Acceleration, gravity’s surrogate, diminished to nothing, and Duncan floated free of the deck. He crossed the compartment to look closely at Broni. She was trembling, exhausted by the takeoff as well as by the physical and psychological strain of being spirited from the manor house and into the sled in Hail Soo’s coffin of woven grasses. Vie might have killed her, Duncan thought. But she was looking through the transparent carapace with an expression of utter wonder.
“Broni?”
“Yes, Mynheer.” Her voice was thin, thready.
“Breathe slowly and deeply.”
“Yes, Mynheer Duncan.” Then: “When shall we see her, Mynheer Duncan? When shall we see the
Glory
?”
He caught her hand and squeezed it gently. “Very soon, now, Broni. Two more orbits.”
“Will the Goldenwing be
there
?” The boy, Buele was pointing at almost exactly the place above the curving disk of Voerster where
Glory
would materialize as Anya began her approach to rendezvous.
“Right there, Buele,” Duncan said.
The youngster was excited, all-seeing. A talent? Duncan wondered. Well, why not? The gifts one needed to live in space were to be found anywhere and everywhere.
Duncan turned in air and floated toward the controllers. It was an almost sinful pleasure to be weightless again, he crossed above the open pod where Eliana lay in the gel. Her eyes were open and she was looking, fascinated, awestricken, at the shape of her homeland. Duncan caught the edge of the pod and anchored himself near her, looking for any sign of panic. There was none. Only amazement.
“It is so beautiful,” Eliana whispered. “How could I ever have known?”
“Welcome to my world, mynheera,” Duncan said.
“Is it all like this, Duncan?”
He smiled at her. “Much better,” he said.
Eliana freed herself from the nonadhesive gel.
“Any disorientation?” Duncan asked.
“No.” She floated clear of the pod.
“Take care. It needs some getting used to,” Duncan said.
She closed her eyes and smiled. “It is like a dream of flying.”
Duncan unreeled a restraining strap and put the end in her hand. “Go gently,” he said.
Broni was sitting up. “Mother,” she said delightedly, “I feel so free.”
Eliana reached for her daughter’s hands. Girl and woman smiled, like children playing a new and fascinating game.
“Oh, God. I think I am going to be sick.” Osbertus Kloster, his loose clothing ballooning about him, looked pale.
Duncan located a medical kit and extracted a patch for motion sickness. He stripped the cover from the adhesive and fixed the disk to Osbertus’ neck.
“Lie still a moment,” he said. “The effect is almost instantaneous.”
The astronomer closed his eyes.
“Breathe more slowly,” Duncan ordered. “There. Better.”
Osbertus opened his eyes again. ”Why is the planet above us?”
“We are orbiting in an inverted position for better actual visibility.”
“Actual?” Motion sickness was suddenly forgotten. Kloster’s pale eyes were alert with eagerness to see, to experience.
Duncan indicated the flight holograph. “That is what we usually fly by.” He glanced at the silver glitter of Voerster’s planetary ocean reflecting the Luyten sunlight. “Sometimes we miss a great deal.”
Black Clavius, free of the couch and floating free beneath the open carapace, sang out joyously in his sonorous voice: “‘
The heavens declare the Glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.
’ Ah, Master and Commander Kr, I have missed it so.”
“Can I come up there, Brother?” Buele was free of his restraints and swimming awkwardly toward the black Starman. Clavius caught him, spun him about so that he floated close to the transparent carapace of the sled. Buele burbled with delight.
Anya, still Wired, but allowing herself to rise from the pod in which she lay during the liftoff to orbit, said, “Damon is calling us, Duncan. The cargo shuttles have returned on automatic, but Jean Marq is not with them. He is still on the planet. And Dietr wants to speak with you.”
Duncan looked across the compartment at Eliana and Broni. The two resembled sisters as they watched Voerster spin above the shuttle, the green of the Sea of Grass now as bright as emeralds in the new day dawning across the continent below.
Duncan unreeled a drogue and plugged it into his socket. Immediately, his perceptions widened.
Glory
orbited three thousand kilometers ahead and five hundred kilometers above the sled. The ship was still well below the gleaming eastern horizon, but it called to Duncan with the loom of home after a long and difficult absence.
Dietr Krieg spoke to him as though they were across the compartment from one another.
“That bullet wound, Duncan. How is it?”
“Well enough. It will keep until you look at the girl. “
“May I register a protest? We are not a ship of do-gooders. “
Duncan smiled in spite of himself. The remark was paradigmatically Dietr. “
No one would ever accuse you of being a do-gooder, Dietr. A good mechanic, perhaps.”
Neurocybersurgeons hated being called mechanics. Four thousand years ago, when their cutting craft including shaving and trimming hair, they had hated being called barbers. Many things changed, but human nature did not.
“Be ready to examine her as soon as we come aboard. “
“Is that native quack with you?”
“No,” Duncan said shortly. In fact, he thought, Healer Roark and the airship captain might well be dead by now, having bought the rest a few precious minutes of time.
Amaya, in the circuit, said,
“We will rendezvous in a hundred forty-seven minutes. Have Damon depressurize Hold Eleven.”
“Understood. I will be ready for your guest--and you, Duncan. Prepare for thirty hours in a recovery capsule.”
“Very well, Ship’s Surgeon,”
Duncan said formally. It was a title seldom used aboard the
Glory
, and one Duncan suspected Dietr, with his Germanic love of protocol, enjoyed hearing applied to himself.
Duncan removed the drogue and turned to see Eliana watching him. Did the sight of a man with a cable connecting his brain to a machine repel her? he wondered. Had she heard him subvocalizing and did she wonder if it were part of some nonhuman ritual?
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
.