The walls and boundaries of reality bulged and trembled surrealistically.
Fear bubbled in Jean Marq’s chest, crowding out the air he struggled to breathe. Defeated, he closed his reddened eyes and suddenly fled into the fantastic landscape of his madness....
Healer Tiegen Roark found himself between fetid-smelling Planetian escorts, herded, like a frightened ebray, out into the wet courtyard of Einsamberg. The enclosure was crowded with Ian Voerster’s and Vikter Fontein’s commandos. Despite the cold, the air was thick with the smell of unwashed men. The Planetians glowered at the lowland
lumpen
and Tiegen was dismayed to see that they had newer and cleaner weapons than the police commando Ian had brought from Voersterstaad.
The physician still could not believe that Ian would be so rash as actually to execute Luftkapitan Klemmer. Other considerations aside--and they were legion--Otto Klemmer was a hero to the recently formed
lumpen
and
cholo
segments of the Voertrekker population, a man who proved by his example that good things came to those who were hardworking and loyal.
To kill such a man in a fit of rivalry brought on by the victim seeming more loyal to one’s wife than to one’s person would be the act of a tyrant. But it appeared as though an execution was exactly what Ian Voerster intended.
Until this dreadful, rainy moment Tiegen Roark had never really permitted himself to think of Ian Voerster as a killer. To be sure, The Voerster had, like all Voertrekker-Praesidents before him, dealt ruthlessly with kaffirs and criminals. But this was different. Otto Klemmer was a white man and a Voertrekker who had broken no law.
The gossip was that only the admonitions of the commando’s chaplain prevented Ian from revenging himself on the offworlders by digging up and dishonoring the corpse of the Starman buried by the river. True or not, Tiegen was aware that that idea had, in fact, occurred to Ian. To his credit, he had not acted upon it.
But problems multiplied. The air between Einsamberg and Voersterstaad was suddenly alive with radio messages, many mangled by the weather, but most clear enough. Ian’s supporters in Voersterstaad were frantically warning that rebellion and treason were in the wind. They begged him to return at once to the capital to face down a restless gang of seditious Kraalheeren. Tiegen had no way to know what was true and what false, but he had heard rumor (passed on by a grinning Highlander) that elements of the Wache, those not under arrest, were fighting in the streets of Voersterstaad with rebellious commandos from the Grassersee kraals.
Tiegen had neither political cleverness nor military proficiency, but common sense told him that if half of what was being said was true, the administration and presidency of Ian Voerster was in deep trouble. He absolutely must abandon Einsamberg to his erstwhile allies--no matter what the cost--and return to Voersterstaad to rally his loyalists.
The physician had been separated from Klemmer soon after his last interview with Ian Voerster, and the sight that now presented itself filled Tiegen with despair. He had no particular fondness for the airshipman (who was, after all, a person of mixed race if the stories were true), but since the ill-fated departure from Voertrekkerhoem’s airship grounds--it now seemed an eternity ago--Tiegen Roark had developed a grudging respect for Klemmer. For that reason he wanted to avert his eyes as Klemmer was brought into the courtyard supported by two of Ian Voerster’s Wache adjutants.
It was obvious that Klemmer had been denied even the most rudimentary medical assistance. His face was distorted by the swelling of his lower lip, where an infection had obviously set in. Both legs had been so badly Beaten (repeated strokes of a rod across the hamstring was a favorite highland torture) that he could not walk. His eyes were invisible under swollen lids and there were bruises and unhealed cuts on both cheeks.
Did I bring that on
, Tiegen wondered,
by accusing the Planetians to Ian Voerster?
It was unlikely. The Highlanders needed no challenge to make them despicable. The stony, airless land they had been given, long ago, by the First Landers had produced a race of brutes.
By all that is sacred
, Tiegen thought,
these are the people to whom a man would give his daughter--or even his wife--for peace in our time?
Tiegen stood in the path of the prisoner’s escort. “Stop, damn you,” he shouted at the Wache commandos. “This man needs attention.”
“Stand aside, Healer,” the officer said. “He’s about to get all the attention he will ever need.”
They shoved Roark aside and mounted the scaffold, dragging the almost comatose Klemmer.
At that moment a sound that was more animal than human reverberated within the stone courtyard enclosure. Everyone about the gibbet looked up at the source.
Two dozen meters above them, there stood the Starman Marq, poised like a bird about to take flight.
On this strange day there was no sun. The light hid behind a high overcast that drained land, sky, and even sea of color. Jean stood--walked?--on bluffs that overlooked the tideless waters of the Cote d’Azur. All around him were the vines planted generations ago by Amalie’s grandfather and great-grandfather. He noted that the grapes had been harvested and the vines pruned to low bushes of blunt, ugly branches.
He looked about for Amalie but somehow, and with a sick certainty, he knew that he would not find her. In his right hand he held a smooth stone, slippery with blood. Red had stained his fingers. He uttered a chirp of mingled horror and disgust and dropped the stone at his feet. It rolled over the cliff’s edge and fell bounding toward the distant sea.
He looked back toward the terraces of the vineyard to see if he had been observed. But there was no living thing in sight. No man or woman, no farm animal, no birds or insects. He glanced fearfully upward. Black carrion birds often soared along these cliffs. But the sky was blank and the landscape immobile, like a painted backdrop on a stage. Yet he was not alone. Jean could hear the soft, susurrating sound of a silent crowd, expectant, waiting.
He would not believe the evidence of the stone. Amalie would soon appear, running down the terraces, hair flying, her naked legs and thighs flashing in the newborn sunlight.
I am cold, ma chérie,
he thought
. Bring the warm sun and blue sky.
But she did not appear. Instead he began to discern a crowd in the marketplace of Aix. The terraces had vanished. Jean did not consider that strange. Nor was it strange that there was a gallows in the square below. A noose blew in a wind that Jean could not feel.
His heart began to thud heavily in a panic reaction. His breath came swiftly and shallowly, making him feel lightheaded. There was activity below. A police van drove slowly through the crowd, which parted like a human Red Sea before it. Jean watched in horrified fascination as the van stopped and gendarmes dismounted.
The condemned man was taken from the van and half-carried to the gallows steps. Jean felt the blood rising behind his eyes. Surely they would fill and burst, bathing him with blood and serum. The pressure within his head was more than any man could bear. He moaned. “Wait! In God’s name, wait!”
The funeral procession below stopped. The condemned man looked up. Jean stared. The face raised below was his own.
“Not me,” the condemned screamed. “Take him. He is the one!”
Jean Marq turned, ran three steps and dove out from the steep cliff over the sea. As he fell, slowly twisting, the sun emerged and bathed his sweat-streaked face with light. Somewhere in the turquoise sea below, Jean Marq knew, Amalie swam, naked and golden, waiting for him at last.
The Voertrekker-Praesident emerged from a small postern door just in time to have the Starman’s socketed skull burst like a melon as it struck the muddy cobblestones at his feet.
The courtyard erupted into riotous confusion. Tiegen’s eyes were drawn to Ian Voerster’s livid face.
The eyes,
the Healer thought,
are enormous and as cold as the ice-strewn Southern Ocean
. The courtyard was vibrating with shock, but something different was taking place inside Ian Voerster. Tiegen Roark could see it, feel it.
The Voerster stepped over the corpse at his feet, bloodying his boots in the spilled contents of the Starman’s Wired head. Tiegen held in an urge to spew. At this moment it was the Voertrekker-Praesident who dominated the scene and imposed order on the confusion. He stared at Otto Klemmer with a look of such hatred as Tiegen had never seen.
Ian Voerster stepped to the base of the gallows and began to issue orders in a frigid, almost inhuman voice. “Clean up this offal, and take the
cholo
back to the cells,” he commanded, “and tell my people to begin boarding the airships. We return to Voersterstaad today.”
Hold 120, a vast, dark emptiness aboard
Glory
, had on Duncan’s command been hastily converted into a holographic theater. The imaging cameras, which had not been used for more than three years, were all activated now. Monkeys swarmed busily through the rigging. Amaya had rotated the ship so that the camera ports in the hull had a clear view of the planet below.
Inside the hold now, Anya, Damon, and Dietr floated, Wired, in the reflected light of the scene of fumbling warfare that filled the volume of hold 120. Duncan had chosen to remain unconnected to
Glory
. Under severe Thalassan self-discipline, he forced himself to see the display as Eliana must see it.
An image of the scene far below played out the beginnings of a spreading tragedy. Osbertus Kloster watched, horrified. There had been no organized war on Voerster since the Great Rebellion, and there were no holo images of that terrible time. Buele and Broni floated in the microgravity near Duncan. He could see, in the play of light across their faces, that they understood what was taking place in the Grassersee, but as children. There was a curious detachment in their expressions. A decision had been made about the two adolescents. The choice for Buele had been touching. He had been wildly eager to stay aboard
Glory
, but he did not want to leave Osbertus. To the old man’s credit, he had insisted that Buele remain “--and see the stars, boy, and see the stars for me.”
For Broni the decision had come more easily. The medical record was unmistakable. Stay and live, return and die. Duncan looked at Eliana with an ache in his chest. Her choice had been to stay aboard
Glory
. But as she watched with horror the killing that had just begun on Voerster, Duncan felt the return of an old loneliness he had foolishly thought a thing past.
He forced himself to look away from Eliana. She had come to watch in Voertrekker dress. Duncan tried not to recall her nakedness, the soft feel of her inner thighs, the taste of her lips and tongue, the warm pressure of her breasts.
It was all a dream
, Duncan thought
. It never happened at all.
He made himself look away and at Black Clavius. The large man was moving his lips in prayer--or in conversation with God. The acts were synonymous with Clavius. But his eyes were sad. The battle they were watching in the holograph was being fought over the fields of a township. Airshipmen on a dirigible bearing the marks of Windhoek were trying to rise above a craft from Joburg, on the southeastern coast of Windhoek Gulf. The commandos of Windhoek dropped burning thermite on their enemy, and fire rained down onto the kaffir fields below.
Glory
’s computer saw the scene from above, but at an oblique angle that made the fiery deluge stand out sharp and deadly against the dusty green of the Sea of Grass.
Eliana reached for Duncan’s hand in the semidarkness. She gripped it with astonishing strength. It was the first physical contact they had shared since the messages had begun to pour in--first from Voersterstaad, then from kraals across the Grassersee all the way to Pretoria, begging her to return.
“Action elsewhere,”
Dietr reported for
Glory
’s computer.
“Voersterstaad,” Eliana said, tightening her grip on Duncan’s hand.
The city was under cloud cover, but the infrared images showed red crowds clotting the streets between the colder, blue buildings. A momentary break allowed
Glory
’s computer to show the scene in true color. There were barricades going up in Voersterstaad. They were closer to this suicidal behavior than we offworlders realized, Duncan thought. He looked at Eliana’s pale face. But she knew. She always knew.
As they watched the display, the terminator moved across the Planetia, the Sea of Lions, the Sea of Grass. For a moment the land below was bathed in the pure, whitish light of Luyten. Suddenly, out of the grasslands, rose wave after wave of emerald green. The phenomenon took place across thousands of kilometers of empty savannah. Green gems glistened in the low-angled light of the westering sun. It was a startling and beautiful sight.
Eliana whispered, “The night breeze is blowing, love, and the grasses have begun to fly.”
When Duncan Kr looked at his Voertrekker beloved, her eyes had closed and her cheeks were wet with tears.
In the unfamiliar garb of a Voertrekker commando, Ulf Walvis stood his post on the level ground between Voersterstaad and Voertrekkerhoem, backed by a thousand men from Windhoek and half that many others drawn from insurgent kraals all across the Grassersee. A hundred meters from his station, a ditch had been dug by the engineering force from Pretoria. Sharpened stakes had been emplaced, and mines had been planted. The university commandos were well into their fantasy of playing soldiers.
Beyond the rather primitive works lay another set of almost identical fortifications protecting a smaller force of commandos and Wache from Voertrekkerhoem. The summer winds were thick with flying grasses and it had begun to rain still again. Old Ulf shivered in his commander’s furs and wondered how he came to find himself here. It was true enough that he had been at the heart of the coalition of Kraalheeren who formed the Friends of Elmi. But he had been a disinclined messenger to Ian Voerster on the day before the Voertrekker-Praesident departed for Einsamberg; he had been an awkward (if excited) conspirator at the meetings where the Friends of Elmi took shape; and he was now an extremely reluctant amateur warrior.