Glory

by Alfred Coppel

  Taking care not to get too near the craft, the Voertrekker-Praesident took up a position on the flank of the now somewhat dishevelled Honor Guard. Benno shouted an order. The Wache troopers, to a man white-faced with suspicion of this monstrous visitation from out there, assumed the formal guard position. It was a posture out of the Manual of Arms, with their weapons (heavy-gauge shotguns) at high-port. It struck Ian Voerster as faintly absurd to assume a position intended for crowd control of restless kaffirs. The huge, hot spearpoints resting in Voertrekkerhoem’s field were unlikely to be impressed.

  For a long moment there was no sound but the creak of hot metal. Then a segment of the spearpoint’s ventral surface began to retract. Previously invisible creases appeared, widened. The entire segment sank into the craft, leaving a black hole.

  Ian Voerster’s breath came hard. His throat was too dry to swallow his frothy saliva. Have they come to kill us? he wondered. Are they truly men, or have they changed into something horrible, something more at home in the void of space than on firm ground?

  After all, what did one really know? Black Clavius was a human being despite the grotesque receptacle in his wool, but that was no assurance that all Starmen were human.

  Something appeared in the opening of the shuttle. A man. Thank God, Ian Voerster thought. Ian Voerster sucked in a deep breath of cold, wet air.

  But for his obscenely revealing clothing--a single garment that clung like a second skin and displayed the genitalia in disgusting bas-relief--the man from the stars could have been a Voertrekker. He stood on the tortured soil, looking about with evidence of a huge curiosity.

  The Starman spoke. The language was Afrikaans of a sort. Understandable, but absurdly accented and archaic.

  “I am Jean Marq, mathematician and syndic of the Goldenwing, Gloria Coelis” he said.

  A murmur ran through the ranks of the Honor Guard. The Starman looked at the troops and frowned. “The shuttles contain the cargo ordered by Alfried Voerster. I need men to help with the unloading.”

  The Voertrekker-Praesident stepped forward and spoke in his most formal manner. “I am Ian Voerster, heir of Alfried Voerster and Head of State, Mynheer Marq. Say what you need and you shall have it.”

  Another ripple of uncertainty ran through the nervous Wache lumpen. Perhaps, thought Ian Voerster, it would have been more practical to greet the Starman with ordinary Trekkerpolizei. But it was too late for that now. The Goldenwing had provided Voerster with a hostage, and when the moment came, the chocolate soldiers of the Wache would have to do.

  But what weapons did the man in the skintight suit carry? It did not look as though he had any place to conceal anything in that vulgar getup.

  The nearby shuttles began to open. The lumpen recoiled. From each machine a strange creature emerged, one a meter tall, with six jointed legs, four arms, and no head. The central torso was ringed with what appeared to be eyes.

  One of the Wache had had enough. He uttered a cry and leveled his shotgun at the clacking horror. Before Benno could prevent it, the trooper fired. Buckshot clanged off the rounded flank of the thing, ricocheting off without visible effect.

  The man called Marq’s expression betrayed his contempt. “It is only a machine, Voertrekker,” he said soothingly. “A machine intended to make unloading less burdensome.”

  Ian Voerster flushed. He was not accustomed to being the object of strangers’ pitying scorn. “Leutnant Benno! Take that man’s name.”

  To Marq, Ian Voerster said, “The man will be punished. Is your device damaged?”

  Marq’s eyes grew oddly veiled. “A syndicate and its belongings are not so easily damaged.” He gave a command. The robot produced a New Earth weapon called a beamer.

  A voice issued from within the first shuttle: “Jean Marq, remember what Duncan said about frightening or offending these people...”

  A bolt of lightning blue light sprang from the beamer’s lens and struck the ground at the offending Wache’s feet. Blue-violet light whirled and left a smoking hole in the earth.

  “Holy Jesus,” Leutnant Benno whispered.

  The semisentient robots chittered. The Wache flung down their weapons and fled, Leutnant Benno in pursuit.

  Ian Voerster stared at the Starman, humiliated and enraged. Alfried Voerster, he thought, what have you done to us? With all the control he could muster, he walked up to Jean Marq and stood stiffly before him. “That was enlightening, Starman. But come with me so that I can show you the hospitality of Voerster.”

  Just inside the courtyard wall of Voertrekkerhoem, a more disciplined and less favored detachment of armed men, this one under command of Trekkerpolizeioberst Transkei, fell on Jean Marq and made him prisoner.

  The small shuttle, one of three kept aboard Glory and variously called the sleds, the jumpers, or the useless toys (mostly by Dietr Krieg), crossed Voerster’s terminator at seventy-six thousand meters traveling at Mach 10.

  The sleds were not so heavily instrumented as were the larger cargo shuttles. Anya Amaya was flying by wire, unconnected to the computer interface. Her hands rested lightly on the controls. She seemed to be flying casually, almost without attention, yet the craft’s descent followed the mission profile created by Glory’s mainframe with zero deviation. Beside the girl sat Duncan Kr, and lashed down in the cargo hold lay the corpse of Han Soo.

  On a virtual-reality holograph hi the sled’s instrument panel, Anya and Duncan could see the wireframe images of the landing area changing as the angles changed. Mountains sheltered a valley. In the valley there appeared to be a large, grounded craft of some kind. “I think it is a dirigible,” Duncan said. “Have you ever seen one, Anya?”

  The girl smiled ironically. “New Earth has its faults, Duncan. Being technologically quaint isn’t one of them. But I did see a picture of a dirigible in a book when I was in breeding school. It was called Hindenburg.”

  “This one is not so grand,” Duncan said, studying the image in the display.

  Anya Amaya’s fingers caressed the controllers she held. I was a misfit in more ways than one, she thought. Even fertile, I would have been a disaster as a New Earth matron. But this is living.

  The sled passed through fifty thousand meters and across a line of squalls far below. The world was blanketed in cloud. The virtual-reality screen ignored the weather and showed a steep line of cliffs extending far to the east. The Shieldwall. The barrier between the grassy heartland of Voerster and a vast, isolated and cold, arid plateau. The Planetia.

  Glowing plasmas streamed off the plummeting sled’s leading edges. Like all landers the sleds were delta-shaped, with stubby wings and a ceramic outer skin. Inside the shuttle’s bobtail, the climb-out engines rested dark and silent. Their only purpose was to lift the sled back into orbit to rendezvous with Glory.

  The inside of the sled was brilliantly illuminated with red light. Duncan looked gaunt and melancholy in bloody illumination. What a sad, lonely boy he must have been, Anya thought. To be the child of a marriage group must have been very like starting life as a clone. Anya Amaya knew about that. A third of the children born on population-hungry NE were clones. It gave her an unpleasant thrill to know that back on her homeworld there were (had been, for they were swiftly growing old and might be dead by now) four others exactly like her. The thought revolted her. It reduced her--a human being--to the non-status of a made thing.

  Skillfully she piloted the sled into the cloud-tops. The wireframe images were all that she needed to keep the shuttle on course. At nineteen thousand meters they were still in the clouds. Radar mapping showed that they had traveled five hundred kilometers along the east-west length of the Shieldwall.

  Flashes of lightning speared the blackness through which the sled was descending. A brilliantly starry night suddenly exploded onto the forward-looking monitors. The sled had thrust free of the storm system. Below, the planet’s broken surface of granite mountains and sheer basaltic upthrusts gleamed in the starlight. Recalling his eidetic study of topo
graphical maps of Voerster, Duncan named them. The Grimsels. High peaks and sheer valleys cut by the movement of great glaciers ten million years ago. Guarded by those mountains lay the valley with the strange name of “Einsamtal.”

  Anya Amaya said, “Buckle in, Duncan. We are almost there.”

  The people in the tower room watched while Luyten ruddied the eastern sky. Broni, exhausted by her watch of the Goldenwing, had fallen asleep and had been taken to her room by Star, who carried the young Voertrekker girl easily. Eliana, Osbertus, and Tiegen Roark had remained in the tower through the night, watching each appearance of the Gloria Coelis as she swept from horizon to horizon in her low orbit.

  The string of golden spearpoints that had separated first had vanished, but a small point of light grew brighter. It left a trail of glowing gasses as it descended the sky.

  Sleepless and excited, Buele had lurked in the shadows of the tower room until Osbertus Kloster gave him a turn at the eyepiece of the telescope. The boy grinned at Osbertus and said, “He is coming, Brother. I called him and he is coming here.”

  Eliana murmured to Tiegen Roark, “Can it be so? Is the Stemkapitan coming to cure Broni?”

  Roark was deeply moved by the proud Eliana Ehrengraf’s pitiful hope. A hope he himself did not share. He wished he dared say to Eliana that the world was not like that--that one did simply wish something to be true and have it so. The world in which he had lived his life--Eliana’s world too-- was simply not so kind. If a Starman was coming it was for advantage. And besides, what could another Starman do that Black Clavius had not tried, only to fail? The simple bitter fact was that Broni Ehrengraf Voerster was dying. The only question now was whether she could live long enough to fulfill the Voertrekker-Praesident’s design, or, with unimaginable luck, frustrate it and leave her protectors alive.

  I was a fool to let my feelings for Eliana embroil me in an affair that will be my death, he thought.

  “Listen,” Eliana said.

  “Thunder,” Osbertus said.

  A cold wind blew in through the open window. The morning sky was clear, star-filled.

  “No, Mynheer,” Black Clavius said from the doorway. He filled the opening, a massive figure in homespun and black leather, his balichord hanging from his shoulder. “Not thunder,” he said.

  “Then what?” Tiegen Roark said irritably, his equanimity badly shaken by his thoughts of a moment ago. He was still a young man and a Voertrekker aristocrat, and but for his decision to follow Eliana to Einsamberg he would have had the prospect of a long and comfortable life. This disagreement about thunder only exasperated him. On the one hand was a foolish old man trying to be a scientist on a world highly antagonistic to real science, and on the other a kaffir giant who came to Voerster only to make trouble among the native blacks. “If not thunder then what?”

  “A sound I have not heard for ten years, Mynheer,” Clavius said.”’The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall He thunder upon them...’”

  Tiegen Roark, his nerves worn by a sleepless night and the sullen fear that had been growing in him ever since he had so foolishly set foot aboard the Volkenreiter, said irritably, “Make sense, old man. Don’t pretend to a holiness you haven’t got!”

  Eliana said swiftly, “Don’t you speak to the Starman in that way, Tiegen.”

  “No need to protect me, my lady,” Clavius said gently. “The Healer is quite right. My holiness is a fraud. I am not an honorable man. Only a homesick one.” He walked to the window and stood listening to the echoes of the sonic boom fading among the sheer granite peaks of the Grimsels.”’Lo, these are parts of His ways: but how little a portion is heard of Him? But the thunder of His power who can understand?’“ He stood at the stone sill, looking down the valley of Einsamtal. Something in the air added to his melancholy and made him uneasy. This, he thought sadly, at the very time when the rolling thunder of his own kind approaching should be filling him with joy.

  The work by the local kaffirs on the moored dirigible appeared to have stopped. Where was Luftkapitan Klemmer? The disciplined Klemmer would scarcely have allowed the kraal kaffirs to stop work on his beloved Volkenreiter.

  Eliana stood beside him. The scent of her hair was like flowers, Clavius thought. What an odd thing to remember on this sere world where flowers were unknown. “Is a Starman coming at our summons, Clavius?” she asked.

  “It could mean that, mynheera,” he replied, still searching the sudden quiet of the mountain valley.

  “It does mean that, Brother,” Buele said excitedly. “That is exactly what it means. I know.”

  “Hush, boy.” Osbertus said edgily. “Speak only when you are spoken to.”

  “Since when, Brother?”

  Before Osbertus could reply, a second peal of rolling thunder swept over the valley. Clavius raised his eyes to the zenith, where the sky was thick with stars, and there it was. A sled, its lifting-body contours glowing with the heat of a swift penetration, its swing wings extending into a landing configuration.

  Tears rose in Black Clavius’ eyes. How could it be that he had ever left his beautiful vastness of stars and darkness? he wondered. What racial madness had driven him ashore to share ignominy with the kaffirs of Voerster? His breast ached with homesickness. Lord, he thought, how well you and The Voerster know me. How well you know my weakness. Selah.

  The sled banked steeply and lined up with the length of the valley. Whoever was flying it was good, very good. Gloria Coelis was thrice blessed with such skilled pilots. The sled disappeared momentarily behind a granite dome and Clavius heard Eliana’s breath catch. For one who had never seen anything in the air moving at such speed, the Ehrengraf displayed an almost intuitive understanding of what was happening.

  The machine reappeared between the mountains and angled steeply toward the ground. At a half dozen meters height, it flared into landing rotation, skids extending from the ventral surface. Next appeared a ribbon chute and the sled struck the ground at a shallow angle a few meters from the moored Volkenreiter. Almost instantly it came to rest hissing and steaming.

  Clavius looked at Eliana. She stood with a hand at her throat, awed by what she had seen, yet somehow understanding it. Her empathic powers were formidable, the giant Starman thought. She has leached understanding from me as a mineral is leached from a stone.

  The others in the room, except for Buele, were not nearly so entranced. The astronomer looked frightened. The Healer had paled, but was standing firm as the hatch in the sled opened.

  Two occupants, a man and a woman, stepped to the ground. As they did so, the sound of gunfire echoed across the valley.

  23. ARE YOU HUMAN?

  On the radio Fontein’s voice from Winter Kraal was flat and without timbre. The carrier wave crackled and sputtered with the electrical discharges of the thunderstorms out on the Sea of Grass. Ian Voerster had to incline his head to the megaphone to understand what it was Vikter Fontein was saying.

  “If you have taken a Starman prisoner, you will have a revolt of the kraals to deal with.” The Planetian’s manner was contemptuous. “You’re a fool, Ian Voerster. You are ripe for the plucking.”

  Oberst Transkei, flushing at the insolence coming from the radio receiver, moved the microphone closer to the Voertrekker-Praesident. “In here, Mynheer, speak directly into this screened bit.”

  It frightened Transkei to see the Voertrekker-Praesident in such a state. The Voerster never personally used the radio, and it was a measure of how angry he had become that he was willing to do so now. Some Kraalheeren believed that technology had caused the Rebellion, and that even the lowest level of technology was suspect. Therefore swords were better than energy weapons, shotguns better than automatic rifles, heliographs better than radios. Some of the established churchmen even preached that the Luddite way was the proper way of life. Ian Voerster had never been such a fanatic. But it was true that he, like a long line of Voersters, preferred the old to the new. There was a time for inno
vation, he thought, but not now, not with Marq a prisoner in the lower cells of Voertrekkerhoem.

  Starman Clavius had been a prisoner--and without the mynheera Eliana’s interference, he still would have been. But the Gloria Coelis syndic was a very different matter. Mynheer Marq was a man with a ship and crew behind him, a ship that had been delivering vital cargo to Voerster. There was no telling where all this would lead, Transkei lamented. Now that freak of nature Vikter Fontein was taunting The Voerster.

  Ian Voerster said, “Don’t start congratulating yourself, Vikter. And above all don’t think you can escape the terms of the contract we signed. Now listen to me carefully.”

  The reply was profanity, but The Fontein was listening as instructed by the Voertrekker-Praesident.

  Transkei fumbled in his sabertache for a cloth with which to wipe the sweat from his brow. He had never, in all his life, felt so exposed and at loose ends. When ruling aristocrats break the law, what might not happen? The sky could fall. The policeman thought about the horrifying descent of the cargo shuttles. They could have as easily been loaded with munitions of war. If they had been, the government of Voerster would cease to exist.

  Ian Voerster said into the microphone, “My agents in Grimsel tell me that Eigen and Georg, with a gang of lumpen cutthroats, passed through there on the way to - Einsamberg. What do you know about this?”

  “I? Not a thing.” The Fontein seemed furious. As well he should be, Ian Voerster thought. Eigen was unhappy with his father’s decision to preempt the marriage contract with The Voerster and it appeared he was doing something about it But was that all there was? There was great guile in the people of the high country. And whatever else Vikter Fontein might be, he was not a fool.

  I am about to shake you badly, monster, Ian thought. Let’s see what you really think. He said, “Broni and Eliana both are at Einsamberg, Vikter.” He waited for the explosion. When it finally came, he interrupted the stream of profanity from the Planetian. “Shouting will win you nothing. Be silent and listen to me.”