Greg Bear: The Forge of God

Arthur Gordon stood in the darkness by the bank of the Rogue River, having walked a dozen yards away from his house and family and guests, momentarily weary of company. He stood six feet two inches in height, losing no more than an inch to a slight stoop. His hair was a dusty brown color, his eyebrows a lighter shade of the same. He had a well-proportioned frame and a sufficient amount of muscle, but he lacked any trace of fat; his muscles showed clearly beneath the skin, giving him an appearance of thinness.

The same leanness added intensity and, falsely, a hint of villainy to his face. When he smiled, it seemed he might be thinking something unpleasant or planning mischief. But when he spoke or laughed, that impression was quickly dispelled. His voice was rich and even and calm. He was and always had been — even in his year and a half in Washington, D.C. — the gentlest of men.

The clothes Arthur Gordon owned tended to the professorial. His favorite outfit was an old brown pair of corduroy pants — he wore them now — a matching jacket, and a blue checked long-sleeved shirt. His shoes were few and sturdy, running shoes for wear around the house, and for work solid brown or black leather wing tips.

His only ostentation was a wide rectangular belt buckle showing a turquoise Saturn and silver stars set in rosewood above brass and maple mountains. He had done little actual astronomy for five years, but he kept that job description close to his heart and quick to his lips, still thinking it the noblest of professions.

Kneeling in the starshadow of ash and maple, he dug his fingers into the rich, black leaf-crusted cake of humus. Closing his eyes, he sniffed the water and the tealike tang of rotting leaves and the clean soapy scent of moist dirt. To be alone was to reappraise. To be alone and know that he could go back, could return at any moment to Francine and their son, Marty, was an ecstasy he could hardly encompass.

The wind hissed through the branches overhead. Looking up, peering between the black silhouettes of maple leaves, Arthur saw a thick spill of stars. He knew every constellation, knew how the stars were born (as much as anyone did) and how they grew old and how a few died. Still, the stars were seldom more than lights on deep blue velvet. Only once in a great while could he make them fill out and see them for what they were, far participants in an intricate play.

Voices carried over the woods. On the broad single-story cabin’s porch, vaulting on sturdy concrete pillars above the fern- and tree-covered bluff, Francine talked about fishing with her sister Danielle and brother-in-law, Grant.

“Men love hobbies full of guts and grease,” Danielle said, her voice high and sweet, with a touch of North Carolina that Francine had mostly abandoned.

“Nonsense,” Grant countered cordially, pure Iowa. “The thrill lies in killing God’s innocent creatures.”

Below Arthur, the river flowed with a whispering rumble. Still squatting, he slid down the bank on the heels of his thoroughly muddy running shoes and dipped his long-fingered hands into the cold water.

All things are connected to a contented man. He looked up again at the sky. “God damn,” he said in awe, his eyes moistening. “I love it all.”

Something padded close to him in the dark, snuffling. Arthur tensed, then recognized the eager whine. Marty’s three-month-old chocolate Labrador, Gauge, had followed him down to the river. Arthur felt the pup’s cold nose against his outstretched palm and rumpled the dog’s head and ears between his hands. “Why’d you come all the way down here? Young master fickle? Not paying attention?”

Gauge sat in the dirt, rump wriggling, tail swishing through the damp leaves. The pup’s moist brown marble eyes reflected twin star-glints. “Call of the wild,” Arthur said on the pup’s behalf. “Out here in the savage wilderness.” Gauge leaped away and pounced his forepaws into the water.

Arthur had owned three dogs in his life. He had inherited the first, a ragged old collie bitch, when he had been Marty’s age, on the death of his father. The collie had been his father’s dog heart and soul, and that relationship had passed on to him before he could fully appreciate the privilege. After a time, Arthur had wondered if somehow his father hadn’t put a part of himself into the old animal, she had seemed so canny and protective. He hoped Marty would find that kind of closeness with Gauge.

Dogs could mellow a wild boy, or open up a shy one. Arthur had mellowed. Marty — a bright, quiet boy of eight, spectrally thin — was already opening up.

He played with his cousin on the sward below and east of the patio. Becky, a pretty hellion with more apparent energy than sense — excusable for her age — had brought along a monkey hand puppet. To give it voice she made high-pitched chattering noises, more birdlike than monkeylike.

Marty’s giggle, excited and girlish, flew out through the tops of the trees. He had a hopeless crush on Becky. Here, in isolation — with nobody else to distract her — she did not spurn him, but she often chided him, in a voice full of dignity, for his “boogy” ways. “Boogy” meant any number of things, none of them good. Marty accepted these comments in blinking silence, too young to understand how deeply they hurt him.

The Gordons had lived in the cabin for six months, since the end of Arthur’s stint as science advisor to the President of the United States. He had used that time to catch up on his reading, consuming a whole month’s worth of astronomical and scientific journals in a day, consulting on aerospace projects one or two days a week, flying north to Seattle or south to Sunnyvale or El Segundo once a month.

Francine had gladly returned from the capital social hurricane to her studies of ancient nomadic Steppes peoples, whom she knew and understood far more than he understood the stars. She had worked on this project since her days at Smith, slowly, steadily accumulating her evidence, pointing toward the (he thought, rather obvious) conclusion that the great ecological factory of the steppes of central Asia had spun forth or stimulated virtually every great movement in history. Eventually she would turn it all into a book; indeed, she already had well over two thousand pages of text on disk. In Arthur’s eyes, part of his wife’s charm was this dichotomy: resourceful mother without, bulldog scholar within.

The phone rang three times before Francine could travel from the patio to answer it. Her voice came through the open bedroom window facing the river. “I’ll find him,” she told the caller.

He sighed and stood, pushing on the corduroy covering his bony knees.

“Arthur!”

“Yeah?”

“Chris Riley from Cal Tech. Are you available?”

“Sure,” he said, less reluctantly. Riley was not a close friend, merely an acquaintance, but over the years they had established a pact, that each would inform the other of interesting developments before most of the scientific community or the general media had heard of them. Arthur climbed the path up the bank in the dark, knowing each root and slippery patch of mud and leaves, whistling softly. Gauge bounded through the ferns.

Marty watched him owlishly from the edge of the lawn, under the wild plum tree, the monkey puppet hanging loose and grotesque on his hand. “Is Gauge with you?”

The dog followed, ears and eyes locked on the monkey, which he wanted passionately.

Becky lay on her back in the middle of the yard, luminous blond hair fanned over the grass, gazing solemnly at the sky. “When can we get the telescope out, Dad?” Marty asked. He grabbed Gauge’s collar and bent down to hug him fiercely. The dog yelped and craned his neck to nip air as the monkey’s plastic face poked him in the withers. “Becky wants to see.”