Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  But not for long, this beauty of contrasts. The long-lived began to have a certain sense of timing, apart from Ian's machines and the opinions of the heavens, and Marak's said greater change was imminent, perhaps this year. Perhaps this very quarter of the year, all the life that clung to a foothold here would meet a new challenge. The earthquakes had assumed a rhythm he had seen before, and if he bet, as some of his foolish descendants loved to do, he would say it would be soon.

  Count among those signs Ian, perhaps seeing better than his machines, too, who quibbled about his going out on this ride, foreknowing he would lose the argument.

  "Go," the Ila had whispered, when she heard about the debate. She had even hinted at going with them-the Ila, who would bring all her accompaniment of tents and attendants and recorders, her cooks and her wardrobe and her comforts, not to mention her often-voiced opinions. He had not wanted her along. So he and Hati had spoken to a handful of the young men, and they had packed up the requisite equipment, thrown saddles on the beshti, and gone speedily over the horizon without further discussion with anyone.

  The Ila, he had heard, had chosen to be amused at his escape, and possibly had rethought the strenuousness of the journey, or possibly had not wanted to leave Ian and Luz unchallenged in the Refuge, likely to make decisions in which she would have no direct part for months. The Ila had generously wished them, through their watchers, a good journey, and was content that they had at least taken her au'it, a woman as ancient as themselves, and in the Ila's service, a recorder whose book now had become many books, full of the most extraordinary things.

  They rode carefully and well back from the rim of the deepening gorge, and this passage, like all others, the au'it recorded, writing as she rode, having given up the precarious ink for a self-contained source, but never relinquishing the weighty book she balanced on her knee, like those many, many books before it.

  The Western Red, a sizable river, poured through the gap into the Needle just east of them, where the rim of a second great river chasm split the southern face of the Plateau and joined the gorge. That seam in the earth stretched hazily off into the distance. From here on, only the wind and the rain had touched this ground since the Hammerfall.

  And this, Marak reminded the younger riders, created a certain danger. For centuries a rock layer might stand, undermined and precarious, balanced against wind and rain and gravity, but not against the added weight of a beshti's pads. So they kept the beshti back from the rim, not letting them meander to the fragile rim, no matter their longing to snatch a mouthful or two of the greenbush that grew there.

  They rode where the high, improbable rim of the Needle Ridge broadened, until they had a good, level space around them. Greenbush as well as knifeweed had spread here, in sand and soil that endured in patches across a layer of sandstone. It was sparse and tough foliage, gray, mazy clumps rising up off a tough and knotty base growth. Beshti could use either for graze.

  "Here for the base unit," Marak said to Hati and to the others, having brought the party to a halt. All about him he surveyed that unobstructed field of view, from the low-lying river gorge and the red land on the other side, to the bare, eroded sandstone spires falling away to the south, down to the wide pans, apart from this strip of ancient basalt.

  This broad place on the ridge was where they would put the critical relay, which might even make contact with number 105, lost out of range to the south, so they could perhaps gain its attention to effect an autorepair. So Marak hoped. At the very least, it was time to set a relay, since contact with the Refuge was perceptibly fainter. And there was, at this height, in that broad sweep of his eye westward, a rim to the sky.

  That was not good.

  "This is a good broad vantage before the Wall," he said. "Set up the base. And bring out the deep-stakes."

  The young men looked, all of them, apprehensively westward, as they ought, when he said that about deep-stakes. They gazed at just a faint dirtiness above the horizon. They should have seen it. Now they had.

  Deep-stakes. Time. Damn, time, and it was just getting to what would be a rapid deployment, just when Procyon had a screen cleared and ready for that new monitor Marak was setting up. He'd known it. He'd known it would work out that way. And what was this about deep-stakes, the irons they used to anchor shelter in a blow? Weather showed nothing but a small line of disturbance off the sea.

  The tap came in from Drusus, the clock showed 1802, and Procyon moved, realizing pain. His left leg had gone to sleep.

  "They're well out on that rocky spine, now, between the Needle River and the pans," he said aloud to Drusus, hiding his disappointment, since he knew Marak could overhear them talking. "They're at the site. Marak's asked the base be set up. Then he asked for deep-stakes."

  Flash of light. Quadruple flash from Drusus. "Coming on a serious blow, I'm afraid. And they're still setting up?"

  Drusus was taking up his watch in a similar office in another apartment, far across the station. Drusus would actually see the new landscape and the camp the instant the new relay and the camera installation turned on, if they got it done before dark. If weather didn't intervene.

  "Looks like."

  He, on the other hand, had to wait until morning to find out what happened, and he would very likely miss the deployment. It would take a bigger blow than seemed likely from the weather reports to prevent the base unit driving its legs down. It took only an hour.

  But he had taxed his brain and his eyes enough over the last eight hours. A flutter in his left eyelid and a leg gone to sleep confirmed it. He was officially booted out of the tap. He hadn't quite shut down yet, as he multitasked his transcript and Auguste's belatedly over to Drusus-they should have gone half an hour ago.

  He had a rapidly burgeoning headache, he'd been paying such tight and constant attention. The average tapped-in line worker in, say, a bank, sat with his ears plugged and his eyes shut, focused on a single audio interface and admitting no alternate possibilities to confuse his brain.

  He, on the other hand, did multitask. He didn't ordinarily take all the information simultaneously available to him, but close to it, and when he had to, his brain ran a large number of tracks quite handily: get the transcript out, get the board shut down, were the final two. All those daily repeated tasks, the same daily-routine keystrokes, the hindbrain could handle on autopilot.

  Drusus had been, it turned out, by a glance at the clock ticking away in his contact display, two minutes late tapping in. Neither of them was sinless, him for hanging on and Drusus for showing up late. But Drusus had delayed to get an updated weather report. Not entirely a favorable one, as it had developed a bit beyond the last he'd pulled down: he could see that when he demanded it. The front they'd thought would miss-wouldn't.

  He slid out of the chair, gathering up the used cup and plate, thinking about the cold front, and spotted the note he'd scrawled on his hand. Which otherwise he'd have completely forgotten, given the depth of his concentration.

  Anniversary.

  Damn. He'd been ready to think about restaurants. About de-buzzing and recovering the sensation in his right foot.

  "Procyon is reluctant to leave us," Marak said, at the edge of his conscious attention, and Procyon felt himself flush, embarrassed to be caught between here and there.

  "Good night," he said to Drusus, "Good night, Marak. Forgive me, omi." With that, he did entirely tap out, doing the little blood shunt behind the ears that shut the contact absolutely down.

  Contacts lost their internal lights, too. He took out the case from his pocket, cupped one eye and the other, dropping them into solution. Didn't take those out on the town, no. And the foot was still asleep.

  He'd been more wound up than he'd thought, so excited about the prospect of that new camera set up for a close-up of the area and taking his notes on the new growth he'd lost track of the weather he was supposed to be monitoring: he was embarrassed about that, in cold afterthought, ashamed that he hadn't tracked that weat
her change, which was a major part of his job.

  He'd gotten lost in his imagination, was what. He had his own curiosity about the land-the Needle River Gorge and the narrowing spine of mudstone and sandstone layered with flood basalt that arced around to the Southern Wall-that actually became the Southern Wall, when it reached the coast. He'd missed giving Marak an earlier warning. Marak had had to tell him. That wasn't good.

  But Marak had seen it. And they were well set, and prepared for what wouldn't be a blow of any scale such as in the old days. It was worth embarrassment, was all.

  And when he should have been pulling down the weather report, he'd been deep in geology, reading the charts-he hadn't known what the atmosphere was about to send down, but he had been tracking very, very accurately the stability of the ground on which Marak proposed to camp, and he had sent that over to Drusus, in its entirety.

  One scientist said the ridge might be an old crater rim predating the Hammerfall. A more prevailing opinion said it was uplift right along with the Plateau across the gorge, but another said that failed to account for the flood basalts. He'd gotten all but visual impressions through Marak's intermittent conversation and pored over his own maps of the lava-capped spine of rock that might or might not be Plateau Sandstone, carved to near penetration by the Needle River on one side and deeply faulted on the other. It had become a spired escarpment on the side of the alkali pans to the south, but the core of the spine was an outpouring of what had to be very ancient basalt, on Marak's side of the Needle. The curving spine where Marak had camped stood a good quarter kilometer above the gorge and nearly that far above the pans, on the other side of the escarpment, strata all tilted toward the south-

  All of that spoke of geologic violence, immense geologic force that, in conjunction with those flood basalts, had predated the ondat attack, in a previous period of vulcanism, on a planet whose plates had been locked, immobile. That was very, very old rock, that spine. It was an access to incredibly old rock. He imagined Geology was in a froth at the moment. He anticipated requests for samples, and almost took it on himself to request Marak collect them.

  He had notions of a very presumptuous memo, was making notes on every geologic hint Marak gave him about the age and orientation of the strata there, whether the rock that had been eroded off the spine was actually the same as the Plateau Sandstone across the gorge, as most geologists thought, or whether it was more like the floor of the pans, where there was also some suspicion of deep volcanic rock. In either case, the basalt layer was much thinner than they had thought. That meant an exposure of-granted extreme uplift-much older rock below?

  And dared he, two years on this job, and with only a recent course in geology of the region, contact Geology with his speculations? If it was not Plateau Sandstone, if the oddly formed spine was actually an exposure of a piece of an older coast that had rammed in here during a previous tectonic activity, they might get something of a magnetic record of prior orientation of the spine. More, in those exposed lower strata of the spine, there might even lurk a fossil record, life predating not only the ondat but the Ila's own interference in the ecosystem. That was the Holy Grail of planetary explorations. Fossil records were incredibly scarce, in the one inhabited area of the planet where they could get to them to collect them.

  He hoped he was going to get a request from Geology tomorrow, when they'd read Marak's observations, and more, when the new relay put a camera active on the site, and Geology got a much closer look at the area. he had an idea they would make urgent requests for all kinds of samples.

  But, God, when the Wall did break, they might well see the flood penetrate through cracks and fissures right into the Needle Gorge, flooding it all, along with the pans, carrying away the spine, so if there was any older record in the rocks, they would lose it once that happened.

  So Marak needed to get those rock samples.

  And his monitors and the room lights were about to turn off. He had to leave. If he didn't clear the room before the systems wanted to lock down, the tap supervisor would tell him about an overstay in no uncertain terms.

  Morning was soon enough to make a memo to Geology. It had to be. He wanted, tomorrow, to get a library search on southern fossils. He wondered if he dared pursue it all the way to Geology.

  Maybe to Chairman Brazis' office. Hello, sir. I'm Marak's junior-most watcher, with two years of basic geology. I think I've just found prior life.

  Ambition had some sensible limits.

  "Board, key out. Door open." The system had a voice lock, and it answered. The screens simultaneously went dark, all around the room. When he came back in the morning, and only in the morning, the door would let him in, at earliest, 0930h. The fact was, he didn't actually rent this apartment: Planetary Observations owned it. Specifically, the Project did, and had made its own alterations, and he wasn't allowed down here or onto the downworld tap except at his strictly regulated hours of duty. The Project didn't want its taps negotiating their own hours or collaborating with each other on their reports.

  So his day's work was done, forcibly so. He let the door lock behind him and took the day's cup and saucer upstairs to the main floor to put into the kitchen washer, all on autopilot. He was still thinking about that landscape Marak had described, still imagining that river gorge and the strata of the spine as he went upstairs and shed the work sweats.

  He took a quick pass through the shower, dry-cycled, and bare-assed it to the closet for a thoughtful change of focus and a major change of clothing-a nice combination of blues and brown, shirt, pants, boots, and jacket. Hair-it was dark brown the last while-in easy short curls, nothing fancy. Eyeliner was permanent. The rest he was vain enough to maintain as nature provided, unimproved, with its few little flaws. He didn't do seek-and-destroy on fat cells: the gym burned them off. He was actually a kilo light when he consulted the scan, and dessert was consequently an option tonight.

  An acceptable, if not a high Trend look. The brown shirt was a pleasure to the skin-and by now he began actually to feel his own skin again, and be sure where his feet were, after the daylong immersion in the tap. The mental solitude of a luxury apartment was delicious, a luxury the Project afforded after a flurry of multitracking and prolonged deep concentration. But solitude and silence would get truly stale before the evening aged much.

  Hell, get the mind off it. He wasn't supposed to think about the job after hours. Wasn't supposed to get together with the other taps and discuss things. His personal speculations-well, the spine had held for ages. It wasn't going to go tomorrow. He could get office time next downtime, to do his extended reports when Hati's taps were on and he was off. He could send out a modest note to Geology then, granted only Geology did wake up and ask for samples.

  "Sam, I'm going out."

  Sam's response was a single chime, not a single word from the computer after noon and before 2200h. His choice, that silence. He wasn't in the mood for a cheeky damn bot if his day was going badly, and he didn't like inane pleasantries if it was a really good day and his mind was still, as it was now, exploring the planet he'd just left, dancing down the ridges and wondering if that line of mudstone Marak had mentioned was in the sequence he hoped it was, and most of all hoping that there was time to do the work. if they missed getting samples when Marak was going out to the Southern Wall, they might still get some when he came back, which might be along the same route, a few months from now. Those rocks weren't going anywhere.

  "Down, Sam." He could speak to the bot. It just couldn't answer. Sam chimed. He walked onto the lift area and rode it down to the front door.

  Outside, in the Close, the lawyer's gardenias wafted heavy perfume to his senses. He nodded to the otherside neighbor tending her roses, a nice lady with not a clue what he did for a living or why a healthy young man left his apartment only in the tag end of the day. She was retired, but spent much of her time writing for a culinary society.

  The occasional polite nod was the only regular interaction he had
with her or his other close neighbors, whose dossiers he had read, and he had rather not know them better. The PO liked it that way. And he did his own part for anonymity, having nothing in common with the lawyer or the retired lady or, God knew, the rest of the honest citizens in the complex. He didn't look hostile or odd.

  He didn't bring home suspicious visitors. He didn't attract police, play loud music, wear his hair in spikes, or set off fire alarms. He was, in fact, relatively faceless in this pricey neighborhood of people who had, occasionally, children with problems; who occasionally threw big parties, who occasionally had noisy divorces and shouting matches on the doorstep, bothering everyone-as he bothered no one. He was Procyon, just Procyon, as the Fashionables chose to be, just Procyon, whose job nobody actually knew, or ventured to ask, and who, they might think, probably did his work by computer, since he wasn't a Stylist, but lived like one. He only went out in the evenings. But few people besides the lady with the roses were home during the day to think about that. It was a neighborhood adequately respectable and not too worried about the character of anyone with the credit to be living here, which was, he was sure, why the PO decided this was the ideal place to install one of its protected talents.