Текст книги "Forge of Heaven "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

A sniff. Ardath drew her constellations about her. “Go back to sleep. It’s clear you don’t care at all about our reputations.”

“Good night.”

Ardath’s eyes burned palest blue. “I am disowning you. I’m going to damn you to everyone for at least a week, and hope it works.”

“Go do that.” He could be kinder. “Shall I walk you downstairs?”

“No need.” She walked to the lift floor.

“Sam,” he said. “Down.”

Ardath vanished into the floor and the shadows below. He didn’t ask how she’d gotten in. Sam knew her voice. He’d identified her as family, as within certain long-established permissions. Unfortunately, Sam wasn’t authorized to turn off the alarm system: thatsystem wasn’t under Sam’s control.

He wished now he hadn’t said such cutting things to Ardath, especially when there might be eavesdroppers. She was what she was. He was what he was. They weren’t ever going to agree on lifestyles. She didn’t know he forever gazed outside the globe they both lived in. And she wasan artist, and a good one, an honest one. There was an importance, that the world have color, and movement, and controversy, for those who didn’t have a view and an obsession outside that globe. What price on that? What price sanity?

Her world, the world she’d give him, if she could, held no attraction for him any longer. It didn’t have the scale of the world below. And which of them lived in reality? He would give anything he had to turn up in Marak’s path and say, to, he imagined, Marak’s great surprise, “I’m Procyon. I’ve come down to stay.”

That wasn’t ever going to happen.

Though he might sincerely wish he could disappear down there, once information got to Brazis that his cover was halfway blown on the street. He’d tried to misdirect Ardath and her intimates even while counseling discretion, but he wasn’t sure he’d been successful in either effort. If word did proliferate on the street that he was a government slink, he might have to say good-bye to where he lived and how he lived. And if they were speculating on possible jobs high up enough to be running messages for the government, Project tap certainly had to be on the short list, and that wouldn’t make him much safer. His career was at risk, and he’d put Ardath in danger, asking her to defuse the rumors. God, it was Brazis who’d made him more public, it was Brazis who’d sent him to Reaux—but who was going to get the axe if his cover was blown?

Damn it all.

When he did get called on the carpet, as he was sure he would be, he’d plead he’d been waked out of sleep and confronted with an already-formed suspicion that he’d tried to deal with. That his sister was smart and, if warned, wouldn’t talk freely—that it was actually safer for her to know something, because she wasn’t talking to the family and she served as a rumor clearinghouse for a certain influential element on the street.

God, he wanted his sister away from Algol, for reasons he should have told her plainly years ago, when he left the Freethinkers.

She wassmart, however. She’d ask Spider and Isis what they thought about the accusations he’d made about Algol, and they wouldn’t have a high opinion of Algol, either, if they were honest, and if they’d kept their eyes open. They were older, far more street-wise than Ardath, having grown up unsheltered. They’d talk sense to her. Maybe a hint from him that their little goddess was in danger would encourage them to take a mutual stand.

If word did get out in the Trend that Ardath and certain others highly disapproved of Algol, that would rob him at least of his better-funded prey. But that scenario also worried him. Algol was dangerous in physical ways, and had no scruples about violence.

Ardath was no fool, however. She knew the hazards of feuds in the Trend. That fear had run all underneath her arguments for him to shove the job and get out of it. The more he rethought it, the more he was convinced she’d come to warn him, in her little performance, her pretense of naïveté, signaling him as hard as she could—even after he’d warned her about the bugs. She’d been trying to tell him his cover was already seriously compromised and that what she’d heard wasn’t just speculation from idle talkers. There already wasa problem. He was the fool, not Ardath.

Brazis having gotten him into this, Brazis might be inclined to take the fact she’d warned him, and give Ardath some consideration—if he could do whatever he was sent to do tomorrow morning. If he could bring Brazis whatever it was he wanted, then Brazis might be a lot more sympathetic, working withhis problem, rather than just dealing with it and sweeping him away.

And, always, there wasMarak to deal with, Marak, who would back him, unless Marak thought he was a fool.

So he daren’t, above all else, blow the assignment he had. He had to come back smelling of success and professional discretion so he could fix whatever Ardath had come to warn him about. Protect his life on the street. And protect Ardath, who would go to war for him, and who by no means should attempt it, against Algol and his ilk.

He looked at the cupboard clock. 0448h. He didn’t dare oversleep.

But dammit, he had to calm his nerves.

He was going back to bed. Lie horizontal. Try to relax his mind.

THE NIGHT AIR was still. The dust had settled. The sky was clear, sparkling with stars, despite Drusus’s warnings of fog and disaster. The ridges above them were shadow. The distant pans were ghost-white under the stars, a dizzy distance below their feet.

Marak stood at the starlit edge of the ledge and called out to the fugitive beshti– “Hai, ye, ye, ye!”

Lone voice in the night, provoking echoes. It was the call they gave out when the beshti were wandering. It reminded the fools of food, of sweet treats. On a good day it could call beshti in from the fields, for the rare sugar that could tempt the most recalcitrant old bull into reach of a halter.

He heard distant answers, likewise, lonely in the night, distinct from the echoes.

“By now they have no idea how to get back,” Hati said glumly, from her perch on the rocks nearby, which he was sure was the truth. Far easier to slide down the yielding sand than climb back up it. Their own descent had its perils. They kept careful track of the trail they followed, to be able to find their way back up again, in what might become foul weather.

Their own beshti had heard and smelled the implied offer, and were on their feet. A wise man kept his promises, even overheard ones, and Marak was ready for them, a couple of sweets in hand, daintily picked off his hand by soft, clever lips.

Then he went to sit by Hati. Certainly the rascals were down there, in earshot, but it was too dark to try another descent until dawn. If they could find no way down, riding, fast enough to get close to them, he might try it afoot. If he could just get his hands on one of the leaders he could get the whole herd up. He didn’t want to shoot the young bull. But he would. He had known that when he asked the boys for the pistol.

He had Auguste for a watcher, now, Auguste who told them nothing, who left them alone, for the most part.

Tonight, in the dark, suspended between the world above and the basin below, he was uneasy, and realized the unease was silly, an ancient fear of vermin, as if deadly surprises might skulk out of the dark places of the rocks. The thought of a foot trek had set off that thought. Vermin had lived in such places as this, before the world changed—

But not now. Tonight it was a foolish fear. The world seemed again what it had been. The hammer had never come down. The world had never broken.

But the vermin were gone. They themselves were the fiercest thing in the world now, he and Hati and the beshti and their kind. And not a thing moved or crawled, else, on the land, nor had for ages…one eerie silence, for all their lives since the Hammerfall, and the great storms. One great loneliness in the land.

And change that moved slowly, until this event Ian had long foretold. The Hammerfall had cracked the world; and the pieces of it drifted on internal fires. And now the Wall had cracked, and the land went on shivering, settling into a new age. The place where they sat would be utterly changed—a seacoast, a sea to the south of the Refuge as well as to the west, across the great plateau. If he lied to his eyes, in that dim view below their feet, he could imagine dark, wind-driven water, water stretching out of sight across the horizon.

Someday, Ian was convinced, life would come crawling up out of that sea and take residence on the land.

Would they personally live that long? Ian said processes of change ran more rapidly than might have been predicted, that this fact itself caused unease in the heavens.

Lying warm in his embrace, looking above the eroded sandstone, Hati pointed out what might be a wisp of cloud on the dark western horizon, an absence of expected stars.

That, now, that was not good.

“SETHA. SETHA!”

Middle of the night and Judy was standing over the bed in hysterics. Setha Reaux lifted his head from the pillow, squinted, and put up an arm to shade his eyes as his wife ordered the light on.

“Setha, she’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“I heard the outside door open. I got up and checked. And Kathy’s gone!”

Reaux’s heart started a moderately labored beat, enough to persuade him he had to fling back the covers, put his feet on the floor, and dutifully go to Kathy’s room—for what, he had no idea—hardly a chance that she’d be hiding under the bed.

He walked. Meanwhile Judy was shouting something. He tended to screen Judy’s voice out when it reached that frantic pitch, because sensible suggestions never happened when Judy hit that particular note. He just plodded down the hall barefoot at fair speed and looked in Kathy’s room.

Kathy, it turned out, hadn’t been shopping today. She’d said she’d go tomorrow. If she’d sneaked out, she had 500c on a card in her pocket, and a quick riffle through the closet didn’t suggest she’d taken much else with her.

“She’s worn the black pants,” Judy said, making her own search. “Maybe a tee, I can’t tell with those things. And her bag.”

Now he’d reached his own state of incoherency. Black pants and a bag, and 500c on his credit card. He could call in right now and cancel the card’s funds, but thatwas how they were going to know where Kathy had gone. He rather thought he was going to extend that credit infinitely. Every time she used that card, they had another chance to find out where Kathy was, and, knowing Kathy, she wouldn’t do the simple addition until it occurred to her the card had held out far longer than she thought. Then she’d probably know they were tracking her and she’d try to be clever with it, but she still wouldn’t throw it away. The need for money, and the sure conviction her softhearted papa would go on supplying it, would lead her to go on using it in emergencies—emergencies the nature of which he could only imagine.

“Ungrateful girl,” Judy mourned.

He didn’t say he counted the situation Judy’s fault. Judy’s fault, true; but maybe his genes. Unlike him, however, Kathy had never learned his trick of screening out Judy’s tirades. Or maybe teen hormones just rose up in rebellion when Judy hit that particular note.

“I’m going to the office,” he said.

“How can you?” Judy shouted at him. “Your daughter’s run off and you leave me here with the situation?”

“I’m going to the office,” he said calmly, “where I can engage my staff on a discreet search for our daughter. She has an account on one of my cards. If she buys a blouse or a soft drink on it, we’ll find her. I have resources there I don’t have here. It won’t take that long.”

“She’s not doing this on her own!” Tears had started. After forty years of marriage, he had the rhythm of Judy’s arguments down pat, and was neither surprised nor moved by them. “It’s that Denny, and Mark!”

“Denny’s fault. Mark’s fault. Let’s not forget Ippoleta Nazrani’s fault.”

“She could do worse than emulate Ippoleta!”

“ Nazrani,for God’s sake, Judy. And our Kathy has better taste.” He hated the Nazranis, up and down, and found nothing to admire in their wispy blond daughter. “Denny Ord and Mark Andrews. Phone numbers.”

“I don’t have their phone numbers.”

“Are the boys in Kathy’s sessions?”

“I don’t know. They’re supposed to be in jail!”

“I don’t guarantee they are. I don’t sit on the courts. Give me some help here, Judy, for God’s sake! I need to contact their parents. I need to find out where they are and where they go and get a tail on them.”

“They live somewhere in the Meridian.”

A district about ten blocks by ten. Thousands of people lived “in the Meridian.” He walked out Kathy’s door, bound back to his room, to find his personal phone, to rouse Ernst out of bed.

“I need two young men tracked,” he said, when he reached Ernst on the house phone, and gave the particulars, the names, the recent arrest, and the Meridian district. Ernst, long-suffering fellow, didn’t object, or protest he’d been waked out of a sound sleep, just said he’d do it. “I need their whereabouts confirmed. I need my daughter tracked. If they’re out of detention, she may be with them. She’s got a Concord Trust card with her with a 500c limit. I don’t want that credit cut off. Extend the credit on it as far as it needs to go. Find out where she’s using it, get somebody down there, and bring her home.”

“Yes, sir,” Ernst said.

While Judy alternately sobbed on their bed and paced the floor.

“Breakfast,” he said, then. Judy just looked at him.

“How can you be so cold?”

“Because I’ve already done something,” he said, not nicely, though he thought Judy probably didn’t take it as personally as, at the moment, he meant it.

He wasn’t pleasant when he waked to news like this. He was a slightly overweight, well-over-fifty, sedentary man, but he hadn’t always been what he was now, and sometimes the combative instincts were twenty years old again. Sometimes he didn’t have as perfect a rein on his temper at home as he had to have on the job. He tried not to let fly now, made an effort to pat his wife on the shoulder and take a conciliatory tone. “We’ll find her, Judy. Just make me a bowl of cereal, will you?” Not that his arm was broken, but Judy needed to do something besides sob and wail, and shedidn’t have any friends she could call for help at 0500h. “No. I’ll tell you what you can do to help: go through the clothes she had and if that tee had any figure on it, describe it.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what’s on those wretched black things. I try not to look!”

“Do you know where she’d shop?”

“Decent shops are closed at this hour!”

“Judy, she’s not going to go to Hampton’s, for God’s sake. Do you know any of the shops the kids go to?”

“ No,I don’t know those places!”

“I want my breakfast,” he concluded, putting his temper on autopilot, just a steady low-key response she couldn’t ruffle. “In an hour, Ernst may have found something. At least he’ll be at the office. Meanwhile we’ll find out what she’s buying. She’s in a finite number of places. It’s not the apocalypse.”

He made his own breakfast while Judy hiked upstairs and went through the closet. As best she could figure, when she came down, it was a gray plain shirt and her makeup kit. Black pants, underwear, black three-strap shoes. Wonderfully descriptive. But Ernst had Kathy’s picture, by now, in the hands of every agency on the station, and the card number set to report to security on every use.

He hoped the Earth ship wasn’t tapping into station communications, and he feared it was. It wasn’t going to look good for him, with a daughter running wild in questionable areas of Outsider fringe society. But it couldn’t be helped what they heard.

He had half a cup of caff more. Judy was calling her mother, and the tears had started again. It was 0548h, and he decided it was a good time to go to the office. There was a chance, if Kathy was on the outs with her mother, she might call there to complain. He hoped she would.

“Stay here,” he said to Judy, putting on his coat. “In case she calls.”

“Where are you going?”

“I told you. To the office.”

She wasn’t happy. He didn’t listen to it. He headed for the door.

“I need you!” Judy yelled at him, and cried.

He couldn’t afford to listen. He left, wishing, not for the first time, that he dared actively shut down the ship’s probing into station’s communications, Earth sipping delicately and routinely at this and that tidbit of people’s lives whenever one of their ships docked. He didn’t dare prevent it, beyond the fact that the station’s automatic defenses and a battery of technicians routinely defended them against some of the best crackers working.

Dammit, this scandal would be a nice mouthful for station gossip.

But what could the Earth ambassador say about it to damn him with authorities on Earth? The governor has domestic troubles with his teenaged daughter? He wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last father in that situation.

He went to the office, not letting himself be distracted, confident that Kathy would use that card, sooner or later—as fast as she could get to a shop.

He didn’t use the phone. He reached the office. Ernst had made it in first.

“Any card use?”

“Not yet.”

“She’s still shopping, then. She goes by Mignette on the street. That’s M-i-g-n-e-t-t-e, I have no idea why Mignette and not Katherine, but she likes it.” He watched Ernst take notes. “Any news on Denny Ord and Mark Andrews?”

“Denny’s in jail for petty theft, still awaiting arraignment. The Andrews boy was sent home.”

“Marvelous! Theft? What in hell? No, don’t tell me. Let Ord loose and track both of them. I don’t care how. Hold it. Are they tapped?”

Ernst called up a record. “Yes.”

“Damn.” By no means respectable Earther boys. And tap traffic was a lot harder to follow. “Physical tail, then. Go ahead and let them go. Mark their ID cards and get a trace on them. If we’re unlucky they’ll reform and stay at home. But let’s just do this practically. She’ll turn up. Have we heard this morning from Mr. Gide?”

“Sleeping, we suppose. Dortland reports no output from that source for the last six hours.”

“Good. At least someone’s having a quiet night.”

“That reminds me. Young Mr. Stafford had a visitor last night. His sister, highly respected in the Trend. We were not able to monitor the conversation. We only observed the arrival and the departure. We’re sure the Chairman has other resources.”

“Probably actually none of our business, if he hasn’t run amok since. Make a note to ask Brazis if the sister is a security concern. Do we have a file on her?”

“She has associates with extremely troublesome contacts in petty crime and among the radicals, but that covers most of the Trend andMr. Stafford. She’s a Stylist, no less, very well respected.”

“I’m not concerned with Mr. Stafford until 0900h. If my daughter calls, put her straight through. Cup of caff. A sweet roll. Two. I need the energy. Get one for yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

He walked into his office, and the office systems powered up. The anoles scrambled, startled by a sudden blaze of light. Their morning was starting early and the gods were annoyed.

Reaux sat down at his desk, head against his hands, eyes pressed against his palms. God, he hoped Brazis didn’t pull anything beyond what they’d agreed on.

He hoped Stafford was reliable. Considering what he was, he ought to be. But he didn’t like to hear he’d had a clandestine contact last night, when everything else was going wrong.

Ernst came in with the cup of caff and the rolls.

“Dortland is on the case himself,” Ernst said.

“Hell, no, I don’t want to divert Dortland. Tell him pay attention to Gide and delegate my daughter’s case. A teenaged girl, for God’s sake. Does it take the top end of station security a whole hour to find her?”

“I’ll tell him that, sir. Mark Andrews has supposedly gone home. We’re moving to verify that. Denny Ord is released. He’s bolted off to the lower levels, toward the Trend.”

Andrews had gotten cold feet. Ord had dived for cover in his chosen element. Had Kathy any way of getting that information? She had her phone. He knewhis daughter wasn’t tapped. And her phone would leave a record. But if she was with anyone, and he almost hoped she waswith someone who knew the district, it didn’t seem to be Andrews orOrd.

That was a new worry, all on its own.

Ernst left. He sipped a better cup of caff than he had at home. Judy’s damn dark roast.

They couldn’t afford Dortland distracted. If there was any question about Gide’s own legitimacy, they needed to know as much as they could find out. So did the Outsider government, which, if it wasn’t in on the matter from the beginning, could become difficult, with any hint of facts hidden from view.

He riffled through reports, chewing sweet roll, washing it down with caff. He had yet to hear anything that could justify Gide’s insinuations about the Project taps. And he reminded himself that this whole business of meeting with the youngest tap was Gide’s idea, not his, not Brazis’s.

So he at least was blameless in any confusion. He hoped he was. Could some future mission fault him, when Earth missions routinely declined to divulge the reasons for their inquiries?

There was nothing in the reports to create a governmental crisis.

On the other hand, if some utter fool back on Earth was trying to provoke a casus belli…

0714h.

“We have a credit card use,” Ernst came in to report, “and security is moving.”

“On?”

“Blunt,” Ernst said, not happily.

“Ord?”

“Heading in that direction. The credit card use was a public phone.”

She damned sure wasn’t phoning home. And she didn’t use her phone, clever girl. That she would call Ord, or someone who could contact Ord, wasn’t at all surprising.

“If we find her, sir?”

That was a leap of procedures he hadn’t made yet. What did he do with his daughter? Talk to her?

Talk wasn’t enough at the present juncture of events.

“Take her into physical custody and bring her back to my residence when you find her. Put her under house arrest, and watch the door.” He could only imagine what Judy would say about agents out front. And he was afraid Kathy wouldn’t go quietly. He flinched at the thought of handcuffs or taser. He didn’t want to ruin his relationship with his daughter. He didn’t want her hurt. But he didn’t want to expose his daughter’s youthful follies to Gide’s snoopery, or have them made an issue at a level of politics Kathy wasn’t ready to imagine.

He sipped the cooling caff and watched the anoles creep about the foliage in quest of the small nuisances that lived below them on the food chain. Top predators in a bubble world. They, like Kathy, were not fierce, on other scales. Like Kathy, they conceived no higher threat in the universe than themselves.

He still loved his daughter. He wasn’t sure about Judy this morning. He hadn’t been that confident about that transaction for quite a long while. He suddenly reached that conclusion, curiously, without overmuch pain. Like Kathy, Judy had her bubble. It wasn’t his. Unlike Kathy’s, he knew what Judy’s looked like, and he’d been reluctant to live there, from long before he married her.

A governor needed a spouse. Absolutely needed one. That had been the transaction. Earth believed in traditional values. It might be a reconstructed reality, crashed, oh, so many times during the long hegemony, but if it was anything, it was traditional, and it was what people wanted to feel safe.

Damn Gide anyway. Him and histraveling environment, as if anything out here was going to wreck Earth’s purity. As if the taps were spreading formulae and processes for deadly nanoceles that were going to spread throughout humanity.

“Listen,” he’d say, if Gide could possibly listen, “let’s just go to the club and have a drink. Let’s solve whatever you came here to fix or find. I can tell you nobody’s going to do a thing like that. It can’t make anybody any money, and money’s what drives the smuggling operations.

“Believe me,” he’d say, further, if Gide would believe anything he hadn’t, himself, experienced, “Concord’s still here. Earth’s ages come and go, in all this fear of contamination. And we’ve lived for ages out here, right above the source—we’ve lived with every fault and failure of the system. We’ve lived with ondataccidents and Movement sabotage, way back in our history, and we survive very handily, still human after ages of exposure, no side effects…”

Well, he’d tried to make that point, regarding the gardens. And to keep him out of view of an Outsider populace that experimented on itself in its long personal progress toward remediation. An Outsider populace that was, in general, colorful and in damned good physical shape, give or take the grotesques’ bad judgment or bad taste. Illicits didn’trun rampant on Concord Station, thank you, as much because the populace was educated about their hazards as because station police chased down each and every outbreak. Outsiders weren’t a splinter of humanity, some artificial second species. They were healthy, trim, fit, and they still bred true from station to station, or with Earthers, if one was foolish enough. They were in such fit shape it made an honest governor who’d had one too many desserts wish he dared take on a few long-term nanisms to sculpt his own youth back, but never say that to the ambassador. Never admit any such thoughts.

He hadused short-term nanotech for approved medical reasons. He’d taken the viral treatment to retain his thinning hair. Earth allowed that much for its own citizens.

But those extra desserts were their own protection, weren’t they? A Concord governor couldn’t afford to look toogood when one of these types came calling. Unexpected attractiveness, a good-looking middle age, who knew? It might end up as a sin in some secret report.

Three more days. They’d pack Mr. Gide onto his ship and wave him a fond good-bye. And there wouldn’tbe any proof that Project taps were passing technological secrets. The Outsiders weren’t fools.

He hoped Dortland moved fast. He hoped they found Kathy before she made a misjudgment that wouldn’t lethim take her back under his roof—before she landed in a hospital bed. If it weren’t for Gide, damn him, he’d be personally on Kathy’s case. Give him one address where she’d just used that card, and he’d be there. He’d talk to her. He’d take her shopping for some look she could live with, he’d buy her an ice cream the way he’d used to, and they’d reach an understanding about her mother, and her sessions, and so many things, so many issues he’d postponed dealing with, all because he’d tried to take Judy’s side and not Kathy’s for years.

That had been a terrible mistake. He saw that, now, clear as clear. And he knew what he had to do about it now to preserve the peace. Not a divorce. It was late in his life to create a scandal. But a very different understanding was going to exist in his household.

In three more days, when Mr. Gide’s ship was a blip outbound and out of his life.