Glory

by Alfred Coppel

  As the airship rose into the gusty winds, Klemmer, standing at the helm and throttles, headed her east, away from Voertrekkerhoem, and advanced the engine speed. Ahead, at some fifty kilometers, Klemmer could make out a pod of thunderstorms. Individuals now, they were swiftly being marshalled into a line of squalls by the winds that blew unopposed across the Sea of Grass.

  Klemmer turned to a more northerly heading, hoping to flank the storm line.

  “Nasty looking buggers,” Blier said from his post at the elevator wheel. “Can we get round them, Luftkapitan?”

  “Certainly. Watch your height, Blier.”

  Klemmer measured the distance to the parturient squall line with his practiced eye and then studied the airspeed indicator. Volkenreiter was making about ninety kilometers per hour and her speed was slowly rising. Her best cruise was 105 KPH, but it would take her fifteen minutes to reach it. It seemed unlikely that it was going to be possible to avoid all of the turbulence and rain ahead. As if to emphasize that point, Volkenreiter shouldered into several severe downdrafts that staggered captain and mate. He hoped his passengers were not frightened by the turbulence, but he could not leave the helm to make his customary tour of the main salon. This was a damnable journey in the making, Klemmer thought.

  But, his hohen schule tutors had taught him, if there were two characteristics that set Voertrekkers apart from all other colonials, it was respect for one’s betters and a dogged devotion to duty. Otto Klemmer gripped the helm with hands impeccably gloved in gray leather and drove his ship toward the distant storms. Volkenreiter climbed steadily into the windy, cloud-dappled sky.

  In the forward salon of the gondola, Broni Ehrengraf Voerster, dressed in leather flying clothes and wrapped in a thickly woven blanket, sat as close to the windows as she could get. Black Clavius stood at the back of her chair.

  “Look at the sky, Clavius. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Broni turned to look up at Clavius, her pallid face alight with excitement. As if to support her contention, the white sunlight of Luyten shone through breaks in the clouds with what looked like a shower of spears. The wind kept the clouds in swift motion so that Volkenreiter climbed through the spearshaft rain, one moment in bright sunlight, the next in twilight. To the east, on the swirling surface of the Sea of Grass, the airship’s shadow raced across the ground, appearing in the light, vanishing in the shadows of the swiftly moving clouds. Broni was fascinated by it.

  “The shadow, Clavius. It keeps pace with us like a spirit. Do you suppose machines like Volkenreiter have souls, Clavius?”

  “If God chooses, mynheera Broni,” Clavius said gently.

  “God?” Broni murmured.

  “‘Who covereth the heavens with clouds? Who prepareth rain for the earth, who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains?”‘

  “That is very beautiful and I do not mean to doubt you, Clavius,” Broni said, her eyes still fixed on the swift shadow far below. “But I wonder about God sometimes.”

  “So do I, child,” the black man said. “So do I.”

  In the rear of the salon, where she sat in conversation with the Healer and a very nervous Osbertus Kloster, Eliana heard the exchange and felt a hand squeeze her heart. Broni’s courage represented the best of the Voertrekker heritage. Just as her father’s insensitive stubbornness represented the worst.

  Of one thing Eliana was now certain. There was nothing she would not do, no line she would not cross, to force the creatures aboard the Goldenwing to save her daughter.

  When Ian returned from Windhoek, weary and expecting the comforts of home, he would be furious to hear that she had taken not only Broni, but Clavius and Osbertus to sanctuary at Einsamberg.

  Two of Eliana’s kaffir servants, a man named Bol and a woman named Star, entered the salon and began to set a table with provisions from large wicker picnic baskets. Fruits, cheeses, pastries. Voertrekker appetites were robust because the foods of Voerster hadn’t the same nutritional value as the victuals of Earth. What meat was eaten came mainly from the stock descended from the animals brought along with the colonists by the Goldenwing Milagro.

  Bol presented the wine bottle for Eliana’s inspection. She had never tasted a proper wine, and she knew it. There had been some wines of South Africa on the Milagro, but all that remained of them were a few bottles in museums in Pretoria and Voersterstaad. The climate of Voerster was too severe for good wine grapes. But she nodded in approval, glad of the interruption.

  The two men with her were not pillars of strength, but they would have to do. At least, she thought, they are loyal and they care for Broni.

  Bol poured the cold wine into thin crystal goblets which had been made before the Rebellion and were therefore priceless. Voertrekker life was filled with the reverent use of old things, the most valuable being things brought from Old Earth, from Home, though Voertrekkers seldom called it that any longer.

  Osbertus tasted the pale red vintage and said, “An Ehrengraf Mountain. How fine, Cousin. It isn’t something we get often nowadays.”

  “There is very little left,” Eliana said, sipping her own. “This is a very special occasion, Osbertus.” She raised the glass and said, “To a family rebellion.”

  Tiegen Roark looked uneasy. He lifted his glass and drank. Buele appeared from the main cabin. His spiky hair had been pomaded by Osbertus in an effort to make him presentable. The attempt was only marginally successful. But Buele was trembling with excitement. He had never before ridden in an airship.

  Osbertus asked, “Has Star given you your lunch?”

  “Who can eat, Brother? We are flying!”

  “Come look, Buele,” Eliana said. “You can see the mountains very clearly from up here,” and she made room for the boy near the window.

  “They have snow on them, Sister.”

  “There is always snow on the Shieldwall.”

  “Is Winter there?” The boy regarded her intently.

  “Yes, Buele,” Eliana said evenly. “It is always winter there.”

  Tiegen Roark looked startled. Was the half-wit actually talking about a season or was he somehow speaking of Winter Kraal, and Broni’s threatened future? How could he know what Eliana, herself, did not know?

  “May I go up and watch the airmen, Brother?” Buele looked to Osbertus Kloster.

  “Yes. But don’t make a nuisance of yourself. Touch nothing.” Buele danced away and swarmed up the ladder to the flight deck.

  “‘Brother’? ’Sister’?” Tiegen Roark looked as though he had noticed a bad smell.

  “It’s a long story,” Osbertus said. “Some other time, Healer.”

  Outside, and slanting away in the moist air, a flight of lizard-birds, close cognates to the legendary archeopteryx of Earth, banked sharply away from the oncoming dirigible and vanished behind and below. The once-distant line of thunder squalls was no longer so distant. Osbertus Kloster said, “Those look ominous, mynheera. I had better recommend to the Luftkapitan that we climb above them.”

  Eliana glanced at a brass altimeter fixed to the salon wall for the edification of the dirigible’s passengers. “We are already at thirty-five hundred meters, Cousin,” she said. “Higher might be dangerous for Broni. Tell the captain to find a way around them.”

  Osbertus exchanged worried glances with Tiegen Roark and stood up. As he passed Broni and Black Clavius, he heard the girl say, “But is it more beautiful than this in space?”

  “The stars shine more brightly,” Clavius said.

  Osbertus heaved himself up the steep ladder into the flight deck. Buele was watching intently the labor of Airshipman Blier on the elevator wheel. Osbertus could see that the elevator man was perspiring with his efforts to keep the dirigible on an even keel.

  Luftkapitan Klemmer stood at the helm, steering a steady course to Einsamberg, beyond the line of squalls.

  “Luftkapitan,” Osbertus said, holding on to the brass rail that ran the full perimeter of the flight deck under the broad windows. “The line squall
s--”

  Klemmer, his face flushed with the effort of flying Cloud Rider undermanned, said testily, “I see the storms, Mynheer Astronomer-Select. We shall climb above them.”

  “That is what I came to say,” Osbertus said, hurt by Klemmer’s impolite abruptness. “The mynheera Eliana instructs me to tell you to find a way through or around them. Any more altitude might be harmful to the Voertrekkersdatter.”

  Klemmer’s already thin lips grew thinner. He was tempted to say, “Falling to the ground in a ripped apart airship would probably be even more harmful.” But one did not speak to the mynheera Eliana Ehrengrafs messenger in that manner. “Very well, Astronomer-Select,” he said. In the many fine gradations of interpersonal address among Voertrekkers, to use one’s title without the honorific “Mynheer” was a slight, as though one were addressing a mere purveyor of goods or services.

  Osbertus looked wounded but he retreated in good order. The captain, no less than Obsertus, was clearly worried. And not mainly about the weather. Perhaps he was just now remembering that he never before had flown the Voertrekker-Praesident’s women to Einsamberg or anywhere else without direct and written authorization.

  Ian will be raging, Osbertus thought. And then, through his fear and misgivings shot a single bright ray of satisfaction. For once in his sedentary, ordinary, pampered life Osbertus Louis Eugen Kloster was behaving like a hero.

  16. FIRST ORBIT

  Glory, in low orbit, swept across Voerster’s sky from northwest to southeast. The light of the Luyten sun reflected through and from a deck of broken clouds above the vast stretches of the Great Western Ocean. Duncan Kr regarded the vast sea with a touch of nostalgia for Thalassa. But where Thalassa’s sea was ever turbulent and angry green, Voerster’s Great Western Ocean was streaked with turquoise shallows and cobalt depths. From latitude 10 degrees north to 10 south the sea displayed the tops of immense underwater forests of kelplike plants that contributed to the oxygen in Voerster’s atmosphere. A severe planet, Duncan thought, but not a cruel one.

  Glory’s rigging glowed with St. Elmo’s fire as the orbital track cut the lines of Planet Voerster’s magnetic field. It was a sight that never failed to awe Duncan. An incredibly beautiful aurora danced and shimmered along the monofilament stays and halyards, leaping spaces, racing up a brace to flash across to a sheet or halyard and down the slender shaft of a mast.

  Duncan Kr was Wired, but sitting on the edge of his pod for a real-time view of the scintillating display. From where he sat, he could observe Anya Amaya’s spacemanship with a Master and Commander’s critical eye. Glory’s Sailing Master was the finest instinctive ship-handler Duncan had ever known. She ordinarily sailed the Goldenwing as though the vast spread of skylar were the Bermudan rig of a light-yacht.

  But since her near death in space, she had grown more cautious, less free and instinctive with her helmsmanship. Though Glory still responded to her touch like a lover, the computer now made allowances for her hesitations.

  When Duncan discussed this with Dietr Krieg, the physician said, “How fanciful you are, Duncan. Amaya is only a woman. And Glory is only a ship, after all, doing what it was built to do. A machine.”

  True enough, Duncan thought. But if it came to that, how did one define “machine”? Did the clipper-ship captains of Earth often remind themselves that their tall ships were only wood and canvas? Duncan thought not. In his personal compartment he kept a tiny gem of a model clipper in a bottle. A tiny Cutty Sark. The original, named for a witch in the poet Burns’ Tam O’Shanter, was a vessel that had made the swift passage around Cape Horn from Europe to the Pacific coast of America many downtime centuries ago. The model-maker, a septuagenarian handicapped sailor-turned-colonist on Nixon, a desert planet in the Wolf Stars, was ten uptime years dead by now, and forgotten by his fellow colonists. But Duncan remembered and honored him for the memory he had preserved so lovingly inside an ancient liquor bottle.

  Were machines only objects--things? Or were they precious cells of a vast universal reality with as much claim to “life” as any other organism?

  From time to time, when his mind was most alert and his natural empathy stimulated by the drogue, Duncan could intercept and interpret the emotional auras of the others aboard Glory. At such times he could feel what they felt, and share their view of the ship they served. Dietr Krieg was ever skeptical, but deep within his personality he, too, carried a need for the reality Glory represented. Damon and Anya loved Glory as wholeheartedly as did Duncan himself.

  Mira’s reality was fascinating, and the most uncomplicated. The cat experienced Glory as the “great-queen-cat-who-is-not-alive.” That was the nearest Duncan could render the alien and immensely aware thought. He found it remarkable and humbling that Mira’s cat brain did not trouble her with human-created distinctions between the living and the solely sentient--the very distinctions that Duncan’s own anthropoid mind insisted upon making.

  Duncan suspected that mankind had never been completely at home in the true universe. Little wonder that when humanity’s australopithecine forebears finally dared to venture onto the savannahs of Gondwana, Mira’s ancestors had often made a meal of them.

  He looked out at the gleaming golden sails reflecting the planet below. If Glory was not alive at such moments as these, then the whole idea of life needed to be winnowed to exclude the grand, the marvelous, and the beautiful.

  Anya, lying in a full sailing coma in her pod, stared at nothing (and everything) with empty eyes. She lay atop the glyceroid, rather than in it, because the changes in Glory’s delta-V could now be measured in millimeters per second. When Anya sailed into a low-orbit injection the resulting flight path was so secure that Glory could orbit the planet for ten thousand years and never graze the atmosphere. Even with her silent fear, Anya was that good.

  She was clothed. It wasn’t her way. But the incident with Jean Marq had chilled her ordinarily open sexuality.

  Through the computer Duncan could sense Jean in the cargo bay, preparing the panniers that contained the refrigerated cargo, and the mules to move them. The inhabitants of Voerster would probably be delighted to receive what had been ordered long ago. But the computer had created a synthesis from the known history of Voerster and the torrent of information sent by Osbertus Kloster, the astronomer at Sternberg.

  The Voertrekker below would be appalled, Duncan thought, if he knew what, in his babbling eagerness to acquaint the syndicate with the nature of his world, he had told Glory’s computer. The Voertrekker society of Planet Voerster was damned. It had lived for a thousand years without change. Its technology advanced slowly or not at all. Challenges were met with methods that had been out-of-date when Golden wing Milagro left orbit around Earth’s moon.

  A colony based on the old and bitter ethic of apartheid would have had a difficult time surviving under Voersterian conditions. Though not a killing world, Voerster challenged men so severely that survival required an enormous altruism. A group that had carried with it from Earth all the buried hatreds and prejudices, and the victims of those hatreds, contained the seeds of suicide.

  Some of Voerster’s history was in Glory’s data banks, filed there when a Glory syndicate had scheduled the voyage purchased from Nostromo’s people, who had accepted the purchases made a downtime generation ago on Voerster. Duncan had studied the history files as he was tasked to do by the compact of Glory’s syndicate. The picture of Voerster that emerged was not an engaging one.

  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.