C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 2 - Forge of Heaven Page 4

  He relied on his wife to bring on that day. He detested Lyle Nazrani. He truly detested Lyle Nazrani, and particularly Lyle's wife Katrione, without whose vitriol the whole arena scandal would never have existed. And he extended it to their social queen daughter, the bane of Kathy's young life.

  "Ernst?"

  "Yes, sir. I do copy. I'll try to handle anything she needs. Breakfast is here, sir."

  Well, something went right.

  0915H. Early to work. With a pile of diet wafers and a snack bar balanced on a saucer in one hand, a pot of caff in the other, and a notebook under his arm, Procyon navigated the door of his basement home office, elbowed the switch, and let the robot turn the lights on.

  He let the door shut on auto, set down his load on the cabinet, and settled into the depths of his work chair without spilling anything, step one. The automatics had turned the room-ringing monitors on. The second of two transcript sticks dropped into a tray.

  Step two, arrange his notebook and set spillable items into various holders. Step three, pour a cup, settle back, and take a sip, first good caffeine hit of the morning.

  Step three, pop the sticks into the reader.

  He flicked a finger to scroll the transcript past his view of the room, transparent mode, floating in air, so they seemed-so he could still see the relay monitors. He had implants-could see one thing in one eye, one thing in the other, and still see through both to account for what was going on in the screens, but he didn't like that much input at once while he was still on his first cup of caff. He coordinated the transcript vision to both eyes. visual, because he wholly detested listening to audio acceleration. The jabber, even computer-sifted for significant bits in emphasis, gave him a headache. He preferred the civilized act of reading.

  And reading, this morning, turned up an interesting discussion Marak and Hati had had with the caravan workers last night. He wasn't sure whether the information in the discussion was new to the record, and thought probably it wasn't-astronomical probability it wasn't, in fact, in the long history of this post-but it very much interested him, to the point he conceived a notion of writing an official memo expanding on those remarks about preimpact wind patterns, relative to something else Marak had once said on his watch.

  It might get more attention than his last effort, which had turned out not to be news to anyone else in the PO.

  Second sip. Personal ritual as fixed as the station in its orbit.

  He counted himself beyond lucky to get his assignment, let alone to have day shift. After midnight down on the world, when staid, scholarly Auguste was online, didn't produce much activity-well, not the truly significant kind-except in the mornings. If there was any of the three shifts he had rather have, it was Drusus's, whose watch was during the station and planetary evenings, when Marak often grew philosophical, or discussed plans with his companions and his wife. But his shift was certainly next-best, full of the midday's activity.

  And important, God, yes. His job, with his two associates' effort, was the most important thing that went on in all of Concord, and not only in his own estimation. It might not be the most exciting, in the day-to-day conduct of things as certain people would see it, since they were watching-in the slow, day-to-day scale of mortal humans-the re-evolution of a planet, on a geologic scale. More to the point, they recorded and analyzed the day-to-day doings of the one living individual who mattered most in the Treaty, the one ongoing life that for some reason kept the ondat themselves intrigued and watching. Marak had lived through the Hammerfall. He was still alive. Mountains rose and eroded away. Tectonic plates moved. And Marak went on living, and the ondat went on sitting here at Concord, watching, and refraining from war.

  Procyon Stafford was the latest of a long, long, long line of observers.

  And the transcript that came to him said that things were routine, that Marak and Hati had reminisced during Drusus's watch, slept through an uneventful night on Auguste's, risen and ridden out with their companions in the tail end of Auguste's, all this in intermittent contact with Ian, back at the Refuge. that absent-minded flow of information passed between two men who had been sharing random remarks for all of time, and who long since had learned to finish each other's sentences.

  The transcript said Marak and his party had gotten under way a little late in the day, for them. Marak, when he was out in the land, believed that a day began at whatever time the terminator swung near enough to be a hint on the horizon-that kind of late. Which meant Marak had been up and moving for, oh, about five or six planetary hours by now, without saying much at all. None of it was unusual, especially not in Marak's scale.

  Auguste's transcript ended with the note: Small discussion relative to landmarks (ref 288) and plant growth, which Marak declares to be common graze and false pearl plant, no samples taken.

  Note: the release of insect life (see my note: ref 122) has not shown up here, but it must exist nearby, since windblown seed from the graze plant has reached this point (ref 1587).

  God. Typical Auguste, whose style crowded more words onto a thought than he personally liked, but Auguste did have a clear vision of the ecology, was dead-on accurate on his references, and usually had intelligent suggestions and comments to inject.

  Windblown, Auguste reminded them, in answer to his own na‹ve suggestion of his last watch. Windblown, which he just hadn't thought of. Things on the station didn't ordinarily pick up and travel-at least on the macroscopic level. But a field of graze plant was not going to reproduce if insects didn't find it, and it couldn't be here if insects hadn't had something to do with it-or-of course-the wind. The wind and the insects. A textbook case of life constantly paving the way for itself. Procyon felt his face flush, reading Auguste's untargeted comment on his suggestion yesterday, that he thought the unsupported graze plant must be an earlier seeding, when it turned out-trust Auguste to have his references, and a mind like an encyclopedia-that no one had visited this area in ages.

  Thus proving Auguste's theory. And proving the newest member of the observation team wasn't clever enough to make observations-yet.

  Survival on Marak's World was such a complex, interwoven thing, so many things to think of, so foreign to his way of thinking. A plant died without bugs, and the bugs needed the plants to get food out of the elements. The one needed the other to reproduce, and the other needed the one to live at all. The wind carried the seeds and the bugs, and if bugs and seeds got in the wrong order, the bugs were certainly worse off, not being able to live at all. Penalty of being higher up the food chain.

  He absorbed the data. Beyond the data, he tried to imagine what it was like to stand on the planet surface, like Marak, feeling an earthly wind on his face, experiencing a rush of air that wasn't a fan-driven draft from an open vent, but rather the product of heating and cooling and the rotation of a planet. He tried to adjust his lifelong thinking-admittedly only twenty years' worth-in terms of things that moved on the wind as well as by gravity and a thousand other interrelated causes that a station-dweller might not think of. He wondered what it was to watch the stars go out because the world was turning toward the sun, and he imagined what it felt like to see that first suspicion of dawn come over the edge of a convex horizon.

  He loved the thought. He swore he'd volunteer to go down without thinking twice, if they ever had to replace Ian or Luz, as, who knew? could happen-if Ian or Luz fell off a cliff. He was sure he could adapt to living forever. He'd like to live forever, no matter the documented downside of that gift and the questions about sanity that consoled those of them that lived and died in normal span, up here on the station. He was sure he could adapt to immortality quite nicely. He'd ride the open land for years, just getting acquainted with the world. Of course Marak would teach him. He'd find the new seedings they'd let loose on a ravaged planet. He'd see lightning from underneath, and listen to thunder with his own ears, and watch the spread of species by means space-based humans just didn't ordinarily think about, and he'd spend the first h
undred years just riding around watching things, before he even got down to taking notes.

  Daydreams, those were. No station-dweller was immortal, and no one went down to the planet. No one ever went down, that was the very point, the reason Concord was here in the first place, staving off war and ondat craziness. The world below, Marak's World, was a permanent sealed laboratory, and three governments' armed forces saw that it stayed sealed, no matter what happened elsewhere, no matter what governments did, no matter what cataclysms came and went. Concord swung around Marak's World, and, like Marak's World, Concord, too, changed very, very little from what remotest ancestors had known.

  Planets? There were worlds in Outsider Space you could land on and live on if you wanted to stay on them forever, but Procyon had no interest in those: they were just as isolate as Marak's World, but the stations above them were, from all he knew, strange, secretive, and focused on a trade in oddments. The people down on those carefully guarded worlds might have been human once, but the one culture struggled with agriculture that wouldn't cooperate, mines that collapsed, and native life that wasn't amenable to their presence, while another was nomadic and barely surviving the violent winters, not to mention the ones where humans hadn't survived at all. No, no interest in being assigned to any of those stations, not in this Concord-born researcher.

  This world-Marak's World, that had been the focus of inter-species controversy, this technology-ravaged world-was the most human of all the colonized planets. It was self-ruling, managing its own environment through all the changes, and its changes were progressive, building up, not just churning away at the edge of catastrophe. Granted, one human lifetime wouldn't see it: but Marak's World was improving constantly from the days of the Hammerfall-was hauling itself up out of the years of destruction and making itself more than viable, while ondat and humans watched. It was a pace of change that, so certain authorities believed, had encouraged ondat to become friendlier. The ondat-human relationship did change, however slowly, and the ondat communicated, these days, on the third station to bear the name Concord.

  A long, long watch. Teams did archaeology over at Mission One station, and brought strange things to the museum, oddments that few people could even figure out, and some of them were stranger still, leavings of the ondat, that today's ondat scarcely recognized. Stations had been orbiting Marak's World, yes, that long, since the Hammerfall, and the world below them had many, many centuries yet to go before anyone remotely contemplated unraveling the quarantine or changing the treaties that depended on it.

  But change did happen. And for a watcher who'd only just begun on his job, there was hope that before he left it, he might see a few more klicks of grassland grow, and a settlement or two spring up.

  Meanwhile he had constant pictures from the camera sites around the world: the ceiling-high half ring of monitors that surrounded him gave him a constantly shifting view, a few from inside the refuge, another out on the volcanic islands, where smoke generally obscured the view. One observation station sat high above the seacoast, where waves broke against jagged rock, and yet another up on the high plateau, where sand still flowed off the edges. He could shift any one of these cameras to the transparent view in his contact lenses, making one of them his momentary, if dizzying reality. He did it, when storms swept in. He loved the lightning, particularly, and the rain.

  0955h. He was about to become recording angel, that particular presence in the heavens that watched over Marak, recorded his information-and advised him in case the wisest man on earth ever needed advice from orbit.

  Procyon ate the wafers-the bar was lunch-then poured his second cup of caff and re-read the more interesting details of Drusus's transcript from last evening to midnight, waiting for the handoff.

  Marak had promised Ian last week that the party would be well up the heights today, wending their way on a safe approach to the Southern Wall. When it came to schedules out in the wild, Marak tended to be right, and today, in fact, he was well along on the very thinnest part of that spit of basalt and sandstone that rose like a spine between the southern basin and the deep cut of the Needle Gorge to the north.

  Day sixty-four. Marak said he meant to set up an intermediate base unit on this spine of rock, positioning a new camera so that the Refuge could monitor this curious dividing line between river-cut Plateau uplift and the sinking terrain of the southern pans.

  And after that, proceeding along that curving spine, he'd take another twenty days to reach the Wall and set up the most important observation station, with camera and global-positioning equipment. Hitherto the Project had only observed the situation at the Southern Wall from orbit, or in the seismic records, the latter of which said that the downdrop fault that edged the Wall was increasingly active-that fault being the reason Marak was going the long way around and avoiding the lowland pans. Speculation was that the combined forces of a moving plate would rip the Southern Wall apart, and if that happened, the pans of the Southern Desert would be a floodplain in a matter of days.

  Not to mention what might result as the colliding plates sorted out precedence. One might override the other. Mountains, volcanics, might result. Geologists were extraordinarily excited, in their longsighted way: on a scale of geologic change, there was a certain urgency in the signs in the earth. which pointed up the fact that right now they had no camera in the area. They'd landed one, that had lasted a week, thanks to an imperfect positioning: it had fallen to the notorious violence of the winter storms. Ian had his next rocket in preparation now, and had fretted and fussed and wished Marak would stay around the Refuge and let it all be done by robotics, instead of trekking out to a region of current hazard. But Marak disregarded Ian's objections and went to watch personally the dynamics of a restless land, the unstable nature of a wide basin below sea level, a burning desert suddenly opened to icy antarctic water. Never mind science, Procyon suspected: Marak wanted to see it.

  So did he. He spent his off-hours reading the bulletins that flowed from geology, from meteorology, from biology, disciplines that had suddenly acquired immediacy for him. All that icy new sea would be shallow, quickly warmed by the sun, cooled by winds off the Southern Sea, meteorologically significant-and, when it happened, in his lifetime or three watchers along, it would be a laboratory of biologic change right in their own laps, when the icy water, with its life, met the superheated pans and lay there for a few centuries, breeding new things in the shallows.

  But continental plates moved at their own pace. gave signs of imminency, and then might refuse to move for a decade or so.

  Which-a sigh, a return to mortal perspective-was something for the immortals, not two-years-on-the-job watchers still trying to justify their existence.

  A glance at the clock. Coming up on 1000h.

  With a thoughtless effort, Procyon tapped in, a simple shunt of blood pressure behind both eyes and ears.

  Triple flash of light. That was his personal signature, coming in. Double flash exited. That was Auguste, outbound. It was a courtesy they paid Marak, just to let him know without disturbing him.

  Hati's watchers weren't active but every third day, at the moment. It was vacation for them, during the days she was constantly close to Marak. It was only when that pair separated that Hati's watchers enjoyed full employment.

  The teams all took their turns, however. His three-man team had a five-day rest coming up, oh, in about two weeks, when Hati's team would be on full-time for at least eighteen days straight.

  That was the other benefit of this job-frequent and lengthy furlough, to let nerves rest and overloaded senses readjust to the world he lived in. In his two years on the job, he'd been on three months of furlough.

  For now, officially on the job, he settled back in his chair, let the caff cool just a little, and shut his eyes. He couldn't see the world through his taps, but he could hear it through Marak's ears, and the cameras let him imagine the sights. He picked up a gentle creak: saddle leather. Two voices conversed, one, Marak's, he
could definitely understand, one distant and generally hard to discern. That was Hati. All day long he lived with that accent-that very old accent, that never changed because it had living speakers. It didn't change, and, consequently, Concord's language didn't change. It was always what it had been, no matter what the rest of the Outside did. He had to be careful, however, about picking up the onworld lilt in his own speech, a giveaway, in a program very careful not to give away the identities or occupations of its most critical personnel.

  Marak and Hati fell silent for a long space, and he picked up just the sound of the beshti. In front of his chair, the view of onworld monitors endlessly cycled in hypnotic, fractal regularity. In most of the monitors the sun was shining. Near the seacoast, rain spotted the lens, and up in the saw-toothed Quarain it was snowing, while the islands to the west were, as usual, obscured in volcanic smoke and steam. One gray spot in the cycle of monitors indicated a relay had come to grief this morning, gone out of service: Procyon noted its number in the sequence and bent forward and flicked buttons. The actual location of the site was up on the high desert plateau: he marked it for autorepair or eventual replacement, both technical functions outside his domain.