Текст книги "Forge of Heaven "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

And as for the little rovers, their solar panels blew apart in the winds, liquid fuel had to be brought to sustain them, grit from the unseeded places got into their works, and they failed. After all was said and done, in Marak’s opinion, despite Ian and his clever synthesizers, riders were still the best.

Riders fared best here in rough land, for instance, where there was very little space between one fall and the next.

A good day in the heavens, a good day on earth. And the Refuge was far behind them and mostly out of mind for days on end.

“The green has spread down to the river terraces,” Hati said to him, when a deep erosion in the rim of the Needle Gorge afforded them a view of those terraces, hazy with depth below, and indeed a careful eye could make out a gray-green, spiky sort of growth they called knifeweed because of the look of it, a stubborn, windblown plant that had outfought the shifting sand in patches throughout the lowlands, growing tougher year by year.

So it grew on the very rim of the Needle Gorge, and now below it.

“Knifeweed,” Marak named it aloud, for Procyon, “patches all through this place and well down into the gorge.”

There was a great deal else of new growth, some of it unexpected. Where he rode now, well up on the spine, they had never gone, only seen it through eyes in the sky.

For those who lived forever, something new was oftenest measuredin rivers and rocks. And to his eye this dark basalt underlying the red and gold land across the gorge, newly dotted with green and gray, this was already a place of change, a sight already worth their coming. Here, ancient volcanic flows were exposed and uplifted, the red cap worn away—only on this side of the gorge. It was a fault line, and a great one.

But not for long, this beauty of contrasts. The long-lived began to have a certain sense of timing, apart from Ian’s machines and the opinions of the heavens, and Marak’s said greater change was imminent, perhaps this year. Perhaps this very quarter of the year, all the life that clung to a foothold here would meet a new challenge. The earthquakes had assumed a rhythm he had seen before, and if he bet, as some of his foolish descendants loved to do, he would say it would be soon.

Count among those signs Ian, perhaps seeing better than his machines, too, who quibbled about his going out on this ride, fore-knowing he would lose the argument.

“Go,” the Ila had whispered, when she heard about the debate. She had even hinted at going with them—the Ila, who would bring all her accompaniment of tents and attendants and recorders, her cooks and her wardrobe and her comforts, not to mention her often-voiced opinions. He had not wanted her along. So he and Hati had spoken to a handful of the young men, and they had packed up the requisite equipment, thrown saddles on the beshti, and gone speedily over the horizon without further discussion with anyone.

The Ila, he had heard, had chosen to be amused at his escape, and possibly had rethought the strenuousness of the journey, or possibly had not wanted to leave Ian and Luz unchallenged in the Refuge, likely to make decisions in which she would have no direct part for months. The Ila had generously wished them, through their watchers, a good journey, and was content that they had at least taken her au’it, a woman as ancient as themselves, and in the Ila’s service, a recorder whose book now had become many books, full of the most extraordinary things.

They rode carefully and well back from the rim of the deepening gorge, and this passage, like all others, the au’it recorded, writing as she rode, having given up the precarious ink for aself-contained source, but never relinquishing the weighty book she balanced on her knee, like those many, many books before it.

The Western Red, a sizable river, poured through the gap into the Needle just east of them, where the rim of a second great river chasm split the southern face of the Plateau and joined the gorge. That seam in the earth stretched hazily off into the distance. From here on, only the wind and the rain had touched this ground since the Hammerfall.

And this, Marak reminded the younger riders, created a certain danger. For centuries a rock layer might stand, undermined and precarious, balanced against wind and rain and gravity, but not against the added weight of a beshta’s pads. So they kept the beshti back from the rim, not letting them meander to the fragile rim, no matter their longing to snatch a mouthful or two of the greenbush that grew there.

They rode where the high, improbable rim of the Needle Ridge broadened, until they had a good, level space around them. Greenbush as well as knifeweed had spread here, in sand and soil that endured in patches across a layer of sandstone. It was sparse and tough foliage, gray, mazy clumps rising up off a tough and knotty base growth. Beshti could use either for graze.

“Here for the base unit,” Marak said to Hati and to the others, having brought the party to a halt. All about him he surveyed that unobstructed field of view, from the low-lying river gorge and the red land on the other side, to the bare, eroded sandstone spires falling away to the south, down to the wide pans, apart from this strip of ancient basalt.

This broad place on the ridge was where they would put the critical relay, which might even make contact with number 105, lost out of range to the south, so they could perhaps gain its attention to effect an autorepair. So Marak hoped. At the very least, it was time to set a relay, since contact with the Refuge was perceptibly fainter. And there was, at this height, in that broad sweep of his eye westward, a rim to the sky.

That was not good.

“This is a good broad vantage before the Wall,” he said. “Set up the base. And bring out the deep-stakes.”

The young men looked, all of them, apprehensively westward,as they ought, when he said that about deep-stakes. They gazed at just a faint dirtiness above the horizon.

They should have seen it. Now they had.

DEEP-STAKES. TIME. Damn, time,and it was just getting to what would be a rapid deployment, just when Procyon had a screen cleared and ready for that new monitor Marak was setting up. He’d known it. He’d known it would work out that way. And what was this about deep-stakes, the irons they used to anchor shelter in a blow? Weather showed nothing but a small line of disturbance off the sea.

The tap came in from Drusus, the clock showed 1802, and Procyon moved, realizing pain. His left leg had gone to sleep.

“They’re well out on that rocky spine, now, between the Needle River and the pans,” he said aloud to Drusus, hiding his disappointment, since he knew Marak could overhear them talking. “They’re at the site. Marak’s asked the base be set up. Then he asked for deep-stakes.”

Flash of light. Quadruple flash from Drusus. “Coming on a serious blow, I’m afraid. And they’re still setting up?”

Drusus was taking up his watch in a similar office in another apartment, far across the station. Drusus would actually see the new landscape and the camp the instant the new relay and the camera installation turned on, if they got it done before dark. If weather didn’t intervene.

“Looks like.”

He, on the other hand, had to wait until morning to find out what happened, and he would very likely miss the deployment. It would take a bigger blow than seemed likely from the weather reports to prevent the base unit driving its legs down. It took only an hour.

But he had taxed his brain and his eyes enough over the last eight hours. A flutter in his left eyelid and a leg gone to sleep confirmed it. He was officially booted out of the tap. He hadn’t quite shut down yet, as he multitasked his transcript and Auguste’s belatedly over to Drusus—they should have gone half an hour ago.

He had a rapidly burgeoning headache, he’d been paying suchtight and constant attention. The average tapped-in line worker in, say, a bank, sat with his ears plugged and his eyes shut, focused on a single audio interface and admitting no alternate possibilities to confuse his brain.

He, on the other hand, did multitask. He didn’t ordinarily take allthe information simultaneously available to him, but close to it, and when he had to, his brain ran a large number of tracks quite handily: get the transcript out, get the board shut down, were the final two. All those daily repeated tasks, the same daily-routine keystrokes, the hindbrain could handle on autopilot.

Drusus had been, it turned out, by a glance at the clock ticking away in his contact display, two minutes late tapping in. Neither of them was sinless, him for hanging on and Drusus for showing up late. But Drusus had delayed to get an updated weather report. Not entirely a favorable one, as it had developed a bit beyond the last he’d pulled down: he could see that when he demanded it. The front they’d thought would miss—wouldn’t.

He slid out of the chair, gathering up the used cup and plate, thinking about the cold front, and spotted the note he’d scrawled on his hand. Which otherwise he’d have completely forgotten, given the depth of his concentration.

Anniversary.

Damn. He’d been ready to think about restaurants. About de-buzzing and recovering the sensation in his right foot.

“Procyon is reluctant to leave us,” Marak said, at the edge of his conscious attention, and Procyon felt himself flush, embarrassed to be caught between here and there.

“Good night,” he said to Drusus, “Good night, Marak. Forgive me, omi.” With that, he did entirely tap out, doing the little blood shunt behind the ears that shut the contact absolutely down.

Contacts lost their internal lights, too. He took out the case from his pocket, cupped one eye and the other, dropping them into solution. Didn’t take those out on the town, no. And the foot was stillasleep.

He’d been more wound up than he’d thought, so excited about the prospect of that new camera set up for a close-up of the area and taking his notes on the new growth he’d lost track of the weather he was supposed to be monitoring: he was embarrassedabout that, in cold afterthought, ashamedthat he hadn’t tracked that weather change, which was a major part of his job.

He’d gotten lost in his imagination, was what. He had his own curiosity about the land—the Needle River Gorge and the narrowing spine of mudstone and sandstone layered with flood basalt that arced around to the Southern Wall—that actually became the Southern Wall, when it reached the coast. He’d missed giving Marak an earlier warning. Marak had had to tell him. That wasn’t good.

But Marak hadseen it. And they were well set, and prepared for what wouldn’t be a blow of any scale such as in the old days. It was worth embarrassment, was all.

And when he should have been pulling down the weather report, he’d been deep in geology, reading the charts—he hadn’t known what the atmosphere was about to send down, but he had been tracking very, very accurately the stability of the ground on which Marak proposed to camp, and he had sent that over to Drusus, in its entirety.

One scientist said the ridge might be an old crater rim predating the Hammerfall. A more prevailing opinion said it was uplift right along with the Plateau across the gorge, but another said that failed to account for the flood basalts. He’d gotten all but visual impressions through Marak’s intermittent conversation and pored over his own maps of the lava-capped spine of rock that might or might not be Plateau Sandstone, carved to near penetration by the Needle River on one side and deeply faulted on the other. It had become a spired escarpment on the side of the alkali pans to the south, but the core of the spine was an outpouring of what had to be very ancient basalt, on Marak’s side of the Needle. The curving spine where Marak had camped stood a good quarter kilometer above the gorge and nearly that far above the pans, on the other side of the escarpment, strata all tilted toward the south—

All of that spoke of geologic violence, immense geologic force that, in conjunction with those flood basalts, had predated the ondatattack, in a previous period of vulcanism, on a planet whose plates had been locked, immobile. That was very, veryold rock, that spine. It was an access to incredibly old rock. He imagined Geology was in a froth at the moment. He anticipated requestsfor samples, and almost took it on himself to request Marak collect them.

He had notions of a very presumptuous memo, was making notes on every geologic hint Marak gave him about the age and orientation of the strata there, whether the rock that had been eroded off the spine was actually the same as the Plateau Sandstone across the gorge, as most geologists thought, or whether it was more like the floor of the pans, where there was also some suspicion of deep volcanic rock. In either case, the basalt layer was much thinner than they had thought. That meant an exposure of—granted extreme uplift—much older rock below?

And dared he, two years on this job, and with only a recent course in geology of the region, contact Geology with his speculations? If it was not Plateau Sandstone, if the oddly formed spine was actually an exposure of a piece of an older coast that had rammed in here during a previous tectonic activity, they might get something of a magnetic record of prior orientation of the spine. More, in those exposed lower strata of the spine, there might even lurk a fossil record, life predating not only the ondatbut the Ila’s own interference in the ecosystem. That was the Holy Grail of planetary explorations. Fossil records were incredibly scarce, in the one inhabited area of the planet where they could get to them to collect them.

He hoped he was going to get a request from Geology tomorrow, when they’d read Marak’s observations, and more, when the new relay put a camera active on the site, and Geology got a much closer look at the area…he had an idea they would make urgent requests for all kinds of samples.

But, God, when the Wall did break, they might well see the flood penetrate through cracks and fissures right into the Needle Gorge, flooding it all, along with the pans, carrying away the spine, so if there was any older record in the rocks, they would lose it once that happened.

So Marak needed to get those rock samples.

And hismonitors andthe room lights were about to turn off. He had to leave. If he didn’t clear the room before the systems wanted to lock down, the tap supervisor would tell him about an overstay in no uncertain terms.

Morning was soon enough to make a memo to Geology. It had to be. He wanted, tomorrow, to get a library search on southern fossils. He wondered if he dared pursue it all the way to Geology.

Maybe to Chairman Brazis’ office. Hello, sir. I’m Marak’s junior-most watcher, with two years of basic geology. I think I’ve just found prior life.

Ambition had some sensible limits.

“Board, key out. Door open.” The system had a voice lock, and it answered. The screens simultaneously went dark, all around the room. When he came back in the morning, and only in the morning, the door would let him in, at earliest, 0930h. The fact was, he didn’t actually rent this apartment: Planetary Observations owned it. Specifically, the Project did, and had made its own alterations, and he wasn’t allowed down here or onto the downworld tap except at his strictly regulated hours of duty. The Project didn’t want its taps negotiating their own hours or collaborating with each other on their reports.

So his day’s work was done, forcibly so. He let the door lock behind him and took the day’s cup and saucer upstairs to the main floor to put into the kitchen washer, all on autopilot. He was still thinking about that landscape Marak had described, still imagining that river gorge and the strata of the spine as he went upstairs and shed the work sweats.

He took a quick pass through the shower, dry-cycled, and bare-assed it to the closet for a thoughtful change of focus and a major change of clothing—a nice combination of blues and brown, shirt, pants, boots, and jacket. Hair—it was dark brown the last while—in easy short curls, nothing fancy. Eyeliner was permanent. The rest he was vain enough to maintain as nature provided, unimproved, with its few little flaws. He didn’t do seek-and-destroy on fat cells: the gym burned them off. He was actually a kilo light when he consulted the scan, and dessert was consequently an option tonight.

An acceptable, if not a high Trend look. The brown shirt was a pleasure to the skin—and by now he began actually to feel his own skin again, and be sure where his feet were, after the daylong immersion in the tap. The mental solitude of a luxury apartment was delicious, a luxury the Project afforded after a flurry of multitrackingand prolonged deep concentration. But solitude and silence would get truly stale before the evening aged much.

Hell, get the mind off it. He wasn’t supposed tothink about the job after hours. Wasn’t supposed to get together with the other taps and discuss things. His personal speculations—well, the spine had held for ages. It wasn’t going to go tomorrow. He could get office time next downtime, to do his extended reports when Hati’s taps were on and he was off. He could send out a modest note to Geology then, granted only Geology did wake up and ask for samples.

“Sam, I’m going out.”

Sam’s response was a single chime, not a single word from the computer after noon and before 2200h. His choice, that silence. He wasn’t in the mood for a cheeky damn bot if his day was going badly, and he didn’t like inane pleasantries if it was a really good day and his mind was still, as it was now, exploring the planet he’d just left, dancing down the ridges and wondering if that line of mudstone Marak had mentioned was in the sequence he hoped it was, and most of all hoping that there was time to do the work…if they missed getting samples when Marak was going out to the Southern Wall, they might still get some when he came back, which might be along the same route, a few months from now. Those rocks weren’t going anywhere.

“Down, Sam.” Hecould speak to the bot. It just couldn’t answer. Sam chimed. He walked onto the lift area and rode it down to the front door.

Outside, in the Close, the lawyer’s gardenias wafted heavy perfume to his senses. He nodded to the otherside neighbor tending her roses, a nice lady with not a clue what he did for a living or why a healthy young man left his apartment only in the tag end of the day. She was retired, but spent much of her time writing for a culinary society.

The occasional polite nod was the only regular interaction he had with her or his other close neighbors, whose dossiers he had read, and he had rather not know them better. The PO liked it that way. And he did his own part for anonymity, having nothing in common with the lawyer or the retired lady or, God knew, the rest of the honest citizens in the complex. He didn’t look hostile or odd.He didn’t bring home suspicious visitors. He didn’t attract police, play loud music, wear his hair in spikes, or set off fire alarms. He was, in fact, relatively faceless in this pricey neighborhood of people who had, occasionally, children with problems; who occasionally threw big parties, who occasionally had noisy divorces and shouting matches on the doorstep, bothering everyone—as he bothered no one. He was Procyon, just Procyon, as the Fashionables chose to be, just Procyon, whose job nobody actually knew, or ventured to ask, and who, they might think, probably did his work by computer, since he wasn’t a Stylist, but lived like one. He only went out in the evenings. But few people besides the lady with the roses were home during the day to think about that. It was a neighborhood adequately respectable and not too worried about the character of anyone with the credit to be living here, which was, he was sure, why the PO decided this was the ideal place to install one of its protected talents.

Just off Grozny was his own ideal place to live, too, and he’d picked it off a very short list of PO-owned properties—close enough to the action, but not in it, so he could walk out of the Close and right onto this fashionable end of Grozny Street. The location was a dream for a young man who came out of a day’s isolation hungry for life.

He let the general traffic and the muted noise of voices ease the accumulated tension behind his eyes. He could call any of his friends, if the common tap in his head didn’t have its output channel permanently blocked. Anywhere he walked, he could get still get music on the common tap, he could get art, he could get talk; but he declined them all, cherishing the silence and privacy inside his skull. If he was like anyone else on the street, he could be tapped in, all the time, and some who only skimmed life certainly lived that way, moving constantly to their own music, talking to their personal taps, checking with a spouse about a grocery order or making an assignation with a lover, never alone in their heads, never—he suspected– thinkingany long, deep thoughts in their lives. Himself, he useda tap all day long for a living, and now that he was off-line, the very last thing he wanted was abstract shapes dancing in his eyes or the latest band blasting its relentless rhythms into his chair-weary bones. He wasn’t thinking deep thoughts eitherat the moment. He just wanted to walk along in internal silence and let his brain float neutral for a while…

Well, give or take the burden of the dreaded anniversary gift, ink still surviving on his hand. The question was whether to make the gift personal, something he could really enjoy giving, or just give up, get something with a high price tag and be done with it.

But a personal kind of place that would also courier the item to his parents’ door—that considerably shortened the list.

He was tired of fighting his parents’ taste. There were greater problems in the universe, and the parentals he was convinced wouldn’t remember next month what gift he’d gotten them this year or last, as long as it didn’t scare them or offend them. And he wanted peace in the family. He opted for the sure thing.

Down Grozny to 12th, and up 12th to Lebeau—Glitter Street, the Trend called it, containing most of the conservative shops, frontages that competed in crystal, glass, gold, jewelry, and utterly useless knickknacks for people with far too much money. It catered to Earthers, particularly, who liked shopping on the chancy edge of the Trend—or to those who imitated Earther taste, which, he admitted sadly to himself, pretty well described his mother. He’d long since given up trying to impress his father with what he picked, and as far as impressing his mother, it wasn’t so much the gift that mattered, it was the package, it was the label. It was his parents’ thirtieth anniversary, and if his father was a cipher to him, he at least figured how to please his mother—and thatwould please his father.

It was all on him, as well. His sister certainly wasn’t going to acknowledge the parental occasion. But he kept relations with the family well polished not only because it was the right thing to do but because it was the sensible thing to do. They were dull, but they were solid as core rock, and depend on it, if things ever went wrong in his life, he’d have family, imperfect and unpleasant, but family, loyal as you could ask. They had their virtues. And maybe, if he ever totally misjudged the universe and messed up his personal life, he’d have someone he could query about his own biases, or at least analyze theirs from a mature perspective—he was old enough now to see them as people, just people, like other people. He’d had his stint at rebellion. Now he tried compliance, top tobottom. He decided he’d give up trying to get them nice things, arty things, real art, from live people who’d admit they’d made whatever-it-was. It’s a pot, had been his father’s most telling judgment, when he’d tried to explain last year’s gift. His mother had put flowers in it.

So this anniversary, after the fiasco of the last one, he learned. He went straight into Caprice, picked out a completely useless hand-cut crystal egg in Caprice’s signature style, such a piece of uninspired commercialism that his sister would have thrown up. He paid the extravagant price on his own credit and ordered it delivered to Ms. Margarita Nilssen and Mr. Jerry Stafford Sr., of 309 Coventry Close, D1088, before 0815h on the 15th of May.

That was tomorrow morning, before he even got out of bed.

The clerk offered the optional gold-embossed 5.95c gift card. He signed it With love, Jeremy & Arden,which was fifty percent a lie and a bit of wicked humor. His sister would be outraged.

So, there, he’d done it. He smiled nicely at the salesman, who hadn’t had to work at all hard for his commission, and walked back out onto the street, free, unburdened now, and taking his own sweet time.

Best he could do. It wasn’t a pot. A former Freethinker rebel had paid good money for a hand-cut Caprice egg, and the station still turned on its axis and spun about the planet it guarded. Was that a sign of advancing maturity?

All-important point, he’d bought that expensive, logo-bearing card, and signed it with his own hand, the personal touch. It would arrive in its envelope of crisp cream vellum, as fancy as if it were going to the governor’s wife, and stand beside the egg on a conspicuous shelf for at least a month. As long as his mother was in a good mood, everybody was happy—and if the parentals were both happy enough, maybe he could claim he’d drawn overtime at work and skin out of the gruesome family dinner of overcooked meat, overdone vegetables, and his mother’s special fruit salad.

God, he really hoped he could finagle his way out of that dinner. He detested his cousins. He wasn’t fond of the uncles and aunts. Most of all, he didn’t want to stand smiling through the usual battery of questions before hors d’oeuvres…Have you seen Arden,dear? Well, yes, Aunt Faye, he had, but he’d have to say no, he hadn’t, or the next deadly question was Where?

And…How’s the job? His father would ask at some point in the evening, as his father asked every time they met, and he’d smile and say the job was fine, then change the topic.

His parents were good and devoted sorts—not that he was sure they still loved each other, but they’d stuck together for thirty years, being good religious people and the descendants and relatives of generations of good religious people. Children were the one achievement that they were instructed by God to create with their lives. His father, after whom he was named, Jeremy Lee Stafford, was a station mechanic, which was right next to a tech, as his mother would always say.

Good pay, his dad would say, looking askance at a son who lived at a very, very fancy address, who didn’t tell his father what he made per year, or explain exactly what he did, beyond that he worked in computers for the government. Key-pushing wasn’t his father’s idea of a high-paying job.

Then his mother would convert the question back into how Arden was getting along, and whether she’d found a job, completely oblivious to how Arden was really getting along, and unaccepting of the fact that Arden was never, ever going to get a job.

Your sister could have had a nicejob, their mother would say (he had the conversation memorized), meaning a job in the plastics shaping factory where their mother was a line supervisor. Their mother had virtually assured his sister an entry level position in household furnishings, with a clear track to good promotions in design if she took the company study program. Arden had run away to the streets the day of the scheduled interview, a fact to which their mother never quite alluded, but his father did, if he ever got into the discussion. She should get a job,his mother would say sadly. Followed by, with that honeyed sweetness usually reserved to herald a new baby: We’re so proud of you.

All because, yes, he clearly had a job of some kind, and he sent them presents, hand-thrown pots and all, and occasionally showed up at the family gatherings wearing a nice suit and talking computer games with his cousins’ rotten kids, who believed, like the aunts and uncles, that he was some kind of computer expert—afterall, he’d gotten a technical scholarship to university and actually graduated, while his missing sister had set her heart on fashion design, which the aunts and uncles all agreed was frivolous.

Live in the real world,the parents would tell them both, and they both got the lecture at every mention of fashion design. So he’d graduated with a technical certificate in communications systems, and his younger sister hadn’t gotten any certificate at all, after her three years in fashion design.

Compared to his sister’s, his relations with the parentals had been sterling. Then, last unavoidable paternal birthday, he’d made the great faux pas. No, he’d let slip when pressed, he didn’t go into the office every day. He did wear a suit when he did. But he usually worked at home.

That entirely upset his parents’ image of him. Last he heard from the cousins, his anguished mother had told the aunts he was doing part-timework for the government. His father acted odd when the topic came up, which his mother finally confided to him was worry about the money he had and the address he had.

I have enough, he’d assured her. I’m doing all right. It’s a scarce specialty. And his mother had said, two months ago, We’re sure you do, and then confessed his father worried he was involved in organized crime.

God. From one crisis to the next. He wished he could actually breach security and tell them in strictest confidence what he did, that he was day watcher over the whole reason for Concord Station existing.

Then his father would look him straight in the eye and ask, with undefeatable logic, So if you’re so damn important, why don’t you do it in an office?