Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  And for that matter, and a cold second thought-these being Earthers, and neither the governor nor the ambassador having any internal tap, they wouldn't completely understand the tech involved, its limitations or its abilities, and they wouldn't like disrespect.

  That was what he was dealing with-ultraconservatives. Think of the parentals-and their priest. Black suits and no earring, no flash on the fingers. Like dinner with the parents and all the relatives at once. Like a family funeral.

  With the possibility of some really scary, state-of-the-art truthers, constantly reading everything he said and probing for what he might be hiding behind every blink of his eyes.

  Don't even think of tapping back to the PO while you're there.

  A hack? The PO's system being a completely different piece of equipment than the public tap system-that made interference with it a whole different operation than the common variety of tap-hackers, whose routine business contacts-and their customers-ranged from Earth security to the criminal underworld. The public tap system was worm-eaten with hackers-which was why the Project tap absolutely had to be a whole different system on every level.

  And because the Project tap was nanocele-based, for all the ages of its existence, it remained unhackable-so the PO insisted. So far, the Project was impenetrable.

  But if anybody thought of hacking it-if anybody was going to try that-that effort, if concentrated on him, might do physical damage. He'd felt overload-he'd felt the tap-output spike when he was recovering from the implant, when it was brand new. He was going where he couldn't even think about using equipment that was supposed to be absolutely secure, equipment that was as natural for him to use now as his sense of sight or hearing. It had bioelectronic components, notably the relays that interfaced with the nanocele. That meant electronics could interfere with it. Could attack it.

  Scary games he'd been dragged into. Marak's World held the only politics he ever wanted to study. That world ran smoothly in the hands of those that had managed it forever, and he was at orbital distance. But now if his one teenaged flirtation with Freethinker idiots had somehow attracted the attention of authorities outside the Project, damned right he was upset. He had a right to be upset-and tooth and nail, he'd fight any implication.

  Only if he had to. He had to remember he had Brazis's political protection. Brazis wasn't going to have Earthers of any stripe telling him who to assign where, or demanding he fire anybody. Brazis would hire two more questionables right off the street tomorrow if only to tell Earth to go to hell.

  And, always a fact of the universe, always, both inside the Project and wherever the Treaty itself was at issue. Marak had the ultimate say about his taps. Nobody, absolutely nobody, challenged him to a duel of wills.

  No. He was safe. Politics couldn't remove him, no matter how this went. Earth could throw a screaming blue fit and it wasn't going to scare Outsider authority, let alone Marak, who could shut down cooperation for a century or two and annoy the ondat in the process. Marak's displeasure could shake an economy. Ruin a career. A dozen careers. Bring down governments.

  Which only argued that an otherwise very junior tap should just go in calmly and confidently, do what he was told to the letter, keep his eyes and ears wide open as requested by the only authority he answered to, and do his job without making his superiors any unnecessary trouble. It was scary, but it wasn't fatal. He just needed to look good, sound respectful, do it and get back.

  Dark suit. No flash. He went upstairs, opened the closet, searched for the dark blue shirt that went with the parental-approval suit. He searched the whole closet three times and finally located the missing shirt in the shadowy back end of the freshener, where he recalled he had put it after the last holiday dinner with the parents and the relatives.

  He found the conservative collar, dug up both matching socks. Head to toe, he became a good boy, as churchly-straight as possible, void of any breath of the Trend-

  Well, except the hair, but he wasn't going to cut that, not even for the Earth envoy. He clipped the locks back into head-hugging simplicity.

  Rings. And earring. He stripped those off and put them in his house safe. No hint of show or display of extravagant salary. No controversy. No hint of arrogance. No problem. He looked sober as clergy.

  5

  The tracks had tended down along the terraces, over drifts of sand, then grown dim on sandstone. Marak and Hati looked for signs at several opportunities for their fugitives to have taken another downward path, but they found none. The wind-blurred traces led instead across a vast flat sheet of sandstone, staying on their level. This gave them hope that if the dust should settle a little, they might catch sight of the group. They quickened their pace.

  They advised the Refuge to advise the camp. The relay had gone up. Auguste said so, and communication had now become reliable. "The leader of this band," Marak said, "will be skittish. This may take a while."

  His own old bull would not have bolted repeatedly and zigged and zagged along the terraces. The young one had. And the herd, indecisive as their new leader, veered slightly southward now, generally down the long spine, still on this level of the terraces. Sandstone spires rose ghostly and strange in the lingering dust, and generally obscured their direct view of what was ahead, even had lingering fine dust not hazed the air.

  Marak had faith that even the spookiness of a new herd leader had to steady down with repeated tremors. But right now their young bull would bolt at every shaking in the earth, every breath of wind, taking the females farther and farther from the old bull he had robbed, and would do so until the females grew annoyed with his skittishness and grew slower and slower to follow. Beshti had their quirks, but they were predictable in their ways.

  About the watchers in the heavens, however, Marak was just a little concerned. He expected Procyon, in the ordinary cycle. He discovered he had Drusus instead. Something strange had happened in the earth, and now something else strange had taken place in the heavens, at a time when he most wanted his information flow to be ordinary and dependable. First his contact had gone on and off, intermittent in the storm. That had steadied, and now other things seemed unreliable.

  "Is Procyon well?" Marak asked Drusus, when first he came in clear. "Is he taken ill?" Hati expressed her concern, too, to her watcher, Carina, who joined her uninvited. That was the measure of worry on Ian's part. They suddenly had watchers left and right, Hati's called back to duty, but his not the one he expected.

  "Brazis has sent him on an errand today," Drusus answered his inquiry. "A request from an Earther lord. Earth seems concerned with his appointment because of his young age. Procyon will pay his courtesies to that person and return, either today or tomorrow. The Earther lord is considered benign. There is no reason for worry, and this is an inquiry, not a matter for concern. I hope, omi, you will accept my being here early, today."

  "We understand," Marak said, to end the protestations. He was, at the moment, at a difficult traverse, on a strip of sandstone scarcely wide enough for safety. He had his answer, but he remained annoyed and just a little suspicious-halfway moved to demand Procyon's immediate attendance, never mind the affairs of lords in the heavens, who had no right to demand the attendance of persons who lived under his personal protection. He knew about Earther lords, he had experienced them, that they were prone to nose about and interfere where they could. And this request was damned ill timed.

  Lords and directors came and went in that place in the heavens that by all description was like the Refuge, all corridors, plain walls, and lights, with here and there a garden, by what Marak had gathered. There the ondat, too, once hostile, thanks to the sins of the Ila, lived and watched over the world with some suspicion, still dangerous-but Earth, at some distance, being the birthplace of all humans and even the beshti and no few of the now-extinct vermin, thought its history gave it a special right to send out its governor to rule this metal world.

  So the Ila said, along with much else he had read in the Books
of the Record.

  But Earth certainly picked a time of great nuisance to make its demands. He knew his own right not to be annoyed by what happened above-particularly where it regarded his watchers. He wanted Procyon with him today-the cheerful young watcher who even in his routine weather reports managed a heartening enthusiasm. Drusus was the director's man, full of rules and cautions. He had the niggling suspicion someone thought Drusus was the watcher he should have right now, since the quake-and that suspicion more than annoyed him. If he thought the boy's inexperience would be a hazard, he would make that call. He was determined not to blame Drusus for the situation, but he could blame Brazis, when he had time, because he was not at all sure there was an Earth lord.

  Meanwhile, however, he could try to moderate his temper and find out the truth of what was going on.

  "Procyon is paying court to some Earth lord," he told Hati, who could be overheard, but who could not overhear Drusus. "No long venture, so Drusus assures us. He's come in early to fill Procyon's place."

  "So," Hati said, frowning. Hati was an'i Keran, Keran tribe, quick to the knife, even in these latter days when the land grew wider and water was no longer a matter of dispute. "Today of all days, and without consulting us. We can well remember such favors." Let the director and the Earther lord hear that. Hati had an opinion of her own, and, unlike him, felt no obligation to be reasonable.

  They were neither of them happy, at the moment. They had another aftershock, and their fugitives took out down a slope-they came on the tracks, a wide wallow in a breakneck sand-slip. There were no beshti lying dead at the bottom, which argued they had made it.

  But it was a chancy ride, and they had to do it. They worked their way down, and tracked the runaways southeastward, while Drusus kept prudent silence.

  The wind was less down here, at least, and haze was less in the air, but they had been cautious coming down, and their fugitives almost certainly opened a wider lead, breaking low brush-a sparse, low-lying spiny growth that spread like fingers from a single plant, and branched and rebranched among the rocks and on the sand, putting down new roots-a warfare like that of nations, vegetative dueling for broader and broader territory. The weed actually poisoned the ground to discourage its competition, and made a thick mat that cracked and broke as their beshti crossed it, behind others that had cracked and broken it in passing. Beshti, who ate most things, found no attraction in this stuff, which the Refuge had never chosen to seed, but which survived and thrived since the hammerfall. And now it helped obscure the ground and made footing less certain in precarious places. It hid holes and crevices.

  "Prickle-star," he said to Drusus. "It smells like graze and burns the tongue. One of the worst things will thrive, and the succulents gain no foothold here, in consequence."

  He felt another aftershock coming. The beshti felt it. It was a hard shaking, and long.

  "Stronger than the last," Hati said.

  The young men up on the spine, minding the tent, were surely getting an education they had not expected on this tame journey.

  And their fugitives, invisible among the spires, would not have stood still.

  "Another quake," he said to his watcher.

  "Are you all right?" Drusus asked him.

  "Well enough," he told Drusus, amicably. "It was stronger, however."

  Hati was used to him talking to his voices in moments of crisis. She talked to her own, today, and told her watcher to let her alone, that there was no difficulty. She was never patient with them. They reached a place of vantage, above the dust-hazed depth of the pans. And an area of darker dust showed in the haze below.

  "Can you see them?" he asked Hati. Hati had risen up with her knees on the saddle in their pause, to have a look with a collapsible glass.

  "Yes," Hati said. "Well away down the slope, toward the next terrace."

  "Where are you, omi?" Drusus asked.

  "Two terraces down toward the pans," Marak answered, and tapped his beshti with the quirt, as Hati dropped down to the saddle and put away the glass. They both started down.

  "Have the beshti gone off again ?" Drusus asked, annoying him with questions.

  "What else would beshti do?" he answered shortly, then amended the answer. "They have gone down, risking their necks. The gorge rim was too steep for them. This is not."

  "It's too dangerous to go down, omi," Drusus told him. "The quake was not minor. Ian believes the Southern Wall is about to fail."

  It took a moment to reach his attention. Then did. "Ian thinks the Southern Wall may have cracked," he said to Hati, but he thought she might have heard it from her own watcher. Her jaw was set in a deep frown. And he abandoned his annoyance with his watcher. "Is it breaking where we thought, Drusus?"

  "The epicenter was out under Halfmoon Bay."

  "It was at Halfmoon," Marak said, for Hati-all he needed say to convey extreme chagrin, because the Halfmoon area of the Wall was their planned destination, the point where the spine they were on intersected the Southern Wall.

  It was the site they had thought would be a safe place to set the next relay.

  "Observers are less sure now how or where the Wall will crack," Drusus said to him. "Don't go down into the pans, omi. The director thinks it best you come back up to camp and let Ian send a mission out from the Plateau, not with trucks. He says he can put Alihinan aware and have his riders bring beshti to your camp.."

  And have someone bring more beshti up from the Refuge to Alihinan, clear up on the Plateau, on the other side of the Needle. "Which will take a while. If the Wall has cracked, the spine itself may grow unstable, and we have a man lying in camp with a broken leg." His beshti's descending strides jolted under him, a chancy descent of a loose, sandy slope. "We stand a better chance by catching our runaways." As haze wrapped them about, obscuring all but the solid shapes of the sandstone spires. "Has the Wall shown a breach?"

  "Not yet."

  "Then tell me when it does."

  "Omi, when it comes, where it comes, they think now it may become a far faster, far wider breach. An entire section of the Wall may fail at once. The displacement in that first event may have been as much as ten meters. "

  Drusus's usual stolid, quiet voice was not stolid or happy at the moment. A cataclysm of icy water was portended to break through, not far to the south, but right where they might have been standing, if they had been a number of days further advanced on their trek. They would have been camped on the Halfmoon section of the Wall, setting up their relay when it changed relative elevation by ten meters.

  Maybe there was reason the director had moved Drusus up in the daily sequence.

  "Ian says he is this very moment preparing a rocket," Drusus said, "to soft-land a relay at Halfmoon. You have no need to go on."

  Ian had had to relay that to him. They had disputed the matter of the rocket hotly before he left, he and Ian, Ian intent on using their sole prepared rocket to set down the relay, before establishing fuel dumps and small manned way stations to take various missions there by truck, a very quick process on one end and a very slow business of establishing a land route on the other, a three-year program with trucks making successively more distant fuel drops, and getting to the Wall eventually. Machines had to be supported by more and more machines. Sand buried fuel dumps. Fine dust found its way into intakes and engines. Landbound machines broke down. Flying ones crashed in inconvenient places and someone, usually with beshti, had to trek after their irreplaceable metals. Marak maintained he didn't need three years to prepare the way for a small, self-sustaining caravan. He could get a firsthand look at the Southern Wall while Ian was still getting under way, and without risk of an airplane or expending another rocket in a very chancy and rocky area.

  He would have been right-if he hadn't lost the beshti. If he'd used Ian's metal-centered cable to secure the beshti, instead of softer, safer rope.

  If, if, and if.

  He hated it when Ian was right. He could limp home with the two beshti they ha
d and all his party could survive with limited canvas. He could give Meziq the makers, set the leg, and have it healed before they got down off the spine.

  But they weren't that far from their fugitives, and they weren't beaten yet.

  "Ian is urging us to take the conservative course and walk home, and perhaps, eventually, someone will meet us with beshti," he said to Hati, their two beshti side by side for the moment. "He says the Wall will crack at Halfmoon."

  Hati shrugged. "So Carina says." Naming her own watcher. "Ian is launching his rocket. Likely we shall still set up our other relay ourselves, after Ian's silly rocket sits down on a rock, like the last one. Several caravans can carry back its metal, if it survives the flood."