GROZNY WAS WHERE LEBEAU Street mingled with the Style, where the low haunts of Blunt Street flowed into the Trend and rubbed shoulders with the rich and carefree.

Heart of the Trend on Concord Station, Grozny Street, where the Style walked side by side with gray-suited, slumming Earthers from exclusive upper levels, the ruling class making their own statement in shades of pearl and charcoal. Flashing newsboards warred, streaming stock and futures tickers under cosmetic adverts and the dockside news. A ship from Earth was coming in. That was major news, rare and interesting, but it didn't immediately affect the Trend, and it didn't affect Procyon, né Jeremy Stafford, walking home from dinner, an easy stroll through the neon and the crowds.

There was Jonah's Place, and The Ox, there was Right Ascension, Farah's, and La Lune Noir, there was The Body Shop and the Blue Lounge -- and the Health Connection, which cleaned up the Body Shop's done-on-a-whims. There was Tia Juana's, the Ethiopia, and the high-toned Astral Plane... not to mention the exclusive little shops that sold everything from designer genes to boots -- and there was The Upper Crust, that very nice little pastry shop that Procyon did his best to stay out of.

The whole station came to Grozny to relax -- well, except those solid citizens content with the quiet little establishments in their own zones, or with the output of their own kitchens. Most daytimers to Grozny took the lift system into the Trend. Very few citizens had the cachet or the funds to live here.

But Jeremy -- who preferred to be Procyon -- had the funds, a fact clear enough in the cut of the clothes, the precious metals of the bracelets, the small, tasteful modifications that an observer might automatically suspect were at issue here, since the body was good-looking.

He was twenty-five and single. He was a former Freethinker turned Fashionable because he liked it, not because he lived by the social tyranny of the Stylists. And he was fit and in condition the hard way, not because he had any great fear of mods, but because of a certain personal discipline. He spent every third night working out at Patrick's Gym, every next night taking laps at the Speed Rink, and only every seventh night carousing with friends down at Tia Carmen's or wherever else their little band of affluent young professionals decided to gather.

He had turned toward home tonight from that seventh-night gathering, warm with drink and the recollection of good company. Home was a little behind the main frontage of Grozny, so to speak, a T-shaped pocket, a pleasantly lit little dead-end street called Grozny Close, which protected its hundred or so apartments from the traffic and rush and the slightly higher crime rate of Grozny Street proper. Number 201 Grozny Close, sandwiched between a highly successful lawyer and a retired surgeon, had a blue door, a shining chrome arch, and a tall orchid tree that Grozny Close maintenance changed out whenever its blooms failed. The whole Close was a riot of such well-kept gardens, and the air consequently smelled less of the restaurants out on the street and far more of the lawyer's gardenias.

The button beside the door knew his thumbprint and let him in, and after the security system looked him over and decided he was absolutely the owner, the floor lifted him up to the main level, the middle one.

It wasn't a huge apartment. It had fine amenities -- the wall-to-wall entertainment unit in the main room was his life's greatest extravagance, the one he personally most enjoyed. But, being he'd had a few drinks, it was upstairs that drew him more than the evening news, which he knew was going to be full of speculation on that inbound ship and no real information at all.

Boring stuff. And he was too tired to order a sim, which cost, and which would run longer than he would stay awake. He took the few steps up, undressed, and slipped into the floating, drifting serenity of his own bed.

Eyes shut. Perfect. Not a care in the world.

Except--

Damn.

Eyes wide open. His parents' anniversary. He'd forgotten to get the requisite present.

"Sam," he moaned. Sam was what he called the computer. "Sam, day reminder for 0830h, onquote: anniversary, endquote. Night, Sam."

"Good night," Sam said sweetly, not questioning the enigma of the note. "Sleep tight."

His mother had used to say that. Whimsy or guilty secret, it put him in a mind to rest, so he assigned it to Sam. Sleep tight.

Duty was done. Work tomorrow. Life was very good.

MORNING BECAME A suspicion in the east. The beshti set to munching the nearby brush, a noisy activity, distraction to a man trying to sleep in his tent until after the sun rose. But so was a wife with notions of lovemaking. Hati was determined, and Marak Trin Tain never refused that request.

That took its time. Hati got her due, and more, and the night watcher politely left them alone, always there, but inattentive. Marak lay afterward with his wife in his arms, eyes shut, listening to the beshti at their breakfast, listening to the boys begin to stir about in the dawn.

Boys: the young men of this generation, two of them with well-grown beards. Young blood was anxious for adventure, willing to cook and pack and heft the big tent about. Marak could show them what they couldn't learn in the Refuge. He could show them the old skills, the knowledge that had kept their ancestors alive. He could tell them about the desert as it had been and as it was, and they drank in such stories.

Young people nowadays were ambitious to recover the world, living in notions the old stories gave them. A few, yes, wanted to be technicians and stay in the halls of the Refuge forever. But a good many more wanted to go adventuring and slip the well-thought law of the Refuge for the absolute freedom of the horizons.

They would not, however, escape the watchers in the heavens. Their reach extended and extended, aided by new relays, and the watchers often foretold events that had used to surprise the world. Part of what the young men loaded onto the beshti with the tents this morning was, in fact, another relay tower, which, unfolded to the sky, anchored to the rock and powered by the sun, made contact with such adventurers as themselves much more dependable. And that made the Refuge much less worried about them.

Marak himself had watched the hammer fall, when the ondat had brought retribution on the world. Hati had seen it. The two of them together had seen the rain of fire in the heavens, had seen ice fall in the desert, had seen the heavens wrapped in the smoke of volcanic fires beyond the sea, and the air turned to suffocating poison.

Through all of it, they lived.

They lived, while the earth and even the sea died and stank of corruption, deprived of light and clean air, leaving life only in the depths of vents and the cracks the hammerfall had made.

They had lived to see the first rockets go out, bearing spores on the raging winds and landing the first relays.

They had seen the rains fall and the air begin to clear. They had seen the desert change and flow with water, seen volcanoes belch out molten rock, seen the world crack and new rifts begin to move.

They had seeded the land and shed life into the waterways that ran down to the sea.

And, eventually, chafing at the restrictions of the Refuge, they had saddled up the beshti and gone out to see their handiwork. To this day, when something was in the offing, he and Hati found themselves a handful of willing young people to go with them -- not that they needed the help, but company on the long treks was welcome... and safer. And it passed on the knowledge into the generations that lived and died around them. The two of them were immortal, for all practical purposes, immortal as the Ila, who shut herself among her records and dealt in knowledge for what she wanted; immortal as Memnanan, who served her with remarkable patience and remained mostly loyal... immortal as Ian and Luz, who were older than the fortress in the sky, but not as old as the Ila. Ian and Luz ruled the Refuge, and their word was law, though they spoke very seldom in matters that regarded the tribes.

They, themselves, Marak and Hati, ruled all the tribes. There were long periods of dull routine in the camps around the Refuge; and there were times when they shook the dust of the ordinary off them and rode out into the world.

But whatever they did, they had the watchers in the heavens with them, in their heads, hearing what they said, making records. Ian and Luz could speak to them, through that means.

And they had that other observer, the Ila's au'it, the recorder of their travels, herself both old and young. She slept, or not, in the shadows of the tent near them.

But from the caravan master to his boys, the younger company was awake and rolling up their mats. The youngest boy began to make tea, while the master packed for the day's journey.

There was enough light now to claim it was daybreak. A great event was imminent in the south. The Southern Wall had grown fragile, and lately trembled with quakes. Consequently they hastened to extend the relays toward that region, widening their view of the world in that direction.

A beshta complained to the coming sun, protesting its day's work.

"If we get up," Marak murmured into his wife's ear, "the boys can strike the tent."

"If we refuse to get up," Hati said, "we can strike it after morning tea."

"The Wall may break, and us not there to see it."

Hati sighed. And sighed again, and sat up, her dark braids, gold-banded, falling loose about her face and swaying against his cheek as she leaned to kiss him. "Up," Hati said. Hup. That word they used to the beshti. And he gathered himself up. A clean, cold wind was blowing. It would turn hot by noon.

Copyright © 2004 by C. J. Cherryh