Nightfall_at_Algemron

"Well, let's see how it goes," Helm said. "No use tying ourselves into arrangements that may seem unnecessary. If the temperature starts dropping suddenly, though. we're out of there."
"No problem with that," Gabriel said. "Tomorrow morning?"
"Sounds good. After we find unbearable amounts of the unknown riches of the ages, we can come back and do the town again."
It seemed like a good plan. They finished their dinner and paid the bill, then walked back along the cold, quiet, narrow streets to the port parking area. Charlotte was more a town than a planetary capital, home to no more than fifteen thousand souls, and "downtown" was no more than a square mile of shops, retailers and restaurants—almost all of which had "Ngongwe" somewhere in their names. It was not very long before they came to a place low in a small dip in the local landscape of gentle hills. Here nestled an area of lights, service buildings, and landing lights now down to half-illumination for the evening.
Gabriel was strolling along looking at the lights and noticed Angela walking along beside him, giving him a thoughtful look. "Mmm?" he said.
"Was that an apology back there?" she said very quietly.
Gabriel thought about that and then said, "maybe."
She smiled slightly. "Well, then this might have been one too."
They nodded at one another in agreement.
"I was worried is all," Angela said.
"Oh?" Gabriel said. "I thought it was mostly Grawl who was worried."
"Absolutely," said Angela. "In fact, in the future I'll let her do all my worrying for me." She glanced up ahead of them where Grawl and Helm were walking side by side and discussing the virtues and vices of flechettes.
"Seems wise," Gabriel said. "She's built for it." "Seriously—"
"Don't mention it," Gabriel interrupted. "You had your reasons. Can't blame you for that." "Even the part about your tiny brain?" Her voice sounded smaller.
"I haven't had it weighed recently," Gabriel said. "There might be some truth in it, who knows?" He grinned at her.
Angela nodded and wandered along to gradually catch up with Grawl. Gabriel went after, his hands deep in his coat pockets, fingering the stone.
Halfway down that dark road, a little ahead of Gabriel, Delde Sota suddenly stopped and looked up into the night, which was cold, but not yet seriously so, now no more than negative ten C or so.
"What?" Gabriel asked, looking up, and then saw what she saw.
Stretched right across the starry sky was a huge black splotch. Only a very few stars were sprinkled across it, compared with the more normal starfield scattered across the rest of the heavens.
"Identification: the Great Dark," Delde Sota replied.
"The galactic rift, isn't it?" Gabriel said.
Delde Sota nodded, and together they stood for a moment while the others walked on. "It calls," Delde Sota said.
Gabriel looked at her in slight surprise. It was not often that she broke into sheerly human speech or forgot her initial modifier, and she never did so by accident.
"Yes," Gabriel said. "It does."
The more he looked up into that darkness, the more true he found the statement. He was briefly transfixed, and the stone in his pocket, which he had been turning over habitually in his fingers, reacted—not in the usual way, but by going cool, then cooler, and finally actually cold.
Gone, something inside him said, looking up at that great darkness. In his head, his point of view swung bizarrely so that he was not looking up into the sky but sideways or down over the edge of a great chasm, a huge gap in things. It was more than a merely physical emptiness. It seemed more the symbol of a greater one, a lack, a loss, a defeat. Long ago, said that silent presence in his head, somehow sad, and that sorrow awakened and stung briefly. Long gone .
Then the world resumed its rightful position, and Gabriel was standing on the ground again, not clinging like a fly on a wall to a precarious foothold with millennia of darkness lying beneath him, waiting for him to fall in silently and be lost. A long way down, said the human side of him, trying to make light of the image or impression he had just received. Irremediable loss, ages old. Something had happened, something that had not worked. Defeat, retreat, an ending. and the answer or solution or end of it all, far away into that seemingly bottomless darkness, far away on the other side of the night that never ends.
"What're you two looking at?" Helm's shout came back.
Gabriel glanced over at Delde Sota, who gazed back, uncommunicative for the moment, and that, too, was strange for her. For a moment the soft amber light from the landing area reflected in her eyes, making her seem strange and otherworldly.
Helm came along and looked up at the sky. "What was it? A ship?"
Gabriel wondered how he could explain, and finally shrugged and said, "Look at it up there. No stars."
Helm glanced up and said, "Yeah, just the good clean darkness, something that our kind can't mess up." He elbowed Gabriel genially and went after the others.
Gabriel followed, wondering how true that was likely to remain.
Chapter Ten
He went to sleep more quickly than he had in a long time. It seemed to have something to do with being on a planet and the perceived stability of such a place. However, he got little rest, for immediately he began to dream—something else that had been happening all too frequently of late.
The dreams were innocuous at first, and even in the midst of them he began to relax. Stars made up the background at first, great panoramas of them, slowly changing—not the kind of thing you would normally see from a driveship, where the stars stayed the same, alternating with the dead black of drivespace.
Then his viewpoint drew back somewhat, and another shape got between Gabriel and the stars: a great darkness. It took him a while to realize that this was not some natural phenomenon like the darkness of the rift beyond Coulomb but something made, a ship—if ship was even the right word for it. There was what seemed a large base, under which huge structures had been built—the stardrives, Gabriel guessed. Above it all was a mighty complex of supports and some clear building material. Inside, all the lights twinkled, and Gabriel realized that he was looking at one of the great traveling city ships of the fraal. Inside that clear structure—a huge elongated dome—he could see what looked like buildings, tall spires
with arched pathways between them. Tiny lights, small and faint as stars, glittered in them everywhere. A city of hundreds of thousands, all caught in glass like some rare plant, protected from the cold and dark outside.
In space there should have been no sound, and there was none, but he heard it nonetheless, the soft buzzing susurrus of many minds—thousands of them, tens of thousands—passing by in this empty place in the night. Fraal, he thought, coming from where? Going where?
Away, he realized, away from humanity and the human worlds, leaving it all behind and heading out into the darkness to try to find their homeworld. Strange that any species should be able to travel so far and for so long that it could no longer remember for sure where it came from. Many of those minds looked into the darkness and inwardly cried, How long must we travel? How may we ever we come home when we have lost the way? Where is home? Are we the ones who left, or have we become so different that there is no home for us any more?
We have wandered too long. We are not what we were. Take us back!
But one voice among the many cried out, No! I will not be what we were. I cannot be what is gone and well gone, and I would not have the rest of us be so, either. We must be what these present times allow us to be, what our own selves make us.
An image of some great meeting, under that domed sky. The fraal made no attempt to light that sky to look like day under some atmosphere, under some sun. The oldest night shone down through the dome, and outside it the slow stars went by. Here that single voice had been lifted and was heard without much concern by the others gathered in their thousands and tens of thousands. They had heard her voice before, and nothing had come of it.