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

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, vol-

    Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 7
    canics, 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 metereology, 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