She was livid with anger and fear for the black man. It was she, after all, who had put him in the position of so outraging the Voertrekker-Praesident by his “uninvited” presence at Voertrekkerhoem.
Eliana had presented herself like an avenging Valkyrie in her husband’s suite of offices and she had flamed, threatened, and finally pleaded. But Ian Voerster was rockbound when he had made a decision.
“The kaffir will go to the Friendly Islands and there is an end to it, Eliana, In a week’s time or a month we may reconsider the matter. That finishes it, mynheera. Do not vex me further about this.”
Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster stared at her husband with loathing. But for the moment--perhaps for all the foreseeable moments in the future--she was helpless in this affair.
Now she stood in the wind, unmindful of the cold, and watched the police airship lift off into the icy blue sky and whir away toward Hellsgate, the prison town at the southern end of the Isthmus of Sorrow which was the portal to Voerster’s gulag archipelago.
11. BLACK CLAVIUS
The bone-skinny lumpe calling himself Fencik leaned against the bare wall of the Common Room and said condescendingly, “The truth is, kaffir, that you don’t know a damned thing about clangs. This paradise is no clang, it’s a camp for nasty boys.” He made a sweeping gesture encompassing the Common Room and the covered walkways separating it from the Refectory and the barracks. There were some rather feeble flowerbeds and areas of dry grass where the detainees could play at soccer. The effect was sere and depressing, but Detention One was not nearly as severe as Clavius had expected it to be when the police dirigible transport had deposited him here.
Detention Two (a generic term to identify the several camps on the Friendly Islands a thousand kilometers southwest of Detention One) was a far different matter. The Friendlies were situated in the Walvis Strait between the Sabercut Peninsula’s south cape and the Icewall of the antarctic island. The currents of the Great Southern Ocean flowed through the strait at forty kilometers per hour, frothing and surging against the ice-clad rocks of the Friendlies. Prisoners had occasionally escaped from Hellsgate on the Isthmus of Sorrow, and from Detention One at the northeastern end of the elongated anvil of the Sabercut Peninsula. But from Detention Two, a camp “of the strict routine,” never.
“This part of Voerster is something you did not show me before, Lord,” Clavius murmured to God. But it appeared that God was not much interested in carrying on a conversation with a fool who got himself confined among the white lumpen and foolish kaffirs who inhabited Detention One.
Beyond the fence topped with razor wire lay nothing whatever but open savannah. The Sabercut Mountains, from which the peninsula took its name, rose precipitously south of the settlement of Hellsgate, where detainees were inducted into the prison system. Though escape was possible, at night the wild cheet came to the perimeter to warn the camp inmates that life outside the wire was dangerous and could be very short.
It was a matter of some interest to Clavius not only that he was the only kaffir in this section of Detention One, but that the lumpen of the section were shocked--and some even angered--by his presence among them. The fences were patrolled by armed lumpen officered by men of the mynheeren class. The staff had a military look, though all wore the uniform of the Tekkerpolizei, which strictly speaking, was not a military organization. Quite obviously this part of Detention One was a very special sort of prison. No cruelty was practiced, but the place had the feel of an oubliette. There were old men here--and, Clavius supposed, old women in the female barracks twenty kilometers farther east, in Vanity, the small camp at Skull Key. Some of the inmates of One claimed to have visited the women of Vanity, but judging from the disgusting sexual practices of the prisoners, Clavius seriously doubted it.
Inmates held at One were in stasis, their cases forever unresolved. “From here,” Fencik said, “they send us God-knows-where, but never back. We’ll never see Voersterstaad or Pretoria again.” It was the sort of thing prisoners said, but Clavius had begun to think it was true. He had been at One for forty days, nearly a Voersterian month. And it seemed he might be here forever.
Fencik (the lumpe seemed to have no other name) was the only inmate willing to have close contact with the Starman. That opened up the possibility that Fencik was a police spy. Black Clavius was still not certain what his offense had been. Obviously he had infuriated The Voerster by responding to the mynheera Eliana’s summons, and on Voerster that was offense enough to land a man “South of Hellsgate,” as the lumpen lawbreakers said. Or “in clang,” as the attenuated Fencik described their situation. It did, however, give Clavius some indication of how bitter the personal war between the Voertrekker-Praesident and his consort had become.
Clavius pursed his lips at the empty blue sky of midday and addressed himself to the Almighty. “Fencik is right, isn’t he, Lord? For me this place is not just a prison, it’s a tenderizer and I am the meat.”
God remained stubbornly silent. Clavius sighed.
“The truth of the matter is,” the skeletal lumpe declared in a pedantic manner Clavius had learned to disesteem in the month he had been detained, “that I was told personally by the Oberst that you were coming, and that it was up to me to see to it that there was no trouble with the other fish.”
Clavius had learned a whole new vocabulary. A prison was a clang. Detainees were fish. A woman on the outside was a squeeze, and a woman of Vanity willing to indulge in intercourse with a fellow fish was a randy, for the denomination of the coin such services were said to command. Clavius had on occasion run afoul of the Trekkerpolizei in the townships, but never seriously enough to earn detention. In the townships the police kept a deliberately low profile. The only really serious crime for kaffirs was rebellion, and there had been no organized rebellion on Voerster for a thousand years.
That caused the philosophical Clavius to consider the relativity of time. As a Starman he was well aware of the physical relativity of time and space. Like all Wired Ones he had learned to accept the notion that time was not necessarily time. That was a troubling concept but one with which every Goldenwing sailor was familiar.
But there was another sort of relativity. Clavius thought of it as social relativity. Some societies--many on Earth at different times in history--moved so swiftly that vast changes were wrought in a century, a decade, a year. Other societies moved far more slowly. The ancient Egyptians of Earth had once fascinated Clavius. It was difficult to imagine a society so unchanging that centuries passed without alteration. But Voerster was such a society. In the millennium since the Rebellion, the Luyten sun had risen and set on an immutable world. To the Voertrekkers and kaffirs of Voerster, the Great Rebellion might have happened yesterday. Fear of one another had stopped time, had cast the people of Voerster in amber.
Clavius had sought to speak of these things with Fencik. But the old fish was not interested in offworld philosophy. He spoke only of prison matters.
Fencik could be an informer, Clavius thought. But if that were the case, then the Trekkerpolizei were wasting an agent because Clavius had no information to give or withhold. Rebellion, treason, or general criminality were impossible for a true empath. Only an insane Starman could engage in such pursuits.
Clavius worried more about Broni every day. The girl’s time was limited at best, but he knew that if permitted, he could make her last weeks comfortable, which, sadly, was more than Healer Roark was able to do.
And there was the secret hope in Black Clavius that the syndicate of the approaching Goldenwing might have a physician skilled enough to make Broni whole. It was, after all, possible. Heart-valve surgery was unknown on Voerster, but it was routine and had been for centuries elsewhere in near space. And who knew what other medical miracles a starship surgeon might have discovered in his travels?
What Clavius did not give voice to, was the aching fear that the Goldenwing--Osbertus Kloster had identified it as the Gloria Coelis--would come and go, and he, Black Cl
avius, would never see it. The image of a tachyon-sailing ship was ever in his mind, like a lovely, unattainable Glory in the sky.
Fencik took a rolled cigarette from the pocket of his prison shirt and offered it to Clavius. “Five rand, kaffir? That’s fair. It’s first-class weed.”
Clavius spread his empty hands and let his deep voice take on the singsong cadences of a native township kaffir. “Where would a poor black kaffir come by five rand, Zor?”
Fencik slapped his thigh and laughed aloud, “Oh, good. Very good, Clavius-kaffir. You have the black lingo down perfectly.” He put the weed between his lips and lighted it. As he exhaled luxuriously, he said, “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Clavius sat on the stoop and watched a gang of fish fitfully kicking at a ball. The game was ancient. He had seen it played on worlds light-years from Voerster. He took a deep breath and bared his great chest to the white light of the low Luyten sun. Odd how the melanin that had brought the kaffirs to Voerster as an underclass protected them so well from the high ultraviolet in Luyten 726’s radiation. By contrast, Voertrekkers of every social class, those who had kept themselves racially unmixed, were uniformly pale of skin and likely to remain so. The incidence of skin cancer among the whites of Voerster was--he apologized to the Lord for the terrible pun--astronomical.
Clavius was a patient man, but he disliked inactivity and he missed his balichord. He wondered if Broni still had it, or if it had been taken from her. Knowing the Mynheera Eliana Ehrengraf, it was unlikely that anyone would try to confiscate anything Mynheera Broni wished to keep.
He let the pallid sun caress his torso and began to sing.
“Is it so?
Really so?
A Bible story
Can be gory,
And not necessarily so!”
“That will get you in trouble with the Unter Oberst damn quick, kaffir,” Fencik said. “He’s a great believer in Scripture, our Oberst.”
‘“And he spake three thousand proverbs; and his songs were a thousand and five,’“ Clavius said.
“You’re a wild one, kaffir. Where did you learn such things?”
Clavius, still smiling, said, “’So the number of them, with their brethren that were instructed in the songs of the Lord, even all that were cunning, was two hundred fourscore and eight.’“
“Is that the number of Starmen? Tell the truth, Clavius-kaffir. And don’t exaggerate. Of Starmen I have seen one. You.”
“’Thou art my hiding place; thou shall preserve me from trouble; thou shall encompass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah.’”
“What an exasperating creature you are,” Fencik declared, flipping his weed in a high arc to the stubbled grass. “I often wonder why kaffirs were brought to Voerster. Knowing you, I wonder even harder.”
Clavius showed his pink palms in a gesture of innocence. “‘For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion.’“
“Enough, enough, y’bloody black man. I stagger under the weight of your knowledge of Scripture. Pity, Clavius, have pity.”
“Most Starmen are eidetics, Fencik,” Clavius said.
“Which means?”
“That we can’t forget.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
“Poor bugger. Forgetting is no bad thing unless you are an angel.”
Fencik jumped to his feet with surprising agility. “Listen!”
“A dirigible. I hear it.”
“There.” A silvery shape glistened in the sunlight. The drone of hydrogen motors grew. Since from this place men only went south to the Friendlies, inmates were frightened when an airship appeared in the sky. Police dirigibles were “balloons to nowhere.”
In a hushed voice, Fencik said, “Are they coming for you, Clavius?”
“Perhaps.” Clavius was thinking of Broni.
“Better you than me, kaffir.” The thin prisoner was undergoing a transformation. He appeared to be withdrawing himself from any personal contact. It was as though if the airship had, indeed, come for Clavius, it initiated a process of disengagement so complete that by the time the ship lifted off again with the Starman aboard, Fencik would have forgotten he ever knew anyone named Clavius.
It happened that way.
“I am Trekkerpolizeioberst Transkei, kaffir. Do you remember me?”
“Indeed I do, Mynheer Oberst. You arrested me,” Clavius said.
He sat, unshackled, on the hard metal bench that ran down the centerline of the gondola of the police dirigible.
Close to the glass of the outward-slanting window, he could see the disk of the craft’s starboard propeller, The carefully burnished bronze blades glittered in the white sunlight.
Clavius found himself the only prisoner aboard the airship. The benches were empty and through the open door to the pilots’ deck he could see only the men flying the machine and three heavily armed policemen. Clavius wondered wryly at the precautions taken for the transport of one peace-loving kaffir.
“I have been instructed to treat you with consideration, kaffir. Have I your assurance that you will not attempt to escape?”
Clavius regarded the jagged mountains a thousand meters below the dirigible. “I have no wings, Mynheer Oberst,” he said mildly.
The police officer was gray, thin-lipped as a lizard, and totally uninterested in any discussion of capabilities with his prisoner. “You can be cuffed or not,” he said. “It is up to you, kaffir.”
“I will not attempt to leave this dirigible without your permission, Mynheer Oberst,” Clavius said solemnly.
“Very well.” The officer signalled for one of the lumpen constables to enter the compartment. “Bring the prisoner his meal.” At Detention One the detainees ate twice a day, both meals exactly the same: grain porridge, a two-hundred-gram portion of boiled faux-goat meat, a tangeroon, and a mug of hot kava. On the police airship the meal was the same, save that it was cold. The lifting gas used on Voerster was helium, but the motors were powered by volatile hydrogen and Voertrekker airshipmen did not light fires aloft.
The constable brought in a tray. The police colonel withdrew to the flight deck. Clavius was mildly surprised to discover that he was hungry. He ate in silence under the somber gaze of the lumpe. Young, Clavius thought, barely out of adolescence. But probably sensible, as most of the Voertrekfcers were sensible. In a static society that did not permit the commons access to political power, it made a certain sense to seek advancement in the police. Clearly the Trekkerpolizeioberst thought so. Under that desiccated exterior lived a man certain that he had made only sensible choices in life.
How wonderful, Black Clavius thought, to be so certain. He closed his eyes and addressed himself again to the Almighty. Why did you make us all so different, Lord? Between the Oberst and me there is a gulf that has nothing to do with light-years or uptime-downtime. I am never as sure Monday is the first day of the week as he is that Voerster is the Universe and that he stands at the center of it. How come, Lord? Answer me that? Thus saith the Preacher: “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
“Kaffir? Are you asleep?”
Clavius opened his eyes and regarded the young policeman. He was leaning forward so that he could speak without being heard by the Oberst on the flight deck.
“Is it true you came from the stars?”
“It is true, Mynheer.” The use of the honorific appeared to make the boy uncomfortable. It wasn’t surprising. The lumpen lived even bleaker lives than did the township kaffirs. “But I have been on Voerster for many years.”
“Voerster is a long way from the stars,” the policeman said. He lowered his voice even more. “I bear you no ill will, kaffir.”
“I am glad of that, constable.”
“Elmi taught that all men were equal. So our preachers say.”
Unlikely, that, Clavius thought. B
ut it was a pleasant fantasy. One that could do no harm to a world set in amber. It was interesting to know that the Cult of Elmi had reached even into police ranks. The mynheeren discounted it, and probably they should. There was not enough of anything, even anger, on Voerster to start another Rebellion. But a gentle cult might comfort the people as the days dwindled down.
“They say a Goldenwing is coming for you.” The youngster had pale eyes and they were fixed on Clavius with what appeared to be envy, mingled with fear. My reputation as shaman, sorcerer and witch appears to have reached the airborne Trekkerpolizei, Clavius thought. I would have preferred less notoriety, but one could not roam downworld with a computer drogue socket in one’s hair without arousing a certain awe.
“Is that true, kaffir?”
“I have heard that a Goldenwing is coming, but not for me, I assure you.”
“That’s too bad. Look down there.”
Clavius did as he was bid. To the south, white against a pale blue sky and a ribbon of almost purple sea, there were sheer frozen cliffs.
“The Southern Ice,” the lumpe said.
Clavius felt a chill that was not from the open cabin window.
“And there, ahead.” The peninsula over which they had been flying ended in a jumbled archipelago of tiny, rocky islands.
“The Friendlies?”
The constable nodded. “Detention Two admin is on the tip of the peninsula and the compounds are spread over a dozen islands between here and the edge of the Southern Ice.”
Clavius accepted that gloomy news in silence.
The dirigible droned on through a clear, cold sky. Forty minutes passed. Fifty. The Oberst appeared again.
“Get up, kaffir. Look below.”
The dirigible was swinging over a bleak settlement on the largest of the islands in sight. Row after row of stone-and-sod barracks covered the great stone in the sea. The shorelines of Detention Two and the neighboring islets were white with seafoam as the current of the Walvis Strait flowed in a torrent from west to east. Without large satellites to make tides on Voerster, the Great Southern Ocean was powered by the vast Coriolis force of the planet’s rapid spin.
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