Free Forge of Heaven by C. J. Cherryh Page B

dry-cycled, and bare-assed it to the closet for a thoughtful change of focus and a major change of clothing—a nice combination of blues and brown, shirt, pants, boots, and jacket. Hair—it was dark brown the last while—in easy short curls, nothing fancy. Eyeliner was permanent. The rest he was vain enough to maintain as nature provided, unimproved, with its few little flaws. He didn’t do seek-and-destroy on fat cells: the gym burned them off. He was actually a kilo light when he consulted the scan, and dessert was consequently an option tonight.
    An acceptable, if not a high Trend look. The brown shirt was a pleasure to the skin—and by now he began actually to feel his own skin again, and be sure where his feet were, after the daylong immersion in the tap. The mental solitude of a luxury apartment was delicious, a luxury the Project afforded after a flurry of multitrack-

    5 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h
    ing and prolonged deep concentration. But solitude and silence would get truly stale before the evening aged much.
    Hell, get the mind off it. He wasn’t supposed to think about the job after hours. Wasn’t supposed to get together with the other taps and discuss things. His personal speculations—well, the spine had held for ages. It wasn’t going to go tomorrow. He could get office time next downtime, to do his extended reports when Hati’s taps were on and he was off. He could send out a modest note to Geology then, granted only Geology did wake up and ask for samples.
    “Sam, I’m going out.”
    Sam’s response was a single chime, not a single word from the computer after noon and before 2200h. His choice, that silence. He wasn’t in the mood for a cheeky damn bot if his day was going badly, and he didn’t like inane pleasantries if it was a really good day and his mind was still, as it was now, exploring the planet he’d just left, dancing down the ridges and wondering if that line of mudstone Marak had mentioned was in the sequence he hoped it was, and most of all hoping that there was time to do the work . . .
    if they missed getting samples when Marak was going out to the Southern Wall, they might still get some when he came back, which might be along the same route, a few months from now.
    Those rocks weren’t going anywhere.
    “Down, Sam.” He could speak to the bot. It just couldn’t answer.
    Sam chimed. He walked onto the lift area and rode it down to the front door.
    Outside, in the Close, the lawyer’s gardenias wafted heavy perfume to his senses. He nodded to the otherside neighbor tending her roses, a nice lady with not a clue what he did for a living or why a healthy young man left his apartment only in the tag end of the day. She was retired, but spent much of her time writing for a culinary society.
    The occasional polite nod was the only regular interaction he had with her or his other close neighbors, whose dossiers he had read, and he had rather not know them better. The PO liked it that way. And he did his own part for anonymity, having nothing in common with the lawyer or the retired lady or, God knew, the rest of the honest citizens in the complex. He didn’t look hostile or odd.

    Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 5 5
    He didn’t bring home suspicious visitors. He didn’t attract police, play loud music, wear his hair in spikes, or set off fire alarms. He was, in fact, relatively faceless in this pricey neighborhood of people who had, occasionally, children with problems; who occasionally threw big parties, who occasionally had noisy divorces and shouting matches on the doorstep, bothering everyone—as he bothered no one. He was Procyon, just Procyon, as the Fashionables chose to be, just Procyon, whose job nobody actually knew, or ventured to ask, and who, they might think, probably did his work by computer, since he wasn’t a Stylist, but lived like one. He only went out in the evenings. But few people besides the lady with the roses were home during the day to think about