Authors: C. J. Cherryh
Forge of Heaven
FORGE of
HEAVEN
�
C. J. Cher r yh
Contents
1
i
3
ii
15
iii
16
19
i
C O N S I D E R T WO B U B B L E S in space, one the shape of
ondat
territory, the other the shape of what is human. Earth sits, not at the center of its bubble, but off center, at the farthest side.
This is the shape of things. The bubbles forever overlap, thanks to a human action.They forever overlap, since humans let the Gene Wars reach the
ondat
homeworld . . . since ruin overtook the heart of
ondat
culture, and the
ondat
went to war with humankind.
Concord Station sits in that zone of overlap. At Concord, humans and
ondat
keep anxious truce and watch, a situation older than all extant governments, all extant culture, all extant languages but one, in both spheres of influence.Time moves incredibly slowly here. But since
ondat
are patient, humans are compelled to be.
The Gene Wars ended here, ages ago, in a cold peace.The ondat maintain one observer at Concord Station—perhaps one. Humans, sharing the same station, have no way to be sure.
Cross deep space, now, to the deep places of human territory.
In the Inner Worlds, farthest bubble within the human bubble, Earth floats in a sea of biological change, still obsessed with keeping dry. Inner Worlds Authority, residing on Earth, restricts even the simple biotech that Outsider Space regards as a useful, even a trivial instrument. The Inner Worlds jealously protect what it calls the pure human genome, and frown on genetic modifications even of a medical, lifesaving nature. Every use of bioengineering technology in this region must pass slow and painstaking review.
4 • C . J . C h e r r y h
Go back to the beginning of this situation, however.
In the larger bubble, and long, long ago, within that region of human territory that Earth calls the Outside, an anti-Earth splinter called the Movement broke from local authority, and broke in a way that forever alienated them from Earth.The Movement bioengineered humans, livestock, and agriculture—specifically to fit colonists for three difficult planets it hoped to claim.
Movement science had joined nanotech with biotech. It changed humans in ways that could be passed on. The Movement claimed worlds, and it meant to govern Outsider territory.
Earth quickly slammed down a total quarantine against everything Outside.
That meant that the far greater number of Outsiders who wanted Earth’s help in this ongoing crisis were abruptly, and without consultation, cut off from direct trade. The next decades were a struggle for moderate Outsider governments to keep their own settlements alive, to organize some sort of government without Earth—and simultaneously to fight the Movement, which was mobile and difficult to track down. Earth began to use Outsider assistance in its own hunt for Movement bases, and reasserted its unifying authority over Outsider governments, but still refused any direct personal contact with places it considered contaminated, and that by then included the entire Outside.
It was not love of mother Earth that kept the beleaguered Outsiders fighting against the Movement. It was pure self-preservation, the knowledge that if biochange produced a disaster, it would happen in their laps. They formed a union of their own, centered at a station named Apex, and laid down laws that would keep trade going, independent of Earth and the Inner Worlds.
Driven farther out by a series of Outsider military successes, the outlaw Movement spread nanotech to another world, to secure a base there.
But another species existed here, previously suspected, but never encountered.
Ondat
landed on the world during this period, contacted these aggressively adaptive Movement nanisms, and unknowingly let loose disaster on their own species, a calamitous runaway that spread from them to their homeworld.
Ondat
went to war, seeing no species or behavioral difference in Movement, Outsiders, or Earth.
Earth and Outsider forces understood at least that Movement actions, specifically the Movement intrusion into
ondat
territory, had touched off this Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 5
war—and they moved quickly to dissociate themselves from the Movement.They joined the
ondat
attack on the Movement in space, they hunted Movement bases down to the last, and gradually the
ondat
seemed to accept that not all humans were hostile.
But in the economics of the war, badly hammered by the
ondat
attacks and Movement alike, the Outside had lost its newfound autonomy. In the process of protecting the Outside from infiltration by the Movement, Earth had maintained tight control of key Outsider sites, despite the new authority at Apex, and despite Outsider trade agreements. Earth ultimately asserted its old rights to install governors at every surviving Outsider colony, in the name of defense and negotiation with the
ondat
.
The Movement gained a number of recruits as irate Outsiders reacted to what they considered a betrayal, but it was a last flourish.The Movement fought a couple of sharp actions against the
ondat
and the Earth Federation, but they lost heavily, and this led to the suicide of three of its leaders.
The
ondat,
mollified by the fact human forces had helped defeat the Movement, drew back into their original borders, and conducted a shoot-on-sight but nonpursuit relationship with Earth Federation patrols.
That shaky border situation defined human and
ondat
relations for over three hundred years.
Federation law maintained a tight grip on Outsider colonies. Earth governors were there to stay. Ironically, however, the absolute isolation that pure Earthers maintained from Outsider worlds and stations (from which they took fuel and electronic information, but little else) allowed Outsiders under those Earth-run administrations the freedom to do pretty much as they wished in nanotech and genetics, synthesizing materials, creating life, creating whole servant ecosystems in limited environments—and simultaneously striving to fine-tune and limit these same systems. The Outsiders’
stated intention was to rein in biological change on the several contaminated worlds, where, certainly, some Outsider descendants lived. They intended to prove that such worlds could be cleaned up.
Remediation
thus became a word of hot political debate between Earth and Outsiders.
So did
self-rule
.
Meanwhile the Second Movement appeared as a political organization on several Outsider stations. Clearly it was a name chosen for shock value: it shared neither personnel nor history with the old Movement, so far as anyone ever proved. But it argued against Earth rule, and it argued against 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h
the quarantine laws. The intellectuals of the Second Movement, none of them over twenty-two at the time of the organization’s founding, not only proposed to remediate the afflicted territories by throwing off all restraint on research, they talked about making a civilized agreement with the
ondat
as a route to regain Outsider self-rule. But two Second Movement founders, after a particularly unfortunate biocontamination runaway affecting Arc, the single Movement-run station, entirely repudiated the organization and turned in five of their radical subordinates. So the Second Movement had splintered, part going underground, into a clandestine radical group, part following the former Second Movement founders, constituting the relatively benign Freethinkers.
Freethinkers, with their music, their occasional prankish demonstrations against Earth government, and their flouting of station zoning laws, particularly—eventually provided a springboard and a backdrop for that other splinter, the radical chic, the Style, with its music, its fetish for nanotech creativity and personal embellishment. Both splinters thrived in illicit trade of various physical goods—smuggling, in other words, an activity that incidentally provided cover for the more dangerous radical underground, which began to call itself the Third Movement.
Like its predecessor, the Third Movement was well hidden in its outer shells of legitimate demands for freedom and self-rule. But it, too, died, in an attempted violent takeover of the remediation labs on Arc. Earth and Outsider forces fortunately prevented calamity there, and the last of the Third Movement leaders committed suicide with their followers.
The border tension between Earth and the
ondat,
meanwhile, continued, with occasional shots fired.
Ondat
did not communicate with humans, did not trade with, did not approach, did not tolerate humans. No one even knew what they looked like.
Then the
ondat
made a radical shift in behavior.
THE UNSPOKEN TREATY: EVENTS JUST PRIOR TO
HAMMERFALL
Ondat
never had communicated with Earth’s ships, except to indicate, by firing at them, just where they thought their border was. Now the
ondat
began a program of nonviolent approach to Earth’s warships inside human space, perhaps testing their peaceful resolve, or, some began to think, wishing them to follow their route.
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 7
Taking the risk, Earth did follow an
ondat
ship—to a hitherto unguessed First Movement base . . . on a world on the
ondat
side of the border. By all evidence, it had been there for centuries, and the
ondat
hadn’t destroyed it; but they signaled that they were about to do so, with the implication, Earth judged, that they thought this newly discovered base represented Earth’s enemies as well, and they were invited to join in the attack.
Or perhaps, someone said in a hastily called council, the
ondat
wanted to know what Earth would do about this find, so that they could judge Earth’s behavior toward these human outlaws, and thus judge whether Earth had secretly supported this base in
ondat
space for all these years.
The situation on the one hand could lead to renewed war, which Earth was by no means confident of winning. Or on the other, it might bring peace and a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and
ondat,
to the relief of all humankind. All Earth had to do to gain
ondat
approval, apparently, was wipe out an inhabited planet—because human beings were scattered across the heart of the contaminated major continent, innocents born in the centuries since the Gene Wars, a population, moreover, that showed no outward signs of divergence from the human genome and that had no way to leave the planet.
The
ondat
waited. Earth hesitated. And desperately consulted.