.” Minamoto no Kami, despite the rigidity of his upbringing as a samurai aristocrat, had always been one of the most sensitive and empathic of men. It was a characteristic much desired in the ruling families of Yamato.
The moment he held the cat and looked into her golden eyes, he had the strange feeling of being valued and understood. Was that possible? Or had he simply fallen under the spell of the stories the Starmen told about the cats of the Gloria Coelis? For an unsettling moment he wondered about the wisdom of discussing so Yamatan a problem as the Lord of Kai in the presence of this small, alien being. Then he reined his imagination into control and began to speak to his nephew about how and what might have to be done to keep Yoshi from creating a disaster.
Hana listened attentively, as Mira intended she should.
15. Mira
Under the arching, transparent carapace of the forward skydeck, and tethered to Glory by the long cable of the drogue in his skull, Duncan Kr floated facing the planet that filled the sky “above” him. Since his earliest days aboard Glory, Duncan had found solace in this ever-varied, never-changing place.
The child of a Class G8 star, Planet Yamato was possessed of an austere environmental purity with its copper-tinged oceans and isolated island-continents. In a four-hundred-kilometer orbit, Glory would pass swiftly from day to night and then to day again in its great inverted swing over billions of hectares of empty sea. Nearing the dawn terminator, Glory was a brilliant golden morning star in the sky over Kyushu, the westernmost continent. The Yamatan MD spacecraft followed her in line astern, like the units of a fleet. But a fleet operated on discipline and an agreed-upon purpose. Thus far, the orbital congregation had neither.
Planet Yamato
was not far in time from its Gondwana period; the island-continents were still drifting away from one another. To Duncan this seemed a metaphor for the conclave of daimyos now aboard Glory. From space the islands closely resembled one another: rockbound coasts, links land and timbered mountains, rushing streams and rivers. The islands would have been perfect breeding grounds for a varied fauna, but life had taken another turn on Yamato. Of flora there was plenty, though the parochial colonists had spent nearly a millennium nurturing the plants and agriculture of their distant homeland. But there were no animals of any sort native to Yamato. The native plants were almost all bisexual, and those that were not were pollinated by the cold winds that blew from the frigid sea to the only slightly less frigid land.
The Yamatans saw themselves as austere as their world. They were, Duncan thought, quite wrong. They were an emotional people quick to anger, even quicker to grieve. Men shed tears as readily as did the women. Even more readily, Duncan thought with a bleak smile. But their emotionalism did not lend itself to ready agreements. Their personal code of behavior demanded adherence to the ancient code of bushido--the way of the warrior--a set of rules that was a thousand years out of date before the first Japanese left the homeworld. How these folk had managed to build a complex industrial society on Yamato was a source of wonderment to Duncan Kr, and a measure of Yamatan adaptability.
But thus far the daimyos gathered aboard Glory had done nothing but “seek consensus.” To the Master and Commander of the Gloria Coelis the discussions sounded like quarreling and seeking advantage, but he was aware that, empath though he might be, the Yamatans were not yet an open book to him--nor to anyone aboard the Goldenwing.
Except, perhaps, the cats. The Folk seemed to be cultivating the colonists in a rather remarkable way. Yamatans, most particularly those who commanded the mass-depletion ships following Glory, were seldom seen now without some member of Mira’s pride accompanying them.
Duncan looked again at the planet above. The Goldenwing had already overflown the Inland Sea and the islands of Takeda and Honda. Beyond lay the third island-continent in the group, and then another long transit over megameters of empty, copper-colored sea.
To Duncan Kr, child of dour Scottish clans to whom names were sacred, the Japanese practice of constantly renaming people and places was vaguely irritating. The practice was disorienting for empaths, who often used names as psychic engrams.
But the name-shifting tradition was strong on Yamato. Young colonists had one name until puberty and Boys or Girls Day--at which time they would take a new one. These they would carry until (or if) they performed some service to daimyo or state that made it seemly to honor them with still another name change.
The island-continents went through similar nominative evolutions, though less often. “It is like baptism on a geologic timescale,” Broni, fresh from a session with Glory's information retrieval system, declared. “Kyushu was once Kagoshima and Shikoku used to be Akita. Their history is full of things like that.”
Only Honshu, the home continent of the daimyos of Minamoto descent and the site of the capital city of Yedo, still carried the names they had been given on Lander’s Day.
The constant naming and renaming created a veritable salmagundi of names of persons, clans, domains, and ancient, distant geography that was discomforting to the conservative Master and Commander of the Gloria Coelis. Though Duncan revered memories of Earth (a world he had never seen), he believed that man would not succeed in space by making icons of his past. There was only one future, and that lay ahead.
It was a grim truth that if mankind were to participate in that future, some action would have to be taken aboard Glory, and very soon. But for now it was restful to float alone in the silence, and think quiet thoughts. He used to do much the same when, as a child, he lay in the pale sunlight of the Wolf sun on the limestone cliffs of the Thalassan coast. Often he would remain on the cliffs until dark to watch the great moon Bothwell rising, and to hear the roar of Bothwell’s great tidal surge smashing against the shore.
As on many colonial worlds, the day on Yamato closely matched that of Earth. A twenty-one-hour rotation accommodated human biological clocks. Even after sixty generations, men and women here still remembered Earth. On Planet Yamato the months numbered thirteen to fit the seasons. The planet’s cold, heavy air was weather-rich; on every orbit Glory overflew cyclonic formations of rain and ice-laden cloud laced with the violet flashes of lightning. Duncan thought the Yamatan weather beautiful. The planet appealed to him. To the north lay the edge of Yamato’s substantial northern ice cap, a floating continent of frozen ocean seldom visited save by the submarine purse-seiners seeking beneath the ice the colorless kelps the Yamatans had learned to relish.
Glory's size made the presence of the hundred or more Yamatans aboard incidental; a thousand could easily be lost aboard a vessel built to carry whole populations. But the Yamatans were made uneasy by the size and emptiness around them. They were accustomed to human habitations built on a tight scale. In their cities they lived elbow to elbow. There were other problems as well. It was apparent that though good manners precluded complaint, the informal behavior of the Starmen in their own environment upset the Yamatans.
Duncan had cautioned the syndics against nakedness. The Yamatans’ ancestors had once enjoyed mixed, nude bathing. But time had made them rather more prudish. It seemed that now the colonials became quite agitated when on-duty syndics travelled about the ship only marginally clothed. These things seemed petty to Duncan, given the purpose of the assembly in orbit.
Duncan wondered that the precocious behavior of Mira and the ship’s other cats did not upset the Yamatans. It was almost, Duncan thought, as though the cats had been commanded to ingratiate themselves with the strangers. Was that possible? It was a long time since Duncan, or any of the Wired people, had treated Mira’s pride as “pets.” But was Mira now instructing her progeny in the fine art of human cultivation? Duncan was prepared to believe it. The neko, as the colonists called them, were making ailurophiles of the people from the planet. Were the cats acting under the guidance of Glory herself?
The Monkey House had been pressurized and there had been a steady traffic of cats into and out of the place. Dietr was under the impression this was the result of a program he had written for Glory to help rehabilitate the skittish and xenophobic monkeys. But as far as Duncan could see, either Glory was acting on her own, or the cats were. They were, among other things, teaching the monkeys to plug themselves into the ship’s electric-power storage--something no syndic had ever been able to persuade the small cyborgs to do for themselves. Had Mira told the Folk to teach the monkeys to feed themselves? Food was a Terrestrial animal’s primary way of comforting itself after a trauma. Mira, who had learned in kittenhood to operate the food replicators, would know that.
Duncan watched the seascape roll above the ship. He found it grimly amusing that Dietr Krieg was obsessed with the desire to become a figure of myth to the enhanced breed of cats he had created. How typical it was, Duncan thought, of the Cybersurgeon to confuse learned scientific skills with godhood. If Dietr imagined his experimental programs could control both Glory and her pride of cats so simply, the Cybersurgeon knew less about the animals and the ship than he ought.
I must see what Mira says, Duncan thought, finding it not at all strange that the idea should take such form.
The small matriarch drifted not ten meters from him, a tiny patch of darkness in the compartment lit only by the sunlight reflected from Yamato’s planetary ocean.
At this hour, the higher-ranking daimyos were bestirring themselves in their austere compartments. It would be another hour before one of the Shogun’s chieftains would appear to ask Duncan to join in one of the interminable consensus-seeking meetings they loved to convene.
The trouble was that no one, not the Yamatans nor any of the syndics, had any idea of where the Outsider would strike next. Even Wired, the Starmen could make only estimates. Glory's mai
nframe was a vast pool of information and deduction, but the ship was, like her people, limited by what she had actually learned from her encounter in the Ross Stars.
Through the thick drogue cable came gigabytes of information generated by Glory. She observed the distant stars for navigational information, the thin almost-atmosphere of near-planetary space, the set and condition of the few thousand square meters of skylar spread on the yards to hold her in low orbit. The ship was waiting. Duncan could sense it. He could almost feel her impatience.
Duncan closed his eyes and concentrated. “Mira. “
He was pleased by the response--a warm sending of appreciation and affection. Mira was learning to communicate with humans, but her essential catness remained uncontaminated. If anything, Duncan thought, it is we syndics who are changing rather than the Folk. He half-smiled as he remembered that some writer of ancient Earth had once written that if man and cat were ever able to interbreed, it would ennoble man, but diminish the cat.
In his mind’s dream he saw again, misted now by time and stellar distance, the almost feline face of Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster, Broni’s mother. He remembered making love to her here, in this very place, drifting on the air, watching the heavens circle as Glory orbited another world. He surrendered momentarily to a grief as pure and bright as the distant stars.
He felt a soft touch. Mira anchored herself on his shoulder. How did she do that without inflicting pain? he wondered.
The cat’s eyes were the color of amber.
She issued a single, soft trill and ran the tip of a rough tongue across his cheek.
The projected thought that formed in his mind was roughly: “Why are we still here? The hunt is out there. “ It had sensory overtones that human speech never had. The smell of a jungle night he knew Mira had never actually experienced. The taste of blood from a fresh kill--something else the small cat had never known. A touch of the angry hunger felt by the predator seeking prey. Did these feelings come from Glory’s vast database, or from an ancestral memory buried in that small, neat head behind the amber eyes? Who could tell?
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