Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  Chime. Sam had swallowed the message. If his parents called, following his note sent by courier, they'd get that as an answer, and give up calling him at home.

  "Sam, turn off the set."

  Chime. Off it went.

  He gathered the basic strength to climb the set of eight shallow steps, and slogged upstairs to bed.

  "It was foul," Mignette said, lying on her bed, tears puddling in her eyes. "Foul."

  "Special you weren't there, at least, Minnikins," Noble's voice said, on the phone Mignette had tucked in her ear.

  "I wish I had been. I wish I'd been arrested along with Tink and Random and my dad had to get me out."

  "That's why I called. Tink's dad got a doctor to come and say he was on meds and he needed to get out and they still wouldn't let him. You have to get your dad to get him out."

  It wasn't good. Mignette didn't want to talk to her dad and explain how stupid Tink had gotten himself canned and needed official help, because a store was going to file charges. Her dad would frown at her and maybe side with mum if he ever heard Tink had boosted a bracelet off a store-the fool was wearing it when they raided outside M's, and there he was, in the can, and a parental and a genuine med excuse couldn't get him out.

  At the moment, she hated Tink, who was Denny, and stupid, stupid, stupid. He pulled this right when her own credit was shaky.

  "I can't get him out. My dad's mad at me. I've used up all my good-points for a month."

  "You've got to. Your dad can stop it if it doesn't get any further. Random was with him. And we were all at the table and we're probably all on the vidder. Mignette, where's your soul?"

  "Was Random with him when he did it? In the store?"

  "I don't know."

  "He was. I know he was." Mignette rolled onto her stomach. Tears ran down her nose, and she wiped them. She slept in the nude. The air from the vents chilled her skin and she felt as if she might throw up.

  "How do you know?"

  "Because he's a fool. And if he's going to be a fool, Random's got to go along, I'll bet he did. And they're probably both in that store's vidder doing it. They haven't got a brain. And I can't do anything, Noble, I swear I can't."

  "Out with mumsy today?"

  "Shut up!"

  "Out getting fancy stuff? Don't care about your friends?"

  "I can't help it!" She heard a noise somewhere in the house and dropped her voice to a whisper, thinking it might be her father, down in the kitchen. She wasn't supposed to be getting phone calls in the middle of the night. "You can talk, and don't you take advantage of it. I can't, right now. I think I heard somebody out of bed."

  "Your mother?"

  "Dad, I think." She was very still, talking in her half whisper. She had a lock on her door. She was sure she'd locked it.

  "Sure they haven't got a bug on you?"

  "No."

  "You truly sure?"

  "I'm pretty awfully sure." She strained her ears to hear down to the kitchen, wishing she was amped, but she couldn't get any useful mod like that, not while she was living at home. She couldn't do anything with mods at all, not even a common tap, and they'd dyed her hair this awful red-brown, like sludge, and she wanted to cry. The fish had been awful. It had been a living thing, and they killed it and her mother tucked it on a plate with a flower arrangement, burned side down and expected her to eat it, because Earthers ate live things, and it was class. "I think he's gone back to bed."

  "You've just got to do something."

  "I can't, is what I'm telling you. Mum and I are having a fight, and Dad won't listen. He just gave me his card."

  "You got credit?"

  "I got a little. Five cee."

  "You're beautiful."

  "Don't tell me that." It reminded her about the hair, which, if Noble had seen her on the street, was just too humiliating to think about, and, more than that, it was permanent dye, Renee had said so. The chemical when they were doing it had made her sick at her stomach and the nasty perfume in the dye was in every breath she breathed now, complicating the nasty taste of the fish on her tongue. "You only care because I've got money."

  "Meet me down at 11th in an hour."

  "The hell I can." She didn't want to explain how she looked. She couldn't stand mirrors. Not until it grew out.

  "Scared?"

  "No."

  If she went down to Blunt, she could buy a mod for her hair, a mod that would let her say what color it was for the rest of her life. Or she could buy one of the fat-nibblers, that would let her eat anything at all, as much as she wanted.

  Or a real multichannel tap. Which got you fevers and headaches for a month or more while it took, but after that, her mother would disown her and she'd have to go to the street to live.

  While Ippoleta ruled the scene on the block and would probably sniff and call her d‚class‚, all the while saying her genes were pure.

  "Maybe I'll buy a hit on Ippoleta and get her infected with a mod."

  "That would be a laugh."

  "Ippoleta's so good, Ippoleta's so smart, Ippoleta's so haute class the instructors all fawn on her. I could just puke."

  The instructors were all part of the social clique, was what. And her father didn't remotely understand what she was up against, in that school full of his enemies.

  "Know what I might buy?" Noble drew her into the fantasy. "A tap."

  "You think your parentals wouldn't know if you did it?"

  "They don't know what I do. I bet I could even get a tap and just not let it show."

  "You'd puke your guts out. I heard a guy once did it at sixteen and he was in hospital for six months. You'd be sicker than hell. On the other hand-surface stuff doesn't do that, most times. I might do my eye color. I might be like that Stylist and have my eyes go all colors. I'll bet my parentals never would know if I kept them brown at home."

  "I wonder how you see in the dark if they glow like that."

  "It's on the iris, not the retina, silly." She knew some things from science sessions. If it could possibly involve mods, she was interested.

  "I still wonder if you don't see the light from them. I'd think you would."

  Having a glow in her eyes didn't sound so attractive, under those terms. She turned the tables. "So what would you get besides a tap?"

  "Me? I'd get a mod so I'd never get drunk."

  She giggled. "Then how would you have fun?"

  A small dull silence. "Well. I suppose. But I could drink all the beer I like."

  "Then you'd need a fat-mod. And all that beer still wouldn't get you drunk. So where's the fun in that?"

  "Hell. Come on down here, rich bitch."

  The parentals would kill her if she did. She could get based, completely based for a month. "Can't."

  "11th and Blunt. Right now. Scared?"

  "Not scared. Just don't want to."

  "Scared of her shadow. Nice little Kathy-boo. All talk and no action. I'll call you back when I'm there. You'll change your mind."

  "Go to hell." She pulled the phone out of her ear and, deprived of body heat, it would beep out on Noble, who was a slime.

  She hated her life. She really hated it.

  4

  The wind had kicked up at dark, as Drusus had forewarned, and a perverse and wicked wind it was. It would have made the extension of the antenna uncommonly difficult, if they had tried to outrace it. It was likely to cause damage if they tried extending before the dust fell, and that and the need to get the deep-stakes driven and the guy wires on the relay station anchored had made them postpone that task.

  The boys were entirely frustrated, having looked forward to calling their sweethearts and relatives back at the Refuge, but the desert and the weather made for patience with certain things. There was always time, in Marak's way of thinking, and an immortal who could love the sound of the demon wind thumping and booming at the canvas and revel in the sand hissing off the tent at night was far happier and healthier in his life. An immortal who could meet occasion
al frustration and not see in it the pattern of all his past frustrations was the one who would survive the longest. Some who had the gift lacked patience, battering themselves against all adversity, increasingly finding malevolence and divine obstruction in small accidents.

  Those who adopted that opinion grew more bitter and strange by the year. They eventually wandered off from their fellows and lost themselves in a solitude where only the dunes changed. They mattered less and less once that happened, and all but the oldest forgot them.

  Or they did as Memnanan's great-grandson had done, before he died: he'd destroyed an entire laboratory and taken three lives before he'd gone down, angry at his life and his long train of reverses. It was sad and pointless, the waste of a life that could have meant something and that had held so much promise. But Memnanan refused to change himself while the world changed around him, and saddest of all, everyone was relieved when Memnanan was gone, even, one feared to say, Memnanan himself.

  So a wise immortal embraced the howling wind and the dust out here in the wide land as he embraced his wife. And he took the delay as a variation in a world that otherwise was too stable, and cherished the reverses that inevitably came as absolute proof there were still surprises to be had in the world-since without surprises, immortality grew unbearable. Memnanan had shut himself away from the desert, sealed himself in his work, and met small reverses with increasing anger in his metal corridors. Lack of humor, Marak believed, had been his undoing, right along with confinement under a roof.

  But there were, mortal and immortal, those blessed with the true spark of curiosity. The boys they had chosen for this trek gathered close on this night of wailing wind and begged for stories, to carry the old tales forward to their children.

  Hati told the best stories. She had a gift for it. She painted the great storms of ages ago. She told a half ring of listening faces by lanternlight how, in those days, the dark, sand-laden wind wore metal away and stripped flesh from bone in an hour. She told how the tribes had had no battery lights, only flame that flickered perilously low as the great gusts sucked the very air out of the tent. There were so many ordinary things this generation had never seen or felt. She told them about villages that now only turned up as half-buried ruins, and how life was then, villagers making gardens in soil-filled stone basins, to waste no drop of water.

  Every word of memory was precious, and Hati never recited: she told the tales with her heart for another generation of eager faces, so many generations by now that the individuals within them grew difficult to remember. Marak himself struggled with names, and mistook people alive now for people generations dead, attributing to the new and innocent, too, the baggage of lives past.

  Perhaps he cared less for individuals than Hati. Perhaps he saw them as an endless succession of similar lives, so that one generation of listening, earnest youth filled the place of another within the tent, and nothing was lost forever.

  He loved young people in general. He was particularly patient with the young ones who volunteered for such long treks with them, young people whose questions repeated the silly questions of generations before them and whose jokes echoed the amusements of generations stretching away into trackless time. Truly new jokes grew like the mountains, slowly, out of cataclysm, and lived for centuries, changing as they aged. When the wind blew and they were shut in like this, they soon wore out the jokes they had, but a wise man laughed all the same, and meant it, simply because they were alive.

  Drusus had said the storm would spend itself by morning. And like most southern storms in these years, the wind lessened enough for them to wrap up close and go out under the morning sky to see what the wind had done to their plans, and how deep it had piled the sand around the base of the relay unit.

  The new day was still filmy with the lightest dust when they went out of the tent to see how much they would have to dig. Sand had blown through the anchor legs of the observation station, but the station sat undamaged, deep-anchored. Sand had completely buried the greenbush of yesterday, except that along the rim, where the windblown grains had fallen into the gorge. The beshti had gotten up when they stirred out of the tent. The beshti would sit like lumps through the worst of the wind; but now, confirming the storm was fading, they gathered themselves up on their long legs, stretching themselves, shaking the sand out of their coats, weaving their long-cramped necks about and complaining. A beshti complained if the wind blew, or if the sun shone, or if it disliked a smell in the air, and if one beshti complained, the rest complained about its racket. It was an ordinary morning.

  There came, however, a strange lull in that ritual complaint, heads lifted, shadows in the red-brown haze of shaken coats, all the beshti staring in one direction.

  There were no other beasts in the land but their kind. There was no moving creature walking the wide world for the beshti to take sudden alarm like that.

  And seeing that ancient, instinctive alert in a herd made ghosts by the filmy dust, Marak's nape suddenly prickled in ancient alarm.

  "Quake," he called out, and began to move toward the herd. Hati moved. The boys stared about them as if they could discover the oncoming threat somewhere in the lingering dust.

  The beshti were tethered to a long-line. If they hit that rope it would foul and there would be wild chaos, not to mention broken bones. Marak gathered his own beshti's halter rope and unclipped it from the line. Hati did the same. The boys were a little behind them.

  A shiver ran deep in the earth. It reached his feet. The beshti shied as the rolling shake began.

  He grabbed the beshti's halter rope up close to the chin, pulled his beshti's head down and around against its shoulder as it squalled. Other beshti tangled with the long-line and went down in a flailing heap, and the tether-line snapped right off the deep-irons. "Get them!" Hati yelled, not a hurt yell, a furiously angry one. "Cut the line! You can never hold them all!"

  Marak half saw, in his own struggle, in dust like mist, another battle going on, beshti scrambling up, two and three together snapping free of a line unable to withstand their strength.

  Hati had held on to her beast's halter, too, and the fouling tether line had popped her beshti hard with a flying knot, then wrapped about its hindquarters, driving the beast mad. The boys struggled to coordinate their efforts, which beshti to free, which to attempt to hold. One boy reached Marak, as he struggled to bring his beshti's head around and down to the gust-clouded sand.

  Downing a beshti was one thing. Keeping it down was another trick. Marak sprawled over its bony jaw, pressing its jaw and neck to the sand as it kicked the boy who'd helped him from the wrong side.

  The boy had courage-he crawled back again and added his weight to the flailing forequarters.

  "Use the aifad!" Marak yelled, too busy keeping the boy from getting killed to use his own. The beshti heaved, trying to roll, and kicked his hind feet at the air with all his might, while the fool boy fumbled about, thinking that he should use his scarf to blind the beast, without the practical experience to get it there across another man's body. The earth heaved, the beshti struggled, and Marak pinned its bony head with all his strength, covering its eyes with his arm, suffering a hard nose-butt into his gut.

  The boy must finally have used his head and gotten the hind feet tied with the strip of scarf. The beshti, deprived of vision, hind legs bound, smothered first under his coat and now another boy's late-arrived aifad, finally quit struggling, lay panting, muscles hard, waiting a chance to explode if he had any notion which way was up.

  "Hati?" Marak asked, half-blind and teary-eyed from the dust, and not daring, at the moment, to risk his grip by turning his head.

  "I have mine," Hati said. "The others all ran." She was not in any way pleased. "Fashti, help Marak."

  Fashti arrived to add his weight to the struggle. All the other boys but Argid seemed to have gone to Hati's aid, and they had, in sum, two of their beshti caught, held down by a weight of bodies as a second rumbling became a general shaking.r />
  It went on and on. Then quit.

  "The others broke the ropes and ran," Fashti said, out of breath. "Meziq has his leg broken, I think."

  "They didn't take the tent. They didn't take the food or water." Marak found himself short-winded. Long since he'd fought for his life, or taken a beshti's knee in the ribs. It was a curious, even exhilarating feeling. "We have two beshti. We'll catch the others. Are you all right, Hati?"

  "Very well," Hati said. "Which shall we let up?"