“How beautiful,” Jean Marq said. He rested in the mouth of the transit tunnel. He had shaved off his several weeks’ growth of beard, trimmed his guerilla-style moustache, dressed himself in a green-and-red skinsuit.
Anya stopped herself with a hand and knee against the fabric wall. Her heart was suddenly pounding.
“Why are you here, Jean?” she asked.
He seemed puzzled. “Is there any reason why I should not be, Anya?”
She was too terrified to answer, but she kept herself calm. She opened a wall pocket, withdrew a skinsuit and pulled it on over her nakedness.
“Are you angry with me,
chèrie
?”
“No,” Anya said tensely, ready to flee.
The Frenchman frowned. “But you are. I can feel it. Was it because of that foolish doll of mine?”
Anya stared in silence. Jean Marq turned thoughtful. “I am sorry you feel like that,” he said. “I only bought the creature as a prank. I had no idea it disgusted you so.”
Anya’s silence remained unbroken, but Jean Marq seemed not to notice.
“It embarrasses me,
chère
Anya. I hope you don’t think I indulge in perversions. Quite the reverse, I assure you. Even in my student days I was considered one of the most moral of men when it came to sexual practices.”
“Were you,” whispered Anya.
“Believe me, when Duncan suggested I space the paracoita I didn’t protest. I put her through the airlock without a moment’s hesitation. And do you know, Anya? Ever since I did, I have been feeling very much better. I can sleep. How do you account for something like that?” He essayed a roguish smile. “Perhaps the mystics are correct. Perhaps we must make sacrifices to the ghosts and spirits.”
God, the girl thought. Does he really believe
he
put the paracoita out the airlock? Was that what Dietr intended? Anya heard Duncan’s voice in the transit tunnel and relief flooded over her like cool water.
“Jean,” Duncan said. “I am pleased to see you up.”
“Duncan.” Jean embraced Duncan Kr warmly. “I have been explaining to Anya about the paracoita.”
Duncan looked at Anya reassuringly. “She understands, Jean. We all do.”
“Thank you, Duncan.” Jean hesitated. “Now where was I going when I stopped to watch Anya?”
“Spin section? If so, I’ll go with you,” Duncan said.
“Perhaps that was it.” Marq turned to Anya in farewell. “I hope you understand,
ma chère
,” he said. “The doll was only a joke.”
Anya could hear Duncan and Jean Marq laughing as they made their way down the transit tube. The girl floated motionless in the air of her quarters, listening.
Mira appeared, clung spread-legged to a wall, and looked at Anya.
Anya extended her arms and Mira released her hold and leaped, slowly, into her arms. Anya buried her face in the cat’s silky fur and said, “He’s a killing madman, beautiful Mira. You have always known, haven’t you? The question is, what do we do about it?”
Nothing in his brief earlier visit to Voertrekkerhoem had prepared Black Clavius for the complexity of The Voerster’s kraal. What he now saw was a formidable fortress housing and sustaining not only the Voertrekker-Praesident and his family and staff, but also a brigade of Trekkerpolizei and hundreds of servants and bureaucrats.
At the conclusion of his long flight from the south, Black Clavius had been deposited at the landing ground known as Lufthavan, the police airship base at Voertrekkerhoem. Ordinary flights from the southwest coast to the cities and towns of the north and east did not depart from Lufthavan. Civilian travelers used the much larger airship ground north of the capital.
When Clavius debarked from the police dirigible, he was immediately taken into custody by a detachment of the Voertrekker-Praesident’s personal police-guard detachment, known as the Wache, of whom there were said to be one thousand. Within this
corps d’elite
was secreted a clandestine, almost furtive element of Voertrekker society. The enlisted ranks of the Wache were filled entirely by children of Voertrekker-kaffir sexual unions. These relationships, though illegal, were tacitly accepted. The practice of black-white cohabitation had been anathema in the pre-Rebellion period. But after the end of hostilities it became a necessity. The casualties of the Rebellion had mostly been men--men of both races. Kaffir men had come close to extermination and were still, even after a thousand years, heavily outnumbered by kaffir women. The population had dwindled almost to the point of extinction three hundred years after the Rebellion, and at that point a desperate Deliberative Assembly had made the decision to accept children of Voertrekker-kaffir unions as potential Voertrekkers--the status to be won by public service.
As a means of repopulating Voerster, the scheme was never more than a minima! success. Social pressure to maintain apartheid remained a powerful influence in the politics of Voerster. But like the Anglo-Indians of Old Earth, the half-breed children of Voertrekker fathers and kaffir mothers tended to be fiercely patriotic, dedicated to the State and the Voertrekker ethos, and protective of their slightly elevated status. As the popular saying put it, “Better the Wache than exposure on the Grassersee.” Meaning that the children who might once have been left to die in the grassland could now hope for a post in the Wache.
Children of Voertrekker mothers by kaffir men were, in theory, entitled to straightforward mixed-blood status. In practice they were discriminated against even by their peers.
But it was a fact that the Wache was considered a prime assignment for the Trekkerpolizei officer corps, many of whom were the partially kaffir second and third sons of Kraalheeren.
Within the first hour after being landed at the detention barracks attached to Lufthavan, Black Clavius was guilty of a social solecism. He quite naturally assumed that the coffee-skinned Wache noncommissioned officer commanding the detachment escorting him was a kaffir and addressed him in the cadences of the townships.
After the swift tongue-lashing, the Starman found himself in solitary confinement with a single meal a day.
Well, Lord,
he murmured
, I am still on boiled goat and one tangeroon. And I get one meal now instead of the two they gave me south of the Isthmus. I am not making much progress, Lord
.
At dawn of Black Clavius’ third day of solitary in the Lufthavan cells, the warder who brought him his goat and tangeroon said, “Eat and then stand by the .door.”
“Yes, Mynheer. May I ask why?”
The warder, a young man with-.broad features, glared at Clavius. “You may not, kaffir,” he said. “They say you are a Starman. Well, you will get no special treatment here.”
“Quite so,” murmured Clavius.
“Stand and wait.”
Clavius did. For three hours.
Lord, we agreed I should stay downworld on Voerster for a time
, Clavius said to no one visible.
You didn’t promise me a flower garden. But it would be much easier if you would make the Voertrekkers into clock-watchers
.
By noon, a commissioned officer of the Wache appeared and said, “Follow me, kaffir.”
Clavius did as he was told. He was led from the barracks, across the leveled dirt plain of the airship field, and across a steeply banked ditch into the great house.
The officer, a subleutnant, was erect and very correct. He wore the red-striped trousers of the presidential detachment.
Inside the house Clavius surreptitiously tried to orient himself and failed. He was far from the suite of rooms where he had seen Broni and Eliana Ehrengraf so many weeks ago. Instead he was marched through echoing stone corridors, out and through covered walkways atop crenelated walls, again into dark buildings and up broad, empty staircases, until he found himself in a populated anteroom filled with stiff and anxious Voertrekkers, all hanging on each word spoken by the young woman sitting at a desk which guarded a tall door. She wore the Wache stripes of a lance corporal. She was tall, with light eyes. Brown skin and nappy black hair showed her ancestry.
“Kaffir Clavius,” the subleutnant said, surrendering a paper slip.
The corporal, who looked still in her teens, stared at Clavius. Clavius stared back. He had never seen a blue-eyed kaffir.
“Kaffir, what are you gawking at? Mind your manners.”
“I will, mynheera.”
“Don’t mock me, kaffir, or you will regret it. I am addressed as lance corporal. You may be with us for a long time. Learn.”
“Yes, lance corporal.”
“Sit down there.” She indicated an empty chair. “I will call you when it is time.”
“Excuse me, lance corporal, but I am a stranger here. When it is time to do what?”
The girl looked at him in amazement. “Why, to see the Voertrekker-Praesident, you foolish kaffir,” she said. “Didn’t you know that is why you were brought here?”
It was purely the hand of Fate and the teeth of a hungry giant cheet that had brought Ian Voerster to the Machtstuhl. Heinrich Voerster, son of Alfried Voerster--Ian’s great-uncle--had been destined to rule Planet Voerster from Voertrekkerhoem.
But Heinrich lived only to the age of seventeen. During the high hunting season (that time of year when upper-class Voertrekkers devoted themselves to murdering the indigenous life of Planet Voerster}, while stalking a large wild cheet alone, the heir to the title of The Voerster and the Machtstuhl was killed and eaten.
In the Alfried Voerster Kraal near the south coast city of Durban there stood a stone mausoleum, on the lintel of which was carved the Alfried Voerster motto:
To Rule is to Serve; to Serve is to Live
. Within the mausoleum, next to the crypts containing the bones of Alfried and his wife Brigidda, there was a sarcophagus containing only a human femur, some ribs, and parts of a human skull, all of Heinrich Voerster that the irritated giant cheet had not consumed.
Ian Voerster was not a hunter, nor a sportsman of any sort. A few academic critics said that Heinrich would have been a better Head of State, would have done a better job of maintaining “the Voertrekker ethos.” But among the Kraalheeren and the members of the mynheeren class there was no dissatisfaction with the performance in office of Ian Voerster.
Ian’s short, muscular frame and large head and features projected an image of vigor. He was ruddy, blue-eyed, and white-blond enough to have been one of the storybook Boers of ancient African legend.
Among the Kraalheeren of the Grassersee, he was recognized as a man of furious temper, dangerous and shrewd. He cultivated that image. It had served him well over the years. He let it be known often that as The Voerster he had no reluctance to exercise the enormous power the covenant of the Voertrekker State bestowed upon him.
Ian had married young, as all Voertrekkers did. He had been bereaved almost at once. His consort, Ulfrieda Klawiter Voerster, died in childbirth. She had had three bloody miscarriages. Her fourth attempt to deliver a child killed her.
What followed was Ian Voerster’s most shrewd political act. He betrothed himself to Eliana Ehrengraf, heiress and kraalheera of the one Voertrekker family disenfranchised for one hundred years after the Rebellion for sympathizing with the kaffirs, but a house with a vast political following among all classes of society.
The union of Ian and Eliana, too, was troubled by repeated infant deaths and miscarriages. Voertrekker bloodlines were attenuating. Ian Voerster began to wonder secretly if he had not somehow offended the Almighty. He was, in his private way, a religious man.
Then sixteen years ago, Eliana had carried to term the Voerster family’s only living child, Broni Ehrengraf. Golden Broni. In a nation where members of the ruling class were not customarily greeted with hosannas and paeans, Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster and her daughter, the Golden Broni, were beloved by Voertrekker and kaffir alike. But as Broni approached puberty, she sickened. Now she lived day by day. Ian Voerster privately believed that she managed this by the grace of some
Greater Power
, a Power aware of the needs of the Voertrekker State.
The Voerster looked up from his work and saw the large black man standing in the doorway. “Come in, kaffir Clavius,” he said.
The Voertrekker-Praesident’s office was as narrow and dark as most of the rooms in Voertrekkerhoem. Late-afternoon daylight came through an arrow-slit of a window high between the stone groins of the western wall. An electric lamp cast a pond of light on the slab that served Ian Voerster as a desk. A second lamp illuminated a Mercator projection of the continent of Voerster on the wall. The map was cluttered with colored pins marking projects of interest to the Voertrekker-Praesident.
Voerster looked past Clavius at the lance corporal. “Thank you Klara. Close the door behind you.”
When she had done as she was told, Ian Voerster addressed himself to Clavius. “I am curious. Are there still kaffirs on Earth?”
“I believe so, Mynheer.”
“And mixed bloods like Klara?”
“It has been many years since I was on Earth, Voertrekker-Praesident. But I would be surprised if there were not.”
The Voerster used a stiletto-like letter-opener to point at an ornately carved straight stool without cushions. “Good, you are a plain speaker. Sit there.”
Clavius lowered himself carefully. The stool was more substantial than he thought, but low. The “kaffir seat,” Clavius thought wryly. He allowed himself to relax a trifle.
Ian Voerster regarded him silently over steepled fingers. Presently, he said, “You saw Walvis Strait, kaffir Clavius?”
“Yes, Mynheer.”
“And Detention Two?”
“Yes, Mynheer.”
The Voerster locked his hands and rested them on the surface of his stone tabletop. “I understand from Oberst Transkei that the weather was benign.”
“It was clear and bright. Cold.”
The Voerster essayed an icy smile. “It gets much, much colder than that. Detainees die of the cold in the sunshine there, kaffir. Detention Two is the last place in the world.”
Clavius said nothing. The Voerster’s point was made. The Friendly Islands, straddling the freezing Walvis Strait between the Sabercut Peninsula and the Southern Ice were like the Ninth Circle of Dante Alighieri’s
Inferno
. Hell on a clear day.