The Shadow and Night (6 page)

“Ho! Stop standing there. Do take a seat. I've lost a cross section.”

Merral, however, remained standing and looked around. His previous visits had been social ones and he hadn't been in his uncle's office for years. It was a single long room with one end taken up by a south-facing window and the other walls covered with maps, diagrams, and shelves of rock samples. In one corner hung various bits of quarrying equipment, including a cutter beam and a sample corer. Despite all the objects and his uncle's apparently easygoing nature, he found it a surprisingly tidy room.

Merral's attention was caught by a small painting on one wall, apparently out of place among all the paraphernalia of work. It was a picture of an entwined mother and child peering out of the window of something he took to be an inter-system liner, as beyond them a specklike in-system shuttle was beginning reentry into the atmosphere of the green and blue planet below them. Against the margin of the picture was a Gate, its status lights green. The caption read, “A last view of Hesperian. A. R. Lymatov, A.D. 11975.”

“Interesting painting,” Merral observed, speaking as much to himself as to Barrand.

His uncle looked up from his papers. “Oh, that. The Lymatov. Yes. My great-grandparents were from Hesperian. But you knew that.”

He stared at it as if seeing it for the first time, then wagged a finger solidly in emphasis. “Yes, now, Zennia doesn't like it. She says it's too posed. I disagree. Of course it's posed. It's a
posed
sort of painting. But it is flawed. Technically, it's wrong. They would have been seated and strapped in long before they got that close to the Gate, and the windows are too big for a liner. But I like it. Do you?”

Merral looked carefully again at the painting. He noticed that the child's arm was raised in a farewell wave that was somehow ambiguous and that the mother's posture was rather rigid and her face determined.

“Yes. I do. Like it, I mean. It's a well-established genre; you could fill a hundred galleries with them. But I find it moving. There's no father. Did he die, and are they leaving his remains there? It asks questions. I suppose he might have gone on first, but somehow the figures suggest otherwise.”

Barrand gave him a knowing nod. “You always did have an abundance of brains. Yes, there is a story. A family of five was planning to go to Granath Beta. Then the husband and the other two children were killed in a freak storm. She and the remaining child went on alone.”

He got up and went over to the painting, speaking quietly and intensely now. “It's always been a challenge to me. It says a lot about faith. About what the Assembly is about. What our calling as a family is.
Resolve. Faith.
You know. All those things.

“It is a well-established genre. But all genres are now.” He stared at the painting. “Funny business, the Assembly, when you think about it. All the emphasis on a stable, sustainable society. The caution over innovations.”

He nodded toward the horse grazing on some hay just in front of the window. “Take animals now. Like Blackmane there. He's a horse, but his genes are different from the first horse that left Earth. Or even that arrived here. Look at him: rounded extremities, reduced ears, nostril flaps, more recessed eyes, thicker hair, heavier hooves. He has adapted to this world with its cold and heat and dust.”

“Of course,” Merral said. “You can hardly freeze adaptation. But what's your point?”

His uncle creased his large forehead in puzzlement. “My point? Yes. Oh, I don't know. The paradox that we have frozen our culture, but that we have let life evolve. I know it's not a new thought—what is after so long?—but it has just struck me with some force.”

“But, Uncle, the wisdom of the centuries is that the stable culture is best. You can't just let a culture evolve; certain limits must be defined. Long, long ago the Assembly decided the parameters in which human beings flourished and set them down. It was a choice; a fixed, conservative, and stable society over one that was open, fluid, and unpredictable.”

There was a deep silence as Barrand, his large frame totally dominating the room, stroked his beard in profound thought. Then he gave a grunt that seemed to indicate mystification.

“Absolutely. What a strange idea for me to have.” He shook his head. “Ho, to business! Oh, I don't need that cross section. Come and have a look at these maps and let's switch into official mode, Forester D'Avanos.”

For half an hour they looked at the maps and imagery, and Merral listened intently as his uncle explained why he wanted to quarry the ridge outside the settlement rather than wait for a new access road to the already-planned quarry site fifteen kilometers to the north. Only he wasn't his uncle now. He was Barrand Imanos Antalfer, Frontier Quarrymaster, and he was presenting his case to Merral Stefan D'Avanos, Forester and head of the team that decided the citing of things such as quarries and forests.
Funny,
Merral thought,
how we distinguish official and family discussions to the extent that it would now be unthinkable for him to call me Nephew and me to call him Uncle.

Eventually Barrand wound to a halt. “So you see, Merral, we could start in the spring and save two years. And think of the energy saving in skipping that thirty-K round-trip. . . .” He trailed off, looking at Merral.

Merral rose to his feet, walked to the window, and looked out at the bare black ridge they had been talking about.

“Barrand,” he said, gesturing at the ridge, “let's go and look at it.”

Zennia was free to come, and an hour later the three of them were standing on the rocky summit of the hill recovering their breath after the stiff climb up. Merral stared around. Suspended overhead was a cool, eggshell blue sky painted with the most delicate pearl brushstrokes of high cloud. To think that they were just water vapor—had the Most High ever made anything so beautiful from so little? There were one or two of the faint corkscrew twists of cloud that revealed local instability in the upper atmosphere layers, but nothing that portended trouble on his ride tomorrow.

Merral lowered his gaze. The farms, fields, and orchards of Herrandown were almost surrounded by protecting woodlands, beyond which lay rough scrub, grassland, and bare rock. To the west of the settlement the bounding fir and alder woods ran into the tree-lined margins of the Lannar River, whose path he could trace northward toward the ranges. Looking northward, from where a cold wind blew that made the eyes water, the ground became increasingly covered with ice and snow. And there, marching along the farthest skyline, were the jagged teeth of the southern Lannar Rim Ranges, gleaming a dazzling white in the sunlight. The notion struck him that this cluster of houses was a vulnerable community.
What a strange idea,
he thought.
Vulnerable to what?
“So, it's suitable rock and there's enough?”

Barrand hesitated and said, “But the ridge will be gone.”

“My idea is this. I think we should work on a plan where the excavation is all on the south side of the ridge, leaving a narrow ridge to the north about this height, but we'll also give permission to excavate below ground level to make one or two long deep lakes.”

Zennia smiled.

Barrand, his face wrapped in deliberation, spoke slowly, his voice warming as he did. “Ho! Yes, I should have thought of it. They'd be spectacular with vertical rock walls behind them. And they'd warm the water because of the solar radiation.”

As they walked down the hill, Merral pushed those thoughts away. Zennia turned to him with a smile. “Barrand has been telling me of your recommendations. You have a gifting of vision and leadership, Merral. You would prefer to disown it, but I think you will use it in the end. If not on Farholme, then elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere? I was born here, as you were and all my grandparents were. No one in our family has been off Farholme since, oh, Great-Uncle Bertran traveled forty years ago.”

“Do you want to go elsewhere?”

It is an interesting question,
Merral thought,
and one that I have struggled with myself.
“I have little thought of leaving, Aunt. I love this place and being here. Farholme may be Worlds' End, but this is my home.” He paused. “I believe that my place is here. For the moment at least.”

Zennia carefully negotiated a sheet of glittering ice and then turned again to him.

“And tell me, you are happy with the forester's life?”

Merral measured his words. “I am, Aunt. I am happy. There is the challenge of seeing Menaya change and unfold as we work on her and with her.”

She smiled, encouraging him on.

“I love it,” he said. “It's the combination of art and science. I look at the ground, the lava ridges, the sand sheets, and say to myself, what can I do with it? What will best bring out the uniqueness of the land? Here a beech wood, there a pine forest.”

“I see the attraction; it is like painting.”

“Indeed, it is art at the grandest scale.” Merral smiled. “One of the great purposes of the Assembly—to take brown-and-gray, dead worlds and turn them into blue-and-green ones alive with life. Thus, we fulfill the mandate to humanity to garden what the Lord has entrusted us with.”

Barrand waved an arm in agreement. “Oh, absolutely. But let
me
ask you a question. Have you
really
no ambitions beyond all this?”

A hard question. My ambition is not something I normally think of.
“Uncle,” he answered after a moment, “I suppose I do have one ambition. More a wish.”

“What?”

Merral stopped and looked up. “Well, I would like to see the forests of Ancient Earth. To examine old woods and jungles. Ecosystems that go back, not just for eight thousand years, but millions of years. Unplanned, at least by us. Composed of a hundred thousand species in relative stability, not our five thousand in unsteady, unpredictable, and changing relationships.”

Barrand grunted, but it was Zennia who spoke. “Yes, I could see that. All Made Worlds are imitations, as best as we can make, of the one original Earth. But I have heard that many of Ancient Earth's forests were badly affected in the Dark Times; they have been reconstructed.”

“True. They are not as they were when our First Father and Mother walked in them. But I would like to see them once.”

The house was in sight now and the dogs were coming out. Barrand, his teeth bared in a grin, turned to Merral. “And perhaps, Nephew, one day you will.”

“Maybe, Uncle, but it's a long walk from here.”

And as the dogs romped around them, they laughed again.

That night Merral borrowed an image projector and went up to his room early to work. He wanted to get the ideas for the ridge tidied up before the Nativity holiday and knew that there would be little time on the next day to get anything done. If he got to the Forestry offices at Wilamall's Farm by dusk as he planned, he should be back in Ynysmant by eight on the regular ground transporter. And as that would leave little time to write up anything, it was best to do it now. So he linked his diary to the image projector and used it to draw an elegant, scaled 3-D model of the proposed quarry that appeared hanging over the desk like a gray whale painted with gridlines.

As he adjusted the edges of his model, he paused. Was he really working up here just because he had to get the work done? Or was there more to it than that?

He felt there was something that he didn't understand in the house, something intangible and impalpable that he preferred to avoid; something he wanted to be away from. Somehow, the house of his uncle and aunt had ceased to be as welcoming as it had been. As he sat there in the room, Merral felt drawn to consider again the mysterious problem that had afflicted Barrand that morning. Had it been resolved, or had it simply been pushed to one side? Certainly, during the evening, his uncle had become more withdrawn and terse.

Merral was sitting there, idly rotating the diagram as he considered his uncle, when there was a gentle tap at the door.

It was Zennia, bearing a glass of warm milk for him. She smiled. “I thought you might like this before you went to bed.”

“Why, thank you very much, Aunt! I hadn't realized how late it had become.”

He took the glass and placed it carefully on the desk. As he began to mention his plans for the morning, he saw a glint of emotion cross her face, a look that came and went so fast that it was hard to recognize. But, fleeting as it had been, Merral felt it to be one of concern, and he knew that it confirmed his own unease. There was indeed something wrong in the house.

Zennia, apparently realizing that she had revealed some secret thing, turned sharply and made to go to the door.

“Aunt, wait a moment,” Merral said. “Uncle . . . how is he?”

Zennia stopped, her hand on the door, and looked at him, her eyes showing unhappiness.