Forge of Heaven

“Procyon!” the man said forcefully—one of the Project agents, he thought, one of Brazis’s men, who knew him by name. He struggled, not to get away, only to free his arm, and stared at the black-coated man, who looked to belong in the Trend, but whose grip was damned hard to break.

The man as suddenly let him go, staring at him with green, shocked eyes.

Nothing made sense. But Brazis wouldn’t let him go. He began backing away.

“Wait,” the man said. “Procyon. Procyon Stafford.”

Dark, dark and green light. He didn’t trust it. He didn’t trust anything now. He took out ru

Safe. Safe for the moment. His thinking mind was trying to come back on-line, and he melted back to the wall and into a chair at a vacant table, head bowed, chest heaving while he caught his breath and his balance and tried to get the dark and the touch and the smell out of his head. He didn’t look up at anybody, didn’t invite being looked at.

He felt as much as saw a shadow come into the place, then, and when he did venture a look up under his hands he saw a shadow that could belong here, just a man in a long dark coat, moving among the Trend fringe and bottom crawlers that frequented the Grotto. Moving with the persistence of a hunter.

It was the man from the nook he’d fled. The man was still tracking him.

Procyon kept his head down, hands shading his eyes, his arms in the pose of a man protecting his drink.

Dark. Pain centered on his forehead.

The man had gone, when he ventured a sidelong glance. He found a breath. A waiter slouched over, wanting an order or else.

He needed his card. He tried to think of something, an order. “Beer,” he said, and the waiter went off. But intelligence cut in. Wariness. If he used his card, they could find him.

He didn’t wait for the beer. He got up, and tried to walk, and all of a sudden the tap cut in like electric shock through his brain.

“Boy.”

Luz. Or the Ila. He gripped the rounded table edge, sank down and discovered the chair, finding difficulty controlling his limbs even to fall into it.

“Boy, listen to me. There’s an outlaw tap near you, someone not on the Project system. Shut down! Shut down now!”

He tried to shut down. He tried. He shunted blood away from that the tap toward his fingertips, as hard as he could, and breathed small controlled breaths, feeling the whole world blur as he tried to keep his feet. If the man following him had left, he might have reported to get help. He had to get out of here.

“You.” It was the waiter. With the beer. And the waiter backed up. Staring at him.

Flurry of flashes behind his eyes. He recognized pattern in the blinks. He didn’t know what it was or what it meant.

He turned full circle. Caught a pale phosphorescent glow in the mirror above the bar, glow on a shadowy figure.

It was him. His forehead glowed with gold light. Looping curls of light, all in a circle on his skin.

Even mirror-reversed, he knew that sign. It was the symbol on ondatships. On doors that should never be opened. On items the ondatwanted. Everyone on the station knew it and avoided it.

Ondatproperty. Don’t touch.

The waiter edged farther away from him. Patrons cleared the area, chairs overturning. People yelled.

He was the center of it. He was scared, heart-pounding scared. He tried to organize his pulse in a forbidden, desperate tap to the office, and shooting pain in his ear all but dropped him to the floor. He was in a dark room deserted except for the waiter, and the woman behind the bar.

“Call the cops,” the woman said, but he didn’t stay for that. He got his feet under him and walked out, back onto the street, keeping to the shadows. Ordinary traffic reassured him. People didn’t run.

Until one drunk, coming directly at him, melted aside from his path with a look of horror.

The man in the black coat had tried to grab him and he had run. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe it had been rescue, back there, and he’d run right where the Project didn’t want him—into public, which was the last thing the Project ever wanted its people to do, but other people were looking at him now, people stopping one another and pointing, and getting away.

He couldn’t tap in. He needed a public phone. He tried to spot one. Meanwhile he kept walking, trying the tap, desperately.

“This is Procyon,” he said to the empty air. His head buzzed, and he thought for a fleeting instant he might have a contact. “I’m on Blunt. I think I’m on Blunt. I need help.”

He heard a hum.

He looked down. One of the cleaner-bots raced along near his feet. He shied off from it, staggering, vision full of flashing lights. He hit a window, caught his balance, and ran, knocking into traffic, people crying out in alarm, dodging away from him, one determined to fight, and then dodging back. He ran until his side hurt, and then he walked, weaving as he went, in a street where people stood along the fringes and stared.

Long-dot-dot-dot-long, the signal in his head said: a long-dot-dot-dot-long that sounded like the alarms everybody on the station learned from infancy.

Long-dot-dot-dot-long became a flash, flash, flash of lights in his eyes, then dot-dot, the signal that meant Avoid.

He shied off from the direction he was going, and got the long-dot-dot-dot-long again.

He stopped, stood blind, but thinking maybe Brazis was trying to get through to him that way, audio pared down to its simplest on-off signal. Go, don’t go.

He walked, and when he went one way, he heard the run-signal, and when he went another he heard the avoid signal.

“Sir?” he said. “Sir? Anybody? Can you hear me?”

“MARAK!” HATI SAID, and Marak sat still, in the first hard spatters of rain, with beshti moaning and complaining near them, with wind tearing at the tarp that was their shelter. He was cold, but sat bolt upright, after forcing his way through the relays. Makers rushed to his defense, heating his body with fever.

He had confronted the Ila within the system. She had not opposed him.

But something had blocked him. He was angry, and took Hati’s warm hand to be sure of Hati’s safety while he hurled his indignation at Ian.

“Ian!” he demanded.

And Ian said: “Luz?”

“Something is wrong,”Luz said. “Something is very wrong. The Ila says so and I believe her, in this. The boy was absent from the system, and now something else is on the system, something that ought not to be there. There is an outlaw tap. Get off. Get completely out of the system.”

“Marak.”That was Auguste, faint and far and wounded. “Are you all right, omi?”

“What’s happening?”other voices asked, most in the accent of the heavens, echoing into one another.

“Shut down!”Ian said sharply, through the racket. Walls that separated one tap from another were tumbling down. Everything dissolved in a babble of voices, and Marak shut down quickly, seized on both Hati’s hands and made sure she was paying full attention to him.

Her braids blew in the gale. Lightning flickered across her face, dark eyes staring into his, deep as the dark, deep as caves into the earth.

“Attack in the heavens,” he said to her. “The whole system is threatened.”

“Let Procyon go,” she urged him fervently, nails biting into his hands, Hati, who had always detested the system. “Damn Brazis and all his watchers. They can go begging a hundred years, and who on earth will miss them? Let us get out of here!”