Glory

The age of colonization ended a thousand years ago. Only a few Goldenwings, the huge spaceships which carried humanity from Earth to many colony planets, still remain, still voyaging between the distant colonies carrying the cargoes those societies need to survive. The Goldenwing Gloria Coelis (known as Glory), with the glittering beauty of a sunrise, its huge space sails spread for hundreds of miles, approaches the planet Voerster with an essential shipment of biological materials, ordered 400 years before in local time. And on Voerster, settled by South Africans determined to preserve apartheid, revolution and war threaten, while the conservative ruler Ian Voerster and his wife are locked in a struggle over their sick daughter, whose heart condition will kill her without the advanced medicine of Glory.