Behold a Dark Mirror Read Free Page B

again.
    His steps clanged as he climbed the metal stairs to the control room.  From there, he could have a view over the turbines, cuddled next to each other like sleeping twin giants.  Spent, not worth removing, the two behemoths were special witnesses of the past purpose of the hangar.  In the control room, Nero checked out that all working panels were flashing the right colors, and no dials misbehaved.
    He turned to hit the Play button of a music machine.  A tune echoed through the void, trying to fill a space that was too empty by orders of magnitude.  Nero inhaled, filling his lungs with Doka's air, assaying its tinges of lubricant and dust and nothing else.  He stooped to examine the track of the energy recorder.  A sharp spike on a flat line drew a smile to his face:  mail.  He'd have to stop at the way station to pick it up.
    Few still remembered him, but those who did were fond correspondents:  Doka was too far and too expensive for casual scribbling.  He left the music machine playing to accompany his exit;  it would turn off on a timer he had set a long time ago.
    Outdoors the temperature was falling as Nero headed for the way station.  Zochar hesitated along its twisted path, neither setting nor rising, an erratic companion to the sanguine Rook.  The housing complex came in sight, neat rows of abandoned trailers:  Once, people sipped drinks and barbecued in the common yards, and children played and laughed.
    Young children...  Like his own, who were now dead.
    A curtain of silence wrapped the buildings.  Everything was waiting as if to be dusted.  Nero parked the cart in the lot reserved for management exactly in front of the main access to the way station.
    The door squeaked as he entered;  he made a mental note to grease its hinges.  The hall had a cozy ambiance, welcome after the power hangar.  There were couches and wall-to-wall carpets;  a layer of dust covered an imitation antique tea table longing for some company.  He stopped to thumb the latch of the mail room door.
    Some day I should get rid of this lock, Nero thought.
    The room was dark.  Nero flipped the light on, and there it was:  an envelope, regurgitated through a hole in the wall, lone inhabitant of the collating equipment’s innards.  On the other side of that wall, the machine room idled.  He picked up the letter:  no return address.
    Nero had his mail, and darkness and frost were looming.  Time to go home, even if "home" and "Doka" didn't go well in the same thought.  Yet solitude was the essential ingredient of life for him now, and Doka provided all the solitude he could wish for.
    His heart accused him:  You have failed!   Nero's conscience pointed sharp fingers:  You killed your family and half the crew.  You and only you are responsible.
    Yet, at the trial for Orlando 's disaster, that ship's skipper had been found guilty on all accounts.  Before the law, Nero and Far Lands Mining were victims of the skipper's negligence.  Not so!   Nero's conscience yelled with overpowering vigor and, Nero would say, merit.  The skipper was the puppet responsible before the law, but Nero knew he had been the puppeteer.  He was now prisoner of the chasm between his motivations and their devastating consequences:  The past was haunting, the present frightful, the future irrelevant;  and sorrow was his overwhelming, unrelenting filler of days that no repentance could dispel.
    His trailer sat on the corner of the park farthest away from the station.  He had chosen his trailer at the time he first arrived, when the crowd was still thick and he wanted to avoid local hangouts.  Later, after Hi had become a ghost town, he had never bothered to move.
    *
    Back indoors, a long shower was a ritual Nero indulged in daily.  Drying, he appreciated with purpose the warmth and softness of his towels.  He always massaged his sinewy back and legs, enjoying briefly the hot friction of the cloth against his skin, revitalizing