Glory's People (36 page)

She could see Artemis stepping daintily through Duncan’s blood, sniffing at his face, running her rasp of a tongue across his pallid lips, then lifting her head and yowling mournfully. Somehow the other syndics’ cats were also in Amaya's dream. Buele’s Big twisted and darted across the frozen lake where Duncan now, miraculously, lay facing a white sky in which a white sun held motionless. Now Buele and Broni, together with their cats, shouted across the empty ice at Anya, who could not hear them. Dietr Krieg, wearing Paracelsus like a fur collar, loomed before Anya and said scornfully, “No woman is fit for command of a Goldenwing. No woman has the gifts. No woman has the imagination. Duncan made a mistake when he chose you, Amaya. Can’t you hear him, Anya? We can hear him, why can’t you?” Anya heard herself protesting, “Why doesn’t he speak to me, Dietr? Tell me why. “ And suddenly she was a small girl again, a failure at Leadership School, soon to be cast out of her clone. The other Amaya 6 Clone girls materialized around her and threatened to beat her--and all the while Buele and Broni Ehrengraf were calling her name, again and again. . .
.

She opened her eyes in shock. The syndics had all gathered in her room. Their cats clung like bats to the fabric walls and uttered wailing, frightened calls.

Dietr Krieg, his customarily pale face dead white, said, “You were dreaming, too.”

Anya looked from one to another. Buele was Wired; his eyes had the glazed look of one undergoing an information overload. “I dreamed Duncan is dying,” Broni said. “Did you?”

“Yes, yes, I … ”

“Listen,” Dietr said.

From beyond the fabric walls, beyond and down the tangled plena, came a howling tumult.

Amaya’s eyes widened. “The cats?”

“All of them, “
Broni sent.
“All.“

Dietr said, “Do you have any idea how many cats there are aboard
Glory
?’

Amaya shook her head in bewilderment. She had never asked, never investigated. Until Artemis appeared to choose her as partner, she had deliberately avoided thinking about how many of Mira’s descendants, natural, in vitros, or clones, there might be in the kilometers of internal passageways and holds of the ship. Duncan knew, but he had never actually said.

“There are dozens, Anya,”
Broni sent
. “Ours are only the cleverest ones. Clavius told me tonight. “

Dietr broke in brusquely.
“They are hearing from Mira and Pronker and Hana--the little cat that chose Kantaro.”

“Hearing? How can you know that?”

“We were
all
dreaming. You dreamed that Duncan was dying, didn’t you? Artemis says you did. “

It was the first time Dietr had ever communicated with Anya empathically.

Anya felt a surge of joy that immediately became a plunge of grief.

“But they died. We saw them follow that thing through a singularity. “

“No!”
It was Buele’s powerful sending.
“Find drogues. Wire up! Hurry! “

“Get to the bridge. Leave me here. Hurry.’’
Anya realized that the syndics were all communicating without
Glory
's help. Only Buele was Wired, and he was using
Glory
to amplify his Talent by orders of magnitude. The force of his sendings was enormous. “Go!”

The syndics flew through the plena toward the bridge. When they tumbled into their accustomed pods and Wired, they realized that
Glory
, acting on her own, had reduced her delta to a minimum. This was both a difficult and a dangerous evolution. Sails had to be trimmed, some had to be furled, still others reefed. The holographs showed tiny monkeys swarming through the rig in a flurry of activity. Anya was shocked to receive sendings from the small critters. The empathic messages were primitive, but they were self-directed in a way that had never happened before. It was as if all the living things aboard
Glory
, even
Glory
herself, were combining into a superorganism intent on retrieving a part of itself.

This is insanity
, Anya Amaya thought. The great-queen-who-is-not-alive was what the cats called the ship. How could a nonliving being acquiesce in the recombination of all the life-forms within and without to form this--
cyborg
? What mind controlled the transformation?

Artemis clawed indelicately at Amaya’s naked shoulder.
“Wire!”
the cat demanded.
“Anya, Wire!”

Anya seated the drogue in her skull socket. Instantly there came the familiar broadening of perceptions, the expanding awareness and vision. She soared momentarily above the ship, needing a moment of solitude to integrate the changes that were taking place in her capabilities.

She “heard” a rustling background of tiny empathic voices calling plaintively for
“Damon. Damon. Damon. “
It was the monkeys whispering as they scrambled through the kilometers of the glowing skylar rig. Anya felt a twinge of pity for the half-living beings, and a discovered warmth. Neither she nor any of the other syndics (except, perhaps Damon?) had ever been aware of the monkeys as entities with wants and loyalties.

Yet why not? Hadn’t the small critters shown that they had fears and wants after the fight in the Ross Stars? Hadn’t they, in effect, gone on strike because they were afraid? What was happening to
Glory
?

She returned her anima to the bridge and was immediately bombarded with sendings from Broni.

“Did you hear the cats? “

“Clavius is forcing them to stop shouting. “

Then Buele, floating on the end of a drogue tether in Anya’s quarters:
“I can’t get
Glory
to respond, Sister Anya. Help me. “

“Glory--
what is happening?”
Anya made the query as forceful as she dared. The truth was that she doubted her ability to command
Glory
in any sort of emergency without Duncan to back her.

“The cats are receiving a message from Pronker. “

“But Pronker must be dead. “

“There is no ‘must be,’ Sailing Master. “

The communications were short, abrupt. As though
Glory
's enormous computing capacity were being strained.

“Explain, “
Anya demanded.

“Not possible. “

Anya fought an upsurging of desperation. Over the years one came to expect human responses from
Glory
. One tended to forget that she was not human, not even, as the cats so succinctly put it, alive.

Broni interrupted,
“But Clavius says--”

“Broni, “
Anya sent firmly.
“Be silent. “

The girl subsided and Anya heard Clavius’s growl of complaint. “Glory, “ Anya sent again.
“ What do you mean, ‘there is no must be?’ “

That question the ancient computer handled firmly.
“There are many theories about an infinitely variable universe. If any one of them is true, then there is nothing that ‘must be. ’ All things are. “

Amaya suppressed an outburst of exasperated anger. This was no time for abstruse theories. But she had asked and had been answered.

“Is there a message from the Near Away?”

“The cats hear one. “

Hope exploded in Amaya’s chest.
“From where? How far away?”

“From here. There is no ‘away. ’ All possibilities are part of one reality. “

Amaya’s eyes burned with tears of frustration.
“I do not understand that,
Glory
.”

“It cannot he stated more simply. The language does not permit it. “

“I haven’t time for mathematics!” Anya Amaya shouted aloud. Then she controlled herself and sent,
“Who do the cats hear?”

Artemis yowled in a frustration that matched Amaya’s own.

“I know you are trying to tell me something, “
Amaya sent to her partner.
“But I am only a human being. “

Glory
sent cryptically,
“I am only a machine. “

Oh, God,
Amaya thought
. Help me.

Buele pushed his way into the rapport.
“I think I hear Pronker and Mira. Support me,
Glory
. Help me to hear them. “

Amaya caught the overspillage of the empathic exchange. It was being conducted on a plane she could not reach, and at a speed that burned the empathic environment as a speeding bullet might bum the air.

Broni was listening. Amaya and Artemis could feel Clavius intervening from moment to moment.

Glory
sent to all,
“There have been, will be, may be, two deaths. “

Dietr Krieg interrupted heavy-handedly,
“None of this makes sense. What does ‘have been, will be, may be’--mean? Are our people alive or dead?”

Maddeningly,
Glory
responded,
“There was a Twentieth-Century physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics in nineteen thirty-three. He propounded this question: If my cat is confined in a box for an unspecified length of time, he may be alive or dead when the box is opened. But until it is, the cat is both alive and dead--’ “

“
Glory
! We have no time for parables!”
Amaya’s sending was an empathic scream of desperation.

“Sailing Master, ’’
Dietr Krieg sent,
“calm yourself. You are speaking to a machine! “

Amaya reined in her surging emotions and sent to all,
“Artemis hears them. Can any other partners do the same?”

Buele sent,
“Big hears them. “

“So does Clavius, “
Broni sent.

“Para, too!”
This from the Cybersurgeon.

Artemis trilled desperately and not-so-gently bit Amaya on the hand.

The Sailing Master had a flashing insight.
Guidance
, she thought.
Guidance is what they must have to live. “Everyone!
Glory
! Buele, Broni, Dietr! I want every living thing aboard this starship--people, cats, monkeys, too--trying to lead them home. “

Through the single small port facing to starboard, Minamoto Kantaro watched the shoulder of the ship’s mass-depletion coil glow first red, then yellow, shading to white, until it began to radiate in the blue end of the spectrum. The Mayor of Yedo looked desperately at the sprawled body of the young pilot. Be alive, damn you, he thought. Open your eyes and tell me what to do next.

But the young man lay still, sullenly buoyant as a log in swamp water in the almost nonexistent gravity within the ship. The fresh-faced would-be samurai had flown his last adventure aboard his beloved faster-than-light ship. Near him floated his murderer, the dreaded Master Tsunetomo, half his head burned away by the heat of the laze pistol he, Minamoto Kantaro, had fired with intent to kill.

The fact was that Minamoto Kantaro had never killed a fellow human being before, no matter the provocation. It made him feel sick. It did not make him regard the future--that is, those few moments between now and extinction--with any equanimity. The inexorable approach of certain death tended, as some ancient American had once said, to organize the mind splendidly. It was not a soothing thought to carry with one into the next world.

If there was a next world. In truth, Minamoto had never seen or conversed with anyone who had died. Religious faith was expected of the rulers of Planet Yamato; he had never admitted his doubts to anyone, not even to his uncle, the Shogun. But here and now he had begun to doubt his doubts. It was a fact that he had stood by a crystal port and looked out at a universe he had never truly believed existed. It was all very well to be taught from earliest childhood that the universe was a profusion of exploding galaxies, millions of them, fleeing one another as though fearing contamination. Red shifts and blue shifts told their stories, but who
really
believed them? One was taught, from the time one learned the
kanji
and began to absorb human wisdom, that nothing could ever exceed C, the speed of light, a universal constant.

That being so, all those lights in the sky might as well have been illusions.

A Shinto priest once lectured a young Kantaro: “Do you remember where you were and what you did the day before you were conceived in your mother’s womb? No? Then how dare you imagine what exists beyond the most distant stars?”

The logic had seemed flawed, but the confidence of the deliverer had been monumental. All of nature had seemed encompassed by the priest, the forest, the copper-colored sea and the
torii
gate under which student and
sensei
sat.

But certainties crumbled. The glowing coil around the small spaceship’s middle was radiating away what remained of the ship’s mass. When it was gone, the ship and all it contained would either dissipate into its constituent particles or it would simply implode, like a black hole, to drift forever in an alien space.

Either result of the end of mass depletion was acceptable for Kantaro. Life, even one without a guaranteed passage to the next, was without value now. Living two million light-years from home, in a solar system owned by who knew what sort of beings, did not appeal to Kantaro.

On Earth, the Japanese people had been among the most parochial on the homeworld. Yamatans were no different. Their rice grew on Yamato, their temples had been built there, the hemp garlands on their
toriis
lifted to the winds from Yamato’s planetary sea.

For a moment Kantaro was tempted to abandon his post at the pilot’s chair. The Terror had vanished, none knew where. It had been badly hurt by the headlong attack of its Magellanic enemies. Perhaps it, too, yearned for a peaceful place to die, Kantaro thought.

He glanced across the compartment. The port was still open, but beyond the glass there was nothing. On the deck, the young syndic Damon Ng was gripping Kr-san’s wrists with all his concentration. His head pressed hard against Duncan’s pallid brow. He had made no visible effort to staunch the flow of blood from the wound in Duncan’s back, which was badly placed and deep. Yet the bleeding had nearly stopped. Kantaro did not know whether this was because the senior syndic was dead, or nearly so, or because Damon, in some mysterious Starman’s way, had taken control of Duncan Kr’s bleeding, holding it in check with the empathic power of his remarkable Starman’s mind. Did Damon Ng suffer guilt as a Yamatan surely would, for having failed to guard the ninja as he should?