Forge of Heaven (34 page)

“Sleeping, we suppose. Dortland reports no output from that source for the last six hours.”

“Good. At least someone’s having a quiet night.”

“That reminds me. Young Mr. Stafford had a visitor last night.

His sister, highly respected in the Trend. We were not able to monitor the conversation. We only observed the arrival and the departure. We’re sure the Chairman has other resources.”

“Probably actually none of our business, if he hasn’t run amok since. Make a note to ask Brazis if the sister is a security concern.

Do we have a file on her?”

“She has associates with extremely troublesome contacts in petty crime and among the radicals, but that covers most of the Trend
and
Mr. Stafford. She’s a Stylist, no less, very well respected.”

“I’m not concerned with Mr. Stafford until 0900h. If my daughter calls, put her straight through. Cup of caff. A sweet roll. Two. I need the energy. Get one for yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 2 1 9

He walked into his office, and the office systems powered up.

The anoles scrambled, startled by a sudden blaze of light. Their morning was starting early and the gods were annoyed.

Reaux sat down at his desk, head against his hands, eyes pressed against his palms. God, he hoped Brazis didn’t pull anything beyond what they’d agreed on.

He hoped Stafford was reliable. Considering what he was, he ought to be. But he didn’t like to hear he’d had a clandestine contact last night, when everything else was going wrong.

Ernst came in with the cup of caff and the rolls.

“Dortland is on the case himself,” Ernst said.

“Hell, no, I don’t want to divert Dortland. Tell him pay attention to Gide and delegate my daughter’s case. A teenaged girl, for God’s sake. Does it take the top end of station security a whole hour to find her?”

“I’ll tell him that, sir. Mark Andrews has supposedly gone home. We’re moving to verify that. Denny Ord is released. He’s bolted off to the lower levels, toward the Trend.”

Andrews had gotten cold feet. Ord had dived for cover in his chosen element. Had Kathy any way of getting that information?

She had her phone. He
knew
his daughter wasn’t tapped. And her phone would leave a record. But if she was with anyone, and he almost hoped she
was
with someone who knew the district, it didn’t seem to be Andrews
or
Ord.

That was a new worry, all on its own.

Ernst left. He sipped a better cup of caff than he had at home.

Judy’s damn dark roast.

They couldn’t afford Dortland distracted. If there was any question about Gide’s own legitimacy, they needed to know as much as they could find out. So did the Outsider government, which, if it wasn’t in on the matter from the beginning, could become difficult, with any hint of facts hidden from view.

He riffled through reports, chewing sweet roll, washing it down with caff. He had yet to hear anything that could justify Gide’s insinuations about the Project taps. And he reminded himself that this whole business of meeting with the youngest tap was Gide’s idea, not his, not Brazis’s.

So he at least was blameless in any confusion. He hoped he was.

2 2 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h

Could some future mission fault him, when Earth missions routinely declined to divulge the reasons for their inquiries?

There was nothing in the reports to create a governmental crisis.

On the other hand, if some utter fool back on Earth was trying to provoke a
casus belli . . .

0714h.

“We have a credit card use,” Ernst came in to report, “and security is moving.”

“On?”

“Blunt,” Ernst said, not happily.

“Ord?”

“Heading in that direction. The credit card use was a public phone.”

She damned sure wasn’t phoning home. And she didn’t use her phone, clever girl. That she would call Ord, or someone who could contact Ord, wasn’t at all surprising.

“If we find her, sir?”

That was a leap of procedures he hadn’t made yet. What did he do with his daughter? Talk to her?

Talk wasn’t enough at the present juncture of events.

“Take her into physical custody and bring her back to my residence when you find her. Put her under house arrest, and watch the door.” He could only imagine what Judy would say about agents out front. And he was afraid Kathy wouldn’t go quietly. He flinched at the thought of handcuffs or taser. He didn’t want to ruin his relationship with his daughter. He didn’t want her hurt.

But he didn’t want to expose his daughter’s youthful follies to Gide’s snoopery, or have them made an issue at a level of politics Kathy wasn’t ready to imagine.

He sipped the cooling caff and watched the anoles creep about the foliage in quest of the small nuisances that lived below them on the food chain. Top predators in a bubble world. They, like Kathy, were not fierce, on other scales. Like Kathy, they conceived no higher threat in the universe than themselves.

He still loved his daughter. He wasn’t sure about Judy this morning. He hadn’t been that confident about that transaction for quite a long while. He suddenly reached that conclusion, curiously, without overmuch pain. Like Kathy, Judy had her bubble. It Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 2 2 1

wasn’t his. Unlike Kathy’s, he knew what Judy’s looked like, and he’d been reluctant to live there, from long before he married her.

A governor needed a spouse. Absolutely needed one. That had been the transaction. Earth believed in traditional values. It might be a reconstructed reality, crashed, oh, so many times during the long hegemony, but if it was anything, it was traditional, and it was what people wanted to feel safe.

Damn Gide anyway. Him and
his
traveling environment, as if anything out here was going to wreck Earth’s purity. As if the taps were spreading formulae and processes for deadly nanoceles that were going to spread throughout humanity.

“Listen,” he’d say, if Gide could possibly listen, “let’s just go to the club and have a drink. Let’s solve whatever you came here to fix or find. I can tell you nobody’s going to do a thing like that. It can’t make anybody any money, and money’s what drives the smuggling operations.

“Believe me,” he’d say, further, if Gide would believe anything he hadn’t, himself, experienced, “Concord’s still here. Earth’s ages come and go, in all this fear of contamination. And we’ve lived for ages out here, right above the source—we’ve lived with every fault and failure of the system. We’ve lived with
ondat
accidents and Movement sabotage, way back in our history, and we survive very handily, still human after ages of exposure, no side effects . . .”

Well, he’d tried to make that point, regarding the gardens. And to keep him out of view of an Outsider populace that experimented on itself in its long personal progress toward remediation.

An Outsider populace that was, in general, colorful and in damned good physical shape, give or take the grotesques’ bad judgment or bad taste. Illicits
didn’t
run rampant on Concord Station, thank you, as much because the populace was educated about their hazards as because station police chased down each and every outbreak. Outsiders weren’t a splinter of humanity, some artificial second species. They were healthy, trim, fit, and they still bred true from station to station, or with Earthers, if one was foolish enough.

They were in such fit shape it made an honest governor who’d had one too many desserts wish he dared take on a few long-term nanisms to sculpt his own youth back, but never say that to the ambassador. Never admit any such thoughts.

2 2 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

He
had
used short-term nanotech for approved medical reasons.

He’d taken the viral treatment to retain his thinning hair. Earth allowed that much for its own citizens.

But those extra desserts were their own protection, weren’t they? A Concord governor couldn’t afford to look
too
good when one of these types came calling. Unexpected attractiveness, a good-looking middle age, who knew? It might end up as a sin in some secret report.

Three more days. They’d pack Mr. Gide onto his ship and wave him a fond good-bye. And there
wouldn’t
be any proof that Project taps were passing technological secrets. The Outsiders weren’t fools.

He hoped Dortland moved fast. He hoped they found Kathy before she made a misjudgment that wouldn’t
let
him take her back under his roof—before she landed in a hospital bed. If it weren’t for Gide, damn him, he’d be personally on Kathy’s case. Give him one address where she’d just used that card, and he’d be there.

He’d talk to her. He’d take her shopping for some look she could live with, he’d buy her an ice cream the way he’d used to, and they’d reach an understanding about her mother, and her sessions, and so many things, so many issues he’d postponed dealing with, all because he’d tried to take Judy’s side and not Kathy’s for years.

That had been a terrible mistake. He saw that, now, clear as clear. And he knew what he had to do about it now to preserve the peace. Not a divorce. It was late in his life to create a scandal. But a very different understanding was going to exist in his household.

In three more days, when Mr. Gide’s ship was a blip outbound and out of his life.

7

0 8 3 7 H . Procyon dressed in the sober shirt, the solemn coat. Breakfast wasn’t sitting any better on his stomach than the 0400h caff had done, and he tried not to think further ahead than he had to.

0842h. He checked the mirror in the bath and had a wild moment’s fantasy, as the Old Man had suggested, of calling in sick—sick with something disgusting and of at least a week’s duration.

The way he felt, he could almost qualify. His head felt fuzzy. He wanted to go back to bed and try for the several hours’ sleep he hadn’t gotten. But he wouldn’t sleep if he did, and he was in it too deep to try to dodge it now.

On the other hand, he promised his bleary-eyed reflection, if he got through early with this interview, he could take this one day, maybe tomorrow, satisfy everybody, make the Director very pleased with him, try to settle the mess with Ardath, and maybe be back where he wanted to be, in his own downstairs office, by the time this ship left port—maybe even late-shift tomorrow if the report was what they wanted and if he could keep his eyes open. If he just got through this one day without knocking into politics he didn’t want to know about, and lived through the debriefing, then he could tell Brazis all about his sister’s visit before Brazis told him. He could put it in the best light, and come out clean. It was all he asked. Just back to the job and no blowup.

He was about to go down to the door when he noticed a blinking light on the entertainment unit.

2 2 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h

Messages. Physical line. He didn’t have Sam report on them—usually they were social messages coming in from that source.

He’d get the list when he had time to handle it, see if it was anyone he wanted to talk to. His friends all accepted that he was rotten about messages. It wouldn’t be anything.

No. He couldn’t stand it. This morning, of all mornings, he had to be sure. He punched the button to get the ID.

His mother.

The anniversary call had ricocheted. The crystal egg and his excuses had, two of them, and nothing had dissuaded her.

Or it could be an emergency. A problem. A health problem. He punched in.

“Jeremy, dear, thank you so much. I know you’re busy, but you have to
eat. You don’t have to bring anything. Aunt Melody is bringing that fruit
salad.

“Do you suppose you can get your sister to come? . . .”

God. It was 0858. He had two minutes to get to the lift station.

He left the message still playing.

“Down, Sam.”

He descended. He walked out his door and lit out of the close at high speed, down Grozny and up Lebeau. He didn’t need to run, quite. But he couldn’t slow down.

He was out of breath when he arrived at the lift station, so out of breath he leaned a hand against the wall beside the lift call, in among half a dozen others waiting for a car.

One of the crowd was an Earther, in a plain gray suit.

“Mr. Jones?”

“Yes,” he said, appalled that the man going through this clandestine charade of code words hadn’t bothered to look other than what he was—Earther to the core, and near the Trend.

“We can take the number 4,” the man said, punching in a code on the nearest bank. And said, blocking with his hand an annoyed woman who tried to input her own destination, “Sorry. This car is locked. Maintenance.”

Damned sure the Earther didn’t look like maintenance. He was as conspicuous as a missionary in a Blunt Street bar. Procyon looked a mortified apology at the woman, at two others watching the embarrassing little scene.

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 2 2 5

The car came. The escort waved him inside. He went, and the escort followed.

The door shut. The car moved.

“I want to see the badge,” Procyon said, furious, and the agent reached to his pocket and flashed it. “Up close, please.”

The man gave him a slower look at it. The badge had a number, a photo ID, and the governor’s seal. James Peter Fordham was the name. The number was 980S. Procyon logged that to memory, leadoff to a day he was sure was going to be excruciating. The Old Man would want detail. He logged every detail to memory, including that number, in case even getting there went wrong.

“Why don’t you walk on ahead down the street when we get out and I’ll follow you?” he suggested to the cop.

Fordham wasn’t, surely, entirely unaware of his appearance.

“I’m supposed to take you to an address.”

“Just head right, and I’ll follow you,” he said. “I’ve no interest in losing you. I’m clearly not Earther. You clearly are. I’m afraid there are already questions.” His sister’s visit last night loomed like a bad dream. He’d been public, getting into the lift. Someone in the crowd might, worse, know his face. He hadn’t been looking around. But he wasn’t exactly incognito on the street, and when Earthers came throwing police authority around to get a lift car, it made noise. If anyone had noticed him, gossip would say Procyon had been in a suit a second day in a row and that a government slink had put him in a lift car. And he was going to have to live with it.