Authors: C. J. Cherryh
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 in-
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 4 3
volving a 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’t
want 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
he
knew 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
that
inspired 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.
4 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h
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.
“ G R E E N ,” M A R A K S A I D TO H I S 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 re-plenished 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
ondat
might one day approve, and grant their descendants peace from a war they never began.
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 4 5
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 the 4 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h
world 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
ondat
seemed 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.
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 mea-
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 4 7
sured in 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 a 4 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h
self-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.