Glory (42 page)

Dietr said, “Come down, Sailing Master.”

Anya, dressed in half a skinsuit (she had startled Broni by explaining that she dressed that way when her menses were flowing because tampons were in short supply aboard the
Glory
), dropped easily to the fabric deck. She spoke to Dietr. “Now, you think?”

“Yes. It had better be now. We won’t get Jean Marq back.”

“I should say that’s a loss, but I can’t,” Amaya said.

Dietr turned to Broni. “Look up. What do you see?”

“The stars, Healer.” The simple statement left unsaid the wonder of it. The deep, deep black of infinite space, the gem-points of light that lay forever beyond the reach of mankind, and the thousands of worlds which did not--worlds reachable by ships like this one, and by people like these. The girl felt a pang of the most poignant longing. Mira appeared from nowhere, accompanied by one of her kittens. She landed .softly on Broni’s shoulder and trilled a feline greeting in her ear.

Broni instinctively caught the kitten and allowed it to nestle between her budding breasts.

Dietr said soberly, “There is a thing I must tell you, mynheera, I considered speaking with your mother first, but decided against it. It will affect you most directly and you have a right to control your own destiny.”

The idea of a woman--most particularly a young woman--controlling her own destiny was remarkable to Broni Ehrengraf Voerster.

“You are very solemn. Healer.”

At this moment Broni heard the sound of Black Clavius’ balichord playing somewhere not too far off. The black Starman had not made music since coming aboard the Goldenwing, seemingly content to feast himself on the sights and sounds he had imagined he would never see again.

“I mean to be solemn,” Dietr said.

“You are frightening her, Dietr,” Anya said protectively.

“She’s a natural empath. She already all but knows.”

“What do I know, Healer?” Broni asked.

‘That you came to me too late, Broni. That the procedure was not completely successful.”

Broni felt a cold chill. She held the kitten’s warmth against her skin.

“Am I going to die, Healer?” she whispered.

Anya ran fingers through Broni’s golden hair. “Dietr, for heaven’s sake...”

“You will die in due time, Broni, as we all will,” Dietr Krieg said. “But if you return to the planet, your time will be almost at once. You cannot live in a gravity well.”

“I don’t understand, Healer.”

“It is simple. If you return to Voerster, the prosthesis I implanted will not keep you alive. The mass of your body--as little as it is--will kill you. If you remain in microgravity, you will live a normal human life span. I am sorry. I was overconfident, perhaps. But I did give you my best skill. Now you--and your mother--must decide.”

Broni said slowly, “Are you saying I can remain aboard
Glory
?”

“The final decision will have to be Duncan’s, of course. He is Master and Commander. But even if you were not so valuable an addition to the syndicate, he would never send you back unless you chose to go.”

“I could be like you?” She looked from Dietr to Anya and back again. Her hand went to her head.

“Yes,” Dietr said. “That, of course.”

“Mother does not know?”

“No. We chose to tell you first. Actually, Anya did. It was a feminist decision. Though God knows the mynheera is feminine enough, even for Anya.”

“She has the right to decide for herself,” Amaya said fiercely.

“Of course she has. I don’t deny it,” Dietr murmured,

Broni looked up at the stars.
To see them close by. To move between them on golden pinions like some glorious bird. How marvelous. How sad for those I must leave ...

Dietr looked at Anya Amaya and produced a wry smile. The girl’s empathic qualities were remarkable. He could almost read her thoughts. What bloodlines there must be on Planet Voerster, he thought. If the Age of Sail were not ending, syndicates would make Voerster a regular port of call, and human nature being what it was, they would loot the planet of its best and brightest. But none of that would happen. The time of the Goldenwings was almost past, and
Glory
would be the last Goldenwing for Voerster.

“What do you feel, Broni?” Anya asked. “Would you join us aboard
Glory
?”

Us
, thought the girl.
“Oh, Anya. “

Dietr said, “Understand that you won’t live forever, Broni. We don’t, you know. We live a normal span of human years. But we sail on the tachyon winds at almost the speed of light. So the years pass at a different rate for us and for downworlders. There will be no return to Voerster, Broni.”

“What will happen to your colleague, Healer?”

“We will never get him back unless your father releases him without conditions. Long ago it was decided that hostages must be expendable among syndics. Anything else would create an impossible situation. You will learn all of these things, Broni.”

“And more. Much more,” said Amaya.

“Can you choose, Broni?” Dietr Krieg asked.

“I want life,” Broni said, with the selfishness of youth, but with her eyes filling. “I want the beautiful stars no matter what, or who, I must leave.”

Dietr produced another of his rare smiles. ”I’m not surprised.”

Broni looked hard at the neurocybersurgeon. “There is something else, isn’t there?”

Dietr glanced at Anya. “Yes. But I needed to speak with you first. I didn’t want you influenced.” He looked up at the distant starlight. “This port call will go into GIory’s log as miraculous. I must ask Duncan, but there’s no doubt what he will say. We are at war with Voerster. It was your father’s choice, not ours. So we will ask the mynheera and Buele to join the syndicate as well. Let’s see now what your mother and the astronomer’s boy have to say when we offer them a new life.”

Since the Great Rebellion it had become fashionable on Planet Voerster to say that a taste for civil war was an old affliction to which both Voertrekkers and kaffirs were susceptible. In the great halls of the kraal manor houses, in the lecture rooms of Pretoria University, and in the caucus chambers of the Kongresshalle, an awareness of history was always a presence. Despite the bloodiness of the past, Voertrekkers had learned to live with their “old affliction.” The specter of civil war haunted their dreams.

The chronicles ignored all home-fought battles save the one great confrontation with the kaffirs. But the Oral Histories which were both a Voertrekker and a kaffir tradition urged remembrance of the people’s past, both on Voerster and on Earth.

The emergence, during the Voertrekker-Praesident’s absence from Voersterstaad, of the Friends of Elmi was only a repetition of similar events, large and small, that had taken place a dozen times since the Goldenwing
Milagro
deposited the First Landers in the Sea of Grass. The Voertrekkers had fought the planet, the kaffirs, and each other for more than thirteen hundred planetary years. Colonists and their descendants who did not succumb to the harshness of the climate and the exigencies of a life of subsistence farming, were savagely culled, generation after generation, by the old affliction. Like his ancestors for a thousand years, Ian Voerster had held these forces at bay since ascending the Machtstuhl.

Now a familiar sense of impending strife had turned the air around Voersterstaad electric. The radio waves crackled with coded messages flying among the Kraalheeren. The Friends of Elmi movement swiftly outgrew the Cult status. The numbers swelled until they encompassed the fifty most aristocratic families on Planet Voerster. In one day, the word spread from the Kongresshalle that Ian Voerster was vulnerable. In two, the landholders of the western Grassersee were rising in arms. In three, commandos were aboard airships dispatched to the capital.

And on the fifth day the plotters began to quarrel among themselves.

A history of failed coups had taught the great families of Voerster that rebellion could succeed only if it were swift and certain. But this time there were different elements in play: a Goldenwing in the sky and a mood of change among the people.

What came to be called the Elmi Rebellion was swift enough. The country commandos flooded Voersterstaad and confined the Wache garrison. Some advanced thinkers among the lesser mynheeren class actually offered the
cholos
of the Wache the franchise in return for their neutrality. Few accepted, but the fact that the offer was made in so race-conscious a society was a measure of how swiftly events were now moving.

What the rebellion demanded was
direction
. The aging and corpulent Kraalheer of Windhoek was a highly suitable symbol of ancient privileges in danger; but what was needed now, and quickly, was a leader. Old Daric Koepje, a retired proctor of Pretoria University, and a man given to political epigrams, put it best to the Friends: “We have gathered the power to destroy Ian Voerster and his work of many years. What we must have now is someone who can prevent us.”

The self-seeking nature of the coalition, and the genuine need to act before Ian Voerster’s infatuation with Einsamberg and the Planetians faded, put hitherto unknown strains on Voertrekker tradition. And with a single, desperate radio call to Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster aboard the orbiting Goldenwing, the brick fortress of Boer-Afrikaans mores began to crumble.

A man so put upon as I
, thought Jean Marq,
should understand all about fugue
. Over the years, Jean had grown accustomed to psychiatric terms. He even took pleasure in them. The Boche had enriched his vocabulary. But Dietr Krieg had failed in his true duty as syndicate physician. For Jean Marq, simply understanding the fugue syndrome was not enough. Dietr should have disclosed to Jean what it was that the mind was seeking when it took flight. It would have saved him from humiliation, as in the case of the disgusting paracoita doll. But Dietr had not. Like the worldly priests of Jean’s youth, the Boche took refuge in academic cant, so that over time Jean Marq’s view of psychiatry became as muddled as the grudging religion that had been a part of his early days.

The Marq family, true to the anticlerical pretensions of French intellectuals, had cautioned young Jean that there was no God, that there never had been a God, that there would never be one. On Earth (centuries after the death of the sainted Karl), Marxism was still a harlot cult among the intelligentsia. Being Marxists, Eduard and Denise Marq were, of course, atheists. Being French, they chose to dither.

If, after all, there
was
a God, He was, as Balzac declared, “incomprehensible.” It wasn’t the Marqs’ responsibility to guard their son’s morals if God, who claimed perfection, failed to make Himself clear.

This sort of ethical ambiguity had not served Jean Marq well in his times of need. Neither had Dietr Krieg’s dissuasive excursions into psychoanalysis. Time and uncertainty gnawed like animals at Jean Marq’s limited reserve of sanity.

Jean’s confinement at Einsamberg Kraal had grown onerous. The physical limitations of a shipboard environment natural aboard a Goldenwing were not the same as this claustrophobic detention between stone walls. The presence of the Planetians added to Jean’s stress. He had always been a latent bigot, and the physical differences between the Highlanders and the rest of mankind--the great chests, the odd hands, the girth, the sucking way they breathed in the thick air of the lowlands--caused Jean Marq to fear and despise them. Racial diversity held no attractions for Jean Marq.

He watched the activity in the courtyard with rising apprehension. Until now, he fancied he had carried himself well, as a Wired Starman should. But this satisfaction grew less palatable with each gray, wet day in the lee of the Shieldwall. The political authorities on this planet were knaves and fools. How they had managed to survive since First Landers’ Day (a holiday, by whatever name, on every colonial world) was a puzzle to Marq. Ian Voerster was a blustering tyrant, exactly like the old-time Afrikaners Jean’s instructors at the Sorbonne had described with such contempt.

Marq stood on the inner wall in the misting rain, watching the happenings in the courtyard two dozen meters below. The construction of the gallows had been slow and overly dramatic. It was a stone arch, and it had taken days of hammering, fitting, and mortaring.

Now, in the grim forenoon, both lowland and highland troops were forming into a square of ranks around the ugly thing. It seemed the gallows would soon be used. Jean Marq’s troubled thoughts raced.

There is something I did, long ago, for which execution is a suitable punishment.

He did not try to recall the act. The last thing he wanted was to remember. The gibbet was surrounded and ostentatiously tested by repeatedly dropping a heavy sack of sand off the narrow stone step six meters above the cobblestones. It was a sickening business. Jean Marq tasted bile in his throat. Death had a stink to it, fetid and bloody. There was a sweetness in his nostrils that suggested human rot.

Jean looked up into the dark sky as though he had been startled by the beat of wings. But the misty air was empty of life. There were no real birds on this benighted world. The wind, curling down the Shieldwall from the high plains above, was frigid. Elsewhere there might be sunlight and clear air, but not here, huddled against the Grimsels.

He thought:
Death must be cold, yet I remember it hot and bright and terrible.

He looked again at the preparations in the courtyard. The stone walls, the cobbled pave, the very air of the execution yard suggested another place, in another town.

In France, in Jean’s time, leniency for criminals was temporarily out of fashion, and death came to malefactors by hanging. In one rather lurid case of the murder of a farm girl, the hanging was to be done in the town square of Aix-en-Provence. It promised to be an execution worthy of the ghostly Albigensian heretics who had once died there in their hundreds.

Jean Marq recognized the terrible scene. It was exactly as he had imagined it to be for all those horrid nights in prison in Montpellier before his father contrived his release.