Free Glory by Alfred Coppel Page B

the loss of a single life a wrenching, melancholy thing to experience. Han Soo himself had once wondered aloud: “What must a lone soul experience, being cast out of its body in these emptinesses? How fast do you imagine a soul can travel across these spaces, if it is going home?”
    Duncan made the Sign of the Fish over Han Soo. It was a completely spontaneous gesture, a remnant of his almost forgotten childhood, when he worshiped with his marriage group in the stone kirk on the cliffs overlooking the great sea of Thalassa.
    Anya Amaya saw and smiled. On New Earth there had been no religion. The people had considered themselves totally rational beings, without the need for psychic crutches. Only in the matter of female fertility were they fanatical. But Anya was a tolerant girl, aware of Duncan’s peculiarities, and slightly in love with him despite them all.
    They left the cold hold and returned the suits to the locker. They flew swiftly “upward” past the spin section, through the empty comb holds to the highest level under Glory ’s dorsal surface. They floated into a compartment, large, as all spaces on Glory were, but warm and dark.
    Anya somersaulted to a stop and floated in between fabric deck and titanium frame overhead.
    “How shall it be?’
    She knew the answer, of course. With Duncan it was always under the stars and the rig, the two things he loved most in all the universe. Young Ng preferred it dark, the more womblike the better. Krieg favored a blaze of interior light that turned the space into a large laboratory, and his performance was usually as cold and brilliant as his surroundings.
    Jean Marq? Anya could only guess. He was a man with a badly damaged libido. Once, quite by accident, she had glimpsed the entombed paracoita he kept in his compartment. She thought it the saddest thing she had ever seen.
    She made a dancing spin in the darkness and passed a hand across the light sensors, A section of the overhead opened, became transparent. Instantly the space was filled with the overwhelming presence of the stars. Glory’s sails, hectares of them, reflected the light of the Luyten sun endlessly, the repeating patterns gilded by the golden skylar. The rig, seen from this angle, was like an expanding maze of a web spun by some magical cosmic spider. And through it shone the red-shifted stars behind and the blue-shifted stars ahead. The effect was breathtaking. Duncan’s upturned face showed his joy. Anya floated to him and rested her small, pointed breasts against his back, her arms around his neck.
    “How you love it,” she said.
    “Yes, I do.”
    “What a lovely man you are, Duncan Kr,” she said.
     
    Many kilometers above the hull’s curving flank, and resembling a fly in the web, Damon Ng prepared to work his way slowly downward. The name Damon had been assigned to him by Glory ’s computer when he first reported aboard for his cybersurgery. His birth name was Eight; he was the eighth of a clone raised to young manhood under a thousand-kilometer-long canopy of green on the large island of Nixon on the planet Grissom, second from the sun Ross 128.
    Damon’s mother was a machine of sorts, not of metal and glass, but of fibers and sap and chlorophyll. An incubator tree. Women on Grissom were rare in the early days and the practice of cloning humans, considered immoral on the once-crowded Earth, was adopted. Young clones were raised in nests provided by the incubator trees. The human parents from whom the cloneable cells were taken did not involve themselves with the young. Nurture was left to specially trained individuals who guided the nesting generation through life as far as puberty, at which time the clone’s specialty in life was selected.
    Damon, however, was Chosen by the Starmen, and he willingly abandoned his life under the towering trees.
    Now he struggled against his acrophobia every minute of every hour of every uptime day. At this moment his ordinarily ruddy face was livid with