Glory's People (5 page)

Perhaps
, Duncan thought, regarding his host shrewdly,
this feudal man might become an ally
. But what of the daimyo of leyasu--the chosen Shogun of this world? Without his approval
Glory
herself might never leave orbit.

Duncan watched the looming mountains thoughtfully. He was about to deal with the ruler of the only colony in Near Space able to build the spaceships that would eventually retire the Goldenwings. The mass-depletion engine under development in the spaceship yards of Kai used tachyons in a new and radical way. Duncan lacked the engineering expertise to understand the concept fully, but Yamatan broadcasts claimed to have achieved speeds comparable to those reached by Goldenwings. The idea both saddened Duncan and gave him hope. Such engines, fully developed, would put an end to the Age of Sail. But those same engines might give humankind a fighting chance against the Terror lurking the dark of Deep Space. It depended on his meeting with an old autocrat in a mountain garden.

As the tilt-rotor made its way north toward the Fuji Mountains, the Sailing Master noted with fascination the odd way in which even in daylight, the stars could be seen in the band of deep azure sky at the horizon. All else was tinged by Amaterasu’s coppery light. Amaya had some psychological difficulty discarding the astronomical nomenclature she had learned as a child for the more fanciful names adopted by colonists. Subconsciously, she scorned the Yamatan’s choice of their Shinto Sun Goddess’s name for the star she had always known as Tau Ceti. She knew this as a failing in her character--God knew Duncan had pointed it out often enough in their travels across the sky--and she repeatedly promised herself to do better, to learn tolerance. But since such a change of heart would have been a denial of all the hard-core feminist ideals she had been taught on New Earth, she suspected that any real change would be a long time coming.

As a penance, she forced herself to view the sky with Yamatan eyes.

Rising in the east was Orion, the quadrilateral of stars known here as Ryoshi, the Hunter. Low on the horizon, the sky had the aspect of night. Nearer the zenith, the coppery G8 light of Tau Ceti managed to overbear the stars. But Yamato’s swift trio of moons bounded the ecliptic plane like signposts. Tokugawa, the gas body, was at this moment displaying the single, thin ring that would swiftly disappear for a day as the viewing angle changed. The sky of Amaterasu’s single terrestrial planet was a constantly changing enchantment, Amaya thought grudgingly. She could not help the swift thought that her own life might have been very different if New Earth, the First Colony, had been a kinder world. But no, it had been biology--her own--not planetary topography, that had caused her to be sold to the syndics of the
Gloria Coelis
. Unable to produce female offspring by the politically correct in vitro method, she had been offered a choice between a sex change and assignment to the permanent labor force or immediate sale to the syndics at that moment fortuitously present in the Proxima Centauri System. New Earth was perennially strapped for the hard currency of Goldenwing syndic goodwill, and Amaya had no love of physical labor, so her choice was ordained. “In the stars,” Dietr Krieg liked to say. At first terrified, she came to treasure the memory of the day she boarded
Glory
and was socketed.

She had been listening to the conversation between Minamoto Kantaro and Duncan. It had been terse and laden with meaning until a few moments ago, when it became apparent that Kantaro-san had said all of substance he was authorized to say. From that point on the talk became fitful and Amaya lost interest.

She regarded Duncan covertly, as she often did. The Master and Commander was a man of hidden depths, but the intimacy among Wired Starmen allowed her to know him well. Much of what she knew was physical, but not all.

Starmen tended to have unusual--even bleak--childhoods. Her own among the cadres of New Earth’s feminist hegemony was similar to most. Dietr was a product of Earth, the home-world, and it was significant that his only comments about his early days were statements of his delight at being recruited as Neurocybersurgeon of the
Glory
. Damon Ng had been a frightened child in the branches of the treeworld of Nixon, bred to an impressive number of phobias that he was only now, after nearly a dozen shiptime years in space, beginning to shed. And Broni and Buele were, by any standard Anya Amaya would accept, refugees from a deeply troubled world consumed with ancient racial problems.

That left Duncan, and he was both the most interesting and the most baffling of the lot. He had been found on Search by the last of the former generation of syndics who had brought
Glory
out from Earth. The practice of Search was rare now among Goldenwing syndics. It had once been the only way of selecting young recruits to man the sailing starships. The Searchers looked for physical skills and stamina, that was a given. But they also sought empathy, a quality that was as difficult to define in Starmen as it was to find among colonists. By recruiting Duncan the old ones had achieved a triumph. Under his command, the Wired Ones of
Glory
's crew combined with their ship to form a remarkable entity. And this entity had, in the last years, been strangely enhanced by the cat Mira and her progeny. There were now a dozen cats capable of connecting with
Glory
by interfacing with the ship’s computer.

And I feel incomplete here, away from my fellow syndics,
Anya Amaya thought.
Duncan is my strength
. In a cold, shuddering mental wind, the reality of the Terror seemed to brush her mind with pallid fire....

Duncan turned to look at her. Empathically linked to her Commander, Anya felt a protective presence ready to defend her--to the death if need be. The psychic signature of the Master and Commander of the
Gloria Coelis,
once a fisherboy of Thalassa in the Wolf Stars.

He regarded her soberly and then returned to his murmured conversation with Minamoto Kantaro. In the years that Anya Amaya had served as Sailing Master aboard Duncan’s ship, she had never been able to truly fathom his depths. But she loved him, as only a syndic could. Mother, sister, lover, wife, companion. Wired Ones developed powerful ties.

Under the tilt-rotor’s wing, the landscape shifted, became rocky foothills darkly green with proto-conifers, the mountains alive with flame yellow lichens. Golden sunlight glinted on a hidden lake. A river tumbled through a narrow canyon glittering like a torrent of amber as it pushed and crowded its way between shoulders of rock toward the paddies and man-made marshes in the valley. From this altitude one could see far out to sea. There were no islands on this stretch of coast, only rocky cliffs and surf. In the distance ahead lay the misty granite tower of Mount Kagu, where Goldenwing
Hachiman's
shuttles were said to have deposited the First Landers.

Amaya, both enchanted and made uncomfortable by the traditional Yamatan garb she wore, found herself wondering about the man they were soon to encounter. Minamoto no Kami had been Shogun of the Four Domains for many more downtime years than Amaya had been alive, yet his grandparents had been young when she was born on New Earth. Such anomalies were functions of the Einsteinian time dilation that governed the lives of Wired Starmen. If what Duncan and young Damon Ng believed about the technology under development here on Planet Yamato was true, then there was a chance that star-voyaging at speeds denied by Einstein might become possible. Amaya hadn’t the technical knowledge to understand mass-depletion technology--few did--but Duncan believed that the depletion engine might make it possible to reduce the time of flight between stars to zero rather than years, bypassing the Time Dilation Effect entirely.

To the stars
instantaneously
.

Anya Amaya closed her eyes and tried to imagine what sort of society would arise from such a technological revolution. From here to Proxima in a heartbeat. From Proxima to Luyten in two. Witchcraft. Black magic. The ability to match the speed of the Terror. She shivered. What lay ahead for humankind? Faster-than-light speeds and hunting-cat partners for all warriors? A great change was in store for humankind. The war for the stars was beginning.

There were no certainties on Planet Yamato, but a near miss by a lazegun bolt tended to organize the mind swiftly and very well, Anya Amaya thought.

Kantaro-san said, “Look there, to the north, Amaya-san. In the shadow of Mount Kagu. The Shogun’s garden.”

It was a good bit more than a garden, Amaya thought. Under a canopy of imported Terrestrial pines, sequoias and cypress trees growing proudly amid the Yamatan conifers, lay a ten-hectare parkland of sand and rock gardens dotted with graceful structures of native wood roofed with colorful tiles. From time to time a ray of yellow sunlight would glint from the placid surface of a carefully sited pond or lake. Reflections painted the water’s surfaces: clouds in black and bronze; pale, copper yellow sky at the zenith; starry, dark sky at the horizon. It was a man-made environment of stunning beauty. The Yamatan botanists had made it grow from the soil of Planet Yamato. An enormously difficult task.

Her face must have shown how the scene moved her, because Kantaro-san said quietly, “Shoguns of the Four Domains have nurtured this great garden for a half a thousand years, Amaya-san. And for centuries before that they dreamed of it.”

The tilt-rotor circled and descended to two hundred meters. At that altitude it hovered. Anya was empath enough to feel that it was being scanned by sophisticated eyes, both human and electronic.

“Security check,” she said.

Kantaro-san’s eyebrows lifted. “I had heard that Wired Starmen listened to the wind,” he said with a thin smile. “I had not expected to have the legend confirmed so quickly.”

Duncan was watching the Yamatan with shrewd interest. “Do you ‘listen to the wind’ as well, Kantaro-san?”

The Mayor of Yedo shook his head ruefully. “Nothing so grand, Kr-san. I know the routine, that’s all.”

The aircraft began again to descend. It sank softly to the ground between stands of thirty-meter
Sequoia sempervirens
, ancient imports from Earth brought to the Tau Ceti system aboard the
Hachiman
. Duncan looked about for the residence of the Shogun. From the air he had seen a number of wooden mansions suited to be the residences of a planetary ruler. But here, in the redwood grove where the tilt-rotor had landed, he could see only a small structure of burnished woods and paper shojis with a roof of tiles and retrousse overhangs. He recognized the style from images in
Glory
's database. It was a
chashitsu
, a setting for the
chano yo
, the traditional tea ceremony. There were no security forces in evidence, no servants or retainers at all save a single slender boy in traditional dress of a samurai page standing like a carving before the low door to the teahouse.

Duncan spoke to Kantaro-san in the most tactful tone he could manage. “How seriously has the ninja affected your situation with the Shogun? Forgive me for asking, but we need you to speak for us with the daimyo.”

Minamoto Kantaro said somberly, “My influence was diminished this morning.” His dark eyes fixed on Amaya and his expression softened. “But the Shogun is easily moved by handsome young women, and if Amaya-san smiles on me, so may the daimyo.”

Anya looked at Duncan in perplexity. Duncan read what she was thinking:
The daimyo is ninety. In real years. Have the Yamatans discovered a fountain of youth?

Minamoto Kantaro stood and indicated the open door of the tilt-rotor. The page had presented himself in a manner so formal that he made an honor guard of one as the syndics stepped to the lichen-covered soil.

The air smelled of pine and recent rain. Duncan could not remember ever having stood in so still and so engaging a place. Wind sighed in the high branches of the
sempervirens
. Beyond lay the sea and the vast copper and blue of Planet Yamato’s early spring sky. Duncan was reminded of the high, silent cliffs of Thalassa, many meters above the spuming surf that shattered silently on the rocks far below.

There was a torii gate hung with bleached hemp guarding the path to the teahouse. Seen from nearby, the elegant little structure seemed a part of the silent forest.

“The Lord of Ieyasu built this with his own hands,” Minamoto Kantaro said, indicating the teahouse.

“The daimyo has built handsomely,” Duncan said.

The page bowed and mutely led the way to a low, meter-high door in the paper-and-wood-frame wall of the building. Inside, the
chashitsu
would be spare, stark in design. A small room with wood-and-paper walls and a stone hearth in the center. Next to the hearth would be the tools of the
chano yo
: the drinking bowls, the teapot, the tea brush. Steaming hot water and towels. The entry, on hands and knees, was meant to teach humility, and the sparse surroundings were intended to remind one that
makoto
--sincerity and simplicity--was to be desired above all things in life.

Yet, if the building and its owner followed ancient tradition, the tea utensils would be of fabulous antiquity and value, probably artifacts brought from the Home Islands on Earth. Far-travelling syndics aboard other Goldenwings said that the old ways were no longer venerated on Earth, but in this colony, at least, Zen discipline and Shinto devotion lived on.

The page, still in total silence, slid open the low door. Kantaro-san indicated that Amaya should enter first. Anya dropped to her knees to pass through the low portal. Duncan and Minamoto Kantaro followed. The boy page resumed his vigil astride the path.

Inside, a handsome old man, dressed in opulent simplicity, knelt before the hearth, the utensils of the tea ceremony to hand. The ceremony might contain an element of humility, Duncan thought, but humility among planetary rulers was a relative thing.

Minamoto no Kami, Shogun of Yamato and daimyo of the Domain of Ieyasu, wore a caftan and kimono woven of black silk and golden thread. On his left breast was embroidered the circle containing the three hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa clan, on the right the solid orange-gold disk that claimed the old man’s descent from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu.