Glory (3 page)

Rob Kr, thought to be Duncan’s father, spoke up. “They have come on Search. They will ask for one of our sons or daughters.” He regarded his fellow clansmen soberly. “They will never take a child unwilling, but if we refuse them they will never return.” He glanced up at the windswept night sky.

Glory
, in synchronous orbit over the land of Sin, was a bright golden star near the limb of Bothwell, the great moon of Thalassa. “They will descend in a shuttle that rides on fire. The Good Book Program describes it all. I put it to you that we must let them leave us satisfied we have treated them with respect.” He looked sadly around the circle of the burning stone fire. “We all know that one day--who can say when?--our children or our children’s children will need the goodwill of the Starmen. So let us select a child, and ask that they choose that one and no other, for the great sea is broad and we are few.“ Rob Kr sat himself down in silence.

Katryn M’donald, the mother of twelve strong daughters, said to the Yearleader: “What Rob says is so. The Starmen must always smile on us.”

Glendora, still standing on the Stone, said to Katryn, “Do you offer one of your girls?”

“I will if I must.”

The clan children, all who were old enough to attend the meeting at the Stone, murmured, some fearfully, a few expectantly.

Rob Kr stood again. “I have the candidate. My Duncan loves the sea but hates the hunt. He is one we can spare.”

Rob was known as a loveless man, but the clansmen whispered at this and the Preacher murmured, “‘Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.’“

“That is a brave thing you do, Rob,” said Glendora, who was Duncan’s birth mother. “It is fit that I join you in it.”

And when the Starmen rode their shuttle down and the then-captain of the
Glory
, a man old even in uptime, named Washington, with black skin and white hair, was met with fish and salt (the gifts of submission on Thalassa), Glendora Kr called Duncan and offered him to the Starman,

It had been a hundred and fifteen long years since last a Goldenwing paused at Thalassa, but the clansmen knew the ritual. Washington felt young Duncan’s skull gently and then asked, “Will you travel with us, boy? To the stars?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, sir,” Duncan replied.

The choosing was not complete until Duncan had been examined for suitability by another ancient Starman, a neurocybersurgeon. When this was done, Duncan’s forehead was painted with a star and Chalkmeer launched into three days of bittersweet celebration.

The clans from kilometers around were represented and there was even a delegation from the Meeting House in Edinburgh. The Starmen, all of whom were aged, said that they had postponed their Search until reaching the Wolf Stars because great Starmen were born under the sign of the Wolf. It may have been flattery, but if it was it was well intended and the clansmen of Chalkmeer were pleased. In those few days Duncan was treated with more love and affection than he had ever known in his father’s cold croft. After the feasting Duncan was taken to a newly built, clean croft and there given aphrodisiacs mixed in strong beer, and for three nights until Moon Bothwell waned, he was visited by each of the nubile girls in Clan Kr, so that his genes would not be lost to the breeding pool.

Then he was decorated with garlands of barley, wrapped in red furs and escorted to the shuttle with songs and bagpipes.

It is many years uptime since that day and those nights by the great ocean. On Thalassa eighty years have gone by. Rob and Glendora Kr are dead. The sons and daughters Duncan spawned in the ceremonial croft have grown old with families of their own. Like all Starmen, Duncan imagines that one day he will revisit the world of his birth. He will not. When Starmen do return to their starting points, they find only weathered headstones over the folk they once knew.

Frowning with peevishness, Ian Voerster, Voertrekker-Praesident and leader of the majority party in the Deliberative Assembly, sat wrapped in furs as the open electric carriage turned the comer at the Gate of Advance and started down the long, narrow avenue toward the Kongresshalle.

Sedate, he thought. That was the word for the progress of his limousine. If the ornate wagon made fifteen kilometers in an hour it was doing well. Once there had been cars on Voerster that ran on petroleum. But the Rebellion had put paid to all that. The theories remained, but the war with the kaffirs had destroyed the infrastructure of a once-technological society. In the case of hydrocarbon fuels, the Rebellion had smashed the refining and cracking plants brought in pieces from Earth on the
Milagro
. And like so many other things, the tools to rebuild them were simply not available. Nearly a thousand years after the kaffir uprising, Voerster remained a rustic planet. A backwater. Ian Voerster often dreamed the dream of many Voertrekker-Praesidents before him. If only a Goldenwing could be captured and used exclusively to resupply Voerster. But it would never happen. There were too few Goldenwings, and space was too vast. If a Goldenwing called twice in a century, it was a near miracle.

At close intervals along Advance Street, police militia in dress uniforms stood at attention. It was what was due the Head of State since the Rebellion, but Ian Voerster viewed the scene with distemper. The driver, a kaffir called Joshua, and the plainclothes bodyguard, a Trekkerpolizei of the Wache--the Security Troops--named Ryndik, sat like book-ends, one ebony, one white, on the driver’s bench. Ian Voerster prized kaffirs able to remain silent--a gift rare among the garrulous blacks. Ryndik, too, spoke seldom--so seldom, in fact, that there were rumors around Voertrekkerhoem that the bodyguard had been captured by wild kaffirs who cut out his tongue. The rumor was as untrue as it was grotesque. Such atrocities had not been perpetrated on Voerster since the Rebellion. But silent kaffir and laconic policeman sat dispassionately together on the carriage bench, wrapped, as was Ian Voerster, in furs against the bitter sea wind that blew across the city from Amity Bay.

Actually, Ian Voerster’s white servants all loved ceremonial occasions. The Voertrekker chose them from families of soldiers and policemen who had a taste for the panoplies of power. Whether or not kaffir Joshua or any other loved Voertrekker holidays and ceremonies, the Voertrekker-Praesident never wondered or cared.

The crowd of kaffirs and white
lumpen
lining the streets of Voersterstaad had shown minimal respect, but they had been sullen. Deorbit Day marked the anniversary of the departure of the Voertrekker colony ship from Earth, and for this reason the Convocation always began at the hour of breaking orbit from Earth’s Moon. In that place, long ago, the hour had been 1322 hours Greenwich Universal Time. The First Landers had immortalized the event by setting the opening of the summer Convocation of the Deliberative Assembly to 1322 Western Province Time. The fact was that no one had any idea of the relation, if any, between the two times. Ian Voerster was fond of quoting the Law of Unintended Consequences. In the case of commemorating Deorbit Day with a Convocation, the First Landers could not have foreseen the great Kaffir Rebellion or the Security Laws which followed, namely the Kaffir Curfew--a law, passed by the Deliberative Assembly, enjoining all kaffirs to be in their townships by 1800 hours. Since the Rebellion, all Voertrekker ceremonials were scheduled to begin after the kaffirs were out of sight. Except the Deorbit Day Convocation, whose hour had been established long ago and very far away.

The effect was to force the races to share this one Convocation. Voertrekkers disapproved, because it seemed an improper mixing of white and colored. Kaffirs disapproved because inclusion in this occasion made them acutely aware that they were excluded from the others on Voerster. The Preachers of Elmi seemed to delight in telling their black congregations that they should love Voerster because it was as much theirs as it was the Voertrekkers’. So Elmi, as white as a snow-peak, was said to have believed. The thought irritated the Voertrekker-Praesident. The cult, for generations only an annoying kaffir fantasy, was now fashionable among University students and even some Kraalheeren.

In his heart Ian Voerster, like many Voertrekkers, disliked sharing Deorbit Day with the kaffirs, but as the Voertrekker-Praesident, Ian was the guardian of traditions, which demanded that the Deorbit Day Convocation ceremonials be paraded before kaffir and Voertrekker alike at the hour stated by the First Landers. Even after so long, the Rebellion still loomed like a threatening shadow over the rulers of Voerster. But courage, too, was a tradition among Voertrekkers, and it would have been bad form to admit that the inhabitants of the townships still had the power to make Voertrekkers tremble.

Beauty had not been a consideration when the state’s architects designed the government buildings of Voerster. Public construction was designed to be daunting to the eye. It was. The Kongresshalle and the surrounding structures-- the Ministry of Defense, the Treasury, the Police Academy, and Home Barracks--had all been designed after the kaffirs were put down and confined to the townships. The architecture was as massive and suspicious as Voertrekker society--resentful and alert.

The halle had the look of nothing else on the planet. Not even the heavy buildings of Pretoria University, two thousand kilometers across the Sea of Grass on the eastern shore of the continent, were so uncompromising. Voertrekker taste naturally ran to stone lodges and bermed manor houses. Dwellings, while always built to larger-than-human scale, crouched low to seek shelter from the constant winds. But the Kongresshalle was arrogant. Its high facade was lined with galleries of blind stone arches, each constructed to collapse on an advancing enemy when the keystone was removed. Above the arches, gray stone walls were pierced with narrow gun-ports high above ground level. Truncated towers stood at each corner of the vast structure, and from each flew the Voertrekker flag--a white cross on a field of black--and under the planetary flag, the banner of one of the four provinces.

It was an intimidating building. With the Wache and police barracks and the armory, the Kongresshalle covered a half dozen hectares of some of the best agricultural land on a planet not known for fertility, Ian Voerster accepted this as a proper sacrifice made to preserve the values of Trekker society.

Like most Voertrekkers, the Voertrekker-Praesident was a farmer. Also like most Voertrekkers, he led a life of privilege supported, on this bleak and wintry world, by the vast labor force of kaffirs descended from the breeding stock brought from Earth by the First Landers. From the first day on Voerster, the Voertrekkers had made it plain to the kaffirs that the promises made on Earth would be kept in abeyance until the society was properly established. They were still in abeyance. The Rebellion had put fulfillment even further away. The kaffirs gave their labor and withdrew their trust. And so it had been for a thousand years. So it would be forever.

Yet even for the privileged mynheeren class, life on the Sea of Grass was harsh. And however hard life might be for the kraal owners of the Grassersee, it was infinitely harder for the descendants of the First Landers who had settled on the stratospheric lands of the Planetia, where the mean altitude above sea level was fifty-five hundred meters and the atmospheric pressure less than half what a normal man needs to breathe.

The volk of the Planetia had all but become a race apart on Voerster, and it was this separation that Ian Voerster was resolved to reverse. The Highlanders were vital to the defense of the State should the kaffirs ever rebel again. Yet they were a deadly danger if allowed to develop further in isolation.

Voerster stared gloomily at the police guard standing along the roadway. Lowlanders, every one. Assuming a Highlander willing to accept Grassersee discipline could be found and put in the Trekkerpolizei or Wache ranks, he would have uglified the neat ranks of the Trekkerpolizei and Wache. Shorter than normal men by a head, the Planetian was built like a wine tun, with a grotesquely distended chest and limbs like the stone pillars of the Kongresshalle. His skin was white, but hidden under a pelt that resembled the coat of an ebray.

The records had been lost, but most medical men on Voerster believed that the Planetians were descended from men and women who had been genetically engineered for the brutal environment of the high plains. Ian Voerster believed it To a Lowlander, Planetians were human--but only just. There were other physical adaptations among the volk of the stratospheric Highlands: an epicanthic fold protected their pale eyes against the glare of the Luyten Sun at high altitude and many were polydactyl on both hands and feet. Under their pelt, the skin had a bluish, anoxic tinge. They were as unruly and vicious as they were unprepossessing.

For a moment Ian Voerster slipped into thinking as a father. He permitted himself to consider the hellish life to which he intended to doom Broni Ehrengraf Voerster when he betrothed her to Vikter Fontein, the Planetian Kraalheer of Winter.

But only for a moment. His ironclad sense of duty and Voertrekker self-righteousness immediately suffocated his conscience. Voertrekkers were not like the other descendants of Earth. They were a volk with a vision, a people with a sense of themselves and their duty.

The first Voertrekkers had proved that on Earth, centuries ago on the long trek north from the Cape Colony. The Voertrekker of Voerster today could certainly do nothing to tarnish that steely resolve and awareness of race.

The carriages of the one hundred congressmen--each as polished and decorated with gold leaf and appliqués as Voerster’s--lined the edges of the roadway. The kaffir drivers had erected banks of solar cells facing the afternoon sun, and each machine appeared to be sucking energy through a cable, replenishing feeble batteries. Electric carriages were used only on holidays and for ceremonial occasions. Little wonder, thought Ian Voerster. It was a sign of the sorry state of Voertrekker science. That was another matter Ian Voerster had always intended to see to, but even after eight years as Voertrekker-Praesident, he had no real notion of how to begin.
Once we were a race of urbanites,
he thought rebelliously,
but now we are a nation of farmers and rustics. It is a mistake to try to make Voerster into something it can never be.