Glory

by Alfred Coppel

  “Yes, Mynhear,” Clavius said. “I can accept that.”

  “Thank you, Clavius,” The Voerster said drily. “I do not refer, in case you are wondering, to the cargoes the Goldenwing will bring. Though I do not underestimate the impact of the goods my great-uncle Alfried ordered. By no means.” He held an index finger to his thin lips in what was a characteristic gesture. “There are those at Pretoria University’s Faculty of Husbandry who are concerned about the effect a large invasion of Terrestrial genotypes will have on Planet Voerster’s ecology--

  “But that won’t be my concern, will it, kaffir? I will be long buried before that kind of problem becomes acute.” He looked at Clavius with an expression of such speculation that it was almost an expression of cupidity. “You and yours, kaffir, take a different view. It is quite possible that you will still be alive in that far-off time.”

  “Not unless I am taken once more aboard a starship, Mynheer, and then returned here on some future voyage,” Clavius said.

  “Ah, of course. The paradoxes of time dilation,” Ian Voerster said. “So difficult for a mere downworlder to grasp with any true understanding.” The pallid eyes grew suddenly as cold as the sky over the Southern Ice. “Tell me, kaffir. Is there any possibility that the syndicate now aboard the Gloria Coelis is the same as the Nostromo syndicate with whom my great uncle Alfried dealt?”

  “No, Mynheer. Time has passed uptime. Perhaps a great deal of it,” Black Clavius said cautiously. “Until I came to Voerster, I had never heard of Goldenwing Nostromo. It is that way in space, Mynheer. There are probably fewer than a dozen Goldenwings still sailing, but they learn of one another only if and when word is circulated by downworlders during a port call. Nostromo’s syndicate quite probably sold your great-uncle’s contract to another syndicate, and that to still another until it became the property of the Glory, hers to fulfill. As to how long ago all this took place uptime--well, Mynheer, if you will forgive me, the question is meaningless. The answer could depend on where the winds of space have carried the Glory, for how long, and at what speeds.”

  Ian Voerster leaned forward slightly, betraying an intensity that disturbed Black Clavius deeply. On Voerster any anxious Voertrekker could mean trouble. And when the Voertrekker in question was the hereditary leader of this benighted society, the trouble could be bitter. “The Rebellion set our sciences back by centuries, kaffir. Am I correct in assuming that technological progress on Earth and the other colony worlds has not suffered such setbacks?”

  “Probably not, Mynheer. But the march of technology is a sporadic thing. No two worlds live at the same pace.”

  “I understand. But medical technology?”

  “The same assumptions apply, Mynheer.”

  “But they will have a physician aboard the Goldenwing.”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “A wiser, better educated man--a more able man than our Tiegen Roark. That surely.”

  Clavius saw the danger signals flying, but knew not how to avoid the pitfalls ahead.

  “I want an answer, kaffir.”

  “A Goldenwing surgeon would be more skilled than a Healer of Voerster,” Clavius said carefully. “But if you are thinking of Broni, Mynheer, do not expect too much. One would have to do a proper diagnosis, and that would almost certainly have to be performed aboard. And a voyage to orbit for someone as ill as the mynheera Broni could be extremely dangerous. The syndicate might simply refuse to take such a chance. I cannot say.”

  “They will do what I say must be done, kaffir Clavius. I am not easily dissuaded.” He pressed a buzzer on his desk and stood again. “I want you to think about it. And to consider how you might best serve me--and mynheera the Voertrekkersdatter.”

  He walked around the desk as Clavius rose from the stool on which he had been sitting. “You shall be my guest here at Voertrekkerhoem, Clavius, while you devote yourself to the pursuit I suggest. You will do this, of course--”

  “Because, like Galileo,” Clavius said with deep melancholy, “I have seen the instruments.”

  “Exactly, kaffir. And because a starship is coming and when it departs you want most desperately to be on it. We both understand your situation to perfection. Rest assured that I shall be protective of your Starman’s ethics.” The Voerster was heavily ironic.

  The door opened and the lance corporal stood ready for orders.

  “Take my special guest, the Starman Black Clavius, to Leutnant Bostik in the visitor’s quarters,” The Voerster said. “Instruct the leutnant that Starman Clavius is to want for nothing.”

  Except my freedom, thought Clavius. So I do what I must do. It is not a question of ethics, Lord, but one of survival.

  14. APPROACH--AND TREASON AT STERNBERG

  Clinging to the fabric bulkhead of the bridge, Mira regarded the large ones. All were lying in their nests, thinking together with the queen-who-was-not-alive. The great queen had her paws on their heads. One of Mira’s kittens who had followed her through the tunnel to the bridge mewed his hunger call and she trilled impatiently at him to be silent.

  Overhead, the ceiling had been opened to that great room she so loved to prowl, but now there was a vast, mottled ball nearby that Mira understood the large ones thought of as another room that they were anxious to enter. The nearness of the lighted ball drove away the creatures she often challenged when she and the dominant tom were alone in the emptiness.

  There was no chance of a hunt here. The tom was involved in some big, clumsy way with the other large ones. The small queen had done something clever, but nothing that interested Mira. The tom-who-cut was exchanging thoughts with the great-queen-who-was-not-alive; the young tom was watching and learning; the mad tom was unreadable but the aura surrounding him made Mira’s fur rise.

  The kitten mewed again, complaining. Mira cuffed him with retracted claws. She looked once more at the large white ball beyond the roof. The face of it, seen through the maze of lines and colors where the monkey things lived, was colored blue and green.

  She looked away and forgot it, attention withdrawn. What the large ones were doing did not interest her. She imagined the taste of freshly killed fish. With a warning trill to her kitten she launched herself into the transit tube toward the compartment containing the terminals for the food synthesizer, which the great-queen-who-was-not-alive had taught her to operate.

  “Du lieber, that damned cat. I can taste the fish,” Dietr Krieg complained.

  “You are her godfather, Dietr,” Damon said. “You made her what she is.”

  Duncan was pleased that young Ng had found enough confidence to jab at the neurocybersurgeon. “Pay attention, all,” he said.

  The others fell silent.

  Duncan said, “How long to orbit, Anya?” Ordinarily it was a question that would have been addressed to Glory’s computer, but Duncan knew his people. Anya needed to be busy.

  “Six days, ten hours uptime, Duncan.”

  “Are we time-conformed?”

  “Within two decimal places,” Damon said.

  “Sail trim?”

  With blind eyes they could all see the newly configured sail plan. All jibs, spankers, tops’ls, and t’gallants tightly furled. Courses on the mains and foremasts braced around to catch the torrent of photons from white Luyten, Tachyons were forgotten now, their influence too subtle to affect the course Anya Amaya had set for Glory, bringing her into low planetary orbit around the luminous, glowing blue-green planet. And it was overhead now; they were within seven hundred thousand kilometers of the surface, carefully bleeding off the last of their interstellar speed.

  In all, it was a magnificent job of sailing. Duncan told Anya so and felt the warmth of her response permeating the entire pre-planetary orbit injection gathering. Only Jean Marq made no response. Ordinarily he would be swarming over Anya’s calculations, making dozens of tiny changes. But nothing. Duncan probed and found that the Frenchman was daydreaming. Duncan felt the soft breath of warm wind, the smell of growing things. Pr
ovence? God, he hoped not that again. But Dietr had warned that Jean could break open. Still, as a member of Glory’s crew, he was here on the bridge. What alternative was there? To open an airlock and send him after his paracoita?

  “Any messages from Voerster?” Duncan asked.

  “Damon has taken that over,” Anya said.

  “Well, boy?” Dietr Krieg asked.

  “I have been getting voice from their observatory at Sternberg. Osbertus Kloster sends gigabits of anything and everything. He is eager to please, Duncan. I put most of it through the demographics program. We have the landing coordinates for the cargo shuttles, though, and something else. I may have misunderstood the meaning-- they still speak a kind of weird Afrikaans--but they asked several times if we had a physician aboard. A ’healer’ they said. I gather someone important is sick.”

  “Downtimers expect immortality,” Dietr said scorn-fully.

  Duncan said, “Keep guarding their frequency, Damon.”

  “Yes, Duncan.”

  “Jean,” Duncan probed gently. “Jean Marq? “

  A long pause. Then: “Yes? What is it, Duncan?”

  “Can you take the cargo pallets down? “

  “Why, yes. If you want me to.”

  Dietr asked, “Have they the proper facilities for keeping the embryos frozen?”

  “They did when they ordered them, “ Duncan said.

  “That was two hundred years ago, down there. “ Krieg had little faith in colonists. None at all in their ability to advance their technology. Krieg had examined all that Anya had put into the data bank--data derived from the man called Kloster--and he was not impressed. Societies that suffered major shocks tended to remain low-tech. If they recovered at all.

  “The Voertrekker Minister of Husbandry said they are ready to receive the beasties,” Anya said.

  “Maybe they think they are getting grown animals,” Krieg said.

  “Even folk of Germanic stock could not be so badly informed, could they, Dietr? “ Damon asked wickedly.

  “Mind your manners, boy,” Krieg said, “or I’ll cut out your liver for Mira and her kinder.”

  “Anya,” Duncan said. “I’ll conn her for a time. You get some sleep. Damon, collect the monkeys in the Monkey House.” The tiny cyborgs tended to become confused when Glory was in low orbit, unable to decide which was up, which down. “And Dietr, as soon as we make orbit, start the mapping cameras. Colonists are always in need of new maps.” Ordinarily this would have been the task for either Jean Marq or Han Soo. But Dietr was capable and it would keep him occupied while Glory was at Voerster.

  Overhead, the planet turned. Now under a swirling patchwork of cloud, the single continent showed green in the heartland, gray-brown in the high plains. The ice caps were enormous, reaching from the poles to latitude 49 degrees. Duncan was reminded of Thalassa. But his home-world was a planet of rock and lichen and sea. On Voerster there were grass and growing things. Thalassa was winter, Duncan thought. Voerster was early spring or late autumn.

  Glory’s sailing directions, available through the computer drogue, informed Duncan that though Voerster was eleven-twelfths ocean, the land received little rain.

  He could see a great cyclonic storm building in the empty ocean of the water hemisphere. By the time it reached the continent of Voerster, it would soar into the stratosphere in great upwellings along the Shieldwall of the Planetia, or it would blow itself out on the vast, level Grassersee.

  The southern ice cap was reflecting the light of Luyten 726. But Glory informed Duncan that the surface temperature there was 210 degrees Kelvin--62 degrees below zero Centigrade. Survivable, but only just.

  Snow was falling on the eastern edge of the stratospheric Planetia where the Blue Glacier joined the Northern Ice. Not an easy world to live on, Duncan thought. But beautiful. Duncan Kr had been shipfast for two dozen months of uptime. The sight of Voerster made him restless and anxious to feel ground beneath his feet again.

  In the hold the brain of Han Soo, still and empty at last, said nothing.

  The old refractor was a fine instrument. It had been centuries out-of-date on Earth when it had been built as a rich man’s plaything. And it had been loaded on Milagro because the then-selected astronomer had held a fixation about the durability and usefulness of refractors in planetary work. Now, Osbertus thought with wry amusement, it was state-of-the-art on Voerster. For broad field observation it had no equal on Voerster. Osbertus had focussed it so that Eliana could see the dust of tiny diamonds that was the stuff of the Galactic lens’ edge. In the field as well shone Smuts, smallest of the Six Giants. And--like a fragile butterfly, small, yet the brightest object in the field-- the Goldenwing Gloria Coelis.

  Eliana drew in a startled breath. She had heard tales of the Goldenwings all her life, had seen numberless artists’ renderings, but this was something very different from all that. No living artist had ever seen a Goldenwing until Nepenthe had materialized without warning in orbit around Voerster. So unexpectedly had the vessel arrived, and so swiftly did it depart that no artist had had the opportunity to study it through the telescope atop the Sternberg. On Voerster there was no means of capturing and preserving an image in color. Photography was an art limited to the observatory’s glass-and-silver-nitrate, black-and-white technology. Astronomer-Select Kloster had found it impossible to produce more than a half dozen badly blurred images as he tried desperately to adjust the telescope to the low orbit Nepenthe had assumed to put Clavius downworid.

  The telescope’s rather clumsy mounting made observing anything in such an orbit difficult. The Astronomer-Select was of the private opinion that close-orbit observing techniques had never been developed by his predecessors because Voerster lacked a proper satellite. Osbertus had studied the Oral Histories of the First Landers. They had remarkable things to say about the “Moon” circling the homeworld. It was a heavenly body laden with an enormous baggage of legend: the home of the Hunt Goddess, the origin of female menses, the subject of an infinite number of verses, songs, and apothegms worthy of Black Clavius: “Now Cynthia, nam’d fair regent of the night--” “Fear may force a man to cast before the Moon--” “By the tight of the silvery Moon--” “Moon over Miami--” “That gentle Moon, the lesser light, the Lover’s leap, the Swain’s delight--”

  Clearly, without such a satellite, both love and astronomy languished. Even the dour Board of Censors acknowledged the nuda veritas that space travel began in the year Anno Domini 1969 with a flight from Earth to the Moon. Without a moon the first leap into space would never have happened and half mankind’s lovers would have died celibate.

  Now nearing Voerster, the approaching Goldenwing displayed itself as an object so intricate and brilliant that it resembled an example of the jeweler’s art displayed on black velvet.

  Eliana Ehrengraf had not come to Sternberg with her escort of two female Trekkerpolizei and a dour Wache captain just to peer through the telescope. She arrived at the observatory in an aristocratic fury--a mood that had darkened as her suspicions grew. She was at Sternberg for a purpose, and the purpose was not sightseeing.

  But the object in the field of the telescope commanded her attention. For a few moments she appeared to have forgotten the uniformed trio standing uncomfortably with Buele on the floor of the observatory dome below the observing scaffold.

  The distant Goldenwing was the most beautiful object she had ever seen. It was more than a thing. That it was made by people like herself made it even more remarkable. There in the sky was a visible symbol of the accomplishments of her species, one willing to challenge the grandeur of heaven.

  The vision tempered her anger and made her wish that Broni were here to share the wonder of it.

  “Isn’t it fine, Cousin?” She heard the voice of Osbertus Kloster in her ear. He had climbed the scaffolding to the eyepiece and was puffing with the effort. As it was with Broni, though to a lesser degree, strong emotions in Eliana Ehrengraf affected those nearby. Customarily she maintai
ned a reserved stillness about her for propriety’s sake, but the sight of Glory in the telescope affected her disciplined emotional control.

  “More than fine, Osbertus,” she murmured.

  “They’ve passed Wallenberg and are inbound through the Gap.” Osbertus was tempted to boast to his beautiful cousin, the Voertrekkerschatz, that this time he had established contact with the syndics aboard, and that this time the Goldenwing carried cargo for Voerster. It would not be, he thought, like the humiliating experience of nineteen years ago with Nepenthe. “They estimate arriving in six days. Six, mynheera. Think of it.”

  Reluctantly, Eliana moved away from the eyepiece. “But I didn’t come here to stargaze, Cousin. I came to ask your help.”

  Osbertus Kloster, distressed both by Eliana’s tightly reined demeanor and by the police escort that appeared to provoke it, was the last man on Voerster wishing to become involved in a family quarrel--most particularly when the family was that of The Voerster and Voertrekker-Praesident. Cousin Ian was not a man to be trifled with. But for Eliana Ehrengraf, Osbertus Kloster would do anything.

  Eliana moved away from the telescope eyepiece. “We must speak about Clavius,” she said in a low voice. “Privately. Without my husband’s snoops.”

  “Well, let us see if they have any imagination,” Osbertus said. “Maybe heaven can immobilize them.” He leaned over the railing of the observing scaffold. “Buele-- Bring the police ladies and the Wachekapitan up here. I am sure they would enjoy seeing the Goldenwing.”

  “Yes, Brother.” The boy’s reedy voice seemed to rise from the darkness below.

  “Brother?” Eliana regarded the old man quizzically.

  “Yes, well--” Osbertus flushed and said, “Some time ago he asked me to explain why Black Clavius so resembled our kaffirs on Voerster when he came from the stars. I told him that all men are brothers. He asked me if that included Voertrekkers, and I said yes, that it did. Then he asked:’Mynheeren, as well?’ What could I say? I replied yes, that it included black and white, mynheeren, and lumpen. From that time on he has called me ’Brother.’ He has a very literal mind, mynheera. Does it offend you?”