“Sailing Master, ’’ Dietr Krieg sent, “calm yourself. You are speaking to a machine! “
Amaya reined in her surging emotions and sent to all, “Artemis hears them. Can any other partners do the same?”
Buele sent, “Big hears them. “
“So does Clavius, “ Broni sent.
“Para, too!” This from the Cybersurgeon.
Artemis trilled desperately and not-so-gently bit Amaya on the hand.
The Sailing Master had a flashing insight. Guidance, she thought. Guidance is what they must have to live. “Everyone! Glory! Buele, Broni, Dietr! I want every living thing aboard this starship--people, cats, monkeys, too--trying to lead them home. “
35. How Long Is Forever?
Through the single small port facing to starboard, Minamoto Kantaro watched the shoulder of the ship’s mass-depletion coil glow first red, then yellow, shading to white, until it began to radiate in the blue end of the spectrum. The Mayor of Yedo looked desperately at the sprawled body of the young pilot. Be alive, damn you, he thought. Open your eyes and tell me what to do next.
But the young man lay still, sullenly buoyant as a log in swamp water in the almost nonexistent gravity within the ship. The fresh-faced would-be samurai had flown his last adventure aboard his beloved faster-than-light ship. Near him floated his murderer, the dreaded Master Tsunetomo, half his head burned away by the heat of the laze pistol he, Minamoto Kantaro, had fired with intent to kill.
The fact was that Minamoto Kantaro had never killed a fellow human being before, no matter the provocation. It made him feel sick. It did not make him regard the future--that is, those few moments between now and extinction--with any equanimity. The inexorable approach of certain death tended, as some ancient American had once said, to organize the mind splendidly. It was not a soothing thought to carry with one into the next world.
If there was a next world. In truth, Minamoto had never seen or conversed with anyone who had died. Religious faith was expected of the rulers of Planet Yamato; he had never admitted his doubts to anyone, not even to his uncle, the Shogun. But here and now he had begun to doubt his doubts. It was a fact that he had stood by a crystal port and looked out at a universe he had never truly believed existed. It was all very well to be taught from earliest childhood that the universe was a profusion of exploding galaxies, millions of them, fleeing one another as though fearing contamination. Red shifts and blue shifts told their stories, but who really believed them? One was taught, from the time one learned the kanji and began to absorb human wisdom, that nothing could ever exceed C, the speed of light, a universal constant.
That being so, all those lights in the sky might as well have been illusions.
A Shinto priest once lectured a young Kantaro: “Do you remember where you were and what you did the day before you were conceived in your mother’s womb? No? Then how dare you imagine what exists beyond the most distant stars?”
The logic had seemed flawed, but the confidence of the deliverer had been monumental. All of nature had seemed encompassed by the priest, the forest, the copper-colored sea and the torii gate under which student and sensei sat.
But certainties crumbled. The glowing coil around the small spaceship’s middle was radiating away what remained of the ship’s mass. When it was gone, the ship and all it contained would either dissipate into its constituent particles or it would simply implode, like a black hole, to drift forever in an alien space.
Either result of the end of mass depletion was acceptable for Kantaro. Life, even one without a guaranteed passage to the next, was without value now. Living two million light-years from home, in a solar system owned by who knew what sort of beings, did not appeal to Kantaro.
On Earth, the Japanese people had been among the most parochial on the homeworld. Yamatans were no different. Their rice grew on Yamato, their temples had been built there, the hemp garlands on their toriis lifted to the winds from Yamato’s planetary sea.
For a moment Kantaro was tempted to abandon his post at the pilot’s chair. The Terror had vanished, none knew where. It had been badly hurt by the headlong attack of its Magellanic enemies. Perhaps it, too, yearned for a peaceful place to die, Kantaro thought.
He glanced across the compartment. The port was still open, but beyond the glass there was nothing. On the deck, the young syndic Damon Ng was gripping Kr-san’s wrists with all his concentration. His head pressed hard against Duncan’s pallid brow. He had made no visible effort to staunch the flow of blood from the wound in Duncan’s back, which was badly placed and deep. Yet the bleeding had nearly stopped. Kantaro did not know whether this was because the senior syndic was dead, or nearly so, or because Damon, in some mysterious Starman’s way, had taken control of Duncan Kr’s bleeding, holding it in check with the empathic power of his remarkable Starman’s mind. Did Damon Ng suffer guilt as a Yamatan surely would, for having failed to guard the ninja as he should?
Then there were the cats. Kantaro tried hard to understand what was happening that involved Mira, Pronker and small Hana. He could not. They were crouched atop the instrument consoles staring fixedly in that strange way of the breed at . . . nothing. Or what seemed nothing. Their eyes seemed focused on a point in the blank Near Away. Kantaro, with his merely human senses, tried to imagine whatever it was they seemed to observe.
What could be so near to be of interest to the beasts? They were, after all, children of Planet Earth, as he was. They, too, had seen the alien splendor of M31 spread across the vault of the sky. And they, too were two million light-years from home.
The weight of such a distance overbore him. He longed for seppuku. If he could only now sit on the deck, make his peace with Amaterasu, and draw a knife across his abdomen in acceptance of honorable death ...
Hana uttered an angry screech: “No! Help us!”
Help? To do what? And how?
Mira turned her head and stared straight into his eyes. “You are a man. Do what men do. “
Kantaro was stunned. None of the syndic’s cats had ever bespoken him so clearly and forcefully.
“Tell me. “
Again she bespoke him clearly, powerfully.
“Call to Glory. Reach out to the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. You seem a man like the dominant tom. Be one. Make the great queen respond to you. “
Broni Ehrengraf lay in the warm gel of her pod, Wired to Glory and closely bonded empathically to Clavius. The cat had been with her inside the pod until a few moments ago, but the hours that had passed since Big had heard the first sending from Duncan and Damon were difficult for a young tom to endure, and he had leapt up out of the pod to sit erect on the metal shoulder of the device.
Clavius was having difficulty with his attention span. One of the characteristics of all cats was an inability to remain concentrated on any thing or subject that did not regularly produce attention-demanding bursts of activity. Broni was aware that Mira had recently been concentrating her schooling efforts on the young cats, especially the males, whose attention was most apt to wander inopportunely.
Not that Broni objected to another, even Clavius’s mother, schooling her partner without her present. Yet Mira, who could be arrogant to a fault, ignored her wishes and had continued to train Clavius in the art of concentration.
Broni, lurking about near the scene of the exercises, had distinctly heard Mira’s sending to the effect that not every object of required attention was going to bound like a rabbit or smell like a field mouse. (Both of which objects Broni was certain neither Mira nor any of the cats, natural and enhanced, aboard Glory had ever actually seen.)
Now it remained to be seen how well Mira had taught her partner his lesson. Since congregating in the bridge, none of the syndics, human or feline, had heard so much as a subetheric whisper from the missing shipmates.
Was it possible that they had imagined hearing an appeal from the absent ones? Had they wanted to hear one so much that, in the event, they did?
That cannot be, B
roni Ehrengraf thought. “Stay alert, Clavius. Stay alert and listen. “
“I listen,” the cat sent shortly. Long concentration made Clavius even more short tempered than it did the others.
The Goldenwing was moving slowly, adjusting its course accordingly. Moon Hideyoshi still lay under the stem of Goldenwing Gloria Coelis. The great ship seemed to be drifting, though of course that was pure illusion. But Glory was travelling far below her usual speed in space, the conning being done by sail trim, with Glory attending to most of that herself, while the monkeys provided the marginal requirement for the constant, small adjustments needed to keep the Goldenwing on a return track to Planet Yamato.
Buele remained in the Sailing Master’s quarters, where he had chanced to Wire up after Big informed him that Mira was calling for help.
For help, he thought. Was it possible or were they all in a hallucination created by Big’s powerful and effective mind? Brilliant he was, but still a cat, Buele thought. On his own home-world of Voerster, women kept cheets as pets and men trained the larger varieties as hunters. But cheets were only like cats. The Terrestrial felines were a very different matter. Their small brains were as active as were human brains. Perhaps more active. The beasts were organized along certain clean design lines that the latent engineer in Buele approved. Instead of creating a being with a large brain that could use only a small percentage of its volume, the Increate had instead designed a small, efficient and, alas, short-lived animal whose autonomous nervous system could perform the necessary housekeeping in sleep with all--or nearly all--the brain cells available. A cat’s years raced by in comparison to a man’s. But a cat’s waking life, though short by human standards, had a breadth of experience and empathic skill no human could duplicate.
Man, Glory's database had instructed Buele, was gifted with a brain that was inventive, creative, and yet almost totally lacking in the ability to comprehend the nature of the surrounding universe.
A cat’s brain was swift, feral, incapable of long periods of single-minded study and purpose, yet brilliantly endowed to perceive, and to receive signals from anywhere in the true universe. It is as though, Buele thought, we humans look at reality through a gauze curtain. They see it all.
Buele glanced at Big lying in Amaya’s bunk. He thought, You see reality as it is. Multiplex. Layered. Interactive. Can we ever learn that?
Big’s sending was brief and to the point. “I don’t understand you. Be silent and listen. “ The cat repeated, almost verbatim, what old Osbertus Kloster, the Astronomer Select of Voerster who had adopted Buele and raised him, often said. And, as such memories tended to do, even in times of great stress, they brought melancholy.
He looked at Big with affection.
To roam the Near Stars I left the old man without a backward look, he thought. Big purred as Buele stroked his broad head. Don't do to me what I did to Brother Osbertus, he thought.
But Big only sent again, “Listen!”
It was Glory who sounded the true alarm. Since the first tentative signal out of the Near Away, Glory had been at work to modify and amplify her own capability to receive empathic calls. Since she was not truly alive, she received Mira’s call as a series of ones and zeros, a language Glory understood well.
She began relaying the translations instantly.
Paracelsus merged from a trance state with a trilling cry and laid-back ears. Dietr Krieg received the call with stunning clarity. Of all the people aboard Glory, he was the last to expect to be chosen. But the cry out of the Near Away seemed guided to him and to his feline partner specifically from Damon Ng.
The torrent of images tumbling through the empathic gap was frightening. A deep, primitive wound. Much blood. Failing life signs. Damon using a level of empathic skills he had never been known to possess to keep a dying man alive.
“Help me, Dietr! Help me. I can’t manage alone. “
The others aboard Glory closed ranks immediately. Dietr felt his fellow syndics supporting him, aided by all life aboard the great ship. Even the chittering cyborgs in the rig were offering their empathic pittances.
Paracelsus scrambled into Dietr Krieg’s open pod, and the Cybersuigeon felt it all.
He closed his eyes and sent, “Hear me, Damon, hear me. “
Clearly, he received, “Duncan is dying. “
A wave of grief crashed over Broni and Anya.
Dietr sent angrily, “No time for that. Help Damon!”
Amaya sent, “Who is piloting the ship?”
“Kantaro. “
Before the tenuous rapport could break, Buele sent, “Mira and Pronker are helping Damon keep Duncan alive. Can't you feel that? Who else is there?”
Amaya sent, “Kantaro has a kitten with him. He calls her Hana. “
Buele sent, “You help Kantaro to find us, Sailing Master. The rest of us support the doctor. “ And then in an unmistakable tone of command he sent, “And you, Physician, Help Damon. Guide him. And--God help you--DON'T LET DUNCAN DIE! “
36. Out Of The Near Away
This, then, thought Duncan, is how it feels to die. There is some pain, though less as time passes. What have I said--‘as time passes’? But there is no time; there is only perception of time. A human invention? Are other lives conscious of time passing, like the water in a river? Mira, does time pass for you, or do you only tolerate my fantasy of minutes, hours, days and years? Yet I can feel my time running out, and even if it is an illusion, I am grateful that there will be an ending. He had spent years pretending to be a stoic, but pain had always daunted him. Pain and failure. Perhaps failure even more than pain.
I was given Glory to care for, Glory and her people. I was rash. I risked them all to hunt the Terror. Now I will not see the ending.
He could feel Damon’s hold on his hands. He is keeping me from shock, Duncan thought. No one taught him that. Somehow it was simply there when he needed it.
I am not breathing, Duncan thought. Damon is doing that for me. The air is shallow in my lungs, but it is enough to hold death at bay for a time. We have all become symbionts, Duncan thought. At need we can share all that we are with one another. Did Glory do this? Did other syndics aboard other Goldenwings become partners in life-sharing?
Sharing. Could it be that this intertwined creature called Goldenwing Gloria Coelis was the next stage of man? He could hear Glendora, the matriarch of the marriage group that bore him all those parsecs and uptime years ago, speaking in a crofter’s long-house by the turbulent Thalassan sea. She addressed Duncan now as clearly as she had on the day he stepped aboard Glory's shuttle with the aged syndic who had come to claim him. Glendora had kissed him, which was strange, because Thalassan Scots were not a demonstrative people, and she said, “Live honorably. Die well.”
It was a farewell suited to the people who hunted the great furred fishes of the Thalassan Planetary Sea from coracles of bone and leather.
It suited Duncan’s situation now.
I will, Mother, he thought. And it will not be long. The void of death lay very near.
He resisted Damon’s entreaty to lie still and allow a fellow empath-symbiont to breathe and circulate the blood for him. What little blood I have left, Duncan thought sardonically. He could feel it, thick and cooling, puddled on the deck beneath him. Damon had stopped the worst of the bleeding. That was a remarkable achievement when the patient could help so little.
Duncan closed his eyes and found himself a child, straddling a spearpine bough and looking fearfully down at a forest floor dappled by the golden light of a GO sun. He was terrified, and urine ran down his slender leg and fell to the ground a quarter-kilometer below. It grieved him that the height frightened him so. The spearpine was the one allotted his peer group for their season in the forest canopy. All the boys of Planet Nixon were expected to have lost their fear of heights by the time of the season in the leaves. How else could they become the environmentalists they were meant to be on Nixon?
But Damon’s fear of heights was as str
ong as it had ever been. The boys in the lodge taunted him for it, and his parents were ashamed. He had heard that a syndic had come downworld from the Goldenwing in orbit. The old syndic, it was rumored, was on Search, looking for the next generation of Wired Starmen for Goldenwing Gloria Coelis. The boys of his group said that he would be offered to the Ancient One, and good riddance.
To live in the sky! What would that be like? Would it be terrifying? How high was the sky? How long was the fall? Was it fraud to give Wired Starmen a child flawed by phobia? Fear rose like an acid tide. No, Damon, Duncan thought. Don’t be afraid. Think only of the joy ...
I am not Damon Ng, Duncan thought. We are intermingled, and empath though I am, this is the first time I can feel his dread of the phobia that has dominated his life. Yet he shares his life with me as an empath must. I have a need like his now. With every shallow breath, the ninja’s wound brings me closer to the point of no return.
He felt the soft touch of a paw on his cheek. Mira. “Mira, my little queen. You will miss me. And I you if there is a heaven. “ He closed his eyes and yet could see, in the dark colors of the feline spectrum, his own still face, and Damon’s, tear-streaked with effort and grief. The image was slightly doubled and Duncan could not think why, until he realized that he was sharing Pronker’s view as well.
He sent to the Folk in a weary, mental whisper: “Guide them home. Guide them home. “
Kantaro gripped the guide-sticks that controlled the MD’s attitude and heading. He was unwilling to allow the ship’s automatic systems to do what they were designed to do. How could they, he asked himself fearfully, when there is no direction, no time, no space in this dreadful place those without imagination had dubbed so off-handedly the Near Away?
The truth was that neither he, nor any other scientist or pilot who had preceded him into the Near Away, had the slightest notion of whether or not it was near or far, or even whether it existed at all.
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