He felt a flash of golden light across his cheek and his faceplate darkened automatically. He looked again at the rig and for a few moments he forgot his fear. Jean Marq, who was now alone on watch, was backing the entire sail plan, resetting the huge mains, the smaller fores’ls, and a flaming array of stays’ls stuns’ls, jibs, and spankers to face Luyten 726 so that Glory might use the photons streaming away into deep space to help slow the ship. For close maneuvering inside a solar system Goldenwings routinely used light-pressure to assist the driving force of tachyons on their sails.
But the evolution was anything but routine from where young Damon was seeing it. Beams of reflected light flashed from sail to sail, were split by gleaming stays and braces, and all the while the skylar fabric reflected a strangely different vision of the stars around the ship.
Damon fed tiny increments of delta-V to his reaction controls, forcing himself to face outward, toward the universe. His hands clenched and he sucked great gasps of pure oxygen into his lungs as he looked at the dusted scatter of stars that was the edge of the Milky Way galaxy--a river of light from this position, a river that surely contained a billion billion stars. How close to home we have remained, Damon thought. It was a very un-Damon-like response to the open universe. Perhaps, he thought as his fear closed in again, I will learn to look outward and upward as Duncan and the others do. It was the thing he wanted most in life. To live unafraid.
He perceived the pattern of the universe in its immensity and then, perhaps because the vision was too vast to contain, he saw it closer too, on a human scale. Suddenly it seemed that he had only to reach out and scoop up a handful of stars from that living, glowing carpet of gems on black velvet.
He tried to recall some lines of the Earth poet Thomas Gray that Duncan had once used: ’“Full many a gem of purest ray serene. The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear--‘”
Duncan was a man of so many, and so varied, tastes.
“Take one” a mocking voice said in his headphones.
“Pick one and give it to some Trekker whore. I have heard they’ll spread their fat legs for a half-rand. Think what they would do for one of those beauties”
Marq, Damon thought. Probing with a dirty finger. What a terrible man the mathematician was.
“Privilege of rank, mon ami. Mathematician ranks Rigger. You are merely tolerated, but I am beloved for my dirty mind”
Damon pictured him, lying in his pod, using Glory to broadcast his nastiness. Yet Duncan tolerated him, and so did Anya. Krieg didn’t matter. He had no feelings.
“Don’t be so sure, young Damon” Marq said clearly. “The Boche has unexplored depths. I have seen him get drunk and weep when Rhine Maidens sing ’Die Lorelei.’“
Damon had no idea what the crazy Frenchman was talking about. The notion of Krieg weeping was absurd. Though it was strictly against orders, and though the isolation it created made him even more fearful, Damon turned off his suit communications.
With a prod from his thrusters he began the long, slow slide down the stay toward Glory’s whalebacked hull. He descended through the web of rigging and the labyrinth of golden skylar. The descent took him twenty long minutes, but presently he hung just over the transparent dome of the observatory.
He looked inside and there, in the shifting light reflected from the sails, he could see Duncan and Anya making love in zero gravity, slowly spinning and tumbling like dancers, their naked bodies intertwined.
He watched, breathless. It was beautiful to see, even for a young man raised among the Puritans of Grissom who had reduced sex to a genetic exercise.
Presently he became aware that Anya’s eyes were open and fixed on him. He felt a flush touch his cheek, but the girl from New Earth only smiled languorously and lifted a hand from Duncan’s broad shoulder to wave a greeting.
With a start Damon realized his radio was still off. He tongued it back to life in time to hear Duncan say softly:
“‘Just such disparity
As is ’twixt air and Angel’s purity
‘Twixt women’s love, and men’s will ever be.’ “
What poet spoke those words? Damon wondered. He only knew that given the setting and the circumstance, Anya Amaya must be finding them beautiful.
6. A HEALER AT VOERTREKKERHOEM
Deeply troubled, Healer Tiegen Roark, the Voertrekker-Praesident’s family physician, turned away from the girl in the large bed. He walked across the room to stand at a window looking out over the vast, starlit grounds of Voertrekkerhoem.
Roark had fought several duels at the Healer’s Faculty, in Pretoria, and he wore a scar on one cheek. The upper-class women of Voerster found the marks of manhood irresistible.
He stood with hands clasped behind his back, a stance taught to al! physicians at the Faculty. Roark, over the course of a long medical career, questioned the value of such teachings. He had often argued with the board of governors that the entire curriculum of medicine at the school was in desperate need of revision. He contended that much less time should be spent on teaching young physicians their social responsibilities and more on actually working with sick patients.
Historically, on Earth, armed conflict had stimulated medicine to superhuman achievements. But the Great Kaffir Rebellion on Voerster had done no such thing. Instead it had wiped out the laboriously won advances of the first three centuries on Voerster and made the next thousand years a medical purgatory. To recognize diseases from the old texts and yet lack the means to combat them was hell for a physician. It was, Tiegen Roark thought bitterly, like blundering through life blindfolded and handcuffed.
He turned back to look again at the sleeping Broni Ehrengraf Voerster. The girl had passed her twelfth birthday in the month of Trinity. She was now past the age of marriage and marriage was clearly impossible unless her health improved.
A touch of tuberculosis, the Voertrekker-Praesident said, of no matter. Tuberculosis was indigenous to Voerster. Well, perhaps, the Healer thought. But Broni’s illness was like no tuberculosis Tiegen Roark had ever seen.
Women of the ruling class on Voerster married for political reasons and no other. There were already whispers of a political union for the Voertrekkersdatter.
Roark studied Broni’s face broodingly. On Voerster tuberculosis ran a slower course than it had on Earth. It was a wasting disease, to be sure, and unfortunately common among the mynheeren. The progress of the illness ran to early feverishness, followed by loss of weight, a weakness of the respiratory system, and chest pains. Then came the expectoration of blood and the occasional hemorrhage. Women, more often than men, tended to acquire the disease. Most bore its ravages all their lives, and still managed to bear several children before the lung-fever killed them.
The Voerster demanded to know why his daughter was in a stage of the disease usually found in females of middle age. The difficulty was, Roark thought, rubbing his scarred cheek, that he dare not say to Ian Voerster that his daughter suffered from an ailment Tiegen Roark could not treat. True, the symptoms appeared to indicate that it was the tubercle bacillus at work in Broni’s lungs. But neither Tiegen Roark nor any of the diagnostic specialists with whom he had conferred had been able to find the bacterium in any specimen of Broni’s sputum. We are no better than tea-leaf readers, Roark thought. If only the Faculty had taught us real virology and neurology, it might not have been necessary for them to work so hard showing us how to stand, hands clasped behind, bellies outthrust, looking like physicians.
Roark, though he had a deep and passionate love of the world on which he had been born, felt its failings deeply. Somehow, the science of optics had never developed as it should have subsequent to the Rebellion. Even after many years, the native lens grinders were capable of producing only mediocre microscopes. Much of the planetary pharmacopoeia was holistic, borrowed from the kaffirs who, denied proper medical care after the Rebellion, turned to the native plants and minerals for healing potions. But the sad truth was that, contrary to legend, kaffir medi
cine was no better than that practiced by the Voertrekker Healers. The kaffirs were sturdy, Roark was certain, because they lived stringent, severe lives. There was a Voertrekker saying: “Arbeit macht Gesund”--work makes one healthy. That was, Mynheer Healer Roark thought, a convenient assurance, to be sure. But it was useless in the case of Broni Ehrengraf Voerster, the Voertrekkersdatter of Voerster. She could scarcely be put to stoop labor in the fields to cure what Tiegen believed was heart damage caused by rheumatic fever in infancy.
And while I ponder and theorize, Tiegen Roark thought bitterly, this lovely child gasps for breath and appears to be slowly, inexorably dying.
Through the open window, and across thirty flat kilometers of grass sea, Roark could see Voersterstaad. He could easily make out the yellow sky-glow of the municipal system of gas mantle street lighting. The gaslights were new, as things were reckoned on Voerster. They had been ignited for -the first time ten years ago, in the month of Trinity, when three of the gas giants in the sky formed their rare conjunction--as they had done again three nights ago.
The city underclass of Voerster, lumpen and Voertrekkers fallen on bad times--totally a disreputable lot--had staged an all-night drunken jamboree, dancing and sopping up liquor in the gas-lit streets because the astronomical event coincided with Deorbit Day and with the totally unrelated news that a Goldenwing was approaching Voerster.
The Trekkerpolizei had been pressed to keep order, but to his credit, the Voertrekker-Praesident had enjoined moderation. No broken skulls for drunkenness, no strict enforcement of the blue laws. His restraint had earned him small thanks from the lumpen, and no more from the kaffirs. Gratitude, Mynheer Voertrekker Tiegen Roark thought, was not a kaffir virtue.
The Healer walked around the room, looking without affection at the dressed stone walls. Austere. Barren. Like a fortress. The entire house was like this. Built to be defended. It had been built on the remnants of an earlier, and even grimmer fortress. There were catacombs below where the Voertrekkers of the Rebellion era had punished kaffirs who had the misfortune to be taken alive by the Voertrekker commandos.
The seeds of the tragedy, Tiegen thought rebelliously, had begun on the day of First Landing, when Bol-Derek Voerster died coming out of cold-sleep. He died, and his promises were forgotten. And thirteen hundred years later a physician has to watch a young girl die on a planet of arrogance and ignorance, he thought. How bitter it was. But Voertrekkerhoem had seen worse. This was a house steeped in the history of the world of Voerster, and of the family who resided here. Not a happy world and family, the physician mused. Not at all.
Roark, as family physician, had personal knowledge of the way in which the first couple of Voerster lived. He wondered if The Voerster and the beautiful Eliana had had intercourse since Broni was conceived, these twelve years gone. He doubted it. Eliana would have submitted, of course, for she was an Ehrengraf, a mynheera of Voerster. He had been about to indulge himself in a cliché: “A Voertrekker to her fingertips.” But was that really so? Most Voertrekker women had eyes blue as saucers, shallow as porcelain platters. To look into Eliana’s dark and melancholy eyes was to see great depths.
Roark was a heavyset man with receding gray-blond hair and the pale eyes of the prototypical mynheer. He was younger than he appeared to be. Another of the “social” skills taught at Healer’s Faculty was how to look older than one actually was. Somewhere in the racial psyche there was a memory of Old Earth, a memory that insisted that one’s worth was calculated by totting up the number of years one had spent ingesting one’s professional qualifications.
The curriculum at Healer’s Faculty could be mastered by any bright young man (there were no Healer’s degrees for women on Voerster) in two years. Roark had chafed at Healer’s for five, constantly being admonished by the Chancellor of Medicine that patience was a prime virtue in a physician. The old idiot, Roark remembered sourly, would then burst into foolish laughter at the brilliance of his soggy pun.
The Roark Kraal had bordered the lands of the Ehrengrafs, and Tiegen had known Eliana since they were children. Had he been other than a mynheer he would have acknowledged that he had loved her hopelessly as a child, as an adolescent, and as a man. But no Roark could aspire to an Ehrengraf, and over the years Tiegen had learned to deal with his attachment for Eliana in a civilized, Voertrekker manner. As far as Roark--or anyone--knew, Eliana had never been in love with any man. She had always stood apart from life, even from love (or its lack), by choice. She was civil to all, even to her social inferiors. She displayed courtesy to everyone with whom she dealt. But love? The female love of a woman for a man? That, Roark thought, was fated not to be part of Eliana Ehrengrafs life.
The physician bent over the sleeping girl and let Broni’s gentle breath play across his cheek. Her respiration was shallow, her lips tinged with blue. The lace handkerchief she held in one delicate hand was bloodstained. Her other hand rested on her small breasts under the thickly embroidered nightdress. Rheumatic heart failure, yes, Tiegen thought. Compounded with the common touch of tuberculosis. The child will probably die. And I can do nothing about it, he thought bitterly.
The house kaffirs and the lumpen in the city all called her “The Golden Broni.” In a society in which the approval of the lower orders was not sought, it seemed every Voertrekker found it easy to love the Voertrekkersdatter. When Broni was abroad the people called her name with affection. The local congregation of the Cult of Elmi offered daily prayers for her recovery, as did all the Voersterstaad parishes of the Church of Voerster. It was all very sad. Because though Healer Roark was only as good a scientist as backward Voerster could produce, he was a physician enough to know the prognosis was very poor. It was an unpleasant truth, which for different reasons, neither of her parents would accept.
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?” sh
e 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.
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