Glory's People

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 1996 by Alfred Coppel All rights reserved.

Cover art by David Mattingly. Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book. Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

Tor Books on the World Wide Web:
http://www.tor.com

ISBN: 0-812-52395-4

The Goldenwing Cycle

1. Glory

2. Glory’s War

3. Glory’s People

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

--William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming”

SETI’s begging signals were heard long ago.

Before the Jihad, Earth’s Hubble Telescope imaged a bulge of energy a thousand light-years long and half a thousand wide as it burst from a dark disk in an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. Ecstatic Terrestrial astronomers theorized that they had identified a black hole, three billion times the mass of the sun.

At the turn of the Twenty-Second Century, in an interval between the religious wars, a second, smaller, but equally intense, phenomenon is imaged by the Lunar Observatory near Tau Vulpecula. Again the astronomers hypothesize that they are observing the birth of a black hole--nearby, a mere three thousand light-years from Earth.

But this time the theorists are wrong. What they see is the opening of a Gateway and a transit. There is something new amid the galaxies of the Local Group.

The Intruder is implacable, a predator, a creature of an environment where there is neither space nor time. It finds in this young universe an endless well of life and energy, free for the taking. It assumes the aspect of Red Sprites to suck dry the planetary storms common on the planets of Tau Vulpecula. And it listens to the faint outbound signals from SETI, a program, a fad long ago abandoned.

By the Earth year 2200, the Intruder has depopulated the aquatic planets of the Virgo Cluster and is moving toward the source of the SETI transmissions. For many years it has drifted across interstellar distances at an Einsteinian pace. But it can move much faster--as fast as it wishes, for it knows nothing of time or distance.

By the time the Third Millennium is half done, Earth’s great Goldenwings have populated the planets of the Near Stars.

The intruder has discovered the narcotic effect of powerful emotions, powerful fears. It now hunts beings who can travel at only near-relativistic speed in a construct of gossamer webs and skylar wings.

It stalks Glory.

A samurai with no group and no horse is not a samurai at all.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo,
Hagakure

Goldenwing Syndic Duncan Kr awoke from an oppressive dream. The room sensors reacted to his waking and increased the illumination in the chamber to a soft glow. From beyond the electronic door there came the softly feminine syllables of a newsreader describing, in classical Japanese, yesterday’s ceremonial events.

Duncan, a tall and angular man too large for the bed in which he had spent the night, swung his bare feet to the elegantly tatami-matted floor and drew in several breaths of the heavy, richly scented air. His recently acquired (and out of date) Japanese limited his understanding, but he surmised that the newsreader was informing her listeners about the extraordinary arrival in the Tau Ceti System. She used the New General Catalog astronomical name instead of the local Amaterasu--the Sun Goddess. Probably as a gesture of politeness toward
Glory
's people. The girl assured her viewers that the visit of the syndics to Planet Yamato, long awaited and fortuitously coinciding with the approach from the south of the Cherry Blossom Front, would not be a disappointment to the citizens of the city of Yedo.

Duncan heard a sharp clap of command as Amaya turned off the holo projector in her room.
Glory
's Sailing Master was already up and exercising in her part of the suite. Their hosts had expected Amaya to share Duncan’s bed and they had been embarrassed when Duncan explained that Amaya was neither his wife nor his concubine, and that Broni Ehrengraf, the other human female aboard the orbiting ship, would not be making the shuttle flight down to Yedo.

The domain patriarchs of the welcoming committee (there had been no women in the formal delegation), had rather sheepishly apologized. “It has always been our understanding that Wired Starmen live in delightful promiscuity, Kr-san. Have we been misinformed?”

Apparently, Duncan discovered, the Wired Starmen of Goldenwing
Hachiman
, the ship that had deposited the first clan of colonists on Yamato, had indeed been delightfully promiscuous. Yamato’s great chronicle of the voyage from Earth--the
Monogatari no Hachiman
--was a seething tale of battles, sexual and dynastic conflicts and misadventures. After reading the Monogatari sent to
Glory
by radio, Duncan found himself wondering how that first load of colonists had survived the adventure.

The legend was bloody and, given the customary ethics of Goldenwing syndics, unusual to say the least. The chronicle described a number of occasions when colonists were awakened from cold-sleep to serve-the needs of the samurai syndics who sailed
Hachiman
. On Yamato there were still many descendants of the children begotten in space by the
Hachiman
syndics.

The
Hachiman
had been unusual in that it made three voyages between Yamato and Earth before vanishing into legend and the vastness of Deep Space.

Duncan and his crew--Amaya, Broni Ehrengraf, Damon Ng, Buele the prodigy, and Neurocybersurgeon Dietr Krieg--had had seven months of uptime to receive, decode and study the broadcasts from Yamato. Amaya, a Centauri feminist, and Broni Ehrengraf, the descendant of Afrikaner Voertrekkers, had found the sexual history described by the descendants of Yamato’s First Arrivers a chronicle of hilariously boastful tall tales. But Dietr Krieg refused to be dubious. “Not all syndics are as Spartan as we,” he said slyly, “and not everyone has had the benefit of your ball-breaker upbringing, Sailing Master.”

Dietr delighted in reminding Anya Amaya that she had been sold by the New Earth Eugenics Authority to the Goldenwing
Glory
syndicate precisely because she had been unwilling (actually she had been unable) to produce female offspring through the strict New Earth protocol of in vitro fertilization. Dietr, with rough syndic humor, claimed to attribute Anya’s sterility to her feminist upbringing.

“Someday, Duncan,” Amaya often said, “I am going to kill or castrate that Kraut son of a bitch.”

Duncan stood and walked to the shoji screen covering the transparent wall. He slid the wood-and-paper construct aside and stood looking down through perfectly clear glass at the city of Yedo. Like a reincarnation of the ancient Japanese capital built by Tokugawa Ieyasu, Yedo was a city of many tiled roofs, walled courtyards and sand gardens. The old mingled with the very new in what
Glory
’s computer described as “the Japanese style.”

The ryokan in which he and Amaya had been housed soared a thousand meters above the streets of Yedo--a city that covered the low coastal hills on which the First Arrivers and their multitude of clansmen and retainers had, over centuries of local time, built their Domain capital.

The sky was clouded and a warm rain was falling. It was early spring in Yamato’s equatorial zone. Duncan could see no fewer than four squalls on the broad, copper-tinged ocean to the southeast. Lightning, like threads of gold, streaked the shadowy cloud towers and danced like faerie fire over the surface of the sea.

To the north lay the Fuji Mountains, a massively broad-shouldered range with perpetually snow-covered heights. It was in the Fujis that Yamato most resembled the ancient Homeland. Great coniferous forests of iron-hard wood from the Fujis provided the planet with most of its building material--a resource that made the Domain of Honshu the wealthiest on the planet.

On Yamato the Domains took the names of the continental islands that comprised their territory. The Japanese had fought civil wars for a thousand years on the home planet. They had no intention of continuing that tradition on Yamato. Land distribution was made soon after Lander’s Day more than a millennium and a half ago, and the distribution remained in effect to the present. Honshu was the family domain of the Minamoto clan. The other continental islands were ruled by other ancient clans. Of particular interest to Duncan was Kai, governed by the Yoshi, an ambitious family of entrepreneurial newcomers (who had arrived on Yamato aboard Goldenwing
Musashi
years after the original settlers debarked from the
Hachiman
). Hokkaido was ruled by the Genji, impoverished descendants of a blue-blooded family whose holdings were covered with ice for nine of the thirteen Yamatan year months.

Duncan looked for his clothes and failed to find them. In the wardrobe, instead, were a half-dozen replicas of his skinsuit, the ordinary shipboard attire when syndics were not naked. The skinsuits were all tailored in beautiful silk fabrics. A number of overgarments, created in the manner of the ceremonial samurai surcoats worn by the “industrial class” Japanese of Yedo, hung beside the skinsuits.

The Yamatans, who wore gray jumpsuits when not indulging in ceremonial splendor, had been careful to provide their visitors with syndics’ skinsuits and not Yamatan apparel. It was apparent that the Yamatans were observant and meticulous people. Their hosts seemed determined to treat the Wired Ones among them with great politeness and generosity.

Today he and Anya would meet the senior daimyo, Minamoto no Kami, the ninety-year-old ruler of Yamato, now celebrating his sixtieth year as Shogun. Their guide and sponsor was a young man less than one-third the Shogun’s age, the daimyo’s nephew, according to
Glory
's database. Minamoto Kantaro was Lord Mayor of Yedo and clearly a politician favored by the ruler. He was also a man of considerable sophistication. He was going to need it, Duncan thought.

As Duncan stepped through the portal field into the
ofuro
, his presence triggered a flood of steaming water into the sunken tub and a holograph of a young girl dressed in a translucent kimono in the center of the tiled shower area. She smiled and bowed, asking, in charmingly accented spacial Anglic, if he required her services as assistant in his bath.

Before he could reply, the girl’s attention was caught by Amaya stepping through the force-field, dressed only in sweat.

“
I
will bathe the Master and Commander, thank you,” Amaya said, deliberately reverting to the old and traditional title used by syndics to refer to their Captains.

The holograph of the
ofuro
girl smiled, bowed and vanished.

“Now you have confused our hosts,” Duncan Kr said. “They already think you are my concubine.”

“I am broadening their chauvinist horizons,” Amaya said, stepping gingerly into the hot bath. She lowered herself into the water, laid back her head to wet her thick, dark hair, and found a seat under water.

“This is pure heaven,” she said. “I had no idea people actually lived like this.”

Duncan stepped into the steaming bath and breathed in the slightly salty scent of the water. On Yamato all water was laden with mineral salts. He crossed the deep pool with a single stroke and returned to take a seat next to Anya Amaya.

“What are you thinking, Duncan?” Amaya asked.

He smiled. “It is rather like microgravity.”

She stretched, drew a deep breath and allowed her body to float. Her breasts surfaced like rising islands. She ran a fingertip over her nipples. They rose and hardened. Duncan wondered if their hosts were watching--learning, as was said to be their way, by observation. Judging from the
Monogatari
, there was little the folk of Yamato needed to be taught about sex.

“Get out,” Amaya said.

“What?”

“Get out and I’ll soap you. What’s the Earth aphorism Dietr is so fond of? When in Rome ... that one.”

Duncan rose obediently from the bath. Captain he might be, but like all the men of
Glory
, he tended to defer to Amaya in matters of pleasure. In order to distance herself from her coldly feminist upbringing, Anya had made a study of pleasing herself by pleasing men. Duncan guessed that the Yamatans would approve of that.

He sat on a tile stool beside the steaming
ofuro
while Anya covered him with faintly sea-smelling soap. The Sailing Master was wonderfully skilled at male-female contact.

When she had done and had washed the soap off his angular body with a cool spray, she took his place on the stool and let him wash her in turn. Amaya’s body was that of a trained and conditioned athlete. Her feminine parts were small and responsive.