Forge of Heaven by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online

humans just didn’t ordinarily think about, and he’d spend the first hundred 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 Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 5
    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 3 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h
    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