Glory's People (18 page)

Damon still felt fear each time he found himself outside and at a great height. Climbing the rig was torture for him--a bitter burden considering that his primary duty aboard
Glory
was that of Rigger.

But recently when Damon went EVA, Pronker took to appearing in the suiting-up room, climbing into Damon’s space armor ready for adventure outside the ship. Anchored to Damon’s padded shoulder, small head inside the suit’s roomy helmet, Pronker clearly enjoyed every moment spent outside. Damon was becoming accustomed to Pronker’s trills and purrs whenever the two found themselves kilometers above the
Glory
’s decks.

Now as Damon responded to his Captain’s command, Pronker kept pace with his movement through the plena by sailing from one claw-hold to the next in soaring leaps, a wingless, furry bird. Damon did not find it at all strange that the young cat led the way as often as he followed. All the cats seemed to know the labyrinth of the Goldenwing better than did the Starmen.

Clavius rode precariously on Broni Ehrengraf’s shoulder as she flew down the plenum toward the bridge. The tom had some memories, implanted by the great-queen-who-is-not-alive, of the original Clavius, the black Starman who had spent nearly twenty years grounded on Voerster. Black Clavius had been a different sort of human from those who belonged to the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. Surely it was the music. Clavius was learning to deal with abstract questions, and the puzzle of his naming was such a question. He was pleased that the Starman Clavius had been greatly loved by Broni. The human concept of love was still strange to Clavius, being mingled with so many emotions having little to do with sex and reproduction. Clavius, just reaching maturity, was obsessed by sex. Sex was important. He seethed with hormones and sexual fantasies, and he waited anxiously for some of his female siblings to reach estrus.

But Clavius was, like Black Clavius, a singer. The man had made music on an inanimate thing called a balichord, which Broni also played. Broni’s pleasure in the music was profound. She was convinced that no living being had ever, or would ever, make more beautiful sounds than the great black Starman had done. For reasons that Clavius could not fathom, his sweet yowlings did not arouse in Broni the same delight they did in many of the young female Folk.

As the girl moved through the cold air of the plenum, Clavius could hear the metallic sounds of her artificial heart. He did not yet know about medical prosthetics, but he did know that his person had a noisy thing inside her body that held her life hostage.

He also knew, because Broni did, that she was destined never to enjoy an interval on that great bright disk in the sky or any other like it, which Clavius knew were many.

As they flew swiftly toward the place Clavius thought of as the inner lair, the tom could sense his siblings--those who had been matched by Mira to humans of their own--assembling. Outside the great queen was the domain of the Beast. Each of the Folk had his or her own vision of the thing that stalked them. To Clavius it was a great dog with bloody jaws. The blood, he thought with a shiver, smelled and tasted of the Folk. He had never seen a dog, but he knew enough to be afraid. It was part of the wisdom given him before he was weaned.

Tonight Mira was yowling warnings to her pride that there was danger inside. The cats, being young and with little real experience of danger, reacted in their own individual ways.

But Clavius realized that safe play and secret learning were almost at an end. A time of tooth and claw was upon them all.

Big, the cobby tom who had attached himself to Buele, was not the quickest of Mira’s pride, nor the most intelligent. But under the influence of the Voersterian boy’s extraordinary empathic Talent, Big was far advanced along the path to direct communication with the human syndics.

He had progressed to the point of adopting the habit of using human names. He recognized Big as his own name. He even knew what it meant--though he thought it foolish, since Buele, indeed any of the humans aboard, was far larger and more massive than Big. But that was the way humans thought.

Buele had discussed with him the human view of the other syndics (most particularly the young queen, Broni) and the feline view of the rest of Mira’s pride. Between cat and boy a lingua franca had begun to develop. Because of Buele’s inability to articulate cat sounds or assume the necessary postures to transmit feline body language, the language they were developing was more human than cat. But the human meanings of words were slurred, elided, and modified by Big’s peculiar worldview. For example, to “discuss “ did not imply the tedious and tendentious human way of worrying a topic. Instead it suggested an acceptance, and even an understanding, of the way each participant in the exchange viewed the problem. This did not mean that the encounter could not explode into a furious matter of tooth and claw. The cats understood that there were times when nothing less would serve. The humans had apparently once known simple truths, but time had dulled their natural senses.

To Buele, the simple statement “I am hungry“ meant a desire to visit a food replicator. To Big the same phrase meant the scent and taste of Mira’s breasts, the anger and sorrow of being weaned, the half-joy, half-fury of quarreling with a sibling, and even the possibility of fighting and killing. Only then came the learned memories of the food replicators and the satisfactions they offered.

Both Buele and Big were intensely interested in the phenomenon of the wolf-dog-dragon that flashed with the speed of thought about the night outside the great queen. They feared it. They dreaded summoning it with their anger or pain or sorrow.

But they were steadfast in their knowledge that it must be faced, and killed because it stalked them relentlessly and would until either they or it were dead.

Big understood death better than did Buele. There were few vermin aboard the great queen, but those there were had been used by Mira as prey for her offspring. To show them death taught them the value of life.

It was a terrible, simple lesson, but a profound one.

Anya Amaya watched with some annoyance as her fellow syndics arrived and took their accustomed places in the bridge. She was still shaken by the clarity of the message she had received from Hana. Un-Wired, she had not expected it. Something profound was taking place aboard
Glory
.

The idea of suspecting a cat of some kind of human conspiracy was lunacy. But was it, really? Mira and her breed were not ordinary cats. Dietr’s meddling had changed them into something quite different than they would have been had they been brought out of cold-sleep as any other mammal aboard
Glory
had been. Now, thought Anya Amaya, here were Buele, Broni, Damon, and Dietr Krieg, all accompanied by cats. It was unsettling, as though she were being excluded from something important taking place just out of her sight and hearing. The Sailing Master was still brooding on this as Duncan and Mira came though the valve.

There was a tear on one arm of Duncan’s skinsuit; blood stained the fabric. There was anger in his lean, lined face. Amaya knew that anger. It manifested itself in a darkness that settled on Duncan when he blamed himself for putting his ship and his people at risk.

Without preamble he anchored himself to the control console and addressed himself to the group. “I thought we had left the worst of Yamatan politics behind when we agreed to meet here on
Glory
. I was mistaken.” He held aloft an object five centimeters in diameter. “This is a throwing star. In the hands of one who can use it, it can kill. If it were not for Mira, it would have killed me.”

Dietr immediately reached for the star. Aboard Goldenwing
Glory
weapons were his concern. None of the other syndics had the experience or the desire to become expert.

“Be careful,” Duncan said. “I think the points are poisoned.”

Amaya was by his side. She touched the bloodstained tear in his skinsuit. “Mira did this?”

“Yes. She saw the damn thing coming. I don’t know how. If she hadn’t I’d be floating dead in the dorsal ob-deck.”

Mira; clinging to the console beside Duncan, looked inscrutable. The other cats lashed their tails.

“See, Brother Duncan,” Buele said, “they all know.”

“Leave that for a minute, boy,” Dietr Krieg said brusquely. To Duncan he said, “Did the star touch you at all?”

“Only my hand. It didn’t break the skin.”

“I can give you an inoculation to be safe.”

Duncan looked at the somber faces around him. “After what happened in Yedo I should have taken better precautions. It could have been any one of you. We will take care now. But first we have a decision to make. We can’t go into Deep Space with an unknown assassin aboard.”

“We must tell the Shogun,” said Broni. Killing had been common on her homeworld, but an attack on a Master and Commander aboard his own ship was a sacrilege. To colonists--and Broni was the descendant of colonists--the Master of a Goldenwing was a mythic, untouchable figure. The ninja attack in the square of Yedo might have been excused as a flash of local political beastliness. But not an attempt aboard
Glory
. That was an outrage. Broni, and all the syndics, had taken it as an article of faith that such barbaric behavior would remain on the planet’s surface.

Damon said, “The Shogun must account for it, Master and Commander.” As always in times of stress or danger, syndics had a tendency to become archaic in their use of the language of the ancient seas of Planet Earth.

“All in time, Damon,” Duncan said. “Wire up, all of you. And never mind considerations of privacy. I want you all to let the cats join in.” He smiled ruefully. “Mira paid their dues.”

The Starmen socketed their drogues. Instantly perceptions widened. Each member of the crew partook of Duncan’s singular memory of the event. What was most remarkable was that they could experience the event through Duncan’s perceptions and through Mira’s. The cats reacted first, arching their backs and bottle-brushing their tails as they experienced Mira’s precisely recalled memory of the moment when she sensed the danger in the shadows. Big, and therefore Buele, reacted with alarm and anger. The large young tom’s reaction to most challenges was one of aggression. Now he growled and searched imaginary shadows for a perceived threat. He saw a human form, unrecognized, but clearly one of the Yamatan colonists. Each of the animals amplified the impression for the human to whom they had attached themselves. The result was a burst of sensation brimming with warning signals and impressions that would be instantly recognized by any of the Wired Ones on the bridge. The would-be assassin could not hide from the feline senses of Mira and her children. The cats paid no attention to human names because they were without true meaning. But the thrower of the star, regardless of his ability to shed one identity for another, was now a marked being aboard the Goldenwing. He was prey.

Duncan brought the conclave back to a human level.
“Does anyone recognize him?”

It was Amaya who had spent the most time studying the Yamatans on the inbound journey, she who might best understand them. Duncan, she felt, was darkly angry at the notion of treachery from the Yamatans.

Anya sent,
“If he is a ninja he is totally focused, totally committed. He will have to be killed. “

All received the impression of a man spaced--thrust into the void without armor or breathing gear. It was the traditional way of death for miscreants aboard spacecraft since the days of the first Mars missions in the dawn of the Space Age.

Dietr added his opinion, an odd mélange of academician’s equivocation and Teutonic sense of a need for rigid justice and discipline:
“If, Sailing Master. If. We must be certain. We should not offend the Yamatans. “

Duncan felt the spillage of outrage and anger from Anya Amaya. The Sailing Master was easily the most emotional of all the Starmen aboard
Glory
, and her New Earther’s anger could be explosive.

The cats responded to her state with anger of their own. What threatened Duncan threatened the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. What threatened her put at risk the cats’ whole universe.

“Anya. Control. “
Duncan’s sending was measured and reined.
“Remember what we face out there. “
It was too easy to allow anger to build. It was contagious. And the Terror fed on it. Fed?

Duncan wondered. Perhaps strong emotions were only signposts for the stalking death, guiding it across parsecs and centuries. But the strongest impression Duncan had had, even when he had been adrift in the Ross System and filled with the realization that death was very near, had been
fury
.

Buele picked up on Duncan’s thought with startling swiftness.
“It is more than that, Brother Captain.”
The syndics’ attention focused on the Voersterian boy.

“Say more, Buele, “
Dietr Krieg sent.
“Say more. “

“I felt sadness. Grief. Loneliness.”

The syndics recoiled almost physically from what they sensed was a genuine sympathy for the thing that tracked them across space, eager to kill.

“You are an idiot, boy!” The Cybersurgeon snapped aloud. The change from empathic communication to spoken language made the cats uncomfortable. Mira arched her back and bared her teeth at Dietr Krieg.

“Don’t threaten me, you saber-toothed little monster. The boy is talking like a fool,” he said.

His own companion, Paracelsus, growled softly. Para relished the closeness of the pride, of the Folk, and of the syndics. He was distressed by whatever disturbed it.

Mira’s sending, urging patience, calmed him. Para was particularly prone to the feline trait of showing indecision when no defined reason for a quick choice of behavior was indicated by the situation. He nevertheless uttered another, softer, growl. It was the young tom’s way of establishing psychological territory, what Buele would call a “yes, but” growl.