by Chris Walley
Zennia stroked Barrand’s wrist, her finger delicate and thin against the muscular bulk of his arm. “All the better then, my dear, to leave it to tomorrow.”
“Quite so. Although tomorrow is official work with my nephew the forester. But I will find time. My wife, as usual, is right.” He carefully put the flute down. “Nephew, your glass is nearly empty. More to drink?”
“Not for me.”
Then they let the conversation drift into a slower, more reflective tempo. In time, they got talking about the arts, and Barrand began to talk with his usual enthusiasm about choral music.
“Oh, Merral, I have had a struggle about what to do for Nativity. Very hard. I’ve always liked to do something special. It’s difficult when there are so few of us, but I don’t mind using re-created voices.”
Merral remembered that in these small communities, the use of the preserved voices of singers in the past was not luxury in music-making, but necessity.
“As we did Bach at Easter, I thought we’d do something more recent. So it’s Rechereg’s Choral Variations on an Old Carol. You know the piece?”
“Heard of it. It’s difficult, isn’t it?”
Barrand nodded to his wife. “Our nephew is too busy. Not enough time to listen.”
Zennia patted her husband’s arm and smiled back at Merral. “Perhaps, dear, in Ynysmant they are too busy making music to listen to it. Remember our blessing of being so remote.”
“Wives are always right, eh, Merral? But of course you wouldn’t know. . . .” His uncle smiled, showing his powerful, white teeth. “Ho. Where was I? Ah yes, let me see. The Rechereg is very demanding. I will need three re-created voices to handle it. The great tenor Fasmiron—the voice is from 8542 when he was at his peak—and Genya Manners, one of the Lannian sopranos during the great years of their academy. She sounds more like a bird than a woman. But I’m having problems with the female alto. It’s a very high part.”
He looked into the distance, tapping his fingers on the wood of his chair.
“Who are you using?” Merral asked.
“For the alto?” Barrand stroked his beard. “Hmm, Miranda Cline perhaps. But does she have the range? Just ten years of singing. It was so fortunate that she agreed to let her voice be copied so she could become a re-created when she did. She came and went like a meteor. . . .”
He stared at the wall-hanging opposite. Abruptly, he looked at Merral. “Nephew! A change of subject entirely. Your meteor. Have you considered why the Guardian satellites didn’t pick it up and destroy it?”
Merral thought for a moment. “It crossed my mind briefly. It seemed large enough to have done damage if it had hit anything. So the 180 East or the Polar Guardian should have intercepted it, you think?”
His uncle ran his hand through his beard again. “Me? Oh, I don’t know. I’ve never given the Guardian satellites a thought. I know there are four, that they’re as old as the present Gate, and that they destroy any meteor or comet coming in on a threatening trajectory. And that is it. They work. So we forget them. . . .” He fell silent, his fingers maintaining a gentle beat on the arm of his chair. “But, Nephew, what I was just wondering was this: Now suppose one or more of the Guardian satellites did see it, but they just plotted the trajectory and then said ‘Oh, the Lannar Crater. Uninhabited waste,’ and let it pass. What do you think?”
“I think I see where your logic takes you.” Merral sipped the last of his drink. “With Herrandown being the farthest settlement north, that’s fine, but inside a decade or two we might have a Forward Colony up to the margins of the southern Rim Ranges—at least if the winters don’t get any worse.”
His uncle nodded, his heavy brow furrowing. “Hmm. Exactly. I just hope someone tells the Guardians. But Nephew, surely the Guardians aren’t smart enough to determine an impact trajectory to such precision that they can let it go over our heads like that?”
Suddenly tired, Merral found himself stifling a yawn. “Oh, sorry, Uncle. Yes, you may have a point but my brain is too fatigued. It would be an interesting thing to know. I’ll talk to someone when I get back.”
“It’s not just you who is tired. Zennia looks asleep.”
At her name, his wife started, opened her eyes, and shook her head so that her brown and silver hair flew around. “I’m—Oh, what an insult! I am sorry. I really ought to go to bed. If you gentlemen will excuse me.”
Merral got to his feet. “I think, Uncle, if you will excuse me, I’ll go too.”
Barrand waved a hand dismissively. “Of course. Zennia, I’ll be up in a moment. But I’ve just had an idea about that alto.”
In the small guest chamber with its single skylight, Merral undressed. Fighting off sleep he sat on the bed, pulled the small, gray curved slab of his diary off his belt, and noting the illuminated message logo, thumbed it on, switching to speech mode.
“Today at 9:15 p.m. Eastern Menaya Time. One message: Nonurgent. Voice from Lena Miria D’Avanos.” The words were flat and metallic.
Pulling out his night-suit, Merral spoke to the diary. “Play, please. Let’s hear my mother.”
“Message begins. . . .” The coldly sterile tones of the machine were thrown into abrupt contrast by the soprano of his mother’s voice, with her haphazard stresses.
“Merral dear. This is not at all urgent. Not at all! But do thank Barrand and Zennia so much for their good wishes for the Nativity. Zennia’s card was lovely. Merral, I am so blessed to have such an artistic sister. Lovely. I shall be writing, of course, but do please invite them down again. Those dark winter nights up north! Of course, I’ll do it myself, but the personal touch is the thing! Oh, and Merral, I saw Isabella today. She asked after you. ‘When is Merral coming back?’ she said. Father and sisters send their love too. Love from your mother.”
The metallic voice returned: “Message ends. No further messages.”
“Okay. Go to today’s notes.”
“Ready.”
“Add ‘Final Observations’ as follows. . . . ”
For the next five minutes, Merral listed what he had seen on the last part of his journey north. He would tidy up the report when he got home. Then he briefly outlined what he hoped to achieve with his uncle tomorrow before he rode south again. Finally, he switched to screen mode and continued his current evening reading of the Word before bringing his praises and concerns before the Most High.
Then Merral slid in between the sheets and lay there listening to the silence of the house and the soft creaking of the wooden frame as the night winds swirled around it. There was, he felt, something extraordinarily satisfying about being tired: the draining of energy from limbs, the leisurely and ordered shutdown of body systems.
On the verge of sleep, he realized that he had not recorded in his diary anything about the meteor. He would, he told himself, do it tomorrow. Toying with the image in the last moments of wakefulness, he played back through his mind the brief glimpse he had caught of it—the ball of light, like some great firework, racing overhead.
As he did so, it struck him that something about it was odd. But what? He ran over the vision again and again, now faster, now slower.
His last thought as he plunged finally into sleep was that, for a meteor, it had been moving too slowly.
Far too slowly.
2
That night Merral dreamed in a way he had never thought possible. Normally, if he did dream, all he would remember of it on waking was a short-lived, gentle, and vague memory. But that night his dream was of an extraordinary intensity and unpleasantness. He was standing alone on a dark, endless sandy beach at the edge of a sullen, night-colored sea, whose slow, heavy waves never broke, but seemed to just crawl up the shore and die before sliding back with a quiet, drawn-out whisper. Somehow, there was something swollen and infected about the sea. The cloudy, sunless sky above was lit with an overcast, tepid yellow light that seemed sickly. In the far distance some dark-winged objects, which he knew were not birds, wheeled and dived ominously.<
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It seemed to Merral that he stood there for an age, a lone figure looking at a sick sea and a dead sky, watching the oily ebb and flow of the waters. There was an atmosphere of expectancy, a feeling that something was on its way, something impending. It was as though the waves in their slow, lapping decay were saying in words just beyond hearing, “Wait. . . . Wait. . . . Wait. . . .” He knew, with a strange certainty, that there was something out there in the waters. Something that was waiting out its time before emerging.
Then, in a fearful moment, he saw the faintest of movements begin far out on the water. An unhurried train of circular ripples began to spread out slowly, and the waters seemed to bulge.
As this happened, Merral felt a strange compulsion. He wanted to run away. Indeed he knew that he had to, but somehow he couldn’t. Instead, half of him seemed to want to stay and to watch what was going to come out of the water. There seemed to be an invitation, a beckoning, even a command for him to stay, to watch, to somehow be present at—
At what? Merral didn’t know. He felt trapped in lonely terror and expectation, bound against his will to watch and await whatever it was that was emerging from the growing ripples.
Suddenly Merral felt he was no longer alone. Someone else seemed to have joined him, some invisible person who tugged at him so that he was forced to turn away from the mesmerizing sea. As he turned away, he felt suddenly released from his bonds. Driven by an overpowering sense of peril, Merral began to run over the loose sand away from the rippling waters. And in his fleeing, he woke up with a start of terror.
Merral lay still for some minutes, wet with perspiration and aware of a thudding pulse in his head. It took him some time to come to terms with what he had experienced. It had clearly been a nightmare, a thing not entirely unknown in the worlds, but almost always in rare psychological ailments or in various poisoning accidents. He switched the light on and went over to the hand basin where he washed his face and checked himself over. To his surprise, he found no evidence of illness. He had no swollen glands, no spots, no pustules, and no distended stomach. Recovering something approaching calm, he went back to bed, switched off his light, and lay down, conscious of a racing pulse. He was vaguely aware of the wind gusting strongly against the walls and heavy footsteps from his uncle and aunt’s room next door. Then he committed himself again into the hands of the eternal Father, the great King, the maker of the heavenly glory, and fell asleep.
This time he slept in peace.
Over breakfast, Merral’s dream nagged at the corners of his mind. He had been talking over with Barrand some of Thomas’s stories from school when Zennia, robed in a warm blue gown, came in and reminded the children that it was time to leave for school. As they left in turbulent good cheer, Merral’s aunt sat at the table and turned to him.
She stared at him, her eyes showing concern. “Did you sleep properly, Nephew? You still look tired.”
Merral put down his cup slowly, perplexed at realizing that he wanted to avoid her question. “Er, no, Aunt. No, not really. The bed was fine, but I just had . . . well, a dream.”
Merral was aware out of the corner of his eye of Barrand, standing against the kitchen shelves, and as he said the word dream, he had the strongest feeling that a look of surprise or dismay crossed his uncle’s face. But when he turned to Barrand, all he could see was a mild expression of quizzical sympathy.
“No! I am sorry,” his aunt replied, her voice full of consideration. “You mean a nasty dream? About what?”
Merral found himself embarrassed. “Well, nothing much really. It was an oddly sort of static dream. Almost . . . well . . . a nightmare. I just . . .” He hesitated. “No Aunt, it’s too silly, really, to talk about. Perhaps it was something I ate.” Then he realized what he had said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that your food was—”
“No, I know what you mean,” she answered, giving him a caring look.
Barrand turned to Merral. “Perhaps . . . perhaps it was the mushrooms.” His normally, smooth deep voice was now ragged.
Then, as Merral watched, his uncle swung away toward the wall and began to move a plate along a shelf.
“I’ve never known them to have that effect,” Zennia commented, sounding slightly puzzled. “We all had them, didn’t we? Husband, you slept all right, didn’t you? I do remember you getting up.”
For a moment, Barrand, apparently engrossed in finding dust on the plate, didn’t look up. “Oh, me?” he said eventually, in a level, flat tone. “Oh, I slept fine. No, nothing like that.”
“Bizarre,” replied Zennia. “Have you ever dreamed like this before, Merral?”
“Never, thankfully.”
Barrand turned toward them, his face expressionless. “Now, don’t rule out mushrooms. Fungal biochemistry is very complex. And they evolve in such a bizarre way; you get new strains all the time. There was a case some fifteen years ago: A whole community of sixty perished out in one of the Lenedian planets. Do you remember it?”
“Vaguely,” Zennia slowly replied, looking at her husband as if there was something she did not recognize about him.
Barrand, who had now swung away again and appeared to be examining the kitchen shelves, nodded to himself. “Yes, well, that was put down to a rogue gene in a fungus. But anyway, no harm done here.”
Merral, unsure of what to say, tried to soothe the situation. “Well, that’s true. No harm done. Whatever it was, I’m fine now.”
Barrand put down the plate he was still holding onto the shelf so awkwardly that it rattled alarmingly. Then without looking back at either Zennia or Merral, he said, “Excellent! Well, dreams or no dreams, we ought to get down to business, young Merral. My office in ten minutes?” But before any answer could be made, he had left the room.
Zennia stared after the departing shape of her husband with an air of puzzled unhappiness, looked at Merral, and made as if to say something. Then she seemed to change her mind and left abruptly, leaving a perplexed Merral in sole possession of the kitchen.
Eventually Merral gathered up his notes on the quarry and stepped outside. It was a brilliantly clear winter’s day, and breathing in the sharp, cold air, he stared at the snow-sprinkled landscape engraved in a crisp winter fragility. As he did, the oddly unpleasant atmosphere of the kitchen seemed to dissolve in the fresh air. Soon, though, Merral felt the cold penetrate his indoor clothes, and he strode quickly down the path to the long shed huddled between earth and basalt block banks.
As he entered, Barrand looked up from where he was sitting behind a desk piled neatly with papers and datapaks.
“Welcome to my palatial office!” he exclaimed jovially, waving his great arms so wide that they nearly touched the opposite sides of the room. Merral felt encouraged that the strange mood seemed to have left his uncle as abruptly as it had come.
“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 looke
d 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.”
