Glory's People (17 page)

While the dominant tom and the queen called Anya had prowled about doing who-knew-what on that brilliant space above, Mira had spent her time more profitably with the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. The great queen did not know everything. There were things about the Folk she still needed to learn, but she knew a great deal about the dark forest where the great killer dog lived. It was shaped like a ribbon of night, twisted once and rejoined to itself so that it had only one surface.

At first this concept had puzzled Mira, but then her feline sensibilities had come to her rescue. For ten thousand generations the Folk had survived by being indifferent to those things that did not concern them. Mira did not care how space was shaped or how large it was. It sufficed her to know that the great dog could dig through the twisted ribbon, ignoring distance. A leap for that furious creature might be the distance from Big’s nose to his tail-tip or from this light in the sky to that other whence the young queen had come. Size and distance were limitations the great wolf did not recognize. It made the creature very dangerous.

Though Mira had been loved and appreciated since kittenhood, she understood about cruelty and death. She belonged to a line much closer to its beginning than did the syndics. There were memories imprinted in her DNA that influenced how she regarded her world.

But the small cat knew about danger from experience. She remembered well the horrors and fury of the encounter in the Ross Stars. She had not been shocked to see men die. The large ones belonged to a species that was expert in killing--not for food any longer, but often for joy. It was fitting that the wolf-dragon should hate and fear the people, but they were Mira’s people and the great queen’s people, and that was all she cared to know.

She released her hold on Duncan and allowed herself to drift away from him in the stark light. They were oddly shaped animals, the syndics. She had always thought so, but recently she had begun to look at them with a less critical eye. The dominant tom had a certain hairless grace to him. There were times in estrus when she found herself wishing that he were a cat.

She stretched and rolled over in the air, exactly as she would have done in a pile of autumn leaves--bright natural coins she had never seen and would never see except as images given her by the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. Once having learned how to access the great queen’s database, Mira had set herself to learning everything she could about the place that gave both the syndics and the Folk their original life. Now, often, as she slept, she would dream of that sunlit place of grasses and trees and vast savannahs populated by prey.

She scanned the sky. The great dog was nowhere to be found. Yet she felt a certain sense of unease. Something threatening was moving nearby.

She twisted again so that she could examine the shadows below her. They moved and shifted with each movement of the ship and change in the reflected light streaming in through the eyelike lens of the carapace.

Something moved below that was not accounted for by the shifting of the light. She sensed human excitement, smelled human sweat, threat, danger.

She reacted to the sudden release of aggression far below. A shape moved swiftly through the still air. Mira yowled with fear and anger. She projected herself straight at the dominant tom, struck him with her claws fully extended so that he recoiled in sudden pain.

“Mira! Damn, Mira!”

The shape flew past, spinning with angry precision, hissing in the air. It struck the duralite transparency of the carapace, held for a moment and then fell away. Duncan snatched it out of the air and stared angrily at it.

It was a throwing star, points dark with poison.

Reflexively, Duncan gathered himself and pushed off from the transparent overhead. He flew steeply downward the dozen meters toward the nearest valve. As he changed position to strike the deck with his feet, he heard the soft rustle of the valve recycling. It would take eight seconds for the cycle to complete, another two to reset itself. There had never been a reason for the syndics aboard
Glory
to modify the interface between the sky-deck and the twisted fabric tubes that surrounded it and connected the compartment to the rest of the ship.

Duncan reached the valve panel and entered the open code. He might have done better, he thought, frustrated, to give the command through the drogue he had been wearing, but which was now slowly retracting into its spool on the distant far bulkhead.

He was conscious of Mira nearby. She was still highly agitated. The fact was, he thought, that Mira had saved his life. The throwing star remained in his hand. He held it lightly in deference to the shiny black coating of venom on the weapon’s points.

The valve began to recycle. His anger was undiminished, but his hope of apprehending the would-be assassin was small and he knew it. Since coming back aboard he had been into the database, studying the exotic subject of ninja, both on the home planet and here on Yamato. What he had learned was not encouraging. Assassination had a long and very nearly honorable tradition in the Asian societies of Earth. Not only was the dark art practiced widely, but it was practiced extremely well, by an assortment of highly skilled villains--among whom the Japanese ninjas were the most adept. With ten seconds in hand, the thrower of the steel death star would be far down one of the empty plena that ran like a circulatory system through the vast body of
Glory
.

The ship herself might be able to locate the would-be killer, but not without a ship-wide alert complete with locked valves and constricted passageways. The visitors would be at best scandalized and at worst driven to take umbrage at what they would see as a racial insult to the lordly daimyos of Planet Yamato.

The valve opened enough for Duncan to slip through into the silent dimness of an empty plenum. He trembled with unused adrenaline. Twice, he thought, they’ve tried twice. And but for Mira he would be a floating corpse, bloated with swift venom.

The cat appeared at his shoulder. Her coat was raised and her tail brushed to twice its normal size. Her pupils were dilated with fear and anger.

He caught her and held her momentarily against his naked chest.
“Thank you, small Mira, “
he thought, and was gratified to hear and feel a soft, reassuring trill. The thought was well formed, and though there were no recognizable human words, Mira was saying,
“You are Duncan. You are the dominant tom. No harm will come to you while I am with you. “

Duncan Kr found the message peculiarly reassuring.

But the matter of the assassin aboard
Glory
had to be settled without delay. We may have brought a killer aboard, and now we have a war on two fronts here, Duncan thought. Bringing the ninja aboard showed how little the colonists really understood what they faced. The ninja brought the Outsider nearer. Duncan was certain of it. Blood lust drew it, destruction fed it.
Up to now
, he thought,
I have let the Yamatans set the pace. No longer
.

When Duncan summoned the syndics, Anya Amaya was with Minamoto Kantaro in one of the small observation compartments in
Glory
's ventral country. Kantaro had expressed a desire to see the Amaterasu System from a vantage point undominated by the planetary bulk of Yamato. Since
Glory
orbited inverted relative to Planet Yamato, a view of the outer reaches of the Amaterasu System could only be had from the small observation decks near the Goldenwing’s keel.

The two--and Hana--had been
viewing
(a Yamatan expression implying great aesthetic pleasure) the gas giants Toshie and Honda. Toshie and Honda were vast, swiftly spinning planets of extremely low density. When they were, as now, in conjunction with one another and simultaneously with Planet Yamato, their disks were visible or discernible to the naked eye. This was infrequent, and the sight was much praised by Yamatans.

Kantaro was becoming accustomed to moving about in null gravity, and he had left his bulky grav harness in his quarters. It secretly pleased him that he could now move about almost as easily as did Amaya.

His satisfaction amused and touched Anya Amaya. For the days the Yamatans had been aboard she had been observing the Mayor of Yedo with increasing interest, wondering if Duncan would object to her taking the young man as a lover.

Anya was bored with the slow pace of the discussions with the daimyos. It seemed to her that each day the conversations became more elliptical and less likely to produce the help
Glory
's Starmen would need in their next encounter with the Outsider. But this was apparently the manner in which Yamatans dealt with problems. Meetings one after another, and a tediously meticulous search for consensus.

She was also somewhat annoyed with the fact that Mira’s kittens--grown into adolescent cats now--were choosing humans to be their companions. The small beasts were showing a powerfully developed sense of discernment. Since she had never been an overt ailurophile, she accepted the likelihood that she, Amaya, would be among the last chosen by the persnickety little creatures. But she had not been prepared to have one of the cats choose Kantaro while she still waited to see if one would choose her.

“Her name,” Kantaro had told Amaya with infuriating solicitude, “is Hana. Which means ‘flower.’ “

To her chagrin, the Sailing Master found that she was jealous of Kantaro for having been chosen before her. The pettiness of the feeling shamed her and drove the notion of Minamoto Kantaro as lover out of her thoughts.

Duncan’s summons seemed to agitate Hana, who rode, syndic-fashion, on Kantaro’s shoulder. Amaya caught an un-Wired sending from
Glory
that made her feel that something was amiss. With a brief explanation, she left Kantaro to be guided back to the more populated areas of the ship by his precious new friend.
“Talk to him if you can, Hana, “
the Sailing Master sent.

She was surprised when a reply sprang full-blown into her mind. The reply was not in words, not human in any way, but the sense of it was crystal clear.
“I shall, old queen,
“ Hana almost certainly replied.

Dietr Krieg left his computer program running untended--or rather tended by
Glory
--while he hurried through the various plena that would carry him most swiftly to the bridge. The urgency of Duncan’s summons filled him with apprehension.

He had not been delighted to have nearly a hundred colonists aboard, most particularly colonists whose ethnic and social patterns were so vastly different from Dietr’s own. He wondered if there had been some sort of contretemps between Duncan and the Yamatans. Duncan was a practiced diplomat at need, but for the Captain to issue so unequivocal a command to
Glory
's people suggested unexpected trouble.

The Cybersurgeon was being followed--one might almost say tracked--by a young orange tom from Mira’s most recent litter, one of the last animals to be surgically fitted with a drogue.

The cat had been “around,” spending much time perched on Dietr’s workstation, watching the Cybersurgeon with what Dietr regarded as a strangely judgmental stare.

At first Dietr had been pleased by the cat’s attention. He had had poor success communicating with his previous veterinary patients. But the marmalade tom, whom he had decided to call Paracelsus (the florid name was quickly shortened to Para, by Dietr or by the cat--the physician could not be sure), appeared to enjoy the Cybersurgeon’s company.

From time to time Para’s thoughts seemed to come through with startling clarity. For the time being, Dietr Krieg was keeping silent about the exchanges--if exchanges they were. He could not, actually, be certain. Dietr was never at ease with what he could not measure.

He had been tempted to speak of Para to, of all people, Buele. A child, to be sure, but wise in cat lore. Buele had remarked only yesterday that Mira’s small Folk were far cleverer than the cheets of his native Planet Voerster. The comment suggested that Buele knew more than he was saying, and waited only for the physician to ask his counsel. The very idea, Dietr thought, was absurd.

He had been rewarded with a strong, almost feral impression of himself seen through other eyes:
“You are powerful. You are he-who-cuts. “

It would take the Cybersurgeon substantially more time before he could admit to himself that the communication he had coveted since the time of his first experiments on Mira had actually taken place.

Meanwhile, Para tracked his syndic, guarding and watching.

Damon Ng had been sleeping in his quarters, dreaming his customary sweat-inducing dreams of endless falling. The young man from Nixon had learned to control his acrophobia, but it was far from conquered. Damon was relieved to receive the order from Duncan. He had been planning a visit to the Monkey House, where the small cyborg deck-apes were being cared for--for the first time, Damon told himself with satisfaction--by the cats.

Cats were rare in the tree-cities of Planet Nixon. But despite his lack of experience with cats, and to his enormous pleasure, he, too, had been adopted by one of the cats, a dun-colored young tom from Mira’s second litter. Broni had named him Pronker, after one of the few Earth animals to survive transplantation to her native Voerster. She explained that the animal’s name was properly “gemsbok,” but that it had a way of leaping straight-legged into the air, apparently for pure joy. In Broni’s native Afrikaans, the leap was called a
pronk
, and it was a move that the Damon’s young tom joyfully mimicked.

Pronker was reserved with the other syndics, but with Damon he was extraordinarily demonstrative. As a prodigious leaper, Pronker delighted in reaching and perching upon the most precarious projection at the highest point within any compartment. Often this was as much as fifty meters or more from the deck. Even in null gravity, heights were always a problem to the Rigger, but Pronker’s example was beginning to give him confidence.