Glory (23 page)
It may well have been true, Duncan thought, that Bol-Derek Voerster had fully intended to deal fairly with the kaffir laborers who had shared cold-sleep with the First Landers. The syndicate of the
Nostromo
had thought so, and noted its opinion in the appropriate computer files. But Bol-Derek Voerster never lived to see the Voertrekkers’ promised land, and from that moment Voerster, as a human colony, was moribund.
The Voertrekkers’ world wasn’t in danger of collapse tomorrow or the next day, but Duncan Kr knew that when
Glory
came this way again, perhaps a hundred downtime years from now, Voerster would be a barbarian world. On Old Earth, pacifists had preached damnation for those who carried the contagion of war and racial strife to the stars. Those ancients in their sackcloth and ashes had little known how right they would turn out to be.
Duncan urged himself to think less depressing thoughts. For a time at least, the goods
Glory
brought to Voerster would raise the spirits of the colonists. After centuries without, within a Voersterian year there would again be a surfeit of Earth animals in the kraals of the single large land-mass that was rising out of the east. The green-and-brown continent was a grassland, Duncan noted. It was easy to understand how the Voertrekkers had abandoned their high-tech society after the race war to live as ranchers and farmers. There would be trout and bass in the few turbulent streams and rivers, and there would be a repetition of the natural conflicts between the imported animals and the native necrogenes. According to what Anya had been told by the downworld astronomer with the radio dishes, the Faculty of Husbandry in the single university on Voerster assumed that the Earth animals (being more biologically sophisticated) would overbear the native necrogenes. Such an outcome had been predicted before the disruption of the Rebellion, and it was the outcome expected now.
But,
Glory
’s demographic-ecological program predicted, that was unlikely to be. The necrogenes’ terrible manner of reproduction kept the animals of Voerster in balance with their environment. The placental mammals from Earth would inevitably overreproduce and eat themselves out of the Voersterian ecosystem. In a hundred of the planet’s long years, it would be as if the beasts from Earth had never come to Luyten 726I4.
But for now
Glory
’s cargo would gladden the hearts of Voertrekker and kaffir alike. The colonists would probably derive more benefit from the technology of the packaging protecting the frozen near-born. In addition to a thousand assorted domestic animals, each pannier contained a low-power nuclear module that, extracted from its pannier, could refrigerate food for a town, or used in another way, could generate electric power for a small city. Each embryo was protected by an individually powered capsule that could cool or warm a kraal for a year. And there were thirty panniers of animal embryos in the hold for Voerster. Such serendipitous benefits explained why the inhabitants of the planets of near space had created almost a Cargo Cult around the Goldenwings.
Anya Amaya sighed and lifted herself to float weightlessly above the glyceroid bed with a tiny pressure of her fingertips. She wore a black skinsuit which matched the glossy ebony of her hair. Since the affray in the rigging, Anya had taken to wearing it in a severe helmet-coif that she mistakenly thought reduced her sexual appeal.
Glory’s
computer declared:
“Orbital injection complete.”
And then, almost immediately:
“Orbital parameters are 221 kilometers by 218 kilometers. Orbital period is 97 minutes 12 seconds.”
A near-perfect injection, Duncan noted. It was, actually, a maneuver comparable to docking a clipper ship by wind power alone, without smashing the pier.
“Well done,” Duncan said. Overhead, through the transparency at the curve of the bridge, could be seen the last movements of the subtle evolution: The few sails still drawing were being rolled into their housings within the masts and yards. Eventually, only a few small jibs and spankers would remain flying to catch the photon streams from Luyten 726 and keep
Glory
locked in orbit.
Glory
orbited upside down in relation to the bright mass of Voerster.
Glory
presently was sweeping over the vast, blue-green wasteland of saltwater known as the Sea of Storms. Cloud patterns made silver-white swirls above the empty sea. As the horizon rolled nearer, a low coastline could be seen that gradually took the shape of a continent consisting mainly of grass plains. The feature called the Planetia was a long, narrow highlands separated from the lowlands by a continent-long wall of eroded, nearly vertical cliffs. Duncan had absorbed the geography of Planet Voerster from
Glory
, but seeing the actual thing was daunting. The Shieldwall averaged slightly under ten kilometers in height.
In the north, the Planetia abutted the Northern Ice, the polar cap. At the extreme east and west, where the seas were ice-free, the Planetia rose sheer from surf to the heights. The Sea of Grass, which covered most of the continent, ended in the south at the equator in a long, empty coastline of marshes and river deltas. A barren isthmus extruded itself from the southeastern coast of the Grassersee, joining a narrow, steep, and rocky spine of land, the Sabercut Peninsula, where the Voertrekkers kept their gulag.
It went without saying, Duncan thought, that the colonists of Voerster would have such a place. In silence, and basking wickedly in the chill breath of the Southern Ice, it spoke volumes.
Duncan returned his attention to the planet. Cloud patterns shifted; in a number of places storms were troubling the Sea of Grass. The Planetia, Duncan estimated, had a median altitude above sea level of nine thousand five hundred meters. In the old measurement still used some places on Earth, that was 31,960 feet. The atmosphere of Voerster was more oxygen-rich than that of the homeworld, making the Planetia habitable, but only just. Could people descended from Earth colonists actually survive in such a place? Duncan wondered. Evidently they could, and did. The
Nostromo
syndics had found it fascinating that the ancestors of the high-plains dwellers, Voertrekker and kaffir alike, had been genetically engineered to live in the heights by what the
Nostromo
people thought was an intrusive society even in its best pre-Rebellion days.
The Planetia had been settled at a much later date than had the Grassersee. After First Landing, two hundred Voertrekker families had divided the grasslands among themselves. The men and women sent to the Planetia had been poor Voertrekkers, some
lumpen
, and kaffirs--all bred for the bitter environment at the roof of the world. Duncan, wise in the ways of human societies, suspected that the Highlanders were not a loveable people.
Storms swept the Sea of Grass near the Shieldwall. Accompanying one particularly violent line of thunder-squalls Duncan could see a half dozen tornadoes stalking like tall giants across the empty grasslands.
The Goldenwing passed over the Shieldwall and high above the grasslands to the eastern coast in a matter of a dozen minutes. From this height, and with the sunlight vanishing, it was possible to look down and discern the two principal cities of Voerster’s east coast, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria. A few smears of civilization, none of them grand, betrayed the presence of Mankind on the Grassersee.
Glory
swept onward, high above the darkening eastern limb of the sea.
“It is quite a pretty world,”
Anya said.
Duncan, wakened from his reverie, realized that he had been watching the planet for an hour.
Anya was out of her pod, sitting on the edge of it, still Wired, but fully human now.
Duncan said, “One might imagine living in such a place, growing up on plains of grass.” He smiled quietly. “Is New Earth like that?”
“Enn-Eee is a tight, nasty world.”
Anya’s dark eyes were fixed on the sight overhead.
“That’s all I can remember about it.”
Voerster was not completely dark. There was a powerful zodiacal light in the Luyten 726 system, and the stars shone in profusion. “But how odd to live without at least one visible moon,” Anya said. On her homeworld, four large satellites illuminated the night sky.
Duncan turned to study the readouts crossing the computer’s visual interface.
Glory
was producing a proper almanac of Voerster: Gravity 0.9981 Earth Normal, pressure at sea level 1978.436 millibars. On the high tableland mean pressure was 953.112 millibars. The average temperature in the lowlands was 291.48 degrees Kelvin; on the high plateau almost nineteen degrees less. “Life must be hell on that high plateau we crossed,” Duncan said thoughtfully. “I wonder how many colonists have endured it, and how many are still there?”
Anya drifted over to Duncan’s pod and steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder. “Mutants live there. Or so my old astronomer claims.” Mutants was not a word Goldenwing syndics used lightly. The danger of stellar flares and radiation was never far from their minds.
Anya felt Duncan’s restlessness through the drogue.
“Are you going downworld?”
“We all should. There is Han Soo to be put to rest.”
“Those racist bastards down there won’t like it. I think they have forgotten that there are other races but Caucasian and black.”
“Nevertheless.”
She made no immediate reply. Anya was no longer completely at ease with Duncan. She missed sexual relations with him. The boy Damon was physically fine, but Duncan Kr was a man.
“You want to go ashore, don’t you, Duncan?” she said. As she spoke she removed her drogue, a subconscious admission she did not want Duncan to receive her emotional emissions clearly.
He said, “I haven’t been ashore since Aldrin.” That had been two years ago uptime. No need to belabor the point, the girl thought. She understood. He wanted a woman. Any woman, as long as she was different from Anya Amaya. Voertrekkers were pale and blonde with great white breasts and broad hips. She turned away, frowning.
Damon called from the communications shack: “Message from Voersterstaad, Duncan.”
“Put it on interphone.”
‘“The landing area at Voersterstaad will be clear in 100 hours. Your lighters have only to signal their approach and if needed we will supply lighting.’ That comes direct from Voersterstaad, Duncan. Not from Stemberg.”
“Thank you, Damon. Anything more about requesting a physician?”
“No, Duncan.”
Anya said abruptly, “I’ll stand the anchor watch on board.” And she launched herself into a transit tube without further talk.
It was odd, but perhaps understandable, that Goldenwing syndicates laced their talk with the archaic expressions of the Age of Sail. An arrival was often a “landfall.” The great Coriolis streams of tachyons swirling out of the galactic center were often spoken of as “the Trades.” And, of course, downworld was “ashore.” Do we do that to keep an anchor firmly fixed in the shingle of our human past? Duncan wondered. We become so nearly creatures of space, beings who live without dimensions. Perhaps we require a vivid set of memories--memories of blue water and blue skies--to keep us fully human.
He looked after Anya and smiled ruefully. The Sailing Master was human enough, he thought. We all need shore-time, Duncan thought. I will take her ashore with me.
He set the interface on standby and detached his drogue. One last glance at the orbital parameters--out of habit, not necessity--and he launched himself into the tube leading to the cargo holds, where Jean Marq was working.
The man riding the lead animal was even larger than most men of the Planetia, where huge genotypes were the rule. He bore university duelling scars, not on one cheek, but both, as if in his student days he had developed a taste for pain and self-disfigurement.
Eigen Fontein had, in fact, killed a fellow student duelist at Pretoria, and only his Kraalheer family connections had saved him from a term of imprisonment south of the Isthmus. Eigen, the elder son of Vikter Fontein, had been formidable from the age of eight when, upon the birth of his brother Georg, he learned that primogeniture was no assurance of a heritage on the Planetia.
At nine Eigen was nearly killed on an unauthorized climb of the Blue Glacier. At eleven he raped his first kaffir girl, and at thirteen, on a pleasure jaunt to Grimsel, his first
lumpe
. And at twenty, in university at Pretoria, he killed in his first duel.
Georg, the younger Fontein, hated his brother with a passion, but the pair were inseparable. It was whispered in the deep warrens of Winter Kraal that Georg ran with his sibling hoping one day to urge him to disaster. The possibility was ever present. Eigen blustered his way through one quixotic challenge after another.
The one passion the brothers shared was hunting the giant mountain cheet. They had, almost alone, hunted the catlike carnivore to near extinction in the Grimsel Mountains, a range of jagged ridges that formed part of the eastern Shieldwall.
On Voerster a Kraalheer once had held a position similar to the daimyo of Earth’s ancient Japan--feudal lord at the pleasure of the serving Voertrekker-Praesident: landlord and planter, rancher and cattle baron. The folk of the highlands were well aware of their history. They had been poor relations at First Landing, then experimental animals during the high-tech years before the Rebellion. But settling them on the plateau, an act of Voertrekker expediency, saved them from many of the depredations of the Rebellion. The kaffirs delegated to form their highland labor force were genetically engineered for the Planetia in the same way as were the mynheeren. Thus when the race war began, the kaffirs of the Planetia felt very little kinship with their siblings of the Grassersee townships.
There was war in the highlands, but it was a desultory matter. The kaffirs still lived on the Voertrekkers’ kraals as they had in the old days in the lowlands. They seldom accompanied their whites on incursions of the lowlands. One
Nostromo
syndic-commentator, the shipmaster, attributed this to loyalty. Another, the
Nostromo’s
surgeon, scoffed at the idea. “The highland kaffir on Voerster,” he wrote into the database, “is as violent and capricious as the high country Kraalheer. Within a dozen generations Planetian society will not exist.” To which
Nostromo’s
Rigger, who had apparently spent some weeks downworld during
Nostromo’s
call, added a postscriptum:
“Nor will the convocation of bigots in the Sea of Grass.”
