Glory (2 page)

A strange man, Han Soo, with a horror of drifting in interstellar space for eternity. Duncan had promised him a burial in soil. If not the soil of China on Earth, then what soil the colonists of Voerster would allow a man of Old Earth.

The Goldenwings suffered from an ancient malady. They were no longer “economically viable enterprises.” Without colonists to transport, what could a ship carry that might be ordered by one generation and delivered to another? This vulnerability to market forces was slowly forcing Goldenwings into dismantlement and oblivion. Circling Columbia, the colony world of the 61 Cygni system, the Goldenwing
Starbolt
slumbered away eternity as a space museum, visited by the precocious children of a technologically advanced society. On Wheat, the prairie world of Beta Indi, the bones of Goldenwing
Potemkin
lay like fossils surrounded by fifty million hectares of grain. But Glory sailed on.

She carried timeless things. In her holds were ingots of rare elements, old books and works of art, bolts of silk and tapestries, gemstones from Barnard’s Star, and polished slates from Lalande. There were a few technological supplies now far out of date at home, but still useful to colonists on less favored worlds.

Glory was certain of a welcome on Voerster. She carried frozen animal embryos for the kraals and farms of Voerster’s savannahs. There were horses, beef cattle, goats, sheep, and dogs. On Voerster’s single continent there were only the few animals descended from the stock brought by the First Landers. Offworld stock had not prospered on Planet Voerster. And there was a sea of wild grass. But there were no trees, no insects, no flowers, and no native mammals. The indigenous life-forms were necrogenes struggling, against their nature, to survive.

A Voertrekker of Voerster could do without native flowers and insects. He could live without trees. But he could not survive without a replenishment of his stock of Terrestrial farm and domestic animals.

A great many of Voerster’s five-hundred-day years before, an ancestor of the present Voertrekker-Praesident had ordered a vast shipment of genetically engineered animals from the captain of a Goldenwing named
Nostromo
.

The old Voertrekker’s descendant now awaited the arrival of the shipment. The volk of Voerster could always be counted on to be stolidly patient and to take the long view of things.

On Voerster, the long view was the only view. Thirteen hundred planetary years before this time, colonists from South Africa had been landed on the single great continent by the Goldenwing
Milagro
. The voertrekking whites had fled from the plague-ridden horror of Africa. Miraculously, they had persuaded several thousand blacks to join them in cold-sleep and colonization. “Look about you,” they said to the kaffirs. “See what Africa has become. There is talk of democracy, but what is real is the repression, plague, tyranny, and death you see all about you. On Luyten we promise you opportunity.”

For the first three hundred years the promises were kept and Voerster prospered. There were some who saw a threat in the assumption of that name, called it code for oppression to come. But the whites wished only to honor their tribal leader, they said, who had led them skyward.

The Great Kaffir Rebellion exploded 301 years after Landers’ Day. It began as a riot and ended in a ten-year war between the races. Civilization was staggered, knowledge was lost. A population laboriously built up to number ten million whites, sixty million blacks and fifteen million persons of mixed blood was savagely reduced to one-twentieth of that number. Science, except for the technology of war, languished. The medical arts stagnated. What had been a burgeoning technological society reverted to rustication. And there it remained, slowly dying, a sad replica of the world of apartheid the first white colonists of Voerster had secretly longed for.

The crew of
Gloria Coelis
knew little of Voerster’s history. The planet had not been visited since the brief call by Goldenwing
Nepenthe
more than fifty years before. But what
Nepenthe
might have discovered about Voerster, only
Nepenthe’s
syndicate knew. Goldenwing syndicates dealt with one another through agents. Space is simply too vast for chance encounters.

Anya Amaya, her eyes open but unseeing, caused the mizzen foretops to be furled preparatory to tacking the ship out of the Oort Cloud. Her move, so neatly done that it took only a score of monkeys racing up the rigging and out onto the spars, was watched and admired by the Captain.

Duncan Kr was a man with a natural appreciation of elegance, and the Sailing Master’s skill was worthy of her talent. Within a solar system Anya sailed
Glory
like a zero-gravity dancer.

Duncan’s pod lay next to the Sailing Master’s. There were others, one for each member of the crew, but at the moment they were empty. Like Anya, Duncan lay nude in the pod’s glyceroid medium, hard-wired to the computer.

His globe of awareness was far larger than Anya Amaya’s. Her responsibility was to sail
Glory
, who was yare. Sweet to sail, quick to the helm, swift and manageable. Duncan’s talent and responsibility was larger. His computer-enhanced awareness englobed the entire vessel and the millions of cubic kilometers of space around her. Duncan sensed the Luyten 726 solar system almost in its entirety. He felt the turbulence of the Oort Cloud, cluttered with hurtling rocks and clumps of ice. Duncan was aware of collisions, close passes, the surge of gravity tides and centripetal forces.

There were twelve planets circling Luyten out to a distance of 5.6 x 10
¹²
kilometers. The outer six were gas giants. Of the inner six, only one was habitable. Voerster, fourth from the sun, was not an easy world. Space had not provided Man with any worlds as good as his own. Soon Duncan would begin to sense the life on Voerster, still a billion kilometers sunward.

Closer at hand, Duncan was aware of the subtle bioelectric spillages from the living things aboard
Glory
. He felt the faint, spectral plasmas formed by the frozen animal embryos in the hold--the feral, joyous, psychic auras of the ship’s family of cats--the strongest from Mira, the young queen who has been given her own small remote interface with
Glory
’s computer. A sardonic joke by Dietr Krieg, the German neurocybersurgeon.

Wired, Duncan shared the protothoughts of the simian-brained cyborgs who inhabited the rig. Duncan even detected the melancholy grace notes released by Han Soo’s slowly dissolving synapses in the comb.

Sentience, Duncan thought, was fragile. But final death in the cold of space can be a slow business.

As Master and Commander--the syndicates were always drawn to ancient ranks and titles--Duncan was aware of all
Glory
contained, including her crew.

He shared Mathematician Jean Marq’s troubled sleep as he sweated through his nocturnal bout with remorse. Each night of every voyage the Frenchman returned to a sunny field long ago in Provence where, over and over, he committed rape and murder.

Dietr Krieg, a saber-blade of a man recruited at the advanced age of thirty-four downtime years, was not sleeping. Duncan felt him nearby.

Dietr, too, was presently hard-wired to the ship’s computer. But he was not concerned with
Glory
or the Oort Cloud or anything whatever pertaining to Luyten or the voyage. Krieg’s passion was medical knowledge for its own sake. Unlike the others of the syndicate, he never felt a twinge of regret or loneliness. He could as easily have worn a black SS uniform in the Dark Century of Earth, performing grotesque experiments on living men and women. He would have done this without heat or rancor, but with a vast curiosity--much the same sardonic curiosity he expressed when he fitted Mira, a four-year-old Abyssinian cat, with a computer interface. Krieg’s only truly human trait was his sense of the prodigious.

As
Glory
transited the dangerous Oort Cloud, Krieg reclined in his quarters, wired to the computer and absorbing a new medical program he had acquired at the last planetfall, on Gagarin. His brain was receiving information at billions of baud. Duncan, aware of the neurocybersurgeon, knew he would not be able to retain data absorbed at such speed. Duncan knew that Krieg knew it, too. But the surgeon was addicted. Hunger for knowledge of his art was what had enticed him into space. “Downside,” he had once said to Duncan, “how long could I live? Eighty years? Ninety? How much could medicine progress in that time? But if my years are
uptime
, I can suck medicine dry.”

Perhaps
, Duncan thought.
There are many wonders. But Dietr lacks a heart. There are things he will never know.

An impression of fear brushed Duncan’s consciousness. It came from young Damon, the last recruit of the
Glory
syndicate. Damon Ng, fifteen and newly Wired. It was his task to back up the monkeys, to handle whatever problems they could not. It was the most menial task aboard
Glory
and the most physically challenging. The Rigger must go EVA many times each voyage and must often climb to the tops, fifty kilometers from the hull of the ship.

Damon Ng was chosen on Grissom, the second planet of Ross 154, a forested world of thousand-meter-tall trees. The natives of Grissom spend all their lives under a green canopy. They see the stars rarely. Damon, like many of his generation on Grissom, was raised on fantastic tales of space and Starmen. When the
Glory
syndicate dispatched Krieg and Han Soo downworld on Search, the young man begged his family to give him to
Glory
.

He quickly discovered that without the comforting ceiling of green leaves above his head he was neurotically acrophobic. A climb into
Glory
’s rigging never failed to call up a choking panic. Yet he went extravehicular at every opportunity, determined to conquer his fear.

It was Dietr Krieg who had introduced Damon to the process of “desensitization.” No psychiatrist, Krieg was curious about the efficacy of such therapy. When Duncan questioned the wisdom of sending a terrified Rigger EVA, Dietr said, “It is an old Earth method, Duncan. If a horse throws you, you must get back into the saddle.”

Duncan asked drily, “Does it work?”

“It may,” Dietr Krieg replied. “But how would I know? I am a neurosurgeon, not a feelgood.”

At the moment there was a minor tangle at the blocks of the starboard mizzen top. A monkey could clear it easily, but Damon Ng was determined to master his phobia. Duncan allowed it because to shield young Damon would be to destroy him. A frightened man between the stars was a menace to himself and to his syndicate.

At this moment Damon was at the mizzen top, untethered, clearing the block and weeping with silent terror.

Duncan feels still another faint, faint sending from the brain of Han Soo. In the cold it takes a life many days to complete its dying. The sending carries the faint scent of soil, the smell of earth. Duncan will ask permission from the Voertrekker-Praesident to lay Han Soo in the ground of Planet Voerster.

Duncan suspects there may be trouble about this. The Afrikaaners who settled Voerster are as bigoted now as they were when they abandoned Earth. But Duncan is prepared to demand a suitable grave for his dead astro-programmer.

Duncan Kr--it was once Kerr--is a tall man, long-boned and pale of skin with shaggy dark hair. His face is homely, but finely modeled. He has eyes that are clear, pure blue and set in deep sockets that by now, in his fortieth year, are nested in tiny webs of wrinkles. He has the face of a man grown accustomed to seeing great distances.

His people, Clan Kr, were very long ago Scots from the islands of Earth called Hebrides. But for seven generations Clan Kr had lived in a bleak seaside village called Chalkmeer, a settlement of stone huts and a stone pier on the north coast of the continent of Sin on Thalassa of Wolf 359, eight light-years from Earth. Thalassa is a world of saltwater and stone, a perpetually wintry world with a single, great satellite that raises tides of two hundred meters once each forty-day month. Huge tides and storms dominate the single- enormous sea of Thalassa. Sin is the only continent. It is gray-green with oxygen-producing lichens. What remains of Thalassa is a gray-green ocean. The land is all rocks and mountains, and it lies under snow for two-thirds of the long, 900-day year.

As a colony Thalassa has not been a success. Life is too difficult and the colonists too few. Humanity is slowly, inexorably losing its grip on the planet. But Duncan‘s people have always been seafarers and fisherfolk. They are stolid and determined--despite the fact that the colony actually began to die the day the sleepers left Goldenwing
Aristotle’s
planetary shuttle and stood to stare in silent dismay at their world.

But for generations they have endured, though each long year there are fewer of them.

Until Duncan was eleven, Earth Standard, he, like all the few children of Thalassa, trolled for the red-furred fishes of the deep ocean. These sad creatures cried out in pain when they were gaffed into the boats, and Duncan, a natural empath, felt their pain and sickened.

His parents were dour, but not unkind. They had no time for therapies and disappointments. Duncan was put to work ashore, to help the women of Chalkmeer grow barley in the interstices of the rocks on which the village perched above the sea.

Duncan was one of six children of a marriage group consisting of four men and a dozen women. The dour Scot settlers grudgingly had chosen this form of marriage as a hedge against the sea, which killed men and left widows.

Duncan was willing and strong for his age, and he might have lived out a life there by the Thalassa Sea in the rocky village of Chalkmeer.

But when
Glory
appeared in Thalassa’s night sky, the clan met at the Scone Stone by firelight, and as the flames leaped skyward, considered how best to deal with the Starmen.

Glendora Kr, the clan’s Yearleader, mounted the Stone and spoke to the gathered people. “The Starmen have come back, as the Computer predicted that they would do. But we have no goods to sell nor money with which to buy. We have no items they can carry into the sky, for the fishes have surrendered only enough furs to supply the grand folk of Sin. The Wired Ones, they know many things. They surely know our state. Then we must consider: why are they here? “