The Shadow and Night

by Chris Walley

  “Yes, it’s the very weirdest thing,” he heard one man say in a tone that made the hairs on the back of his neck prick up. “You know I’m now doing the health certificates for the employment check on the sixty-five-year-olds?”

  “Of course,” said the other man, whom Merral felt he had seen around the hospital. “I sympathized, remember? It’s one of the worst things about being a doctor. People often get unhappy at being told to ease up on work.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. See, in the last six weeks, I have had three—really—three people, all thanking me for failing them.”

  “Seriously?” Merral, held spellbound by the conversation, noted the genuine surprise in the voice.

  “Absolutely. The last guy said, ‘Well, Doc, truth to tell, I’m glad. It’s all been a bit of a strain lately. I reckon I’m glad to go and do part-time work.’ The other two said much the same.”

  “Extraordinary. But I’ve heard other things too. . . .”

  At that point, the navigator came over and called them to the plane, and Merral never found out what other new and ominous novelties had transpired in Ynysmant. He could have asked, but he was already worried about becoming known as the man who was asking too many odd questions. As the plane rumbled up into the dusty air, he knew that there were some very serious decisions to be made in Isterrane.

  Two hours later Merral landed at Isterrane airport to find the sun shining through an atmosphere swept free of dust by the coastal breezes. The terminal was full, as two flights from the west had just come in, and he could not see Vero. To his surprise, a tall, well-built man came over to him. He was in his early twenties, with short, pale brown hair, a chiseled face, and green eyes.

  “Forester D’Avanos? Sentinel Enand sent me for you,” the young man said in a musical voice.

  Merral stared at the young man and decided that they had never met. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “My name’s Lorrin, Lorrin Venn.” An open smile broke across the face, and there was an eager and enthusiastic handshake. Lorrin Venn, Merral decided, was another of Vero’s team, just out of college.

  “This is good,” Lorrin announced with enthusiasm. “I am really delighted to meet you, sir. I’m in the FDU, and I’m under instructions to take you to the Library Center to meet Mr. Vero. Straightaway. Do you need a hand with the bag?”

  “No, it’s light.”

  The young man, already moving toward the exit, shrugged in an easygoing manner. “Okay, sir.”

  “But why the Library Center?”

  “Sir, I wasn’t told and I didn’t ask. But over here, please. We have a vehicle.”

  At a pace so fast that Merral could barely keep up, Lorrin walked through the main doorway and out to where a small, blue, four-seat urban machine was parked.

  “But can’t we find a lift?” Merral asked.

  “No need, sir,” was the quick and buoyant response. “The FDU has its own vehicles now. Priority.”

  “I see,” Merral answered, wondering exactly what else Vero had acquired for the Farholme Defense Unit. He gestured to the people waiting at the terminal exit. “But shouldn’t we offer a lift to someone? We have two spare seats.”

  Lorrin smiled. “No, sir,” he said. “The FDU has priority here too. Orders are to take you straight there and not to wait. Speeds us up no end. It’s neat.”

  “I see,” said Merral, noting Lorrin’s enthusiasm for the privilege. “I was expecting Zak. What’s he up to?”

  “Zak Larraine? He’s in the contact team. I’m in support.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Contact’s gonna be more exciting.” There was a note of regret in his voice.

  Lorrin whistled softly as he drove; it was a tuneful and happy sound, and Merral found it soothing. Halfway to the Library Center, the young man turned to Merral with a curious, almost awed look. “You know, sir, we’ve all heard about you.”

  “About me? What—?”

  “That you fought the creatures. On your own. ‘Hand to hand’ was the old term.” His tone was respectful.

  “Oh . . . ,” Merral said, feeling embarrassed, “you know about that?”

  “Well, Mr. Vero told us. See, we don’t have much else to go on, really. Your information is hard data. But it sounded well, heroic.” He looked encouragingly at Merral. “I’d love to know more. Be neat.”

  Merral looked out of the window for a moment, turning away from this man who seemed to think he was a hero. “Lorrin, I would give a lot to be able to forget all about it. Forever.” Then he realized that his words might sound rude. “But, well, if you need me to talk about it, then I’ll do it. But only once. And then under pressure. And, if it’s all right with you, not now.”

  “Mr. Vero said it was nasty,” Lorrin said, glancing at him. “But I figured it might just be him. Well, sir, when you tell it, I hope it’s not just for the contact team.”

  “Lorrin, if you don’t hear it, you won’t miss much. It was nasty. Very. Fighting is nasty. Period.”

  Lorrin seemed to consider the matter and then, moments later, began to whistle again.

  They parked at the rear entrance to the Library Center, and Lorrin, still whistling, led Merral in through an unlabeled door and hurriedly down a dusty metal spiral staircase that vibrated under their footsteps. From the faint hum from the wall beyond, they were at the back of the data storage units that formed the core of the Library Center. And as he thought it, it occurred to him that what he was hearing was no longer just the sound of one small extension of the Library, the vast information network that spanned the Assembly. As far as Farholme was concerned, it was the Library and would be until today’s young men and women were elderly.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Lorrin turned, pushed open a door, and walked through into darkness. The automatic lighting switched on slowly after him, almost as if it were reluctant to believe that anyone was actually there. Ahead of them lay a narrow, bare, and unpainted brick corridor with a feeling of neglect about it.

  “Mind your head,” Lorrin called back, gesturing to the sagging cabling festooned along the roof. With energetic strides, he set off down the sloping and curving corridor. Merral followed him as fast as he could, hearing their footsteps echoing all around. After a hundred meters or so, they stopped before a solid dark door in the side of the wall.

  The door swung open a fraction to reveal Vero’s brown face. His look of caution was suddenly transformed into one of pleased recognition, and he flung the door wide. “Welcome. Do come in!”

  Clasping Merral’s shoulder in a friendly grip, Vero led him into a tiny, white-painted, brick-walled chamber with a low, curved roof and the air of having been recently cleaned out and painted. It was sparsely furnished with a table, a few chairs, and a wallscreen, and in one corner a number of cables snaked down from an open ceiling duct to the floor.

  Vero waved a hand at the young man. “Thanks, Lorrin! Can you find Harrent and tell him our guest is here? Quietly, though. Don’t shout it out. Then get the truck ready.”

  “Right, Mr. Vero,” Lorrin replied, in what Merral felt was a strangely formal way, and turned and walked swiftly back up the corridor. As the door closed, they could hear him beginning to whistle.

  Vero closed the door firmly behind him and turned to stare at Merral.

  “My friend!” Vero said, pleasure stamped across his face. “It’s been too long. I have missed you. Especially with Brenito gone. I wanted to be in touch with you, but I thought it best to leave you be.”

  Then he paused, swelled out his cheeks, and exhaled with a loud sigh. “Oh yes, such a lot has happened since we last met! But take a seat.” He gestured to a chair and then bobbed over and sat on the other side of the table behind a pile of datapaks and a battered yellow notebook with a neat 5 inked on its cover.

  “And I’m glad to see you, Vero,” Merral replied.

  He was struck by the odd feeling that Vero seemed at home in this subterranean room.

  “B
ut you’ve found it.” Vero stared expectantly at Merral’s backpack.

  “Yes. On the eastern edge of Fallambet Lake Five; the Fallambet is in the north of the crater. It’s a tributary of the Nannalt River.”

  “Ah. It was off the Nannalt Delta that the Miriama found the cockroach-beast.”

  “Yes. I made that link too.”

  “Splendid! I can’t wait to see it. But I’d better. Anyway, Lorrin looked after you all right?”

  “Yes. Happy fellow. Where’s Zak?”

  “Oh,” said Vero rather vaguely, “out with the contact team. But Lorrin was fine?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a great guy. One hundred and ten percent enthusiasm. The top student last year in Library Science at the College at Baandal. Loves working with the FDU.”

  “So it seems. I think he’s happier than me about it all. But Library Science?”

  A sudden look of deep intensity came into Vero’s eyes. “Merral, I have realized many things over the last few weeks.” He shook his head as if awed by events. “I decided early on that I could create an FDU from first principles, but that it would take about twenty years. And your news from Larrenport and your doctor’s alarming report on obstetric problems suggested to me that we might not have twenty months, or even twenty weeks. I realized that the only way of speeding things up was by using the past. So Lorrin—and others—have been working in the Library. And we have found more than we expected.” His expression was suddenly pained. “Ah. And also less. But Harrent will explain that.”

  Then his troubled look lifted and he smiled again. “But it is good to see you.”

  “I was sorry to hear about Brenito. I’d like to visit the grave.”

  “I’ll try and find the time.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “Yes. I keep saying, ‘What will Brenito counsel?’ and then—” Emotion welled up in Vero’s voice, and for a few moments he was silent. “But then I tell myself he would have told me to decide for myself.”

  “Are you living at his house?”

  “No. I have been tempted. But it’s too far out to run a secure communications link to. And I’ve been working very odd hours. I have two people staying there, though. Cataloging all that he left behind. It’s quite a collection of objects. They have instructions to look for anything that has a bearing on the rebellion.” Vero’s expression brightened. “But how is Ynysmant? Isabella? your parents?”

  “Troubled, Vero. All of them. There are problems in Ynysmant. The mood—whatever we call it—is spreading. I’m sure.”

  “So quickly?” Alarm flooded Vero’s face. “I have heard hints of problems. I don’t think we have any time to spare at all.” He paused. “Anyway, I’ve brought you here first because I want you to hear what Harrent the librarian says about a problem. He’s not part of us—not really—so don’t reveal anything, right? Then we move on to the base.”

  “The base? I thought this was it.”

  “This?” Vero seemed amused at the thought. “You don’t understand. The base is very much larger. You remember the new water transport project for Isterrane, based up in the Walderand River?”

  “Vaguely . . .”

  “Well, the project was frozen; the pumps were being brought in through the Gate. So they’ve given us—that is, the FDU—the pump chambers. It’s ideal. But secret.” He tilted his head, listening. “Ah, that will be Harrent now. But remember, don’t say too much.”

  There was a knock at the door, and a very tall and elderly gray-haired man in a dark official suit came in, stooping carefully and rather stiffly to avoid hitting his head on the doorframe. Inside the room, he straightened himself up carefully, eyeing the low ceiling with suspicion. He shook hands in a rather ritualistic way, first with Vero and then with Merral.

  “Harrent Lammas, Assistant Librarian of Isterrane,” he said in polite, formal tones. His air of reserve seemed to Merral to be heightened by the dark eyes and a rather stern expression.

  They sat down and Vero turned to Merral. “Let me start by explaining that Lorrin and I wanted to do research in the Library, but I was worried that we might be watched. So I consulted Harrent here and, well, together we found some interesting things. Harrent, please explain.”

  The tall man rested his long arms on the table, exposing neat white shirt cuffs beyond the dark, precisely turned-up sleeves of the jacket. This is a man, Merral thought, who is everything I would imagine a librarian to be: precise, knowledgeable, retiring.

  “Very well,” Harrent said, his expression suggesting that he was far from being at ease in this setting. “Hmm, Merral, I’m not sure how much you know about how the Library works. I take it you have some understanding?”

  “I know that the Library is modeled on a fixed geography of rooms, corridors, and stacks which goes back to the days before virtuality when libraries really were repositories of books. So wherever you are in the Assembly and whether you access it by a diary or a computer, you get the same pattern.” Harrent nodded encouragingly, and Merral continued. “What else? I also know that there are rules and protocols of Library use, which, to my limited knowledge, have always existed. I suppose they go back to the era of the Technology Protocols?”

  “Actually they started to be subscribed to over a hundred years earlier. Anything else?”

  “No, not really. It’s just there for whatever we want—words, text, images, programs.”

  Harrent nodded in a rather restrained way. “Hmm, in some ways I am pleased by your ignorance. It is a maxim of Library usage that the system and the librarians should be transparent.”

  A cautious smile flickered across his face. “Sometimes, in our case, literally.”

  He tapped his diary and the wallscreen opposite lit up with the familiar picture of a grand vaulted Gothic interior with multiple levels of floors, along which book-lined corridors stretched off on either side as far as the eye could see. As Merral looked at it he remembered the pang of disappointment he had had as a child when he had found out that there had never been a real building as grand and glorious as this.

  With a smooth and practiced speed, Harrent slid the viewpoint confidently along the main aisle and then down a side corridor. As he did, he passed gray, stylized human figures, devoid of detail, that were either standing by shelves or moving along purposefully. The librarian nodded at the screen. “The Library at the moment. Very familiar and part of all our lives. Every member of the Assembly has grown up with this exact version since 2170, with only minor software tweaks since. And a billionfold more data.” His tone was so dry and formal that Merral wondered how much contact with real human beings his job involved.

  “Now for various reasons,” Harrent continued, “some practical and some psychological, it has always been found helpful to indicate other users graphically. As we just saw. It’s really just a convention.”

  “But you never know who they are or what they are reading,” added Merral.

  “Just so. Hmm, privacy. But—and it’s a little known fact—the on-duty librarians have a different view. Diary, librarian mode.”

  The figures on the image were now suddenly marked in multicolored bands, and as Harrent approached a form standing nearby, Merral saw that superimposed on the color bands were long sequences of letters and numbers.

  “See now, this coding allows us librarians to help a little if needed. I can walk down the library, quite invisible to other users, and see all this. Thus I can tell you from the color codes that this, hmm—yes, is a male academic from Qarantia, that he studies language acquisition, and that he is a regular user of text files and familiar with the Library. In this case, he is unlikely to need help. I can even check, if I wanted, from the data displayed on him, what he has ever examined or downloaded.”

  “I had no idea,” Merral said. “You have more of a supervisory role than I suspected.”

  A strange, rather awkward smile slid onto Harrent’s face. “Hmm, I take that as a compliment, Forester. The ease of Li
brary use is only achieved by a lot of hard work behind the scenes. And anyway, why should you? What we do is only to help users. Though it’s also, to a lesser extent, useful for us. It’s so much easier to get an idea of what is popular in the Library, and with who. Hmm, actually very usefu—”

  “Harrent,” interrupted Vero, glancing at his watch, a finger raised in partial admonition, “could you explain the oddities? Please?”

  “Hmm, sorry. Ah, I am beginning to fear that in this new era some of the relaxed traditional customs may go. Yes, well when Vero here asked for my help, I realized, after the initial surprise, that he might be able to shed light on some anomalies that had recently occurred. And which were, in my long knowledge of library work, unprecedented.”

  He delicately tapped a corner of his diary screen. “Now, in order. This is a data record, taken eight days after Nativity Day last year. A remote librarian recorded this view.”

  There were the multicolored figures again but, in the middle of them, a figure shaded black stood examining a data file on a shelf.

  “Harrent,” Merral asked, hearing the alarm in his voice, “who is it?”

  The librarian gave a little sigh of bewilderment. “Hmm, we really don’t know. We at first assumed a data error, or a software glitch. The figure has no code identifiers, no records, no identity. We named him, her, or it, ‘the ghost.’ ”

  Vero gestured at the screen. “Please tell Merral what the ghost is downloading.”

  “It is in the History rooms and it is scanning Lyonel’s Introductory History of the Assembly of Worlds.”

  “The basic high school text?”

  “Quite.”

  “Is that all?” Merral asked, remembering having read Lyonel’s work when he was around thirteen.

  “Odd, eh? But watch, it moves on and we lose it. It was leaving no trail for us to follow. We can’t call it up. Very irregular.” Merral thought that it was the untidiness of the matter that outraged Harrent. “Not at all the sort of thing one likes to have in a library.”