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

the days she was constantly close to Marak. It was only when that pair separated that Hati’s watchers enjoyed full employment.

    3 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h
    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 dis-cern. 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.
    The site had been hammered by hail, maybe. Or cyclone. It was at least one of the sites in fairly convenient reach of the Refuge, not in Marak’s direction on this trek, however. It was a relay that—he checked the record—Memnon’s fourth daughter had set up on her last trek in that direction.

    Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 9
    That was old, then, five hundred years or more. A wonder it had been still functioning, as was. He put the whole problem into his report for Brazis. Auguste had missed it—unlikely, since Auguste rarely dropped a stitch—or the malfunction had just happened.
    The monitors kept him sane in this job, confined in a viewless room. They lent him a sense of utter freedom, of wandering the planet below at any slight moment of boredom. While Marak was in range of cameras, as he was within the Refuge itself, he could maintain a schizophrenic identification with Marak and his surroundings, and with Hati; when Marak had been there, he had seen, sometimes, Ian and Luz and more than once, the Ila, who, diminutive and beautiful, was the scariest individual he had ever imagined.
    For Marak, he held the mental image of a man in his thirties, more often than not wrapped in the robes of his long-lived tribe, which Marak preferred. Marak’s people learned new skills, knew computers and bioscience, hydroponics and engineering, mining and manufacture, the old ways and the new. Most of Marak’s people wore clothing that was far more conservative than one saw on the station, but certainly not desert robes. These generations stepped aside and stared in awe when one of the Old Ones, young as themselves, walked through the halls of the Refuge, a breath of the past in their body-swathing, tribal-patterned robes, with the