Glory's People (29 page)

These thoughts brought Buele a certain sadness for what might have been. He was, after all, a son of Planet Voerster, and life at Starhome had been gentle and rewarding.

But the paths to the future are obscure and unforeseen. In those days Buele could not have known that his future lay in the sky, not peering at it as the stars wheeled over the Sea of Grass. The ways of Brother God, he told himself often, are strange, indeed.

Buele felt Big beside him, large paws twitching as the cat visualized the sky in his own terms: a dark savannah, redolent of menace and thick with the spoor of a great dire wolf.

“Speak to Clavius, Big, “
Buele sent.
“Let him calm you. “

For reply, the large young tom extended his foreclaws to grasp Buele’s naked flank. Buele bore it stoically. Big was an excitable personality. Most particularly when he felt himself Outside the ship and vulnerable.

“What is it? What do you sense? What do you feel?”

Buele dealt gently with his partner. It was better to soothe Big than it was to challenge him. The latter could be a painful experience, whether it was in space, among the Folk, or simply at the food replicator. Big had a tom’s fighting spirit, an active imagination and an enormous appetite for the fish-flavored concoctions
Glory
had taught him to select from the feeding consoles.

These, and other thoughts very like them, were never far out of Buele’s mind. Life aboard
Gloria Coelis
was a forever-fermenting challenge, and
Glory
herself was a never-flagging source of facts, theories, expatiations, suggestions, pointers, discourses and elaborations on tens upon tens of thousands of subjects Buele found fascinating. Save for Duncan himself, who had a very special sort of relationship with Mira, Buele’s relations with the Folk were farther advanced than anyone’s aboard, even Broni’s, whose bonding with Clavius was deeper and more powerful than anyone, even Broni herself, knew.

The result was that the boy, listed in
Glory
's computer only as “Supernumerary” (
Glory
declined to limit Buele’s usefulness), had a more focused grasp of the environment
Glory
inhabited and the ambience she created for her people than any of the older syndics--perhaps even including Duncan Kr.

None of this bestowed upon Buele an attractive physique nor a charming personality. In this respect he remained what he had always been, a lumpen potboy, largely self-schooled, untactful, and a human being of enormous courage.

It was this last trait that was required now as, lying in his bridge-pod and accompanied by the anima of the large comatose tomcat beside him, he seemed to float off
Glory
's stern quarter as the very fabric of space formed a dark vortex, a construct that resembled an accretion disk and a swiftly deepening whirlpool of fuliginous blackness that began as a single microscopic point and expanded rapidly into a ravening tower of spinning dark shot through with a fine network of ultraviolet electrical discharges.

From invisibility the manifestation grew into an abominable spinning rent in the sky that towered far above the tall spars of the speeding Goldenwing.

The com circuits aboard both
Glory
and the MD ship came alive with crackling urgency. But the nearness of the electrical disturbances in the black vortex scrambled all electronic communications. For the moment, each Starman, each familiar, and each ship was isolated by the intensity of the disturbances.

In the image-world inhabited by Buele and Big, the image that most expressed the cat’s vision of the world was a wolf shape of grotesque proportions. Big’s anima appeared, expanded, larger and larger still, a silhouette of remarkable menace, back arched, tail brushed, claws extended, fangs threatening in a mouth framed by black lips drawn back in a snarl of violent, outraged anger.

This image appeared to Buele in an interval so short that it was unmeasurable. There was no sound in space, but Buele heard Big’s raging, howling challenge--a scream that pierced the high registers and became a supersonic wail of rage.

For just one moment Buele felt the Terror’s response. A cold heat, a sullen fury, confusion and that bitter emotional streak of loneliness. It seemed to Buele that he lay at the bottom of an enormous spinning vortex while unseen, far above him, Big--grown into an enormous image through which the Near Stars shone only dimly--crouched, snarling and holding at bay the darker creature.

Bueie had a flash of childhood memory.

He was an abandoned child on the night roads of Planet Voerster and he had stumbled upon a kraal of Kaffirs sacrificing to the Six Giants--the bright planets of Voerster’s winter sky. There were chants and wails, and the child Buele shivered as he remembered the talk heard of Kaffirs sacrificing Voertrekker babies in their search for nature's few bounties.

The seekers appeared in the starlit night, an old Kaffir shaman and his mud-masked apprentices. They were using rods in rhabdomancy, searching for edible wild roots in the clay soil of the plain below the Shieldwall.

The shaman found him and Buele tranced into his first remembered exercise of what syndics would one day call his “Talent. “ For an instant, the boy was that shaman. He felt the caked mud on his cheeks, the dirt beneath his feet, the pull of a penis-sheath decorated with stones, the pain of a broken molar, the hunger that drove him.

In that remembered moment, Buele was many things.

What he was
not
was afraid.

Broni Ehrengraf, lying with Clavius in her bridge-pod, experienced many things at once. She heard Big’s yowl of feline rage and fear even through the thick walls of Buele’s pod and her own. It was a cry that Clavius amplified with his own feral cry of anger. Broni experienced the cat’s fury as well as his terror, and she experienced it as a free anima in space on
Glory
's port bow. Moments before she had been in psychic free-flight beside
Glory
; despite the general apprehension that dominated the Goldenwing and all aboard her, the girl had been unable to reject totally the pleasure her present empathic state gave her.

She knew that she trailed Buele in the process of learning to control and command her own Talent, but her skills had grown in the months since leaving the Ross Stars. She had allowed herself a touch of arrogance in recent days. .

Amaya, who had become Broni’s primary mentor aboard
Glory
, had been less critical since the encounter in the Ross Stars. And even Duncan, who could regard self-satisfaction with great suspicion, seemed to be pleased with Broni’s progress as a syndic.

But though the Voersterian girl had learned something of the techniques of psychic battle at Ross 248, this new encounter was of a different order of magnitude.

What her anima perceived was the same rent in space that Buele and Big had seen. She saw it less clearly, and consequently more uncertainly. The very concept of space itself having sufficient physical reality to be ripped like a piece of cloth was alien to any and all the science to which she had been exposed during her life on Planet Voerster. The discussions with her fellow syndics aboard
Glory
had been intellectual exercises of the sort difficult to translate into actual events.

Yet against all reason the rift in space existed and was swiftly growing larger. Broni felt the demanding presence of Anya Amaya.

“Back to the ship, Broni. “

“But Duncan is out there!”
Broni’s protest was as firm and as resolute as she could make it.
Duncan is my exemplar, my true father, my lover. And I am Voertrekker
, the girl thought
, I cannot desert him.

She could feel Duncan at a distance, Duncan and Mira together making ready to take some desperate action. Anya seemed to know what it was. Why did the Sailing Master know and not she?

Anya Amaya commanded:
“Broni! Obey me!”

All that the girl felt for Duncan, all the imaginings and the sexual dreams, all the fear of losing his protection, turned her ordinarily orderly mind into that of a frightened child.

Again, Amaya:
“Back to
Glory
, Broni! Back!”

Broni wanted desperately keep her fear at bay, but her skill was insufficient. The stygian rent loomed and the Near Stars vanished. The edges of the spatial tear grew veined with dancing violet plasmas.

Broni sensed the full threat of the Terror. It was overpowering. At this distance it filled the sky. But the image was real, not hers. It came from Clavius--an unreal half bird, half dragon. A basilisk. But Clavius kept it at bay.

Broni watched in horror as the Yamatan MD ship began to react to the forces of the Gateway. It seemed suddenly to be veined with ultraviolet light, and it was no longer firmly shaped. Its outlines melted and flowed with the plasmas in the Gateway. What had been a spaceship was transforming itself into a fluorescent stain in black water, no longer a solid thing, but a liquid image, an object in transition from an objective reality into a metaphor. It flowed ever more swiftly out of a universe Broni knew and into one that neither she nor anyone within a million light-years would recognize.

And Broni remembered a thing the original Black Clavius would often say when he appealed to his God: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

As a sick child she had taken comfort from the black Starman’s words. Her failing heart had often taken her close to the valley of the shadow. But now her courage faltered.

The mass-depletion ship elongated as it passed the event horizon, spilled into a spinning maelstrom of other-space, attenuated into a streak of fading light that could have been a dozen meters or a thousand kilometers long--and vanished.

If one
will
do it, it can be done.
--Yamamoto Tsunetomo,
Hagakure

If it can be done, it
will
be done.
--Western dictum

Anya Amaya thought she was prepared for what she had witnessed, but a stab of deep grief and terrible fear told her that she was not. In the instant the Yamatan spacecraft flowed through the Gateway and disappeared--in that instant Anya knew that all Duncan’s oblique attempts at preparing her for what might come had failed.

It seemed almost as though
Glory
herself were mourning. A cybernetic spasm spread like a cold wave through the empty holds and passageways of the Goldenwing.

Every mind and heart aboard the great-queen-who-is-not-alive was shaken by it. Anya was first aware of Broni’s cri de coeur, accompanied by a frightened yowl from Black Clavius. The sense of both cries was:
“Are they dead?”

The fear expressed by Broni and her partner was a true measure of how dependent on Duncan Kr were Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
and her people.

Anya felt a thickening of emotion in her throat. For a decade of uptime years she had been Duncan’s second-in-command, disciple, quondam lover and faithful friend. Now, in this one terrible moment for which she had only imagined herself prepared, she became his mourner, as did the ship and every living thing on her.

Anya held Artemis too tightly and struggled to contain her near panic. Gallantly, the little cat did not struggle to be free.

In their control pod, Buele and Big experienced the disappearance of the MD ship as a sudden vanishing. Their loss focused upon Damon and Pronker, with whom they had been spending much time recently. Buele felt the loss of the Rigger acutely; since arriving at Tau Ceti the two young men had developed a genuine fondness for one another. Now both Damon and the Captain were swiftly, shockingly, gone. To make a bad situation worse, Pronker and Mira, the matriarch of all the Folk aboard, were also gone. Overwhelmed with fear and grief, Big emitted a shrill and anguished yowl that filled the pod.

Buele’s breath expanded under his ribs until it seemed he must suffocate. His bare legs and arms extended, jerked, drummed against the padded sides of the metal pod. The inexperienced but combative Big reacted as his kind had responded to the unknown for millennia. Everything nearby became an enemy. Cornered, the young tom prepared to fight or flee. He leaped onto Buele’s naked breast, claws extended, back humped, fur bristling.

It was
Glory
who saved the boy from serious injury. The great-queen-who-is-not-alive took command and suppressed Big’s desperate response. Buele’s sense of loss was less easily banished. He felt suddenly lost in emptiness and grief-stricken.

Big released his bloody grip on the young man’s smooth chest and began to lick away the blood, grooming him apologetically.

In the hangar deck, where the Yamatans had gathered around their Shogun aboard the
Dragonfly
, a link from the external imagers in the Goldenwing’s rig showed them what had happened to their MD ship.

Reactions were varied. To Lord Yoshi, the would-be samurai, the sight of the spacecraft flowing like water into a crevasse was terrifying. He had been toying with a grand dream of becoming a hero to the
bakufu
lords of Yamato, but the disappearance--so swift, so easily accomplished, as though Man and his works were nothing--squelched what little fighting spirit he had been able to muster. All mysterious things were frightening to Lord Yoshi.

But the event was real. It had happened. And to the point, it had happened to
others
. There was a lesson in that, Yoshi thought shakily. And like the natural entrepreneur he was, the Lord of Kai began to search for an advantage in this sudden turn of fate.

Yoshi Eiji imagined that the disappearance now eliminated the troublesome ninja. And, as a bonus, it also wiped from the political slate the person of Minamoto no Kami’s nephew and heir apparent.

The nonagenarian Shogun was grief-stricken, though his iron personal discipline kept his feelings hidden from his retainers. Yet he had been prepared. The master of the Goldenwing had made it clear that a battle must be fought, and that he intended that it should be fought as far as possible from both his ship and from the millions of colonial descendants living on the continental islands of Yamato.