“That is very interesting, I’m sure,” Osbertus said primly.
“It is a lovely song, mynheera,” Tiegen Roark said. “I thank you for it.”
“You are welcome, Healer,” Broni said formally.
Clavius said to Eliana, “I should like to examine her, mynheera.”
“Of course, Starman.”
“I will retire,” Osbertus said. Despite the fact that he had brought Clavius to Voertrekkerhoem for this precise purpose, he could not imagine remaining while the offworlder examined the Voertrekkersdatter. He looked expectantly at Tiegen, but the Healer clearly had no intention of leaving.
Osbertus said to Eliana, “I know my rooms, Cousin. I will make my own way.”
Eliana offered her hand and he kissed it with great formality. He left the room troubled and wondering if he had done the right thing this early morning. Yet what else could he have done after Eliana had asked him?
In the space of a quarter hour, during which the sky beyond the windows of Voertrekkerhoem grew steadily lighter until Luyten 726’s rising chased the last Giant from the sky, Clavius counted Broni’s heartbeats, listened to her chest with Tiegen’s listening tube, pricked her fingers and tasted her blood, and held her narrow naked feet between his hands and judged the pressure of the pulse above her heels.
“It is almost certainly rheumatic fever, mynheera,” he said to Eliana. Tiegen Roark stood listening in stolid silence. He had made that diagnosis weeks ago. The problem was: What to do about it? The pharmacopoeia contained no remedy.
Broni had begun to look very worn. The Wired One placed a hand over her eyes and uttered a soft, crooning chant. Eliana recognized it as similar to the chant kaffir mothers used to lull their children to sleep when they were cold or hungry. In the townships, sometimes sleep was preferable--the only anodyne for deprivation.
Immediately Broni began to breathe more deeply and easily. Within moments, the girl was asleep. Her cheet, Ylla, climbed once again into her lap and took up a position of guardianship.
Clavius indicated that they should leave the girl’s bedside. At the dark far end of the long room, the Starman said softly, “The fever has damaged her heart, mynheera. There is leakage through the valves. It is the cause of all her difficulties.”
“You have some knowledge, kaffir,” Tiegen said. “But what’s to be done?”
“As you know,” Clavius said tactfully, “rheumatic fever is an illness of the very young, Healer. Many times a child can contract the disease and suffer little or no damage. At other times the heart can be fatally damaged.” He felt the turmoil in Tiegen Roark’s mind. The man knew that Clavius’ knowledge was superior to his own, but he hated to know it.
Understandable
, Clavius thought.
Tiegen was thinking: How many children like Broni would die because medicine on Voerster was little better than witchcraft? Tiegen Roarit felt suffocated by his own ignorance.
All this the empath in Clavius detected. He said, “Of course, Healer, remember that I am not a qualified physician--”
“Nor am I.” Bitterly.
“What can be done, Clavius?” Eliana asked.
“By us? By me? Nothing, mynheera. There is a surgical procedure, but it is impossible here.”
Tiegen Roark flashed, “A surgical procedure? To work
inside the heart!”
Clavius nodded. “Heart-valve repair was common practice long before
Milagro
left Earth, Mynheer Healer. My guess is that the Voertrekker physicians practiced it routinely before the Rebellion.”
“A thousand years ago?”
“Downtime, Mynheer. Yes.”
Roark looked ill. “How did we fall so far behind?” The question was rhetorical. Everyone knew what the Kaffir Rebellion had cost. The textbooks blamed the kaffirs, of course. But what did it really matter who was responsible, Tiegen thought desperately.
We are bound for the Pit, all of us
, he thought.
Clavius regarded the Healer sympathetically. “It is not your fault, Healer.”
Eliana interrupted fiercely. “What can you
do
, Clavius?”
“I haven’t the skill, mynheera,” the black Starman said.
“There is a Goldenwing coming,” she said. “Goldenwings carry physicians, surely?”
“Yes.”
“Will the syndics help us?”
“I don’t know, mynheera,” Clavius said. “Goldenwing syndics are not saints. They are ordinary men.”
Eliana gripped his forearm. “This is
Broni
, Clavius. This is my only child.”
“She is right, kaffir,” Tiegen said roughly. “If there is a physician aboard the
Gloria Coelis
who can perform the surgery, they must allow it.”
Clavius raised his eyes to heaven. These folks expected unbounded altruism from the Starmen. From the living myths who brought them from the distant Earth. But what he said was true. Syndics were ordinary men--with extraordinary skills, perhaps--but still ordinary men.
The people of
Nepenthe
marooned me because they thought me mad
, he thought. Was that the act of mythic demi-gods?
His deliverance came from an unexpected and unwelcome source.
A female house kaffir came running through the door breathlessly.
“Mynheera, mynheera--the Voerster has returned from Voersterstaad. He is very angry about the Starman’s visit, mynheera--”
Eliana stood in the doorway, backed by Clavius and the Astronomer-Select. Down the hall marched a detachment of four Trekkerpolizei. One saluted Eliana and presented himself to Clavius. “I am Trekkerpolizeioberst Transkei, kaffir. By order of the Voertrekker-Praesident, I place you under arrest.”
Six hours later, as the halfday bells tolled, Eliana Voerster stood on a widow’s walk overlooking the Voertrekkerhoem landing ground, despairing as a detachment of the Trekkerpolizei marched Black Clavius into the police dirigible for the flight to Hellsgate.
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.
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?