Read Glory's People for Free Online

own mass-depletion-powered ships.
    They see us as inflight, pursued by a superior force , Duncan thought. Not a situation calculated to endear us to the people of Planet Yamato.
    Kantaro-san said, “There are many secret societies on Yamato. Their names would mean nothing to you, and hardly more to me. Their activities have always been limited to family feuds and clan disputes. Until now. The bolt fired at you was political. The lord Minamoto must decide what is to be done.”
    Duncan said, “There is nothing political about Glory ’s call in Yamato, Kantaro-san.”
    “Here, Kr-san, survival is political.” His hand rested on the cord-braided hilt of his wakizashi , a short sword that was clearly sharp as an old-fashioned razor. Duncan Kr studied his host’s unlined face intently. The syndic’s empathic power brought him to the edge of understanding. But not farther. Duncan was a Caucasian. Before his people colonized Thalassa they had accumulated the experience of three thousand years of Western history in their genes. In Minamoto Kantaro’s heredity was twice that number of years dominated by east Asia’s intricate ethos. The psychological infrastructures upon which the personalities of the two men depended were, literally, worlds apart. Close observation and study , Duncan thought, might bring understanding of a sort, but would it bring the empathy without which a human defense of Near Space might be impossible ? Planet Yamato lay like an unaware gatekeeper, at risk on a strange and terrifying frontier.
    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.
     

4. The Shogun’s 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