by Chris Walley
“Isabella, we will go back now. Anyway, we said ten minutes.”
“A good idea,” she answered, relief in her voice. “What are you going to do?”
“I will take advice in Isterrane. In the meantime, I think we are neutral about what we have seen. The data, after all, needs analysis.” Merral began to walk back toward where his uncle was.
“I suppose you are right.”
Barrand was sitting on a tree trunk whittling away at a piece of wood with a knife. “Ho! I was wondering where you had both gone to.”
“I found something that might have been a track and I picked up some samples for analysis.”
Barrand seemed almost uninterested. “Some faunal anomaly, I’ll bet. Well, we’d better get back for lunch.”
Lunch was an oddly subdued affair, especially by comparison with the other meals he’d had at Herrandown. Elana preferred to stay and eat in her bedroom. Barrand and Zennia were pleasant and affable, and the food was good and plentiful, but Merral felt a tension. Every so often Merral noticed glances between his uncle and aunt that hinted that all was not well between them.
After lunch Barrand and Zennia disappeared into the kitchen to make coffee, leaving Merral and Isabella alone in the small family room that he had sat in with his aunt and uncle just before Nativity. That reminded Merral that he really ought to try and raise the issue of the recording. It was not a prospect that appealed, and thinking of the best way to approach it began to occupy his mind. While Isabella sat looking at a portfolio of his aunt’s paintings, Merral got up and, trying to clarify his thoughts, opened the window and leaned out, enjoying the fresh spring air.
As he did he realized he could hear what his aunt and uncle were saying. The kitchen window must be open, he thought, and the breeze came from that direction. A second or two later he realized that the conversation was also very animated.
His uncle’s voice, loud and ill tempered, drifted past. “You shouldn’t have got me to bring him in. It’s something we can handle.”
It was such an extraordinary tone that for a moment Merral wondered if it really was his uncle.
Then his aunt replied and, to his distress, her manner was similar. “We handle it?” she seemed to snap. “We haven’t a clue—least of all you. There’s something wrong here, Barrand. I keep telling you.”
There was a snort, as if an animal were loose. “Don’t be a fool, woman. There’s nothing wrong here but hysterical women.”
“Hysterical? I like that!” His aunt’s voice seemed to vibrate with rage. “The real problem is a man—a man who is too proud and too stubborn to admit that there is something badly wrong here!”
Merral, suddenly ashamed both of eavesdropping and of what he was overhearing, abruptly closed the window. He stepped back into the room wondering if his face was burning. He was staggered, even shocked. The words he had heard made sense, but the tone was like nothing he had ever heard before. Things like it were alluded to in the old literature, but for it to happen between a husband and wife? It was hardly credible.
“What’s wrong?” Isabella asked.
“I have heard . . .” He paused, finding himself in agonized consternation. “No, I can’t say. . . .” He looked at her. “What’s wrong here, Isabella? I’m convinced everything is. Badly.”
Isabella opened her mouth to speak and closed it abruptly at the sound of approaching footsteps.
The subsequent coffee was a very quiet, even embarrassed affair in which almost nothing was said. After it Merral and Barrand left Zennia and Isabella and went over together to the office.
The big man closed the door, sat down awkwardly at his crowded desk, and stared over his papers at Merral.
“Tell me, Nephew,” he asked, “what will your verdict be?” Merral felt that there was a wary, defensive look on his uncle’s face.
Merral did not answer immediately, his mind instead running over a range of possible answers. Eventually he spoke. “Uncle, I need to take some advice. I am a forester. I am not convinced that the problem lies in my area. If it does, it goes beyond my knowledge. Frankly, I have no idea what is going on.”
Barrand nodded and leaned back in his chair. “So what are you going to do?”
“The day after tomorrow I will go to Isterrane and talk to some people there about your situation.”
A clear look of unease crossed his uncle’s face. “It’s going to go that far? I was hoping that it could be sorted out easily. Here. Or at worst, Ynysmant.”
“I had hoped so too, but I think not. I think I need specialist advice. You see, there is always the possibility that the wrong action may make matters worse.”
“I suppose so.” His uncle shifted his large frame heavily in his chair. “Well, to be honest, Merral, I’m rather regretting my call yesterday. Zennia pushed me into it. Elana had this thing, this vision. By taking it seriously, we have just made matters worse.”
“You don’t believe her?” Merral asked.
“Believe what?” There was a hard-edged incredulity in his voice. “That she saw a creature that doesn’t exist? I wouldn’t say it to her face, of course. No, let’s just say I’m frankly skeptical—very skeptical. Female hormones, I’d say.”
Feeling unsure what to say, Merral said nothing.
“See, Merral,” his uncle continued, leaning forward slightly, “I would rather that we kept the whole thing low-key. Not blow it up. This girl of yours, Isabella, now—very nice, don’t get me wrong—she may talk and we might have the colony here closed down. And we’ve worked hard.”
He gestured widely with his arms, got up with a lurch of the chair, walked to the window and peered out of it.
“It’s not easy here, you know. ‘The blessings of isolation,’ I think my wife said.” He made a strange, almost mocking noise. “Maybe, it has its curses, though. Fifty of us. All together, and such a lousy winter. I wonder if you people in Ynysmant really understand. . . .”
He swung round and shook his large head angrily as if trying to break free of something.
“Strange, Merral. I’ve never felt this way before. Very strange. Sorry to take it out on you, too. It must be the weather. It’s just . . . well . . . in a word, tough here.”
He paced the floor as if trying to find words to express his feelings. He paused at the Lymatov painting and stared hard at it. “We were talking about this last time, weren’t we?”
Merral nodded.
“Well it’s saying different things to me now. It asks a question. Is it worth it? Is the whole venture”—he threw his arms wide as if to encompass the colony—“the sacrifices, the blood, the suffering. Is it all worth doing?”
For some time Merral’s perplexity was so great he could say nothing. Eventually, feeling compelled to speak, his reply was hesitant.
“I have to say, Uncle, that this question has been debated, well, ever since the Intervention. The verdict has always been that it is. It is all worthwhile.”
“Well then,” his uncle said, in a tone that suggested he was unconvinced, “in the event of the entire Assembly of Worlds versus Barrand Imanos Antalfer I guess I must be wrong.” And he sat down so heavily in his chair that it protested. “Sorry,” he said, but his tone denied his words.
There was a heavy silence in the room. Merral, wishing he was elsewhere, plucked up his courage. “Uncle, before I go. There is one more thing. I hate to mention it. But I have a question about your concert at Nativity. The one with the Rechereg.”
Merral found it impossible to identify the emotion that his uncle’s face suddenly acquired.
“Oh yes. That. Did you like it?”
“Very much. But Miranda Cline . . . she seems to have sung at a higher pitch than she was able to in life.”
Very slowly, almost as if drugged, Barrand nodded his head. “Ah, that. That. I’m surprised you noticed.” He shrugged.
“My attention was drawn to it. But her range was altered?”
His uncle gave a long, low sigh. “In a w
ay, yes. In a way, no. See, she would always have liked to sing higher. I’ve read her biography. That’s the thing. So I was acting—shall we say—in her best interests.”
“But we don’t know what she actually thought. Or what she thinks now. And the Technology Protocols say that—”
“Oh yes.” There was a clear note of irritation here. “Number six, isn’t it? But I think she would have agreed.”
In the hanging silence that ensued, Merral realized that he was becoming tempted to say that the affair didn’t matter. But he knew it did matter. He tried to think what to say next but was spared by his uncle. “Look, I was in a hurry and I didn’t think it would give offense. But I will destroy the file.”
“Probably the best thing.” But it was more than a matter of giving offense, Merral knew. It was wrong.
The silence returned, only to be broken again by his uncle’s voice, now quiet but vaguely truculent, as if he was trying to reassert himself. “But maybe, Merral, we need to remember something.”
“What?”
“That the Technology Protocols were made by men, not God. They’re not Scripture.”
Merral suddenly realized that they were now in very serious and very deep waters. He knew that he had to get out of the conversation without giving in.
“No, they aren’t. True. But they are part of the fabric of the covenant of the Assembly of Worlds, and there has been no serious discussion of the removal of any part of them for over ten thousand years.”
Merral decided that he really couldn’t get into an argument. He had to talk to Vero about this.
“Anyway, Uncle. I’ve had a long day. We can discuss it all at some other time.”
“Oh, perhaps so. Anyway, you’d best be going.”
Barrand got to his feet, his bulk seeming to dominate the office.
“Look, I’m sorry about the business with Miranda Cline. It was stupid. It’s just been a long winter.” He sighed heavily. “You’d best go. I suspect it will all blow over here. A proper spring is nearly here and summer won’t be far away. And I’ll feel better when I get the quarry started. But thanks for coming.”
Merral chose his words carefully. “Uncle, be assured of this. I support you, and I’m available whenever you need me.”
They walked slowly back to the house where they were greeted by Thomas, now released from school, who leapt on Merral with a boundless energy and demanded to clamber over him. Merral put up with it for a few minutes and then deposited the child on the ground. Not only had Thomas become heavy today, his heart was not in it. Instead, he hugged him and let him go. As he looked at him, he realized how much he wanted to have children of his own someday.
“So, Thomas, how are things?”
“Not good, Cousin. Not good at all.” He gestured with a stubby and rather dirty hand to the surrounding woods. “There’s something bad out there. Real bad. You’re gonna fix it, aren’t you? You are, for sure. Do you promise?” His round face was troubled.
“Well, Thomas, promises are made to be kept. So it’s a serious business to make them. I won’t promise to do what I may not be able to. But what I will promise, Thomas, is this. . . .” He paused, thinking of the binding significance of his words. “I am going to do everything to find out what’s bad in the forest. I promise.”
“Thanks. Thanks. Find out what’s in there.”
He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then he whispered something to Merral in a voice that was so quiet that no one else heard it.
And what Thomas said so appalled and disgusted Merral that when he went over everything that he had seen and heard that day, it was Thomas’s comment that alarmed him most of all. And when, the day after, he journeyed to Isterrane, it was still a preoccupation.
Again and again, the words that Thomas had whispered to him came back to him. Endlessly, he saw the little lips move and heard the voice whisper to him.
“Find it, Cousin Merral, find it. And when you find it . . . kill it.”
8
As the short-haul passenger flier made its unhurried descent through thick but patchy clouds into Isterrane Airport, Merral peered out through the window. As it was fully loaded, the pilot chose not to land vertically, but instead to come in on a gentle curving descent northward over Hassanet’s Sea. Although slower, this approach to the landing strip was Merral’s favorite as it offered him better views, and today he was not disappointed.
As they dipped below the clouds, his first sight was of the warm blue waters of Isterrane Bay with the high gray cliffs and green woods of the western headland rising beyond. Moments later as they swung round, the sloping red-tiled roofs of Isterrane could be seen, broken up into segments by the green of the fields and parks which ran into the very heart of the city. As the flier came in low and straight for touchdown, the gleaming pale gray wall of the hundred-meter-high anti-tsunami barrier that guarded the seaward margin of Isterrane suddenly seemed to loom up above the town’s skyline.
I wonder what Vero makes of that, Merral wondered, remembering the sentinel’s unease at Congregation Hall’s role as a refuge. But we must do things like this; on our unstable Made Worlds there is always the risk of some submarine landslide, volcano, or earthquake suddenly displacing a million tons of water landward. And a hundred other perils. But, as the thought came to him, Merral found his reflection becoming somber as he realized that he had—for all its risks—always found his world vaguely reassuring. True, it had its hazards, but they were all mapped, cataloged, and known. And yet, in the last two days he had come to wonder whether Farholme was such a known world after all. Could it be possible, he had puzzled, that they might have overlooked something? Might it be that there was something not mentioned in the Catalog of Species loose here? Something so strange that no light could be shed on it by all the millennia of knowledge of the Assembly?
Both the atmosphere and space segments of Isterrane Airport seemed busy. Away down to the west, on the long rendered-basalt runways of the space strips Merral noted the white squat hulls of three general survey craft and two of the much larger in-system shuttles. Probably as a result, he found there was a lot of land traffic leaving the port, and the allocating computer almost immediately found him a seat in a vehicle going past the Planning Institute complex. So it was barely twenty minutes after landing that Merral was able to let himself into the guest room that had been issued to him. He unpacked his things, briefly admired his view of the Institute’s mixed woodlands and the lake with the high white fin of the Planetary Administration Building rising behind it, and then sat down at the table with his diary to try to contact Vero.
The image that he received showed him immediately that his friend was not yet in Isterrane. The picture was shaking. Vero’s face was too close to the screen, and behind him were the unmistakable green furnishings of a long-haul flier. Even as Merral extended a greeting, Vero’s eyes closed as if in pain, his face bobbed sharply, and there was a thud as the transmitting diary bounced. The brown eyes opened and Vero gave an unnatural smile. “Merral! I am just being reminded of something I once read but had long since forgotten.”
“What was that?”
The face jerked again.
“Ah! That atmospheric turbulence on the Made Worlds can be very much worse than that on Earth. And much less predictable. Oh, here we”—the image jarred and the dark skin seemed to acquire a paler tone—“go again. I’ll never complain about the Gates again. Never! Look, Merral, I’m six hours away. Where shall I meet you?”
“The Planning Institute. I’ll be there all this afternoon.”
Vero nodded weakly. “I’ll come straight over as soon as I land. If I land. . . . Look, I’m going to switch off. On Earth it’s very rude to be sick on screen. Oh no!”
The screen went blank. After a few moments of praying for Vero, Merral called Anya Lewitz. She winked at Merral and gave him a broad smile that seemed to split her freckled face. “Tree Man! You made it in from the wilds. Welcome to the big town.” There was
a boisterousness to her manner that Merral found engaging and heartening.
“Nice to be here and to see you, Anya. I have something for you.”
“Great, put it on a lead and walk it over. What does it eat?” Merral’s concerns seemed to diminish in the presence of Anya’s seemingly boundless good cheer.
“Sorry, it’s dead. No, just a couple of samples.”
“Shame! You’re at the Institute?”
“Yes . . . how did you . . . ?”
“That decor. Terribly dull. No wonder the planet is such a mess; you guys can’t even paint your own walls coordinated shades of blue. Look, get on over straight away. We are at the south end of the center. I want to catch up with your news and I’ve a meeting in a couple of hours.”
Using the Institute’s transport allocation system, Merral very quickly found himself a lift to the western side of the city, where the various offices, laboratories, and nurseries of the Planetary Ecology Center occupied most of a park the size of Ynysmant town. From the main entrance, he walked along the long, covered path to the Reconstruction Project Station. There, after stopping briefly to marvel at the wall-size holograph system that was today showing The Blue Whales of Marsa-Mena, he was directed up to Anya’s office.
This turned out to be a charming, extended second-floor room under a high-pitched wooden roof, with wide glass windows and a balcony overlooking the city. For all its size, the room seemed full. The walls were covered with maps and images of animals, the shelving loaded with equipment, datapaks, models, and books, and the spare table and bench space were covered by papers and charts. In one corner of the room a model of a giant sloth, almost Merral’s height, stared at him with a haughty air. In the far corner some tree hamsters in a large cage ran up a branch and peered at him with some uncertainty.
Anya gave him a hearty hug and a moist kiss on the cheek. Very nice, Merral thought, surprised at the strength of his feelings. She gestured in her lively way to a seat at a low table. They sat down, and she looked at him in the evaluative way old friends do after an absence of years. Merral felt that Anya’s notorious playfulness and exuberance had been slightly tempered with growing maturity, but not entirely lost. No, she has just learned how to tame it.