The Shadow and Night

by Chris Walley

  “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-si
zed 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.”

  As they returned to Anya’s apartment, Vero broke off a conversation with the others and came over to Merral. “There is a freight flight tomorrow at 6:20 a.m. with space for two. You can manage it?”

  “Yes, but there goes my relaxing morning. But certainly. I’ll call my parents to make sure that they’ll be expecting us tomorrow night.”

  “Do tell them that it will be for a single night. And give them my love.”

  The news of their early flight seemed to precipitate the end of the evening. Amid thanks to Perena and Anya, the five split up.

  As Merral made to leave, Anya grabbed his hand lightly. “And take care up north. Cockroach men or not, it’s tough country. We can’t afford to lose you.”

  He squeezed her hand. “I’ll be back. God willing. Whatever’s out there.”

  Then they parted.

  On the way back to his room, Merral thought about Anya in a mood that oscillated between pleasure and concerned perplexity. It was one more thing, he said to himself, which had to be sorted out soon.

  The flight next morning was uneventful. Mist shrouded much of Isterrane on takeoff and low cloud hid Ynysmant on landing. Merral went with Vero straight to the Planning Institute, and after dropping their bags in his office, they both went over to see Henri, who was engaged in drawing a sequence of graphs on his desk. He turned off the monitor as they came in and gave both of them a warm welcome, his deep-set eyes asking unspoken questions about Vero. After introductions and pleasantries, Merral carefully explained what he wanted.

  Henri sat back in his chair and looked from one to the other in a thoughtful manner.

  “A week’s trip, fine. But a rotorcraft tomorrow? There’s not much time to arrange it. . . .” He ran his hands through his thinning hair. “Ach, we will have to reschedule other things. But . . . if you really think this is needed?” There was a questioning note in his voice.

  “I do.” Merral found himself surprised at both the abruptness of his answer and the certainty it carried.

  There was silence for a moment and then Henri shrugged and smiled. “Fine, man. I’ll arrange it.” He stared at a wall map a moment and then looked back at Merral. “In fact, in some ways, I’ll be glad of it. The Quarry Logistics Team is up there now and I’ve already had one comment about Barrand.”

  A stab of concern pierced Merral. “Is he—are they—all right?”

  “Well, yes. But he’s put a bolt on the house door.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath from Vero and Merral turned to him. “A what?”

  The dark face was clouded, and Vero spoke in a low, expressionless voice. “A bolt. A catch openable from one side only. Like you’d use—I assume you do here—to stop children from getting into machinery. You put it high against a door.”

  “I see,” Merral said, trying to imagine the mental state that would need something like that. He turned back to his director. “You mean, Henri, that he bolts himself—his family—in?”

  “At night, I gather. And he walks around with a big stick, too. That’s about it.”

  There was a long silence that eventually Henri broke with hesitant words. “I’m sorry . . . I’m on the point of sending the psychologist up. I was waiting to hear from you. Your uncle is, I suppose, scared.” He looked inquiringly at Vero. “Sentinel, do you know why?”

  Vero pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. “Everybody thinks I do, but I’m afraid it’s not the case. I’m as much in the dark as anybody else. But I am determined to find out.”

  “Good, good.” Henri’s face expressed a continuing unease. “I don’t like it at all. I’ll let you get everything ready. Help yourself to gear. I’ll arrange the craft for dawn.”

  After leaving Henri, Vero returned with Merral to his office where they called up maps, photographs, and computer reconstructions of the Lannar River system.

  Vero gazed intently at the detailed imagery. “How accurate is this?”

  “The resolution is two meters. It’s accurate but misleading. I find that it’s the fine grain on a landscape that takes time. These images never show things like brambles, thorns, and mud. But you get the overall trends.”

  “Your surveying and monitoring machines—do they ever get this far north?”

  “Infrequently. It’s a long way. Sometimes it may get looked at as part of some special project; for instance, we had a region-wide beaver survey last year and the Lannar was covered then. But not much else is done. A drone probably cruises over once a month looking for oddities. As Herrandown develops we will survey it more.”

  “So, it’s little known.” Vero looked at the map. “How far would we get in four days?”

  “Day one would be around thirty kilometers in the narrow, densely wooded meanders from Herrandown. Day two would be, say, another thirty kilometers in the more open section where the river braids itself. All being well, that would bring you to the foot of Carson’s Sill. Now, that bit’s tricky.”

  Vero gestured at the image. “I can see that.”

  “Yes, that leads up to the Daggart Plateau, which lies in front of the Rim Ranges. That’s a climb of at least eight hundred meters—probably nearer a thousand—up and over a lot of steep ledges. Tiring. But then you are on the plateau at the top. With that long lake, the Daggart Lake.” He paused. “So that’s an easier walk along that. Say we do twenty kilometers that day. Day four, what? Another thirty kilometers along the plateau to the edge of the Lannar Rim Ranges proper. Would I be right in thinking that you would not wish to go farther?”

  “Yes,” Vero answered as he peered at the image again. “It gets very steep then. Four days will be enough.” He flexed his fingers. “Yes, my guess is that we will be ready for pickup by then. One way or another.”

  They looked at each other. Funny, Merral thought, I can’t easily visualize what sort of answer we might find to this set of problems. I wonder whether he can.

  Vero tapped his diary. “I’m puzzled that we’ve not heard from Anya. It’s nearly lunchtime.”

  “Let me call her.”

  When she came on screen, Anya looked harassed. “Oh, sorry, you guys. You did well to get out of town and not to wait. The results are a bit of a mess. I can’t decide what’s going on. I’m going to get a second opinion. And our bug scholar has only just come in from out of town.”

  “Any hints?”

  Anya flashed Merral a smile, but he felt it was the forced expression of someone under pressure.


  “Insufficient data, Tree Man. I’ll call you as soon as I have anything.”

  Merral and Vero ate lunch outside, sitting under a large apple tree and looking across the lake to where Ynysmant rose up out of the water, its roofs gleaming in the sun. They were both silent, as if the burden of the expedition north had crushed the desire for conversation.

  They were crossing back through the compound after lunch when a rough cry rang out. “If you please! Mister Merral.”

  Merral turned to see a familiar, bent-backed figure lurching across the compound toward him.

  “Jorgio!”

  Merral hugged him. As he did, he caught again the smell of earth and animal and he felt sorry that, since their last meeting just before Nativity, he had not made the time to go up to Wilamall’s Farm. “Let me introduce you,” he said. “Jorgio Aneld Serter—gardener, stable hand, and old friend—this is—”

  “Verofaza Laertes Enand, sentinel. But—more commonly—Vero. Delighted to meet you.”

  The two of them shook hands and looked at each other. As they did, Merral saw a strange expression passing across Jorgio’s face: a look that was almost one of recognition.

  “If you please, Mr. Vero; you are from Ancient Earth?” Jorgio asked.

  “News about me must have been spreading,” Vero replied with a quiet laugh. “Or is it my accent?”

  A smile appeared on the leathery face. “I was told to expect you.”

  It was Vero’s turn to look puzzled now.

  Jorgio turned to Merral. “I was looking for you. I have a message for you and Mister Sentinel here. I assume he’s come to sort out what’s wrong.”

  Vero looked startled. “Excuse me, Jorgio—before you give us this message—what is wrong? I gather the weather hasn’t been good.”

  Jorgio stared at him, his thick lips protruding. “Tut tut! No. Not just the weather. Much more than that. There’ve been all sorts of things wrong. Here and there. As you know.”