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years of wandering exile, failed to stop at Sternhoem to discourse and drink greena , the bitter grass brandy of Voerster, with Osbertus.
    Once, to Osbertus’ great delight the Starman said, quite without urging, “God is pleased with you, Mynheer Osbertus. You are a Voertrekker of a very different kind.”
    On Voerster, the word Voertrekker did varied service. The inhabitants of Voerster called themselves Voertrekkers. They were ruled by the Voertrekker-Praesident. Most of their monuments incorporated the word Voertrekker or the idea of Voertrekkerdom. Many centuries ago, the people from whom the Voertrekkers of Voerster sprang had left southern Africa to found a Free State. Those who led this great migration were called Voertrekkers --literally “those who travel in front.”
    In the Age of the Exodus, Bol-Derek Voerster, leader of the embattled and finally defeated Successor State, engaged the Goldenwing Milagro to carry the folk and their laborers to a recently discovered world in the Luyten system. The old Boer died of shock awakening from cold-sleep. But it was declared that the patriarch’s dying wish was that the world be known as Voerster and the people as Voertrekkers “until the end of time or the Day of Judgment, whichever comes last.”
    If Bol-Derek had lived long enough to see the Planetia, to which a third of his colonists--the less affluent--were assigned, Osbertus Kloster wondered if he might have been less grand with his prediction.
    In Kraalheeren circles it was said that Bol-Derek’s true genius had been his ability to entice Successor State kaffirs to join the migration to Luyten. It was a Kraalheeren joke that Bol-Derek must have promised the blacks all the grass they could smoke and forty hectares and a mule. But the truth was that Bol-Derek promised them what the Successor State had never delivered: equality, freedom, land, and escape from an Africa grown plague-ridden and chaotic. But Bol-Derek did not survive the awakening from cold-sleep, and when the Milagro landed the seeds of the Great Kaffir Rebellion were planted in the soil of Voerster.
     
    The Observatory of Sternhoem and all it contained was considered the property of Mynheer Astronomer-Select His sinecure included possession for life (at the Voertrekker-Praesident’s pleasure) of Sternhoem and all its chattels.
    Voertrekker society maintained the colonial fiction that all property and worldly goods were owned in common, to be used for the common good. This did not prevent the accumulation of wealth, but it did tend to stifle dissent. Since Landers’ Day no one but a male of the Voerster tribe had ever governed from the Machtstuhl or lived in Voertrekkerhoem, the presidential kraal.
    A Voertrekker folktale told of Voerster’s only, female ruler. The story was that once, near election time, a single generation after the Landing, the only candidate, Bolger turn der Voerster, died of a surfeit of greena and eel. Though grieving as a wife should, his young bride, a cousin named Elmi Voerster Ehrengraf, disguised herself as her husband, won the election, and assumed the mantle of Voertrekker-Praesident. It was said that she lived out her life as a man, ruling for fifty years. She was reputed never to have left the gloomy galleries of Voertrekkerhoem until taken out in her bier at the age of one hundred and twenty-three. Her austere kindness to the lumpen and the kaffirs was legendary, and the source of the mythology surrounding the Cult of Elmi.
    The story was probably apocryphal, but Osbertus Kloster had always rather hoped it was true. Black Clavius found it highly amusing but never ventured an opinion on whether Elmi was the stuff of fantasy or flesh and blood.
    Eliana Ehrengraf Voerster, the Voertrekkerschatz and, in Osbertus Kloster’s opinion, the most beautiful mynheera on Voerster, liked to smile her dazzling smile and say that it should be true, that Elmi must be real. “I would not be related to a shadow,” she said.