Glory (28 page)

It troubled and angered The Voerster that certain pampered academics in Pretoria were now questioning the wisdom of accepting the long-awaited shipment of placental mammal embryos from Earth. Their argument was that the native necrogenes were perfectly attuned to the fragile ecology of Voerster, based generally on a one-for-one replacement of living animals. Mammals had shown a vast capacity to reproduce in the high-technology years before the Rebellion. Many of the native species had been forced into extinction by competition from the more biologically advanced Earth animals.

The Rebellion had shattered that pattern as it had many others. But now the question was being asked again.
I am no scientist
, Ian Voerster thought exasperatedly.
I know nothing of ecosystems and macrobiology. I only see a world sparsely populated by man and beasts. My predecessor thought it wise to restock the animals, and if he thought it so do I, and there’s an end to it.
This was not the moment to worry about either the long-term effects or the cost. There were other things on Ian Voerster’s plate. A disloyal wife, for one.

The weather had delayed the arrival of the Impala-class police dirigible. The special detachment of police The Voerster had ordered to prepare for a swift flight to Einsamberg stood to arms, waiting for the skies to clear. The skies did not. There were short intervals of sunshine and clear weather, but without the Impala, the troops were useless. And there was a stubborn radio silence from Einsamberg.

The intelligence wirelessed in to Voertrekkerhoem from Ian Voerster’s spies in Pretoria and Grimsel was disquieting. The one thing The Voerster had not prepared for was an act of violent stupidity by one of Vikter Fontein’s brutish sons. Yet the Voertrekker-Praesident was experienced enough in the statecraft of Planet Voerster to visualize what Eigen Fontein might be doing. When a professor of the Faculty of Law at Pretoria wirelessed in a long and academic dissertation on the Law of Tribe, The Voerster exploded in a fury and sent off an order that the old fool be de-tenured and banned. But the sense of the lecture was clear and Ian Voerster seethed.

And in their midst of bad news and bad weather, Ian Voerster was informed that the cargo shuttles from the orbiting Goldenwing had separated and were beginning their entry into the atmosphere.

Another delay was inevitable. The Voertrekker-Praesident dared not be absent when the spacemen descended with
Gloria Coelis
’ valuable cargo. His quarrel with Eliana and the recovery of the Voertrekkersdatter would have to wait

Secretly, The Voerster was not only angry, he was sick with worry. It had been a mistake to tell The Fontein that Einsamberg would be his. Ian had no legal right to make such a promise and he knew it. But he had counted on Fontein’s greed. Vikter’s acquisitiveness was legendary even among Voertrekkers. Ian, sitting at his antique desk under the wall-mounted assegai and shield, clawed at his white-blond beard in anger. He was a man who despised the haphazard. Yet the years of planning seemed suddenly to be completely at the mercy of senseless variables: the weather, the arrival of the Goldenwing, the capriciousness of a strong woman’s will.
I was not born to be The Voerster
, he thought angrily.
Why did it fall to me!

Polizeioberst Transkei appeared at the open door to the Praesident’s office. The Oberst was apprehensive. His last meeting with Ian Voerster had not been one he cared to remember.

“What is it?” Ian Voerster demanded sharply.

‘The first of the shuttles is in sight, Mynheer.” As if to underscore his words a sonic boom cracked across the rainswept grassland surrounding the old manor house. It rattled the glass in the high windows and seemed to shake the very stones of which the house was built.

“Any radio messages from the pilot? What rank?” It was a given on Planet Voerster that whether one’s visitor came from the next kraal or from the stars, protocol had to be followed.

“Only an identification signal, Mynheer. The Starman piloting the shuttle train is called Jean Marq. He is alone. They always identify themselves as Starmen without regard for titles. It is their way, Mynheer.”

Ian Voerster was well aware of all this. The ceremonials for the visit of a Goldenwing were imbedded in all colonial cultures. Man was dispersed now among all the habitable worlds of the stars within a half dozen light-years from Sol, and everywhere a port call by a Goldenwing was a rare event.

“Is there space enough for the cargo shuttles?”

“Starman Marq sees no difficulty, Mynheer. At least I believe that is what he is telling us. His Afrikaans is very bad.”

“How good is your Space English, Transkei?” Voersler asked irritably. “Turn out an honor guard for this Marq person. Do the shuttles carry weapons?”

“I do not know, Mynheer Voertrekker-Praesident.”

I am surrounded by fools
, The Voerster thought. “Have a company of the Wache on the landing ground. Armed. There is no point in being careless.” Deep in his Voertrekker Afrikaans psyche was a strong distrust of foreigners.

The ancient histories told how the original Voertrekkers, the Boers of Earth, had been bullied and compelled by out-landers to dismantle their segregated society. Ian Voerster knew the stories very well. One of the most hated Voertrekker words--
shashon
--meant “to force and degrade.” It derived from the Anglic word
sanctions
.

Ian Voerster rose from his chair and smoothed his black civilian tunic. He wore uniform when he must, but he was, he told himself, a civilian at heart. No one could ever say that the government of Voerster, unchanged for a thousand years, was a military dictatorship. “See to the guard, Oberst.”

“At once, Mynheer.” Transkei hurried on his way. Ian Voerster went to the door and surveyed the outer office. The clerks and male secretaries stopped work and awaited his commands. “Benno,” he said to his military aide, “come with me.”

The young Wache officer left his desk and stood at attention.
Everyone is playing at soldier
, Ian thought irritably.
God knows I need soldiers, but I have none. Not real ones. These are rural constables, no more than that
. Even the
ci-devant
mynheeren who came from Voerster’s “best families” were, in truth, country yokels with a countryman’s prejudices and bumpkin mentality. The vaunted university at Pretoria was really little more than a duelling and finishing school. Leutnant Benno was a good lad, but slow to grasp anything new or unusual.

Damn her
, Ian thought.
Damn my dutiful, stiff-backed wife Eliana Ehrengraf. When I need her most where is she? Hiding at Einsamberg with my valuable daughter, and both of them intent on defying me.

He spoke to the room. “You all heard the noise from the sky. It means that a Goldenwing’s shuttle craft will be landing soon here at Voertrekkerhoem. It is an occasion you will all wish to witness. So for the time being you are all dismissed to the battlements, where you can see the proceedings.” A nervous murmur of appreciation, still laced with apprehension, ran through the room. “Come with me, Benno. We still have work to do,” Ian said.

Aboard the master-shuttle, Jean Marq was Wired into the shuttle-train’s computer and the Local Area Network that bound the auxiliary craft to his shuttle and the lot to
Glory
’s mainframe. He was handling the varying required changes in delta-V with experienced skill. Back on
Glory
, Damon lay in his pod, Wired, monitoring the descent.

Jean Marq could see the planet below only as a virtual-reality display. Wireframe representations of reality suited Jean in his present state of mind. Virtual reality was without sexuality, without enticement. All reality would be better so, thought Jean Marq.

Still, the temptation to see the world as it really was enormous. Perversely, Jean removed his helmet and activated a video imager.

Voerster resembled Earth. Jean had not been quite prepared for that. It was slightly smaller and more pelagic, but the chemical content of the atmosphere resulted in similar sky colors, the seas were salty and shading from deep cobait blue to muddy green, and the continent was somewhat Earth-like. The coast of the Sea of Lions, a region kept reasonably warm by its position on the equator, reminded Jean of the Mediterranean coast of France. There were low, rocky hills behind the seacoast Like the hills of Provence, he thought with a sudden shiver.

“What’s wrong?”
Damon asked through the drogue.

“Nothing is wrong, little man. Do not be so nervous. I am flying these landers, not you.”

Damon subsided. The boy was edgy because Duncan and Anya were not aboard
Glory
, Jean thought. They had dropped away to make their own reentry in one of the personnel sleds. Duncan was always the altruist, Jean thought tolerantly. A colonist had only to weep for help, and voila! there was the Master and Commander of the
Glory
.

The seas of Planet Voerster were, in actual fact, all parts of the same, globe-spanning ocean. The old charts showed a Sea of Storms between the North Tropic of Luyten and the Arctic circle. But the Sea of, Storms became, as a circumnavigation in those high latitudes was completed, the Luyten Sea. One washed the northwest coast of the continent, the other the northeast coast. The southern sound of the Sea of Storms had been named--with considerable vainglory, Jean Marq decided--the Voerster Sea. But south of the equator, the entire planet was girdled by the Great Southern Ocean, pinched into a raging strait in one place by a nasty-looking, barren blade of land called the Sabercut Peninsula. The tip of the saber almost touched a projection of the antarctic ice cap that reached north almost to the--more Voertrekker vainglory--South Tropic of Voerster.

The old tyrant who led the migration from Earth to this half-finished world under Luyten 726 had left his name on the planet, the seas, the tropics, and the single continent. That, Jean thought sardonically, was vainglory in any reality.

But it was the Sea of Lions that attracted Jean Marq. It was narrow and several thousand kilometers long. If he allowed himself to slip into fantasy, he thought with a lump in his throat, that sea could almost
be
the Mediterranean. Tideless because Voerster had no satellites.

How strange that must be, thought Jean. Almost every world he had visited in the course of his uptime years had at least one satellite, often many. But the night sky of Voerster would display no such near neighbors. Only the stars and, of course, the six gas giants of the system’s outer marches.

Still there was something about the land and sea below that evoked nostalgia. Like most men of his Gallic race, Jean was bound to his homeland by emotional ties of great strength and duration. Even after all his years in space, the appeal of a rocky coastline and a turquoise sea under a white sun was very strong. Would Duncan object to a long stay on Voerster? It was hard to say. Duncan kept his own counsel.

Along with the wave of nostalgia that shook him came other, darker memories.
A seminude girl lying oddly in the hot sun, blood on her head, half-open eyes glazing reproachfully in the noonday light..
.What was it that he found so easy to remember and yet so difficult to
grasp
?

Dietr Krieg had only recently asked odd questions about the dead dream-girl in the vineyard, and about Anya Amaya and how it was that she had almost been killed while working in the rigging a dozen kilometers from
Glory
.

Each time Jean’s mind seemed prepared to plunge into the black hole yawning for him, something caused him to withhold understanding in a fluttery panic.

Others panicked, he thought defensively. Young Damon. He had come from Grissom even more raw and useless than the average Starman came to his syndicate. Jean had warned Duncan that the youngster would be a burden. Fear of heights clung like the stench of
merde
to him. And yet-- And yet--the boy was actually losing some of his terror. There were even times when Damon Ng reminded Jean Marq of himself.

So Duncan had been right Again. He had said the boy would learn and become useful and it was happening just as he said it would. What a remarkable man was Duncan, Jean Marq thought. No one could command the
Glory
as well as the quiet fisherman from Thalassa. The ship and the crew all responded to him.
All
, Jean Marq thought.
Even I
.

The first shuttle in the train, the leader of the line of cargo panniers, was touching the outer fringes of the atmosphere. Odd flares of light and glowing plasmas streamed from the V-shaped nose cone. Ablative materials had long ago been abandoned. By the time
Glory
’s auxiliary spacecraft were built, the metal ceramic bond needed for repeated reentries was old science.

But the curling, streaming glow of heat and fire still made a spectacular show. Jean Marq wondered if any of the primitives on the world below were watching as
Glory
sent her children into the sea of air below her. They were missing a marvelous show if they were not.

Through the thin image of the curtain of fire Marq could still see the coastline of the Sea of Lions. It really was like Provence, there was no other way to describe it. A land that cried out for vineyards, though the climate would call for very hardy grapes. With a half-smile Jean wondered if the Voertrekkers had discovered oenology.
Glory
pampered her syndicate, but the wine cellar aboard was sorely lacking in both quality and quantity. Jean Marq had, for a moment, the flashing impression that he was not thinking with his customary seriousness. The idea rather pleased him.

Dietr the Boche had been feeding him something in his Dust, Jean was certain of it. Despite all his advanced medical degrees and training, the man was a hog-butcher. Why else would one of the Boche’s discernment leave the home-world for a life of wandering among the near stars? It made no sense. And what made even less sense was that he, Jean Marq, once of the faculty of the Sorbonne, was doing precisely the same thing and, at the moment, deriving a kind of light-minded pleasure from it.