The Shadow and Night (25 page)

Between Vero and Merral sat Anya, who, despite her sister's role as cook, was very much the hostess. Whenever the conversation flagged, she drove it on with an anecdote, joke, or provocative statement. Every so often she shook her long hair and the highlights in it glinted in the light of the candles. Merral found himself enjoying watching her face for the sheer animation and joy of life in it. Again, he felt that there was something he found very attractive about her. Once, the thought came to him suddenly that, under other circumstances, there might have been the possibility of something developing between them. The idea so disturbed him that he rejected it immediately and found himself in such a momentary state of consternation that he had to ask Theodore to repeat a question.

The fact that three of the five around the table were relatively quiet did not stop the conversation from moving rapidly and freely. There seemed to be no agenda, no concerns, no preoccupations.

Midway through the evening, Merral suddenly found himself thinking about how he appeared.
I have reviewed my friends, but how do they see me? How do I appear to them? Strange,
he decided.
I've never worried about how I seem to others before.
It was almost as though he longed for a mirror in which to see himself. Was he becoming self-conscious? These odd thoughts vaguely troubled him. He felt he was worse than some adolescent. He resolved that when the Herrandown problem was resolved he would take some leave. A week just walking the beaches, cliffs, and woods of Cape Menerelm might help clear out these funny ideas. His reverie was interrupted by Anya asking Vero if he found the food satisfactory.

Vero delicately wiped his mouth before answering and smiled. “The food is excellent, Anya, and a credit to Perena's cooking skills, but I am, I fear, still recovering from having lost and gained several hundred meters of altitude in under a second this morning. Repeatedly.”

“All our fault, Vero,” rumbled Theodore. “The seas are too shallow. We still can't get the current systems stable. Heat transport is unbalanced. That's what gives you all that turbulence.”

Anya winked at Merral. “For the benefit of our new guests, Theodore is the expert on the thermal properties of the deeper sea basins. He wants to use a Mass Blaster to deepen them all another kilometer.”

Theodore gave a wide grin. “Only some. It's not really feasible now. But it would have helped when they were knocking Farholme into shape.”

Merral nodded. “I've heard that. But it was the early days in making worlds then, Theo. They were still struggling with how to slow rotation speeds so we didn't have to live around a sixteen-hour day. Contouring ocean depths was an imprecise science. We know better now.”

Perena looked across at Vero. “Well, I sympathize,” she said, her quieter voice somehow cutting across the table in a way that Theo's louder tones did not. “I've seen those equatorial storms bubbling up and I've often given thanks that I'm in vacuum. But space is different. . . .”

She paused, rotating the stem of her glass between her delicate fingers. The company looked at her and she continued, but in a tone of voice that almost sounded as if she was talking to herself. “In fact there are times when you would like some turbulence. It's the sense of void that is striking about space. Of being supported by nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Anya gave her sister a bemused look. “Oh, for a Near-Space Captain you feel a lot. You are too much the poet.”

Perena shrugged and smiled as if at a private thought. Then in an even quieter voice she said, “But vacuum kills quicker than either air or water.”

There was a brief, stiff silence, and then Anya, in a voice that seemed a fraction too strident, asked, “So Vero, how do you like our world?”

Vero thought for a moment. “For myself, I think I have been surprised how familiar things are. But then, of course, that is the very goal of making worlds. We are—as we have found out—a species that is adapted for one world. To live elsewhere on a lasting basis we must re-create our homeworld as best we can. The standard for every Made World is Ancient Earth. The Assembly has shunned novelty; we cannot take too much strangeness.”

“So, what do you miss?” Anya asked.

“I miss the history of Ancient Earth and the richness of its species, but there are many compensations. Above all, I enjoy the freshness, the excitement—the challenge—of Farholme. This is, indeed, a new world.”

With nods of agreement the meal continued.

After everybody had finished eating, Perena suggested they all go on the roof. “It is the first clear night we have had for weeks. I need to see the stars.”

“You'd think,” Anya commented, her blue eyes glinting conspiratorially at Merral, “that she saw enough of them at work.”

They clattered up a narrow spiral staircase, lifted a hatch, and clambered onto a flat roof bounded by a metal railing. The sky was clear and the stars shone as brilliant chill points of light. Theodore and Anya walked off together down to the end of the roof and stood looking over the lights of the town.

Perena, looking up, spoke quietly to the slight figure standing beside her. “So, Sentinel Vero, what do you think of our stars?”

“I like them better here than from Aftarena.”

“Really? It's not that different in latitude.”

“Ah, Perena,” he replied, and there was a wistful note in his voice, “from here I can see the Gate.”

Merral watched his hand stretch out across the stars and point to the golden hexagon of light high above them.

“Ah yes. I had forgotten that.” Perena's voice was sympathetic. “And that means a lot to you?”

“Yes . . . it does mean a lot to me. I have missed it these last three months. Through
there
is home, family, friends. And my father is rather elderly and not in good health.”

“I understand. And you would wish to be going through it soon?”

“I suppose so, but duty declares that I should stay here.”

“Yes, duty,” Perena sighed. “This side of heaven, duty and desire are often in tension. But in my experience they mostly overlap.”

“Mostly,” he said. “For which we give thanks. It was not always thus.”

Merral heard rather than saw Perena reach out and briefly touch Vero's shoulder. He marveled at the paradox of humanity.
We have the strength to sling ourselves between stars and yet at the same time the weakness that, when we do, we end up lamenting our absent loved ones. And yet it is perhaps appropriate to remember the weakness,
he thought,
lest we think we are more than we are.

Perena spoke again quietly. “There is a ship coming through the Gate in a few minutes. The inter-system liner
Heinrich Schütz,
inbound from Bannermene with Farholme being—inevitably—the last port of call. Heading back inward in six days' time if I remember rightly.”

She walked over to a low cabinet, opened it, brought out a fieldscope, and swung the lenses up to her eyes.

“Yes, the status lights are on the slow red flash.”

Merral strained his eyes hard at the six golden lights of the beacon satellites.

A minute passed and they stared at the same spot. Merral remembered his own surprise when he had first visited the other hemisphere of Farholme and found the Gate, with its geostationary orbit forty thousand kilometers over the equator due south of Isterrane, absent.
We grow up with the Gate and its beacons,
he reminded himself.
It is the first thing in the night sky they show us as children. After all, Sol and Terra are not easy to find. “That's the Gate, Son,” they say. “Through that your parents, grandparents, or whoever came from other planets and, ultimately, Ancient Earth. Through that, not just people but all our messages go. That's our umbilical cord.” And as you grew up you realized just how important the Gates were.

Merral still remembered the shock of the surprise he had had as a ten-year-old when he had worked out that if, instead of the two-day Gate trip they had taken eighty years earlier, his great-grandparents D'Avanos had set off from Menedon on the fastest ship available, they would still have been en route to Farholme. As someone had said, after the cross—and it was a long way after—the hexagon was the geometric symbol of the Assembly.

Perena's voice broke into his thoughts. “Here we go. Rapid flashing.”

He could hear the latent excitement in her low voice. Merral stared up at the hexagon waiting for the flash as the awesome energies involved in taking the shortcut through Below-Space were balanced. As he watched, an abrupt wave of iridescent deep violet blue rippled out from the core of the Gate, briefly masking the fringing beacon lights, and then faded away.

Perena gave a little grunt of pleasure and put the scope down. She turned to Merral, the starlight reflected in her eyes. “Sorry, I get a thrill from that.”

“You love space, Perena?” Merral asked.

She sighed happily. “Yes, I do. It's not for what it is itself. Space is nothing, truly nothing. But I see it as the nothing that holds the Assembly together. If that statement means anything.” She paused and looked heavenward. “And I love the whole thing, the Assembly, the Gates, the stations, the whole great system of things. Not forgetting, especially, this tiny, insignificant, half-finished little planet. And, most of all the One who made it and sustains it.”

Then she turned her face back to Merral and he caught in the half-light an amused grin, almost as if her declaration had embarrassed her.

There was a gentle tap on Merral's arm. He turned to find Vero hugging himself for warmth.

“I'm sorry. I find this a bit cold. I'm going to go down to check the possibility of us getting on the first flight to Ynysmant early tomorrow. Would you be able to do that?”

“Yes, I suppose so. But I thought we wanted to talk to Anya?”

“She can reach us easily enough. There is nothing to detain us here.” He dropped his voice. “Sorry, Merral, but I've been thinking over all you said again. I'm becoming frustrated by these fragments of evidence. I think we need to take some action. Everything points to Herrandown and the area to the north of it. My mind is becoming fixed on this Lannar River. Anyway, if we leave it too late the trail could be too cold.”

Merral thought quickly. “Yes. I take your point. Let's see if we can do it. You check if there is a flight.”

Anya and Theodore seemed also to find it cold and followed Vero down, leaving Perena and Merral alone on the roof. They stood there leaning on the rail for some time, engaged in desultory conversation as Perena pointed out the trail of tiny glinting points that marked the processed cometary ice inbound from Far Station to be stored as fuel for the ships at the Gate and Near Stations.

A faint orange flash at the edge of his vision caught Merral's attention.

“Meteor! Small one to the south. Oh, but it's gone.”

“Ah, it burned up before I could see it.”

Seeing the meteor jogged Merral's memory. “Perena, three nights before Nativity I was up at Herrandown and there was a very big meteor that came overhead. Going north, with a noise like thunder. Some ground vibration. It was almost as bright as day for a second and it quite shook the ground. Scared the animals.”

“That
is
big.” She sounded intrigued.

“I was wondering—well, we all were—why the Guardian satellites didn't eliminate it before it came in. They can't have just assumed that the north was uninhabited, can they?”

He saw her shake her head. “No. They deal with such things well beyond Farholme. Typical Assembly policy to play it safe; it allows a second or even third chance to get them. It's spectacular if you are close enough to see it happen. I saw it once. I was near the north polar one. It warned us and we had—oh—fifteen minutes to get clear. There was no real risk. But it was a pretty impressive sight. It instantly vaporized about a cubic kilometer of nickel iron asteroid.”

“I don't understand why they didn't get this big one. But then I don't really understand the mechanics of it all.”

“Well, they have a hierarchy. Within a hundred thousand kilometers of Farholme they watch everything larger than a small boulder; beyond that they track everything house-sized or larger as far out as Fenniran or as Alahir's corona. Larger blocks are tracked to the system's edge or, if they are comets, well beyond. Anything coming in fast on a Farholme or Farholme Gate impact trajectory they blast. Pulsed protons, UV laser cannon, Mass Blaster. They are actually more worried about the Gate in some ways. With an open Gate you could patch up or evacuate a damaged world. Without a Gate . . . ” She shrugged.

“Okay. But—and I've never thought of this before—suppose it's a ship or incoming probe?”

“Oh, these things are smart, Merral,” she replied with a broad smile, and for a moment he was reminded of her sister. “They know where every ship of ours is. They need to. In fact for slower ships or static structures, like a Weather Sat, they may protect them if they detect a meteor is inbound. So the only risk is to an unscheduled ship or a probe coming in fast on a particular trajectory. That's unlikely. But if it were to happen the Guardian would always check on the ship identity codes.”

“So have you any idea why it let this one through?”

“No. But they always work. There would have been a reason. I've flown the flights that service them. There are endless backup systems. Look, give me the details and I'll run it through the Guardian files and we'll see what happened.”

“Twenty-second December, around five-thirty eastern Menaya time. Above Herrandown going north.”

Perena noted the details in her diary, and as she put it away, she shivered. “I'm getting cold too. It's all right for you; you work outdoors. Let's go down.”