Glory's People (16 page)

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.

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 mainframe 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?

Duncan turned his attention once again to the stellar night beyond the rim of the planet. Here the sky closely resembled that seen from Earth. A mere four parsecs scarcely distorted the constellations. Orion the Hunter ran with bright-eyed Sirius. Cassiopeia reclined between Cepheus and Andromeda.

Only Dietr of the syndics had ever actually seen the heavens of Earth, but the Cybersurgeon was too pedestrian to dream about them. Perhaps, Duncan thought, that was the better way. To regard the life around you without an overburden of imagination simplified the daily business of living aboard a starship. In this moment a simple life seemed very desirable to the Master and Commander of the
Gloria Coelis
.

To colonists the Wired Ones seemed immortal, but Duncan knew far better than most how old the lonely years made a man feel.
But the sky, ah the sky
, he thought,
incredibly ancient and forever young ...

Mira, too, watched the sky. The distances were far greater than the most prodigious feline leap, but they were ignored by the Folk, because she knew that when the time came, the enemy, the prey (she saw it as a vast, snarling dire wolf creature, part dog, part dragon) could not hide from her. She reached out with her small mind to a distance she did not understand or wish to understand. She knew all that she needed to know about the being that stalked them down the silent dark.

The large ones thought there were many, but there was only one. Speed and anger were what made it so formidable. Mira knew that in the time she could leap from plenum wall to plenum wall, the great wolf could leap across what the syndics called the sky.