There was a flash of anger in Eliana’s dark eyes. “I expected better from you, Healer,” she said.
Roark flushed. All his life he had prided himself on his liberality, his freedom from prejudice. Yet the idea of Eliana turning to township jujus revolted him.
“He is from Earth” Eliana said.
“Yes, he probably has knowledge I lack. But he is not a physician. He is only an adventurer, a wanderer.”
“And a kaffir?”
“Since you say it. Yes, a kaffir,” Tiegen said defiantly.
“And can you cure Broni?”
I would discard my birthright, give my life, endanger my soul to say yes, Tiegen Roark thought. But I cannot. He shook his head slowly.
Eliana’s hand rested for a moment on his sleeve, a touch as gentle as a falling leaf. “Forgive me, Tiegen. But Broni is my only child.”
“And most beloved, mynheera,” Roark said heavily. “I know, I know.”
“It is not tuberculosis,” Eliana said.
“No. It is not.”
“The Voertrekker-Praesident insists.”
“I am sorry. But the ills of the universe do not obey the commands of The Voerster of Voerster,” Roark said.
“He plans a marriage soon.”
“That is absurd, Eliana. It is impossible.” In fifteen years, Tiegen Roark had not called Eliana Ehrengraf by her given name. The breach of etiquette was enormous. But the statement had been so blunt, so harsh, that it took him a moment to recover himself enough to say, “Forgive me, mynheera. They taught me better than that at Healer’s.”
Eliana said, “In the hall, if you please?”
They left Broni’s great room and stood in the stone hallway decorated with the mounted heads of every sort of ancient necrogene in the Sea of Grass. Eliana said, “Believe me, Healer. The Voerster intends to marry Broni to a Highlander.”
“A Highlander? Who, mynheera?”
“I don’t know yet. There are at least three Planetian Kraalheeren that The Voerster needs to hold the highlands. Every one of them is a savage.”
Tiegen was shocked at the cold hatred in her voice. “That is out of the question, mynheera.”
“I agree,” Eliana said in a voice Tiegen had never heard her use. “I will never allow it.”
“The Voerster would not send her to live in the highlands.”
“There are the Hurtsiks. They hold three quarters of a million hectares above Blomfontein.” Eliana’s eyes seemed to have hardened to chips of brown obsidian. “Hurtsik has six sons. Not one of them yet married. There are others.”
“No, mynheera. It could not possibly be,” Roark protested.
“I wish that were so, Tiegen. But I know The Voerster. So do you. If not the Hurtsiks, then some other. Perhaps the Fonteins, who are even worse. Wild animals.”
Tiegen Roark drew a deep breath. Having been physician to the Voersters all these years had been a great windfall. He was now, by any normal standard, a rich man. He could even retire and devote himself to research on necrogene physiology, a subject that had fascinated him since Healer’s Faculty. But, Lord God, he thought, how I shall miss seeing Eliana...
He suddenly realized that despite his denials, he had quickly accepted the future Eliana Ehrengraf described. Why else would his thoughts turn suddenly to retirement?
But viewed realistically, a highland marriage for Broni Ehrengraf Voerster was out of the question. She could not possibly survive on the Pianetia. The rest of it--that virginal girl a bride of some barbarian kraalmeister’s six-fingered son--was revolting.
“Well, Tiegen? I am waiting.”
“With respect, mynheera...” Tiegen felt a flash of fear. Eliana clearly expected him to say that he would prevent The Voerster doing anything so harsh as giving Broni over to a matrimonial rape in an environment that would tax even a healthy woman beyond endurance. Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster was asking for an ally. No, for a coconspirator. And on Voerster, the Voertrekker-Praesident had the power to condemn. By simple fiat, if he chose.
“Please, mynheera,” Roark said. “Be very careful what you say.” What you say to me, he thought.
“I intend to stop him,” she said. “My husband is not God.”
Tiegen Roark sucked in a shallow breath, “I cannot listen to you, mynheera.”
Eliana’s face showed the emotion she was feeling. “Are you so very much afraid, Tiegen?” she asked bitterly.
“Her illness will dissuade him, mynheera,” Roark said. “But if he persists--it is his right to choose the time and circumstances of the Voertrekkersdatter’s marriage. It is the law, mynheera.”
Eliana Voerster seemed to withdraw into some stratospheric, icy height. “I thank you for telling me that, Healer.”
“When the Voerster returns from the Convocation, perhaps we could suggest a stay at Einsamberg for the Voertrekkersdatter,” Roark said. “The mountain air--”
“Thank you,” Eliana Voerster said. “I will take it up with my husband.”
Tiegen Roark felt as though his heart had turned to stone. Eliana’s withdrawal was near to complete.
“I hope,” he said, with what dignity, he could muster, “that the black Starman is able to amuse mynheera Broni. I am told he is very clever.”
“Good morning to you, Healer,” Eliana said. “I will watch with my daughter now until morning.”
In the great bed, Broni lay half-sleeping. She could hear the murmuring voices of her mother and the Healer in the passageway. She could feel the emotions they were experiencing as a kind of milky star stream, rather like the currents of stars in the moonless skies of Voerster. She often used night images and star visions to explain to herself what it was she had seen and felt since she was a small child. Once her mother had told her that she, too, had experienced the same things when she was a very young girl at Ehrengraf Kraal at Einsamberg. But Eliana no longer had the gift. Broni could tell.
Before Tiegen and her mother had awakened her, Broni had been having such lovely dreams. Familiar dreams of warm summer skies and fields of flowers such as never were on Planet Voerster. The fact was, Broni thought, that God was showing her the place in heaven where she would breathe the scents of spring and run, as she had never been able to do, through fields of real grass ablaze with true wildflowers.
Her mother’s sharp, imperious anger with the Healer flashed through Broni and she shut her eyes tight and buried her face in the deep pillows, saddened by the conflict between the two outside her door. Didn’t they understand that everything was already decided? That before year’s end Broni Ehrengraf Voerster would be gone from this life?
7. A LATE NIGHT MEETING IN VOERSTERSTAAD
I cannot do it, thought Ian Voerster. I simply cannot bring myself to do this thing.
He stared across the table at the Kraalheer of the Fontein Kraal--known to everyone as Winter Kraal, for the spirit of the place. By the Lord God, the Voertrekker-Praesident thought, what would our mutual ancestors have thought of such a creature? The dark gossip of early experiments by the ruthless biogeneticists among the First Landers always came to mind when one faced a Highlander at close range.
Vikter Fontein was but 152 centimeters tall. In the old English measure used by the First Landers, five feet and one inch. He massed 144 kilos, half again what a normal man might, and this bulk was strangely apportioned over his barrel-like frame. His waist and midriff were large, but made to seem small by the vast expansion of his chest and lungs. His skin, as much of it as could be seen under the mat of facial hair Planetians favored, was tinged with gray-blue. His eyes were hooded by the heavy epicanthic fold of the Highlander. An occasional Planetian displayed the rudiment of a nictitating membrane, another legacy of the genetic engineers who dominated the first three hundred years of medical science on Voerster. Vikter Fontein was not so favored, but it was said that his third wife (who had died like the others) had been.
The Planetians had been put on an evolutionary fast track. But even the most charitable
observer would be tempted to say that they were now a biological dead end, Kraalheeren from the high plains now valued lowland women as the means of breeding themselves back into the biological mainstream of Voerster.
The Kraalheer sat with one hand spread before him on the table, displaying six long fingers. His chest expanded and contracted with a hollow, rushing sound in the high air pressure at sea level.
The total effect of these physical differences was daunting, Ian Voerster thought, and repulsive.
“I can deliver the Highlanders,” Fontein said in his deep, reverberating voice. “Or I can take them for my own. It is for you to decide, Voertrekker.”
“We have been one nation for thirteen hundred years,” Ian Voerster said, “Do not threaten me, Mynheer Fontein.*’ What he said was only conditionally true. The Rebellion had bifurcated the colony long ago, and the rift remained. But the people of the lowlands and the Planetians had always pretended they were one people. Without the kaffir enemy, Ian Voerster thought, matters could be quite different.
The Fontein leaned forward across the polished gray-stone table. As he did, Voerster was struck by how much he resembled the pictures of terrestrial Japanese sumitori in the hohere shule texts: thick, broad shoulders, huge chest, outthrust head with almost no neck, staring eyes, and a broad, hooked beak of a nose.
“I don’t threaten, Ian Voerster. I say what is obvious. You are frightened of the independence movement on the Planetia. You have cause to be. I organized it.”
The Voerster glanced swiftly at the closed door behind which stood Han Ryndik and a dozen members of the Trekkerpolizei’s Special Branch. A touch on a hidden buzzer and there would be a stampede of armed men through the door to arrest the Kraalheer of Winter. He had just admitted treason and subversion of the Voertrekker State.
But then what?
To break the independence movement on the Planetia was impossible as long as Lowlanders could not fight and dirigibles could not effectively fly there. If Fontein were gone, the leadership would fall to the Hurtsiks. If they went down, another of the highland tribes would rule. The movement could not be defeated, only co-opted. Which is why I am here, meeting in secret with this barbarian, Ian thought.
“Don’t talk to me about Voertrekker unity and racial purity,” The Fontein said, staring. “If that’s what you intend.”
*That was not my intention,” the Voertrekker-Praesident said heavily. He thought: The truth is that we have more in common with our Grassersee kaffirs than with this Voertrekker-descended human variant. But the widening gap between white and white on Voerster had to be stopped. It was too late to annul the physical changes taking place among the people of the Planetia. The medical skills that had created them were lost a thousand years ago. But the men of Voertrekker blood on Voerster dared not break the fragile social compact they had made with one another long, long ago when they decided to flee Earth for the sake of the chimera of racial purity. Not while we still send kaffirs to the Friendly Islands for infractions of the racial laws, The Voerster thought. They are more civilized than that in the high country.
Ian Voerster tried to regard Vikter Fontein calmly and dispassionately, as a ruler and politician should. It was obvious that Fontein Kraal was prospering. Fontein’s clothes had been made by a skilled tailor, probably in Pretoria, where the people of the Planetia customarily conducted their business. His tunic was made of deep green felt and velvet flashed with gold. There were gold chains around his bulging neck, a small fortune’s worth of them. On his head, in the highland manner, he wore a green tarn on which the Fontein badge was worked with more gold and several quite respectable stones.
The diamond mines of Fontein Kraal were productive, that was obvious. If Broni goes to Georg or Eigen Fontein, Voerster thought, she will never want for anything tangible.
Only for air to breathe and a human being to love her. His own sense of honor mocked him cruelly.
“Will you say what you brought me here to say?” The Fontein said. “I feel confined in this stone box of a house. The walls are too near. The air is too thick. How do you breathe this soup?”
There was actually a sheen of sweaty moisture on The Fontein’s bluish brow. As a courtesy to the Kraalheer of Winter, the temperature in the room stood at fourteen degrees Celsius, five degrees less than Ian Voerster found comfortable, even wrapped in his customary furs. Yet the dour Highlander from the northeastern edge of the continent found it too warm. Clearly, very special arrangements would have to be made for Broni’s comfort if she were to live on the high plain.
“It would be a tragedy if, after all these hard years, the Voertrekkers on Voerster should fall into white-on-white strife,” Ian Voerster said. “Do we agree on that?”
“There are worse things, Voerster.”
Being a Highlander he would think so, the Voertrekker-Praesident thought. But civil war would not be like the tribal skirmishes of the high plateau. What technology existed on Voerster was centered in the Sea of Grass.
“I have no experience of war,” Voerster said. “I have no wish to acquire any. There are better ways.”
The pale gray eyes narrowed. Fontein was not-so confident as he wished to appear. That was worth remembering. Once an alliance was made, it had to be clear who was the dominating partner.
“I thought you would never get to the point,” Fontein said.
“I am not there yet,” Voerster said, controlling a flash of anger. To have one of this creature’s get as son-in-law would be taxing, he thought.
But necessary. The Trekkerpolizei Domestic Intelligence Unit warned that the highland tribes were ready to start raiding the towns and villages of the Grassersee. “I am prepared to offer you a post in the government.”
Fontein placed another hand on the table. Twelve fingers. Angatch! (The Voertrekker, as he often did, fell back on naming the kaffir gods of the nanny who had raised him.) He really must stop reacting with such revulsion to the Planetian’s physical deformities. But those hands were disgusting.
“I would never live in Voersterstaad. Not if you made me Voertrekker-Praesident.”
Ian Voerster flushed. “The post could be honorary. Most government posts are, Vikter,” Voerster said with controlled mildness.
“What else are you offering? How badly do you want the Highlanders to stay in the high country?”
Voerster regarded The Fontein speculatively. So even after years of separate development, even separate evolution, a Voertrekker was still a Voertrekker. Cupidity had been a Voertrekker trait when the first Boer commando left the Cape Colony for the north. Nothing had changed, not really. For some reason the realization made him feel far more confident about what he must do.
“I propose an alliance, Kraalheer. I propose linking our two ancient families by marriage.”
The heavy face betrayed cupidity. “I have two sons,” Vikter Fontein said. “Georg and Eigen.”
The Voerster said, “To me one Fontein is like another. I have only one daughter.”
“They say she is sickly,”
“It is a lie.”
“Could she live on the Planetia?”
“Arrangements would have to be made.”
“And she could bear sons?” The eyes were cavernous now and the strange hands had vanished to fondle the holsters where his customary weapons had rested before being surrendered to Colonel Ryndik.
“Yes.” May the Lord God of Hosts forgive me, Ian Voerster thought. He knows about Broni’s frailty. “There is more.”
“Offer, Voertrekker-Praesident. What more?” Not nearly so scornful now.
Cupidity runs our world, Ian Voerster thought. You are a shopkeeper, after all, Fontein.
“The estate of Einsamberg. The ancient Ehrengraf Kraal. It is part of Broni’s inheritance. To be yours when the banns are read.”
“And the town of Grimsel, on the Shieldwall. And the funicular railroad through the Pass.”
He might be a great Kraalheer in the highlands, Voerster though
t coldly. But he bargains like a lumpen shopkeeper.
“A plebiscite in Grimsel.” Most of the inhabitants of the Shieldwall town were Highlanders in any case and were already Fontein partisans. “But not the railway.” That was the only access from the Grassersee to the Planetia. It could not be exclusively in Vikter Fontein’s hands.
The Kraalheer of Winter stared at Ian Voerster. Purple-red lips within the mat of beard slowly formed a grimace that among Highlanders passed for a smile.
“Done,” he said. “With one alteration.”
“Which is?”
“I have been a widower for ten years. I see no reason for wasting a young lowland beauty on either of my brutes.”
For a moment the Voertrekker-Praesident was nonplussed.
The matted smile broadened and the eyes grew cold as sea-ice. “As you said yourself, Cousin. One Fontein is like any other, I will marry the girl myself.”
8. AN EBRAY ON THE SEA OF GRASS
The vehicle, commonly called “a steamer,” was a massive cart that rode on six unshod steel wheels. The seven-meter-long machine, which surrendered its rear deck to a cast-iron boiler and several polished brass pistons and rocker arms, was controlled from an open cockpit in front--furnished with three small seats upholstered in leather, two forward and one behind beside the luggage bay.
Mynheer Osbertus Kloster sat in the right-hand front seat before the tiller and drove the clattering, wheezing car swiftly southward and across wind through the Sea of Grass toward Voertrekkerhoem.
The steamer progressed at good speed across the flat ground with an assortment of clangs and hisses, leaving astern a cloud of dust, steam, and flying grass. Beside the Astronomer-Select sat Black Clavius, knapsack and balichord clutched protectively in his lap. He peered ahead into the near distance lighted by the three focussed gas lanterns on the bow of the steamer, and to the sides where the tall grass lashed and whipped as the vehicle stormed by.
Electric carriages were fairly common on Voerster, but they were limited by the primitive batteries Voertrekker industry was able to produce. The planet supplied the lead and acid used, but lacked the more sophisticated materials of which the old science texts spoke. The technology of the First Landers and their descendants for the first three hundred years had been handicapped by the limitations imposed on specialization by the colonization plan. By the time of the Rebellion, science and industry had become well established on Voerster. But all advancement was stifled and techniques were lost as the war against the kaffirs became a Voertrekker priority. And in the dark ages that followed the Rebellion there had been a revulsion against the technology producing the weapons that had so nearly depopulated the planet. Scientific knowledge became a swift ticket to the gallows as Luddite moralists did their best to reduce Voerster to the presumed safety of a primitive, agricultural world. Scientists and inventors were no longer lynched on Voerster, but thirteen hundred years since First Landing, the Astronomer-Select Kloster’s steam car was a “state-of-the-art” device.
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