Glory

by Alfred Coppel

  “Take a good look, kaffir.”

  Clavius could see tiny, antlike figures moving far below. What did the passage of a dirigible at this height mean to them? God help the poor souls, he thought. Probably nothing at all.

  The dirigible made a long, slow circle. Another. Then the pilots pointed the nose to the north across the Sea of Lions. Soon nothing was in sight but ocean, whitecapped and frigid, between the Walvis Strait and the south coast of the Grassersee a thousand kilometers to the north.

  “‘And they showed Galileo the instruments,’” Clavius whispered, “’and said to him: “recant.”‘“

  “What did you say, kaffir?” the Oberst asked.

  “Nothing, Mynheer,” Clavius said. “It was something that happened very long ago and very far away.”

  For hours they flew over the Sea of Lions. The Luyten sun was sinking off the port quarter when the constable, who had returned to guard the prisoner, asked, “Is it true, kaffir, that you were born on Earth?”

  “It is, young man.”

  “Don’t call me that. I am a constable of the Trekkerpolizei.”

  “My apologies, Mynheer,” said Clavius. “Where did you learn to sound like that? Our kaffirs don’t talk that way.”

  “No, your kaffirs sound like what they are, Mynheer. Natives of Voerster.”

  Searching, thought Clavius, watching the constable’s face grow even paler, his lips grow thin. Like any human being. Searching for himself. For others. For his world and what it means. He also suspects I am being insolent, and that is still forbidden on Voerster. On any planet, the lumpen or equivalent were more protective of status than were the aristocrats. Lord, he told God, your designs do not vary much.

  The Oberst appeared in the door and spoke sharply to the constable. “Your orders are to watch, not to fraternize.”

  “Sir.”

  The Oberst looked at Clavius. “Have you thought about what you saw back there near the Ice?”

  “Yes, Mynheer.”

  “Remove yourself to the flight deck, constable. I wish to interrogate the prisoner.”

  “Sir!” The constable stamped his foot, making the deck tremble. He withdrew. And the Oberst, who slid closed the door to the flight deck, stationed himself between Clavius and the starboard windows.

  “You are traveling at the express command of the Voertrekker-Praesident,” he declared.

  “I thought perhaps I might be,” Clavius said.

  “Mynheer Oberst.”

  “Mynheer Oberst.”

  “You expected to be reprieved, then.”

  “I did not know I had been convicted of anything, Mynheer Oberst. Have I been?”

  “In absentia. Of persistent vagrancy.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “On Voerster that is a serious charge, kaffir.”

  “I am sure it is, Mynheer.”

  To break the taut silence, Clavius asked, “Where are you taking me?”

  “That’s not your concern, kaffir,” the Oberst said.

  Did that man have any idea how absurd that statement was? Lord, doesn’t he think I have the right to be “concerned” about where I am taken, and to whom?

  “I have heard that you converse with God,” the Voertrekker said. “That is blasphemous.”

  Ah, Clavius thought. A believer. New Luth or even Babst. Not Cult of Elmi. “I speak to Jehovah, Oberst. But I have never claimed he spoke to me.”

  “Once you would have been whipped and put in the stocks, kaffir.”

  Clavius sighed heavily. Most of his conversations with Voertrekker policemen seemed to end up this way. “Yes, Mynheer,” he said. “Very likely.”

  He directed his gaze beyond the standing police colonel to what could be seen through the broad windows of the dirigible’s gondola. The airship had made its landfall. Ahead lay a low shoreline and beyond that the broad plains of the Sea of Grass, blue-green now as the time for spore-flight came near. The savannah winds made quite lovely patterns in the tall grasses. It seemed invisible dancers spun and whirled from the sea to the land, making circling, curving patterns that transformed both sea and grass into a dancing floor.

  The course was north by northwest. The white sun touched the horizon and prepared for its plunge into the Voerster sea.

  “What do you see, kaffir?”

  “Nothing you cannot, Mynheer,” Clavius said. “The Sea of Grass, the Southern Ocean, the sky. It is a beautiful world.”

  “Yes?”

  Clavius looked inquiringly at the policeman.

  “You think it cold and barren, kaffir?”

  “No, Mynheer Oberst. I have seen much worse.”

  “You are arrogant, kaffir. You make judgments,” the Oberst said heavily.

  For a moment, Lord, Clavius thought, I was one with the sky and land, one with white Luyten, and almost a free man. But this dour man has drawn me back here, like a fetus in the belly of a necrogene....

  The dirigible droned on over the darkening Grassersee. In the long twilight, the night seemed to rise from the heart of the land. The last of the daylight stayed in the sky until the stars began to appear.

  The policeman marched to the door of the flight deck before he turned to say, “Get some rest if you can, kaffir. I am to deliver you directly to the Voertrekker-Praesident when we reach Voertrekkerhoem. You’ll get little rest after that.”

  12. IN THE GAP

  With Mira on his naked shoulder Duncan Kr swam in a black sea bounded by distant stars and dominated by the swiftly diminishing ringed disk of Wallenberg. Hard-wired to Glory, Duncan was the ship. The golden wings he spread were his own, the rain of tachyon impacts on the square kilometers of skylar felt like rain on naked flesh.

  In near space there was not an object bigger than a micrometeoroid within two hundred million kilometers. Still decelerating, Duncan’s speed was now down to sixteen percent of the speed of light. Brighter than Wallenberg, and growing with each passing minute of time, was Luyten 726--white, featureless, showering Duncan with photons that, unlike the tachyons streaming out of the galactic center, were short-lived, ardent, burning.

  Glory experienced her environment like a living thing and every sensation centered in the brain of the man supine in the glyceroid medium inside his pod.

  Duncan could also capture some of the rich sensations Mira was experiencing. She saw space as a great empty room into which she had leapt with feral joy. There were creatures in the dark, things too subtle for the man (who Mira thought of as “the dominant tom”) to detect, but the cat sensed them and arched her back and bared her teeth to warn them not to come near. She had sensed these creatures before, usually when teamed with this tom, who was more alert than the others. Far off, well beyond pouncing range, floated a great white-hot ball of light. She could see with her inner eye the streams of hot droplets that streaked the black emptiness with a suggestion of light. Behind lay another ball, this one ringed, but it was receding swiftly and Mira’s attention span was short. She, too, was the ship (who was the “queen-who-was-not-alive”), and what were wings to the man were claws to the cat. Come to me, she mewed, clicking at the creatures watching her and the tom. But they never came. Instead, when they sensed her they slipped away into a deeper darkness, vanishing into a geometry without light, time, or space. Mira preened herself on her victory, clung to Duncan’s shoulder and, catlike, fell into a drowsing dream.

  From the drogue in the medical computer came Dietr Krieg’s cold thought: “She never stays awake long enough for me to identify what she sees, Duncan.”

  Jarred out of his own spatial dream, Duncan let the Universe contract to the interior of Glory’s crew spaces. “They are the spirits of the dead, Dietr. Or they are the angels who dance on the heads of pins. What difference does it make? Mira will always be able to see ghosts that evade us. The secret is that she doesn’t care. Let her rest.”

  “Yes, Master and Commander. I hear and obey. May I come to the bridge? “

  That meant, Duncan thought, t
hat Krieg wanted to convey information that he preferred to keep from Glory’s computer where it could be accessed by others in the crew.

  “Come,” he said.

  Reluctantly he sat up in the pod and disconnected his drogue. He had, in fact, been indulging himself. Glory was traversing the Gap, the region of the Luyten 726 system that corresponded roughly to Sol’s so-called “asteroid belt” between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Here, however, the space between the outermost inner planet, Voerster, and the innermost of the Six Giants, Wallenberg, was far more vast. It differed, too, in the almost sterile quality of the region. Aeons ago the gravity of six great gas giants had swept the rubble from the Gap, and for a radial distance of five hundred million kilometers Glory would encounter nothing more substantial than grains of dust.

  Duncan lifted Mira from his shoulder and set her down on the curve of the pilot pod’s lid. She stretched and regarded him reproachfully. With a soft trill she rotated several times in a genetically programmed sketch of making a nest and arranged herself in a furry disk, one paw covering her eyes.

  Duncan ran a hand over her head, avoiding the cerebral antenna. He scratched her briefly behind the ears and turned to the control panel. With his drogue withdrawn into the console he was, as he sometimes secretly described himself, merely a man again. Glory sailed herself inward, making what use she chose of the tachyon-rich Coriolis wind. Even at twice the speed of light, a single tachyon might take ten thousand downtime years to reach this far from the great black hole at galactic center. From time to time Duncan was near to overwhelmed at the sheer size of the universe. It was a feeling very like that he had known as a child, alone in a skiff, contemplating the vastness of the Thalassa Sea.

  In a curious way, he thought, we are always prepared for what we experience. Did that postulate the existence of a God? Perhaps so, but if it did it would take a far more believing man than himself to know it. Duncan accepted that there was life in the universe: He could be certain only of Earth and her colonial children, and perhaps the strange things Mira seemed to see when she was “in space.” But if they really existed they were denizens of some strange dimension that Man would not penetrate for another million, or perhaps twenty million years or more. For now, Duncan thought, if Earth’s children were alone, why then, amen.

  He opened the dome of the bridge and studied the rig. Half the sails were furled, but Glory still spread a half million hectares of skylar. It was arranged in an intricate pattern that caught both the tachyons and the hot photons streaming away from the Luyten sun. He recalled how they had felt only a moment before, savoring the memory of an incredibly sensual experience. There was nothing like that now. Data came to him through purely human senses. Adequate, but nothing more.

  Dietr Krieg, dressed in a silver skinsuit, flowed out of the transit tube from below. Duncan glanced at the locator and saw that Damon was working out in the gravity-spin section. Jean Marq appeared to be sleeping peacefully in his bunk, free of nightmares as he had been ever since he had come to believe that he had “murdered” his paracoita. Anya Amaya was in her quarters, drogue-connected to a Zen program she had asked Glory to run for her.

  The girl had been badly frightened in the incident near Drache, but she had vast reserves of strength upon which she could call. It had taken courage to survive as a sterile female on New Earth. The taste for Zen was something new. But if it helped her cope with the knowledge that while in fugue Jean had tried to murder her, so be it. Anya had ethnic roots going back to the Hispanics and Slavs of Old Earth. Both strains, according to Krieg, were susceptible to melancholia after events of great emotional impact.

  Dietr looked at the sleeping cat. “Willful little beast. Sometimes I think she thwarts me just to be contrary. I may have to do another and train it to be more responsive to orders.”

  “You know a great deal about cybersurgery and not very much about cats,” Duncan said.

  “Probably,” Dietr Krieg said. He anchored himself to a wall with his Velcro slippers. “I am still concerned about Marq,” he said.

  “I thought you did very well by him with that trick with the paracoita.”

  “I only gave him a logical substitution for the memory he carries with him. I am afraid he will wake up one fine moment and realize that he tried to kill a real woman a second time. His hatred of females is vast, Duncan. He even hates that one.”

  Mira moved her paw and regarded the neurocybersurgeon with unblinking eyes.

  “She knows. Don’t you, small beast?” Krieg made as if to pet the animal and she retreated just out of his reach, hissed softly and leaped across the bridge to the tunnel.

  “Arrogant little monster,” Krieg said. “By rights she should treat me like God. I gave her her enhancements.”

  “What can be done about Jean?” Duncan asked.

  “For now, nothing. But he needs time ashore. How long will we stay at Voerster?”

  “Long enough to deliver the cargo. Very little more. We have commitments to Aldrin and Gagarin on this voyage.”

  “You are Master. But I recommend a longer stay. Jean needs to get away from Glory. The computer has pumped up his enhancements so that he is afraid to sleep without Dust.”

  “I thought that was before the-- What should I call it? The incident?”

  Krieg said, “I am a surgeon, not a psychiatrist. I call things by their names. Before he tried to murder Amaya.”

  “Then his improvement is only temporary,” Duncan said.

  “I don’t know, Duncan. The business with the doll was a snatch at a straw, an experiment.”

  “You don’t snatch at straws, Dietr.”

  “Well, it seemed expedient to let him think he abandoned the paracoita while he was in fugue. If he hungers for woman-killing, the silly doll was a surrogate. If nothing else it has bought him some time.”

  “Will he try again to attack Anya?”

  Krieg shrugged, a strangely fluid gesture in free-fall. “It’s possible. Jean Marq is a very sick man. As far as I am concerned, he remains dangerous.”

  “Anya knows how to be careful,” Duncan said. “And don’t mention it to Damon. He has appointed himself Anya’s protector.”

  Krieg’s pale eyebrows arched. “Since you have delegated your duty.”

  Duncan stared at the physician. “Is that what you believe, Dietr?”

  Krieg could not meet Duncan Kr’s eyes. “No, of course not. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  “Yes,” Duncan said, turning away. “It was.”

  “The fact is that you are a better practical psychologist than I am,” Dietr Krieg said. “Have you stopped sexual contact with Anya as well?”

  “Yes,” Duncan said. “For a time it is better that Damon be her man.”

  “I will log that in my diary,” Krieg said. “I hope there are substitutes on Voerster.”

  Duncan regarded the physician with a thin, wry smile. “I doubt it, Dietr. But you can do without. Devote your time to learning ship-handling.”

  “Shipmaster, you have ruined my day,” Dietr Krieg said. “Where is the challenge in becoming half-computer, half-starship?”

  In her compartment Anya Amaya floated naked in the Lotus, eyes closed. For the last thirteen minutes she had been repeating a mantra. Repeated injunctions from Glory’s computer to concentrate on the sound of one hand clapping had so exasperated her that she had disconnected her drogue. On New Earth she had been caught up in Eastern Terrestrial religions as had all the young people of her population cohort. But the truth was that mysticism as a credo was unsuited to the pressures of life in a Twenty-second Century colonial society. It was all very well, her professor of spatial integers had once remarked, for nontechnical beings living in a nourishment-poor environment to sit in odd positions and try to recite the One Thousand and One Names of God. It was quite another--and time-wasting--for the children of a society whose technology was surpassing that of the home planet to do the same.

  Anya opened her eyes and floated,
breathing deeply, in an effort to become one with the Cosmic Self. Regardless of Glory’s excellent program library, Anya remained too decidedly Caucasian to meld with the Cosmos in the manner of a Dravidian beggar.

  It was quite impossible, she told herself. She would simply have to learn, in the way of a Wired Starman, how to deal with her new fears. It was not, she told herself, the same terror that Damon felt when floating in space twenty kilometers above the deck. Of that sort of thing, she thought, I have no more fear than a monkey. I revel in extravehicular activity. No, what terrified her-- what no Zen program or breathing exercise would ever make her forget--was that a shipmate, Jean Marq, had deliberately tried to destroy her, tried to send her spinning off into deep space to die a death so cold and lonely that it defied description. Krieg had explained that the Frenchman was in fugue when he had swung the yard at her. The explanation did not help. In fact it made matters worse. If Jean was unaware of what he had done, what assurance was there that he would not do it over and over again until he succeeded?

  It had been young Damon who had come to her aid, young Damon who held her, comforted her, confessed to her his own personal dreads, offered to share hers.

  The boy’s attention had been a healing influence. She was still not willing to go EVA when Jean was in a pod on the bridge, but Damon’s sweet concern strengthened her.

  It was strange, she thought. She had expected all of that from Duncan, who was the rock upon which the Glory syndicate was anchored. But he had remained oddly aloof, looking at her new relationship with Damon Ng with benign indifference.

  She thought about Damon’s youthful, quasi-Asiatic body, smooth, with undefined yet strong musculature, small but efficient sex, and almond-shaped, innocent eyes. Damon was not who I had expected to cling to in extremis, she told herself, releasing her legs from the Lotus. But he served. He was a shipmate. She stretched her cramped muscles, then rolled into a ball, arms around her knees. With a small change of inertia, she started to spin, her hair flying. When she began to feel disoriented she snapped out to full length and bent into the pike position. Again she extended to her full body length, spinning like a baton, feeling the centrifugal force expand and lift her breasts.