Glory (41 page)

“Then come with me.” Anya spun once again and took a different plenum leading toward the dorsal. Eliana followed in silence.

Presently they reached a high, arching chamber whose entire ceiling was transparent. Beyond the skylight rose the masts and the spidery wonder of the monofilament rig. St. Elmo’s fire raced along stays and halyards. The pale light of Luyten gleamed on furled skylar sails. Here and there in the rig, kilometers away from the ship, the tiny lights showed where ship’s monkeys were at work. High overhead, almost against the transparency, Eliana could see the spread-eagle shape of a naked man outlined by the sun’s glare.

“He comes here to take the sun on his wound, and to look at his beloved stars,” Amaya said softly. She cast herself loose from the wall and held Eliana at arm’s length. “He comes here to avoid meeting you, mynheera, and compromising your Boer sense of morality.” Eliana could see that there was no hint of a smile on the New Earther girl’s pretty face now.

“But we know better, you and I,” Amaya said. “We know what must be done, don’t we?”

“Yes,” Eliana said sibilantly.

Amaya’s fingers found the ties that held Eliana’s Voertrekker’s gown in place. She loosed them. In the micro-gravity, Eliana’s disrobing had the quality of a pavane. Anya untied the Boer knots, opened the gown and let it fall away.

As Eliana felt the unfamiliarly cool air on her nakedness, she thought that the ease with which she was made naked was, after all, a part of the Voertrekker ethos. She watched as Anya Amaya bent and removed her Voertrekker sandals. She felt her nudity like a pressure in her loins. Amaya slipped off the polished wooden ring that held her hair. A black mane framed her pale face. Eliana hung in space, back arched, legs spread, eyes half-closed, lips apart.

Amaya put her arms about Eliana and pressed her breasts against her own. She whispered, “Perhaps one day--but not now, mynheera.” She pushed gently and Eliana rose through the bright darkness toward Duncan.

He had heard them, turned, seen the last of it. He spread his arms and enfolded Eliana.

Eiiana Ehrengraf felt his naked body against hers. She felt him enter her with consummate skill and tenderness.
In all my dreams of love
, she thought, as his mouth found hers and her legs wrapped around his waist,
it was never, never like this
.

The Kraalheer of Windhoek looked about the ancient panelled Kongresshalle room so redolent of generations of heavy rhetoric. He studied the faces of his peers with a mixture of surprise and pride. Ulf Walvis, a man in his declining years with an undistinguished history, a balding pate and a sagging belly, had become a hero. His colleagues on the Committee of Investigation and Inquiry of the Deliberative Assembly had just elected him by voice vote to the chairmanship of a new committee--The Friends of Elmi.

No one on Planet Voerster could have been more surprised to find himself leading a movement than the Kraalheer of Windhoek. He had been publicly humiliated by The Voerster on the airship ground of Voertrekkerhoem--with the members of the Committee of Investigation and Inquiry watching from the manor house. That should have ended his career in politics.

It did not.

After Voerster had departed with his punitive expedition to Einsamberg, the jailers of the Wache released Walvis from the cells, and the committee returned in sullen silence to the capital. For most of his seventy-odd years, Ulf Walvis had been thought rather a fool. But now he was the right man at exactly the right moment in the history of Planet Voerster.

Women enjoyed few rights on Voerster, and the Kraalheer of Windhoek was an unlikely feminist champion. But when the woman being wronged was sole heiress to a prime First Lander’s holding, a shudder ran through the Kraalheerenschaft. And when the Voertrekker-Praesident struck Walvis before witnesses, he created a necrogene within the body politic.

Wags among the Voersterstaad
lumpen
who loitered near the Kongresshalle murmured that the legislator’s courage grew in direct proportion to Ian Voerster’s distance from Voersterstaad. There was truth in this. But Ulf Walvis did what came naturally to the old Boer nobility. As the original South Africans on Earth had often done in times of trouble, Ulf turned to Voertrekker legend.

The legend was the symbolic mother figure of Voerster.

Elmi Voerster Ehrengraf was the mythic wife who took her dead husband’s place as one of the first Voertrekker-Praesidents, and who lived as a man for what was reputed to have been a hundred-odd years. Opinions about Elmi’s tenure varied. But the time was right, the advocate was right, and the symbol was exactly right for a troubled world.

The Kraalheer of Windhoek, savoring his Claudian emergence as a political force, regarded the potential new members of the Friends of Elmi, and welcomed each with relish. He had not realized until now how much he hated Ian Voerster--
had
hated him ever since, as The Voerster, he first stepped up to the Machtstuhl.

The caucus room was crowded, the air heavy with the smell of portly men in heavy clothing. Ulf finished his welcoming remarks, to the newcomers from Durban, Milagro, Capetown, Port Elizabeth, and Pretoria.

The full attendance testified to the fact that Ian Voerster had made a critical error. It was all very well to play tyrant and oppress the
lumpen
and kaffirs, but when one threatened the privileges of one’s own aristocracy, one sowed dragon’s teeth. The Voertrekker-Praesident, a man of impeccable bloodlines, had become a danger to every landholder in the Grassersee. Rather than scattering to their kraals as they always had when confronted with unpleasantness, the Kraalheeren who had been at Voertrekkerhoem, or who had heard of Ian Voerster’s activities, congregated at Voersterstaad.

The populace, both mynheeren and
lumpen
, was becoming aware that Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster was (by what magic or connivance no one was certain) now aboard the orbiting Goldenwing that could be seen several times each night by every living soul on Planet Voerster. They knew also that Ian Voerster had rashly taken a Wired Starman hostage. Why he had done so dangerous a thing was only conjecture, but the consensus seemed to be that he was trying to force the Starmen aboard the
Gloria Coelis
to return both the Ehrengraf and the Voertrekkersdatter so that he could give one or both to the despised savages of the Planetia. This was a matter of concern to everyone on Planet Voerster.

At the meeting in the Kongresshalle, Ulf Walvis and his coconspirators were delighted to see some fair-weather friends. Among the newcomers in the first rank of furred and brocaded legislators stood Rector Abelard of Pretoria University--the alma mater of all present--and Kraalheer Guderian of Milagro, the sacred land on which the Goldenwing
Milagro
deposited the First Landers, a holy place to every Voertrekker. Both Abelard and Guderian had an unfailing instinct for avoiding schemes with a potential for failure. Their presence in the caucus room was an omen of success.

Outside the Kongresshalle, the kaffirs, aware as always, watched and waited. The legend of Elmi appealed to them because it was the foundation of the Cult of Elmi, which taught equality for kaffirs. To the lowland
lumpen
Ian Voerster’s promised infusion of Planetian freaks into an already bigoted society meant a great deal, and none of it good. The townships were restless, having heard that Black Clavius, too, was aboard the orbiting Goldenwing and might soon be gone. The kaffirs had grown accustomed to the Starman’s presence on Voerster. His privileges among the Voertrekkers had earned the kaffirs much cheek. His departure was being regarded as a loss for the kaffirs of Planet Voerster.

Ulf felt weighed down by his heavy legislative robes, but he had made himself into an imposing figure because he knew how his peers valued appearances. A month ago not one would have come to hear him speak. Now they stood to listen.

Ion Voerster, he thought, it is remarkable what a blow on the mouth can do for a politician.

The Kraalheer of Windhoek drew a deep breath and began to speak treason.

Broni Ehrengraf Voerster, revelling in an unexpected freedom, swam in the cool sunlight entering
Glory
’s dorsal. She could feel Luyten’s radiation on her naked skin. It felt best along the thin line of scar tissue between her adolescent breasts. She twisted to look down at Dietr Krieg, the Starman Healer, who seemed to recline on shadows in what he told her was “the spaceman’s slouch,” a position that the syndics could maintain for hours without effort. She waved to him and he waved back.

Through the transparency overhead she could see Duncan and her mother playing like children outside in the rigging. They wore skinsuits and light bubbles of glass on their heads. Duncan was instructing Eliana on the use of the small reaction device in his hands. Each time Eliana tried it, she was sent spinning through the rig, scattering the monkeys who were at work patching a skylar sail. In the earpiece she wore, Broni could hear her mother’s laughter.

There was something else, something that aroused loving pity in the younger woman. Each new experience, each unfamiliar sight, evoked wonder. She heard Eliana say:
“Oh, Duncan--isn’t that Port Elizabeth Sound?”

The narrow limb of the silver Luyten Sea rolled over the horizon, sparkling with wind-patterns and dappled with clouds. As each moment brought a new vista into view,

Eliana responded to it with warm and unrestrained delight. The thin film of air and water, of life, which clothed the planet above sparkled in the light of its parent star. From moment to moment, Eliana would pause in what she was doing and exclaim her joy.

“The Sea of Lions sparkles like diamonds. “

“You sparkle, Eli.”

He calls her Eli
, Broni thought with a tolerance beyond her years.
Duncan makes up nicknames for her and she’s like a girl, loving it.
The Voertrekkersdatter let herself rise to the transparency and signalled to the pair in the rig. Her mother mimed a kiss. Below her Damon Ng and Buele appeared, g-string naked--probably as a concession to Broni’s sensibilities. Silly, perhaps. But how quickly one became accustomed to Starmen’s ways. And how absolutely aghast her father would be, she thought with a giggle. So far Black Clavius and Cousin Osbertus had not succumbed to the pervasive nudity, but Clavius had spent ten years among the kaffirs, who did not approve of nakedness before whites. And she could not imagine Osbertus Kloster shedding either his clothes or his academic dignity. Though it amused her to think of the old cousin delivering a learned paper to the dons of Pretoria University wearing only his Master of Sciences bonnet.

She pushed off from the transparency, spinning and twisting in a weightless dance. The scar on her chest pulled slightly, but Dietr had warned that it would, and that it would probably itch until it was completely healed.

It filled Broni with wonder that the Healer had actually opened her chest like a Landers’ Day package and done unimaginable things to her heart and lungs. A prosthesis powered by a microdot of nuclear fuel now beat in her breast, aiding the heart whose progressive failure had so nearly killed her.

Dietr signalled for her to come down to him. She took a last look at her mother and Duncan dodging through the wires and halyards like truants, before she jackknifed like a platform diver and pushed off again, moving easily down through the compartment. She passed Damon and Buele on the way. The astronomer’s apprentice shouted a greeting, and for him she had a smile. But seeing Damon so nearly naked
did
affect her and she looked away, and then back again, behind her fingers. She could feel what Damon was thinking. His interest in Broni grew stronger each day aboard
Glory
. She would have to speak with her mother and ask about that. Or if not the mynheera (it was increasingly hard to think of Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster as wise and venerable), then Anya Amaya. She would do that, yes, when next she and Anya met for the cosmology instructions she had been taking from the New Earther.

When she reached the Healer he handed her a medical gown. He let a smile touch his thin lips. “To keep you warm, Broni Voerster, not to cover you. I am a Healer and a syndic,” he said.

And a man, Broni thought. It was very interesting, the way she now affected the males aboard
Glory
. If Eliana had not been so preoccupied with Duncan, would she be displeased? It was an interesting question. A Voertrekker girl was raised to be silent, to remain in the background, to deny her sex. Until that moment when she was given, body and chattels, to a man whom she probably had never seen before, and who had the right in law to loose the cords of her gown and demand both virginity and sexual fulfillment.
All things considered
, Broni thought,
we do well enough, we Voertrekker women
. But the task was a difficult one.

Dietr Krieg took her by the arm and led her out into the plenum.

“Are you going to be stern, Healer?” Broni spoke ingenuously, aware, and not minding at all, how poorly the hospital garment covered her.

“Don’t use your nubile tricks on me, mynheera. I am too old a dog to hunt children,” Dietr said sternly.

Broni smiled, far from offended.

The Healer led the way past a branching in the passageway and guided her along a fabric tube she had entered before. In time the way widened into a dark, open-roofed chamber similar to the one above. But this time the transparency in the overhead displayed not the brilliant face of Voerster, but the cold and distant stars. Somehow, during their passage, they had changed orientation, a thing that happened often aboard
Glory
. Motion aboard
Glory
was like venturing onto a Moebius strip. The lack of gravity was both a delight and a perplexity. Did the Starmen themselves ever really become accustomed to it? Broni wondered.

As they entered the large chamber, Broni became aware that Anya Amaya floated in the darkness. She was “shooting stars” with an ancient bubble octant. It was an optical device used long ago by navigators of the homeworld. Amaya said she liked to practice with it, never knowing when the skill might be needed.