The Shadow and Night (69 page)

“Night is coming,” the captain said and seemed to shiver.

Then in a slightly unsteady way, he sat on a corner seat. Merral rose from the table, sat opposite him, and waited. Finally, with a grimace, the captain spoke. “The trip. You really want to know all about it?”

“Yes. That's why I'm here. Take your time.”

Daniel sipped his drink. “A ten-man crew. No women on this voyage. A two-week trip. Our orders were to sail a precisely defined course—north to the Nannalt Delta and then eastward over Tarrent's Rise. A series of zigzags. No, I don't plan the course. Rassumsen in the Institute does that.
Stop.
” He raised a hand. “You know about Made World oceanography?”

“A little.”

“The oceans are the most important thing on a Made World. Most overlooked. Transmit energy, water, nutrients. Switch a water current off and the climate goes crazy. Very delicate, almost chaotic. So we have to watch them carefully. That's what we're about. Physical oceanography. The physics and chemistry of seawater and the seafloor. We were mostly looking at seawater chemistry.
Not
biology. Got that? That's important to my story.”

“Go ahead.”

“So we were up at the delta mouth first. We knew from the color of the water there had been flooding as soon as we got near. So much mud in the water, we were sailing red-brown seas. From the lavas. You've seen it?”

“Only from the air.”

“Yes, well, it often occurs at that time of year. But this year, of course, it was particularly bad because of the wet winter. Anyway, our task was to put out a kilometer-long array of sensors. Across the area where the fresh water from the delta was mixing with the seawater. Thirty-meter-long sensor tubes, each separated by forty-meter gaps, all linked by optic fiber. Leave it out for twenty-four hours. You get the picture?”

“Yes.”

“But when we got there we realized there was going to be a problem. There was a lot of debris in the water. Wood, tree trunks. All that stuff washed out to sea.” He shrugged. “So we anchored, put out the array in the afternoon, and kept a watch for anything striking it. That was hard, as it was misty. And cold. The only good thing was that it wasn't raining and the sea was smooth.”

Daniel paused. “Anyway, I got woken about two in the morning by one of the men on watch. Lemart, Billy Lemart, lives on the Rise Side. A whole tree had got caught in the outer sampling array.” For a long time he said nothing, his lips moving silently. “So I dressed and we looked at it. We agreed that we needed to clear it before it wrecked the equipment. So I left the officer on watch in charge, and three of us decided to go and try and free it with the launch.

“I want you to understand what it was like. Cold, mist patches rising off the water. A faint starlight. A cone of silver light from the ship on the water. We get out there—seven hundred meters out—and we see this tree wrapped on the cable. Massive thing, half as long as the ship, big roots. Fir of some sort. . . . Sorry, Forester, I don't know the name.” He paused again and closed his eyes for a moment. “The plan was easy. Get out to the far end, free it, and tug it away. I got out the all-purpose cutting-saw tool we have. The combination arc-and-vibration P20 unit. You know the thing?”

“For trees? Never use it. The fire risk is too great.”

“Ah—of course. Well, that's not a problem twenty kilometers from land. Anyway there's me, Billy Lemart, and Lawrence Trest. Trest takes the cutting tool, I manage the launch's lighting, and Lemart has the helm. You have to be careful. If he cuts the tree so it rolls the wrong way, we could lose the launch. And us.” He stopped, sipped his wine again, and wiped his lips with his tongue. “You've got the picture, then?”

“Yes,” Merral answered slowly, feeling a prickling of unease.

“It's dark and cold. Anyway, Trest cuts away one branch.
Splash.
Then suddenly he yells out, ‘Cap'n, there's an animal in the branches!' ”

Merral felt himself go rigid.

“I point the light at the tree and—” Daniel swallowed and closed his eyes, as if in pain. “In it . . . is a
thing.
Moving. At first I think it's a bear. Then I realize it's like nothing I've ever seen. Perhaps half my size, brown, and shiny.”

“Shiny?” Merral heard himself say, his own voice sounding strange.

Daniel opened his eyes wide in a look of acknowledgement.
“Ah,
” he said in a long, ragged whisper as their eyes met, “so you have seen it too?”

He stared at his glass, seemed to realize that it was empty, and put it on the floor with an exaggerated carefulness. “It was hard to see, really. Ten meters or so away. But it was shiny; glistening in the spotlight. The weirdest, most horrible thing. You could make out plates on it. Brown, gleaming—some sort of strange limbs. An odd brown head. Moving very slowly. Toward us . . .”

“Go on,” Merral said as gently as he could.

“Like a big insect. A fifty-kilo cockroach. You could hear the thing hissing. None of us liked what we were seeing.

“Lawrence steps back and starts praying. Weird thing was, I could see its breath. Weird—for an insect, that is.”

Suddenly the captain exhaled noisily and the words began running out. “Then, all of a sudden, this
thing
leaps at the boat. Just like that. Weird arms up in the air, clattering. As if they were mechanical. Billy screams. The thing lands in the prow, rocks the boat, and lashes out at Lawrence. An attack. Lawrence runs back, nearly overturns the boat. Drops the cutting tool. Now this thing, brown plates, scales—whatever—is in the boat. Like a lobster the devil's made. Then it's coming at me. So, I do the only thing I can think of and I pick up the cutting tool. And as the thing moves toward me, I flick the beam on.”

Merral shuddered, imagining all too clearly the cockroach-beast in the boat held at bay by a meter-long, pencil-thin beam of glowing, high-temperature gas.

“For a moment I thought it was going to back off. Then it jumps. Waves its arms at me and then moves at me. With these weird hands that look like they are crossed with an electrician's wire cutters. And—”

He stopped and stretched out his arms on either side of him as if to brace himself against the cabin walls. Then, with his voice slower, the captain spoke again. “And I hit it with the beam. There's an awful scream and a smell of burning. The flames are all round its face and it leaps in the air, screaming. I keep the beam on it because I'm terrified, and it lands on the edge of the boat. Thrashes around there in flames. Then it crawls over the edge and drops into the water.”

His jaw trembled. “And Billy is yowling and Lawrence is yelling at me and I realize I've still got the cutting tool blade on. So I turn it off and I see that we're all shaking like leaves in a gale, and I focus the light into the water where this thing is thrashing about with steam coming off it. And there's blood all over the side of the boat. And then this thing stops moving and just lies there, bobbing up and down. Facedown, with this strange corrugated brown back. And there's blood in the water.”

Far away a ship's siren sounded. When it had died away, the captain began again. “So we stare at the body. Lawrence is just saying ‘mutant insect, mutant insect' over and over again. Billy is gibbering, and I'm wondering what to do.”

He sighed. “But I figure now we did the wrong thing. We should have hauled it back onboard, piled it in a big sealable bag, thrown out half our food, and put it in the freezer. Let Biology look at it. Well, you can guess what we did, can't you?”

“Yes. Easily.” Merral realized his mouth was dry. “Just let it float away and washed off the blood?”

Daniel nodded, and Merral could see his pink tongue wrap round his lips. “Yes.” His voice was thickened and slow now. “We said we were
physical
oceanography, see, not biological. And we just decided that it's some insect thing, right? Some mutant, Made World arthropod, some crustacean monstrosity. That's why I don't eat the things now. Only, as I stare at it, it begins to roll over. ‘It's sinking,' says Lawrence, and his teeth are chattering. And as it does I see the head properly.”

He rubbed his cheeks with his hands as if rubbing soap into his beard. “This is the worst bit. You see, it's the head—the face—that's burned the most. And as it sinks, slowly, I can see that it has a skull. White bone, braincase, jaws. A skull. Like you and me.”

“Ah.
”

“Yes.” A muscle twitched in the side of Daniel's face. “It wasn't an insect. So that's why we decided to keep quiet. We figured—well, I figured—that I'd killed some poor mutated human. We swilled out the boat, got the tree trunk free of the cable in double-quick time. Promised secrecy to each other. By dawn, we were kilometers away. So there you are. I killed it.”

Merral stood up and stretched himself, more to give himself a chance to think than because he needed to. He walked to the window and then back to his seat.

“Let me try and put your mind at rest,” he said after a moment. He took out his diary, found on it an image of two cockroach-beasts, and showed it to Daniel. “Is this it?”

The seaman gasped. “Two more?”

“Yes. I think there are still others left.” He switched the image off and sat down. “I have also met these creatures, and under circumstances like the one you described, I too killed one. It was either him or me.”

The eyes widened. “You're serious? You are not just saying that?”

“Can you imagine what a nip from those hands would look like on an ankle?” Merral lifted his right trouser leg and rolled down his sock, exposing the red line of the still-healing wound. “My boot protected me a bit, but it still cut in.”

He covered his ankle again and looked at Daniel, who was shaking his head in disbelief. “No, Captain, whatever you killed was not human. It had human elements, but it was, in a way that we do not understand, a fabricated creature. And evil. I think it would have killed you and all your crew if it had had the chance. I think you can rest in peace about your action.”

“Thank you. Thank you!” The captain seemed close to tears. “Thank you very much indeed. You have no idea—” He shook his head.

“I do,” answered Merral, feeling an intense pity for this man. “Oh, I do. Actually I can guess your feelings better than most people. After all, I did the same as you. But in my case it was very obvious that these were hostile, evil things.”

“So . . . what are they?”

Merral hesitated, then decided that this man had earned the right to know far more than he knew already. So, omitting the details of the spiritual malaise that seemed to have affected Barrand and the Herrandown community, he described as much as he knew of the two types of intruders seen near the Lannar Crater. At the end, they agreed that it was perfectly likely that a creature, unfamiliar with the way Farholme's rivers could suddenly rise, might all too easily have been caught in a flash flood and washed out to sea.

Daniel shook his head in disbelief. “I was horrified about what I had done. Now I am less so. Instead, I am appalled at what has been done in the making of these things.”

“Yes,” answered Merral, “and there many questions lie.”

“But are they a danger? with the Gate gone?”

“We do not know. Their losses have been heavy. They have not been reported much beyond the area of the Lannar Crater. We are working on the problem. That is why I came here.”

“Altered
humans,
” Daniel muttered in disgust. “And the Gate gone. These are strange days.”

“Indeed,” answered Merral. “But it's as well that as few as possible know how strange they are. And if I may ask you more questions—what happened on the rest of the trip?”

“Ah,” Daniel sighed and shook his head. “Yes, well, from then on it seemed like things went wrong. Only the three of us knew, and we said nothing, which was hard. We cleared the delta and then the wind got up. Even with stabilizers running at full compensation it was rough. The wind was from the north and it was bitter out; there was spray lashing over the prow, night and day. The ice covered the deck and the equipment; the antislip surface was useless. Then we got the main submersible sampler snagged on a recovery and had to send a diver down. He got his suit cut and nearly froze from exposure. Then we had a storm and a big wave that almost swamped the ship. And somehow a ventilation hatch was open and we got water all through the ship. And the electrics started playing up. Oh, and everybody started going down with colds. It was a dreadful trip. Worst I've known. And the thing was, they all started blaming me or each other.”

“I see.” Merral looked around, imagining ten people in this room with the floor tossing and heaving and all arguing with each other. “And that's when the allowance idea came up?”

“Yes.”

“Who thought it up?”

“No one will admit it. Each side blames the other.”

An insight flickered in Merral's brain and he tried to grasp it, but the captain continued speaking and he lost it. “Anyway, when we got back, someone asked me to raise it as a suggestion and—like a fool—I did. I can't think what came over me.”

He gave another deep sigh. “So the rest of the voyage felt like a curse. There is an old sailor's poem, from before the Intervention. I only know it in the Communal translation as ‘The Venerable Sailor.' The original is Alt-Dutch or Ancient English.”

“English. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.' ”

“That's it. Anyway, you remember how in the days of sail, the sailor shoots an albatross with an arrow and the ship gets cursed as a result. Strange poem. You never know with the ancients whether they really believed these things. It kept coming back to me.” He gave a tired smile. “But tonight I think I can sleep as a more relieved man. I will tell Lawrence and Billy when I see them. Privately, of course.”