Free Forge of Heaven by C. J. Cherryh

simultaneously available to him, but close to it, and when he had to, his brain ran a large number of tracks quite handily: get the transcript out, get the board shut down, were the final two. All those daily repeated tasks, the same daily-routine keystrokes, the hindbrain could handle on autopilot.
    Drusus had been, it turned out, by a glance at the clock ticking away in his contact display, two minutes late tapping in. Neither of them was sinless, him for hanging on and Drusus for showing up late. But Drusus had delayed to get an updated weather report.
    Not entirely a favorable one, as it had developed a bit beyond the last he’d pulled down: he could see that when he demanded it. The front they’d thought would miss—wouldn’t.
    He slid out of the chair, gathering up the used cup and plate, thinking about the cold front, and spotted the note he’d scrawled on his hand. Which otherwise he’d have completely forgotten, given the depth of his concentration.
    Anniversary.
    Damn. He’d been ready to think about restaurants. About de-buzzing and recovering the sensation in his right foot.
    “Procyon is reluctant to leave us,” Marak said, at the edge of his conscious attention, and Procyon felt himself flush, embarrassed to be caught between here and there.
    “Good night,” he said to Drusus, “Good night, Marak. Forgive me, omi.” With that, he did entirely tap out, doing the little blood shunt behind the ears that shut the contact absolutely down.
    Contacts lost their internal lights, too. He took out the case from his pocket, cupped one eye and the other, dropping them into solution. Didn’t take those out on the town, no. And the foot was still asleep.
    He’d been more wound up than he’d thought, so excited about the prospect of that new camera set up for a close-up of the area and taking his notes on the new growth he’d lost track of the weather he was supposed to be monitoring: he was embarrassed Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 5 1
    about that, in cold afterthought, ashamed that he hadn’t tracked that weather change, which was a major part of his job.
    He’d gotten lost in his imagination, was what. He had his own curiosity about the land—the Needle River Gorge and the narrowing spine of mudstone and sandstone layered with flood basalt that arced around to the Southern Wall—that actually became the Southern Wall, when it reached the coast. He’d missed giving Marak an earlier warning. Marak had had to tell him. That wasn’t good.
    But Marak had seen it. And they were well set, and prepared for what wouldn’t be a blow of any scale such as in the old days. It was worth embarrassment, was all.
    And when he should have been pulling down the weather report, he’d been deep in geology, reading the charts—he hadn’t known what the atmosphere was about to send down, but he had been tracking very, very accurately the stability of the ground on which Marak proposed to camp, and he had sent that over to Drusus, in its entirety.
    One scientist said the ridge might be an old crater rim predating the Hammerfall. A more prevailing opinion said it was uplift right along with the Plateau across the gorge, but another said that failed to account for the flood basalts. He’d gotten all but visual impressions through Marak’s intermittent conversation and pored over his own maps of the lava-capped spine of rock that might or might not be Plateau Sandstone, carved to near penetration by the Needle River on one side and deeply faulted on the other. It had become a spired escarpment on the side of the alkali pans to the south, but the core of the spine was an outpouring of what had to be very ancient basalt, on Marak’s side of the Needle. The curving spine where Marak had camped stood a good quarter kilometer above the gorge and nearly that far above the pans, on the other side of the escarpment, strata all tilted toward the south—
    All of that spoke of geologic violence, immense geologic force that, in