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would be a natural thing to seek one’s own kind, even among the stars. But the truth was that Clavius was slightly mad.
    But, Osbertus thought firmly, all Starmen were peculiar. Clavius was the only Starman the Astronomer-Select had ever actually met face-to-face. But how could Goldenwing crewmen not be strange when they carried embedded in their skulls a terrifying sign of the supernatural?
    Clavius wandered the savannahs with his Book of Gospels, his knapsack of homeopathic cures, his musical instrument, and his deep sonorous voice. He was revered in the homelands, where the blacks called him “Starkaffir.” Even in Voersterstaad mere was a kind of clique among the sons and daughters of the elite, devoted to meeting with Clavius and listening to his outlandish stories. The young mynheeren gathered in the parks and commons to hear Black Clavius preach, sing, and spin tales from offworld. Many of the young people were also followers of the Cult of Elmi. Shocking, really, thought Osbertus. A kaffir cult, a kaffir Starman, and the young of the best families on Voerster. Where would it end? he wondered.
    Osbertus sometimes attended these meetings incognito. He regarded the marooned star sailor as a perpetually replenished well of information about a vast life he, Osbertus Kloster, could only imagine. And he always made certain that Sternhoem was generous with its hospitality when Clavius appeared. The aging astronomer, even more than the young fashionables, yearned to know about the lands in the sky.
     
    Osbertus pushed the green-shaded lamp away and rubbed at the bridge of his ample nose. All around him was the echoing silence of the observatory dome, catwalks lighted at intervals by red night-lamps. The astronomer’s desk was of wood, real wood. When a rare near-tree was felled on Voerster, the logs went to the cabinetmakers of Voersterstaad where artisans cut and polished it until it was almost indistinguishable from the wood brought by the original colonists. Earth wood existed on Voerster only in tiny bits, now used for jewelry. But Osbertus Kloster’s desk was from Earth, brought aboard the Milagro , along with the Machtstuhf, now in the Great Room of the Kongresshalle in Voersterstaad.
    The desk belonged in a museum, and Kloster’s great-great-grandfather, a previous holder of the Sternhoem sinecure, had pridefully placed it on display in the grand foyer of the observatory. But when Osbertus became Astronomer-Select, he had had the desk carefully moved upstairs to the base of his beloved telescope so that the two artifacts Osbertus cared about could share one space.
    The telescope was shut down and unmoving and had been since the tenth night-hour. It troubled the astronomer that the telescope was so lightly used. But the fact was that the government of the Voertrekker State was penurious and indifferent to astronomy--to all science, except agronomy. Even medicine on the planet progressed--when it did progress--in the footsteps of the plant geneticists.
    The native animals of Voerster were all necrogenes. It was interesting to speculate how things would change after the shuttle of the Gloria Coelis unloaded ten thousand or more frozen placental mammals for the farms and kraals of Voerster. And wasn’t it odd that the word the mynheeren used to denote their estates was a word the homeworld Zulu had once used to describe the enclosures where they confined their cattle? Such matters intrigued the Astronomer-Select. Pondering was his avocation.
    He looked thoughtfully into the upper darkness of the dome. The long tube of the refractor seemed to vanish into the gloom. Osbertus had caused Buele to hand-crank the dome closed because who knew what damage might be done by the night to the twenty-six-inch objective lens far above his head? Of course no harm had come to the telescope in all this time, but if--if some ill befell the irreplaceable glass, what would Osbertus Kloster do? Suicide as a form of apology was not