The Shadow and Night (72 page)

All these phenomena worry me in different ways. If they are interlinked—and the timing suggests that they are—then the implications are extremely disturbing.

Yours, in the Service of the Assembly,

Forester Merral Stefan D'Avanos

Then he sealed his letter in an envelope, addressed it to Representative Corradon at Isterrane, marked it “private and personal,” and handed it in at the airport office with a request for it to be urgently sent by courier.

Merral arrived back at Ynysmant in the late afternoon and, deciding it was too late to go into the Planning Institute, walked into town along the causeway. Hearing the energetic chop-chop of the waters against the walls and feeling the wind and sun on his cheeks, Merral stopped to look at his hometown rising on its steep, dark mound out of the lake. Seeing its curving lines of red roofs, spires, and towers bathed in the spring sunshine, he was seized with a sudden, intense affection for Ynysmant.
It's
very
good to be back.
It seemed quite extraordinary that less than two weeks ago he had left there with Vero for Herrandown. His life before then already seemed to be distant and dreamlike.

He walked on, and as he approached Ynysmant, the long, steep-pitched roof of the hospital caught his eye and an idea came to him. Instead of going straight home, he turned up the street that led to the hospital, and walking in through a side entrance, he made his way to Administrative Affairs. There, in his office dominated by potted plants, he found Tomos Daynem, the junior administrator.

Tomos, lean and muscular, seemed to bounce up from his seat when he saw Merral at his doorway.

“Hi, Merral! Come in. Heard you were out of town.” He shook hands. “Welcome back. Take a seat.”

Merral sat down, stared at his friend, and gestured to the image on the wall of the winning side at last year's Ynysmant Team-Ball championship.

“How have we done lately?” he asked, knowing that particular image well. On it, Tomos, as captain of the Blue Lakers, one of the three best teams in town, was holding the cup high while Merral, who had merely played as a winger in a semifinal match, stood at the back.

Tomos gave a theatrical groan. “Oooh, don't ask. We lost against the Western Lake College First Team. Those boys are good. And we need to improve our passing. You ought to play more.”

“I ought to. I just don't seem to be in the right place at the right time. Any repercussions from the loss of the Gate?”

He shook his head. “None I've thought of. I mean, it's hardly as if we had inter-system championships, is it? It's all we can do to get a northeastern Menaya tournament organized every three years.”

Merral felt a sense of relief that something at least seemed to be unchanged. In fact, it was hardly surprising; Assembly sports were informal, localized, and frequently haphazard.

Tomos leaned back in his chair. “But you didn't come to talk Team-Ball, I presume.”

“No,” answered Merral, choosing his words, “I have an odd question. I was in Isterrane recently, and there was some discussion about some regional medical anomalies. Then, this morning, I visited a rather aged great-aunt in Larrenport, and I found that she and some others were having problems at the end of their lives. They were fighting it, afraid of death. Anxiety. All very disturbing. It had just started within the last two months. So, I thought I'd ask you if there were any oddities you had heard of concerning the terminally ill.”

Tomos's mouth made an expression of surprise. “Odd. I've heard of nothing. Not here. And I meet with all the medical sections regularly, so I'd know. In the last two months?” He shook his head. “No. Same as usual. A couple of heart attacks when the Gate went, but that's not the same thing.”

Merral felt a surge of relief. The idea that his hometown was unaffected was a relief.

“Thanks. I'm glad to hear it.
Very
glad. Forget my question.” He rose to leave. “I'll leave you to get on with your work.”

“Thanks. In fact, I am pretty busy. The Gate loss has had a major impact on the hospital's work. We'll have to make do without some equipment, some organ replacements, and some drugs.” Tomos got out of his chair in a fluid motion and walked to the door. “It's going to be a very challenging half century. About the only plus point is that with no visitors we should have fewer stray viruses.”

“Nice to hear something positive.”

“Ah, but the difficulties may come when the isolation is over and we get exposed to any new strains that have developed.” Tomos smiled. “But that won't be my concern. Anyway, Merral, I'm glad I've put your mind at rest.” He opened the door. “Mind you, if you'd asked me about the beginning of life, I'd have had a different story to tell.”

“The
beginning?
” Merral asked, suddenly feeling as if a lump of ice had been placed against his back.

“Yes. The delivery problems. But that, I presume, is another thing.”

“What?”

“The labor difficulties we seem to be encountering this year.”

Merral held on to the doorframe. “We have problems with
babies?
” He was aware that his voice sounded strangely muffled.

There was a nod. “Yes. But you didn't ask about that. You look a bit pale, Merral, are you okay?”

“Sorry. I've had a stressful few days. Can I talk to someone about it?”

Ten minutes later, Merral was sitting in another office staring across a fussily tidied desk at Dr. Edgar Meridell, a short, plump man with a smooth, bald head framed by tufts of white hair sprouting above his ears, and prominent white eyebrows. Just behind him a holographic womb and baby were displayed on a floor stand, but Merral tried to avoid looking at it. He remembered that it was an unease about dissections and anatomy in his early biology courses that had been partly responsible for diverting his career into forestry.

“The best index,” the obstetrician was saying in his dry, rather scholarly voice, “is the use of painkillers in childbirth. We use a substance called OA25. That's obstetric anesthetic 25. Do you need the formula?”

“No.”

“Assembly standard. Has been for, oh, five hundred plus years. We have it on standby; the mother can ask for it if she feels excessive pain. Now, the figures—” he consulted his diary with slender fingers—“yes, last year, '851, we had just over two hundred babies born here, and it was used twice. Say, less than one percent take-up. Now this year—” he tapped the diary screen carefully—“ah yes. We have the figures for the first four months, as a percentage; January—2 percent; February—6 percent; March—15.8 percent and April, well, 29.4 percent. Our projections for May's figures are looking—” he gave a low whistle— “higher still.”

Merral thought about the figures. “Very odd. So it's doubled every month, more or less. You will soon be at over a half take-up.”

The doctor gave a reluctant nod of assent.

“So what's happening? Labor is getting more painful?”

“Well, now,” came the wary answer, “that's not scientific language, Mr. D'Avanos. It's not easy to measure pain quantitatively. All we can say is that midwives are reporting an increasing demand for painkillers during childbirth. I've done a memo on it.”

“I see,” Merral answered, trying to keep his emotions from showing on his face. “Can you do me a favor? Send me a copy. No hurry. But by hand, not by diary.”

The eyebrows rose. “It's a bit out of the area of forestry, isn't it?”

Merral shrugged. “Yes. I'm collecting oddities. It's becoming a hobby. Any idea why this is happening?”

“Embarrassingly, we have no idea. The possibilities are a virus, but there is no evidence of that. Some dietary issue, perhaps. Some sudden variation in a trace element. Or it might just be some factor to do with the dreadful winter. Lack of exercise . . . that sort of thing.” He shrugged his shoulders and looked mystified. “But I'll send you that memo.”

Suddenly, feeling that he had taken as much bad news as he could bear, Merral decided that he needed to get out of the hospital. He found a secluded site that looked westward over the inlet of Ynysmere and the rolling ground beyond it and sat down on a sun-warmed bench.

There he sat staring into the distance for some time, his mind distracted by events. Words and phrases seemed to circle round and round in his mind.
Birth and death; Herrandown, Larrenport, and Ynysmant; not death as we have known it; that age of humanity is over.
Linked with the phrases were images: his great-aunt's tears, Daniel Sterknem's face as he remembered his terror, the eyebrows of Dr. Meridell raised in puzzlement. Plainly, some subtle, vague, and spreading evil was abroad in the land, and its occurrence was clearly related to the intruders. And what he needed to do was equally plain: he had to observe and report, and when he was given the go-ahead, do everything he could to find the intruder ship. In the meantime, his duty was to not alarm anyone.

A cooler gust of wind spiraled past him, and to his surprise he realized that it was nearly six o'clock. It was time to see his family. He got up from the bench and walked out of the grounds, up through the sinuous streets to his house.

“I'm back,” he called out as he entered the house. His father, starting at his voice, stood up suddenly from the general room table where he was writing on sheets of paper. Brushing crumbs off his chest, he came over and hugged Merral.

“Why, Son! Good to see you. Excuse me—” Stefan gestured to a half-eaten sandwich on a plate by him—“I started eating. I wasn't sure when you were coming. Your mother is next door, just having a chat with friends. As she does—”

Merral sat at the table opposite, relishing being back home. “You look tired, Father.”

“Me? Oh, it's been a long, weary day,” his father said, running his hands through his straggly hair and stroking his unruly silver beard. “We have been making new guidelines about even stricter recycling of anything with rare earth elements.”

“So you are working on it now?” Merral pointed to the sheets of paper covered with blocks of neat handwriting, lines, and arrows. It was one of the characteristics of his father, consistent with his often-winding way of thinking, that he preferred to scribble on sheets of paper rather than use a diary.

“This? No, it's my Historic. We Welsh speakers are having a discussion meeting next week.” He paused, then read the title.
“Am fater y Porth a'r oblygiadau ar gyfer dyfodol y Cynulliad a Farholme,
or
On the matter of the Gate and its implications for the future of the Assembly and Farholme.
I said I'd open it with a presentation of some of the issues. But oh, Son, it's hard work.” He sighed and stroked a rogue strand of hair vaguely back into place over an ear. “It gets harder as you get older. A lot of future tenses. And concepts. I find Welsh so much less clear-cut than Communal and, of course, a lot more difficult.” He sighed again and his finger intertwined with his beard. “But I wonder really—”

“You wonder really
what?
” asked Merral, feeling almost too scared to ask.

“Well, I don't know. I just feel, somehow, this emphasis on us all pursuing these old languages—sorry, that's not a sentence.”

Merral, dismayed by what he was hearing, tried to keep his face blank and nodded encouragement for his father to continue.

“Yes, I've just been thinking now about the whole issue of preserving Historics. Perhaps this business—” he gestured upward to where the Gate would have hung if it had not been in a billion fragments—“will give us a chance to think things through. . . .” Then, as if struck by the implications of what he was thinking, he fell silent.

Before Merral could make any reply, the door opened and his mother bustled in and surrounded him with her arms.

“Merral
dear.
How
lovely!
Let me look at you.”