Glory's People (14 page)

He spoke into his com unit:
“The atmosphere is now breathable, honored sirs. You may open your hatches and debark. “

The hatches of the barge dilated, extruded handsomely decorated ladders. The Yamatans began to descend. Their silk clothing, kimonos and
hakamas
finely embroidered with gold and silver dragons and mythical designs, rustled as they moved. Damon made a great effort to retain an impassive face, but on Nixon, the wooded forest world where he was born, no one, no matter how wealthy or highborn, wore such magnificent clothing.

Warriors wearing two swords thrust through their blood-red sashes descended to the softly giving deck of the hangar bay. The grav units they wore were state-of-the-art devices fitted closely to the wearer, but they still marred the line of the Yamatans’ sartorial magnificence with their bulk. Nor were the armed men accustomed to wearing the grav harnesses. The samurais’ movements were not exactly what they would have been on the surface of the planet below. They moved like men burdened. Damon wondered why they should so handicap and trouble themselves, but Broni had explained that the Yamatans were too “dignified” to endure zero-G. Theirs was a society of ancient proprieties.

As the samurai reached the deck, Damon realized that they wore stylized, lacquered armor over their magnificence. The thin-gauge steel pieces were decorated with fine macramé in brilliant colors, each article of armor secured to the next with cords of bright colors. The helmets on their heads were inlaid with gold and silver designs, and each displayed a crest--the device, or
mon
, of the individual warrior’s clan. The effect was one of barbaric splendor.

Damon also noted that each man wore a laze pistol in his sash
. Ceremonial guards they may be
, the Rigger thought,
but they do not rely on antique swords to protect their Shogun
.

That individual descended to
Glory
's deck with perfect dignity. He was less fully armored than the fifteen or so samurai who had preceded him, but his clothing was even more sumptuous. The silk he wore was a black of deepest night worked with diamond stars in the constellations seen, not from Yamato, but from ancient Earth, the homeland.

Damon had to remind himself that these were people who, in the ordinary course of working days, wore outfits similar to the skinsuits the Starmen favored--though not so revealing. This was clearly an occasion of tremendous ceremonial importance.

Yamatans continued to debark from the barge and from the small MD ships moored nearby. A circle formed around Damon and the Shogun. The Rigger wondered if this were proper, he being a junior member of the Goldenwing’s crew. But it was not like Duncan to object. Duncan wondered what his forebears (most of them time-dilated years dead by now) would think of the agoraphobic countryman they had consigned so willingly to the service of the Wired Ones standing in conversation with the glittering rulers of Planet Yamato.

Damon bowed deeply, as
Glory
's database had taught that he should, and said in Yamatan Japanese, “Welcome aboard
Gloria Coelis
, Minamoto-sama. I am Damon Ng, Starman.” He indicated the movement in the gathering crowd where Broni was approaching. With just a touch of vainglory, he added, “And this is Starman Broni Voerster, formerly Voertrekkersdatter of Planet Voerster and now a member of this syndicate.”

“Well done, Damon.” Duncan Kr stood below the Dragonfly's open hatch. “Well done, Broni.”

Damon’s eyes widened. Duncan wore a skinsuit of an opulence never before seen aboard
Glory
. As did Anya, who materialized beside him. Yamato, thought the Rigger, must be a world of fabulous wealth. He had heard the childhood stories, of course, that on Earth the Japanese had paved the streets of their capital, Kyoto, with golden bricks. He had doubted such tales until now.

Minoru Ishida, surrounded by the detachment of Clan Takeda samurai and stepping with the awkward precision of a man wearing a gravity harness, moved away from the anchored spacecraft toward a valve opening in a distant, arching wall of monofilament fabric.

The entire Yamatan contingent, over one hundred strong, travelled like a ceremonial procession across the vast hangar deck toward what the young syndics had announced as private accommodations for the Shogun and his many escorts. Ishida knew Minamoto no Kami well enough to know that he allowed all this pageantry because it was part and parcel of the business of governing the powered classes of Planet Yamato. The nearer one came to authority, Ishida thought sardonically, the farther back in time one had to reach for the ceremonials and rituals of the people.

In his persona of Tsunetomo, the Master Ninja had become perhaps the planet’s greatest authority on the mythic past of the Japanese colonists whose descendants now populated the Amaterasu System. Outsiders--
gaijin
--might have difficulty understanding a people who lived their ordinary lives in business dress and surrounded by every convenience a sophisticated technology could provide, yet performed their government functions dressed like characters in a Noh play. Outsiders would almost certainly imagine that such people were primitive at heart, rather than the reverse, which was the actuality.

The business of governing the colony established by Golden-wing
Hachiman
under the Tau Ceti sun was as complicated and as sensitive as ruling the Home Islands on Earth had ever been. Yamatans did not take to strangers, and tended to look down upon them (even such strangers as the Starman syndics who had long ago planted the people on Planet Yamato). The colonists had long since ceased to think of themselves as colonists. Their ties to the homeworld were mythic, psychological, and not at all physical.

The islands on Earth whence these people had come were in the seismic region known as the Ring of Fire, a circle of great faults surrounding the largest ocean on the homeworld. They were repeatedly subjected to catastrophic earthquakes. Yet in antiquity the ancestors of these folk had been known to pridefully reject aid from
gaijin
in times of disaster. While cities burned and thousands died, the offers of help from “outside” were refused.

Tsunetomo understood this, and the reason for it. Ethnic isolation had produced a closed culture. It remained closed even light-years from the islands that spawned it.

Now another catastrophe threatened. Tsunetomo-Ishida did not for one moment doubt that the threat was real. The cosmos, after all, was a place of darkness and danger. But the offer of help from strangers from beyond the near stars was worse than any threat from the Near Away. One danger promised only war and destruction. The other promised change.

Duncan, walking carefully in his unfamiliar Velcro slippers, considered that so far, at least, the conclave had begun well.
Glory
’s database was somewhat out of date. A Goldenwing’s situation made that ever likely. But it had prepared both Anya and himself for the odd quirks of the Yamatan sense of dignity.

He had refused out of hand Minamoto Kantaro’s offer of gravity packs. The very notion of such a thing had set Anya Amaya’s eyes to rolling in a feminist outburst of opinion about Yamatan social ethics. Duncan had promised her that once all were safely accommodated aboard
Glory
, all the syndics would be free to return to their normal free-fall behavior. It seemed probable that at such a time the Shogun and Kantaro would be able to remind the daimyos (most of whom had never been offworld) that the Starmen had their own ways, and their own ideas of dignity and that their ability to be at ease in zero-G was no
waza
--no trick, no mere performance.

“Forgive me, Kr-san,” Kantaro said when they embarked on the
Dragonfly
, “but it will be necessary to show the daimyos that you are serious people, even though you do customarily float about in free-fall.”

Amaya had mercifully avoided making any comment. For which Duncan was grateful. Dealing with colonials taught one to accept the absurd with complete seriousness.

Duncan’s attention shifted to Broni. The Voertrekker girl, resplendently arrayed in a skinsuit she imagined would both satisfy Yamatan male-dominant prudery and still impress the visitors with the capabilities of
Glory
's ancient replicators, had already attracted a substantial cadre of admiring young samurai about her as she led the procession out of the cavernous hangar deck and into one of
Glory
's more commodious passageways. Buele had joined her, as had Damon, both young men assuming the solemn faces they considered suitable for ambassadors of goodwill. Big, who had been riding with Buele, was briefly seen in free flight as he vanished into the holographic forest Broni had created.

Duncan tongued his com unit and subvocalized to Dietr, who had been instructed to stand by in the carapace compartment nearest the bridge with a full assortment of antivertigo nostrums. It would not take long for the more adventurous Yamatans to slip out of their grav harnesses and try the freedom of moving about unencumbered in the null gravity. Unfortunately, adventurousness was no proof against the nausea free-fall could induce.

“Are you ready for surgery, Cybersurgeon?”
he asked with hidden amusement. The notion of Dietr administering to a crowd of motion-sick Yamatan businessmen-samurai elicited a sardonic amusement in Duncan. There was little enough to smile about, he thought. The telescopic images of the last Yamatan MD ship being consumed--there was no better word for it--by the fiery portal that had opened without warning out near Planet Honda chilled the blood. In the mythology of his people, the Thalassans, ice-giants and dragons lived beyond the curve of the world--a vast distance away to a people who earned their keep in skin-boats. No one actually believed the myths, of course, but they were part of the culture, brought by the clans from Earth along with the ancient tartan patterns of their weaving and a taste for Scotch whiskey. The fisherfolk of Thalassa lived a harsh life on their rocky islands, but they were not ignorant. They knew the difference between stories and real life.

And now, after so many years and so far from Earth, did the myths became real? Somewhere in the vast literature of the homeworld there was a phrase:
Here there be dragons
.... and real, terrifying death.
I am a simple man
, Duncan Kr thought, looking at the high, arching ceiling of the great hold.
But this is my life, and I must defend it.

“Duncan?”

“Yes, Dietr. “

“I asked you if many were coming down with motion sickness. “

“Not yet. The grav harnesses are clumsy. They’ll start shedding them and then you will have patients. “

“I can hardly wait. “

Dietr, brilliant surgeon that he was, had never lost his Teutonic parochialism.
He will meet his match with these people
, Duncan thought. He glanced at Anya, walking between Kantaro and the Shogun. She was smiling and talking animatedly. Apparently even New Earther feminism had its limits. Perhaps it was the opulence of the brocade kimono she wore. She seemed very different from the image he knew best: the naked Sailing Master floating in the gel of her pod, Wired to
Glory
and guiding a ship as large as a city and populated primarily by ghosts.

Dietr, too, was having fretful thoughts.

When the
Gloria Coelis
broke orbit at Nineveh and began to ride the Coriolis wind back toward Tau Ceti, the Cybersurgeon had been silently dubious about Duncan’s hope of finding allies for the coming battle with the Terror. It had been Dietr Krieg’s experience that human beings were neither the brave nor the idealistic creatures they believed themselves to be. It had never been a simple matter, the Cybersurgeon believed, to enlist soldiers in an unwinnable war.

But Duncan believed, and therefore so did
Glory
's other Wired Ones. Dietr had watched developments at Yamato first with doubt, then with amazement, as Japanese colonials, a race of transplants who appeared to imagine themselves players in some centuries-old Noh drama, abandoned their real lives as entrepreneurs and engineers and businessmen, and followed Duncan emotionally into space, where the most horrible enemy ever faced by spacefaring Man waited. It was a revelation of how powerfully Duncan Kr affected those around him, and it was an epiphany of the romantic way the Yamatans saw themselves: as true samurai.

Lieber Gott
, Dietr thought,
the universe is a far, far stranger place than I had ever imagined it to be.

For the first time the practical, prosaic Cybersurgeon felt an approving brush across his mind. It came from near and far, from the hidden vastnesses of
Glory
.

From the cats by all that is holy
, Dietr thought.

And from
Glory
herself.

We have been aboard this vast hulk for a hundred hours, Minamoto-sama,” the Lord of Kai complained, “and we have done nothing but look at ghastly images of the way in which people died at Nimrud. What is the point?”

Yoshi Eiji was the descendant of “late ones”--meaning colonists who arrived at Yamato aboard the second, and seldom mentioned, Goldenwing,
Musashi
. The latecomers had arrived a mere century of local time after the
Hachiman
colonists, and, as had happened before in other places, their arrival was not met with rejoicing.
Musashi’s
passenger list had been rife with social misfits and low-caste workers from the Home Islands. In a pattern often repeated in the colonization of Near Space, the Jihad on Earth drove away first the able and adventurous and then the less so, the less capable and the burdens on a slowly collapsing Terrestrial economy.

Every colonized world that absorbed more than one shipload of colonists had a similar disadvantaged minority. But if the Japanese of Yamato were parochial to an unpleasant degree, they were also, and above all else, pragmatists. Their history on Earth told of repeated occasions of the lower castes being allowed, in times of great need, into positions of leadership. The Taiko Hideyoshi, one of the founders of Terrestrial Japan, had begun his career as a foot soldier in the ranks of the vassals of Oda Nobunaga. When the Lord Oda made him samurai he had been too poor to own a horse. Yet he, with Oda and Tokugawa Ieyasu, created a nation that lasted for a thousand years.