Forge of Heaven (6 page)

above the seacoast, where waves broke against jagged rock, and yet another up on the high plateau, where sand still flowed off the edges. He could shift any one of these cameras to the transparent view in his contact lenses, making one of them his momentary, if dizzying reality. He did it, when storms swept in. He loved the lightning, particularly, and the rain.

0955h. He was about to become recording angel, that particular presence in the heavens that watched over Marak, recorded his information—and advised him in case the wisest man on earth ever needed advice from orbit.

Procyon ate the wafers—the bar was lunch—then poured his second cup of caff and re-read the more interesting details of Drusus’s transcript from last evening to midnight, waiting for the handoff.

Marak had promised Ian last week that the party would be well up the heights today, wending their way on a safe approach to the Southern Wall. When it came to schedules out in the wild, Marak tended to be right, and today, in fact, he was well along on the very thinnest part of that spit of basalt and sandstone that rose like a spine between the southern basin and the deep cut of the Needle Gorge to the north.

Day sixty-four. Marak said he meant to set up an intermediate base unit on this spine of rock, positioning a new camera so that the Refuge could monitor this curious dividing line between river-cut Plateau uplift and the sinking terrain of the southern pans.

And after that, proceeding along that curving spine, he’d take another twenty days to reach the Wall and set up the most important observation station, with camera and global-positioning equipment. Hitherto the Project had only observed the situation at the Southern Wall from orbit, or in the seismic records, the latter of which said that the downdrop fault that edged the Wall was increasingly active—that fault being the reason Marak was going the long way around and avoiding the lowland pans. Speculation was that the combined forces of a moving plate would rip the Southern Wall apart, and if that happened, the pans of the Southern Desert would be a floodplain in a matter of days . . .

Not to mention what might result as the colliding plates sorted out precedence. One might override the other. Mountains, vol-

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 7

canics, might result. Geologists were extraordinarily excited, in their longsighted way: on a scale of geologic change, there was a certain urgency in the signs in the earth . . . which pointed up the fact that right now they had no camera in the area. They’d landed one, that had lasted a week, thanks to an imperfect positioning: it had fallen to the notorious violence of the winter storms. Ian had his next rocket in preparation now, and had fretted and fussed and wished Marak would stay around the Refuge and let it all be done by robotics, instead of trekking out to a region of current hazard.

But Marak disregarded Ian’s objections and went to watch personally the dynamics of a restless land, the unstable nature of a wide basin below sea level, a burning desert suddenly opened to icy antarctic water. Never mind science, Procyon suspected: Marak wanted to
see
it.

So did he. He spent his off-hours reading the bulletins that flowed from geology, from metereology, from biology, disciplines that had suddenly acquired immediacy for him. All that icy new sea would be shallow, quickly warmed by the sun, cooled by winds off the Southern Sea, meteorologically significant—and, when it happened, in his lifetime or three watchers along, it would be a laboratory of biologic change right in their own laps, when the icy water, with its life, met the superheated pans and lay there for a few centuries, breeding new things in the shallows.

But continental plates moved at their own pace . . . gave signs of imminency, and then might refuse to move for a decade or so.

Which—a sigh, a return to mortal perspective—was something for the immortals, not two-years-on-the-job watchers still trying to justify their existence.

A glance at the clock. Coming up on 1000h.

With a thoughtless effort, Procyon tapped in, a simple shunt of blood pressure behind both eyes and ears.

Triple flash of light. That was his personal signature, coming in.

Double flash exited. That was Auguste, outbound. It was a courtesy they paid Marak, just to let him know without disturbing him.

Hati’s watchers weren’t active but every third day, at the moment. It was vacation for them, during the days she was constantly close to Marak. It was only when that pair separated that Hati’s watchers enjoyed full employment.

3 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

The teams all took their turns, however. His three-man team had a five-day rest coming up, oh, in about two weeks, when Hati’s team would be on full-time for at least eighteen days straight.

That was the other benefit of this job—frequent and lengthy furlough, to let nerves rest and overloaded senses readjust to the world he lived in. In his two years on the job, he’d been on three months of furlough.

For now, officially on the job, he settled back in his chair, let the caff cool just a little, and shut his eyes. He couldn’t
see
the world through his taps, but he could hear it through Marak’s ears, and the cameras let him imagine the sights. He picked up a gentle creak: saddle leather. Two voices conversed, one, Marak’s, he could definitely understand, one distant and generally hard to dis-cern. That was Hati. All day long he lived with that accent—that very old accent, that never changed because it had living speakers.

It didn’t change, and, consequently, Concord’s language didn’t change. It was always what it had been, no matter what the rest of the Outside did. He had to be careful, however, about picking up the onworld lilt in his own speech, a giveaway, in a program very careful not to give away the identities or occupations of its most critical personnel.

Marak and Hati fell silent for a long space, and he picked up just the sound of the beshti. In front of his chair, the view of onworld monitors endlessly cycled in hypnotic, fractal regularity. In most of the monitors the sun was shining. Near the seacoast, rain spotted the lens, and up in the saw-toothed Quarain it was snowing, while the islands to the west were, as usual, obscured in volcanic smoke and steam. One gray spot in the cycle of monitors indicated a relay had come to grief this morning, gone out of service: Procyon noted its number in the sequence and bent forward and flicked buttons. The actual location of the site was up on the high desert plateau: he marked it for autorepair or eventual replacement, both technical functions outside his domain.

The site had been hammered by hail, maybe. Or cyclone. It was at least one of the sites in fairly convenient reach of the Refuge, not in Marak’s direction on this trek, however. It was a relay that—he checked the record—Memnon’s fourth daughter had set up on her last trek in that direction.

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 9

That was old, then, five hundred years or more. A wonder it had been still functioning, as was. He put the whole problem into his report for Brazis. Auguste had missed it—unlikely, since Auguste rarely dropped a stitch—or the malfunction had just happened.

The monitors kept
him
sane in this job, confined in a viewless room. They lent him a sense of utter freedom, of wandering the planet below at any slight moment of boredom. While Marak was in range of cameras, as he was within the Refuge itself, he could maintain a schizophrenic identification with Marak and his surroundings, and with Hati; when Marak had been there, he had seen, sometimes, Ian and Luz and more than once, the Ila, who, diminutive and beautiful, was the scariest individual he had ever imagined.

For Marak, he held the mental image of a man in his thirties, more often than not wrapped in the robes of his long-lived tribe, which Marak preferred. Marak’s people learned new skills, knew computers and bioscience, hydroponics and engineering, mining and manufacture, the old ways and the new. Most of Marak’s people wore clothing that was far more conservative than one saw on the station, but certainly not desert robes. These generations stepped aside and stared in awe when one of the Old Ones, young as themselves, walked through the halls of the Refuge, a breath of the past in their body-swathing, tribal-patterned robes, with the aifad, the veil that kept moisture in, dust out, and thoughts private.

Talk stopped. Imagination—came up against a wall.

They were all special, the surviving Old Ones, suffering no age, no death except by mishap so severe and sudden their internal nanisms failed to make repairs. They passed their longevity to their children not by genetics but by infection; and could bestow it on strangers as well, but they rarely did that, as hard experience had, so the literature said, made it clear that generations more focused on a mortal timescale did not easily adjust.

The world, since the Hammerfall, had reacquired a biological clock. Latter-day lives ran by nearer and nearer expectations of outcome, and began to think that several days of waiting was long.

The original Old Ones not only had learned Outsider science, they had a personal memory of the Hammerfall: that was one thing.

The Ila, oldest of all, had the memory of the Gene Wars and the Landing, and had originated the nanisms that had reshaped the 4 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h

ecology, a life span that staggered the mind even to contemplate.

That handful of immortals had a community that transcended old feuds, had a shared perspective that somehow anchored them in time, a shared reality from which they were all born and from which they seemed to derive their curious sense of scale. He had read Marak’s personal views on the subject, in which Marak swore he’d beget no more children, and give no one else his gift: it was too hard, Marak said, for the later born, without that cataclysmic event of the Hammerfall in their past.

Why? Why was it hard? What had the immortals all seen, that made that moment the changing point? Procyon yearned most of all to ask such questions, sure that there were more than the obvious drawbacks to immortality that a callow twenty-five-year-old could think of. He was sure there was a word somewhere in it that could give him a far different perspective than he had, a perspective that might be useful in what he did—so useful, so immensely useful, he might become an expert, an oracle in the service of the Project, if he had it.

Brazis would have his hide if he spoke to Marak unbidden, that was what—well, except for weather warnings and the like. If Marak ever wanted to exchange views with him, philosophically speaking, Marak easily could do that, and so far didn’t, and thus far showed no interest in doing so, which would likely be the rule forever.

Marak apparently liked him, however. Marak had chosen him out of a hundred possibles, not the most experienced watcher on staff—in fact, the least. Not the brightest, maybe, certainly not graced by the best record in the Project, being only third-shift watcher of one of the youngest of Memnon’s line, aged six, and having gotten into the Planetary Office by the skin of his teeth in the first place, despite his lack of connections inside the Project.

He didn’t know
why
Marak liked him. He certainly wasn’t the watcher the Chairman had wanted Marak to pick, he was sure of that—but the regs said all possible choices had to be in the pool when one of the seniors chose, and the ancient agreements said it was absolutely Marak’s choice to make, end of statement.

So after sifting through all availables, Marak had picked him, for Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 4 1

reasons Marak never had to explain, and the rules, most tantalizing, never let the subject of that selection ask.

The little he did know—Marak’s seniormost watcher, the day watcher, had died of old age, time finally overtaking even the most highly modified in the Planetary Office. Marak, Drusus had told him, didn’t want somebody senior, coming in with perspective and history with him, and especially didn’t want someone with a long record of intimacy with any other of his contemporaries. Marak, he overheard in the Project hallways, zealously avoided politics and kept his own counsel. And the same whisper among the watchers, some jealous, said Marak might test him for years before he said a thing to him of a personal nature.

Or Marak might never talk directly to him at all. He knew it must frustrate the Planetary Office that Marak wasn’t talking to his day-time watcher in the frank, offhanded way he’d talked to the last one. A source of information had gone. And all he could be, all the PO could be, was patient, and hopeful, and meticulously correct.

He didn’t know where his career would take him, though he doubted he would be shunted aside, as he’d been moved from his last assignment, unless he did something extravagantly objection-able to Marak. So he had a certain security, being as high as he could get, while getting a major vacation now and again, enjoying his work as the dream job, and being paid exorbitantly.

The drawback—there
was
one true drawback to it all—was that he couldn’t tell anybody on the outside what he did for a living.

Watchers—Project taps—worked inside a security envelope that, if you breached it, would just swallow you down and never let you out again, in any physical sense, let alone the informational one. So assuredly he had no desire to break the rules and end up living his entire life as a shadow in the farthest recesses of the Project offices.

And what was that job? He monitored Marak’s whereabouts, activities, and observations, he took notes, he made his hour-by-hour transcript, he passed that on to Drusus, who passed it on to Auguste, who passed it back to him, as watchers had done, time out of mind. He was a highly classified instant communications system and still an observer-in-training, but he never forgot it was a dangerous planet down there, and his attention to what he did 4 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

could conceivably make a difference between life and death for a man on whom the integrity of the Project depended, a contrary and independent man who’d lived longer than any human mind could grasp.

His job, in effect, was keeping tabs on God, or such a god as the planet had, besides the Ila, besides Luz and Ian.