The Shadow and Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€œWelcome 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.
    â€œHo! 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.”
    â€œInteresting painting,” Merral observed, speaking as much to himself as to Barrand.
    His uncle looked 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.
    â€œYes. I do. Like