The Shadow and Night (58 page)

She paused and closed her eyes as if uncertain about what to say next. “They were. I was staring at them when I saw, under the fuselage, that there was someone on the other side of the ship.”

Merral heard a sharp intake of breath from Vero. Perena continued. “From where I was standing I could really only see a pair of legs, and the way the light was, it was impossible to make out anything about them. It was as if someone else had come in and was looking at the other lifting surface. I was, as you can imagine, pretty puzzled. After all, I had asked that no work be begun before I had okayed it and it was the Lord's Day. And I had not heard the door open. So I walked over and peered round the nose.”

She hesitated. “There was someone there. He was standing up and looking at the underside almost as I had been doing. Now, whether it was a trick of the lighting or something else . . . I have to say I can't give any sort of real description.” Now her words came slowly, in a labored way. “I had the impression of a tall, dark figure. Almost a silhouette. A man, I would say. Yes, definitely.”

She paused, and Merral was oddly aware that beyond the tense silence he could hear the faint hiss of the ventilation system. “He was—or he seemed—oddly dressed. As if he wore something like a loose, long black coat and seemed to have a hat of some sort. But it was hard to make out. He always seemed on the edge of my vision. And I am fairly certain that he cast no shadow; there is a lot of lighting in Bay One. He was just peering at the underside of the wing as if he was curious. No, more than that; as if he disapproved of what he saw.”

Vero opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and gestured for Perena to ignore him.

“I suppose,” she said, as if speaking to herself, “I knew that there was something wrong. Well, not wrong,
weird.
I think I shivered.” She gave a little swallow. “Then he turned toward me and spoke. And it's hard to describe his voice, but his way of speaking was incredibly striking. As if the words were just pressed out of the air. . . .”

She fell silent, staring at the planet far below and Merral could see her reflection in the curved, coated glass.

“What did he say?” Vero asked, as gently as if he were talking to a child.

“He said this: ‘Captain Lewitz, night is falling. The war begins.' But I can't give any sense of the sheer weight of the words.”

She paused again and moved her head so that she was looking carefully at Merral and Vero, as if weighing them. “ ‘Night is falling. The war begins.' ”

Vero asked, “Do you understand what he meant at all?”

She looked at him blankly. “Not then.” Then she looked to where the Gate had been. “But I do now. Or think I do.”

Perena turned back to Vero and Merral saw there were shadows under her eyes. “I wish I could describe the voice. It was human in its words, but not in its sound. It was emotionless; I felt there was no flesh and blood, no lungs and larynx involved, but that it was not—most definitely not—a machine voice.” She shook her head. “If it was a vision, it was a remarkably concrete one. Anyway, so I said, ‘Who are you?' ” Then she paused and sharply corrected herself. “
No.
I said, ‘Who are you,
sir?
' because there was such an authority in the voice. Then he answered me. ‘I too am a captain, and I too serve.' He paused, as if to let the words sink in, then he said, ‘I have been sent by our Lord the King as an envoy to you. I am to warn you that the enemy is seeking to regain his authority over your worlds. His power extends to Farholme Gate. Even now he seeks to seize your friends.' ”

Merral felt himself reach for the grab rails. He glimpsed Vero gulping and, for a moment, wondered if he was going to vomit.

Perena swallowed and when she spoke again there was a great emotion in her voice. “I was nearly sick with fear, but I said, somehow, ‘Can I stop it?' There was another silence and then he just said, ‘You may be able to stop the ship entering Farholme Gate.' Then he seemed to start to walk away toward the rear of the
Nesta.
There he turned briefly to me. ‘And remember, Perena, whatever happens, the King reigns. And stand firm.' Then he was gone.”

“Gone?” Vero's voice shook and Merral was aware of his hands twitching.

She raised her eyebrows. “He just wasn't there. In the chamber. Did he move or did he vanish? I don't know.”

She turned and leaned her head back against the glass and looked at them, her face pale and intense. “For a moment I froze. Then I started shaking and I had to lean back against an undercarriage leg to brace myself. I prayed. Then I realized that you were going through the Gate in just over an hour. So I raced up to the complex offices and asked if anybody else had been in Bay One. They looked at me as if I was deranged. ‘Of course not,' they said. I ran to the Gate Control office. I must have been a sight for them to see. I told them to stop the
Schütz.
Turn it back, whatever. Then the fun began.” She sighed, rubbing her chin gently. “They were very kind, they all knew me, but they said, ‘Why?' Of course, I was in a mess, because all I could say was that I had met someone or had a vision of some sort. So they looked at each other and checked and rechecked all the Gate signals while they got me a chair.” She wrinkled her face up in a rueful smile.

“Visions, I now realize, do not appear in the manuals. Nor do angels. Anyway, the Chief of Operations—a nice man—said, well, they had Standard Operating Procedures and, of course, there was nothing they could do. There was no basis to order any diversion. So I thanked him and walked out. Of course, I couldn't get you on the diary. Then I remembered something, so I walked through to Communications and sat down at the desk where they had the backup systems. There was no one about there so I sent the message that you got. I saw how it was cut off after a minute, so I just went outside and sat on a step and prayed. Half an hour later, I heard this extraordinary commotion from the Gate Control Office. I ran in. . . .” She took a deep breath. “You cannot imagine the atmosphere there. But eventually we realized the ship was safe, if damaged. As you know, a number of Gate fragments perforated it, but you were going so fast by then that their relative speed was pretty low.”

She looked at them with an oddly respectful look. “I trust both of you have given thanks for great mercies. Despite our ships' excellent self-sealing abilities, most space travelers who see the stars with naked eyes find that it is the last thing they do see in this life.”

Vero bowed. “I think that neither of us will overlook that.”

For some moments, nobody said anything, and in the silence Merral heard the clatter of equipment echoing from one of the station's corridors. Finally Vero, his weary face marked by a bemused expression, spoke. “Extraordinary, quite extraordinary.” He looked at Merral. “Are you reminded of something in Perena's account?”

“Jorgio's dream, of course. Of the testing of the Assembly; to watch, stand firm, and to hope.”

“Yes,” said Vero. “But Perena, I keep thinking about this appearance—this apparition. I do not have the words. What was it?”

She closed her eyes for a moment before opening them. “I wondered if it was a hallucination. I was tired and stressed. But there was a curiously solid quality to the appearance. As if it had come from somewhere else. And there were other things; I felt a moral aspect to the envoy. I felt under judgment in some way. It was—” she stared at her fingers and Merral wondered if she was blushing— “a not entirely welcome feeling.”

“Was it an angel?” Vero asked. “In the Scriptures, an envoy and an angel would be the same word.”

Perena shook her head. “I would not wish to claim—or deny—that he was an angel.”

“That angels guard the Assembly,” Vero said slowly, “is an ancient statement of faith. That, in this age of the world, they do not appear to human beings, is a statement based on equally ancient experience.”

“In this age of the world?” Perena said in a sharp voice. “But if I understand Jorgio's vision—and mine—then this age of the world may be ending.”

Vero stared out into space for a moment. “Perena,” he said, and his tone was troubled, “I stand corrected.” Then he turned to her. “Thank you twice over. Your encounter not only saved our lives; it has added another significant piece to the puzzle.”

She shook her head. “There are two more things I must tell you. First, yesterday evening I did a check on the
Argo.
The ship that in 2098 went into Below-Space with a living crew and returned with a dying one.”

Vero bent closer as if to hear better, swayed, overcompensated, and began to spin. Perena grabbed his arm and steadied him.

“Take it easy. No sudden movements. Anyway, very little of the
Argo's
voyage was made public. The crew names, dates of injection into Below-Space, and recovery; that sort of thing. There are some comments on the properties of Below-Space, and they provide our only real eyewitness knowledge of what happens there. The comments were that, as the remote probes had suggested, some wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation travel through Below-Space. At the upper levels you could make out stars and planets in shades of gray, but as you went deeper, it became opaque quickly. But with depth they reported a progressive and remarkable degree of mental disorientation with hallucinations and eventually delirium. Which, sadly, proved irreversible.”

“Is that it? That tells us little.” Vero looked disappointed.

“No, the oddity is this: That is all that was reported of the mission of the
Argo.
”

“But there must have been a full report published.”

“No. I checked. The full report on the voyage of the
Argo
is one of the few documents never put into the public domain in the entire history of the Assembly.”

“Really? Why?”

“Ah. I then ran a search on rumors and fables of early Assembly space flight. There was one record to do with the
Argo
; simply an early post-Rebellion rumor that it had encountered ‘Powers.' ”

“
Powers?
Not ‘power problems'?”

“The wording is precise, if ambiguous.
Powers.
With a capital letter.”

“Surely it was just a tall tale?”

“The obvious conclusion but for one very odd fact. The
Argo
Review Commission, made up of a dozen men and women, met in closed session in 2099. It met for a week, adjourned, and then resumed with an enlarged board of six extra people. It met for another month. They made two recommendations: first, that the
Argo
report must remain forever unpublished, and second, that no further attempts were ever to be made to explore Below-Space. Gate links were fine, but going outside them was not.”

“Odd.” Vero stared at Perena with tired eyes. “Why did they enlarge the board? To put on more psychologists?”

An odd, distant expression crossed Perena's face “No, Vero, it wasn't psychologists. It was theologians.”

“Theologians?”

“The six extra people were the Custodians of the Faith.”

Merral suddenly felt cold. “Perena,” he said, “they felt that there was something
wrong
in Below-Space?”

Perena paused, looked at Vero, and began again. “I think—and it is partly a guess—that they concluded that in deep Below-Space there were spiritual forces, elemental powers. Influences. Something like that.”

Vero frowned and shook his head. “It has always been a belief that, if allowed to, human beings always go too far and become, either directly or indirectly, involved with evil powers. That is why we have checks and controls. But I had never heard that it might be so literally true. Nevertheless, Perena, I am not sure I see how this affects us now. We have more pressing problems.”

Perena looked at him, her eyes troubled. “I have not finished. I have another piece of information for you. But let me first ask you a question: Assuming the intruders did destroy the Gate, why did they do it?”

Vero opened his hands wide. “It's obvious. They wanted to kill us. To stop us getting through with the news.”

“I am not so sure.” The voice was quiet.

Vero gave her a look of astonishment. “There are few things that I now take for granted, but that was one of them. I mean, isn't it obvious?”

“Surprisingly, no. Did either of you notice when the explosion happened with respect to your scheduled entry into the Gate?”

“I did,” Merral said. “Now you mention it, it was after entry time. A few minutes later.”

“Yes.” Perena's firm tone brooked no argument. “It exploded at 11:07. You would have entered at 11:02, so that by then you would have been exactly midway between Gates.”

Vero stared at Perena in astonishment. “I had never thought . . . What would have happened?”

“A good question and one the spatial physicists—there are two of them here—will have to work on. It has never happened. But the Normal-Space tube would have collapsed instantly and you would have dropped out into Below-Space. At the deepest point of your traverse, you—”

“—would have done what the
Argo
did.” Vero's voice trembled.

Merral suddenly felt an urgent longing to be on the ground and to never, ever leave it again.

Vero, swallowing hard, was staring at Perena, his eyes open in a wild surmise. “What did this envoy say about what the enemy wanted to do again?”

“He said ‘The enemy wishes to seize you.' Not destroy . . .”

For a moment Merral could only close his eyes as a wave of fear and horror broke over him. He felt his body shake.

When he opened his eyes, he saw that Vero had drifted over to the window and was gazing down at the planet. There was a long silence.