Glory (10 page)

Broni’s pulse was light and slow. Roark could see the depression of the flesh above her larynx as she labored to draw breath. He produced his stethoscopic tube and listened to the faint, uneven beating of her heart.
God curse our ignorance
, he thought. He had heard that particular sound only once before, coming through the tube from a heart of a very old man.

Her problem lay there, but The Voertrekker would not have it. The daughter of Ian Voerster could not be incapable of marriage and childbearing.

Carved into the insanely expensive wooden planks of the headboard of Broni’s bed was a quotation from the Earth Bible:

WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?

The line was heavily embellished with the sculptured figures of imps and demons and necrogenes and remembered mythic animals of Old Earth. How like the Voersters to have a sick child sleep under that grimly decorated admonition every night. For that matter, how like them to take what was clearly a celebration of Man and his relationship to God and turn it into a warning of dire mortality.

Roark was not a religious man, but Earth Bible reading was a part of the curriculum at the Healer’s Faculty, and the physician had developed an affection for the verses of the Psalmist.

“Do those words trouble you, Tiegen? They trouble me.” Eliana stood behind him. She had come in soundlessly. As he turned he could smell the faint flower scent in her glossy black hair.

Roark bowed as protocol demanded. “Mynheera,” he said.

Eliana was dressed, as always, in dark colors. A deep maroon dress of velvet, and a surcoat of heavy quilted fabric, unadorned but for a black-and-silver sash and a wooden pin to match the wooden comb in her hair. Her complexion was pale. She never darkened. And her black brows arched like the wings of a bird over luminous brown eyes. If ever there was a denial of the Voertrekker genotype, the mynheera Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster was it.

She was not tall, but her slenderness made her seem so. Her gown reached to her ankles in the modest fashion approved for married Voertrekker women, and she wore black leather-thonged sandals on her long, graceful feet.

On the bed Broni opened her eyes and smiled at her mother. Eliana took her hand and held it. “Did you sleep, child?” she asked.

“Very well, mynheera,” Broni said. Her smile, despite all, was brilliant, sunny. “Marvelous dreams. About the Goldenwing coming.”

“We will have to have you up and around by the time it arrives,” Eliana said.

Never, Tiegen Roark thought, without enormous luck and the help of an unfeeling God. The Goldenwing that was the topic of everyone’s conversation these days would not arrive for more than a month, almost two. Who on this benighted world, the physician wondered, knew enough medicine to keep this beautiful child alive that long?

Eliana Voerster appeared to have sensed his doubt. She released Broni’s hand and covered it with the counterpane. “I must speak with Healer Roark, Broni,” she said.

“Secrets?”

“Small secrets, my love.”

With the physician following, Eliana crossed the room to stand in a prayer bay, surrounded on three sides by stained-glass windows. She turned and regarded Roark intently.

“I have sent for the Starman,” she said.

In spite of what he had heard about Eliana’s regard for the offworlder, it came as a jolt to hear it from her. “The kaffir?” he said.

“Are you shocked, Tiegen?”

“No, mynheera. No,” he lied. “It is only that--” He found the statement impossible to finish. He himself had occasionally encountered the black Starman, had heard him preach and sing. But he had never seen him heal. “Such things are for the
lumpen
and the kaffirs,” he said.

There was a flash of anger in Eliana’s dark eyes. “I expected better from you, Healer,” she said.

Roark flushed. All his life he had prided himself on his liberality, his freedom from prejudice. Yet the idea of Eliana turning to township jujus revolted him.

“He is from
Earth
” Eliana said.

“Yes, he probably has knowledge I lack. But he is not a physician. He is only an adventurer, a wanderer.”

“And a kaffir?”

“Since you say it. Yes, a kaffir,” Tiegen said defiantly.

“And can you cure Broni?”

I would discard my birthright, give my life, endanger my soul to say yes,
Tiegen Roark thought.
But I cannot.
He shook his head slowly.

Eliana’s hand rested for a moment on his sleeve, a touch as gentle as a falling leaf. “Forgive me, Tiegen. But Broni is my only child.”

“And most beloved, mynheera,” Roark said heavily. “I know, I know.”

“It is not tuberculosis,” Eliana said.

“No. It is not.”

“The Voertrekker-Praesident insists.”

“I am sorry. But the ills of the universe do not obey the commands of The Voerster of Voerster,” Roark said.

“He plans a marriage soon.”

“That is absurd, Eliana. It is impossible.” In fifteen years, Tiegen Roark had not called Eliana Ehrengraf by her given name. The breach of etiquette was enormous. But the statement had been so blunt, so harsh, that it took him a moment to recover himself enough to say, “Forgive me, mynheera. They taught me better than that at Healer’s.”

Eliana said, “In the hall, if you please?”

They left Broni’s great room and stood in the stone hallway decorated with the mounted heads of every sort of ancient necrogene in the Sea of Grass. Eliana said, “Believe me, Healer. The Voerster intends to marry Broni to a Highlander.”

“A
Highlander
? Who, mynheera?”

“I don’t know yet. There are at least three Planetian Kraalheeren that The Voerster needs to hold the highlands. Every one of them is a savage.”

Tiegen was shocked at the cold hatred in her voice. “That is out of the question, mynheera.”

“I agree,” Eliana said in a voice Tiegen had never heard her use. “I will never allow it.”

“The Voerster would not send her to live in the highlands.”

“There are the Hurtsiks. They hold three quarters of a million hectares above Blomfontein.” Eliana’s eyes seemed to have hardened to chips of brown obsidian. “Hurtsik has six sons. Not one of them yet married. There are others.”

“No, mynheera. It could not possibly be,” Roark protested.

“I wish that were so, Tiegen. But I know The Voerster. So do you. If not the Hurtsiks, then some other. Perhaps the Fonteins, who are even worse. Wild animals.”

Tiegen Roark drew a deep breath. Having been physician to the Voersters all these years had been a great windfall. He was now, by any normal standard, a rich man. He could even retire and devote himself to research on necrogene physiology, a subject that had fascinated him since Healer’s Faculty.
But, Lord God
, he thought
, how I shall miss seeing Eliana...

He suddenly realized that despite his denials, he had quickly accepted the future Eliana Ehrengraf described. Why else would his thoughts turn suddenly to retirement?

But viewed realistically, a highland marriage for Broni Ehrengraf Voerster was out of the question. She could not possibly survive on the Pianetia. The rest of it--that virginal girl a bride of some barbarian kraalmeister’s six-fingered son--was revolting.

“Well, Tiegen? I am waiting.”

“With respect, mynheera...” Tiegen felt a flash of fear. Eliana clearly expected him to say that he would prevent The Voerster doing anything so harsh as giving Broni over to a matrimonial rape in an environment that would tax even a healthy woman beyond endurance. Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster was asking for an ally. No, for a coconspirator. And on Voerster, the Voertrekker-Praesident had the power to condemn. By simple fiat, if he chose.

“Please, mynheera,” Roark said. “Be very careful what you say.”
What you say to me
, he thought.

“I intend to stop him,” she said. “My husband is not God.”

Tiegen Roark sucked in a shallow breath, “I cannot listen to you, mynheera.”

Eliana’s face showed the emotion she was feeling. “Are you so very much afraid, Tiegen?” she asked bitterly.

“Her illness will dissuade him, mynheera,” Roark said. “But if he persists--it is his right to choose the time and circumstances of the Voertrekkersdatter’s marriage. It is the law, mynheera.”

Eliana Voerster seemed to withdraw into some stratospheric, icy height. “I thank you for telling me that, Healer.”

“When the Voerster returns from the Convocation, perhaps we could suggest a stay at Einsamberg for the Voertrekkersdatter,” Roark said. “The mountain air--”

“Thank you,” Eliana Voerster said. “I will take it up with my husband.”

Tiegen Roark felt as though his heart had turned to stone. Eliana’s withdrawal was near to complete.

“I hope,” he said, with what dignity, he could muster, “that the black Starman is able to amuse mynheera Broni. I am told he is very clever.”

“Good morning to you, Healer,” Eliana said. “I will watch with my daughter now until morning.”

In the great bed, Broni lay half-sleeping. She could hear the murmuring voices of her mother and the Healer in the passageway. She could feel the emotions they were experiencing as a kind of milky star stream, rather like the currents of stars in the moonless skies of Voerster. She often used night images and star visions to explain to herself what it was she had seen and felt since she was a small child. Once her mother had told her that she, too, had experienced the same things when she was a very young girl at Ehrengraf Kraal at Einsamberg. But Eliana no longer had the gift. Broni could tell.

Before Tiegen and her mother had awakened her, Broni had been having such lovely dreams. Familiar dreams of warm summer skies and fields of flowers such as never were on Planet Voerster. The fact was, Broni thought, that God was showing her the place in heaven where she would breathe the scents of spring and run, as she had never been able to do, through fields of real grass ablaze with true wildflowers.

Her mother’s sharp, imperious anger with the Healer flashed through Broni and she shut her eyes tight and buried her face in the deep pillows, saddened by the conflict between the two outside her door. Didn’t they understand that everything was already decided? That before year’s end Broni Ehrengraf Voerster would be gone from this life?

I cannot do it
, thought Ian Voerster.
I simply cannot bring myself to do this thing.

He stared across the table at the Kraalheer of the Fontein Kraal--known to everyone as Winter Kraal, for the spirit of the place.
By the Lord God
, the Voertrekker-Praesident thought,
what would our mutual ancestors have thought of such a creature?
The dark gossip of early experiments by the ruthless biogeneticists among the First Landers always came to mind when one faced a Highlander at close range.

Vikter Fontein was but 152 centimeters tall. In the old English measure used by the First Landers, five feet and one inch. He massed 144 kilos, half again what a normal man might, and this bulk was strangely apportioned over his barrel-like frame. His waist and midriff were large, but made to seem small by the vast expansion of his chest and lungs. His skin, as much of it as could be seen under the mat of facial hair Planetians favored, was tinged with gray-blue. His eyes were hooded by the heavy epicanthic fold of the Highlander. An occasional Planetian displayed the rudiment of a nictitating membrane, another legacy of the genetic engineers who dominated the first three hundred years of medical science on Voerster. Vikter Fontein was not so favored, but it was said that his third wife (who had died like the others) had been.

The Planetians had been put on an evolutionary fast track. But even the most charitable observer would be tempted to say that they were now a biological dead end, Kraalheeren from the high plains now valued lowland women as the means of breeding themselves back into the biological mainstream of Voerster.

The Kraalheer sat with one hand spread before him on the table, displaying six long fingers. His chest expanded and contracted with a hollow, rushing sound in the high air pressure at sea level.

The total effect of these physical differences was daunting, Ian Voerster thought, and repulsive.

“I can deliver the Highlanders,” Fontein said in his deep, reverberating voice. “Or I can take them for my own. It is for you to decide, Voertrekker.”

“We have been one nation for thirteen hundred years,” Ian Voerster said, “Do not threaten me, Mynheer Fontein.*’ What he said was only conditionally true. The Rebellion had bifurcated the colony long ago, and the rift remained. But the people of the lowlands and the Planetians had always pretended they were one people. Without the kaffir enemy, Ian Voerster thought, matters could be quite different.

The Fontein leaned forward across the polished gray-stone table. As he did, Voerster was struck by how much he resembled the pictures of terrestrial Japanese sumitori in the
hohere shule
texts: thick, broad shoulders, huge chest, outthrust head with almost no neck, staring eyes, and a broad, hooked beak of a nose.

“I don’t threaten, Ian Voerster. I say what is obvious. You are frightened of the independence movement on the Planetia. You have cause to be. I organized it.”

The Voerster glanced swiftly at the closed door behind which stood Han Ryndik and a dozen members of the Trekkerpolizei’s Special Branch. A touch on a hidden buzzer and there would be a stampede of armed men through the door to arrest the Kraalheer of Winter. He had just admitted treason and subversion of the Voertrekker State.

But then what?

To break the independence movement on the Planetia was impossible as long as Lowlanders could not fight and dirigibles could not effectively fly there. If Fontein were gone, the leadership would fall to the Hurtsiks. If they went down, another of the highland tribes would rule. The movement could not be defeated, only co-opted. Which is why I am here, meeting in secret with this barbarian, Ian thought.

“Don’t talk to me about Voertrekker unity and racial purity,” The Fontein said, staring. “If that’s what you intend.”