Glory (38 page)

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.

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.

Below the ridge there was patch of newly turned soil-- the cold, wormy grave of the Spaceman. The Kraalheer Vikter Fontein shuddered and superstitiously refused to look at the last resting place of the old Mandarin, Han Soo. In the highlands it was black death and ill fortune to look upon a new grave. The Fontein shuddered, looked at the blank sky, and marched on, thinking that the bargain which had seemed so fine that late night in Voersterstaad seemed a great deal less so here and now in the valley of Einsamtal under the Shieldwall.

What daunted the downworlders overtaking
Glory
was her vast size. The sled approached the Goldenwing cautiously, as though it were fearful its filial relation to the ship might be forgotten and its tiny existence snapped up and snuffed out by its glorious, diamantine mother. The visitors were made speechless by the dimensions of mast, spar, and rig. Even their sense of distance and proportion was challenged as they approached
Glory
, At five hundred kilometers she was large and seemed nearby. At one hundred, she dominated the sky. At fifty, her furled wings umbrellaed Voerster. She was not only the most beautiful artifact Eliana and the others from below had ever seen, she was the most commanding.

Amaya carefully piloted the sled toward the hatch of hold 11. The sensation was one of entering a cathedral in space. The carapace remained open. Duncan guessed-- since it was a choice always left to the sled pilot--that the Sailing Master had left it so to awe the Voertrekker passengers. She succeeded.

Eliana held Broni against her breast. The girl trembled. Buele and the old astronomer turned faces upward and outward, astonished by the patterned intricacies of the iridescent monofilament rig. It carried light, and it divided the cosmos into uncountable segments, as though some prodigious god were intent on apportioning a mystic judgment. Black Clavius smiled and feasted his eyes on a sight he had not seen for many long downworld years.
Glory
was more beautiful, even, than
Nepenthe
, he thought.

The sled moved into the cavernous interior of hold 11. A high overhead gradually hid Voerster and the stars. Broni said in a faint whisper, “Mynheera, Voertrekkerhoem and the Kongresshalle could fit inside this place.”

The distant fabric walls and overhead were pierced by myriad ports and skylights. Through some could be seen the silvery glare of Planet Voerster, through others only the rig, the sky, the stars, and the Six Giants.

Even Buele was subdued. He murmured to Osbertus that not only would the Kongresshalle and Voertrekkhoem, as Broni said, fit inside this one empty hold, “But everything between the Kongresshalle and the shores of Amity Bay, as well. Have you ever seen anything so empty, Brother Osbertus? It must be kilometers from end to end. Whatever could they have carried in such spaces?”

Duncan withdrew his attention from the control displays and said to Buele, “She carried people in cold-sleep, Buele. On her first voyage she transported ten thousand colonists from Earth to Aldrin.”

Buele was starry-eyed. “She carried a
world
, Brother Duncan?”

“Yes. But only once. On Aldrin, her syndicate took possession of her.”

“And she has been in the sky ever since then?”

“Deep space is her home.” Duncan glanced at Eliana again. She was watching him with an unreadable expression in her dark, shining eyes.

The sled lurched slightly as Anya Amaya allowed it to settle the last few centimeters to the fabric deck. Turbines and generators unspooled, their flywheels winding down through the tonal scale as they slowed. Behind them, the hold hatch contracted like a sphincter, shutting out the light of space. The walls of hold 11 began to bulge as interior pressure was restored.