Glory's People (37 page)

Then there were the cats. Kantaro tried hard to understand what was happening that involved Mira, Pronker and small Hana. He could not. They were crouched atop the instrument consoles staring fixedly in that strange way of the breed at . . . nothing. Or what seemed nothing. Their eyes seemed focused on a point in the blank Near Away. Kantaro, with his merely human senses, tried to imagine whatever it was they seemed to observe.

What could be so near to be of interest to the beasts? They were, after all, children of Planet Earth, as he was. They, too, had seen the alien splendor of M31 spread across the vault of the sky. And they, too were two million light-years from home.

The weight of such a distance overbore him. He longed for seppuku. If he could only now sit on the deck, make his peace with Amaterasu, and draw a knife across his abdomen in acceptance of honorable death ...

Hana uttered an angry screech:
“No! Help us!”

Help? To do what? And how?

Mira turned her head and stared straight into his eyes.
“You are a man. Do what men do. “

Kantaro was stunned. None of the syndic’s cats had ever bespoken him so clearly and forcefully.

“Tell me. “

Again she bespoke him clearly, powerfully.

“Call to
Glory
. Reach out to the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. You seem a man like the dominant tom. Be one. Make the great queen respond to you. “

Broni Ehrengraf lay in the warm gel of her pod, Wired to
Glory
and closely bonded empathically to Clavius. The cat had been with her inside the pod until a few moments ago, but the hours that had passed since Big had heard the first sending from Duncan and Damon were difficult for a young tom to endure, and he had leapt up out of the pod to sit erect on the metal shoulder of the device.

Clavius was having difficulty with his attention span. One of the characteristics of all cats was an inability to remain concentrated on any thing or subject that did not regularly produce attention-demanding bursts of activity. Broni was aware that Mira had recently been concentrating her schooling efforts on the young cats, especially the males, whose attention was most apt to wander inopportunely.

Not that Broni objected to another, even Clavius’s mother, schooling her partner without her present. Yet Mira, who could be arrogant to a fault, ignored her wishes and had continued to train Clavius in the art of concentration.

Broni, lurking about near the scene of the exercises, had distinctly heard Mira’s sending to the effect that not every object of required attention was going to bound like a rabbit or smell like a field mouse. (Both of which objects Broni was certain neither Mira nor any of the cats, natural and enhanced, aboard
Glory
had ever actually seen.)

Now it remained to be seen how well Mira had taught her partner his lesson. Since congregating in the bridge, none of the syndics, human or feline, had heard so much as a subetheric whisper from the missing shipmates.

Was it possible that they had imagined hearing an appeal from the absent ones? Had they wanted to hear one so much that, in the event, they did?

That cannot be
, Broni Ehrengraf thought.
“Stay alert, Clavius. Stay alert and listen. “

“I listen,”
the cat sent shortly. Long concentration made Clavius even more short tempered than it did the others.

The Goldenwing was moving slowly, adjusting its course accordingly. Moon Hideyoshi still lay under the stem of Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis.
The great ship seemed to be drifting, though of course that was pure illusion. But
Glory
was travelling far below her usual speed in space, the conning being done by sail trim, with
Glory
attending to most of that herself, while the monkeys provided the marginal requirement for the constant, small adjustments needed to keep the Goldenwing on a return track to Planet Yamato.

Buele remained in the Sailing Master’s quarters, where he had chanced to Wire up after Big informed him that Mira was calling for help.

For help, he thought. Was it possible or were they all in a hallucination created by Big’s powerful and effective mind? Brilliant he was, but still a
cat
, Buele thought. On his own home-world of Voerster, women kept cheets as pets and men trained the larger varieties as hunters. But cheets were only
like
cats. The Terrestrial felines were a very different matter. Their small brains were as active as were human brains. Perhaps more active. The beasts were organized along certain clean design lines that the latent engineer in Buele approved. Instead of creating a being with a large brain that could use only a small percentage of its volume, the Increate had instead designed a small, efficient and, alas, short-lived animal whose autonomous nervous system could perform the necessary housekeeping in sleep with all--or nearly all--the brain cells available. A cat’s years raced by in comparison to a man’s. But a cat’s waking life, though short by human standards, had a breadth of experience and empathic skill no human could duplicate.

Man,
Glory
's database had instructed Buele, was gifted with a brain that was inventive, creative, and yet almost totally lacking in the ability to comprehend the nature of the surrounding universe.

A cat’s brain was swift, feral, incapable of long periods of single-minded study and purpose, yet brilliantly endowed to perceive, and to receive signals from anywhere in the true universe.
It is as though
, Buele thought,
we humans look at reality through a gauze curtain. They see it all.

Buele glanced at Big lying in Amaya’s bunk. He thought,
You see reality as it is. Multiplex. Layered. Interactive. Can we ever learn that?

Big’s sending was brief and to the point.
“I don’t understand you. Be silent and listen. “
The cat repeated, almost verbatim, what old Osbertus Kloster, the Astronomer Select of Voerster who had adopted Buele and raised him, often said. And, as such memories tended to do, even in times of great stress, they brought melancholy.

He looked at Big with affection.

To roam the Near Stars I left the old man without a backward look
, he thought. Big purred as Buele stroked his broad head.
Don't do to me what I did to Brother Osbertus
, he thought.

But Big only sent again,
“Listen!”

It was
Glory
who sounded the true alarm. Since the first tentative signal out of the Near Away,
Glory
had been at work to modify and amplify her own capability to receive empathic calls. Since she was not truly alive, she received Mira’s call as a series of ones and zeros, a language
Glory
understood well.

She began relaying the translations instantly.

Paracelsus merged from a trance state with a trilling cry and laid-back ears. Dietr Krieg received the call with stunning clarity. Of all the people aboard
Glory
, he was the last to expect to be chosen. But the cry out of the Near Away seemed guided to him and to his feline partner specifically from Damon Ng.

The torrent of images tumbling through the empathic gap was frightening. A deep, primitive wound. Much blood. Failing life signs. Damon using a level of empathic skills he had never been known to possess to keep a dying man alive.

“Help me, Dietr! Help me. I can’t manage alone. “

The others aboard
Glory
closed ranks immediately. Dietr felt his fellow syndics supporting him, aided by all life aboard the great ship. Even the chittering cyborgs in the rig were offering their empathic pittances.

Paracelsus scrambled into Dietr Krieg’s open pod, and the Cybersuigeon felt it all.

He closed his eyes and sent, “Hear me, Damon, hear me. “

Clearly, he received,
“Duncan is dying. “

A wave of grief crashed over Broni and Anya.

Dietr sent angrily,
“No time for that. Help Damon!”

Amaya sent,
“Who is piloting the ship?”

“Kantaro. “

Before the tenuous rapport could break, Buele sent,
“Mira and Pronker are helping Damon keep Duncan alive. Can't you feel that? Who else is there?”

Amaya sent,
“Kantaro has a kitten with him. He calls her Hana. “

Buele sent,
“You help Kantaro to find us, Sailing Master. The rest of us support the doctor. “
And then in an unmistakable tone of command he sent,
“And you, Physician, Help Damon. Guide him. And--God help you--DON'T LET DUNCAN DIE! “

This, then, thought Duncan, is how it feels to die. There is some pain, though less as time passes. What have I said--‘as time passes’? But there is no time; there is only perception of time. A human invention? Are other lives conscious of time passing, like the water in a river? Mira, does time pass for you, or do you only tolerate my fantasy of minutes, hours, days and years? Yet I can feel my time running out, and even if it is an illusion, I am grateful that there will be an ending.
He had spent years pretending to be a stoic, but pain had always daunted him. Pain and failure. Perhaps failure even more than pain.

I was given
Glory
to care for,
Glory
and her people. I was rash. I risked them all to hunt the Terror. Now I will not see the ending.

He could feel Damon’s hold on his hands
. He is keeping me from shock
, Duncan thought.
No one taught him that. Somehow it was simply there when he needed it.

I am not breathing
, Duncan thought.
Damon is doing that for me. The air is shallow in my lungs, but it is enough to hold death at bay for a time. We have all become symbionts
, Duncan thought.
At need we can share all that we are with one another. Did
Glory
do this?
Did other syndics aboard other Goldenwings become partners in life-sharing?

Sharing. Could it be that this intertwined creature called Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
was the next stage of man? He could hear Glendora, the matriarch of the marriage group that bore him all those parsecs and uptime years ago, speaking in a crofter’s long-house by the turbulent Thalassan sea. She addressed Duncan now as clearly as she had on the day he stepped aboard
Glory
's shuttle with the aged syndic who had come to claim him. Glendora had kissed him, which was strange, because Thalassan Scots were not a demonstrative people, and she said, “Live honorably. Die well.”

It was a farewell suited to the people who hunted the great furred fishes of the Thalassan Planetary Sea from coracles of bone and leather.

It suited Duncan’s situation now.

I will, Mother
, he thought.
And it will not be long
. The void of death lay very near.

He resisted Damon’s entreaty to lie still and allow a fellow empath-symbiont to breathe and circulate the blood for him. What little blood I have left, Duncan thought sardonically. He could feel it, thick and cooling, puddled on the deck beneath him. Damon had stopped the worst of the bleeding. That was a remarkable achievement when the patient could help so little.

Duncan closed his eyes and found himself a child, straddling a spearpine bough and looking fearfully down at a forest floor dappled by the golden light of a GO sun. He was terrified, and urine ran down his slender leg and fell to the ground a quarter-kilometer below. It grieved him that the height frightened him so. The spearpine was the one allotted his peer group for their season in the forest canopy. All the boys of Planet Nixon were expected to have lost their fear of heights by the time of the season in the leaves. How else could they become the environmentalists they were meant to be on Nixon?

But Damon’s fear of heights was as strong as it had ever been. The boys in the lodge taunted him for it, and his parents were ashamed. He had heard that a syndic had come downworld from the Goldenwing in orbit. The old syndic, it was rumored, was on Search, looking for the next generation of Wired Starmen for Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis.
The boys of his group said that he would be offered to the Ancient One, and good riddance.

To live in the sky! What would that be like? Would it be terrifying? How high was the sky? How long was the fall? Was it fraud to give Wired Starmen a child flawed by phobia? Fear rose like an acid tide. No, Damon, Duncan thought. Don’t be afraid. Think only of the joy ...

I am not Damon Ng,
Duncan thought
. We are intermingled, and empath though I am, this is the first time I can feel his dread of the phobia that has dominated his life. Yet he shares his life with me as an empath must. I have a need like his now. With every shallow breath, the ninja’s wound brings me closer to the point of no return.

He felt the soft touch of a paw on his cheek. Mira.
“Mira, my little queen. You will miss me. And I you if there is a heaven. “
He closed his eyes and yet could see, in the dark colors of the feline spectrum, his own still face, and Damon’s, tear-streaked with effort and grief. The image was slightly doubled and Duncan could not think why, until he realized that he was sharing Pronker’s view as well.

He sent to the Folk in a weary, mental whisper:
“Guide them home. Guide them home. “

Kantaro gripped the guide-sticks that controlled the MD’s attitude and heading. He was unwilling to allow the ship’s automatic systems to do what they were designed to do. How could they, he asked himself fearfully, when there is no direction, no time, no space in this dreadful place those without imagination had dubbed so off-handedly the Near Away?

The truth was that neither he, nor any other scientist or pilot who had preceded him into the Near Away, had the slightest notion of whether or not it was near or far, or even whether it existed at all.

His imagination still reeled from the shock of emerging into true space and seeing the stars of the Magellanic Cloud and the overwhelming sight of the Great Andromeda Nebula dominating the vault of heaven with its immense beauty.