Forge of Heaven (5 page)

Now Judy ran up against a daughter who had her mother’s iron will and a dose of free spirit from God knew where. Kathy’s ideas came bubbling up in color combinations that—her mother’s words—belonged down on Blunt Street. Kathy thought that was a good 3 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h

thing. Judy didn’t. The argument was loud. Judy’s demand for obedience in matters of reputation and appearance was inflexible.

Personally, he felt sorry for his daughter.

On an ordinary day.

“I can’t just take her to Renee! Renee has appointments! And I can’t
take her into Whispers like this, in public!”

“Renee can come to the apartment, can’t she? Just explain the problem, pay the woman off—buy her theater tickets. It can be fixed, Judy. Just use your imagination. And don’t call me with the details. I have a serious problem here. We all could have a serious, career-ending problem if dealings with this ship blow up, and I can’t think with the two of you going at it. Just take care of this yourself. All right?” Calm, quiet voice, against Judy’s panic. It was a secure line. Security saw to that, constantly. “Take a deep breath.

You have my complete support. Call Renee. It won’t take that long.

It’ll all be fixed.”

“I don’t know why she does these things!”

“It can be fixed. It’s not an illicit. She’s not pregnant. Go do it, Judy. I love you.”

Click. Judy hung up, not happy. Judy was going to go have herself a cry and call Renee, and cry some more after that.

Trendy, too-tight clothes. Too much makeup. Kathy was fifteen-going-on-twenty, and Judy was trying to keep her socially respectable in a crowd Kathy had the brains and the family connections to rule with an iron hand, if she ever set her mind and her energies to it. Notably, Kathy could toss Ippoleta Nazrani and her little fuzzy-sweatered clique into social oblivion in another year,
if
Kathy didn’t squander the social capital she had before her taste caught up to her budget.

He relied on his wife to bring on that day. He detested Lyle Nazrani. He truly detested Lyle Nazrani, and particularly Lyle’s wife Katrione, without whose vitriol the whole arena scandal would never have existed. And he extended it to their social queen daughter, the bane of Kathy’s young life.

“Ernst?”

“Yes, sir. I do copy. I’ll try to handle anything she needs. Breakfast is
here, sir.”

Well, something went right.

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 1

*

*

He let the door shut on auto, set down his load on the cabinet, and settled into the depths of his work chair without spilling anything, step one. The automatics had turned the room-ringing monitors on. The second of two transcript sticks dropped into a tray.

Step two, arrange his notebook and set spillable items into various holders. Step three, pour a cup, settle back, and take a sip, first good caffeine hit of the morning.

Step three, pop the sticks into the reader.

He flicked a finger to scroll the transcript past his view of the room, transparent mode, floating in air, so they seemed—so he could still see the relay monitors. He had implants—could see one thing in one eye, one thing in the other, and still see through both to account for what was going on in the screens, but he didn’t like that much input at once while he was still on his first cup of caff.

He coordinated the transcript vision to both eyes . . . visual, because he wholly detested listening to audio acceleration. The jabber, even computer-sifted for significant bits in emphasis, gave him a headache. He preferred the civilized act of reading.

And reading, this morning, turned up an interesting discussion Marak and Hati had had with the caravan workers last night. He wasn’t sure whether the information in the discussion was new to the record, and thought probably it wasn’t—astronomical proba-bility it wasn’t, in fact, in the long history of this post—but it very much interested him, to the point he conceived a notion of writing an official memo expanding on those remarks about preimpact wind patterns, relative to something else Marak had once said on
his
watch.

It might get more attention than his last effort, which had turned out not to be news to anyone else in the PO.

Second sip. Personal ritual as fixed as the station in its orbit.

He counted himself beyond lucky to get his assignment, let 3 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

alone to have day shift. After midnight down on the world, when staid, scholarly Auguste was online, didn’t produce much activity—well, not the truly significant kind—except in the mornings. If there was any of the three shifts he had rather have, it was Drusus’s, whose watch was during the station and planetary evenings, when Marak often grew philosophical, or discussed plans with his companions and his wife. But his shift was certainly next-best, full of the midday’s activity.

And important, God, yes. His job, with his two associates’ effort, was the most important thing that went on in all of Concord, and not only in his own estimation. It might not be the most exciting, in the day-to-day conduct of things as certain people would see it, since they were watching—in the slow, day-to-day scale of mortal humans—the re-evolution of a planet, on a geologic scale. More to the point, they recorded and analyzed the day-to-day doings of the one living individual who mattered most in the Treaty, the one ongoing life that for some reason kept the
ondat
themselves intrigued and watching. Marak had lived through the Hammerfall. He was still alive. Mountains rose and eroded away. Tectonic plates moved. And Marak went on living, and the
ondat
went on sitting here at Concord, watching, and refraining from war.

Procyon Stafford was the latest of a long, long,
long
line of observers.

And the transcript that came to him said that things were routine, that Marak and Hati had reminisced during Drusus’s watch, slept through an uneventful night on Auguste’s, risen and ridden out with their companions in the tail end of Auguste’s, all this in intermittent contact with Ian, back at the Refuge . . . that absentminded flow of information passed between two men who had been sharing random remarks for all of time, and who long since had learned to finish each other’s sentences.

The transcript said Marak and his party had gotten under way a little late in the day, for them. Marak, when he was out in the land, believed that a day began at whatever time the terminator swung near enough to be a hint on the horizon—that kind of
late.

Which meant Marak had been up and moving for, oh, about five or six planetary hours by now, without saying much at all. None of it was unusual, especially not in Marak’s scale.

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 3

Auguste’s transcript ended with the note:
Small discussion relative to landmarks (ref 288) and plant growth, which Marak declares to be
common graze and false pearl plant, no samples taken.

Note: the release of insect life (see my note: ref 122) has not shown up
here, but it must exist nearby, since windblown seed from the graze plant
has reached this point (ref 1587) . . .

God. Typical Auguste, whose style crowded more words onto a thought than he personally liked, but Auguste did have a clear vision of the ecology, was dead-on accurate on his references, and usually had intelligent suggestions and comments to inject.

Windblown, Auguste reminded them, in answer to his own naive suggestion of his last watch.
Wind
blown, which he just hadn’t thought of. Things on the station didn’t ordinarily pick up and travel—at least on the macroscopic level. But a field of graze plant was not going to reproduce if insects didn’t find it, and it couldn’t be here if insects hadn’t had something to do with it—or—of course—the wind. The wind and the insects. A textbook case of life constantly paving the way for itself. Procyon felt his face flush, reading Auguste’s untargeted comment on his suggestion yesterday, that he thought the unsupported graze plant must be an earlier seeding, when it turned out—trust Auguste to have his references, and a mind like an encyclopedia—that no one had visited this area in ages.

Thus proving Auguste’s theory. And proving the newest member of the observation team wasn’t clever enough to make observations—yet.

Survival on Marak’s World was such a complex, interwoven thing, so many things to think of, so foreign to his way of thinking.

A plant died without bugs, and the bugs needed the plants to get food out of the elements. The one needed the other to reproduce, and the other needed the one to live at all. The wind carried the seeds
and
the bugs, and if bugs and seeds got in the wrong order, the bugs were certainly worse off, not being able to live at all.

Penalty of being higher up the food chain.

He absorbed the data. Beyond the data, he tried to imagine what it was
like
to stand on the planet surface, like Marak, feeling an earthly wind on his face, experiencing a rush of air that wasn’t a fan-driven draft from an open vent, but rather the product of heat-

3 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h

ing and cooling and the rotation of a planet. He tried to adjust his lifelong thinking—admittedly only twenty years’ worth—in terms of things that moved on the wind as well as by gravity and a thousand other interrelated causes that a station-dweller might not think of. He wondered what it was to watch the stars go out because the world was turning toward the sun, and he imagined what it felt like to see that first suspicion of dawn come over the edge of a convex horizon.

He loved the thought. He swore he’d volunteer to go down without thinking twice, if they ever had to replace Ian or Luz, as, who knew?
could
happen—if Ian or Luz fell off a cliff. He was sure he could adapt to living forever. He’d like to live forever, no matter the documented downside of that gift and the questions about sanity that consoled those of them that lived and died in normal span, up here on the station. He was sure he could adapt to immortality quite nicely. He’d ride the open land for years, just getting acquainted with the world. Of course Marak would teach him.

He’d find the new seedings they’d let loose on a ravaged planet.

He’d see lightning from underneath, and listen to thunder with his own ears, and watch the spread of species by means space-based humans just didn’t ordinarily think about, and he’d spend the first hundred years just riding around watching things, before he even got down to taking notes.

Daydreams, those were. No station-dweller was immortal, and no one went down to the planet. No one ever went down, that was the very point, the reason Concord was here in the first place, staving off war and
ondat
craziness. The world below, Marak’s World, was a permanent sealed laboratory, and three governments’ armed forces saw that it stayed sealed, no matter what happened elsewhere, no matter what governments did, no matter what cataclysms came and went. Concord swung around Marak’s World, and, like Marak’s World, Concord, too, changed very, very little from what remotest ancestors had known.

Planets? There were worlds in Outsider Space you could land on and live on if you wanted to stay on them forever, but Procyon had no interest in those: they were just as isolate as Marak’s World, but the stations above them were, from all he knew, strange, secretive, and focused on a trade in oddments. The people down on Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 5

those carefully guarded worlds might have been human once, but the one culture struggled with agriculture that wouldn’t cooperate, mines that collapsed, and native life that wasn’t amenable to their presence, while another was nomadic and barely surviving the violent winters, not to mention the ones where humans hadn’t survived at all. No, no interest in being assigned to any of those stations, not in this Concord-born researcher.

This world—Marak’s World, that had been the focus of inter-species controversy, this technology-ravaged world—was the most human of all the colonized planets. It was self-ruling, managing its own environment through all the changes, and its changes were progressive, building up, not just churning away at the edge of catastrophe. Granted, one human lifetime wouldn’t see it: but Marak’s World was improving constantly from the days of the Hammerfall—was hauling itself up out of the years of destruction and making itself more than viable, while
ondat
and humans watched. It was a pace of change that, so certain authorities believed, had encouraged
ondat
to become friendlier. The
ondat
-

human relationship did change, however slowly, and the
ondat
communicated, these days, on the third station to bear the name Concord.

A long, long watch. Teams did archaeology over at Mission One station, and brought strange things to the museum, oddments that few people could even figure out, and some of them were stranger still, leavings of the
ondat,
that today’s
ondat
scarcely recognized.

Stations had been orbiting Marak’s World, yes, that long, since the Hammerfall, and the world below them had many, many centuries yet to go before anyone remotely contemplated unraveling the quarantine or changing the treaties that depended on it.

But change did happen. And for a watcher who’d only just begun on his job, there was hope that before he left it, he might see a few more klicks of grassland grow, and a settlement or two spring up.

Meanwhile he had constant pictures from the camera sites around the world: the ceiling-high half ring of monitors that surrounded him gave him a constantly shifting view, a few from inside the refuge, another out on the volcanic islands, where smoke generally obscured the view. One observation station sat high 3 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h