Glory

by Alfred Coppel

  Anya Amaya sighed and lifted herself to float weightlessly above the glyceroid bed with a tiny pressure of her fingertips. She wore a black skinsuit which matched the glossy ebony of her hair. Since the affray in the rigging, Anya had taken to wearing it in a severe helmet-coif that she mistakenly thought reduced her sexual appeal.

  Glory’s computer declared: “Orbital injection complete.” And then, almost immediately: “Orbital parameters are 221 kilometers by 218 kilometers. Orbital period is 97 minutes 12 seconds.”

  A near-perfect injection, Duncan noted. It was, actually, a maneuver comparable to docking a clipper ship by wind power alone, without smashing the pier.

  “Well done,” Duncan said. Overhead, through the transparency at the curve of the bridge, could be seen the last movements of the subtle evolution: The few sails still drawing were being rolled into their housings within the masts and yards. Eventually, only a few small jibs and spankers would remain flying to catch the photon streams from Luyten 726 and keep Glory locked in orbit.

  Glory orbited upside down in relation to the bright mass of Voerster. Glory presently was sweeping over the vast, blue-green wasteland of saltwater known as the Sea of Storms. Cloud patterns made silver-white swirls above the empty sea. As the horizon rolled nearer, a low coastline could be seen that gradually took the shape of a continent consisting mainly of grass plains. The feature called the Planetia was a long, narrow highlands separated from the lowlands by a continent-long wall of eroded, nearly vertical cliffs. Duncan had absorbed the geography of Planet Voerster from Glory, but seeing the actual thing was daunting. The Shieldwall averaged slightly under ten kilometers in height.

  In the north, the Planetia abutted the Northern Ice, the polar cap. At the extreme east and west, where the seas were ice-free, the Planetia rose sheer from surf to the heights. The Sea of Grass, which covered most of the continent, ended in the south at the equator in a long, empty coastline of marshes and river deltas. A barren isthmus extruded itself from the southeastern coast of the Grassersee, joining a narrow, steep, and rocky spine of land, the Sabercut Peninsula, where the Voertrekkers kept their gulag.

  It went without saying, Duncan thought, that the colonists of Voerster would have such a place. In silence, and basking wickedly in the chill breath of the Southern Ice, it spoke volumes.

  Duncan returned his attention to the planet. Cloud patterns shifted; in a number of places storms were troubling the Sea of Grass. The Planetia, Duncan estimated, had a median altitude above sea level of nine thousand five hundred meters. In the old measurement still used some places on Earth, that was 31,960 feet. The atmosphere of Voerster was more oxygen-rich than that of the homeworld, making the Planetia habitable, but only just. Could people descended from Earth colonists actually survive in such a place? Duncan wondered. Evidently they could, and did. The Nostromo syndics had found it fascinating that the ancestors of the high-plains dwellers, Voertrekker and kaffir alike, had been genetically engineered to live in the heights by what the Nostromo people thought was an intrusive society even in its best pre-Rebellion days.

  The Planetia had been settled at a much later date than had the Grassersee. After First Landing, two hundred Voertrekker families had divided the grasslands among themselves. The men and women sent to the Planetia had been poor Voertrekkers, some lumpen, and kaffirs--all bred for the bitter environment at the roof of the world. Duncan, wise in the ways of human societies, suspected that the Highlanders were not a loveable people.

  Storms swept the Sea of Grass near the Shieldwall. Accompanying one particularly violent line of thunder-squalls Duncan could see a half dozen tornadoes stalking like tall giants across the empty grasslands.

  The Goldenwing passed over the Shieldwall and high above the grasslands to the eastern coast in a matter of a dozen minutes. From this height, and with the sunlight vanishing, it was possible to look down and discern the two principal cities of Voerster’s east coast, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria. A few smears of civilization, none of them grand, betrayed the presence of Mankind on the Grassersee.

  Glory swept onward, high above the darkening eastern limb of the sea.

  “It is quite a pretty world,” Anya said.

  Duncan, wakened from his reverie, realized that he had been watching the planet for an hour.

  Anya was out of her pod, sitting on the edge of it, still Wired, but fully human now.

  Duncan said, “One might imagine living in such a place, growing up on plains of grass.” He smiled quietly. “Is New Earth like that?”

  “Enn-Eee is a tight, nasty world.” Anya’s dark eyes were fixed on the sight overhead. “That’s all I can remember about it.”

  Voerster was not completely dark. There was a powerful zodiacal light in the Luyten 726 system, and the stars shone in profusion. “But how odd to live without at least one visible moon,” Anya said. On her homeworld, four large satellites illuminated the night sky.

  Duncan turned to study the readouts crossing the computer’s visual interface. Glory was producing a proper almanac of Voerster: Gravity 0.9981 Earth Normal, pressure at sea level 1978.436 millibars. On the high tableland mean pressure was 953.112 millibars. The average temperature in the lowlands was 291.48 degrees Kelvin; on the high plateau almost nineteen degrees less. “Life must be hell on that high plateau we crossed,” Duncan said thoughtfully. “I wonder how many colonists have endured it, and how many are still there?”

  Anya drifted over to Duncan’s pod and steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder. “Mutants live there. Or so my old astronomer claims.” Mutants was not a word Goldenwing syndics used lightly. The danger of stellar flares and radiation was never far from their minds.

  Anya felt Duncan’s restlessness through the drogue. “Are you going downworld?”

  “We all should. There is Han Soo to be put to rest.”

  “Those racist bastards down there won’t like it. I think they have forgotten that there are other races but Caucasian and black.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  She made no immediate reply. Anya was no longer completely at ease with Duncan. She missed sexual relations with him. The boy Damon was physically fine, but Duncan Kr was a man.

  “You want to go ashore, don’t you, Duncan?” she said. As she spoke she removed her drogue, a subconscious admission she did not want Duncan to receive her emotional emissions clearly.

  He said, “I haven’t been ashore since Aldrin.” That had been two years ago uptime. No need to belabor the point, the girl thought. She understood. He wanted a woman. Any woman, as long as she was different from Anya Amaya. Voertrekkers were pale and blonde with great white breasts and broad hips. She turned away, frowning.

  Damon called from the communications shack: “Message from Voersterstaad, Duncan.”

  “Put it on interphone.”

  ‘“The landing area at Voersterstaad will be clear in 100 hours. Your lighters have only to signal their approach and if needed we will supply lighting.’ That comes direct from Voersterstaad, Duncan. Not from Stemberg.”

  “Thank you, Damon. Anything more about requesting a physician?”

  “No, Duncan.”

  Anya said abruptly, “I’ll stand the anchor watch on board.” And she launched herself into a transit tube without further talk.

  It was odd, but perhaps understandable, that Goldenwing syndicates laced their talk with the archaic expressions of the Age of Sail. An arrival was often a “landfall.” The great Coriolis streams of tachyons swirling out of the galactic center were often spoken of as “the Trades.” And, of course, downworld was “ashore.” Do we do that to keep an anchor firmly fixed in the shingle of our human past? Duncan wondered. We become so nearly creatures of space, beings who live without dimensions. Perhaps we require a vivid set of memories--memories of blue water and blue skies--to keep us fully human.

  He looked after Anya and smiled ruefully. The Sailing Master was human enough, he thought. We all need shore-time, Duncan thought. I will take her
ashore with me.

  He set the interface on standby and detached his drogue. One last glance at the orbital parameters--out of habit, not necessity--and he launched himself into the tube leading to the cargo holds, where Jean Marq was working.

  17. THE FONTEINS OF WINTER

  The man riding the lead animal was even larger than most men of the Planetia, where huge genotypes were the rule. He bore university duelling scars, not on one cheek, but both, as if in his student days he had developed a taste for pain and self-disfigurement.

  Eigen Fontein had, in fact, killed a fellow student duelist at Pretoria, and only his Kraalheer family connections had saved him from a term of imprisonment south of the Isthmus. Eigen, the elder son of Vikter Fontein, had been formidable from the age of eight when, upon the birth of his brother Georg, he learned that primogeniture was no assurance of a heritage on the Planetia.

  At nine Eigen was nearly killed on an unauthorized climb of the Blue Glacier. At eleven he raped his first kaffir girl, and at thirteen, on a pleasure jaunt to Grimsel, his first lumpe. And at twenty, in university at Pretoria, he killed in his first duel.

  Georg, the younger Fontein, hated his brother with a passion, but the pair were inseparable. It was whispered in the deep warrens of Winter Kraal that Georg ran with his sibling hoping one day to urge him to disaster. The possibility was ever present. Eigen blustered his way through one quixotic challenge after another.

  The one passion the brothers shared was hunting the giant mountain cheet. They had, almost alone, hunted the catlike carnivore to near extinction in the Grimsel Mountains, a range of jagged ridges that formed part of the eastern Shieldwall.

  On Voerster a Kraalheer once had held a position similar to the daimyo of Earth’s ancient Japan--feudal lord at the pleasure of the serving Voertrekker-Praesident: landlord and planter, rancher and cattle baron. The folk of the highlands were well aware of their history. They had been poor relations at First Landing, then experimental animals during the high-tech years before the Rebellion. But settling them on the plateau, an act of Voertrekker expediency, saved them from many of the depredations of the Rebellion. The kaffirs delegated to form their highland labor force were genetically engineered for the Planetia in the same way as were the mynheeren. Thus when the race war began, the kaffirs of the Planetia felt very little kinship with their siblings of the Grassersee townships.

  There was war in the highlands, but it was a desultory matter. The kaffirs still lived on the Voertrekkers’ kraals as they had in the old days in the lowlands. They seldom accompanied their whites on incursions of the lowlands. One Nostromo syndic-commentator, the shipmaster, attributed this to loyalty. Another, the Nostromo’s surgeon, scoffed at the idea. “The highland kaffir on Voerster,” he wrote into the database, “is as violent and capricious as the high country Kraalheer. Within a dozen generations Planetian society will not exist.” To which Nostromo’s Rigger, who had apparently spent some weeks downworld during Nostromo’s call, added a postscriptum: “Nor will the convocation of bigots in the Sea of Grass.”

  For a dozen generations Kraalheeren of the Planetia had tried to breed beasts known to the colonists as hornheads, a moss-and-lichen-eating ruminant resembling an Earth buffalo. The effort had failed. The hornheads being native necrogenes, no gravid female ever survived parturition. Herds multiplied slowly or not at all, and the meat was tough and unpalatable. Riding beasts were another matter. The faux horses were rodent-cognates and were born in litters, thus becoming numerous enough to make husbandry worthwhile. But the riding beasts did not thrive in the heights, thus giving the Kraalheeren of the Planetia excuse to lust after the acres of lush grassland to be found in the plains below.

  With the spread across the Grassersee of homesteaders and small farmers, the age of the Kraalheer in the lowlands was ending. But on the Planetia the Kraalheeren were supreme.

  It was Ian Voerster’s intention to see to it that their power grew no greater. The independence movement in the high country was an intolerable threat. The instrument of his intention was to be the Fonteins.

  The Fontein brothers and their troop of lumpen followers had descended to the village of Grimsel by way of the Grimsel Pass Funicular Railway, an engineering marvel whose completion had left Voerster financially exhausted for a generation. The railway reached almost to the Sea of Grass, but not quite. The settlement of Grimsel, in the moraine left by the retreat of the Blue Glacier, supported no more than two thousand souls, an eighth Voertrekker, a half lumpen, and the remainder kaffirs.

  This was why Eigen Fontein, who had a well-developed taste for kaffir females, always began his hunting excursions in Grimsel.

  It was rumored that there was platinum-bearing ore in the Grimsel range, but no one had ever found any. Yet the stories drew lumpen and impoverished, hopeful Voertrekkers from as far away as Pretoria and Voersterstaad.

  It was customary for Planetians descending the Shieldwall to linger several days in Grimsel, becoming accustomed to the greater air pressure and humidity of the lowlands, before continuing their journeys to Voersterstaad or Pretoria by airship. Temperatures above freezing were rare in the highlands, and on summer days when the mean temperature of Grimsel was in the forties Celsius, Highlanders complained bitterly of the heat. They were a sullen lot, given to fighting among themselves and complaining about the differences in hardships endured by “High Voertrekkers” and flatlanders.

  Airships avoided the high plateau. They were limited by their pressure altitude--the height at which the gas in the envelope expanded to the point of requiring a release of volume--in a place where no helium was available for replacement. Rarely, perhaps once in every dozen years, the Staadluftflot and the Society for Planetary Studies sponsored an aerial expedition to the Planetia, and even to the Blue Glacier and the Northern Ice. These expeditions regularly killed adventurous young Voertrekkers and required the rescuing of others. Any lowlanders rescued from the Ice by a team of High Voertrekkers never forgot it. Were never allowed to forget it. Courage and bravado (as well as fool-hardiness and brutality) were the stuff of life above the Shieldwall.

  When the Fonteins and their hunter-marauder posse of Winter Kraal lumpen alighted from the funicular, they immediately did as they always did in Grimsel. They hired kaffir whores and lumpen whores, too, for those who favored them, and proceeded to “tree the town.”

  The source of the expression was Old Earth’s western America and it remained in favor in towns such as Grimsel, despite the fact that most of the inhabitants had never seen a tree and others had never before seen a town.

  It became immediately apparent to the people of Grimsel that the Fonteins were on hand for more than hunting and whoring. The high-country lumpen got drunk and made a quantity of loose talk. What they said was that Eigen had it in his mind to “take a bite of the Grassersee.”

  Some feared that he meant Grimsel, which was technically (if not actually) a part of the Sea of Grass. Others said he meant something different. The Voerster’s spies listened.

  No one in Grimsel had dared ask a Fontein of Winter what sort of hunt he intended in the lowlands that required so many armed men. But the stablekeeper reported that Mynheer Fontein had been heard to say that he had descended from the plateau “to claim Einsamberg.” Not from the Ehrengrafs, to whom it belonged, but from his father, the KraaJheer of Winter. This shocked the liveryman’s listeners. The mountain lands to the west and south of Grimsel had been the holding of the Ehrengraf clan since soon after Landing Day. The estate was seldom visited by any member of the family, but was always kept in readiness by a staff of kaffirs who were, by any standard shabby Grimsel knew, uncommonly loyal to the Kraalheer family who owned Einsamberg and the Einsamtal Valley.

  The Ehrengrafs, everyone knew, were kaffir-lovers dating from the days of the Rebellion. Whatever Eigen Fontein had in mind for property belonging to kaffir-loving lowland aristocrats was no concern of Grimsel’s. But right was right, and no Fontein, son or father, had any rightful
claim to the old estate.

  In stormy, near-freezing weather--it had snowed the night before the arrival of the Fonteins, and there was still ice in the ravines--the Winter men rode out. They were dressed in home-spun shirts and trousers, hornhead leather back-and-breastplaies, ebray leather boots, broad hats with the brim pinned up with the kraal badge (a giant cheet killing a hornhead), and great blunderbuss shotguns across their backs.

  No one asked any questions. The leader’s demeanor did not encourage familiarity. The people of Grimsel saw the Fonteins depart and were well pleased to see them go. Of course, there were rumors. Rumors and gossip were all that made life in Grimsel bearable.

  The only man with any knowledge of the law in Grimsel was the brewer, a quondam solicitor who had come to the hills seeking gold many years ago and stayed to make beer. The lawyer-turned-brewer contended that Einsamberg was protected by a First Lander’s Portion writ, and that therefore it was not Voertrekker-Praesident Ian Voerster’s to give, but the property of his wife, the kraalheera Eliana Ehrengraf, The subject was discussed over the brewer’s barrels. But it was soon forgotten. The people of Grimsel were, for the most part, disappointed prospectors, crippled miners, and unemployed funicular railroad men. They had a short attention span. And they had little interest in politics and none whatever in the intrigues of Voertrekkerhoem, a quasi-legendary kraal on the shore of the Great Southern Ocean far, far from Grimsel.