Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  That was old, then, five hundred years or more. A wonder it had been still functioning, as was. He put the whole problem into his report for Brazis. Auguste had missed it-unlikely, since Auguste rarely dropped a stitch-or the malfunction had just happened.

  The monitors kept him sane in this job, confined in a viewless room. They lent him a sense of utter freedom, of wandering the planet below at any slight moment of boredom. While Marak was in range of cameras, as he was within the Refuge itself, he could maintain a schizophrenic identification with Marak and his surroundings, and with Hati; when Marak had been there, he had seen, sometimes, Ian and Luz and more than once, the Ila, who, diminutive and beautiful, was the scariest individual he had ever imagined.

  For Marak, he held the mental image of a man in his thirties, more often than not wrapped in the robes of his long-lived tribe, which Marak preferred. Marak's people learned new skills, knew computers and bioscience, hydroponics and engineering, mining and manufacture, the old ways and the new. Most of Marak's people wore clothing that was far more conservative than one saw on the station, but certainly not desert robes. These generations stepped aside and stared in awe when one of the Old Ones, young as themselves, walked through the halls of the Refuge, a breath of the past in their body-swathing, tribal-patterned robes, with the aifad, the veil that kept moisture in, dust out, and thoughts private. Talk stopped. Imagination-came up against a wall.

  They were all special, the surviving Old Ones, suffering no age, no death except by mishap so severe and sudden their internal nanisms failed to make repairs. They passed their longevity to their children not by genetics but by infection; and could bestow it on strangers as well, but they rarely did that, as hard experience had, so the literature said, made it clear that generations more focused on a mortal timescale did not easily adjust.

  The world, since the Hammerfall, had reacquired a biological clock. Latter-day lives ran by nearer and nearer expectations of outcome, and began to think that several days of waiting was long.

  The original Old Ones not only had learned Outsider science, they had a personal memory of the Hammerfall: that was one thing. The Ila, oldest of all, had the memory of the Gene Wars and the Landing, and had originated the nanisms that had reshaped the ecology, a life span that staggered the mind even to contemplate. That handful of immortals had a community that transcended old feuds, had a shared perspective that somehow anchored them in time, a shared reality from which they were all born and from which they seemed to derive their curious sense of scale. He had read Marak's personal views on the subject, in which Marak swore he'd beget no more children, and give no one else his gift: it was too hard, Marak said, for the later born, without that cataclysmic event of the Hammerfall in their past.

  Why? Why was it hard? What had the immortals all seen, that made that moment the changing point? Procyon yearned most of all to ask such questions, sure that there were more than the obvious drawbacks to immortality that a callow twenty-five-year-old could think of. He was sure there was a word somewhere in it that could give him a far different perspective than he had, a perspective that might be useful in what he did-so useful, so immensely useful, he might become an expert, an oracle in the service of the Project, if he had it.

  Brazis would have his hide if he spoke to Marak unbidden, that was what-well, except for weather warnings and the like. If Marak ever wanted to exchange views with him, philosophically speaking, Marak easily could do that, and so far didn't, and thus far showed no interest in doing so, which would likely be the rule forever.

  Marak apparently liked him, however. Marak had chosen him out of a hundred possibles, not the most experienced watcher on staff-in fact, the least. Not the brightest, maybe, certainly not graced by the best record in the Project, being only third-shift watcher of one of the youngest of Memnon's line, aged six, and having gotten into the Planetary Office by the skin of his teeth in the first place, despite his lack of connections inside the Project. He didn't know why Marak liked him. He certainly wasn't the watcher the Chairman had wanted Marak to pick, he was sure of that-but the regs said all possible choices had to be in the pool when one of the seniors chose, and the ancient agreements said it was absolutely Marak's choice to make, end of statement.

  So after sifting through all availables, Marak had picked him, for reasons Marak never had to explain, and the rules, most tantalizing, never let the subject of that selection ask.

  The little he did know-Marak's seniormost watcher, the day watcher, had died of old age, time finally overtaking even the most highly modified in the Planetary Office. Marak, Drusus had told him, didn't want somebody senior, coming in with perspective and history with him, and especially didn't want someone with a long record of intimacy with any other of his contemporaries. Marak, he overheard in the Project hallways, zealously avoided politics and kept his own counsel. And the same whisper among the watchers, some jealous, said Marak might test him for years before he said a thing to him of a personal nature.

  Or Marak might never talk directly to him at all. He knew it must frustrate the Planetary Office that Marak wasn't talking to his daytime watcher in the frank, offhanded way he'd talked to the last one. A source of information had gone. And all he could be, all the PO could be, was patient, and hopeful, and meticulously correct.

  He didn't know where his career would take him, though he doubted he would be shunted aside, as he'd been moved from his last assignment, unless he did something extravagantly objectionable to Marak. So he had a certain security, being as high as he could get, while getting a major vacation now and again, enjoying his work as the dream job, and being paid exorbitantly.

  The drawback-there was one true drawback to it all-was that he couldn't tell anybody on the outside what he did for a living. Watchers-Project taps-worked inside a security envelope that, if you breached it, would just swallow you down and never let you out again, in any physical sense, let alone the informational one. So assuredly he had no desire to break the rules and end up living his entire life as a shadow in the farthest recesses of the Project offices.

  And what was that job? He monitored Marak's whereabouts, activities, and observations, he took notes, he made his hour-by-hour transcript, he passed that on to Drusus, who passed it on to Auguste, who passed it back to him, as watchers had done, time out of mind. He was a highly classified instant communications system and still an observer-in-training, but he never forgot it was a dangerous planet down there, and his attention to what he did could conceivably make a difference between life and death for a man on whom the integrity of the Project depended, a contrary and independent man who'd lived longer than any human mind could grasp.

  His job, in effect, was keeping tabs on God, or such a god as the planet had, besides the Ila, besides Luz and Ian.

  And learning. Fast. Marak, when he was in the Refuge, had encounters with people with various agendas hour to hour, and it was his job to consult with other watchers and suspect who was up to what. When Marak dealt with his own family, in their enclave-or with the Ila-where politics was definitely at issue-transcripts were a fast and furious production. A tap knew a mistake could racket to the halls of government.

  But this, this venture into the outback, was six months of pure wonder, observations, close work with the science departments, instead of other taps. Marak traveled out into the world with his wife, enjoying the days, observing a land whose scale of change was more like his own life span and Hati's.

  Out there Marak could say, as he had yesterday, of a certain landmark-it's almost all worn away now, the way some people would say, Hmmn, that frontage was painted green yesterday, wasn't it? Or, The camelia's in bloom. How nice.

  His job, his enviable job, was watching God watching the world change.

  Third cup of caff. Take a walk around, stretch the legs. Take a break. Meddle with the displays. Tinker with a 3-D puzzle he had laid out on the counter days ago. Take a note or two. Since the tap was audio, mostly, and one-way, at his selecti
on, he could do that, while keeping up the transparent transcript he was building. There were other aspects he could use, including voice from his direction, simply by talking aloud and letting the resonant bone of his skull carry the sound to the tap, but such contacts were rare. He wasn't supposed to talk aloud during his hours of observation, in order not to annoy Marak. He used a keyboard, used a tablet, drew and typed in a rapid code. Across the station, in various apartments, in various offices, the day's records grew and sifted from one office to another, everything from repair requests to weather reports and geology.

  His notes by midmorning were mostly botanical, the latest involving a patch of low scrub of a kind, greenbush, that Marak remembered personally seeding north of the Needle River, oh, six or so hundred years ago. Reference available to Procyon's casual scan said it tended to be a precursor species. It put down roots, and lighter seed that blew up against it lodged, grew, and fought the precursor species for water, if water was scarce.

  Scarce it was not, on the Plateau, and would be less so if the Southern Wall cracked. As the climate changed, precursors and new plants would live and fight each other for sunlight, until their strongest descendants won. But that was in the future. Marak said he was seeding several other plants as they passed, a ground cover, stubweed, and a taller type of shrub, blue dryland windwalker, that, Marak said, might rim a someday sea.

  Procyon keyed up images of those plants, too, getting his own picture of what Marak intended and the sort of growth Marak foresaw covering the thin sandy skin of this rise. He didn't want to make another statement Auguste could gently imply was foolish.

  And he was insatiably curious.

  Crazy, his younger sister had said about him. Way too serious. Enjoy life. Who cares about classes? Cut out. Party.

  He did enjoy life, precisely because he knew what those plants looked like, because he was planning a way to get into an intelligent dialogue with Auguste in this next report to prove he wasn't a fool, and because he knew, because Marak hadn't needed to give his conclusions aloud, but had-that he'd been purposely given a tidbit of information. A living god thought his curiosity was worth rewarding, the way he had rewarded his predecessor's. Finally.

  And that inspired him beyond all expectation. Curiosity was his life. Curiosity made him enjoy getting up in the morning. Curiosity made him dive right in even before the alarm went off-

  Hell!

  Anniversary. The parental anniversary.

  He'd come in here, isolate from the house system, before Sam gave him the scheduled reminder, and he hadn't remembered to tend to it before work.

  He made a note on his hand, as something he'd carry out of the room.

  He could take care of it. He had an idea. Courier delivery. Peace in the family was the important thing.

  Marak and Hati rode, meanwhile, talking quietly, and Procyon listened, only listened.

  Eavesdropping on God. Tagging along like a five-year-old, learning everything in the whole world as if it were new, and sometimes almost forgetting to type his notes in the excitement of the instant.

  They'd come in sight of the rim of the Needle River Gorge, the edge of the western lowlands. They had reached the narrowest part of the rocky spine, from which they could see the deep of the gorge on one hand and the expanse of the pans in the other, both at the same time.

  God, that had to be a view.

  "Green," Marak said to his wife and his companions, looking back down the curve of the long ridge of rock-desert pans dizzyingly far below on one side, and now the eroding deep of the great gorge on the other side of this resistant, ancient lava flow. He added, for his young watcher, "As far as the eye can see."

  Marak rode comfortably, foot tucked in the curve of the beshti's neck, rocking gently to a rhythm as steady and eternal as his heartbeat, the line of their caravan still ascending that narrow spit that was part of the Plateau, which became, ultimately, the Southern Wall.

  "Green-rimmed like the Paradise," Hati said, meaning the river of the Refuge, where fields and farms and orchards had skirted the first dependable water of the midlands desert, to welcome the refugees in the days of the Hammerfall.

  Plants always came first in their plan. Plants that cleaned and replenished the air, not only plants on the land, but algae blown out onto the vast oceans, mats of algae in shallows, life of more complex sort running down with water from the free-flowing streams of the midlands. Marak understood these things. Hati understood. That was the work they did, slowly remaking the world in a way the ondat might one day approve, and grant their descendants peace from a war they never began.

  They'd seen the rockets go out, trailing fire into the dusty clouds until they were a white and vanishing glare. Such rockets burst far away and showered algae bloom high into the furious winds. Over and over and over, year after year, Ian had sent them out.

  They had seen the snow come down, and the hail fall, sometimes breaking rocks, the hail of those days was so large. They had seen monstrous whirlwinds dance across the lowlands, vortices within vortices, whirlwinds that, carrying sand on the high plateaus, would strip an unprotected body to bone as they passed.

  From the earliest days of the Hammerfall, rains had begun in the high desert, and the winds dried the rain, and sent it high up into clouds that rained down again, until, year by year, since the great destruction, the wind kicked up less dust. These days, gray-bottomed cloud swept off the heights in regular systems, clouds carried on the winds at the edge of heaven.

  These days, dependable streams of water fell in a thundering spray off the escarpment, in a chasm that widened year by year, and, conjoined, they flowed down to the Needle, carving a deep gorge on its way to the sea, working its last bends closer and closer to penetrating this ridge.

  They had seen the rains fall until the air itself changed, until, these days, they wore the a'aifad more often against the evening chill than the blowing dust that had been the rule in oldest times.

  They had ridden the eastern lowlands hundreds of years ago, finding lichens on once-barren rocks, and scum on the pools. They had carried samples to Ian and Luz. The Ila, on first hearing of their discovery, had avowed herself uninterested. "Tell me something more than scum on the ponds," she had said, affecting scorn. But she had surely heard, this power who had loosed her own makers on the world in one single pond of free water. And all through these ages, Ian and Luz had watched her very carefully, as if she nursed some secret store of trouble she could loose if ever the world grew amenable. Certainly she might to this day possess knowledge she had never given to them. That she did have such knowledge, Marak was certain.

  But Ian and Luz had knowledge, too. They had changed the world with their skill. On their account, the Ila's great enemy, the ondat, had called off their war with the world, and only watched from the heavens, waiting, waiting, for what outcome those who dealt with them claimed not to know.

  The land went on changing. The ondat seemed satisfied, for now, at least.

  The beshti under him had struck a steady pace. Hati's strode side by side. The boys rode easily behind, with the pack beasts all rocking along at that sustainable rate that could cover considerable ground in a day, climbing up the long, gentle rise of the spine. Machines could go many places where riders might suffer great privation; but Ian lost a good many of his precious drones and robots to uneven ground, to weather and dust, too-metal and materials that had to be searched up out of drifting dunes at great labor. by riders, who had to go after the failures.

  And as for the little rovers, their solar panels blew apart in the winds, liquid fuel had to be brought to sustain them, grit from the unseeded places got into their works, and they failed. After all was said and done, in Marak's opinion, despite Ian and his clever synthesizers, riders were still the best.

  Riders fared best here in rough land, for instance, where there was very little space between one fall and the next.

  A good day in the heavens, a good day on earth. And the Refuge was far
behind them and mostly out of mind for days on end.

  "The green has spread down to the river terraces," Hati said to him, when a deep erosion in the rim of the Needle Gorge afforded them a view of those terraces, hazy with depth below, and indeed a careful eye could make out a gray-green, spiky sort of growth they called knifeweed because of the look of it, a stubborn, windblown plant that had outfought the shifting sand in patches throughout the lowlands, growing tougher year by year.

  So it grew on the very rim of the Needle Gorge, and now below it.

  "Knifeweed," Marak named it aloud, for Procyon, "patches all through this place and well down into the gorge."

  There was a great deal else of new growth, some of it unexpected. Where he rode now, well up on the spine, they had never gone, only seen it through eyes in the sky.

  For those who lived forever, something new was oftenest measured in rivers and rocks. And to his eye this dark basalt underlying the red and gold land across the gorge, newly dotted with green and gray, this was already a place of change, a sight already worth their coming. Here, ancient volcanic flows were exposed and uplifted, the red cap worn away-only on this side of the gorge. It was a fault line, and a great one.