Glory

by Alfred Coppel

  GLORY

  Alfred Coppel

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Alfred Coppel

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by David G. Hartwell, Cover art by Darrell Sweet

  ISBN: 0-812-52393-8

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-12452

  Once again--for Elisabeth.

  a broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,

  and pavement stars, as stars to thee appear

  seen in the galaxy, that milky way

  which nightly as a circling zone thou seest

  powder’d with stars.

  him that yon soars on golden wing...

  John Milton

  PARADISE LOST

  1. IN THE OORT CLOUD

  She is a Goldenwing and her name is Glory. Her bones are titanium plated with gold, and fragile as those of a bird. She wears a skin of monomolecular fabric; each strand of the thread from which it is woven is a single long molecule. Delicate as it is, it has withstood micrometeoroid strikes, asteroid collisions, and the dust between the stars. Glory is far older than her syndicate. She has outlived many syndicates before it.

  She was built in orbit around the Moon, one thousand seven hundred of Earth’s years ago. She is still one of the most beautiful artifacts ever made by Man.

  Glory was completed in the last year of the Twenty-first Century--near the end of the Exodus and in the midst of a religious revival. The story is told that she was christened with holy water and blessed by a bishop. It may be so. In the last years of the Exodus there was a jihad. Christians were hunted down and slaughtered in the streets of a mostly Muslim world.

  Glory was commissioned to carry preachers, priests, monks, and nuns to the safety of the stars. Her first destination was Ross 128I2, a world called Aldrin.

  They named her Gloria Coelis--Glory of Heaven. On her maiden voyage she carried four thousand New Catholics and seven thousand Protestants stacked in honeycomb holds, in frozen sleep, to sanctuary, eleven light-years from Earth.

  Yet even as Glory spread her sails to the tachyon wind, the Exodus was ending. The homeworld, sick with religious slaughter and drained of her most adventurous souls, had grown weary. It would take a thousand years for the planet to restock itself with freedom and enough courage to continue the colonization of the stars.

  At the completion of Glory’s maiden voyage, she became the property of the men and women who sailed her, the first syndicate. Many changes of command later, she has become the ship of Duncan’s syndicate--a fifth generation of Wired Starmen.

  Glory and her people have been in space, with only short stays downworld, for twelve ship years. A working span for Starmen, many lifetimes for landsmen, who live by a different measure.

  The tachyons which flow from the galactic center are the only particles in the known universe that exceed the speed of light. The hectares of skylar sails a Goldenwing flies impede tachyons and transfer a fraction of their enormous energy to the ship. And as a Goldenwing approaches light-speed, time dilates. Objects in motion experience time more slowly than objects at rest. The laws of relativity are strange but inflexible.

  At this moment, Glory is transiting the Oort Cloud of the system Luyten 726. She is slowing, but still moving at a fraction of the speed of light. In two shiptime days of twenty hours each, she will assume high orbit over Planet Luyten 726I4, known as Voerster. And on a hilltop on Voerster, where Glory is being watched nightly by an old astronomer whose dream it has been to live long enough to see a second Goldenwing, a month will pass before Glory’s shuttles descend to the capital town of the Voertrekkers.

  Time dilation plays strange games with short-lived humans.

  It is their spread of sail that gives Glory and her sister-ships the name of Goldenwing. Skylar is gossamer-thin and the color of sunlight. From Glory’s ten-kilometer-long hull rise a half dozen slender masts. Angled at ninety degrees are her two mains. They rise fifty kilometers from carapace deck to masthead. There are three mizzens of thirty kilometers each and a foremast of ten. The monofilament rigging gleams’ like a spider’s web in the starlight of the Oort Cloud- The trim of Glory’s tops and skysails can presently be monitored only by the hundreds of imaging devices scattered throughout the rig.

  The radio environment surrounding the ship carries the chittering voices of the monkeys, small cyborgs who scurry through the rig performing the myriad tasks needed to keep a sailing ship moving at her best speed. Their voices are high-pitched, simian. They speak a language created for them by Glory’s computer, part machine clicks and tones, part animal chirps and growls. It is exactly suited to the monkey-brained cyborgs; Glory is semisentient, and she provides for all her creatures.

  Seen from the bridge and from the dorsal apertures in the hull, the eternal sky seems dominated by the eighty million square meters of bright skylar Glory flies. But that is only illusion. The Wired Ones know that humans are insignificant intruders among the stars.

  In orbit around an inhabited world a Goldenwing is seen sailing across the night, a golden creature, wraithlike, silent, a vision of light and breathtaking, commanding beauty. It is a sight landsmen think themselves lucky to see once in a generation.

  “There,“ mothers tell their children. “Your great, great grandparents came here”--from Earth, or Gagarin, or Christa McAuliffe--”in one of those beautiful things. Perhaps in that very one.“

  There is fear in the women’s voices. Wired Ones make demands. On Search they may ask for a child. Children chosen tend to submit willingly to the surgery and training. To those left behind they become an object of awe. On some worlds, like ice-covered Lalande 2, the chosen have been remembered as gods.

  A Goldenwing in the sky is a promise of adventure, and of escape from the subsistence worlds where colonists struggle to survive. But now Goldenwings are very few, and the paucity echoes with ancestral sadness. A rare Goldenwing awakens memories of the blue Earth, and touches watchers with the melancholy of humanity’s restless roaming.

  The age of the sailing starships is nearly ended. They have performed great services. They have carried humanity to the near stars: to triple Centaurus, to Barnard’s Star, Wolf, Lalande, to Sirius A and B, to the Ross pair, to Indi, to 61 Cygni, to the Luyten Stars. But it is nearly done now. It will take Earth thousands of her swift years to repopulate sufficiently to launch a second wave at the stars.

  The colony worlds are primitive; few have progressed beyond hand labor and agriculture. It is not an easy thing to people an empty galaxy.

  But it is an article of faith among Goldenwing crews that when Earth is reclaimed by her far-traveling children, they will not come in cold-sleep, aboard sublight sailing ships. They will come in new vessels, swifter than light, and armed with new sciences developed under foreign suns.

  But this tomorrow will not dawn in Glory’s time. Nor in the time of Duncan’s syndicate. On some colony worlds interplanetary ships are built and manned. But Glory and her sisterships are the work of Earth, the homeworld. The golden starships and their Wired Ones, though fewer this century than last, are still the reaching hand of humankind.

  There is a dead man in Glory’s hold 1009. For him, relativity has ceased at last to have meaning. He was a member of Glory’s fifth syndicate before he became the astroprogrammer for the syndicate captained by Duncan Kr. Han Soo was eighty, shiptime, when he died of a stroke. He was born on Earth, in a land called China, eighteen hundred years ago.

  Glory has sailed from Sol to Barnard’s Star, to Proxima, then to Wolf, and now to the Luyten Stars. A round-robin voyag
e takes Glory five years uptime.

  The tachyon winds are constant. As once her clipper ship precursors were driven by the trades across the oceans of Earth, Glory is driven by the great Coriolis force of the epochal spin of the Milky Way galaxy.

  With starlight reflecting from her great wings, Glory traverses the Luyten Oort Cloud--the Luyten solar system’s vast englobature of frozen rock and ice far beyond the orbit of Luyten 726I9, the gas giant Drache.

  Glory tacks and points to intercept Planet Voerster, fourth from the Luyten sun.

  Starmen, it is said, are made, not born. Physically, this is certainly true. Each has undergone neuropsychosurgery and a socket implant. And each began life as a down-worlder. Almost without exception Starmen are recruited as children by other Starmen on Search downside. There are women Starmen, but they are few. Fertile females are not surrendered willingly by colonial societies with empty worlds to populate.

  Aboard Glory in this syndicate period there is a single woman. Anya Amaya--her name, in the language of New Earth, where she was born--is pronounced with a kind of musical elision. She is native to the tenth planet of Proxima Centauri where women must breed at thirteen. When Glory appeared over New Earth Anya had reached the age of fifteen and had not yet borne a child. Considered useless by her femina-group, she was--in the manner of New Earth-- offered for sale.

  It was her blind good fortune that Glory’s computer detected a talent; Duncan’s syndicate bought her the moment she was put on the market. She has now been in space, Wired, for four uptime years. On New Earth nineteen years have passed and Anya is forgotten. The cold women of New Earth do not bestow godhood on Goldenwing crews. They are far too sophisticated for that.

  Starship syndicates are pure meritocracies. On Glory, once her neurosurgery and implant healed, Duncan and Glory’s computer have made Anya Sailing Master.

  At this moment Anya lies nude in her pod on the bridge. Her body twitches and quivers like a sleeping cat’s. Through the thick cable connecting the computer to the socket in the back of Anya’s skull, she and Glory are exchanging billions of bits each second. As Sailing Master she is overseeing the work of the monkeys, the set of the sails, the process of sloughing off speed, the availability of the crew, the distance of protocomets, the gravitational effects of distant bodies.

  At this vast distance from the Luyten star, and so lightly tasked, Anya has time for personal concerns.

  She has been humoring the old astronomer on Voerster. His name is Osbertus Kloster, and he is related to the ruling family of Voerster. Anya has been in communication with him for weeks. By burst code alone. Relative time-scales must be matched before voice communication is possible.

  But Osbertus has used his primitive radio dishes to send excited greetings and information about the astronomy of the Luyten 726 system. His greatest accomplishment as a scientist has been a plot of the six gas giants of the outer Luyten solar system. He has carefully and in great detail informed Anya of the known facts about Erde, Smuts, deKlerk, Wallenberg, Thor and Drache. It is his contribution to a great event: the arrival at Voerster of a Goldenwing.

  Using Glory’s computer, Anya Amaya has had the astronomy of the Luyten solar system plotted for weeks. But ever tactful, the girl has pretended that Osbertus Kloster has provided Glory with vital information.

  Now she is giving gentle orders to the monkeys who are swiftly reefing and backing the sails so that Glory may begin to bleed off excessive delta-V. Once done, Glory will slingshot around the outermost giant--Drache--and overtake Voerster, arriving exactly two twenty-nine hour days before Voerster’s apastron, when the season of storms ends on Voerster’s stratospheric highlands.

  Anya Amaya joyously uses the astronomical assets available to her to achieve an elegant solution to a problem in celestial mechanics. This ability is the talent Glory’s computer discovered. It is the reason that Anya Amaya is Sailing Master. All Starmen are talented. It is a requirement of their craft. Anya Amaya and her captain, Duncan Kr, are more talented than most.

  Glory’s cold-sleep combs were empty. They had been empty since the last colonists awoke on Aldrin, long ago. The only human thing in the combs was the dead astroprogrammer in hold 1009.

  A strange man, Han Soo, with a horror of drifting in interstellar space for eternity. Duncan had promised him a burial in soil. If not the soil of China on Earth, then what soil the colonists of Voerster would allow a man of Old Earth.

  The Goldenwings suffered from an ancient malady. They were no longer “economically viable enterprises.” Without colonists to transport, what could a ship carry that might be ordered by one generation and delivered to another? This vulnerability to market forces was slowly forcing Goldenwings into dismantlement and oblivion. Circling Columbia, the colony world of the 61 Cygni system, the Goldenwing Starbolt slumbered away eternity as a space museum, visited by the precocious children of a technologically advanced society. On Wheat, the prairie world of Beta Indi, the bones of Goldenwing Potemkin lay like fossils surrounded by fifty million hectares of grain. But Glory sailed on.

  She carried timeless things. In her holds were ingots of rare elements, old books and works of art, bolts of silk and tapestries, gemstones from Barnard’s Star, and polished slates from Lalande. There were a few technological supplies now far out of date at home, but still useful to colonists on less favored worlds.

  Glory was certain of a welcome on Voerster. She carried frozen animal embryos for the kraals and farms of Voerster’s savannahs. There were horses, beef cattle, goats, sheep, and dogs. On Voerster’s single continent there were only the few animals descended from the stock brought by the First Landers. Offworld stock had not prospered on Planet Voerster. And there was a sea of wild grass. But there were no trees, no insects, no flowers, and no native mammals. The indigenous life-forms were necrogenes struggling, against their nature, to survive.

  A Voertrekker of Voerster could do without native flowers and insects. He could live without trees. But he could not survive without a replenishment of his stock of Terrestrial farm and domestic animals.

  A great many of Voerster’s five-hundred-day years before, an ancestor of the present Voertrekker-Praesident had ordered a vast shipment of genetically engineered animals from the captain of a Goldenwing named Nostromo.

  The old Voertrekker’s descendant now awaited the arrival of the shipment. The volk of Voerster could always be counted on to be stolidly patient and to take the long view of things.

  On Voerster, the long view was the only view. Thirteen hundred planetary years before this time, colonists from South Africa had been landed on the single great continent by the Goldenwing Milagro. The voertrekking whites had fled from the plague-ridden horror of Africa. Miraculously, they had persuaded several thousand blacks to join them in cold-sleep and colonization. “Look about you,” they said to the kaffirs. “See what Africa has become. There is talk of democracy, but what is real is the repression, plague, tyranny, and death you see all about you. On Luyten we promise you opportunity.”

  For the first three hundred years the promises were kept and Voerster prospered. There were some who saw a threat in the assumption of that name, called it code for oppression to come. But the whites wished only to honor their tribal leader, they said, who had led them skyward.

  The Great Kaffir Rebellion exploded 301 years after Landers’ Day. It began as a riot and ended in a ten-year war between the races. Civilization was staggered, knowledge was lost. A population laboriously built up to number ten million whites, sixty million blacks and fifteen million persons of mixed blood was savagely reduced to one-twentieth of that number. Science, except for the technology of war, languished. The medical arts stagnated. What had been a burgeoning technological society reverted to rustication. And there it remained, slowly dying, a sad replica of the world of apartheid the first white colonists of Voerster had secretly longed for.

  The crew of Gloria Coelis knew little of Voerster’s history. The planet had not been visited sinc
e the brief call by Goldenwing Nepenthe more than fifty years before. But what Nepenthe might have discovered about Voerster, only Nepenthe’s syndicate knew. Goldenwing syndicates dealt with one another through agents. Space is simply too vast for chance encounters.

  Anya Amaya, her eyes open but unseeing, caused the mizzen foretops to be furled preparatory to tacking the ship out of the Oort Cloud. Her move, so neatly done that it took only a score of monkeys racing up the rigging and out onto the spars, was watched and admired by the Captain.

  Duncan Kr was a man with a natural appreciation of elegance, and the Sailing Master’s skill was worthy of her talent. Within a solar system Anya sailed Glory like a zero-gravity dancer.

  Duncan’s pod lay next to the Sailing Master’s. There were others, one for each member of the crew, but at the moment they were empty. Like Anya, Duncan lay nude in the pod’s glyceroid medium, hard-wired to the computer.

  His globe of awareness was far larger than Anya Amaya’s. Her responsibility was to sail Glory, who was yare. Sweet to sail, quick to the helm, swift and manageable. Duncan’s talent and responsibility was larger. His computer-enhanced awareness englobed the entire vessel and the millions of cubic kilometers of space around her. Duncan sensed the Luyten 726 solar system almost in its entirety. He felt the turbulence of the Oort Cloud, cluttered with hurtling rocks and clumps of ice. Duncan was aware of collisions, close passes, the surge of gravity tides and centripetal forces.

  There were twelve planets circling Luyten out to a distance of 5.6 x 1012 kilometers. The outer six were gas giants. Of the inner six, only one was habitable. Voerster, fourth from the sun, was not an easy world. Space had not provided Man with any worlds as good as his own. Soon Duncan would begin to sense the life on Voerster, still a billion kilometers sunward.

  Closer at hand, Duncan was aware of the subtle bioelectric spillages from the living things aboard Glory. He felt the faint, spectral plasmas formed by the frozen animal embryos in the hold--the feral, joyous, psychic auras of the ship’s family of cats--the strongest from Mira, the young queen who has been given her own small remote interface with Glory’s computer. A sardonic joke by Dietr Krieg, the German neurocybersurgeon.