The ancient histories told how the original Voertrekkers, the Boers of Earth, had been bullied and compelled by out-landers to dismantle their segregated society. Ian Voerster knew the stories very well. One of the most hated Voertrekker words--shashon--meant “to force and degrade.” It derived from the Anglic word sanctions.
Ian Voerster rose from his chair and smoothed his black civilian tunic. He wore uniform when he must, but he was, he told himself, a civilian at heart. No one could ever say that the government of Voerster, unchanged for a thousand years, was a military dictatorship. “See to the guard, Oberst.”
“At once, Mynheer.” Transkei hurried on his way. Ian Voerster went to the door and surveyed the outer office. The clerks and male secretaries stopped work and awaited his commands. “Benno,” he said to his military aide, “come with me.”
The young Wache officer left his desk and stood at attention. Everyone is playing at soldier, Ian thought irritably. God knows I need soldiers, but I have none. Not real ones. These are rural constables, no more than that. Even the ci-devant mynheeren who came from Voerster’s “best families” were, in truth, country yokels with a countryman’s prejudices and bumpkin mentality. The vaunted university at Pretoria was really little more than a duelling and finishing school. Leutnant Benno was a good lad, but slow to grasp anything new or unusual.
Damn her, Ian thought. Damn my dutiful, stiff-backed wife Eliana Ehrengraf. When I need her most where is she? Hiding at Einsamberg with my valuable daughter, and both of them intent on defying me.
He spoke to the room. “You all heard the noise from the sky. It means that a Goldenwing’s shuttle craft will be landing soon here at Voertrekkerhoem. It is an occasion you will all wish to witness. So for the time being you are all dismissed to the battlements, where you can see the proceedings.” A nervous murmur of appreciation, still laced with apprehension, ran through the room. “Come with me, Benno. We still have work to do,” Ian said.
Aboard the master-shuttle, Jean Marq was Wired into the shuttle-train’s computer and the Local Area Network that bound the auxiliary craft to his shuttle and the lot to Glory’s mainframe. He was handling the varying required changes in delta-V with experienced skill. Back on Glory, Damon lay in his pod, Wired, monitoring the descent.
Jean Marq could see the planet below only as a virtual-reality display. Wireframe representations of reality suited Jean in his present state of mind. Virtual reality was without sexuality, without enticement. All reality would be better so, thought Jean Marq.
Still, the temptation to see the world as it really was enormous. Perversely, Jean removed his helmet and activated a video imager.
Voerster resembled Earth. Jean had not been quite prepared for that. It was slightly smaller and more pelagic, but the chemical content of the atmosphere resulted in similar sky colors, the seas were salty and shading from deep cobait blue to muddy green, and the continent was somewhat Earth-like. The coast of the Sea of Lions, a region kept reasonably warm by its position on the equator, reminded Jean of the Mediterranean coast of France. There were low, rocky hills behind the seacoast Like the hills of Provence, he thought with a sudden shiver.
“What’s wrong?” Damon asked through the drogue.
“Nothing is wrong, little man. Do not be so nervous. I am flying these landers, not you.”
Damon subsided. The boy was edgy because Duncan and Anya were not aboard Glory, Jean thought. They had dropped away to make their own reentry in one of the personnel sleds. Duncan was always the altruist, Jean thought tolerantly. A colonist had only to weep for help, and voila! there was the Master and Commander of the Glory.
The seas of Planet Voerster were, in actual fact, all parts of the same, globe-spanning ocean. The old charts showed a Sea of Storms between the North Tropic of Luyten and the Arctic circle. But the Sea of, Storms became, as a circumnavigation in those high latitudes was completed, the Luyten Sea. One washed the northwest coast of the continent, the other the northeast coast. The southern sound of the Sea of Storms had been named--with considerable vainglory, Jean Marq decided--the Voerster Sea. But south of the equator, the entire planet was girdled by the Great Southern Ocean, pinched into a raging strait in one place by a nasty-looking, barren blade of land called the Sabercut Peninsula. The tip of the saber almost touched a projection of the antarctic ice cap that reached north almost to the--more Voertrekker vainglory--South Tropic of Voerster.
The old tyrant who led the migration from Earth to this half-finished world under Luyten 726 had left his name on the planet, the seas, the tropics, and the single continent. That, Jean thought sardonically, was vainglory in any reality.
But it was the Sea of Lions that attracted Jean Marq. It was narrow and several thousand kilometers long. If he allowed himself to slip into fantasy, he thought with a lump in his throat, that sea could almost be the Mediterranean. Tideless because Voerster had no satellites.
How strange that must be, thought Jean. Almost every world he had visited in the course of his uptime years had at least one satellite, often many. But the night sky of Voerster would display no such near neighbors. Only the stars and, of course, the six gas giants of the system’s outer marches.
Still there was something about the land and sea below that evoked nostalgia. Like most men of his Gallic race, Jean was bound to his homeland by emotional ties of great strength and duration. Even after all his years in space, the appeal of a rocky coastline and a turquoise sea under a white sun was very strong. Would Duncan object to a long stay on Voerster? It was hard to say. Duncan kept his own counsel.
Along with the wave of nostalgia that shook him came other, darker memories. A seminude girl lying oddly in the hot sun, blood on her head, half-open eyes glazing reproachfully in the noonday light...What was it that he found so easy to remember and yet so difficult to grasp?
Dietr Krieg had only recently asked odd questions about the dead dream-girl in the vineyard, and about Anya Amaya and how it was that she had almost been killed while working in the rigging a dozen kilometers from Glory.
Each time Jean’s mind seemed prepared to plunge into the black hole yawning for him, something caused him to withhold understanding in a fluttery panic.
Others panicked, he thought defensively. Young Damon. He had come from Grissom even more raw and useless than the average Starman came to his syndicate. Jean had warned Duncan that the youngster would be a burden. Fear of heights clung like the stench of merde to him. And yet-- And yet--the boy was actually losing some of his terror. There were even times when Damon Ng reminded Jean Marq of himself.
So Duncan had been right Again. He had said the boy would learn and become useful and it was happening just as he said it would. What a remarkable man was Duncan, Jean Marq thought. No one could command the Glory as well as the quiet fisherman from Thalassa. The ship and the crew all responded to him. All, Jean Marq thought. Even I.
The first shuttle in the train, the leader of the line of cargo panniers, was touching the outer fringes of the atmosphere. Odd flares of light and glowing plasmas streamed from the V-shaped nose cone. Ablative materials had long ago been abandoned. By the time Glory’s auxiliary spacecraft were built, the metal ceramic bond needed for repeated reentries was old science.
But the curling, streaming glow of heat and fire still made a spectacular show. Jean Marq wondered if any of the primitives on the world below were watching as Glory sent her children into the sea of air below her. They were missing a marvelous show if they were not.
Through the thin image of the curtain of fire Marq could still see the coastline of the Sea of Lions. It really was like Provence, there was no other way to describe it. A land that cried out for vineyards, though the climate would call for very hardy grapes. With a half-smile Jean wondered if the Voertrekkers had discovered oenology. Glory pampered her syndicate, but the wine cellar aboard was sorely lacking in both quality and quantity. Jean Marq had, for a moment, the flashing impression that he was not thinking with his cust
omary seriousness. The idea rather pleased him.
Dietr the Boche had been feeding him something in his Dust, Jean was certain of it. Despite all his advanced medical degrees and training, the man was a hog-butcher. Why else would one of the Boche’s discernment leave the home-world for a life of wandering among the near stars? It made no sense. And what made even less sense was that he, Jean Marq, once of the faculty of the Sorbonne, was doing precisely the same thing and, at the moment, deriving a kind of light-minded pleasure from it.
He was feeling the changes in delta-V now and he settled himself in one of the dual pilot’s chairs facing the computer interface. Jean smiled vacantly. I have let that German witch doctor rearrange things inside my head. I should not have permitted that. But now that it was done, one felt a glorious sense of pure freedom. There had been no real nightmares for several weeks. A dream or two. But no dream Amalie. No blood. For that, if for nothing else, he thought, I should thank the Boche.
He reset the drogue in the socket in his skull. Immediately perceptions sharpened as the computer LAN reinstated the virtual-reality program and enhanced it. Ahead and below lay Voertrekkerhoem and the designated landing ground. Radar showed storms on the continental plain, line after line of them. A storm cell had only recently passed over the landing site.
Young Damon’s presence suddenly came through the communications link powerfully. “Can you handle the string?” he asked firmly. Marq frowned. What was it that made the boy so hostile? There was something. He felt it. But it was hidden behind the mental curtain Dietr Krieg had erected in Jean Marq’s mind.
“I can fly the string down your pants, mon ami,” Marq said affably. “I was doing this when you were a smear on the sheets of your papa’s bed. If I make you nervous, unplug.”
Damon would never do such a thing when Duncan had ordered him to stand watch and monitor the descent of the cargo panniers.
Duncan and Anya had taken one of the small sleds, descending to some other mysterious destination with Han Soo’s frozen corpse. Why did that trouble him, Jean wondered. What do I care about Anya Amaya? He was the only member of Glory’s syndicate with whom she had not shared her body.
But that was his own choice. Long ago he had made it plain he wished to remain celibate. Still it lessened his pleasure to think of Duncan and Anya descending together. It was not--suitable.
“I am going to land this shuttle manually,” he announced to Damon. “The others can follow on program.”
Damon had no objection. Nor any sign of acrophobia, Marq thought. But then the reality they were both experiencing was virtual, computer-generated, not actual. It made a difference.
“I will follow you through on the controls,” Damon said.
“If you wish to learn,” Jean Marq said.
In the virtual world they shared, the virtual Jean Marq raised a virtual hand and smiled a virtual smile at a virtual Damon Ng.
“Ready to begin, boy,” Jean Marq said. “Nobody lives forever.” Jean wondered how it was that thought had slipped by the mental curtain the Boche hog butcher had installed.
“Is that what you call Dietr? Hog butcher?”
“Mind, now, boy,” Jean Marq said almost airily. “Faite attention!”
At eighty thousand meters the ceramic surfaces of the descent vehicle glowed red. Plasmas curled away from the entering shuttle in a spectacular show of colors and light. The shuttle train was crossing the ocean side of Voerster. Beneath the fiery trail lay only rainswept, empty ocean. The fire in the sky reflected from the tideless waves unseen. As the lead shuttle approached the terminator, the first real suggestions of air began to burn, oxygen exploding into a white streak of fire against the darkening sky.
The shuttle crossed the Sea of Storms in minutes, descending from seventy thousand meters to fifty thousand. Over the northern spur of land and lights of the Cape Colony the shuttle descended steeply to only ten thousand meters. Jean Marq instructed the computer to bank the string into a long turn to the south and Amity Bay. A series of deep, rolling sonic booms rocked the city of Joburg, bringing Voertrekkers and kaffirs into the streets.
Over the Grassersee, Jean took over from the computers and flew by wire. The lander had become a swiftly moving glider. The string crossed Sternberg at five thousand meters and leveled for Voertrekkerhoem’s landing field. Jean’s view of the land below was still a computer-generated wireframe sketch. The shuttle had no forward-looking windows, only a sloping carapace of red-hot ceramic. But in the virtual reality created by the computers, Jean Marq could see clearly the lights put on the field by the downworlders. Lanes for the string of cargo panniers. One lane lay near the complex wireframe image that was the way Glory’s computers saw Voertrekkerhoem.
Jean skillfully banked the shuttle and lined it up with the landing ground. He armed the drag parachutes.
At five hundred meters, he leveled the ceramic arrow and lowered the skids. To celebrate his skill, he pulled the drogue from his head and made the landing blind, on analog instruments. The way Duncan might do it, he thought. The way only a veteran Starman could.
22. FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE INTERFACE
A series of terrifying booms, like the crash of thunder on doomsday, rolled across the Grassersee. The old leaded windows of Voertrekkerhoem rattled; some shattered and fell in shards to the stone floors. From where he stood surrounded by his Wache Guard of Honor, Ian Voerster could hear the shrieks of the women on the widows’ walks and the moans of terror from the house kaffirs. The ranks of the Wache wavered and stumbled. Even the shimmering blue-white arc-lamps that bathed the airship landing ground in cold, harsh light seemed to flicker as the sonic booms rolled across Voertrekkerhoem.
“Stand fast! Stand fast, damn you!” The Voertrekker-Praesident’s voice could scarcely be heard over the rolling thunder from the east
Ian Voerster was the first to see the descending shuttles, falling like huge, gleaming spearpoints out of the night sky. The spacecraft were shadows on the emerging stars. Ian’s blood felt as though it were congealing in his veins. His limbs felt wooden, and his heart labored, as he raised a pair of binoculars.
Lightning raced through the thunderheads moving west The electric blue light flashed on the carapace of the leading lander. Clearly the tiling was made of some heat-resistant material because it glowed white at the leading edges, shading to ruddy red along the ugly, humped dorsal surface. In the field of the binoculars, the vehicle seemed aimed directly at The Voerster and his frightened troops.
It approached, or fell, at a stunning rate. One moment it had passed high above Amity Bay, in the next it was rushing low overhead with a crackling rumble of tortured, parted air. In train behind it came others, all alike, at intervals of perhaps a half kilometer. It was like watching a flight of giant assegai.
As the last sonic boom rolled and crashed across the Sea of Grass, the first shuttle struck the turf of the landing field with incredible violence. It ploughed into the field, turning a long, deep furrow that steamed and hissed with the red heat of the blade that had created it. A ribbon parachute, larger than any similar device ever stored aboard a Voertrekker dirigible, opened and slowed the shuttle to a stop. When movement ceased, the spacecraft lay sunk in the wet soil, surrounded by a fog of superheated water vapor.
The spaceship was far larger than Ian Voerster had thought it would be. Delta-shaped, it was fifty meters from tip to blunt tail, a half dozen meters from keel (now buried in the soil of Voerster) to the thick, darkly blind carapace of the dorsal surface.
The Voerster had only a moment to consider the lead lander before another roared over his head, and another and another, until the landing field of Voertrekkerhoem was littered with redhot, steaming, hissing spearpoints. There was a smell of burnt metal in the air and Ian Voerster could feel the sweat of fear rolling down his ribs. He took note of the fact that the vehicles were featureless, terrifyingly blind. They lay on the field amid their brightly colored ribbon-chutes, a legion of the most threateningly
foreign devices Ian Voerster had ever seen.
The Nepenthe had rained no such storm of fearsome devices on Voerster. Ian remembered seeing that Goldenwing transiting the sky, and the descent of a small machine, large enough to carry a single man, that remained on the surface of the planet only long enough to deposit Black Clavius on the ground. Then it had risen, or so the witnesses claimed, silently into the sky to be gone. Clavius’ arrival on Voerster had been nothing like this terrifying visitation.
The Voerster glanced back at his house. It seemed smaller, less grand than it had only moments before. The women, servants, and kaffirs had all vanished. Only the Voertrekker-Praesident and his barely controllable Honor Guard remained on the landing field surveying a multitude of still-glowing sky machines with gleaming, mottled carapaces that looked to Ian Voerster as though they were made of porcelain or ceramic. What sort of people owned such machines as these? For the first time, Ian Voerster, his mouth dry with anxiety, thought to ask himself whether or not he had the means--and the courage--actually to do what he intended doing.
No man could live on Voerster without an intimate knowledge of fear. No man could rule Voerster without an equally intimate knowledge of how to control and use fear, Ian shouted an order to Leutnant Benno to advance the Honor Guard until it commanded the forepart of the first vehicle at the far end of the field. Benno barked commands at the Wache troopers and trotted down the long, smoking furrow to where the shuttle rested. The Voerster followed, aware that his boots and trouser-legs were being stained with hot mud as he slogged through the ploughed ground. The dirt reeked of burnt iron.
As he reached the rear of the first shuttle he studied it carefully. He needed to know everything possible about these Starmen and their machines. Protected by a cowl of stained ceramic were six bell-shaped protuberances that appeared to be mounted on swivels. They were still in motion, and obviously superheated. The metal of which they were made radiated heat in waves that made the air shimmer.
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