Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  Lovely.

  He didn't tap down to the planet to investigate Luz or the Ila, and he didn't contact Ian, who was very likely furious with Luz over the incident and probably had a headache to match his. He didn't want another of the Ila's messages blasting through the system-not at the risk of the taps.

  The Ila had managed to set the whole system on its ear.

  And the new rift in the Southern Wall, meanwhile, which was the slow tumble of a house of cards, ondat revenge, long postponed. that cataclysm just casually proceeded on its way like a juggernaut, as the plates had been moving for ages.

  Did he half suspect that the Ila had timed her efforts up here to coincide with an era of maximum attention on a planet-changing event? He had his strong suspicions. His very strong suspicions. The whole Project had been concentrating on a narrow section of planetary crust-and never even thinking the tap system had become a sieve, coinciding with actions attracting Earth's passionate disapproval.

  Instruments could, however imperfectly, see beneath the clouds of condensation down there, and it was truly spectacular now, that waterfall.

  Damned lucky that Marak hadn't had a closer view of it. He was diverted, Ian was diverted. Everyone was busy and a little desperate. And no matter how involved Ian might like to be now in the Luz-Ila matter, quakes down at Halfmoon would likely continue to be a priority, getting Marak and his people out alive.

  The Ila had appeared to reform, abandoning her usual diversion of making a director's life interesting. She had been so nicely cooperative lately. God.

  What was this new sea about to bring the universe at large? The long-sought remediation? Proof that life on Marak's World was unlikely to infect ondat? Proof that Movement technology, running down its own evolutionary track, could devolve into simple, nonaggressive biology, ultimately capable of working only in its own limited environment?

  The Ila was dead set, as always, on blowing that happy outcome to hell.

  So Apex would check her move at Orb, and if they were lucky, on Concord itself. The Treaty Board had settled an agent here in the mistaken theory they were going to overturn a conspiracy and get their fingers into all sorts of business, while Earth's more conservative public, convinced by agelong propaganda that one simple mod was damnation, would view an assassination attempt on Concord and a lab raid on Orb as armageddon in full career. Concord and Earth were in for a period of unhappy and dangerous relations, while the Ila sat and watched, ever so pleased.

  God, he'd like to ask the Ila's tap some critical questions. But that was never going to happen.

  And he had a meeting of the Council in less than an hour, in which time he now had to decide how much of Magdallen's claim to let out to that body for debate. He decided that, no, he wouldn't attend. But he did have to instruct his proxy. And he had to consider what Magdallen had said, that it might be time to turn over that office.

  "Sir." Dianne. "Drusus is reporting in, on one."

  Physical line. He punched a button on common com. "Drusus. Are you all right?"

  "Not so good, sir. I'm at a public phone. But I'm on my feet. I heard it. Shall I go on?"

  Drusus, veteran Drusus, didn't ask what had happened to cause that blowup on the tap. Didn't sit down and quit. But he'd been hit, wide open.

  "Do you need medical?"

  "I don't think so, sir. I'm functional. Bad headache, but not so I can't continue. I've talked with several people who know our man. They claim they haven't seen him. That they're concerned and looking for him. Which probably means he's found a dark hole somewhere, if his head is like mine, right now."

  Brave Drusus. "Get home right now and relieve Auguste. Auguste was hit hard. We don't know about his contact."

  "Yes, sir," was all Drusus said, the public line being no place to discuss department business, and depend on it, Drusus was on his way at all possible speed, to take up a duty, bottom line, more important than Procyon's survival. The man deserved a medal. And his reporting in meant the PO had one less worry on the streets.

  He didn't think the Ila had meant to kill Marak's taps. Antagonizing Earth, threatening civilization, yes-on their scale a disaster; on hers, a maneuver that might or might not pay what she hoped. But a war with Marak, an antagonism that could keep an anger alive as long as Marak's memory, he very much doubted was anywhere on her agenda. In their way, the oldest immortals stuck together in a dynamic of touchy personalities, and what Luz currently wanted, which was to find Procyon, the Ila seemed to want. She had told Procyon to get home. Her help was intended to win leverage, maybe, inside downworld's ongoing politics. because Marak was going to be damned mad if he gathered the scattered pieces of this business and put them together, to find out that the Ila had harmed his watcher.

  He had one more call to make before he briefed his proxy for the Council meeting: he wanted to find out what Reaux had learned from Gide, and simultaneously to drop a piece of information in the governor's lap.

  "Governor." Jewel Sanduski hastened her pace to overtake Reaux in the hospital corridor right by the front doors. "The Chairman wants to talk to you. Where?"

  There wasn't a convenient place. "Take station there," Reaux said to his bodyguard, pointing to a public restroom back down the hospital corridor. He walked back, ascertained it was empty, set them on watch to keep people out, and took Jewel inside the restroom foyer with him.

  "Antonio?" he asked, over by the mirror and away from the door where his guards were. "We're as secure now as we're going to be."

  "We've had several problems just come to light. How's Gide?"

  "Not that bad. Angry. Very angry. He has credentials, and he's threatening to establish an office of his own on station, which I don't think I can prevent, but I can limit, by the Treaty itself. I'm headed back to my office at the moment. You caught me on my way out of the hospital."

  "Have you any word on your daughter?"

  How in hell did Brazis know about Kathy? His face heated. His heart skipped a beat. But he kept his equilibrium. "No, I haven't. Agents are out searching. No word on Mr. Stafford at the moment. No word from the ship out there. My staff's monitoring the situation, but no one's talking to us."

  "Someone was talking, unfortunately. The Ila pirated her way onto the tap network looking for Mr. Stafford and completely fried her senior tap in the process."

  "God!"

  "Every tap we had working is affected-migraines, nausea-and the one they're trying to resuscitate, but they hold out very little hope she'll ever function."

  "This is intolerable!" He wasn't sure whether he meant this unnerving mode of conversation, through a tap-courier's unexpressive mouth, or the fact the devil incarnate had breached station security while Earth was minutely scrutinizing every move he made.

  "I did get brief contact with Procyon, in the process, but I couldn't ascertain location. He is alive, and there are a lot of holes he could duck into. We're trying to find him. Apex is upset. They have an agent here, who's just presented himself to hear my strong complaints, and he's likewise interested in what your Mr. Gide came here for-the notion of illicits getting up off the planet. He's here to counter Mr. Gide's presence. So we have a problem, Setha, a big problem. The Ila is involved, to the hilt."

  "She can get in on your system anytime she wants?"

  "Unfortunately that's turned out to be true. Worse, I fear she can do it with far less commotion than she just created. She's had the Project tap for a very long time, which we did of course know: she acquired it from Ian. And now we know she's breached our codes to reach us as noisily as possible, doing a great deal of damage. I wouldn't put it past her to be involved with data-smuggling, if she had the means, and quite frankly, she may have found a way in. Why she blew through so publicly-the motive may have been to silence her own tap contact, who may have been passing information as Gide thought-or maybe to try to convince me she's necessarily that noisy when she does it, and I don't believe that for a moment. I think she's been into our system many times wit
hout being detected. I'm ready to believe Gide's suspicions may actually be valid."

  A deep breath. Second thoughts. And a desperate commitment. Give information and get information. "Listen, Antonio: Gide is definitely Treaty Board. He's setting up an office here. I can't prevent that. He insists there's First Movement operating on the station, among the Freethinkers, of all places. What you've turned up, then. that makes you think he's not mistaken in his suspicion. Something has gotten off the planet."

  "Not necessarily the things we would most fear. We doubt she would start with her most valuable commodities. We take it seriously enough. Council is going into session." It was always Jewel's voice, incongruously so, Jewel's eyes that assessed his reactions. "I'm going to be hard to find for the next hour, but my proxy will be handling Council, informing them of what they have to know to deal with Mr. Gide. I have other business, which I can't talk about. No matter where I am, Jewel can reach me at any time. She'll stay in your vicinity. I say again, stay entirely away from Stafford. Let me bring him in. We have strong evidence that your chief of security is secretly reporting to the ship, that he's an agent of some party on Earth, or of the Treaty Board itself. We think Dortland may have deliberately cracked Gide's containment and stranded him, on orders Gide knew nothing about. This would mean an overt and a covert operation of the Treaty Board here at Concord simultaneously. Does this alarm you?"

  Reaux's heart accelerated its already rapid beat. Dortland, a spy? It might be a clever lie. It might be a deliberate attempt to isolate him from his own staff, and make him get his information from Outsider sources at the very moment Brazis had just confessed how compromised those sources were.

  But exotic equipment, a short-range missile, for God's sake, smuggled into an exclusive garden court, past tight security-

  Two of Dortland's men had died, in that garden, of neuronics, a close-up kind of weapon, and not one the average criminal could get.

  Would Dortland do a thing like that? His own men? Men he could just walk up and touch? Take utterly by surprise?

  "What evidence do you have of that?"

  "I tell you the barest, unproven information I have. I have yet to confirm it from another source. But I value you as a stable influence in office, and I have no wish to see you replaced or in any way subordinated to the Treaty Board. That would be an unacceptable change in the status quo. Don't trust Dortland. Above all, I ask you don't let him near Stafford. I want you to get Dortland off that case. If he snatches a Project tap, you know what hell is going to break loose, with my government and, for that matter, with the ondat. Let's never forget them, if the peace is violated."

  Where was he going to get a distraction to take Dortland off the hunt for Stafford?

  Send him hunting for his own daughter?

  That was all the distraction he had to offer. Damn it all to hell, if he couldn't trust Dortland, he couldn't trust anybody Dortland had hired. He was utterly isolated, except for Ernst. Except for his Outsider contacts.

  And could he use Kathy that cold-bloodedly, even put her in harm's way, supposing Dortland might have motives to bring him down?

  He didn't know what viable alternative he had. He didn't know who he had left that he could trust.

  He signed off with Jewel and exited their impromptu conference room, gathering up his escort, two of Dortland's men, as Jewel tagged behind them. He made a phone call as he walked. "Ernst?"

  "Sir?"

  "I've received very alarming news. Call Dortland. I want him to go down to Blunt himself, I want him to find Kathy. Highest priority."

  1O

  "Nothing," Marak reported to Hati, who begged him to silence all the voices and not to attempt the contact again-but he was more than annoyed, now, beyond the fact of a brutal headache. He rode, still, patiently along a sandstone ledge, Hati behind him. There was silence in heavens and the earth alike-the chatter was all hushed, now, everyone lying low.

  No response from Luz, none from Ian. Auguste was ill, incapable of coherent answers if he had any beyond, "I swear I have no idea, omi."

  Now the system had blown up. By all he could determine, the Ila had broken into the system for a momentary contact with Procyon, which he had not managed to join quickly enough. Auguste, close to a relay, had fallen ill, and Ian and Luz were probably still arguing age-old grievances with one another. It was one of those times when the width of the desert was probably a good distance.

  It would have been a good thing, except the haze in the west, that they had watched grow and grow-a cloud now towering into the heavens and spreading.

  More, the wind had acquired a strange smell, a dank, rotten smell compounded with the tang of wet sand as the wind swept upward from the basin floor. There was no sight of the distant calamity. At any moment the gap might break wide. The sands nearest Halfmoon were being deluged with sea water, a widening pool, by now, churned deeper and deeper by falling water. The heavens failed to advise them how the catastrophe was progressing. Auguste, who had been advising him on his route, and who had promised him a way back no matter the weather, was afflicted and silent.

  If the whole of the Wall at Halfmoon should go-suddenly-in one of the frequent aftershocks-what might they see on that horizon?

  Much more than a cloud, he was sure, and meanwhile the silly beshti kept zigzagging their way down and down as if they had all the time in the world, ultimately headed to the pans, the sort of terrain that had made their ancestors lords of the desert. Down there was graze. And water. Could they not smell water on the wind?

  The fools had no idea what they smelled. That it was all the water in the world threatening to thunder down in a kind of flood no beshti's instinct could imagine; these beshti had no idea.

  In the scales of the worlds above the world, this handful of recalcitrant beshti had become a dire problem. There might well be siege in the heavens. The long peace with the ondat might be ending. The earth still shuddered from the last cataclysm, the broken pieces of its crust drifting across the heat of hell, and now the heavens threatened to go to war over an Earth lord's whim and a feud breaking out between the Ila and Ian, one he had wanted no part of in its early stages. Let them shout and threaten, he had said, when it started. Let them spend the first wind of their anger.

  He had in mind to spend a great deal of time in the desert. After that he might mediate. He had not planned on being the center of the argument.

  They came easily down to the next terrace, he and Hati, following the still recent passage of soft pads on old dust. Beshti hardly went without a trace-but if that cloud went on spreading across the horizon and a deluge came down, adding to their hazards, the tracks would vanish, too. The young bull kept his stolen herd moving just enough. But let him get a head start, let the thunder and the rain add panic to earthquake, and the females, however reluctant now, might take out for the pans for good and all.

  The beshti under them smelled change in the wind, too, and there was this about beshti: they stuck tighter together when things went badly. Their own pair sniffed the tracks and smelled the rocks, aware what they were tracking, uneasy in this shift of the wind, Hati's female seeking others of her kind and his own old bull, smelling the scent of the young rebel, gaining a darker, more combative intent.

  The terrace they reached was vast, having its own horizon, having piles of rock and growth of vegetation, some of which, grease-wood, grew taller here than it had on the unprotected plateau or the ridge above.

  Their fugitives might be somewhere on this very level, somewhere beyond the spires of sandstone, the irregular ins and outs of the shelf and the obscuring growth of tall brush. The terraces and ledges that seemed from above to offer easy passage down to the pans proved, not unexpectedly, a constant frustration of dead ends and precarious edges, the most promising ways as apt to strand the herd with no way out but a long trek back the way they had come-toward them. At all disadvantage, they were still gaining on their quarry, and if the heavens could settle down and pay attention
again, he still might get his needed information on their route.

  But he could not wait for that help. Night was coming on, when the young rascal might not rest. The Ila had made a disastrous move. Now the sullen and strange tribes of Earth were making demands on Brazis that for some reason Brazis could not resist, and the whole untidy intersection of interests was increasingly threatening.

  The Ila had had one of her notions go extremely wrong, in his best guess. He could sometimes prevail with the Ila: they shared certain views. They both knew the world as Luz and Ian had never seen it, and shared opinions Luz and Ian did not understand. He knew her ways and her attitudes, and he would offer to intercede, if anyone could listen. Luz was alone with the situation, alone with the Ila in the Refuge, he was aware of that, and knew the two of them had been entirely too friendly lately. Luz was in the Refuge, and Ian-Ian was likely off at the far end of the lake, in the town that had grown there. Ian, who had been Luz's lover off and on for as long as the Refuge had stood, was currently not Luz's lover, and a feud had simmered between Ian and Luz with varying heat for most of the last hundred years. It had started over Ian's insistence on autonomy in his own work, unease in a relationship that had grown with Luz's dislike and Ian's support of the previous director in the heavens, who had had ideas coinciding with Ian's, on the apportionment of scarce metals.