Glory (4 page)

Kaffir Joshua stopped the carriage directly in front of the stone stairs leading into the first gallery of the Kongresshalle. As Ian Voerster alighted, there was the customary delegation on hand to welcome him. Guildsmen in silver chains from the crafts, academics in caps and gowns, and inevitably, his neighbors from the Kraalheer High Council, a hugely outdated committee that still was, theoretically, in command of distribution among the kraals of supplies from Earth.

The trouble was that no supplies had ever arrived from Earth. In the last two hundred years, the only Goldenwing calling at Voerster had been the
Nepenthe
. She paused briefly in orbit, nineteen years ago. The visit had not been the one awaited, despite the optimistic predictions to that effect from the then-only-middle-aged Astronomer-Select. The last Voertrekkers on Earth had become extinct a thousand years ago. The colonists in Luyten had no agents or relatives who might tend to their affairs on Earth. But the present Voertrekker-Praesident’s Great-granduncle had dispatched an order to the homeworld by the captain of the
Nostromo
, a Goldenwing that had called at Voerster a hundred and twenty years before the appearance of
Nepenthe
.

It had been assumed that the appearance of
Nepenthe
was the arrival of that long-ago order. It was not. Had Osbertus Kloster not been related to the Voersters, he would certainly have been dismissed.
Nepenthe
did not carry the supplies ordered by Great-granduncle Titus Voerster.
Nepenthe
brought nothing, stopping only long enough to deposit on Voerster a single, very large, and slightly demented Wired Starman named Black Clavius. Ian Voerster, at that time new in his office and uncertain how to deal with the unprecedented situation, solved his dilemma by doing nothing. For the last nineteen years a grounded Starman, with kaffir skin and the odd notion that he could speak with God, had roamed Voerster preaching foolishness, mingling with the Preachers of Elmi, and practicing shamanism. He was still at it.

The disappointment still rankled Ian Voerster.

The Voertrekker-Praesident was enfolded by the Kraalheeren for his ceremonial walk into the Kongresshalle. In his sabertache lay the latest of the daily reports he had been receiving from Osbertus Kloster at Sternberg. There actually was a Goldenwing approaching. And this time, the astronomer assured his cousin the Voertrekker-Praesident, it was the
Gloria Coelis
, carrying the cargos for which Planet Voerster had waited so long. That was the good news, Ian Voerster thought grimly. The bad was that the Starman syndies intended burying a yellow man in the soil of Voerster. No person, black or white, on Voerster had ever seen an Asiatic. And who knew what other outlandish demand the Starmen might make?

But the main business of this day, Voerster thought, was not about Starmen and their strange ways. His first and most important meeting after the tedious business of the Convocation was done, was with Vikter Fontein.

The Kraalheeren convoyed him closely (like a tarted up prisoner, he thought) into the Great Room crowded with two hundred of his peers gathered for the trimestrial democratic sham of the Convocation of the Deliberative Assembly.

The interior of the room was paneled in polished brown-stone, somberly reflecting the heavily dressed splendor of the assembled Voertrekkers. There were three Convocations each year, holdovers from the early days when the First Landers opted for their own peculiar brand of parliamentary government. The Deliberative Assembly had never managed self-government. The nation of Voerster--the only nation on the only continent on the planet--was an oligarchy. It had never been anything else.

Ian Voerster settled into the uncomfortable Machtstuhl-- the Chair of Power--a narrow throne made of valuable wood (and a source of aching buttocks to a long succession of Voertrekker-Praesidents). The legs of the Chair were carved into representations of the incredibly ancient Roman fasces, the bundle of rods representing the power to chastise, and the ax representing the power to kill. Earth-images.

The chaplain began his long and certain-to-be-dreary New Lutheran Invocation and the Assembly stood with heads bowed. There were never any seats on the floor of the Great Room. An ancestor of Ian Voerster, infuriated by seventeen hours of speech-making, had decreed that in future, all delegates to Convocations would stand for the duration of the ceremonials. Later, in the separate meeting rooms scattered throughout the gloomy pile of the Kongresshalle, the delegates could sit for their inevitable wrangles.
But thank the Lord God,
Ian Voerster thought,
here they must stand until their legs ache.

His somber eyes fixed on the corner of the Great Room where the delegates from the Planetia stood shoulder to shoulder around the commanding figure of Vikter Fontein. No bowed heads there.

Fontein, bulky even for a Planetian, returned his gaze with a steady, dark hostility. The Voertrekker-Praesident frowned. To retain the fidelity of the high plains he must win the loyalty of that savage man. Broni, child, forgive me, Ian Voerster thought, knowing that even if his daughter did, his wife, the kraalheera of Ehrengraf, never would.

Five hundred kilometers from Voersterstaad’s lights stood the Sternberg--the Star Mount. As mountains went on Planet Voerster, Sternberg was unremarkable in all respects but one. The hill--for such it was, with slopes covered with the primitive grasses of the plain that surrounded it--was six hundred meters high. On the summit stood the single dome of the National Observatory of Sternhoem. The top of the Sternberg was the highest ground between the Great Southern Ocean and the Shieldwall of the Planetia. Here, above the Grassersee lived the current Astronomer-Select of Voerster, Osbertus Kloster, sixty local years old and a cousin of the Voertrekker-Praesident.

Inside the observatory dome stood an Earth-built, copper-tubed, twenty-six-inch refracting telescope. It was a matter of great pride to each succeeding Astronomer-Select that the instrument had come to Voerster aboard the
Milagro
. It was more than a thousand downtime years old and in beautiful condition.

For generations the holders of Sternhoem had been pensioned academics from the University of Pretoria. Some had been Osbertus’ own forebears. Sinecures ran in families on Voerster. Most holders had been content to do the local astrometrics Astronomers-Select had always done. One measured the precession of Voerster’s seasons, charted the annual pattern of sunspots on the surface of Luyten 726, and searched fruitlessly for the brown dwarfs believed to be a part of the Luyten 726 astronomical triple. The dwarfs could not be found with the equipment available, and they were so distant that their effect on Voerster was almost nil--and would be so for the next five hundred thousand years. The brown dwarfs became a kind of scientific Holy Grail, distant, improbable, legendary.

Osbertus spent his first years at Sternhoem searching for the brown dwarfs as ail Voertrekker astronomers were bound to do. But with the passing of years he had become fascinated with radio astronomy.

Voerster had gone into shock during the Rebellion. It had still not recovered. Many sociologists believed it never would. There was hydroelectric power generated by the rivers that plunged down the sheer cliffs of the Planetian Shieldwall, and steel was still made on Voerster. There was coal and iron and a low level of science and technology. But the passage of a thousand years had strange effects on post-Rebellion society. Time had become detached from the people’s lives. The Rebellion--a seminal experience for Voertrekkerdom--never really receded into history. It was as though it had happened last year. And the advances Voerster had laboriously made in the years between the arrival of the
Milagro
and the Rebellion were never recovered. The population stagnated. Intellectuals feared Voertrekker society was moribund. It had lasted a thousand years after the Rebellion through the grim miracle of the Voertrekker mind-set. According to the gloomy demographers of Pretoria University, it could not last another five hundred.

But with diligence and sacrifice and that same dogged determination that characterized the Voertrekker breed, Osbertus Kloster was single-handedly able to resurrect the science of radio astronomy. Crude parabolic dishes, fashioned by the Astronomer-Select and his kaffir work force, dotted the crest of the Sternberg.

From Sternhoem to Durban on the southern coast the distance was seven hundred kilometers. Pretoria lay two thousand two hundred kilometers due east. And between the observatory and the nearest part of the northern Shieldwall lay another thousand kilometers of the Sea of Grass, empty but for a half dozen isolated kaffir townships.

Osbertus Kloster was an improbable innovator. He was nearly fifty years old on a planet where a year was made of 510 twenty-nine-hour days. An Earthman would have said he was in his seventies. Kloster was also overweight, unmarried, shy, and cursed with a face and manner so amiable that he was customarily taken for a fool. He was not a fool, but he had long ago discovered that a poor relative of a ruling family on Voerster was almost certain to be thought one. His mother, now ten years deceased, had been Ian Voerster’s great-aunt. Using family influence, she had obtained a University education for her three sons. From Pretoria one went to the clergy, the second to the army. Osbertus presented a problem, but fortunately Klosters had been scientists in times past. She prevailed upon The Voerster to give Osbertus the sinecure of Sternhoem. And at Sternhoem he remained, humble and grateful.

Nineteen years ago Osbertus had nearly lost his post when he mistook some unrecognized electronic emissions from the Goldenwing
Nepenthe
as indications that Voerster’s long, long awaited shipment of farm animals and other goods from Earth was about to arrive. When
Nepenthe
only paused long enough to maroon the Starman Clavius, the then-new Voertrekker-Praesident Cousin Ian had been furious, claiming that Osbertus had made him look a fool.

Osbertus learned caution from the incident. But he also learned to take great pleasure from the presence in the Sea of Grass of the marooned Starman Black Clavius, who had never, in all his years of wandering exile, failed to stop at Sternhoem to discourse and drink
greena
, the bitter grass brandy of Voerster, with Osbertus.

Once, to Osbertus’ great delight the Starman said, quite without urging, “God is pleased with you, Mynheer Osbertus. You are a Voertrekker of a very different kind.”

On Voerster, the word
Voertrekker
did varied service. The inhabitants of Voerster called themselves Voertrekkers. They were ruled by
the
Voertrekker-Praesident. Most of their monuments incorporated the word Voertrekker or the idea of Voertrekkerdom. Many centuries ago, the people from whom the Voertrekkers of Voerster sprang had left southern Africa to found a Free State. Those who led this great migration were called
Voertrekkers
--literally “those who travel in front.”

In the Age of the Exodus, Bol-Derek Voerster, leader of the embattled and finally defeated Successor State, engaged the Goldenwing
Milagro
to carry the folk and their laborers to a recently discovered world in the Luyten system. The old Boer died of shock awakening from cold-sleep. But it was declared that the patriarch’s dying wish was that the world be known as
Voerster
and the people as Voertrekkers
“until the end of time or the Day of Judgment, whichever comes last.”

If Bol-Derek had lived long enough to see the Planetia, to which a third of his colonists--the less affluent--were assigned, Osbertus Kloster wondered if he might have been less grand with his prediction.

In Kraalheeren circles it was said that Bol-Derek’s true genius had been his ability to entice Successor State kaffirs to join the migration to Luyten. It was a Kraalheeren joke that Bol-Derek must have promised the blacks all the grass they could smoke and forty hectares and a mule. But the truth was that Bol-Derek promised them what the Successor State had never delivered: equality, freedom, land, and escape from an Africa grown plague-ridden and chaotic. But Bol-Derek did not survive the awakening from cold-sleep, and when the
Milagro
landed the seeds of the Great Kaffir Rebellion were planted in the soil of Voerster.

The Observatory of Sternhoem and all it contained was considered the property of Mynheer Astronomer-Select His sinecure included possession for life (at the Voertrekker-Praesident’s pleasure) of Sternhoem and all its chattels.

Voertrekker society maintained the colonial fiction that all property and worldly goods were owned in common, to be used for the common good. This did not prevent the accumulation of wealth, but it did tend to stifle dissent. Since Landers’ Day no one but a male of the Voerster tribe had ever governed from the Machtstuhl or lived in Voertrekkerhoem, the presidential kraal.

A Voertrekker folktale told of Voerster’s only, female ruler. The story was that once, near election time, a single generation after the Landing, the only candidate, Bolger turn der Voerster, died of a surfeit of
greena
and eel. Though grieving as a wife should, his young bride, a cousin named Elmi Voerster Ehrengraf, disguised herself as her husband, won the election, and assumed the mantle of Voertrekker-Praesident. It was said that she lived out her life as a man, ruling for fifty years. She was reputed never to have left the gloomy galleries of Voertrekkerhoem until taken out in her bier at the age of one hundred and twenty-three. Her austere kindness to the
lumpen
and the kaffirs was legendary, and the source of the mythology surrounding the Cult of Elmi.

The story was probably apocryphal, but Osbertus Kloster had always rather hoped it was true. Black Clavius found it highly amusing but never ventured an opinion on whether Elmi was the stuff of fantasy or flesh and blood.

Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster, the Voertrekkerschatz and, in Osbertus Kloster’s opinion, the most beautiful mynheera on Voerster, liked to smile her dazzling smile and say that it should be true, that Elmi must be real. “I would not be related to a shadow,” she said. “Even the shadow of a saint.”