Nightfall_at_Algemron

You may go your way, if you feel so, the answer came in chorus, the many agreeing, all speaking together in the favorite way of fraal, almost in song. Many others have done so, gone the way you wish. You will be happy among those others, the humans and their like, but when you have been there a while, young as you are, having lived among them and learned their ways, will you be fraal any more?
Fear stirred inside her, but she said to them regardless, I would sooner not be fraal than I would go through this life always saying, This is not what I am looking for, or That is not what we once had! None of us have ever lived in this ancient past we seek so fruitlessly, and it keeps us from living here and now the only lives we have!
They laughed at her. It was not unkindly laughter, but it was infuriating, and Gabriel had heard its like before: from his father occasionally, or from others who knew that eventually you would get over this craziness of yours, that eventually you would see reason and come around to their way of thinking. It was the kind of laughter that made you, perhaps irrationally, turn your back on what you had and strike out into the darkness, though you shook with fear as you did it.
She faced them down, that great assembly that she had called, as any one fraal may. The single voice, though valued among fraal, was also feared as something that might be used as a weapon. Safe speech, among the fraal, lay in numbers, and "the lone voice in the dark" was how they characterized madness.
You, she cried, you all have heard the voice whose words I speak now, the one that does not look back with Joy on the old world but fears it and what it will make of us if we return. Does an adult climb back into its cradle or the sling in which its mother carried it? Is that the best thing to do with the rest of our lives? The uneasy dreams that make us all stir and cry out once or twice in a life are there for a purpose. They warn us of what happens if we succeed in returning to our childhood. It was in search of adulthood as a species that we went out into the night. Will we reJect it now, when it is Just beginning to come within our grasp?
The violences and strifes ofthe humans and the weren, the sesheyans and the t'sa and all the others, said the chief of the voices that strove against her, these are nothing to do with us. Their passions are not ours. Their fears, their hatreds are not ours. By drawing too close to them, by remaining among them and sharing in their wars and migrations and seeking after power, we endanger ourselves.
Is life merely about being safe, then? she cried. It was not for safety that we undertook this long Journey, but for difficulty, heroism, pain, and passing through pain into triumph, for courage, danger and deliverance from danger! All of them seek these same things, though the details may vary. They hunt truth and Justice as we do. They seek meaning, and where they do not find it, they seek to make it and so become godlike, for meaning, like matter, is made out of nothing! If you will leave them now to their fates, having Judged them too dangerous, too untidy, then when the equal and opposite reaction occurs, and the universe Judges you in your turn, you will be right to be afraid! No other voice will speak for you then. No one will say, Evil beset me, and you did not stand by idle but were our help. We were trapped, and you helped us find a way out. We were alone and hungry, and you fed us and bore us company!
It is easy, said several of the chief voices together then, to speak ancient sentiments in meeting and seem bold and compassionate, but it is harder to enact them without consensus. You have had none before, and you have none now. Perhaps it is time that there should be an end to your incitements.
She was silent then for several breaths. All that great assembly grew silent as well to see whether she would join her voice to theirs again.
Finally she spoke. We shall see how easy it is, she said, to act instead of merely speaking, and to act by commission instead of omission. You shall see me no more. You may hear of me and may speak of me in chorus if you like, but at the last, each of you will have to think of me alone and hear me, alone, in your minds. Will you dare?
She left them.
Astonished, they watched her go. She took with her, as was her right, one seed from the city's gardens. No one understood why she took that particular one, the slowest growing plant of all, the least likely to come to flower away from the conditions for which it was designed. Some saw it as a challenge, as her words had been, and they were glad to see her go. All around her, afterward, the silence fell, the silence that she had been trying to break ever since, with what success they would never know.
In the dream, Gabriel could hear the chorus of fraal voices raised to drown her and her memory out. He could see the little island of light and minds and voices drift away into the darkness, hunting an old dream.
. and that was when it began to shift. The voices all changed, grew ragged around the edges, and the light and the colors died, and that black blotch where there were no stars started slowly to creep across the sky, eating the stars that were there, blotting them out. The dream started to become nightmare as Gabriel started to feel, much too clearly, the many forms that nightmare was now learning to take. The writhing, stroking, strangling curl of the creatures living inside those like Major Norrik, and the acid pain and fury trapped inside the bioengineered skin of the kroath. Other anguishes, some that cut and some that burned, but all together, all working for the one cause now, not to conjoin voices, but to blot out and
strangle all voices that were not theirs. A terrible low roar of hating mind out of the night, and the darkness ate all the stars, and as the last star went out, it screamed—
Gabriel jerked upright in bed, sweating. The stone, across from him in its customary place on the shelf, was glowing softly, pulsing in time with his heart.
Gabriel wiped his head and grabbed the stone as if it was some kind of anchor or lifeline. It was somehow cause to all these effects. He was terrified of it, but avoiding the fear would get him nowhere now. He waited until his breathing calmed and the stone's pulsing slowed, and then he lay down again, but it was a long while before he could get to sleep. He did finally manage it; and he dreamed again, but this time he was less frightened to see the darkness come creeping against the stars. In the dream, he stood watching and said, irrationally, Now we begin to be warned against you. Now we are prepared. Come do your worst.
Silent, the dark tide washed over him, but this time Gabriel laughed. Chapter Eleven
The next morning Gabriel was the first one up. He got dressed in a slightly heavier than usual singlesuit and boots and made chai, drinking it black. Helm called from Longshot to discuss a schedule for the day's flying, and then Angela called to see if Gabriel wanted anything from the provisioners in town. They were assembling a shopping list when he heard the door open down the hallway and saw Enda in one of her long silky morning robes with all her long silver hair down her back come out to see about some chai herself.
The shopping list took a few more minutes, and Gabriel did not rush Angela. When Grawl's roars of "Hurry up!" from behind her finally encouraged her to finish, Gabriel got up from his seat at the dining table and went across to the galley for more chai. Enda slipped away as he came out, but by her door, she paused and looked at him.
Gabriel was still very uncertain about the protocol for these things. Finally, he simply said, "I had a dream last night."