Forge of Heaven (2 page)

Earth’s ethicists were aghast at the situation, on purely moral grounds—while certain Outsider experts who had long studied
ondat
behavior raised another objection: that meekly committing an act of murder the
ondat
directed could set a bad precedent for the
ondat
-human future. A second set of experts from the Earth Federation also raised the point that this was a First Movement base, and that it might contain biological bombs that even today’s Outsider science couldn’t stop: the place was possibly more dangerous to them than to the
ondat,
if that population broke containment.

This was the surface debate. But certain other Outsiders, siding with the ethicists and those in favor of rescue, saw their chance at getting their hands on First Movement technology not only intact, but advanced centuries beyond their last information—because there seemed to be a high-tech establishment on the planet that still functioned. The planet represented a potential informational windfall, possibly even the key to the long-sought provable remediation.

Bitter accusations of Movement sympathies flew back and forth in the subtext of communications between the outermost Earth authority at Orb and the Outsider Council at Apex. But the strange coalition held, aided by 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

a peculiar fact: Earth’s military was powerful, but its bioscience had stag-nated over centuries, under the quarantine laws. Earth functioned on faith that if the
ondat
ever mounted a bioneered threat in retaliation, Outsiders would be the ones to meet that threat, while Earth’s powerful military pounded hell out of the
ondat
. And Earth joined the ones who favored study, which
Earth
saw as the moderate course.

The
ondat
waited through this debate, observed by one lone human ship—and eventually shoved a few small rocks out of orbit, their machines beginning to attach themselves to more ominous pieces of free-floating rock in the solar system.

Time was running out. Outsiders overcame their differences: the study proposal won out, and they went into urgent conference with Earth. If they could set up and work at a base down there, Outsiders said, they could find out whether there were still other Movement bases undiscovered, and maybe—as humans talking to other humans, in the face of the
ondat,
who were truly alien—humans could gain permanent control of this place and learn from it. Outsiders were willing to sacrifice two of their own experts to go down there to do it, with no possibility of return. The world was within the overlap of the human-
ondat
border. An Outsider mission could take responsibility for it, if they could just negotiate a deal with the
ondat
and promise to watch it.They could learn the nature of the threat that had existed in the first place—much of First Movement information was lost to war and time—and they could measure the threat that still existed. They could learn to communicate with the
ondat
.

Earth and the Outsiders attempted to present the proposal to the
ondat,
who sat, encased in their ship, still faceless, operating their robotics.

The
ondat
balked, while a few more rocks dropped. The
ondat,
through symbol transmission, apparently wanted assurances that the Movement ship on the planet wouldn’t take off again, that there wasn’t a conceivable means for Movement technology to escape the gravity well.

Negotiations dragged on. Outsiders took a new intellectual tack with Earth’s representatives: most of all, they indicated, they needed to gain knowledge of the place and monitor its biology, along with any adaptive replication machines.They could help target the strikes.

Nanoceles, complex biounits of the Movement’s creation, were a sort of life.They responded to evolutionary pressure, and would fit themselves for any changed environment. If the planet was devastated, they would go off program and become, in effect, true new life, at a bottleneck of evolution—

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 9

not inherently more dangerous, Outsider scientists argued, than life that evolved naturally. Certain capabilities would be trimmed off in a process of natural selection, and they would no longer be fitted to do what the Movement had designed them to do. In short, remediation might be possible for this and other worlds, including the
ondat
homeworld.

To do anything scientifically useful, however, scientists on the Outsider team needed at least a century to work on the planet, to get their hands on that tech and understand the original design before it mutated wildly under the scouring the
ondat
proposed.

And if they got that century, Outsiders swore they would share that knowledge with Earth and the
ondat
.

Earth joined Outsiders in last-ditch negotiations with the
ondat,
who had already chosen their missiles to crack the planet.

The Outsiders got forty years to work.

THE EVENTS OF
HAMMERFALL

An Outsider team went down, a dive to prison without escape and, ironi-cally, the assumption of a godlike power over a whole planet’s future. The two scientists promised to report as long as they could, implying they expected to die in the scouring of the planet.

But the mission they intended was to get First Movement tech into their hands, build deep, and survive the destruction with part of the native population, and with their own laboratories intact.Their landing craft was capable of withstanding anything but a direct hit from one of the planetkillers or direct involvement in the consequent volcanics; and the Outsiders left not even that matter to chance, since Outsiders were helping target the strikes.

The Outsider team onworld hastily burrowed a deep refuge, created surface modifications, took their samples, and set to work.

Foremost concern, Outsiders suspected Movement was still active on the planet: their first priority was to get any such highly trained persons into their own hands along with their lab records.

They were dismayed to discover that, indeed, not a successor, but an original member of the First Movement was still alive and still ruling after so many centuries.The Ila, as the locals called her, had intended to refurbish the Movement, build an ecology and an economy, rule a devoted population, and live quite well here. A new war? Possibly. A new culture? Slowly. Space-

1 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h

flight? She certainly had the plans. Her science gave her the longevity. She just needed the industry.

But her plans hadn’t gone utterly smoothly: the planet was shor t on metals and cer tain other key elements, making the synthesis of essential materials more difficult. More, the inhabitants, as generations spread out and adapted to the new planet, not only adapted to the harsh conditions, but developed self-interest and rebelled against her. The inhospitable planet itself hammered her other creations, destroyed them if they were slow to mutate and mutated them into problems if they were rapid to respond.

The Outsiders were right. Even with Movement active and in charge, it was becoming a new world.

The Outsider team saw the Ila and her records as key to their problem: and both resided in her ship, the half-buried center of the establishment the locals called the Holy City. Clearly that ship and that city were the one place on the planet from which they absolutely couldn’t divert the
ondat
strike.

They had to get that information out of the target zone.

The forty years was almost gone. Last-moment negotiations to stall the planetkillers fell apart. The Outsider team attempted to use the planet’s own rebels to draw the Ila out or crack that citadel.That failed. As a last resort, they began to call in certain human residents of the world, in whom they had implanted communication nanisms, to save them and gather their knowledge.

But again the Ila thwarted them. She heard rumors of odd goings-on, and brought the affected people to her capital, endangering a major element of the Outsiders’ plan.

But her bringing those particular people in brought the Outsider team an unexpected chance. Marak Trin Tain, a young man with leadership abilities as well as political importance, reached the Ila in person.Through him, using the implanted tech, the Outsider team delivered a warning to her, to evacuate her base and seek shelter in the east.

It was a warning Marak Trin Tain didn’t wholly understand, but the Ila certainly did. She evacuated the city and saved her records as a bargaining leverage, exactly what the Outsider mission wanted.

The
ondat
attack had already begun.The Outsider team continued to try to stall the planetkillers, claiming one of their team was out in the desert and in trouble. Whether or not their appeal actually delayed events, or that the larger planetkillers, coming from farther out in the solar system, lagged Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 1

behind others that served as ranging shots, Marak and his party, including the Ila, reached the Refuge before the first true planetkiller fell on the other side of the world.

So the Outsiders got their hands on the Ila, on hundreds of years of records, and on a great number of refugees.

The hammer came down. And the world became a volcanic hell.

The Outsiders continued to transmit new discoveries to ships in orbit—and the
ondat
seemed to accept their presence on the world so long as that stream of knowledge flowed. Earth didn’t leave the vicinity, nor did the Outsider ship break contact with their team from orbit. Nor did the
ondat
leave.There were things to learn.There was a lingering threat here to keep an eye on.

The
ondat
understanding of humans was insufficient to let them reason out quite what humans were up to, after everything that had happened. But humans were perfectly willing to indicate that they would not lift the team off the planet, nor visit them, and that they would establish a permanent base in orbit to guarantee that permanent state of affairs.

The
ondat
evidently believed this—as long as
ondat
stayed to guarantee it, too. A station grew. Earth naturally moved in an official to govern it. The Outsider Council established a matching governmental structure aboard.

The
ondat,
still unseen, set aside a section of the station and moved in a capsule which became incorporated in the structure, and ultimately integrated with it.

The name of the new station was, hopefully chosen, Concord. A trade route was set up, from Arc, to supply it.

Below, the planetkillers had done their work.The impacts had sent shock waves through to the other side of the planet: volcanic plumes melted hot spots in areas of weakened crust. Vast lava flows choked the sunlight planetwide in thick clouds of noxious vapors. The planetkillers had vaporized undersea carbonates in the sea off the west coast of the inhabited continent, killing the food chain planetwide.

The hardiest life survived in the depths of the seas and the crevices of the earth, along with extremophiles of various sorts, some of which were likely foreign, imported by the Ila, some native, both unpredictable in their potential, given the conditions that prevailed.

The world had a lengthy course to run before the atmospheric balance reasserted itself . . . not, however, as lengthy a course as might have been without the nanisms that now played their part in an accelerated evolution.

Observers up on Concord remained hopeful, but highly skeptical.

1 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

CONCORD AND THE NEW AGE

Concord itself grew over the centuries, an establishment mostly Outsider, still with the colonial government Earth installed and maintained—and, unique to Concord, at least one, and perhaps a handful of
ondat
observers.

This arrangement made it an overwhelmingly important station, a very influential Earth governorship, and an equally potent Outsider chairmanship, in many ways independent from the Outsider Council at Apex. No one was sure about the
ondat
.

On the planet, life reasserted itself and interlaced in biological cooperation.The doors of the Refuge opened and human scouts traveled out into a vastly changed world, to hand-spread more seeds prepared by Outsider science—and to shed their own nanisms into the world, hoping for the best.

Seeding operations began to spread hardy plant life the Outsiders claimed contained remediating nanoceles, creations intended to spread throughout the biosphere, attracting and eliminating certain of the runaways, themselves changing and reproducing into beneficent microorganisms.

Nothing dangerous in the original sense had yet turned up—but, certain doubters could point out, there was necessarily one place where the Ila’s nanoceles still flourished: in the Ila herself, and in a handful of other survivors, whose lives had passed ordinary human limits, notably Marak Trin Tain, who was the earliest and hardiest explorer of this new world.
He
became a contact point for the observers aloft;
he
became a known quantity, a continuing, reliable guide, about whose doings the
ondat
were extraordinarily curious, whose activities they wanted to know, at all points—one single human being, a benchmark, perhaps, about whom their records were continuous, who perhaps embodied their understanding of the species with whom they shared, and did not share, a station.

The original team likewise availed themselves of that long life. They had become living laboratories of Outsider attempts to contain the Ila’s science.

The nanotrackers, potent against the runaways, failed to attack the First Movement modifications in the Outsider team and in the Ila—a circumstance that some pessimists aloft called proof of the danger inherent in First Movement tech, and others, more optimistic, called proof of the fine control the Outsider team already exerted, on their way to remediation.

The Outsider team simply said it was not to their advantage to kill themselves—since with those internal nanisms, they were, in effect, immortal—a rumor that caused nervous shivers far beyond Concord.