Forge of Heaven (14 page)

Well, but he was growing layers, himself. Secrets. Things he didn’t admit. Ardath grew more and more apart from him. He worried about her, but as yet thought of nothing he could do but live within her reach, and wait, and keep to his own venues except on rare occasions of purpose. Like the parental anniversary.

La Lune Noir wasn’t on his sister’s list. Too near Blunt for high fashion, but sitting on Grozny, purveying its fancy food at a modest price that didn’t upset his old Freethinker sense of economy. It had that kind of clientele, not quite in the Style, rubbing elbows with the fringe of the Trend.

And it had that beautiful showcase of desserts, right in the window.

He walked in and, being as he was a regular, his regular waitress nabbed him and showed him right to his table, his preferred place near the vid screen. “The usual?”

“Everything.”

He loved not having to think much on his off shift. He liked La Lune for leaving their patrons music-free and vibration-free, to bring in their private choices on their taps, or not.

It meant the place was hushed, except the noise of adjacent conversations, the clink of glasses, and the occasional crash of a dish.

“Damn!” from the kitchen. He laughed.

That
was La Lune.

A trio came in during his supper, danced on the transparent floor, to music the lot of them shared, and he recognized in that set three of his old Freethinker friends, who’d likewise left the den and prospered obscenely, by Freethinker standards. Marcus 8 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

Liebermann was a medtech and Danny Casper was a paralegal.

And Angie Wu, who’d recently married Danny, had become that archenemy of Freethinkers and terror of every marginal shop on the street—a customs cop.

They waved at him, he waved at them—he exchanged a few words with Danny and Angie and Mark when the music changed and they left the dance floor—how are you doing? Seeing anybody? New job? And from him to Angie and Danny: Congratulations on the wedding.

Seen any others of the old gang? however, was anathema as a question. He’d kept his distance from these three, and didn’t socialize. They didn’t have that much in common anymore, didn’t occupy the same stratum of society.

Polishing more than a handful of social contacts cost more energy than he had these days, and he was glad that his three old acquaintances didn’t propose to join him in a dinner well under way.

He enjoyed the last of his entrée, drank a second glass of wine, shut his eyes in the general noise of quiet conversations around him, and let the tension flow out through his fingers and toes. He was trying not to think more deeply about Ardath.

He remained concerned about the changes in her, however, which seemed too many, too fast. He worried about the day she’d age, and how she’d take it, and where she’d go, when his own career was a very healthy, government-funded, extended lifetime—so long as he didn’t personally piss off Brazis or commit one of the hundred and one fatal rule infractions.

Not hard rules. No theft. No drugs. No illicits. No criminal associations. No dinner with three old friends over there—not because they weren’t probably completely respectable, these days, but because if he did, they’d have government investigators raking over
their
pasts, maybe to their detriment.

All his friends had to pass muster. And intimate relationships outside the department just couldn’t happen.

That was the killer. You could work out arrangements for a personal life in government service: a prospective mate could be sucked into the offices, given some adequate job, and earn an equivalent security clearance, but you’d better be damned sure, thoughtful, and permanent about your choice. Divorce that mate, Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 8 9

and you might both be reassigned somewhere less nice within those office walls. The PO didn’t like attachments or tag ends that hung out into the ordinary world . . . especially tag ends that hung out down in the Trend.

And if a tap should get fired from his job, worse thought, he got to spend the rest of his life wondering how the world down there was getting along, what that sandy plateau was becoming, how the people he’d come to know almost as family were doing in their day-to-day lives—and no one in the Project would ever give him those answers. Lose his security classification over some infatuation? Even a passionate attraction? It was like a musician agreeing to be cut off from music if he fell in love inconveniently—or ever changed his affections. It was a painter agreeing to go blind if he fell in love. It was the one cruel downside of his extravagant lifestyle, and it had happened more than once in the long, long history of the department. A significant number who’d fallen afoul of the infamous Rule 12, the personal relationships rule, and gotten into some insolvable personal entanglement, had subsequently gotten in trouble with the Project’s secret police, or spiraled down with drugs, with drink, with a series of unsuccessful relationships inside the Project, spreading disaster around them as they went. Or they just ended up discreetly killing themselves.

Nasty line of thought. He wasn’t going to let himself make that fatal mistake. Wasn’t going to associate with anybody outside the walls. Wasn’t going to get fired. No way. No relationships outside the Project. If you were going to be a tap, you had to come in young and full of hormones, that was one thing, and that fact gave the Project trouble. He’d applied just for a job, his hope when he made the try: just a job and a good salary, in computers. But his application kept getting shunted through to other departments. When his application had gotten up as high as it could get, and when he’d found out he was under consideration for the Project, he’d been stunned; when he’d learned he might become one of the taps, he’d been scared as hell.

But attracted by the pay scale. Give it that. Attracted by the security. So attracted he’d been like every other tap that had come in from beyond the security wall: he’d been seeing the glamor and ignoring the other facts of his proposed life.

9 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h

But when he was actually about to get the tap, Brazis himself had had a sobering talk with him about Rule 12. He’d been bone-ignorant, but still ambitious. Having seen his parents trying to make ends meet on two salaries, and seeing what he could make if he went that track, he was blinded by the prospect. He’d sworn on a stack of mission statements that he’d remain faithful and true to the department, avoiding all outside entanglements forever and ever, amen.

They’d run a further battery of drug, health, and psych tests and opted him in, seeing something in him, he supposed, that he never could figure, and completely ignoring the Freethinker business, which he’d thought would be a deal-breaker. He’d been eclectic in his studies, unable to settle, except for the certificate in computers.

He’d hoped for employment in the technical wing and ended up opted in behind the security wall as that most rarefied of Project entities, a tap.

Then, Marak having made his pick, contrary to all Project hopes, Brazis had had a quiet fit and called him in for another interview, asked him excruciatingly pointed and personal questions for an hour and stared at him for another few minutes as though he were something under a microscope. He’d tried hard, since then, not to have another interview with Brazis until he’d put a few successful years behind him in the job he’d risen to. Maybe a successful paper or two. Maybe a geological memo going somewhere. He wanted something extravagantly positive in his record, to justify Brazis’s signing off on his assignment.

He knew he was bright. He knew he was incredibly lucky. He knew that an eclectic academic background was one of the assets that had gotten notice from the Project, but utterly outrageous chance had landed him in the assignment he had. He personally liked Marak . . . if you could like somebody on his scale . . . he more than liked him: he found in that strange, calm personality a stability that he’d never had, a matching curiosity that opened his mind to question after question, an insatiable hunger for knowledge he’d never known could be accessible. But now that he’d found his place in life, he absolutely dreaded anything that could threaten that good fortune. Meetings with old friends and his extended Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 9 1

family always left him anxious, remembering what he’d been, where he’d been headed, where he was now, and how fragile the whole structure was.

Crystal eggs, parental expectations, and the cold, impenetrable wall behind which the PO worked. He didn’t
want
the PO raking through his immediate relations . . . or making trouble for Ardath.

Damn, he wished he hadn’t had to tap out on Marak today when he had. He hoped there’d be a perfectly functioning new camera waiting for him tomorrow. He could imagine those vistas, the red river gorge, the long steep fall to the pans on the other side, and the trembling knife-edge of the arcing ridge between. He could imagine the slow movement of tectonic plates that had created the place, the flow of lava in geologic ages before plates became locked in place, before the hammerfall had set them free again . . .

“I always see you alone,” his waitress said, picking up the remnant of his dinner. “Are they friends of yours?” With a nod at the other table.

“Old acquaintances.”

The young woman lingered hopefully, stayed to talk, and Procyon, at first irritated, not wanting any closer communication to spoil his nonrelationship with his favorite waitress, still fell into her game. There was no departmental rule against sociability, and he liked her well enough—played at her little flirtation, but only just, and, mindful of Ardath and her kindness to the hopefuls, he didn’t give her any real encouragement to escalate the game. She was maybe twenty. Bright. She got good tips. She’d find whoever she was looking for. Someday.

She offered him dessert, gratis. As if he were Ardath. He didn’t know what to do about that. He hoped he hadn’t encouraged her too much—that she didn’t have further plans.

He made his selection, a burnt cream. “I don’t think my patronage is going to bring in floods of Fashionables.”

“No,” she said with a wink. “But you know people that will.”

Damn. Damn and double-damn. It wasn’t his personal attractiveness. It was Ardath the girl was courting.

Tag, Ardath would say, long-distance, you’re it.

9 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

*

*

Nothing else could.

A crisis had arrived, and he watered his plants, one and all, distracted into the hope of a bud stem emerging. The new cattaleya had proven amazingly cooperative, even luxuriant. The oncidium had produced a new plant, and rested, and now that trouble showed up, and a temporary glut of water, he was sure a number of the rest of the collection would soon think about blooming.

He fed his darlings. He carefully removed an old leaf. He discarded the detritus and wiped down the lighted shelves himself.

Housekeeping, fearing for their lives, refused to touch them. He refused to have cleaner-bots anywhere in the office.

Agent Magdallen had been busy when he called on him to come in.
Busy,
Magdallen had had the temerity to inform him.

Agent Magdallen might have been extremely busy, Brazis began to think, ever since that inbound ship made the news.

But his plainclothesmen had nabbed the man and outright laid down an ultimatum: come in, or spend the next ten days in confinement.

“Agent Magdallen is here,” Dianne informed him sweetly—his dragon at the gate, Dianne, who would also have assured that Magdallen entered the secure offices inconspicuously, on some other office’s summons, and without untidy items in his possession, or she’d break his fingers.

What happened inside this set of offices, Governor Reaux’s security couldn’t penetrate, often and earnestly as it tried.

The door opened. A weary-looking older Fashionable in a black coat came in—stood for a moment observing the orchid-tending.

“You needed me?” One shoulder straightened. The other did.

Magdallen stood a little taller. Brazis watched the reflection in an aptly placed mirror strip, and saw hawk-nosed Magdallen grow subtly younger and slimmer by the moment. The long hair slowly lost its white streaks in favor of healthy black.

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 9 3

Needed him. Hell. Magdallen had never been on his needed list, among gifts the CG had sent him, but he was stuck with him. Talent came in from the Chairman General and a local chairman dealt with the offering until it decided to go away and spy elsewhere.

“This ship,” Brazis said, sparing a sidelong glance. A very sharp glance. “Do you know why this ship is coming in?”

“No.”

Short and sweet. “Not our local business?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. I can’t examine its origins. Or its passenger lists.”

Magdallen was here on a ghost hunt, and was surely powerful, but not as powerful as Magdallen thought, that was the point Brazis meant to make.

“Tell me. Does ‘sir’ ever pass your lips?”

“Sir.”

The tone did it. It finally did it. Brazis put down the watering pitcher on the edge of the credenza and brushed off his hands, facing the subject squarely.

“Agent Magdallen.”

“Sir.”

One suspected sarcasm. Magdallen might be used to local authorities running scared of him and his backers. Brazis didn’t personally run scared of man or devil. As head of the PO, technically entitled to a seat on the High Council, he didn’t flinch at an inquisitive auditor, not in any particular. Nor did he worry too much who was currently sitting behind the Chairman General’s desk at Apex. CGs came and went, and might fall from office. So might a local chairman; but from his position as Project Director, only Ian and Luz acting together could remove him, so long as he lived.