The Shadow and Night (57 page)

“Perena!” cried Merral, lunging forward to hug her. He missed and, arms flailing, started spinning.

Retaining her fingertip hold on the strut, Perena stretched out a hand, caught him, and pulled him over so that he could reach the handrail. Then she wrapped an arm around him and hugged him. They hung there staring at each other.

“It's gone,” he heard himself whisper, and he realized he sounded like a child. “The Gate's gone.”

Perena lifted her gaze upward through the gold-tinted glass to where the hexagon would have been. “Yes,” she replied, and there was strain in her voice. Then she added, quietly but defiantly, “Nevertheless, the King still reigns.”

“Amen!” Merral answered, but felt it was an effort to say it.

Perena gave him a smile, at once determined, weary, and sympathetic. “I'm glad you agree. But it's a hard thing to say.”

Funny,
he thought,
she looks older now. But then perhaps we all do.

“What are you doing here?” Merral asked, realizing how pleased he was to see her. “I thought you were getting your ship fixed?”

“I came up as extra crew on the
Shih Li-Chen
just now. They have a general survey craft here, the
Eliza N'geno,
they want bringing down, and I'm assigned as co-pilot.”

She sighed and glanced down at Farholme. “A new ruling, as of this morning. All ships are to have co-pilots. Ship safety is now a priority. We can't afford to lose a single vessel from now on.”

“I'm afraid I've been a bit too absorbed to take in much of the news from elsewhere. What's it like down there?”

She shook her head. “Hard to summarize. It's taking time for it to sink in. No real lasting panic, of course. Resignation, acceptance, grief: especially where families have been broken up. The day after tomorrow has been declared a solemn day of petition and fasting.”

“That I had heard. But what do they know?”

She stared out of the window again at the planet below. “Only that there was a Gate malfunction on an unprecedented scale. There is no hint of intruders, or of it being deliberate
—
I think that is the word. To those that know of it, my warning is being put down to a premonition. I have a reputation, it seems.” She smiled a shy, secretive smile. “Apparently, out of the whole of Space Affairs, I seem to be the one person that everyone feels a visionary warning might have been granted to. I don't know whether to be personally flattered or collectively ashamed.”

“And was it a vision? We owe you a lot.”

For a second she continued gazing out of the window. “No,” she said in quiet way as she turned back to Merral, revealing a curious, thoughtful expression. “Not in a conventional sense. Something very strange happened. But I will tell you of it when Vero is with us. And how is he?”

Merral detected a deep concern in her voice and he chose his words carefully in answering. “It's been bad for everybody. But for Vero it's been an especial blow. He's said little since it happened and I've left him on his own. He's been in the chapel a lot.” Merral remembered how he had last seen Vero, a brooding and disconsolate figure floating in the corner of the chamber the station congregation used for worship.

“Poor Vero,” Perena said, with a sigh of sympathy. “I've sent a request for him to come and meet us here. Incidentally, the provisional statistics are that ten thousand Farholmers are trapped out of the system and just over a thousand people are trapped in. Both cases are awful.”

“I can imagine. The only family member I have lost contact with is a great-uncle on Mamaria, and I've never met him. I've been asking myself, how would I take being told that I would be an old man before I had any sort of communication with my family? And Vero's father is elderly and frail.”

Perena bowed her head as if in resignation. “It's tough. And how are you handling it? How's the ankle?”

“The ankle is fine, especially when I'm weightless. As for the rest, I'm trying to digest it. Bit by bit. I'm spending time in here. I find staring at Farholme consoling in some way. As if having a perspective on the planet gives me a similar perspective on my problems.”

“Yes.” She gave him a determined smile. “But they're
our
problems. We are together in this.”

“Thanks. That is one of the things that makes it bearable. How's Anya?”

“Numbed and quiet. Which is an unusual state for her. She has lost—no, that sounds like they are dead—but you know what I mean—colleagues and friends. We all have.”

She paused. “Of course, in a way it's worse for us four. Everybody else thinks it was some appalling, unexpected accident. We know—or we strongly suspect—that it wasn't that.”

Merral felt himself clench the handrail. “No!” he answered, and he was surprised at the bitterness in his voice. “It was an attack! It was a deliberate, malevolent destruction of the Gate! Perena, when I think of it, it reminds me of the attack on Spotback. Multiplied a millionfold!”

“Yes,” she said in barely audible tones, “and we must act. Look, I've also been sent up here to bring you both back personally. Anya's arranged a private meeting between Representative Anwar Corradon and us tomorrow. But I'd like to talk to you and Vero first.”

She cocked her head sideways and listened. “Sounds like him.”

There was a clunking noise from along the corridor. A pair of flailing legs descended out of the roof hatch, a groan, and a moment later, the rest of Vero awkwardly followed.

Perena launched herself toward him, smoothly curling into a tight ball and then unrolling with a final neat twist. She came to a stop with her feet against a wall strut and stretched herself out so that she lay horizontally across the corridor.

A sickly grimace appeared on Vero's drawn, weary, and unshaven face. “Perena Lewitz, the Queen of the Zero G Circus,” he said in a subdued voice.

Then he smiled solemnly. “But it is very good to see you. However, bearing in mind my delicate stomach, could you please go the right way up? I would feel better about hugging you.”

Perena walked down the side of the wall, stood vertical, and then reached out slender arms and hugged him. Nervously, Vero clasped his arms about her and held her tight.

“Well, Vero,” she sighed as they separated, “I could wish you were safe home. Yet it's good to see you too. Very good. And I'm glad you are in one piece. The King does indeed reign.”

“Yes,” he answered in a hesitant tone, staring at the observation window and Farholme beyond it. “To deny that would be a greater disaster than the loss of the Gate.” But Merral felt there was more determination than enthusiasm in his voice.

Then, with his legs hanging out untidily behind him, Vero hauled himself slowly along the guide rail until he was alongside Merral. As Perena made a precise glide to join them, Merral gripped his friend's arm.

“Are you feeling better?” Merral asked, heartened at Vero's appearance.

“Yes, I suppose so. It's been a bad twenty-four hours though. Extremely bad. The only way I have kept going is by trying to work out what's happening.”

Vero drifted slowly forward and then peered dubiously through the glass at the stars, his gaze moving along the Milky Way until it found the location of Ancient Earth. Then he stopped and sighed deeply. “I am telling myself that I mustn't do that. Home is now down there.” He gestured to the world below.

Merral felt a pang of sympathy for his friend. “We may be able to do something,” he muttered.

“No.” There was a sad and dogmatic shake of his head. “Don't encourage any false hopes. I have heard the commentators. And I checked it out myself. There is no chance of you—I mean
us—
making a new Gate.”

Perena gestured down at Farholme. “We have the plans in the Library.”

“No, Merral, Perena,” he answered. “They are there to satisfy curiosity alone. Shielded Gates—Gates of any sort—are just too big. I hadn't realized a full Shielded Gate is nearly two million tons in mass. There's one factory that makes them—in the Solar asteroid belt. Even then it takes ten years to fabricate just one. A world of thirty million people can't do it. We can't even make an unshielded one.”

“No,” Merral admitted, “I suppose not.”

“So you see, I'd better make the most of it. Become a Farholmer.” He scrutinized the world below. “Hi, home,” he murmured in an unconvinced tone. “Will you have me?” he asked Merral.

“Of course.” Merral patted his arm. “Anyway, we are citizens of the Assembly, not of planets. But for your insistence yesterday we would have lost everybody on the ship. We owe you a lot.”

“We still lost five, or whatever the toll will finally be.”

“I know, but it could have been much worse. And I had given up. You didn't. Why?”

Vero rubbed his face with his mobile fingers. “I had a terrible thought, a presentiment, that what I had done with the diary it might be possible to do with the Gate. Get into the circuitry and rearrange it. Turn the power against itself. I tried to push the idea to one side, but the phrase came back to me: ‘Don't rule anything out.' As the Assembly we have never really built in safeguards against . . . sabotage.” He shook his head as if the word stung. “We sentinels should have insisted that it was always a possibility.” He stared silently outward. “I derive no pleasure at all from being right.”

Merral turned to Perena. “You realize that we weren't sure it was you?”

“But Merral believed it was,” Vero interjected, “and persuaded me it was genuine. And I just didn't want to give up. I guess I was really hoping that—by playing for time—you would get through again.” Then he frowned and bit his lip. “But I wish we could have saved the Gate.”

Merral stared out of the glass and thought hard. “Yes. But it seemed so impossible.” He peered up to where, at the edge of the window, the three remaining Gate beacons hung equidistant from a smudge of dust that obscured the stars. “I still barely believe it. You heard poor Gateman Lessis. ‘They never fail.' We never believed they could. And by forcing us to look at the visual images, you saved the ship.”

“I suppose so . . . ,” Vero said dully, as if distracted by the vision of the world below. He stared down, his eyes squinting as he peered toward the planet's surface.

Merral knew what he was looking at. “I know,” he added, following his gaze to the edges of the Lannar Crater, now half flooded with black night. “My eyes keeping looking there too.”

Vero nodded and turned to Perena. “Farholme will manage?”

For a moment, she didn't answer but merely tapped delicate fingers thoughtfully against the glass. “The short-term prognosis—that is, over months—is fairly good. But the big issue is the long term. There are a number of teams being set up to study the implications. There are so many unknowns, but the provisional word is that—if the Most High wills—Farholme may well survive fifty-plus years of isolation.”

“Merely ‘may well'?”

“Assembly caution,” she answered with forced humor, and Merral realized that there were aspects to the Gate loss that she was still trying to come to terms with.

“Will you keep flying?” Vero asked her.

“To a lesser extent. We need to work out how much we can actually afford to do. Space flight is a major area—maybe
the
major area—where the worlds rely on the Gate system to supply spare parts. We have some supplies, but we can't make fuselages or ion engines here, let alone gravity-modifying engines or Gates. Fortunately, Assembly engineering has always gone for having long times between servicing. Of course, we don't need in-system shuttle flights or a Gate Station now. And we can recycle bits of the
Schütz.
It all may help.”

“I see.” Vero looked at Merral and then back at Perena. “We need to talk. I have some ideas; I think they are outrageous, but this situation is so extraordinary that it needs some explanation.”

Perena gave a slight nod of affirmation. “If we have to see Anwar Corradon tomorrow, we need to decide what we are to say. And I would like to think that we have not just questions but also answers.”

“Exactly,” Vero said. “So first, the warning, Perena. Can you explain about it?”

Perena gazed back at him. “Explain? No, but I can tell you what happened. That was a strange matter. Very strange.” Her eyes seemed to focus on something invisible that was a long way away, and Merral sensed again the depths that there were to her. Vero leaned forward unsteadily, his weary face showing an intense curiosity.

“Very well,” she said softly. “After I left you I decided to stay over rather than go back into town, so I just grabbed some things off the ship and took a berth at the pilot's center. Yesterday—was it really only yesterday?—I decided to look at the
Nesta
before going over to the morning service. So I went over to the Engineering and Maintenance Complex and checked in. When I looked at the status screen at the entrance, I saw that there were a couple of people around the main offices but no one in Bay One. I'm certain of that because I'd asked that no work be started without me being there, and I remember feeling reassured that this was the case. Anyway, it was the Lord's Day. So I walked down to the entrance to Bay One, glanced at its status screen, and saw again that no one was there and that the bay was at normal temperature, pressure, and radiation. In E and M Complexes you always do that. Just in case. You don't want to walk into vacuum.”

She paused, as if mentally thinking through her account. “So I went through the airlocks, put the lights on, and wandered up to the port lifting surface.” She gave a tiny smile as if thinking of a private joke. “I suppose I wanted to reassure myself that the holes were really there.”