It was, all told, a rather lovely world, this Voerster, Clavius thought. Not an easy world, no. But possessed of a certain nobility, like the morose folk it sheltered.
The light at the door to Sternhoem gleamed brighter as Clavius approached. He could see no light from the observatory proper, so he assumed that Osbertus had ordered Buele to close the dome. The old fellow had a horror of exposing the telescope to the night sky unless it was actually in use. What strange Voertrekker tabu was that? the black Starman wondered. But no matter, Osbertus was good company and a good man. He, too, was deeply concerned about Broni Ehrengraf Voerster. In a world without much love, the old astronomer bestowed what he had to give on The Voertrekker’s daughter and her mother.
With the red-shifted stars from which
Glory
fled shining down through the overhead skylight, Starman Jean Marq slept.
The hot Provencal sun burned down on the familiar, rock-terraced hillside, throwing hard, black shadows from the dry vines. The vintage would be bitter without rain, without pity from the sun. The Earth was weary, even the ocean level was low. The weather had been changing for a thousand years, and as it changed, Earth itself became more inert, as though determined to survive by husbanding what strength was left in the soil and air.
Even the wild grasses were sere, but in Amalie’s russet hair he could smell thyme and marjoram, and on the damp cloth of her bodice the sweet female smell of her sweat.
He had followed her down the terraces in great, slow, dreamy leaps as though he, and she, could fly like ravens that circled overhead, crossing and recrossing the swollen yellow disc of the sun.
Jean Marq watched her now as she flew down the mountainside. Back straight and slender as an arrow, brown bare legs flashing, full skirt lifted to show her white thighs. He could hear her laughter as he followed her with his breath coming hard and his heart pounding in his chest. Why did she run from him, he wondered, and why did her flight seem magical?
Amalie filled his days and tormented his nights. She was only a farm girl, a peasant tied to the land by tradition and family and French law, while he was a rising star of the ancient Sorbonne’s faculty of mathematics. The social distance between them was stellar, but he knew that he would give his life and his privileges to possess her.
She stopped, chest heaving, to wait for him. Dampness glued the cloth of her blouse to her breasts, hard as melons. The nipples were a dark announcement of her nubility, thrusting against the wet cloth. Her best shirt, Marq knew; his gift. White chambray with red thread worked in a pattern around the collar and across the breast. Bright, like a trickle of blood.
She called mockingly to him and he felt light, as though he could launch himself into space and fly like a spear to her, pierce her, embrace her, explore her as the sunlight did,
A peasant, yes. But a land-owning peasant. Jean Marq was French enough to care a great deal about that. For centuries France had slowly been slipping back into the medieval mystery of her beginnings. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, it had been the same when the continent began to awaken after the great plagues of the Fourteenth Century killed forty million souls and left vast tracts of field and forest abandoned and silent save for the cry of birds and the rutting roars of the stag.
Now two-thirds of the population of Earth were gone to the nearer stars. There was a great stillness in the abandoned cities, a melancholy peace on the breast of the empty land. Yet the great schools persisted. The Sorbonne, Cambridge, Columbia--the universities still produced scientists.
Marq was on holiday after the demanding ordeal of winning his tenure. He had come south to Provence for the sun, the sea, and the stillness.
He had met Amalie Delacroix and had had no peace since his first view of her working in her father’s terraced vineyard. She tormented him with her body, naked under skirt and blouse. She tormented him with looks and touchings and simply by being Amalie, eighteen and a woman. She even tormented him with long, speculative statements on how she would, if she could, apply for her passage to the stars (to which, in this time, every citizen of Earth was entitled), and spend a year or maybe two in cold-sleep so that she could awaken to a world alive with fiery young men who would not be afraid, as some were, to take her by force and make love to her.
Jean Marq listened and the sweat rolled down his back and his loins filled and he hardened and asked himself, “Does she mean what she says? Is that what she wants?”
He would lie awake at night sick with longing and perhaps even with love, though Jean was not a loving man.
Marq stirred in his pod and moaned. Oh, Jesu. Again he was following Amalie down the stone terraces of that ancient, vanished Provence. The great terraces that were like steps built for some dark and malevolent god.
He stood on a terrace above her, looking down at the flash of leg and thigh with which she favored him as the wind lifted her skirt. He felt the heavy pounding beat of his pulse in his throat and behind his eyes. His penis was hard and full. He called out to her, “Amalie, Amalie, attendre!”
The sound of his call echoed down the terraces and reached the cliffs that fell away to the empty sea. Somewhere there was laughter.
She had vanished and panic surged. Why did she mock him so? He felt the sharp stone shards through his light sandals, and then she was behind him--and her pungent woman scent was in his nostrils, and her arms were around him.
Let it be different this time, he thought in his dream. Please, God, let it be different.
He turned and they kissed; she curious, he hungry, searching. Her tongue flicked his, ran across his lips. Her breasts pressed hard and damp against his naked chest. They sank to their knees and she allowed him to open her blouse and search her nipples with his mouth. She tasted of salt and sun.
“Je t’aime...je t’adore.”
Oh, God, he heard her laughter.
She said, “Enough now, Jean. “ She pushed his face away from her breasts and sat back on her heels, her nipples glistening in the bright sunlight.
She frowned and said, “Now look at what you’ve done. You’ve torn my blouse. You are worse than the laborer’s boy.”
A thing of orange light flashed in his head. The stone terraces, the sky, the sea, the vineyard vanished, and there was only Amalie and her naked slobbered breasts. Love and hatred exploded. He threw himself upon her, lifting her skirt until it gathered around her waist.
“Stop this, you fool,” he heard her say. She always said it in exactly the same way, without fear, with a touch of contempt.
The sun pierced his bare back with spikes of light. Close to, behind her russet eyelashes, he could see her eyes, green and shot with flecks the color of gold, pupils narrow against the sun and then dilating with fear. He felt himself penetrating her, driving into her without mercy or charity, tearing her tender hymen and feeling her heave beneath him in screaming protest.
Engorged to bursting, he drove himself into her again. The circling birds joined their screams to hers. He felt her clawing at his face and then, quite suddenly, she was still, limp, and he emptied himself into her.
“Amalie, Amalie, je t’adore--”
He lifted his weight from her and looked down into her flushed and sweat-streaked face. Her eyes were open, staring over his shoulder at the sun. A trickle of blood ran down her cheek from her hairline, and another leaked from her ear.
Jean Marq said, “Amalie?”
Then he lifted his right hand which was clenched around a smooth stone taken from the terrace. It was smeared with her blood...
He felt ten tiny needles piercing the skin of his chest. They burned like fire. He opened his eyes in terror and looked into the tiny cat face of Mira.
The animal’s small head sprouted a hair-thin platinum wire. That damned Boche Krieg’s demented experiment. The cat knew what a man was thinking. Predator’s thoughts filled Marq’s sleep-pod. Mira’s slit pupils dilated in a mad parody of the dream--Amalie’s. The cat’s eyes became bottomless. Marq had the crazed notion that Mira was threatening him, warning him that if he displeased her she would somehow disclose his dream to Duncan.
Marq made a savage sound in his throat and struck at the cat, but she was far too swift. She released her hold on him and leaped, weightless, across the compartment to land on the fabric wall and cling there, still looking at him. Mira had been born in space, had lived all of her life in free-fall.
Glory
was her universe.
Jean Marq sat up in the open pod and hugged himself to stop the inner shivering that dominated his naked body. Would the dream never end?
Mira hissed at him and launched herself into the transit tube. Marq hated the cat and she hated him. Krieg’s cyber-surgery and the computer made it possible for her to tell him so. Each time he dreamed of killing Amalie, the small beast knew and came to judge him. With the others aboard the
Glory
, she was gentle and affectionate. Even with the icy Krieg. But with Marq, who had murdered a female creature, she was a tiny fury.
Still shivering in the cold air of his personal compartment, Jean Marq arose and slipped into a skinsuit. Among the clutter of his personal gear he found his stash of Dust. Duncan knew that he had brought Dust aboard, because Duncan knew everything. But Masters seldom interfered with the vices of their crewmen. Only if they reduced the efficiency of the ship did they enforce their authority. Duncan Kr was not a disciplinarian. He ruled by example, not by threat.
Marq broke the seal and inhaled deeply. Dust gave him no pleasure. What it did was dull remorse.
He pushed off and floated to the terminal in the wall and plugged in.
Glory
told him the state of voyage, ship, and crew.
Duncan and Anya Amaya were conning the ship.
Glory
was tacking away into a region of the Oort Cloud swept almost clean by the gravity of Drache, the great white gas giant that guarded Luyten 726’s outer marches. Young Damon was EVA, surrounded by monkeys. What did the youngster find to talk about with those half-machine, half-animal things? Some Dust would do
that
one no harm whatever. Ng’s acrophobia was like a stench in the ship, Marq thought,
The neurocybersurgeon had unplugged himself and was relaxing in his pod, dreaming up who knew what Germanic grandiosity. He was listening to Wagner. The
Liebesnacht
. The bulkhead microphones picked up the music. There was no real privacy anywhere aboard a Goldenwing. For safety’s sake, no crewman could ever be out of touch.
On impulse, Marq asked that
Glory
show him the frozen corpse of Han Soo in the hold. The computer imaged the old Celestial’s still face and Marq saw it clearly. He felt a pang of deep sorrow. Han Soo had been Marq’s only friend aboard the
Glory
.
Marq closed his eyes and studied the calm, distant face. It was like an ivory carving: the smooth features, closed eyes behind sloping epicanthic folds. Those eyes, Marq thought, had opened first in the valley of the Yangtze River. And they had closed for the last time eight light-years from Earth, after a life that a downworlder would think was as long as forever.
We share the emptiness, Old Man
, Marq thought.
You sleep dreaming of Earth as I do. But you will never awaken more.
The computer showed him that Duncan and Anya were both naked in the bridge pods. Though it was common practice among Starmen to go nude if they chose, it still sent a shaft of sensation through Marq’s loins to sense the image of the naked teenaged girl conning the ship. She would never have bared her breasts to the sun of Provence, he thought, yet she lay naked as a newborn in her working pod without a second thought. She slept with Duncan and Krieg and Damon without prejudice. And she would have done so with Jean Marq, too, but for Marq’s need to do penance. Anya Amaya’s New Earth open sexuality was like a splinter in Jean Marq’s flesh. Eros was a demon, a destroyer of men.
Marq told the computer to inform Duncan that he was awake and ready to stand his watch. Then he detached the computer drogue from his socket and allowed the heavy cable to retract into the fabric wall.
His face was stubbled and there was a sour taste in his mouth, but he did not wash himself or clean his teeth. Marq deliberately neglected his body. He seldom shaved, washed infrequently. He almost never visited the spinning segment of
Glory
’s hull where gravity to order was simulated by centrifugal force and the Starmen could exercise with weights and springs. Han Soo had once told Marq that his physical neglect was deliberate, a self-inflicted punishment. Jean Marq accepted that judgment. Since there was really no God, it fell to each man to pass sentence on himself for his sins.
He was vaguely hungry, but as always, the thought of suckling on the feeding tube nauseated him. From time to time young Damon, who fancied himself a great chef, would open the vast galley--designed to feed thousands-- and create a sumptuous meal, a feast for monarchs. But the daily business of nourishing the crew was handled by
Glory
herself, who did not much care whether or not the food was elegant, only nourishing. Jean Marq, once a gourmet, likened eating ship’s fare to the consumption of offal. With the need to recycle everything on long-duration voyages, the simile was not pure hyperbole.
Marq turned from the terminal and caught a glimpse of his doll in her half-open drawer. “She” was a quasi-living, speaking paracoita (a name given such devices by an ancient writer named Wolfe, who speculated vastly about Earth’s future), an almost ludicrously buxom product of the sex laboratories of Yoni Island, on Nightwing in the Ross Stars. Driven beyond endurance by abstinence early in his first voyage, Jean had purchased the grotesque artifact. She was a low-level android designed to perform coitus on demand. “Better than Lefty’s sister,” the vulgarians of Yoni had said of their product. But Marq, shamed by what he had done, never used her. She rested in her transparent case, a plastic sepulcher decorated with erect phalluses and gaping labia.