Текст книги "Forge of Heaven "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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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. Windblown, 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 andthe 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 liketo 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 heatingand 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? couldhappen—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 ondatcraziness. 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 onthose 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 ondatand humans watched. It was a pace of change that, so certain authorities believed, had encouraged ondatto become friendlier. The ondat-human relationship did change, however slowly, and the ondatcommunicated, 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 ondatscarcely 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 highabove 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, volcanics,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 seeit.

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.

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 seethe 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 discern. 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.

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 himsane 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 theecology, 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 whyMarak 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, forreasons 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 daytime 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 objectionable 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 wasone 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 didcould 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.

And learning. Fast. Marak, when he was in the Refuge, had encounters with people with various agendas hour to hour, and it was his job to consult with other watchers and suspect who was up to what. When Marak dealt with his own family, in their enclave—or with the Ila—where politics was definitely at issue—transcripts were a fast and furious production. A tap knew a mistake could racket to the halls of government.

But this, this venture into the outback, was six months of pure wonder, observations, close work with the science departments, instead of other taps. Marak traveled out into the world with his wife, enjoying the days, observing a land whose scale of change was more like his own life span and Hati’s.

Out there Marak could say, as he had yesterday, of a certain landmark—it’s almost all worn away now, the way some people would say, Hmmn, that frontage was painted green yesterday, wasn’t it? Or, The camelia’s in bloom. How nice.

His job, his enviable job, was watching God watching the world change.

Third cup of caff. Take a walk around, stretch the legs. Take a break. Meddle with the displays. Tinker with a 3-D puzzle he had laid out on the counter days ago. Take a note or two. Since the tap was audio, mostly, and one-way, at his selection, he could do that, while keeping up the transparent transcript he was building. There were other aspects he could use, including voice from his direction, simply by talking aloud and letting the resonant bone of his skull carry the sound to the tap, but such contacts were rare. He wasn’t supposed to talk aloud during his hours of observation, in order not to annoy Marak. He used a keyboard, used a tablet, drew and typed in a rapid code. Across the station, in various apartments, in various offices, the day’s records grew and sifted from one office to another, everything from repair requests to weather reports and geology.

His notes by midmorning were mostly botanical, the latest involvinga patch of low scrub of a kind, greenbush, that Marak remembered personally seeding north of the Needle River, oh, six or so hundred years ago. Reference available to Procyon’s casual scan said it tended to be a precursor species. It put down roots, and lighter seed that blew up against it lodged, grew, and fought the precursor species for water, if water was scarce.

Scarce it was not, on the Plateau, and would be less so if the Southern Wall cracked. As the climate changed, precursors and new plants would live and fight each other for sunlight, until their strongest descendants won. But that was in the future. Marak said he was seeding several other plants as they passed, a ground cover, stubweed, and a taller type of shrub, blue dryland windwalker, that, Marak said, might rim a someday sea.

Procyon keyed up images of those plants, too, getting his own picture of what Marak intended and the sort of growth Marak foresaw covering the thin sandy skin of this rise. He didn’twant to make another statement Auguste could gently imply was foolish.

And he was insatiably curious.

Crazy, his younger sister had said about him. Way too serious. Enjoy life. Who cares about classes? Cut out. Party.

He did enjoy life, precisely because heknew what those plants looked like, because he was planning a way to get into an intelligent dialogue with Auguste in this next report to prove he wasn’t a fool, and because he knew, because Marak hadn’t needed to give his conclusions aloud, but had—that he’d been purposely given a tidbit of information. A living god thought his curiosity was worth rewarding, the way he had rewarded his predecessor’s. Finally.

And thatinspired him beyond all expectation. Curiosity was his life. Curiosity made him enjoy getting up in the morning. Curiosity made him dive right in even before the alarm went off—

Hell!

Anniversary. The parental anniversary.

He’d come in here, isolate from the house system, before Sam gave him the scheduled reminder, and he hadn’t remembered to tend to it before work.

He made a note on his hand, as something he’d carry out of the room.

He could take care of it. He had an idea. Courier delivery. Peace in the family was the important thing.

Marak and Hati rode, meanwhile, talking quietly, and Procyon listened, only listened.

Eavesdropping on God. Tagging along like a five-year-old, learning everything in the whole world as if it were new, and sometimes almost forgetting to type his notes in the excitement of the instant.

They’d come in sight of the rim of the Needle River Gorge, the edge of the western lowlands. They had reached the narrowest part of the rocky spine, from which they could see the deep of the gorge on one hand and the expanse of the pans in the other, both at the same time.

God, that had to be a view.

“GREEN,” MARAK SAID TO HIS wife and his companions, looking back down the curve of the long ridge of rock—desert pans dizzyingly far below on one side, and now the eroding deep of the great gorge on the other side of this resistant, ancient lava flow. He added, for his young watcher, “As far as the eye can see.”

Marak rode comfortably, foot tucked in the curve of the beshta’s neck, rocking gently to a rhythm as steady and eternal as his heartbeat, the line of their caravan still ascending that narrow spit that was part of the Plateau, which became, ultimately, the Southern Wall.

“Green-rimmed like the Paradise,” Hati said, meaning the river of the Refuge, where fields and farms and orchards had skirted the first dependable water of the midlands desert, to welcome the refugees in the days of the Hammerfall.

Plants always came first in their plan. Plants that cleaned and replenished the air, not only plants on the land, but algae blown out onto the vast oceans, mats of algae in shallows, life of more complex sort running down with water from the free-flowing streams of the midlands. Marak understood these things. Hati understood. That was the work they did, slowly remaking the world in a way the ondatmight one day approve, and grant their descendants peace from a war they never began.

They’d seen the rockets go out, trailing fire into the dusty clouds until they were a white and vanishing glare. Such rockets burst far away and showered algae bloom high into the furious winds. Over and over and over, year after year, Ian had sent them out.

They had seen the snow come down, and the hail fall, sometimes breaking rocks, the hail of those days was so large. They had seen monstrous whirlwinds dance across the lowlands, vortices within vortices, whirlwinds that, carrying sand on the high plateaus, would strip an unprotected body to bone as they passed.

From the earliest days of the Hammerfall, rains had begun in the high desert, and the winds dried the rain, and sent it high up into clouds that rained down again, until, year by year, since the great destruction, the wind kicked up less dust. These days, gray-bottomed cloud swept off the heights in regular systems, clouds carried on the winds at the edge of heaven.

These days, dependable streams of water fell in a thundering spray off the escarpment, in a chasm that widened year by year, and, conjoined, they flowed down to the Needle, carving a deep gorge on its way to the sea, working its last bends closer and closer to penetrating this ridge.

They had seen the rains fall until the air itself changed, until, these days, they wore the a’aifad more often against the evening chill than the blowing dust that had been the rule in oldest times.

They had ridden the eastern lowlands hundreds of years ago, finding lichens on once-barren rocks, and scum on the pools. They had carried samples to Ian and Luz. The Ila, on first hearing of their discovery, had avowed herself uninterested. “Tell me something more than scum on the ponds,” she had said, affecting scorn. But she had surely heard, this power who had loosed her own makers on the world in one single pond of free water. And all through these ages, Ian and Luz had watched her very carefully, as if she nursed some secret store of trouble she could loose if ever the world grew amenable. Certainly she might to this day possess knowledge she had never given to them. That she did have such knowledge, Marak was certain.

But Ian and Luz had knowledge, too. They had changed theworld with their skill. On their account, the Ila’s great enemy, the ondat,had called off their war with the world, and only watched from the heavens, waiting, waiting, for what outcome those who dealt with them claimed not to know.

The land went on changing. The ondatseemed satisfied, for now, at least.

The beshta under him had struck a steady pace. Hati’s strode side by side. The boys rode easily behind, with the pack beasts all rocking along at that sustainable rate that could cover considerable ground in a day, climbing up the long, gentle rise of the spine. Machines could go many places where riders might suffer great privation; but Ian lost a good many of his precious drones and robots to uneven ground, to weather and dust, too—metal and materials that had to be searched up out of drifting dunes at great labor…by riders, who had to go after the failures.