Clavius had been walking southeast for three days and four nights, but he was unwearied. On Earth he had massed one hundred thirty kilograms. Here, under .96 gravity, he massed slightly more than one hundred twenty. But that still made him a very large and heavy man on Voerster.
His head was covered with nappy, tightly curled hair turning gray. He had a face that was the color of purple grapes and his irises were black, set in eyeballs white as eggshells.
He had received a summons from the mynheera Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster, a person of great spirit and physical beauty, and one of the most unhappy women Clavius had ever known. The messenger said that the mynheera Broni was ill once again and that the Voertrekkerschatz begged his help. The mynheera Eliana had sent Clavius a carnet de passage for the dirigible flight from Windhoek to Voertrekkerhoem. But Clavius had refused it. Voertrekkers grew uneasy and unpleasant when they found kaffirs in restricted places, even though it was technically against the law to do more than confine kaffirs to the townships after curfew. The Starman had always found this facet of Voertrekker life fascinating. In a society built entirely on separation of the races, it was actually illegal to “discriminate.” Refusal to serve a kaffir, for example, in any restaurant designated as racially open, resulted in severe legal sanctions.
The luftschiff transport system of Voerster was, by law, open to all. But it was still too new, too scientific, to be integrated. And in any case, Clavius thought, it was not fitting that the volk of Voerster be troubled by a giant of a man from offworld, who was himself still learning tolerance.
‘“But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with Thee, and shall serve Thee until the year of jubilee,’“ Clavius said aloud in his bass drum of a voice. “But jubilee, Lord, when shall that be?”
Then, because he did not wish to be overcritical of God, he added:’“When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou has ordained: what is man that Thou art mindful of him?’“
There were times he was sorely tried considering how God ran the universe. But it was a big place He had made, and it took a deal of minding.
And the Lord did mind, did look after His creations. Poor, earthbound David, singer and poet that he was, had had no idea how magnificent the works of the Lord Jehovah really were. “You do care, Lord. You do pay attention most of the time. You even look after this poor black man marooned nine light-years from Earth, where he was born. And you send me dreams, Lord. I don’t always understand them, but that’s not surprising, considering that You are God and I’m only a Wired Man put aground by an impatient syndicate. But You gave me a gift of healing to make up for it, and I thank You for that.” It was a humbling thing that the Lord of the Universe, the builder of the nebulae and quasars, cared--even a little bit--about Black Clavius.
The plain across which Clavius walked had originally been named the Copemica. The Shieldwall had been the Mid-continent Fault and the high plain had been named for the first true astronomer, Planetia Galileo Galilei. But the Voertrekkers, with their penchant for renaming everything they possessed, called the savannah on which most of the Voertrekker kraals were located “the Sea of Grass,” and the land above the Shieldwall simply “the Planetia.” The Highlanders took perverse pride in the killing land they ranched.
Clavius had made his way there, as he had to every corner of the populated continent of Voerster. The high kraal owners had regarded him with cold curiosity. They were men and women who for years on end did not leave the high tableland, and had no wish to do so. Clavius had visited the high-plains kaffirs and found them as proud of place as were their mynheeren. Human beings, Clavius thought after the long and arduous journey back to the savannah, had a great capacity for misery.
Dressed in the rough homespun of the working kaffir, Black Clavius walked with a space-devouring stride. In the long years downworld he had traveled constantly and had never been lost. A map of Voerster’s sky was imprinted on his brain, alongside the words of the holy Books he favored. The Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita--all were filed away line by line in memory. Like all astroprogrammers aboard Goldenwings, Clavius was an eidetic. He could forget nothing. And the weight of his memories made him slightly mad.
He looked to the spot low on the eastern horizon where dim So! could be seen on a clear night. It was not possible this night. The cold air was too turbulent. But still, the star that gave birth to mankind was there, even if unseen. Clavius found it amusing that the Lord of Hosts had chosen a planet of that unimportant star as the birthplace of his chosen people. “How come You picked that one, Lord? There were plenty of others. Millions upon millions of them. Or did You put them in other places, Lord? Did You hide a tribe or two in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or perhaps nearer to home in the Hercules Cluster?”
It gave Clavius pleasure to indulge in these speculations. It made him feel much nearer to his Maker, and somehow in the Lord’s confidence.
Clavius had spent the last fortnight in a kaffir homeland east of Windhoek, on the North Sea coast. The folk had been generous, as always, and his presence appeared to give them great joy.
Kaffirs always seemed to know when he was coming. As he approached a township he would be met by swarms of black children who would close in about him and escort him to the longhouse in the center of the kraal where the adult kaffirs would have foregathered to await him.
Then there would be singing and dancing--oh, the dancing!--how he loved the dancing. Even if food was short in the kraal, there would always be roasted tubers and fresh tender meat of the native beast called a “faux-goat”--meat sliced thin while the necrogene still lived, causing it nobly to imagine it was being eaten by its own needy young.
Necrogenesis was a harsh fact Clavius had had to learn about when the Nepenthe abandoned him on Voerster. But he understood now that each world had its truths and most of them were very hard.
On Voerster no necrogene ever bore more than one offspring, one clutch, one litter.
It was surprising to Clavius that the Voertrekkers never learned a lesson from the self-sacrifice of the native life. But they did not. Instead of sacrificing themselves for their sons and daughters, they immolated their children for power or dynasty or simply for property. Though the kaffirs called the Voertrekker way of marriage “blood-breeding,” sometimes they were a great deal more explicit and vulgar than that. “The Trekkers blood-fuck only in the missionary position,” they would say with gales of laughter. It was true. In his years downworld, Black Clavius had never encountered a Trekker couple matched in love. He thought that a great pity.
Black Clavius had heard that another Goldenwing was approaching Voerster. To see one Goldenwing in a lifetime was about all any man living on one of the planets of near space could expect. Goldenwings were becoming ever more rare. But two ships to one world in ten years really was remarkable. Clavius was eager to talk with Mynheer Osbertus about it. The black Starman never forgot that he was Wired, a man of deep space. The interface socket under the woolly hair was a defining and unchangeable part of his life. If he lived a thousand uptime years he would always yearn for the ecstasy of awareness a Wired One experienced when the mind was enhanced and expanded by interfacing with the incredibly sophisticated and sensitive computer aboard a Goldenwing.
Machines like that were no longer built. Even before Clavius was Chosen on Earth by the Nepenthe syndicate, astrogational computers for tachyon-sailing starships had not been built for at least a generation. Very little had been built on Earth during the years of Clavius’ childhood there. The homeworld had spent itself on the holy wars and the Exodus to the stars. Now Earth lay exhausted, a garden grown rank with the remnants of the great dream.
Well, in the twenty-five years of the Exodus, Clavius thought, sixty planets had been planted with human seed. Not all the colonies were successful, but enough were so that in another thousand years or ten thousand (What did time matter?) another Exodus would begi
n the cycle all over again.
Meanwhile Earth waited, Gaia supine--but not dead. Like the necrogenes of Voerster, she gave herself to her ungrateful offspring.
The Nachtebrise was rising. After midnight the winds of the Grassersee always blew west to east. The kaffirs of the Sea of Grass put sails on their carts to travel on the Nachtebrise.
Clavius could hear the wild grasses rippling, heads still heavy with pods. In another week, the spore pods would sprout wings and fly with the wind for three days of fantastic soaring. Dirigible passengers often reported seeing flying grass at five thousand meters. Then the wings would fail and for a day the sky would rain spores. The Sea of Grass would begin to turn emerald green with the first rains of autumn. On Voerster it was the beginning of the natural yearly cycle.
It was, all told, a rather lovely world, this Voerster, Clavius thought. Not an easy world, no. But possessed of a certain nobility, like the morose folk it sheltered.
The light at the door to Sternhoem gleamed brighter as Clavius approached. He could see no light from the observatory proper, so he assumed that Osbertus had ordered Buele to close the dome. The old fellow had a horror of exposing the telescope to the night sky unless it was actually in use. What strange Voertrekker tabu was that? the black Starman wondered. But no matter, Osbertus was good company and a good man. He, too, was deeply concerned about Broni Ehrengraf Voerster. In a world without much love, the old astronomer bestowed what he had to give on The Voertrekker’s daughter and her mother.
5. IN THE WAKE OF THE DRAGON
With the red-shifted stars from which Glory fled shining down through the overhead skylight, Starman Jean Marq slept.
The hot Provencal sun burned down on the familiar, rock-terraced hillside, throwing hard, black shadows from the dry vines. The vintage would be bitter without rain, without pity from the sun. The Earth was weary, even the ocean level was low. The weather had been changing for a thousand years, and as it changed, Earth itself became more inert, as though determined to survive by husbanding what strength was left in the soil and air.
Even the wild grasses were sere, but in Amalie’s russet hair he could smell thyme and marjoram, and on the damp cloth of her bodice the sweet female smell of her sweat.
He had followed her down the terraces in great, slow, dreamy leaps as though he, and she, could fly like ravens that circled overhead, crossing and recrossing the swollen yellow disc of the sun.
Jean Marq watched her now as she flew down the mountainside. Back straight and slender as an arrow, brown bare legs flashing, full skirt lifted to show her white thighs. He could hear her laughter as he followed her with his breath coming hard and his heart pounding in his chest. Why did she run from him, he wondered, and why did her flight seem magical?
Amalie filled his days and tormented his nights. She was only a farm girl, a peasant tied to the land by tradition and family and French law, while he was a rising star of the ancient Sorbonne’s faculty of mathematics. The social distance between them was stellar, but he knew that he would give his life and his privileges to possess her.
She stopped, chest heaving, to wait for him. Dampness glued the cloth of her blouse to her breasts, hard as melons. The nipples were a dark announcement of her nubility, thrusting against the wet cloth. Her best shirt, Marq knew; his gift. White chambray with red thread worked in a pattern around the collar and across the breast. Bright, like a trickle of blood.
She called mockingly to him and he felt light, as though he could launch himself into space and fly like a spear to her, pierce her, embrace her, explore her as the sunlight did,
A peasant, yes. But a land-owning peasant. Jean Marq was French enough to care a great deal about that. For centuries France had slowly been slipping back into the medieval mystery of her beginnings. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, it had been the same when the continent began to awaken after the great plagues of the Fourteenth Century killed forty million souls and left vast tracts of field and forest abandoned and silent save for the cry of birds and the rutting roars of the stag.
Now two-thirds of the population of Earth were gone to the nearer stars. There was a great stillness in the abandoned cities, a melancholy peace on the breast of the empty land. Yet the great schools persisted. The Sorbonne, Cambridge, Columbia--the universities still produced scientists.
Marq was on holiday after the demanding ordeal of winning his tenure. He had come south to Provence for the sun, the sea, and the stillness.
He had met Amalie Delacroix and had had no peace since his first view of her working in her father’s terraced vineyard. She tormented him with her body, naked under skirt and blouse. She tormented him with looks and touchings and simply by being Amalie, eighteen and a woman. She even tormented him with long, speculative statements on how she would, if she could, apply for her passage to the stars (to which, in this time, every citizen of Earth was entitled), and spend a year or maybe two in cold-sleep so that she could awaken to a world alive with fiery young men who would not be afraid, as some were, to take her by force and make love to her.
Jean Marq listened and the sweat rolled down his back and his loins filled and he hardened and asked himself, “Does she mean what she says? Is that what she wants?”
He would lie awake at night sick with longing and perhaps even with love, though Jean was not a loving man.
Marq stirred in his pod and moaned. Oh, Jesu. Again he was following Amalie down the stone terraces of that ancient, vanished Provence. The great terraces that were like steps built for some dark and malevolent god.
He stood on a terrace above her, looking down at the flash of leg and thigh with which she favored him as the wind lifted her skirt. He felt the heavy pounding beat of his pulse in his throat and behind his eyes. His penis was hard and full. He called out to her, “Amalie, Amalie, attendre!”
The sound of his call echoed down the terraces and reached the cliffs that fell away to the empty sea. Somewhere there was laughter.
She had vanished and panic surged. Why did she mock him so? He felt the sharp stone shards through his light sandals, and then she was behind him--and her pungent woman scent was in his nostrils, and her arms were around him.
Let it be different this time, he thought in his dream. Please, God, let it be different.
He turned and they kissed; she curious, he hungry, searching. Her tongue flicked his, ran across his lips. Her breasts pressed hard and damp against his naked chest. They sank to their knees and she allowed him to open her blouse and search her nipples with his mouth. She tasted of salt and sun.
“Je t’aime...je t’adore.”
Oh, God, he heard her laughter.
She said, “Enough now, Jean. “ She pushed his face away from her breasts and sat back on her heels, her nipples glistening in the bright sunlight.
She frowned and said, “Now look at what you’ve done. You’ve torn my blouse. You are worse than the laborer’s boy.”
A thing of orange light flashed in his head. The stone terraces, the sky, the sea, the vineyard vanished, and there was only Amalie and her naked slobbered breasts. Love and hatred exploded. He threw himself upon her, lifting her skirt until it gathered around her waist.
“Stop this, you fool,” he heard her say. She always said it in exactly the same way, without fear, with a touch of contempt.
The sun pierced his bare back with spikes of light. Close to, behind her russet eyelashes, he could see her eyes, green and shot with flecks the color of gold, pupils narrow against the sun and then dilating with fear. He felt himself penetrating her, driving into her without mercy or charity, tearing her tender hymen and feeling her heave beneath him in screaming protest.
Engorged to bursting, he drove himself into her again. The circling birds joined their screams to hers. He felt her clawing at his face and then, quite suddenly, she was still, limp, and he emptied himself into her.
“Amalie, Amalie, je t’adore--”
He lifted his weight from her and looked down into
her flushed and sweat-streaked face. Her eyes were open, staring over his shoulder at the sun. A trickle of blood ran down her cheek from her hairline, and another leaked from her ear.
Jean Marq said, “Amalie?”
Then he lifted his right hand which was clenched around a smooth stone taken from the terrace. It was smeared with her blood...
He felt ten tiny needles piercing the skin of his chest. They burned like fire. He opened his eyes in terror and looked into the tiny cat face of Mira.
The animal’s small head sprouted a hair-thin platinum wire. That damned Boche Krieg’s demented experiment. The cat knew what a man was thinking. Predator’s thoughts filled Marq’s sleep-pod. Mira’s slit pupils dilated in a mad parody of the dream--Amalie’s. The cat’s eyes became bottomless. Marq had the crazed notion that Mira was threatening him, warning him that if he displeased her she would somehow disclose his dream to Duncan.
Marq made a savage sound in his throat and struck at the cat, but she was far too swift. She released her hold on him and leaped, weightless, across the compartment to land on the fabric wall and cling there, still looking at him. Mira had been born in space, had lived all of her life in free-fall. Glory was her universe.
Jean Marq sat up in the open pod and hugged himself to stop the inner shivering that dominated his naked body. Would the dream never end?
Mira hissed at him and launched herself into the transit tube. Marq hated the cat and she hated him. Krieg’s cyber-surgery and the computer made it possible for her to tell him so. Each time he dreamed of killing Amalie, the small beast knew and came to judge him. With the others aboard the Glory, she was gentle and affectionate. Even with the icy Krieg. But with Marq, who had murdered a female creature, she was a tiny fury.
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