The zero gravity appeared to have eased the effects of the hard takeoff for Broni. The girl was sucking in great breaths of the oxygen-rich air inside the sled. Eliana whispered to her and the girl responded with a wan smile.
As the sled passed over the eastern Shieldwall, Broni gasped with excitement. “The Blue Glacier, mynheera! Look how the sun shines on it. Oh, how lovely it is!”
Eliana looked across the compartment at Duncan with an expression of utter joy. “Thank you,” she said silently. “Thank you with all my heart.”
Glory’s sled passed over the eastern coast of the continent at a height of one hundred eighty kilometers. Black Clavius could see the first wink of the Southern Ice. He shivered in spite of himself. Against the silvery blue of the Great Southern Ocean, the grays and browns of the Sabercut Peninsula lay like a corpse in the sea. Clavius studied the Isthmus of Sorrow, and remembered the pitiful coffles of detainees on the way through Hellsgate. Clavius had been fortunate. They had transported him by police dirigible. The inhabitants-to-be of the more severe clangs in the Friendly Islands were not so favored. Between Hellsgate and the Detention Two complex across Walvis Strait from the Southern Ice lay eight hundred kilometers of narrow mountain road along the southern shore of the Sabercut, a strand known as the “Skeleton Coast” for a similarly inhospitable coast on the homeworld. There were no accurate records on which to rely, but the word was that dozens--possibly even hundreds--of prisoners had died on that journey of despair.
As the sled orbited southeast, the low sun-angle struck shards of cold light from the Sea of Lions and Walvis Sound. Clavius wondered about the detainees he had seen and spoken to in the ceils at Voertrekkerhoem, at Hellsgate and Detention One. What had become of the garrulous lumpe Fencik? Was he somewhere down there on the icebound shores of the Skeleton Coast?
Clavius had seen few kaffirs on his short journey through the penal system of Planet Voerster. The word in the clangs was that kaffir miscreants were either dead or immured in the southernmost camps of the Friendlies. It was quite possibly so. It seemed a way of coping that came naturally to the Voertrekkers of Voerster.
Osbertus Kloster clung with a death-grip to the restraints on his couch, but his face was uplifted and he stared open-mouthed at wonders he could never have guessed at in his days--he thought of time past that way--at Sternberg. The view of the heavens through the observatory’s small refractor was not a hundredth of what he could now see with his naked eyes.
Out beyond Voerster’s southern limb the Astronomer-Select could see four of the Six Giants, enormous and brilliant. Green Erde, the kaffirs’ Mandela; yellowish Wallenberg, that the blacks called Tutu. Thor, the war god, whom the kaffirs worshipped as Chaka. And dreaded Drache, the dragon, who was more powerful in his kaffir persona of Angatch, the All-Powerful. And, slowly changing as the sled flew, the curved illusion that was Voerster-- the kaffirs’ Afrika.
There is so much to know, Osbertus thought breathlessly, so much to learn. And life is so short. I am so near my end. He glanced at Buele and wondered why he was not surprised that the boy had been instantly at home aboard the starcraft. Open-eyed and wondering, but amazingly self-possessed and at home. The astronomer looked briefly at Anya Amaya and Duncan; at the moment both were Wired to the vessel and obviously in communication with the great Goldenwing still beyond the curve of the planet. He felt a furious flash of envy. To know what they knew. To be as young as they were. To sail between the stars and live forever ....
He reined himself sadly. Be gracious, Mynheer Voertrekker, he thought, and be generous with your thanks for what you have already been given.
Broni’s wan attention was captured by the girl beside Duncan at the control console. The Voertrekkersdatter could sense an aura about the New Earther that was redolent of energy, sexuality, devotion--to what? Was it to her ship that Anya directed all that love? Broni wondered. To her syndicate? Was it to Duncan? It was all of these and more. Anya’s personality seemed turned outward, toward the deep between the stars. It was a yearning and a fulfillment. Broni seemed suddenly to know what made Anya Amaya different from the downworlders with whom Broni had spent all her few years. It was a faith, almost a religion, and it held her enthralled by the promise of an endless and ever renewing unknown.
The Voertrekker girl turned her attention to Duncan. Now that she had turned the key with Anya, had she the instrument with which to begin to know Duncan Kr, and by extension all of the Starmen of Glory’s syndicate?
For as long as Broni could remember, she and her mother had affected the moods and emotion of those around them. Looking at Anya Amaya and Duncan Kr, Broni understood to what uses such a wild talent could be put. The realization made her pulse race. Anya and Duncan turned as one to look at her, and despite the frailty of her grip on life, Broni Ehrengraf Voerster wanted to shout with joy.
Eliana sensed her daughter’s joy. She watched as Duncan and Anya responded to Broni’s emotional offering. They sensed it so clearly that it was as though a beam of light were uniting them all.
For a moment she felt bereft, left out. These were deeply personal experiences neither she nor Broni had ever shared with others. Then she felt Duncan’s emotions brush against her own. She looked at him. It was a revelation. Other men had fallen in love with Eliana Ehrengraf. But she had never encouraged any of them, not even Ian, for hers had always been destined to be a dynastic marriage. The love between man and woman had seemed forever beyond her grasp. And now, Duncan.
What has come over me? she wondered. Have I become wanton? She had given herself to The Voerster virginally, as was fit for Boer aristocrats. She had never looked at another man with desire.
A Voertrekker kraalheera kept her bargains.
Until now.
Duncan smiled slowly and moved to her side. “That great sea is like the ocean on my homeworld, mynheera. The sun is brighter here, and it shines more willingly, but an ocean that covers nine-tenths of a world brings memories of Thalassa.”
“Did you grieve for your homeworld, Duncan?”
“I think perhaps I did. For a time. But no grief lasts forever.”
“A downworlder knows very little about forever,” she said.
There was no reply he could make. Seen from her point of view, he and Amaya and the rest were virtually immortal. Did she dislike him for that? No, he sensed nothing of the sort from Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster. If anything, she regarded him with admiration. With love? His own state of arousal near her made dispassionate judgment difficult.
Amaya, sharing Duncan’s feeling through the drogue, seemed to resent Eliana Voerster less. “We will dock on the next orbit,” she said. “The western coast of Voerster will be visible again in six minutes.”
Eliana said softly, “So precise.”
Amaya heard through the drogue, with Duncan’s hearing. She said, “It needs to be so. It is not a game.”
“Forgive me, mynheera,” Eliana said openly. “I have much to learn.”
“If the need arises,” Amaya said drily, “I will try to teach you.”
The sled crossed the western coast in bright morning sunlight. Osbertus could see the deep inroads of the sea at Windhoek Gulf and Amity Bay. From this viewpoint, the argument among Voersterian scientists about the origin of many of Planet Voerster’s features seemed specious. Both the gulf and the bay were almost certainly formed by the impacts of asteroids or large meteors during the formative stage of the Luyten 726 system. The old astronomer felt a deep, personal gratification at the clarity of the evidence. The Asteroid Collision Theory had been argued as long ago as Osbertus Kloster’s time at Pretoria University. As a student he had been a member of the minority, a fervent Asteroidist. This, combined with an absolute refusal to indulge in the sport of slashing the faces of his fellow students with a saber, had earned him a reputation for being eccentric. Which I was, he thought, eyes fixed on the continent below, and for which I am now very grateful.
He looked at Eliana with a certain pedantic
satisfaction. He had lectured the Voertrekkerschatz many times on his vast file of peculiar astronomical and natural theories. He hoped she saw in the crater-shapes of Windhoek Gulf and Amity Bay a vindication of her quaint cousin.
But Eliana was not thinking about geological shapes. What she saw was the brilliant green of the Sea of Grass, the cyclonic swirl of silver-white clouds above the continent, the dark grays and browns of the Shieldwall and Grimsel Mountains, and the ice blue of the Blue Glacier shading to white as it melded with the dazzle of the Northern Ice.
For a strange moment Eliana felt an almost physical pang of separation and love for the bleak land so far below. She was struck by a lonely thought; To feel the Nachtebrise once again and see the grasses take wing, yes, I should like to feel and see that at least once more.
Orbiting between the Tropic of Luyten in the north and the Tropic of Voerster in the south, the sled was above Durban on the Sea of Lions when Glory rose above the curve of Planet Voerster’s silvery limb.
Broni saw the Goldenwing before any of the others watching through the sled’s transparent carapace, and she responded with a tremulous cry of ecstasy.
Glory orbited in sunlit splendor, a long, slender hull surrounded with the lofty spikes of her masts and rigging, all glittering with the laserlike streaks of monofilament rigging. From portside main to starboard mizzen a web of light spread across a gap of twenty kilometers. Zodiacal light framed the ship against the blackness of space and the stars. Directly behind Glory lay the constellation of the Ploughman, a stooped figure guiding a diamond-bladed plough through the furrows of infinite darkness. As the sled overtook Glory, even Duncan was moved by the sheer size and beauty of his command.
Buele grew wide-eyed and uttered a chortle of pleasure. “She is so big! See how very big she is!” He tugged at Osbertus Kloster’s flowing sleeve, and the Astronomer-Select of Voerster could say only, “I had no idea, no idea at all--“ The vast ship they were overtaking bore almost no relation whatever to the tiny gemlike miniature he had seen in a telescope field. This was very different. This was--Glory. Eliana caught Duncan’s hand and held it. “So beautiful, Duncan. So beautiful!”
And Black Clavius, who drank in the sight of the Goldenwing as a man might drink water in the desert, let himself rise almost to the curve of the transparent overhead. O, Lord, he thought, to travel again-- “‘A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, And pavement stars...’“
His deep voice broke and he floated without speech, tears of greeting after long separation flowing down his cheeks.
30. A MATTER OF DISCIPLINE
At a distance Jean Marq considered the tired and angry man berating his troops in the meadow below the manor. There was a lack of sophistication common to these off-worlders; all of them, he thought, no matter how arrogantly they proclaimed authority. The time he had spent close by the Voertrekker-Praesident of Voerster had not increased his respect for the man. He reminded Jean of a prosperous farmer he had once known, long ago, in Provence. A troubling memory--indistinct, and yet laden with unpleasant emotions for which he had no explanation. Jean had been studying the situation on Voerster. It was plain to any unbiased observer that Ian Voerster was willful, which was unattractive in anyone and ugly in a ruler, and stubborn, which was dangerous. His Afrikaner ancestors had been forced to surrender South Africa to the Xhosa and the Zulu. Now he saw his task as maintaining Voertrekker domination over Voerster forever, even if it meant allying himself with the no-longer-quite-humans of the Planetia. The man fancied himself a politician and military tactician, and while his skills in both professions might be adequate for ordinary times on Planet Voerster, where men like himself had been writing the rules for generations, there was some question in these extraordinary times.
Somehow the Voertrekker-Praesident had managed to antagonize his entire peer group, the mynheeren class of colonists, by mishandling the freaks from the highlands and alienating his wife and daughter, who were now safe with Duncan--presumably aboard the Glory.
Jean Marq paced the upper stories of the manor house at Einsamberg and wondered what Ian Voerster imagined would happen when he informed Duncan that a member of his syndicate was being held hostage. He stood on the high battlements and looked down into the meadow that formed the floor of the valley of Einsamtal. Two airships were moored there--the military craft that had brought him, with Ian and a detachment of troops of the Wache, to this place in the foothills of the Shieldwall, and the other encountered and turned back along the way as it was limping westward. The Volkenreiter had been damaged and was being flown by two men when the military force had encountered it and forced it to return. The men aboard the dirigible had been arrested immediately and were now imprisoned somewhere within the manor.
On the valley floor a colony of tents had sprouted--squat ugly things meant to shelter the squat, ugly, sometimes many-fingered men who had descended from the Planetia to meet with Ian Voerster and his troops.
Jean understood that they had rushed to this place intending to capture and detain the Voertrekker-Praesident’s women. They had arrived too late. The sled had gone. Voerster’s wife had taken asylum aboard the Glory.
Jean Marq felt a reluctant sympathy for Voerster. His wife had made a fool of him, perhaps even cuckolded him. At the very least she had prevented a dynastic marriage, and who knew what other plans she intended to disrupt.
Ian Voerster imagined he could prevent further catastrophe by informing Duncan Kr that Jean Marq was now officially a hostage. But Starmen did not respond to such threats. Sailing the Coriolis forces would be impossible if every and any gang of colonists could control the movement of the Starmen and their ships by outlawry.
Duncan would do nothing to retrieve Jean Marq and the Frenchman knew it. It was simply a matter of discipline. But did the colonial know it? Jean wondered. It seemed he did not, to judge from the way he was leering up at his captive, showing him off to the thickset Planetian with whom he was speaking. Arguing? Now that did seem likely. It appeared to Jean Marq that every conversation entered into by Ian Voerster turned acrimonious.
The Frenchman left the parapet and sat on a stone bench. He did not feel well, and the nightmares were returning. Apparently the Boche had been doing something right with his treatment of Jean Marq. But he had taken his last dose of medication before leaving the ship. It had been days now and the effects were wearing off. The dreams were returning. The trouble was that Krieg’s conditioning had been highly effective in the disruption of mnemonic patterns. He still could not remember the whole content of the nightmares which had been growing so troublesome aboard Glory. He remembered piercing hot sun. A rocky terraced hillside. Ancient vines making stark: shadows at midday. And a girl. There had been a girl named Amalie, and Jean knew that he should know her name as well as he knew his own.
He lifted his face to the white light of Luyten. Another sun, he thought. Warmer, more golden....
He closed his eyes and reluctantly allowed sleep to draw near.
“I see him well enough,” Vikter Fontein said in his rasping voice. “Explain to me what profit you have turned by taking him hostage.”
Ian Voerster, tired and in need of a bath after three days in the field, frowned up at the Kraalheer of Winter. “With him I get my women back.”
“My women,” Fontein said bluntly.
“Not yet, Fontein. You have the manor, be content with that for a time.”
The Fontein looked about him at the valley of Einsamtal. Compared to his holding of Winter on the high plateau in the shadow of the Blue Glacier, Einsamberg was a paradise. But he knew as well as Voerster that his claim on the estate was tenuous. The Boers who settled Voerster had some peculiar laws, but they lived by them. This generation’s Voerster was a dangerous--and opportunistic--deviation from the straightlaced Boer ethic to which all Voertrekkers claimed to subscribe.
“There is still the matter of the First Lander’s Writ on this holding,” Fontein said.
“Don’t
talk to me about First Lander’s Writs, damn you,” Ian Voerster said angrily. “I am buying your loyalty, Fontein, with land and a daughter. Be content with that.”
“I might be,” the Planetian said flatly, “if the girl were here. Or failing that, the Ehrengraf.”
Voerster’s florid face went livid. “You’ll have Eliana Ehrengraf when Voerster stops turning and not an hour before.”
The Fontein looked across the field to where his lumpen were engaged in hand-to-hand practice under the command of his new heir, Georg Fontein. “This adventure has already cost Winter a son, Voerster. I want my due.”
“You lost your sons because both your sons are idiots, not through any failing of me or mine,” Ian said. “They had no call to come down to the Grassersee on a fool’s errand. I promised the Fonteins should have Einsamberg and so they shall--always provided that the Deliberative Assembly does not take collective action against us for trying to establish some sort of order among our turbulent peers.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” Vikter Fontein said.
“Oh, would they not? I brought your people down to the lowlands. It hasn’t been a popular move, Vikter. You can retreat to the Planetia and it isn’t likely anyone can follow you. But the combined mynheerenshaft could keep you in the heights until Luyten goes dark. Whatever else you choose to forget, do not forget that.” He looked again toward the battlements of Einsamberg for Marq, but the Starman had gone. “As long as we have the offworlder, we have the dominant hand. The Starmen will do anything to get him back--even return my people.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Of course I believe it.”
“I do not,” Vikter Fontein said heavily, and turned away to stamp across the meadow grasses toward the ridge where, Georg had told him with funeral face, Eigen Fontein had been properly cremated.
Glory Page 29
