Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  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-thinking any long, deep thoughts in their lives. Himself, he used a 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 either at 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 that would 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 to bottom. 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 un-accepting of the fact that Arden was never, ever going to get a job.

  Your sister could have had a nice job, 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-after all, 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 wo
uld 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-time work 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?

  And his mother would decide "strictest confidence" naturally included her sister.

  He increasingly didn't want to go to the anniversary dinner. Other thirty-years-married people of his parents' generation might think of going out to a romantic dinner for their anniversary and even make love afterward. No chance of that. His parents invited all the relatives and their kids to an enormous supper, to sit in the cramped living room for hours discussing sports and even more remote relatives, most of them deceased.

  Worse, at some time in the evening, particularly if he once spoke his mind to his young cousins, the talk would get around to religion, that other great divide; and if he ever expressed an honest opinion violating their notions on that, his mother might ask again, in a hushed voice, if, working for the government, he was modified.

  And if he ever answered that question with the truth, he'd have her praying for him daily.

  If she saw Arden these days, they'd all be on tranquilizers.

  He took 11th Street back down, a walk past two-story apartments. Cleaner-bots scuttled, small half domes moving busily wherever walkers were scarce, gathering up here and there a discarded wrapper, a little accumulation of dust. A handful of giggling, overfunded pre-pubes from upstairs, whose responsible parties probably hadn't given a damn in years, taunted the bots, slyly tossing small bits of trash to attract them and trying in vain to tip them over. The teens were police bait, oblivious to the watch-cameras.

  He left them to their folly, strolled back onto Grozny Street at the busiest intersection on restaurant row.

  La Lune Noir. He was in a mood for the pastries. Best desserts in the Trend.

  Now he was in a good mood.

  2

  An anole lounged in plain sight, belly down on a rock. Setha Reaux, having missed lunch, had a cup of caff, a muffin, and tried to steady his mind as he contemplated his bubble world. The lizard contemplated him from the other side of the glass.

  The incoming ship had answered his queries, finally. Special Ambassador Andreas Gide to Setha Reaux, Governor of Concord. We will remain here five days for consultations. We look forward to a brief and productive conference.

  Consultations. Business. Special Ambassador. An official, this Mr. Gide, with an unstated mission.

  His first relieved thought was that there was no indication, at least, of an audit, and no summary request for records. After an all-night scramble, and all morning going through files, he had all the tax records accessible and immaculately clean if there should be a question. All the Council meeting logs. All the communications with the various business interests, on-station and off-. He had gotten it all organized in thirty-six hours, in the face of that oncoming, silent ship. He'd gotten the arena records in careful context, along with the time line of phone calls and conference agendas, which proved his case on the construction of the new station, in case there was a question on that front, locally or otherwise.

  But nothing about this arrival looked like an operations audit after all, as that message indicated. He couldn't say he was exactly disappointed to hear there was a Mr. Gide with some sort of consultations in mind-mortally relieved, was more the point-but after a night and a day in the office, he was frayed, underinformed, and most of all frustrated.

  A flood of inquiries had hit his desk early when this ship had turned up, local agencies wanting to know what everybody on the station wanted to know: what was going on and why an Earth ship was here off schedule. The price-fixing board had immediately swung into action, of course, and the securities and exchange people had put in a night of overtime trying to scotch speculation on ordinary goods and luxury items. Everybody was discommoded. The fashion shops likewise were probably organizing flood sales on their newest items. When the regular Earth freighter touched the station in its annual visit, information on the mother world's fashions came with it, and things changed rapidly in the haut ton shops.

  This unexpected midyear arrival created an economic flutter in the damnedest places.

  Technology futures naturally went softer by the hour: Earth technology was also a wild card, and one never knew what would show up in that market when Earth injected its Inner Worlds creations, patterns, and patents into the station's data files, extracting automatic payment as they went.

  Every ship traded. Even warships traded. Earth couldn't physically touch the physical goods of an Outsider station, but patents and patterns for synth programs went back and forth on a two-way trade, some of it in Earth-owned goods on another Outsider station, some of it in stock futures, some of it in actual substance off-loaded from an Earth ship, just nothing taken aboard. Earth always bargained hard for what they sold, and had a monopoly on the finest synthesizer patterns, those that enabled molecular synthesis on say, caff and fine wines, patterns that subtly changed from year to year, each variation available at very high cost.

  In that trade, Earth had a bottomless gold mine, and the buzz was already out that there was, inbound, a new liqueur and a very fine Merlot pattern, not to mention an exciting and rare offering, the pattern of an aged wine from an estate collection: the ship's command levels and the mysterious Mr. Gide might not have communicated a damned thing, but the trade office had certainly gotten communication from the ship's trade officer, so ordinary business and moneymaking wasn't beneath this ship, was it?

  And what was currently going on in the substrate of the trade office was the ordinary flurry of intense, small-time negotiations, the trade board and individual license houses engaged by voicelink with the ship's trade officer, who would work to obtain what he wanted and to pay as little as possible for it in goods and credit.

  Reaux had sent a personal agent on a fast, discreet round of face-to-face meetings with key corporations, stating, quote, we regard this as ordinary trade and intend strongly to defend local interests-and implying, of course, the reciprocal, but unspoken: if you defend us if asked any nasty questions about our administration-just a little happy talk to confirm that, yes, the governor was certainly on the local corporations' side, and they would all stand united, nobody being negotiated out of what advantage they held in their creative property, and nothing radically changing in the economic climate. Only granted they themselves hadn't done something to bring on some sort of inquiry from Earth, the government would defend patents and negotiate for all companies equally, none sold out at disadvantage for the benefit of another no matter how Earth tried. He could be tough. Had been, on one notable occasion.

  As for the stock market, the various moderating systems had engaged as they ought, and functioned as designed. Bulk commodity selling was impossible once those regulations went i
nto effect: that was always the worst hit that could follow rumors of a new technology or a major sale, but the automatic safeguards had slammed that brake on the minute the ship turned up, and consequently there was no need to stop regular trading as that ship glided toward them. There was even a modest wave of profit riding the event, small speculative buying of certain companies' shares.

  So the ship looked to carry on ordinary business, midyear as it was.

  So what was this oddly timed contact from Earth? A Mr. Gide? And consultations?

  When had Earth ever consulted its governors?

  That unusual word was worth looking for. Reaux put the computer to searching all the Earth ship calls since Concord's founding, precisely for Consultations. That took a few moments, during which he drank off the cooling cup of caff.

  Chime from the desk unit. "Sir." Ernst. "Your wife is asking if you'll be home for supper tonight."

  "Put her on," he said, and hearing the contact made: "Judy?"