Read Online Glory by Alfred Coppel - Free Book Online Page B

of Han Soo in the hold. The computer imaged the old Celestial’s still face and Marq saw it clearly. He felt a pang of deep sorrow. Han Soo had been Marq’s only friend aboard the Glory .
    Marq closed his eyes and studied the calm, distant face. It was like an ivory carving: the smooth features, closed eyes behind sloping epicanthic folds. Those eyes, Marq thought, had opened first in the valley of the Yangtze River. And they had closed for the last time eight light-years from Earth, after a life that a downworlder would think was as long as forever.
    We share the emptiness, Old Man , Marq thought. You sleep dreaming of Earth as I do. But you will never awaken more.
    The computer showed him that Duncan and Anya were both naked in the bridge pods. Though it was common practice among Starmen to go nude if they chose, it still sent a shaft of sensation through Marq’s loins to sense the image of the naked teenaged girl conning the ship. She would never have bared her breasts to the sun of Provence, he thought, yet she lay naked as a newborn in her working pod without a second thought. She slept with Duncan and Krieg and Damon without prejudice. And she would have done so with Jean Marq, too, but for Marq’s need to do penance. Anya Amaya’s New Earth open sexuality was like a splinter in Jean Marq’s flesh. Eros was a demon, a destroyer of men.
    Marq told the computer to inform Duncan that he was awake and ready to stand his watch. Then he detached the computer drogue from his socket and allowed the heavy cable to retract into the fabric wall.
    His face was stubbled and there was a sour taste in his mouth, but he did not wash himself or clean his teeth. Marq deliberately neglected his body. He seldom shaved, washed infrequently. He almost never visited the spinning segment of Glory ’s hull where gravity to order was simulated by centrifugal force and the Starmen could exercise with weights and springs. Han Soo had once told Marq that his physical neglect was deliberate, a self-inflicted punishment. Jean Marq accepted that judgment. Since there was really no God, it fell to each man to pass sentence on himself for his sins.
    He was vaguely hungry, but as always, the thought of suckling on the feeding tube nauseated him. From time to time young Damon, who fancied himself a great chef, would open the vast galley--designed to feed thousands-- and create a sumptuous meal, a feast for monarchs. But the daily business of nourishing the crew was handled by Glory herself, who did not much care whether or not the food was elegant, only nourishing. Jean Marq, once a gourmet, likened eating ship’s fare to the consumption of offal. With the need to recycle everything on long-duration voyages, the simile was not pure hyperbole.
    Marq turned from the terminal and caught a glimpse of his doll in her half-open drawer. “She” was a quasi-living, speaking paracoita (a name given such devices by an ancient writer named Wolfe, who speculated vastly about Earth’s future), an almost ludicrously buxom product of the sex laboratories of Yoni Island, on Nightwing in the Ross Stars. Driven beyond endurance by abstinence early in his first voyage, Jean had purchased the grotesque artifact. She was a low-level android designed to perform coitus on demand. “Better than Lefty’s sister,” the vulgarians of Yoni had said of their product. But Marq, shamed by what he had done, never used her. She rested in her transparent case, a plastic sepulcher decorated with erect phalluses and gaping labia.
    To use the paracoita, he felt, would be to abandon the last of his humanity. He intended to set the thing adrift in deep space, but somehow had never managed to do it. Uptime passed and the paracoita traveled with him, reclining in her case, silent but ever ready, acquiescent, and virginal.
    Bareheaded and barefoot, Marq launched himself into the transit tube that had swallowed Mira. It was a fabric entrail, one of thousands that wound through