Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  "Marak."

  Clear and cold. The very man he wanted to hear. "Ian. What happened? What is the sudden racket and silence up there?"

  "We have no idea."

  "We have every idea," the Ila's voice interposed over Ian's. "We have a perfectly adequate understanding of what happened up there. The fool director has completely cut us off."

  "Ila," Luz interjected.

  He had been worried because the tap had been silent. Now he had no patience for this bickering. The width of the desert was not enough to insulate him and his wife from the Refuge and its petty politics. "All of you," he said sharply. His arm had gone to sleep under Hati's shoulder, and tingled as she stirred. "Settle your differences. I have no interest in all of this, except the safety of my watchers, two of whom are dangerously affected, if not dead, and one of whom is pursued by Brazis's enemies and now held from talking. Break the system open. Tell Brazis stop this nonsense, use his resources and pull Procyon back to safety. Now."

  "That is the very point, Marak-omi," Luz said, "that the station wants no contact with us at the moment. Brazis apparently detected a Movement cell active on the station. We believe Brazis is the one who shut the link down, for defensive reasons."

  "We are far from certain," Ian said.

  "Folly," Hati said disgustedly. She had sat on the periphery of this conversation. But she clearly heard what Ian and Luz said, all on her own. "My husband says it all. We are wet, we are cold, we are at this moment in very ill humor on a cliff that may pitch us down into the basin, and when we get off it, trust my husband will not rest until Brazis accounts for this boy. Ila, we appeal to you. Tell us the truth behind all of this."

  "About fools who call themselves Movement? Who engage in illicit trade and infiltrate new technology into the system? I know nothing at all substantive."

  "We have our deep suspicions," Ian said.

  "Enough!" Marak said, beyond angry at this sniping and bickering and insinuation. "Is it Brazis who shut us off, or is there some other agency?"

  A crack of thunder. A gust of wind carried rain under their shelter, threatening to tear the canvas away from the three irons they had embedded.

  "We have not the least idea," the Ila said carelessly. Marak could see the gesture in his imagination, a lift and wave of the fingers, dismissing his strong hint of other interference-or some enemy diverting their attention elsewhere.

  "Hati," Luz said, "Marak-omi, we need you. We need you both. We ask you stay with us."

  Oh, doubtless Luz needed their support in the situation now, Marak thought. Doubtless Luz now repented her bickering with Ian and even more bitterly repented her period of friendship with the Ila. Doubtless Ian and Luz alike dreaded being deserted to the Ila's society without his mediation. Half a year was already wearing on their close, three-sided society. without him in the Refuge. They were ready to call him back. And if his and Hati's absence had driven Ian to the far end of the Paradise and actually precipitated this event, he regretted it, but he much doubted that was the case.

  Dared he raise the thorny matter of Brazis's personal faults with Ian now? They all had ears to hear. They all would have heard what he had heard in the system, if they had been listening at all. The three of them at the Refuge had all known, if he had not imagined it entirely, that there was something seriously wrong on the system. They had failed to raise the issue or warn him. Subtlety and subterfuge was at work, and he had no desire to fling sand in the soup before he knew what the new alliances were.

  "We have no choice but tend to our own affairs, our way," Marak said. "We expect others to do what they can."

  With that, he shut the voices down himself, definitively, and possessed a thunderous and rainy silence he had chosen. Let them worry what he knew, and what he might do about it.

  He gripped the slit of the tarp against the wind, with his wife warm and close against him, and they looked out on the lightning-lit rain, on rock spires and new streams of water pouring past them-well calculated, where those storm-made streams would run.

  The heavens quarreled. At least they knew the relay the boys had set up on the ridge was functioning very well, even in the weather, since the Refuge had come in clear and strong.

  This, the thunder and the rain and the constant shivering of the earth, this was reliable and real. The grinding war of shattered sections of the earth were producing something he and Hati had never seen, and despite their danger, even this far away, they shared it. Let the Ila and Ian battle it out with Brazis and the rest. Watchers came and went, sorry as they might be for the loss of three innocents. They could never touch the heavens. They had the earth to watch.

  But, then-a small thought slithered back into Marak's mind-if there was in fact someone new in the network, then perhaps something in the long maneuvering in the world above had truly changed. Like the cracking of the earth's plates under the hammerfall, like the rupture of the Southern Wall, an event that, over time sufficient to lift mountains, and bring this weather down on them-change could happen up there. They had feared the water rising from below, and instead were half-drowned by water falling down on them from the sky and the cliffs. Surprise could still happen, on the world's scale.

  And if something up in the heavens had finally cracked, then they were no longer in an endless loop, one set of known forces against another. If something up there had cracked, then, up there, as below, plates might have begun to shift, bringing chaos and real change in the heavens.

  "What are you thinking, husband?" Hati, close against him, could surely feel his heart, and the tension in his arms. It was never a good plan to lie to her.

  "A stranger. A stranger seems to have arrived in the heavens. Or something has shifted."

  A deep breath. Hati was considering that notion.

  "They do not affect us," she said.

  "Indeed," he said. "And the uplink is still in our hands."

  Brazis might have silenced the downlink, as he could, but not what ascended to the heavens. He knew the Ila's tricks. He knew what she had done to get into Brazis's system: trip switch after switch, locking the relays open, and move like quicksilver, difficult to stop. That was the way.

  And use not the ordinary contact codes, but the emergency ones, the ones just very few people alive remembered, the ones intended to allow them to reestablish contact in an inert system if something did go wrong in the heavens.

  The master codes. He had never forgotten them, from the earliest days in the Refuge, when the earth and sky were broken. He lived his long life assuming something, at some time in all eternity, would surely go wrong, and he tested his memory of them from time to time.

  He did it now. "I think I can get through," he said to Hati.

  "Forbear," Hati urged him. "Watchers have died of mistakes. Cannot we?"

  He sat with his eyes closed, deaf and blind to the storm, quietly testing his limits, probing the relay, running small tests.

  The beshti set up a sudden raucous clamor that shattered his effort, a clamor that, under the roar of the rain, found an answer in the dark. Beshti talked to beshti in the storm.

  Now-now, cold and hungry, soaked and deafened by thunder, their fugitives had become agitated enough to break from the young bull's rule. His own beshti sent out a loud warning into the dark, overruling the young bull's orders to the females.

  Hati had not disturbed him with that news. He heard it for himself. He got up, and Hati-after so many years they had no need to discuss the necessities-Hati was right beside him, leaping up into the driving rain, both of them quick to lay hands on the old bull's halter before he ripped the deep-irons right out of the rock, double-tether and all, and ran off to kill the young thief.

  "Hyiii-yi-yi!" Hati yelled her own summons out into the dark, and beside them the herd matriarch bawled out her fury at the robbery. The young bull had thought the string were all his females until two arriving senior riders brought in this senior bull and a canny old female that changed the rules on him. There,
before the earth ever shook, was the root of their problem. The young bull, opportunist, had done what instinct told him.

  So now, fleeing an uncertainty in the weather and the earth, the females who had run off with the young bull had turned, evading calamity they might feel in the earth itself, disaster reeking in that icy wind.

  Not at a convenient moment for their return, no. They had rather have found their fugitives by daylight, on easy ground. In the stormy dark, beshti saw ghosts and devils at every turn, and every fleeting notion was an enemy.

  The females came, nonetheless.

  So the young bull was going to come up that rain-soaked slope. He had no choice.

  In the uncertainty of the night, they had left the beshti saddled, the leather under weather cover, and Marak ripped the plastic cover free, losing it to the wind as he tried to gain footing to mount, as shadowy huge figures came bawling and braying up among the shadowy pillars, out of the rain, driving the bull into a circling struggle to get free.

  "Let go, woman!" he yelled at his wife, worried for Hati's safety, but there was no chance Hati would let go her hold, though the old bull threw his head up, lifting Hati completely off her feet as Marak grabbed at the rein.

  Beshti milled around in the lightning and the rain, squalling and bawling to drown the thunder. One silly cow fouled their tether-line, trying to cross it, tangled and threw Hati half to her knees.

  "Unclip!" Marak yelled, half-turning toward Hati as he got a hand on the rain-slick saddle, and Hati risked one free hand, lifted a knife, shining in the lightnings, and began to saw the taut tether-line, no wrestling with the halter clip against the beshti's irate strength.

  Marak swung up and landed astride as the bull snapped free with a rolling shake of his long neck.

  "Hya!" he yelled, and popped the old bull hard on the rump with his quirt, disabusing him of any thought he was riderless. His vision was all a blur of lightning-lit rain as the old bull spun about, threatened from the dark, with an unexpected problem on his back. He was all puffed up to fight, and had a rider with a loaded quirt and a taut rein complicating his headlong rush for trouble.

  The young bull lunged out of the rainy dark toward them, teeth bared.

  "Hai!" Marak yelled, pulled his beshti's head aside by main force, jerking himself out of the way, and hit the young bull hard across the face when the youngster tried to sneak a bite.

  The young bull, veering off, shouldered them hard in the movement and came in again. Where the cliff edge was, Marak had a guess, but only a guess. Marak laid on a second blow, and a third, the rascal thinking to snake his head under to nip the old bull's throat. The old bull fought to turn under the rein and come full about for a neck-blow that could kill. For a moment it was all a squalling mill of turning bodies and diving heads, and Marak plied the loaded quirt on their young attacker with all the force in his arm, until the young bull finally felt the blows and shied back, flash of the white of one eye in the flickering lightning.

  The old bull lunged to give chase. Marak hauled his head around and back, which forced the old bull around and around in a circle. Pops of the quirt stinging his rump kept his rear dodging sideways to escape those blows. This proved too many diversions at once for the old fellow's brain, and he grudgingly resigned the fight, puffing and blowing, on the very edge of the cliff.

  There was a great deal of grunting and blowing all around, and complaints out of the dark, complaints from the young bull, complaints from the herd, rumbles of thunder from the rock walls above them. The earth itself jolted, one sharp thump, and the panicky herd milled and squalled in confusion.

  Another rider showed in the lightnings. Hati had gotten herself up to the matriarch's saddle, and applied her quirt liberally wherever a beshti showed a disposition to break out of the herd and start a panic or a fight with the matriarch.

  They were soaked to the skin. Their tarp with their supplies inside was flat, trampled in the confusion. He had the gun. He had never thought to use it.

  But they had the herd back in their control.

  13

  The hospital didn't have a feeling of shattering crisis as Reaux arrived. Two volunteers stood just past the foyer, chatting idly by the lift, then stopped their conversation and stared, openmouthed, recognizing their governor, and security.

  Security called a lift car. Reaux rode up to the isolation level, fretting at the ordinary speed, and exited with his minimal escort, the two building security guards Ernst had commandeered for him. No training, no special skills-but no commitment to Dortland, either.

  God, what was he into?

  The look of crisis manifested the moment he exited onto the Gide's floor and turned the corner toward the isolation units. Hospital security was in plain sight, armed not with guns but with detector wands and hose-down kits. He'd seen the precautions in drill. He'd never seen the reality in his life. He didn't know where the safe limit might be, and pulled up short with his unprotected staff.

  "What are we up against?" he asked.

  "Governor, sir." The hazmat leader in charge spoke jargon to a collar-com, and a moment later, having heard some sort of answer: "Containment's maintained, sir. It's safe right here."

  "Can I see him?"

  He didn't particularly want to see Gide, but it was what he'd come to the hospital to do. The first report had said Gide could die.

  Reaux was a civilized man-but he had fervently hoped for that event. What he had heard on the way here, however, indicated something far less satisfactory.

  He knew the drill with the suit, now. He went into the adjacent room and suited, making the seals tight, checking them twice. When he came out, the men opened the door for him, and he went into the restricted area, leaving his escort in the safe zone.

  Faceless, behind another mask, the physician in charge met him as he came through into containment. Waiting for him, clearly.

  "Governor."

  "Doctor. What's the story here?"

  "We've got a problem, but not as life-critical a medical problem as we initially feared. There's a nanism at work, organizing fast. A sited nanism, not general."

  "Where is it?"

  The doctor touched the side of his masked head.

  "Are you saying it's a tap, then?" A tap was good news. A tap was a limited involvement, a known mod, with a known progress, a known limit.

  "Not commercial. No chance it's commercial. It's a large area of involvement. It's got the ear, the jaw, and the nerves and vessels there, and it's developed faster than anything I've seen."

  "Any chance it's contagious? How in hell did he get it?"

  "Any breach in the skin. Which he certainly has. Even ingested. It wouldn't matter. The usual administration of the common tap is in a capsule. But we can't readily identify it and we're taking no chances until it's finished doing whatever it's going to do. He, on the other hand, wants out of here immediately. He's furious. And I take it this infection isn't within your knowledge, Governor."

  "No," he said, aghast that the doctor had even suggested it, as if his government could have done it.

  But Dortland? He could hardly believe it. But he supposed it was possible.

  And meanwhile his brain spun its wheels on that word tap, getting nowhere he wanted to go. "No, I assure you this is nothing my administration knows about."

  "It happened somehow."

  "Is he still conscious?"

  "Too conscious. Sedation isn't taking. That's one thing that very much worries us. He's got a hellacious headache, understandable with a new mod, and whatever it is, the nanism's sopping up any drug we give him-not uncommon. It's been doing that. But, on the not entirely positive side, his wounds are healing extremely fast. It acts-" A little hesitation. "And this is what makes me nervous-it acts like a general nanism. It acts, in fact, complex."

  Complex. Complex was not at all a good word. Complex put it far beyond the sort of monopurpose illicit the occasional teenaged idiot met and had to have purged out of his system.
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  If it was a complex nanism, if it was worse than that, sending it to specialists who understood things that didn't have to do with a little body-sculpting. that might be a good idea, and, far from offending the doctor, he was sure the doctor would support that move.

  Except it bounced Gide, with all the classified things in his head, down to Brazis's territory. All the experts in this sort of thing were Outsiders.

  But the facts were, somebody had infected a body too pure to walk Concord streets with a mod he began to fear no hack parlor down on Blunt would dare handle-something that came precapsuled, maybe, that an ordinary hand could handle. Or something injected. Probably not contagious. But it had effects in the bloodstream, by what the doctor said, and that meant it might potentially travel.

  "I'll see him," he said.