The first flotilla of missile platforms to slide out of the initial blast umbra showed what looked like the crescent of a blue-white giant appearing behind the staging post star. And MorningLightMountain finally realized what the humans had done.
The star was going nova.
Ozzie woke up as slim beams of bright sunlight slid across his face. He lay motionless for a while, eyes shut, a smile playing across his face. Let’s see. He opened his eyes and brought his hand around in front of his face. His antique wristwatch told him he’d spent nine hours asleep. “Oh, yeah?” His voice was a contented challenge to the universe.
He unzipped the sleeping bag and stretched. The cool air gusted over him, and he reached for his cord pants. Once he’d fastened the belt around his waist, he picked up his checked shirt and grinned knowingly. Very carefully, he slipped his arms into the sleeves. There was no ripping sound from any of the stitches. “Man, some progress!” Both of his large toes stuck up through holes in his socks as he shoved his feet into his boots. “Ah well, then again, maybe not.” They definitely still needed darning. He patted the pocket on his old dark gray fleece where his small needle and thread packet was stashed. “Maybe tomorrow.”
He was pressing down on a giggle as he pushed the curtain aside and stepped out of the crude shelter. “Morning,” he called out cheerfully to Orion, who was sitting beside the fire he’d just rekindled. Their metal mugs were standing on a shard of polyp above the flames, wisps of steam rising from the water inside.
“Five teacubes left,” Orion said. “Two chocolate. Which do you want?”
“Variety is the spice of life, man, so let’s go for tea today, shall we?”
“Okay.” Orion gave the little gold cubes of chocolate a wistful look.
“Fine, thanks,” Ozzie said. He sat down on one of the ebony and maroon polyp protrusions, wincing as he straightened his leg.
“Excuse me?” Orion said.
“The knee, thank you, it’s a lot better, but I’m gonna have to keep up with the exercises to loosen it up. It’s still plenty stiff after yesterday.” He gave the perplexed boy a happy look. “You remember yesterday, right? The walk down to the end spire.”
“Yes.” Orion was becoming petulant. He couldn’t figure what the joke was.
Tochee emerged from the jungle, its manipulator flesh coiled around various containers it had filled with water.
“Good morning to you, friend Ozzie,” it said through the handheld array.
“Morning.” Ozzie took the mug that Orion proffered, ignoring the boy’s scowl. “Did you find anything interesting?” he asked the big alien.
“I have detected no electrical power circuit activity with my equipment.” Tochee held up a couple of sensors. “The machinery must be very deep inside the reef.”
“Yeah, if there is any.”
“I thought you said there was,” Orion protested.
“Something generates gravity. My guess is, it’s too sophisticated to be anything like a machine. Specific quark lattice, folded quantum fields, gravitonic-molecular intersection assembled at a subatomic level, something like that. Who knows, who cares. It’s not why we’re here.”
“What are we here for, then?” Orion asked in exasperation.
“The Silfen community.”
“Well, they’re not here, are they.” The boy waved his arm around in a broad half circle to illustrate the absence of the humanoid aliens. Tea sloshed out of his mug.
“Not yet.” Ozzie picked up one of the bluish gray fruits they’d gathered and started peeling it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Okay, think on this. Nobody here believes we crashed here on Island Two by accident, right? I mean, what are the odds, man? The gas halo is big in anyone’s language. And the old Pathfinder, face it, we’re not talking Titanic here.”
“A natural collision was unlikely,” Tochee said.
“So we’re not here by accident. And what did we find yesterday? What’s at the end of the reef?”
“Spires,” Orion said doubtfully.
“Which we all decided would make excellent landing areas for flying Silfen.” Ozzie bit into the coarse fruit, grinning at his companions.
“They’ll come to us!” Orion smiled brightly.
“That is an excellent deduction, friend Ozzie.”
“Many thanks.” Ozzie wiped some of the juice from his beard. “It’s worth a try, anyway. I can’t think of any other reason for today.”
The tiniest of frowns flickered over Orion’s face, but he let the comment go. Ozzie couldn’t quite work out if the boy and Tochee were real or not. Temporal reset was not something he believed in. There were many ways of manipulating spacetime within a wormhole so that time appeared to flow faster around the observer, but traveling back in time was a fundamental impossibility. So if this day on the reef was an artificially generated reality, it was a perfect one, which logically meant his companions would replicate their real selves down to the last nuance. Then again, they might be sharing the dream—in which case why didn’t they remember the yesterdays? Of course, maybe there was some kind of closed temporal loop subsect operating inside the gas halo, a microcontinuum operating in parallel to the universe but with different time flow laws. He wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible. Intriguing idea to try to analyze, though it was a very long time since he’d attempted math that complicated. And today, he decided, wasn’t the day to begin again.
After breakfast he made sure Orion and Tochee gathered their belongings to carry with them on the trek through the reef’s forest. Without understanding if what was happening was real or not, he couldn’t risk them losing the few essential items they still possessed if they did find a path and move on to somewhere else. So the tent and water filter pump, the few tools remaining, all came with them.
“Should we be picking fruit?” Orion asked as they wound through a section of trees that were nearly all laden with grapelike clusters of scarlet berries. “We normally pick fruit.”
“If you want to,” Ozzie said. He was concentrating on keeping his head clear of the ceiling formed by the lowest branches as he bounce-walked his way forward. The trees were large and old, producing a wide interlocking lacework of branches and twigs. Sunlight around the trunks was a gentle twilight glimmer, complemented by dry air smelling faintly of spice.
Orion gave a victorious whoop, and immediately shinned up the closest trunk. Ozzie could see him walking along the branches overhead as twigs snapped, and the occasional leaf fluttered down.
“Are you not using your sensors, friend Ozzie?” Tochee asked.
“I’ve got a few running,” Ozzie said defensively. He didn’t fancy trying to explain to Tochee that right now they might both be nothing other than figments in the Silfen Community’s dream. If they weren’t, he’d be facing a serious credibility crisis. “We’ll save the complex ones for something interesting.”
“I understand. I will continue to record the general background, it may help us determine—”
“Hey!” Orion yelped.
Ozzie couldn’t quite tell if the boy was in pain or just startled. There was a flurry of motion in the forest’s lower ceiling five meters away from him. Broken twigs and a small crowd of leaves plummeted down. Orion’s legs appeared in the rent. They swung from side to side a couple of times, and he let go, falling slowly to the thin layer of sandy soil covering the polyp. Several clusters of the red berries fell with him. He looked directly back up, a flustered expression on his face.
“What’s the matter?” Ozzie went toward the boy with an easy bounding motion. Tochee speeded up to match him, its locomotion ridges spreading out for better traction.
Orion was scrabbling backward, his eyes fixed on the tear he’d created. Stronger slivers of sunlight shone straight down through it. “There’s something up there,” the panicked boy gasped. “Something big, I swear it.”
The front of Tochee’s body lifted off the ground as the alien a
ligned its pyramid eye on the gap. “I see nothing, friend Orion.”
“Not right up there, more off this way.” Orion pointed.
“What sort of size are you talking about?” Ozzie asked nervously. The boy’s behavior was making him jittery. Was that intentional? Or were they out of the illusion now? If so … His hand slipped down toward the sheath where his knife hung.
“I don’t know.” Orion clambered to his feet. “It was this shape moving, that’s all. A dark shape. My size, maybe bigger.”
Tochee had begun sliding in the direction Orion indicated, winding slightly from side to side in short economic movements. Its colorful fronds were standing proud from its hide, waving slightly in sympathy with its body motion. Something about the alien’s intent and confidence reminded Ozzie of native American hunters. When he looked up again at the ragged ceiling of branches and leaves there was nothing to see, just the occasional flutter of the leaves, the chiaroscuro dapple in perpetual random motion.
“What’s—” Orion began.
Ozzie closed a hand about the curious boy’s pointing hand, lowering it. “Why don’t we just keep on going to the spire?” he said, trying to be casual as he put a finger to his lips. Orion’s eyes bugged.
Tochee reared up, an impressive action even in the reef’s low gravity. The front edges of its locomotion ridges curled into hooks that fastened around a branch, holding it vertical. The manipulator flesh on its flanks lunged out, flattening into two tentacles that shot up into the forest’s vegetation. For a moment nothing happened. Then Tochee let go of the branches, and tugged with its tentacles. Its heavy body fell smoothly. A humanoid form came crashing down through the forest’s low ceiling.
Ozzie was already leaping forward. He landed right on top of the figure struggling on the ground next to Tochee. The pair of them rolled over and over as Ozzie tried to get his opponent in a wrestling lock. Whoever he was holding writhed like an electrocuted octopus. Every time Ozzie grabbed a limb, it was torn from his grasp with above-human strength. Something like a thick leather cloak kept batting against his face. They wound up rolling into the bottom of a tree, with Ozzie on top. The tough dark fabric was slapping into his face again. So he just lashed out with both feet. He was no street-fighter, never had been, so the toes of his boots just connected with the polyp; the follow-up bounce meant his knees landed hard.
“Ow. Sheesh, that hurts.”
“Then stop fucking kicking, you moron,” a harsh voice said in heavily accented English.
Ozzie froze. The leathery wing fell away from his face, and he was looking right at a male Silfen, whose narrow feline eyes stared back with impatience.
“Huh?” Ozzie blurted.
“I said, cool it with the hardass routine. You’re crap at it anyway.”
Ozzie let go as if the Silfen burned. “You can talk.”
“You can think.”
Surprise battled with resentment. “Sorry, man,” he said meekly. “You startled us, you know, creeping around up there.”
Orion had come over to stare down in amazement. He slowly pulled the pendant out of his shirt, blinking at the intense green light. He looked at it, and back at the Silfen who was now gracefully climbing to his feet. There was a rustle as he flapped his wings, sending out little puffs of the dusty sand, before folding them back so they formed neat creases below his arms. His tail did a quick whiplike flick before settling into a shallow U-curve that kept it off the ground.
Ozzie patted at his own clothes, mildly embarrassed.
Tochee slid up beside Ozzie and Orion to look at the Silfen. “I believe you said these creatures would not speak your language?” the array voice said.
The Silfen turned to look at Tochee. Ozzie’s inserts caught it, but only just: the humanoid’s eyes flashed with ultraviolet light. A ripple ran along Tochee’s manipulator flesh ridges as it began to project its speech images in reply. They began to speed up, the two of them conversing very fast. If this is a simulation or a dream, why does it need to talk with Tochee?
“I didn’t know they could speak English,” Orion whispered breathlessly to Ozzie.
“Me neither.”
The Silfen finished communicating with Tochee, and bowed slightly, blinking. The ultraviolet faded from his eyes.
“Who are you?” Ozzie asked.
The Silfen’s circular mouth opened wide, allowing the long slender tongue to vibrate between his rows of teeth. “I am the one who dances in the endless wind streams which flow along the tumbling white clouds as they circle in eternal orbit within the star of life.” He gave a sharp whistle. “But you may call me Clouddancer. I know how you humans have to be so quick and shallow.”
“Thanks.” Ozzie tipped his head to one side. “Why the German accent?”
Clouddancer’s tongue quivered. “Authority. I look like one of your legendary demons. If I start talking like some stoner hippy then I’ve got a serious credibility problem, right?”
“Absolutely, man. So are you here to tell me what I want to know?”
“I don’t know, Ozzie. What do you want to know?”
“Who threw the barriers around the Dyson Pair, and why?”
“Long story.”
Ozzie gestured at the dusky forest with both arms. “Do I look like I’m going somewhere?”
They walked back through the forest to a clearing half a kilometer away that they’d passed through earlier. Ozzie wanted a less oppressive environment to concentrate on the details. Orion was totally fascinated by a winged Silfen who could speak English.
“Where did you learn it?” the boy asked.
“Common knowledge where I come from, kid.”
“Where’s that?”
“Here. Where the hell else do you think someone my weight can flap their way around? Jeez, what is it with neurons and your species? Is it a natural shortage or do you molt them as you grow up?”
“Here? The gas halo?”
“Is that what you’ve named this?”
“Yeah. We were on one of the water islands.” Orion grimaced with the memory. “We fell off.”
Clouddancer’s tongue quivered as he whistled.
Ozzie had heard Silfen laugh before; he put this down to something equivalent to a derisive snort. “You need to put a few warning signs up, man,” he said sharply.
“You fell off because you were hasty, you schmuck,” Clouddancer said. “You should take time off, observe your environment, work out any problems in advance. That’s the smart thing to do.”
“Bullshit. You dumped us there. You have a responsibility.”
Clouddancer stopped. His wings rustled, the tail snaking from side to side. “No we don’t. We are not responsible for anyone but ourselves. You chose to walk our paths, Ozzie, you decided where they would end. Take responsibility for your own actions. Don’t blame everyone else; you’ll turn into a lawyer. You want that?”
Ozzie glared back at him.
“How could we decide where the paths take us?” Orion asked. “How do they work?”
“The paths are old, very old. They have grown apart from us of late. How they work is up to them. They try to help as much as they can, they listen to those who walk them. Some of the time, anyway.”
“You mean they deliver you to where you want to go?”
“Oh, no. They rarely change; they don’t like change. Most simply remain closed. It’s kinda sad when they do that, but there are always new ones opening. You’ve always got to go forward, right? That’s something we’ve all got in common.”
“Do you mean …” Orion shot a glance at Ozzie for reassurance. “If I wanted to find Mom and Dad, they’d take me there eventually?”
“They might. That’s kind of an elusive goal you’ve got there, kid.”
“Do you know where my mom and dad are?”
“Long way from here, that’s for sure.”
“They’re alive!” the incredulous boy cried.
“Yeah yeah, they’re still knocking around.”
Orion started crying, tears smearing the dirt on his cheeks.
“Friend Orion,” Tochee said, “I am pleased for you.” It reached out with a tentacle and touched Orion’s shoulder. Orion gave the manipulator flesh a quick grateful squeeze.
“Good news, man. The greatest.” Ozzie put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, hugging him. “I hope you’re right,” he said in a warning tone to Clouddancer.
The Silfen shrugged, ruffling his wings.
“When this is over, I’m going to set out again and find them,” Orion announced. “I know what I’m doing now. I can survive out here. I’ll get myself some decent equipment first, though.” He looked down at his feet. “And boots.”
“I’ll buy you the best,” Ozzie said. “Promise, man.”
The clearing had a covering of thick mossy grass. Strong sunlight from the overhead star shone down, dappling the edges. Ozzie slung his pack to the ground, and sat with his back against it. Orion was too excited to sit; he paced about, grinning every time he looked up at the vast sky.
Ozzie held his water bottle out to Clouddancer. “Drink?”
“Water? Shit, no. You got any decent booze?” The winged Silfen crouched on the spongy ground opposite Ozzie. His tongue flicked out with reptilian speed.
“I didn’t bring any. I figured I needed to stay sober for this.”
“Okay, good call. You want to start the twenty questions routine now?”
“Sure. I’ve earned that right.”
Clouddancer managed a very human-sounding snort without using his tongue.
“Did you put the barriers around the Dyson Pair?” Ozzie asked. This wasn’t quite how he’d envisaged the end to his journey, the historic moment of contact with the real Silfen. There was a certain daydream that had him in an ancient cathedrallike alien library, maybe an abandoned one, where he roamed the aisles, reactivating computers with huge banks of flashing lights. Now that would have been cool, rather than getting his ass damp on the grass while he chatted away to a demon as if they were a pair of old barflies. Yep, definitely didn’t see that coming.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 182