“The Kaffir is in the neighborhood,” Buele said. To Buele, Black Clavius was always
The Kaffir
.
The information brought a flash of pleasure to the Astronomer-Select. “See to it that an outside light is left burning, Buele.” For years a burning light at the door to the observatory had been an invitation to Black Clavius.
“Yes, Mynheer. And shall I send the message to Voersterstaad now?”
“Not to Voersterstaad, Buele,” Osbertus Kloster said patiently.’To Voertrekkerhoem.”
“I know where that is,” Buele said with enthusiasm.
‘Then go send the message, Buele.”
Presently Osbertus, standing at one of the windows level with the inner catwalk, heard the click of the telegraph key and looked thoughtfully out at the starlit savannah. All six of Luyten 726’s gas giants were in the sky, blazing like first-magnitude stars against the constellations of the Ploughman, the Virgin, and the Hanged Man. Voerster was without a major satellite and clear nights blazed with stars.
Mynheer Kloster wondered again what new things would come to Voerster when the people of the
Gloria Coelis
arrived. He found himself anxious as a schoolboy awaiting a treat. The visit of the great Goldenwing would be, he felt certain, one of the most memorable occasions in a long and sadly unremarkable life.
Black Clavius walked the game path with a swinging stride, staff in hand. His familiar Starman’s pack--known to all the township dwellers as a source of succor and help for pain--hung from his great shoulders. From it depended an ancient, beautifully inlaid balichord. The instrument’s strings thrummed musically at each step as Clavius strode toward the distant light on the dark shape of the Sternberg.
The sky giants, drops of molten light, were ranked across the heavens from zenith to horizon. Drache the Dragon shone with pure white brilliance; Thor, the War God, had a bloody hue. Wallenberg, deKlerk, and Smuts were like blue diamonds. And Erde was a magnificent green, the green of emeralds, the green of stormy seas. At this time of the year the configuration of the gas giants changed nightly as a radically elliptical orbit swung Voerster swiftly past the slower-moving outer planets.
The kaffirs, of course, had different names for the giants. Drache was Angatch, the supreme and terrifying god of Madagascar. The companion five giants were called razanes, for the ghostly attendants of Angatch. Individually they were named Chaka, Tutu, Nampa, Mbutu, and Mandela. An eclectic pantheon, to be sure, Clavius thought.
The Starman wondered whether it was fit that he should be tolerant of so many pagan images in the religion of the kaffirs, or if he should speak out. He had been thinking of this and, as he walked, discussing it with God, whom he knew well.
“‘O, Lord, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy displeasure. Have mercy on me, O Lord; for I am weak: O Lord, heal me; for my bones are vexed.’”
The verse was a favorite of Black Clavius, one he addressed to God whenever he suspected he had not been as upright as he should be. Clavius often addressed himself to God in the words of the Psalmist, who had also been a favorite of the Almighty.
The cold was deep out on the savannah, but Clavius took no notice. He loved to walk under the thickly starred night sky of Voerster. And he loved to confound God with his skill at remembering the Book. He looked with affection at God’s face, the diamond-bright sky.
There were other Books, of course. In his travels he had found many. But it was the language of the First Book that gave him the most pleasure. Sometimes it seemed to him that when he spoke to the Lord in the language of the Book, the Lord used the same language to reply in a voice undimmed by distance or time. What were parsecs and centuries, after all, to the Creator of the universe?
The dust of the savannah trail underfoot had the pungent smell of the native necrogenes. How strange it was, and how very sad, that the beasts of Voerster--warm-blooded or cold--were all born in the belly of the parent who must inevitably die as the young ate its way into the world, to be sustained in its first days of life by the corpse of the lifegiver. The ways of the Lord were prodigious indeed. Clavius understood that each world that had been given life made its own sacrifices to pass it on. Compared to the placental mammals of Earth, the beasts of Voerster had a far more difficult racial choice. They had only self-immolation to drop into the sacred balance of life. Was that really fair?
Clavius understood that the necrogenes were one of God’s experiments, probably discarded with hardly a second thought from the Almighty.
From time to time Clavius felt it his duty to remind God that he owed more kindness to all creatures, even to the primitive creatures of Voerster.
And what about Voerster’s adopted children? Clavius wondered. Voertrekkers and their kaffirs colonizing Voerster had not been God’s idea, but Man’s. Still, the father should protect the child. On this subject, God had been silent all night.
Clavius had been walking southeast for three days and four nights, but he was unwearied. On Earth he had massed one hundred thirty kilograms. Here, under .96 gravity, he massed slightly more than one hundred twenty. But that still made him a very large and heavy man on Voerster.
His head was covered with nappy, tightly curled hair turning gray. He had a face that was the color of purple grapes and his irises were black, set in eyeballs white as eggshells.
He had received a summons from the mynheera Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster, a person of great spirit and physical beauty, and one of the most unhappy women Clavius had ever known. The messenger said that the mynheera Broni was ill once again and that the Voertrekkerschatz begged his help. The mynheera Eliana had sent Clavius a
carnet de passage
for the dirigible flight from Windhoek to Voertrekkerhoem. But Clavius had refused it. Voertrekkers grew uneasy and unpleasant when they found kaffirs in restricted places, even though it was technically against the law to do more than confine kaffirs to the townships after curfew. The Starman had always found this facet of Voertrekker life fascinating. In a society built entirely on separation of the races, it was actually illegal to “discriminate.” Refusal to serve a kaffir, for example, in any restaurant designated as racially open, resulted in severe legal sanctions.
The
luftschiff
transport system of Voerster was, by law, open to all. But it was still too new, too scientific, to be integrated. And in any case, Clavius thought, it was not fitting that the volk of Voerster be troubled by a giant of a man from offworld, who was himself still learning tolerance.
‘“But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with Thee, and shall serve Thee until the year of jubilee,’“ Clavius said aloud in his bass drum of a voice. “But jubilee, Lord, when shall that be?”
Then, because he did not wish to be overcritical of God, he added:’“When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou has ordained: what is man that Thou art mindful of him?’“
There were times he was sorely tried considering how God ran the universe. But it was a big place He had made, and it took a deal of minding.
And the Lord did mind, did look after His creations. Poor, earthbound David, singer and poet that he was, had had no idea how magnificent the works of the Lord Jehovah really were. “You do care, Lord. You do pay attention most of the time. You even look after this poor black man marooned nine light-years from Earth, where he was born. And you send me dreams, Lord. I don’t always understand them, but that’s not surprising, considering that You are God and I’m only a Wired Man put aground by an impatient syndicate. But You gave me a gift of healing to make up for it, and I thank You for that.” It was a humbling thing that the Lord of the Universe, the builder of the nebulae and quasars, cared--even a little bit--about Black Clavius.
The plain across which Clavius walked had originally been named the Copemica. The Shieldwall had been the Mid-continent Fault and the high plain had been named for the first true astronomer, Planetia Galileo Galilei. But the Voertrekkers, with their penchant for renaming everything they possessed, called the savannah on which most of the Voertrekker kraals were located “the Sea of Grass,” and the land above the Shieldwall simply “the Planetia.” The Highlanders took perverse pride in the killing land they ranched.
Clavius had made his way there, as he had to every corner of the populated continent of Voerster. The high kraal owners had regarded him with cold curiosity. They were men and women who for years on end did not leave the high tableland, and had no wish to do so. Clavius had visited the high-plains kaffirs and found them as proud of place as were their mynheeren. Human beings, Clavius thought after the long and arduous journey back to the savannah, had a great capacity for misery.
Dressed in the rough homespun of the working kaffir, Black Clavius walked with a space-devouring stride. In the long years downworld he had traveled constantly and had never been lost. A map of Voerster’s sky was imprinted on his brain, alongside the words of the holy Books he favored. The Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita--all were filed away line by line in memory. Like all astroprogrammers aboard Goldenwings, Clavius was an eidetic. He could forget nothing. And the weight of his memories made him slightly mad.
He looked to the spot low on the eastern horizon where dim So! could be seen on a clear night. It was not possible this night. The cold air was too turbulent. But still, the star that gave birth to mankind was there, even if unseen. Clavius found it amusing that the Lord of Hosts had chosen a planet of that unimportant star as the birthplace of his chosen people. “How come You picked that one, Lord? There were plenty of others. Millions upon millions of them. Or did You put them in other places, Lord? Did You hide a tribe or two in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or perhaps nearer to home in the Hercules Cluster?”
It gave Clavius pleasure to indulge in these speculations. It made him feel much nearer to his Maker, and somehow in the Lord’s confidence.
Clavius had spent the last fortnight in a kaffir homeland east of Windhoek, on the North Sea coast. The folk had been generous, as always, and his presence appeared to give them great joy.
Kaffirs always seemed to know when he was coming. As he approached a township he would be met by swarms of black children who would close in about him and escort him to the longhouse in the center of the kraal where the adult kaffirs would have foregathered to await him.
Then there would be singing and dancing--oh, the dancing!--how he loved the dancing. Even if food was short in the kraal, there would always be roasted tubers and fresh tender meat of the native beast called a “faux-goat”--meat sliced thin while the necrogene still lived, causing it nobly to imagine it was being eaten by its own needy young.
Necrogenesis was a harsh fact Clavius had had to learn about when the
Nepenthe
abandoned him on Voerster. But he understood now that each world had its truths and most of them were very hard.
On Voerster no necrogene ever bore more than one offspring, one clutch, one litter.
It was surprising to Clavius that the Voertrekkers never learned a lesson from the self-sacrifice of the native life. But they did not. Instead of sacrificing themselves for their sons and daughters, they immolated their children for power or dynasty or simply for property. Though the kaffirs called the Voertrekker way of marriage “blood-breeding,” sometimes they were a great deal more explicit and vulgar than that. “The Trekkers blood-fuck only in the missionary position,” they would say with gales of laughter. It was true. In his years downworld, Black Clavius had never encountered a Trekker couple matched in love. He thought that a great pity.
Black Clavius had heard that another Goldenwing was approaching Voerster. To see one Goldenwing in a lifetime was about all any man living on one of the planets of near space could expect. Goldenwings were becoming ever more rare. But two ships to one world in ten years really was remarkable. Clavius was eager to talk with Mynheer Osbertus about it. The black Starman never forgot that he was Wired, a man of deep space. The interface socket under the woolly hair was a defining and unchangeable part of his life. If he lived a thousand uptime years he would always yearn for the ecstasy of awareness a Wired One experienced when the mind was enhanced and expanded by interfacing with the incredibly sophisticated and sensitive computer aboard a Goldenwing.
Machines like that were no longer built. Even before Clavius was Chosen on Earth by the
Nepenthe
syndicate, astrogational computers for tachyon-sailing starships had not been built for at least a generation. Very little had been built on Earth during the years of Clavius’ childhood there. The homeworld had spent itself on the holy wars and the Exodus to the stars. Now Earth lay exhausted, a garden grown rank with the remnants of the great dream.
Well, in the twenty-five years of the Exodus, Clavius thought, sixty planets had been planted with human seed. Not all the colonies were successful, but enough were so that in another thousand years or ten thousand (What did time matter?) another Exodus would begin the cycle all over again.
Meanwhile Earth waited, Gaia supine--but not dead. Like the necrogenes of Voerster, she gave herself to her ungrateful offspring.
The Nachtebrise was rising. After midnight the winds of the Grassersee always blew west to east. The kaffirs of the Sea of Grass put sails on their carts to travel on the Nachtebrise.
Clavius could hear the wild grasses rippling, heads still heavy with pods. In another week, the spore pods would sprout wings and fly with the wind for three days of fantastic soaring. Dirigible passengers often reported seeing flying grass at five thousand meters. Then the wings would fail and for a day the sky would rain spores. The Sea of Grass would begin to turn emerald green with the first rains of autumn. On Voerster it was the beginning of the natural yearly cycle.