Authors: C. J. Cherryh
“And Procyon?”
“He was with the Earth representative when the attack happened. We believe he was injured and shaken by explosion. I ask you, lord Marak, be much quieter in the system. Don’t wreck us.
Let us work. The Ila occupied the system and possibly harmed some of the taps. I don’t know Auguste’s condition now. You may harm him if you press too hard.”
A pause.
“Well enough. But I intend to find this boy myself if you take
much longer about it, I warn you, lord Brazis, I am short of time and
short of patience. The system is our lifeline, and we are approaching a critical need for it.”
“I well understand that, sir. And I ask you, in all courtesy, report to us what you do find.”
Silence, then. Silence so sudden it left a burning sensation in his skull. Brazis rubbed his ears and found his hands were shaking.
He got up from the chair and exited to Dianne’s office. She looked up from her desk, clearly unaffected, except by the sight of him.
She
hadn’t been within the system, that or Marak’s approach had been skilled and surgical, going straight where he wanted it . . . unlike the Ila’s blazing entry. Damned right, the Ila’s action had been a disruptive attack.
“Sir?” Dianne asked. “Sir, are you all right?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Fast inventory of the taps. Particularly Drusus and Auguste. Get them to check in.” He had a shuddering urge to sit down, but stayed on his feet. Dianne was already talking to the system. It had survived. The government still stood.
3 0 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h
“Auguste’s lying down on his couch,” Dianne murmured.
“Drusus has reached his apartment in the last two minutes. Both have severe headache.”
“I don’t doubt,” he said. So had he.
“Are you going to address the Council at all, sir?”
“No. Everything to my proxy. This is far too hot.” He had to sit down. His vision kept going in and out. He walked over to an interview chair and dropped into it.
“Shall I get you some ice water, sir? Do you need Dr. James?”
“No. Water.” Ice water sounded very good. He wasn’t sure, else.
The system was under attack, and he had Magdallen, whose credentials he couldn’t completely verify—and he had Marak, who right now was in the middle of the wilderness, while the Ila claimed she was on Marak’s side. He by no means believed that.
And Luz urgently called Ian in to help her, a 40k trek by truck or beshta.
Help her do what? Silence the Ila, or keep the worldlink to the tap system from collapse?
Worse thought, could Ian possibly be heading into danger, an ambush at home?
He took a chance with his aching head and tapped into security.
“Open the system, all relays.”
“All relays, sir, confirm.”
“You heard me. All relays. Do it but keep the damper in place.”
If this kept up, if the Ila and Marak grew more insistent in their attempts to get in past mechanisms they likely knew far better than did the technicians managing the net, it could damage the wetware of the critical system, nanisms lodged in vulnerable human skulls—nanoceles that, in his own skull, were already busy repairing the damage, overheating his body, pushing his metabolism at the moment to fever heat.
Which pushed his blood sugar way low. He wanted an orange juice instead of the water, and asked Dianne to get it for him.
She brought him that and a thickly iced danish, taking a subjective eternity to do it. By the time it arrived he was shaking so he could hardly pick up the orange juice.
*
*
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 0 7
A G R I T T Y F L O O R , dim light, towering, dirty facades. Procyon had no idea how he had come to be lying in discarded plastic in system twilight with a hellacious headache, but he was.
Suddenly remembering cleaning robots—stupid robots that couldn’t tell him from the trash—he scrambled up.
He got as far as his knees before the pain in his forehead dropped him onto his elbows, momentarily blind. He crawled over against the wall to let his heart settle down and his vision clear. It did, and to his horror he found himself in a service nook facing a cleaner slot, one of those little gates where the service bots went back into the secret places of the station. He’d never paid attention to them. Now he remembered being dragged off inside. If things couldn’t fit in the slots, bots took them apart, ripped plastics, shredded metal.
But they weren’t supposed to take dead bodies, let alone living people.
Had it happened at all? Or was he hallucinating the whole thing?
He didn’t know how he’d gotten here. He felt heat in his face, heat running through all his body.
That wasn’t right. Like when he’d taken the Project dose, that was what it felt like, when he’d first acquired the high-tech tap and the visual machines. Beyond the fever, his head hurt, back to front and side to side, a lancing pain that slowly centered on his forehead.
He felt of his forehead, expecting blood. There wasn’t. Just a welt. And in a self-preservative moment of clear thinking, he wanted away from that cleaner slot, as far as he could get, in case he passed out again.
He got a knee under him, hands on the wall, and levered his way up to his feet.
There. Nothing broken. Hell of a headache. General sick feeling, from gut to diaphragm.
Then he remembered Gide.
He remembered talking to Luz.
And the Ila.
He immediately tried to make the blood shunt to contact the office. The effort sent pain through the roots of his teeth, total dis-
3 0 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h
ruption of vision and sense that dropped him where he stood. He tried again, ignoring the pain, and it just wouldn’t happen. All he heard was the distant, constant noise of the street.
Then:
“Procyon.”
Luz. His heart jolted in panic and he braced himself for the white pain that was the Ila.
But the next sound was a man’s voice, a familiar, welcome voice.
“Procyon.”
“Marak-omi.” Relief and terror at once. He was on his rump in an alley in fear for his life and his continuance in the program, and
Marak
had found him again, through Luz—Marak, who had every reason to be upset with his absence in this crazed mess. He staggered to his feet. “I’m very sorry, sir. I’ve been trying as hard as I can to get back to you.” As if he’d just missed a phone call. Fool.
And his voice was shaking so he didn’t know if Marak could even understand him. “I have a small problem.” Twice fool. He’d promised Marak he’d be back before now. Before . . .
He couldn’t remember.
“I’m still trying to get home, sir.”
“Are you in safety now?”
“I think I’m fairly safe now, yes, sir.”
“What is Brazis doing about your situation?”
“I don’t know, sir.” He didn’t know how much Marak actually knew about Brazis, about the station, or by now, about the craziness that was going on. Marak’s question, What is Brazis doing?
ricocheted off the completely unrelated fact that flashed into his mind, that some tremendous force had come past him in a doorway, from the outside, from the garden. Not his apartment. The ambassador’s.
Security had suffered a massive lapse—if it
was
an accidental lapse. Gide hadn’t just blown up. Someone had fired past him.
He’d tried to help Gide. And it wasn’t his fault.
Very big events were sailing over his head, and one lowly tap, even if he was Marak’s, wasn’t on that high a priority for survival—not in the scale of governments having an argument. Brazis assuredly wouldn’t risk the Project for him.
But Marak, who didn’t give a damn about most that existed up Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 0 9
here . . . Marak was contacting him, like the Ila, through relays he was sure weren’t part of the public system.
“I think I’m in trouble,” he confided to Marak, trying not to shiver. “I think I’m in very serious trouble.”
“Explain,”
Marak said, an order from a man for unthinkable ages used to being obeyed; and just as quickly, in the tones of any man having found something lost:
“Hati, I have him. He says he is away
from home and in trouble.”
Hati said something. There was a faint rumble.
“What was that, sir?”
“Thunder,”
Marak said.
His own pain dimmed. “Have you shelter? Are you in danger?”
“Dismiss concern for us. Listen. You never should have been involved
with this Earth lord. Now the Ila has found a way to reach you, Brazis
knows it, others in the heavens may know it, and Ian and Luz certainly
know how it was done. This is a dangerous situation.”
Another rumbling of thunder. He heard beshti call out, that rare and eerie sound, as he sat shivering next to an ominous gateway in an alley nook. His teeth chattered shamefully. But it was a comfort to hear those sounds, to settle his mind down on the world. “I am safe at the moment, omi.”
“Take no chances,”
Marak said.
“Avoid all disputes with the Ila.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. The tap had never hurt, not since his first days on the system, but now it ached from the base of his skull to the roots of his teeth, and his forehead stung as if he’d been burned.
The relays out here seemed at the point of overload. So did he. He bowed his head into his arms, intending to follow Marak’s advice and not budge or use the tap until he had guidance.
The pain became too much. He lost whatever Marak had said.
He lost Marak. He was blind, beset with flashing lights that floated in his vision.
“Procyon. Answer me. Where are you?”
Marak again.
“Trying to figure that out, sir. A street—near where I live. I have a terrible headache. I’m trying to get home.”
“How far is that?”
“Not that far.” Complications in his situation recurred to him.
The lost coat. The dark place. Earther authorities were looking to get their hands on him. “I think it’s night.” Night was when they 3 1 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h
took the lights down on the streets, to satisfy the human need for night, for change in the day. White light went down and neon came up, and then a person trying to get home could be a little less conspicuous.
Unless police happened to be watching his apartment. Police had been following him. He thought they had been following him. He had a memory, a quick flash, finding blood on his coat.
He’d lost the coat, thrown it away, to avoid detection. What else had he done?
“Procyon, are you safe?”
“I think so, sir. It hurts. I want to let the headache go away. It’s hard to think. Give me an hour, sir. About an hour. I’ll get on home.
I promise you I’ll be all right.”
A N H O U R O N , the attempt at contact died in a confused flutter of noise and lights, and Marak, sitting cross-legged on the ground, gave Hati a worried look.
“I cannot find him.”
“Brazis?”
“I have said all I shall say to Brazis.”
Twilight had come down, deep and strange. The contact he attempted kept fading out.
But the storm was coming on. Even near the relay, the signals might grow chancy.
They had not overtaken their fugitives, who had remained elusive and skittish with the weather. Cloud covered most of the sky now, flashing with lightnings, rumbling with thunder. The prospect of the oncoming gust front was what had persuaded them they should drive down the deep-stakes in the last of the light and take what rest they dared. The strange smell on the wind increased with surface air sweeping out of the west, a smell like old weed, wet sand, heated rock. It would be a blow. It would be a very strong blow.
“He is injured, whether by the goings-on with this man from Earth, or by the Ila’s recklessness.” He was angry at the entire situation. He clenched one hand over the other wrist, arms about his knees, gazing out into the murky distances of the basin below Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 1 1
them, the spire-covered descent of sandstone terraces. “I will try again before we move.”
The beshti, double-tethered with deep-irons right beside their sleeping mat, grazed on sweetweed that grew in a drift of sandy soil, as content as beshti could be, in this isolate, dangerous place, with the skies muttering warnings and the wind rising.
Their legs ached from their long, generally downward ride, constant jolting against one bracing leg or the other. It should have been a profound relief, too, finally to reach Procyon and prove that he was alive.
“Perhaps we should tell Ian,” Hati said. “If not Brazis.”
“Neither,” he decided. “Neither, until I have some indication where his safety may lie. He claimed he was going home, which by no means sounded safe, if enemies were looking for him. An hour, he said. Now the contact fails. Perhaps the weather. But we have nothing from him. We have nothing from Ian.”
“Husband, we have to look to ourselves. Time to go up.”
Events pressed hard on them. They had come within hearing of the herd, and lost them. They camped now right at the crest of the rocky slant that was the herd’s last and most frustrating escape.
Contact with the Refuge had gone. Their terrace was broad and well away from overhangs, which protected them from quake. But that was not saying what layers of soft sediment underlay it, and what the rain might do.
Worse, they were about to lose the tracks, once rain came coursing down the myriad channels that laced across the slopes. They might pick them up after, in wet sand, but that was hoping the rain would stop before the flood overtook them.
“Shut your eyes,” Hati said, hugging him in a little shiver of the earth, so slight even the weary, feeding beshti were indifferent to it. “Rest for what time we can, and hope the fog holds off. If we have to climb in a hurry, we climb, and hope the fool beshti out there do the same. The boys will meet us up on the ridge. For now, rest. We have done all we could. We cannot fight the rain. Shut your eyes. Half an hour. Then we climb out of this.”