The Shadow and Night by Chris Walley Page A

horse. He was not surprised; he was too far away from any homes for stray visitors and he knew that the current schedule of the Forestry Development Team did not include any visits in this area. No, today the woods were his and he was glad of it. He loved the solitude and was always glad of the opportunity to sing his heart out to heaven’s King.
    He remounted and set off southward, starting to sing as he went. Today, though, for some strange reason, he found a lack of spontaneity in his singing, and it was only by dint of discipline and effort that he kept himself going. But for the next three hours, as he rode slowly along the old track as it wound its way down and round a succession of valley flanks and ridges, Merral sang, working his way twice through the entire Nativity section of the Assembly songbook. It was not, he knew, the greatest singing, and there was little in it of the quality that Barrand’s re-created voices would have, but it was genuine and, with a deep gratitude, he offered it up to the One who was the Light above lights.
    But even in the singing Merral was keeping a careful eye on the forest. In general he was pleased with what he saw, finding almost all the trees, apart from those felled or beheaded by ice storms or wind gusts, in a satisfactory state. No, he concluded, after its two centuries of history this wood would pass—at least at first glance—the highest test of a Made World woodland and be taken as an original forest of Ancient Earth, albeit one with some unfamiliar species. A closer inspection would, of course, show a much more limited diversity of plants and animals, and some oddities as species adapted rapidly into the new and unoccupied environmental niches. Everything took time, and you couldn’t just throw a world together and hope it would work. Everything had to be checked, its every possible interaction with everything else modeled and predicted. And even then things went wrong; like the fungal species that digested dead wood on one hundred and sixty worlds but which, on the hundred and sixty-first, suddenly became one that digested living pine trees. But as they said, “every world sown was new lessons reaped.” What had taken a thousand years on the first Made Worlds now took under half that. But there was always room for improvement and no world was ever truly Earth.
    As he rode south, Merral noticed, with faint surprise, that his spirits seemed to lift. He put it down to the gentle lifting of the temperature and to getting away from the bleak emptiness of Brigila’s Wastes. Yet it was funny, he reflected, that he had never felt such a change in mood before. But he soon shrugged off his puzzlement; introspection was not something that he, or any of his world, ever indulged in for long. He stopped once for food in a clearing overlooking a stream, setting Graceful free to find what she could to eat among the blanched and withered grasses. Then, mindful of the short winter days, he set off again. Yet as he did so, a strange, fleeting thought came to him that he had an anxiousness to be home he had never had before. It was still another oddity for him to consider.
    By four in the afternoon he had approached Wilamall’s Farm and other tracks joined his. At one junction, Merral waited while a woodland surveyor, six smaller undergrowth analyzers docked onto its back, ambled past on its eight long, metallic legs. As it passed him the machine stopped and turned its slender head toward him. The two large glassy eyes looked at him without expression. Merral raised his right hand vertically to reassure the surveyor that he needed no assistance. The machine raised a front paw in dumb mechanical acknowledgement and continued on its way south.
    The sun was hanging low on the western hills as Merral came out of the forest and saw below him the fences, roofs, and domes of Wilamall’s Farm. Down by the labs a line of gray samplers full of plant fragments for