The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Morty.”

  He waited a long moment before asking: “Would you have come to see me if you weren’t caught up in all this?”

  “I would be here no matter what happened to the Commonwealth. I promise. I don’t even care that you might have killed Tara.”

  “I probably did, you know. Investigator Myo doesn’t make many mistakes.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We were good together, even if I was just a naïve kid. I know we’ve both changed since then, but we have to see what we can be this time around. We both owe our old selves that, don’t we?”

  “Damn, you are something else.”

  “Will you send me what information you can?”

  “I guess so. I don’t want to disappoint you again, Mellanie. So … I suppose you’ve got some foolproof method of smuggling the data back to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Yeah, thought so,” he said in a resigned tone. This truly wasn’t that first-life teenage Mellanie with the hot ass that he’d sweet-talked into bed. Not anymore. She’d changed into somebody a lot more interesting. Still goddamn hot, though.

  Mellanie pulled a hand-sized square out of her pocket and held it up. It was made up from densely packed alphanumerics that glowed a faint violet as they flowed against each other in perpetual motion, always staying inside their boundary. She peered at it curiously. “Wow, I’ve never seen a naked program before.”

  The sheer girlishness made him smile in fond recollection. “What is it?”

  “Encryptionware. I bought it off Paul Cramley.”

  “I remember Paul. How is the old rogue?”

  “Harassed. He promised this will bury your private message to me in the sensorium datastream you send to the show. I can pull it out, but no one else will be able to.” She pressed the square into his hand, and it unraveled, strings of symbols flowering outward to blend into the sphere walls. They chased the gray script around for a moment, before fading into the same semivisible gray as the rest of the symbols.

  Morton’s e-butler reported a new program had loaded successfully in his main insert, but lacked an author certificate and nonhostility validation. “Let it run,” he told the e-butler.

  “It’ll also decrypt the messages I send to you,” Mellanie said.

  “I hope they’re all obscene pictures.”

  “Morty!” Her disappointed face melted away into a Dali-esque swirl of color. He was back in the darkened rec room with her warm naked body cuddled up against him.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “I’m very grateful.”

  “Care to show that? Out here in the physical world.”

  “Again? Already?”

  “I have been waiting for over two and a half years.”

  The Pathfinder had spent just three days drifting along in freefall, and already Ozzie was facing a decision he really didn’t want to make. A big part of his problem was that they had no destination. Even if they did, getting there would be difficult. Air currents in the gas halo were completely unpredictable. Moderate breezes would carry them along steadily for over half a day before depositing them in pockets of doldrumlike calm for hours on end. They left the sail up most of the time so the raft presented a decent-sized surface area to catch the breezes no matter what their orientation was. Gusts blew up abruptly, fortunately short-lived, filling out the sail as if they were still on the water, and sweeping them along in a giddy tumble. Once they’d actually had to furl the sail in, their little raft was shaking so much. In itself, such a method of travel was an interesting concept. Ozzie was mentally designing a sailing airship that could voyage through the gas halo with considerable finesse; in his mind it looked like a cylindrical schooner that sprouted a cobweb of rigging filled by sails. He could have quite a life captaining that around this fabulous realm. Many lives, actually.

  Those were the kind of dreamy ideas with almost infinite possibilities to extrapolate that made his mundane real-time slightly more bearable.

  With Ozzie’s encouragement, Orion had slowly adapted to freefall, though he was never going to be at home in the milieu. However, the boy could now move about the raft with a degree of confidence, although Ozzie made sure he wore his safety rope at all times. He could even keep most of his food down. There wasn’t much Ozzie could do about the way he worried, though. Their pitifully minute ship adrift within the macrocosm that was the gas halo induced a sense of isolation that even gave Ozzie momentary panic attacks.

  Tochee was another matter. The big alien was genuinely suffering in freefall. Something in its physiology was simply unable to cope with the sensation. It spent the whole time miserably clinging to the rear decking. It hardly ate anything because it just kept regurgitating any food that did get past its gullet. It drank very little. Ozzie had to keep pleading and insisting to make it do that.

  He knew they had to return to a gravity field soon.

  Making their big friend drink was only one of the problems they were now experiencing with their water, and it was the mild one. More acute was their dwindling supply. Ozzie had never considered they might run out of water. Fair enough, he hadn’t expected them to fall off the worldlet, which was the root cause of the problem. They’d set sail on a sea that his little hand-pumped filter could easily cope with, providing them with as much fresh water as they wanted when they wanted. In fact, water had been the one dependable constant on every planet they’d walked across.

  All they had for storage was Ozzie’s trusty aluminum water bottle, a couple of thermos flasks, and Orion’s one remaining plastic pouch. They’d all been full when they went over the waterfall, but in total they only held five liters. Now they were down to half of the plastic pouch; and that was with facial fluid pooling in their cheeks and throats eliminating the thirst reflex in both the humans.

  Ozzie had seen distant gray fog banks the size of small moons wafting through the gas halo, the majority of them tattered nebulas stretching out idly along the air currents, while a few were thick spinning knots like Jovian cyclones. None of them was within half a million miles of the Pathfinder. It would take months, or even years, to reach them.

  A third of the fruit that they’d so carefully stacked in wicker baskets before setting off had tumbled off into the void when they went over the water worldlet’s rim. They’d munched their way through quite a lot of the remainder since then, supplementing it from what remained of their prepack-aged food. The globes were succulent and juicy, but no real substitute for drinking. They wouldn’t sustain them for more than another couple of days at best.

  That left Ozzie considering the other objects or creatures that occupied the gas halo. With little else to do except observe their environment, he’d soon realized the nebula was actually quite densely populated. The largest artifacts were the water worldlets. He’d been wrong with his first guess about their geometry, though. As they were blown farther away from their original worldlet he saw its true shape. It wasn’t a hemisphere; more like a bagel that had been sliced in half. The flat upper surface with its archipelago of little islands was always aligned sunward, with the sea pouring over its entire rim. Water followed the curve around and then began its long climb back up through the central funnellike hole to fill the upper sea again and start the cycle over. The orifice where it surged out on top was always capped by an opaque white cloud squatting on the water, shielding the upwelling from sight. For a look at the gravity generator that made such a thing possible, Ozzie would have cheerfully sold his soul. Not that they could go back to the worldlet even if they were caught up by a wind blowing in the right direction. He simply couldn’t work out a safe way to land (or splash down). Not without a parachute.

  So he started looking at the other things orbiting around and around inside the gas halo. There were a lot of bird-equivalent creatures flittering about, either singularly or in huge flocks. Those that had come close enough to see clearly so far had fallen into two
categories: a genus with a screwlike spiral wing running the length of their bodies, and others that Orion had named Fan Birds, resembling biological helicopters. They might have been edible, but some of the spiral birds were quite large, almost Tochee’s size, with long sharp tusks that Ozzie didn’t really want an up-close and personal look at. Besides, he couldn’t figure out how to catch one.

  The fact that there were so many indicated they must have easily accessible food sources, which was an encouraging prospect. He’d seen a quantity of free-flying trees, globular dendrite-style structures made out of what looked like blue and violet sponge, four or five times the length of Earth’s giant sequoias. He had more hope for them than the birds; they must have some kind of internal water reserve. As yet, none of them had been close enough to try for a rendezvous, especially with Tochee in its weakened state. They probably only had one chance at being towed toward a rendezvous, and the distance was decreasing with each passing day, so he would have to make a very careful choice.

  What he really wanted was the kind of reef that Johansson had described. If for no other reason, Johansson had walked home back to the Commonwealth after being on one. So far there’d been no sign of anything like that. There were a myriad of specks everywhere he looked, but he had no way of judging the size and nature of them until they got within range of his retinal inserts.

  His handheld array wasn’t helping much, either. For the third time in an hour, Ozzie reviewed the data it was displaying in his virtual vision. Nobody was using the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit in. Nobody had responded to the distress signal he’d been broadcasting constantly since their arrival. Although how far such a signal would travel through the atmosphere of the gas halo was a moot point.

  Ozzie sighed in disappointment—once more. According to the clock in his virtual vision it was four hours since he’d last had a drink; when he checked the antique watch on his wrist it read the same. It was time to make that decision he’d been delaying in the hope of a small miracle.

  His pack was tied to the decking a couple of meters away from the cradle he’d rigged up for himself. He wriggled out of the shoulder straps and glided over to it. The filter was inside, with its little length of tube coiled up neatly.

  Orion stirred inside the nest he’d constructed out of rope and his sleeping bag. He started to say something, then saw the filter in Ozzie’s hand. “Oh, no. You can’t.”

  “What’s gotta be done’s gotta be done,” Ozzie replied sadly.

  “I’m not going to,” the boy announced with complete finality. “The Silfen made this place. So we don’t have to do that.”

  “Are they near?” Ozzie asked patiently.

  Orion pulled out his friendship pendant. He had to cup his hands around the little gem before he could see the diminutive jade spark at the center.

  “Don’t think so.” The boy sighed gloomily.

  “Figures.” Ozzie rummaged farther through his pack until he found an old polythene bag. He stared at it despondently. “Guess this is it then.”

  “I’m not going to.”

  “Yeah, you said.” Ozzie pushed off from the decking, and hauled himself hand over hand around to the nominal underside of the raft, which put a modest barrier between himself and his companions. This was difficult enough without an audience. It took a while for his reluctant body to cooperate, but he eventually managed to pee into the bag.

  He screwed the filter onto the top of his water bottle. Looked at the polythene bag. “Oh, just do it, you wimp,” he told himself. The end of the tube went into the bag, which he constricted to keep the fluid around the intake. He began pumping the filter, squeezing the simple trigger mechanism repeatedly until there was nothing left in the bag.

  “Oh, that is just massively gross!” Orion exclaimed as Ozzie reappeared around the edge of the raft.

  “No it’s not, it’s just simple chemistry. The filter removes all impurities, the manufacturer guarantees it. You’ve been drinking identical water to this ever since we started.”

  “I have not! It’s pee, Ozzie!”

  “Not anymore. Look, old-time explorers had to do this the hard way when they got lost in the desert, you know. We’ve got it easy, dude.”

  “I won’t do it. I’m sticking to fruit.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” Ozzie popped the cap on his water bottle, and deliberately took a big swig. It tasted of nothing, of course; but what he thought he could taste was a different story. Damn that kid! Putting ideas in my head.

  “Is that safe?” Tochee asked.

  “Don’t you start.”

  “It’s disgusting, is what it is,” Orion said. “Grossly gross.”

  “I don’t know if you two have actually noticed,” Ozzie said, suddenly fed up with the pair of them, “but we are seriously up shit creek without a paddle. From now on, the two of you are saving your piss as well.”

  “No way!” Orion yelped.

  “Yes.” Ozzie held the bottle out toward Orion. “You want this?”

  “Ozzie! That’s yours.”

  “Yeah. I know. So you start saving your own.”

  “I’ll save it, but I won’t drink it.”

  “My digestive organs do not function as yours,” Tochee said. “There is no separation mechanism for me. Will your most excellent filter work for that?”

  Orion gave a horrified groan, and turned away, jamming his hands over his ears.

  “I guess there’s only one way to find out,” Ozzie said glumly.

  Sharp motion woke Ozzie, something poking him repeatedly on his chest. He removed the band of cloth he’d wrapped around his eyes to give him some darkness. A tentacle of Tochee’s manipulator flesh was poised in an S-bend right in front of his face, ready to prod him again.

  “What?” Ozzie grunted. It was difficult to get to sleep in freefall; he resented being roused. His virtual vision clock told him he’d been asleep for a mere twenty minutes. That only made him more grouchy.

  “Many large flying creatures are passing,” Tochee said. “I do not think they are birds.”

  Ozzie shook his head to try to clear the lethargy away. Big mistake. He clamped his jaw hard to combat the sudden feeling of nausea. “Where?”

  Tochee’s tentacle straightened to point toward the bow.

  Orion was already struggling against the thick folds of his sleeping bag as Ozzie maneuvered around him. He slowed himself with a couple of tugs, then gripped the decking firmly with his right hand. It left his head sticking clear of the raft, making him think of a medieval soldier peering cautiously over the castle rampart to watch an invading army approach. A gentle breeze blew his Afro about. Tochee and Orion moved up beside him.

  “Wow,” Orion whispered. “What are they?”

  Ozzie used his retinal insert to zoom in. The flock must have been spread out over half a mile, hundreds of leather-brown spots slowly swirling along behind a tight little cluster. It was like watching a speckly comet, with a loose tail undulating slowly in the wake of the nucleus. They were over a mile away, tracing a wispy line against the infinite blue of the gas halo atmosphere. His e-butler brought a host of enhancement programs on-line, isolating one of the spots. The image was slowly refined, bringing the creature out from its original fuzzy outline.

  “Holy crap!” Ozzie muttered.

  “What is it?” Orion demanded.

  Ozzie told his e-butler to display the picture on the handheld array. He turned the unit to the boy. “Oh!” Orion said softly.

  It was a Silfen, but not like any they’d seen in the forests as they walked the paths between worlds. This one had wings. At first sight, it was as if the simple humanoid figure was lying spread-eagled at the center of a brown sheet.

  “I should have guessed,” Ozzie said. “Yin and yang. And we’ve already seen the fairy folk version.” The flying Silfen did look uncannily like a classical demon. With the sun behind it, Ozzie saw the wings were actually a thick membrane that stained the light a dark amber. They were divid
ed into upper and lower pairs that seemed to overlap; certainly there was no crack of sunlight between them. The top set were fixed to the Silfen’s upper arms right down to the elbow, allowing the forearms to move about freely. A filigree of black webbing sprouted from the upper arms in a leaf-vein pattern, stretching the membrane between them. On the legs, the longer, second set of wings extended as far as the knee, then bent outward, leaving a broad V-shape between their curving edges so the lower legs were free. The Silfen would still be able to walk on land. A long whip-tail extended out from what on a human would be the coccyx, tipped by a reddish kitelike triangle of membrane.

  The Silfen wasn’t flying the way planet-bound birds did. Here in the gas halo it simply soared. The big membranes were sails, allowing it to catch the wind and cruise along where it wished.

  Watching the flock as they glided along in huge lazy spiral curves, Ozzie felt an enormous pang of envy. They had what was surely the ultimate freedom.

  “We should do that,” Orion said wistfully. “Sew ourselves into the sail and fly along. We could go wherever we wanted, then.”

  “Yeah,” Ozzie agreed. He frowned, the boy’s idea making him concentrate on what he was seeing, rather than just gawping in envious awe. “You know, that’s wrong.”

  “What is?” Tochee asked.

  “This whole arrangement. The Silfen body is designed to walk in a gravity field, just like ours, right. So if you’re going to modify one to flap around the gas halo, why leave the legs and arms? This isn’t a modification to allow them to live here permanently. What they’ve produced is like a biological version of our Vinci suits. It’s temporary, it has to be. You don’t need legs here, and you couldn’t carry those wings about very easily on a planet.”

  “I guess,” Orion said dubiously.

  “I’m right,” Ozzie announced decisively. “It’s another part of their goddamn living-life-through-the-flesh stage. A great one for sure, but we’re still not seeing the final them, the adult community.”