“What happened here?” Orion asked, his voice verged on the reverential.
Ozzie shook his head, for once humbled by the scale of the tragedy. It was profoundly disturbing that a species obviously so capable and intelligent could allow their civilization to fail in such a fashion.
“I think we should ask the Silfen.”
As soon as they started to angle back toward the avenue they discovered why the Silfen were making such hard going. It wasn’t the wind that pushed against them, the memories of the old road were growing stronger. All the past travelers who’d used the ancient highway were retracing their journey, each of them using the canyon at the same time. They lacked the solidity that the apparitions of last night had possessed, but they more than made up for that by the sheer weight of numbers.
At first Ozzie merely flinched as the phantoms flew toward him sporadically, bracing himself as they hit only to find they’d passed straight through him without any contact. Some of the aliens, the majority, were simple walkers. Others drove rickety carts or rode animals. A few were in mechanical contraptions.
The density of the spectral travelers increased proportionally as they drew nearer to the avenue. With them came their noise, the cries of hundreds of aliens talking and shouting at once. And their numbers finally added up to a little gust of pressure. Ozzie put his head down as he headed into them. He felt something touch his wrist, and jumped in shock. When he looked down he saw Tochee’s tentacle of manipulator flesh coiling around his hand. The alien was also taking hold of Orion’s wrist. Linked together, the three of them pushed in farther toward the Silfen.
Inside the line of trees the bygone aliens merged together into a single blurred slipstream of color. Their voices became a single unending howl. It really was a gale pushing against them now. Ozzie leaned into it, thankful for Tochee’s steadying grip. His shirt and sweater were flapping wildly against him. He set his face with grim determination and forced his feet to move onward.
The Silfen were easy enough to see, a knot of darkness amid the torrent of color and light and noise pouring through the avenue. As they forced their way closer he realized that the Silfen were all old. Their long hair was thin and gray; deep creases lined their flat faces, etching dignity into their features. He’d never seen signs of aging among them before—of course, he’d never seen Silfen children either, assuming there were such things. But age had given them a distinction that humans normally lacked as their years advanced. And even now as they pushed themselves against the road’s history their long limbs never faltered.
“Greetings,” Ozzie called in the Silfen language.
One of the Silfen turned, her wide dark eyes regarding him with the curiosity of a grandmother who’d forgotten the name of her favorite grandchild.
“It’s me, Ozzie. Remember me?”
“Never can we not remember, dearest Ozzie, least of all amid this place of remembrance. Joyful that we are to find you here where you sought to be.”
“Sorry, but I never wanted to be here.”
Her gay laughter seemed to calm the whooping of the ghosts. “Demanding you were that all wonders should be shown and known in places far from home. How fast your mind skips and changes with your fickle mood, a delight and a sorrow burn behind your eyes with the beauty of twin stars forever dancing around their perfect circle.”
“Are these wonders to you? I think they are times long gone.”
“Hearken to the knowing, Ozzie, as you tread paths through lost worlds. Full with understanding you shall become to the delight of your stubborn self. Wonder begats not only the joy but the sorrow. Both must be for the other to live for ultimately they are twined into the one. Here you come where few have been, so deep is your need, so loud is your song. Still we love you though you are not ready to fall into the one circle of light and air where the song will be sung to the end be it bitter or be it sweet.”
“This? This is the answer to the Dyson barrier? Tell me of the imprisoned stars, I would so much like to learn.”
“So you will as you walk down this valley of death to the shadows that linger and mourn.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” he muttered in English. “You’re quoting the Bible at me?”
The Silfen woman’s long tongue shivered in the center of her mouth.
“Is this where I looked to be? Is this inside the prison around the stars? Do your paths reach through walls of darkness?”
“Cast aside your numbers and your coarse voice and learn how to sing, sweet Ozzie. Song is the destiny of all who live who love to live.”
“I don’t understand,” he groaned through clenched teeth. “I don’t know if this is the answer. What is this fucking place?” He gave the Silfen a look of anguish, and switched back to their language. “Why are you here in this dead valley? Why do you endure this?”
“Here we come to complete our song, small and frail we are, and searching for our place amid that which is to come. Long our journey has been, bright has been the light shining upon us, loud the songs we have had sung to us, hard and soft has been the land upon which our feet have trod. Soon we shall walk no more.”
“This is it? This is the end of the Silfen path? Will your feet end their walking in this valley?”
“Ozzie!” Orion called. “Ozzie, the ghosts are going.”
Ozzie looked around. They’d reached the last two trees, and the pressure was fading rapidly. The ghosts were fading away, allowing the full rays of the sun to sweep down across the broken rock of the valley floor. As he looked around in bewilderment their warbling voices dwindled to nothing. He was left stumbling forward, bracing himself against nothing. Stretching above him for the full height of the canyon wall was the ancient crumbling alien palace city.
“The path we walk and love goes round and round, and thus it can never end, Ozzie,” the Silfen woman said. She sounded profoundly sad, as if she was telling him about death. “It begins when you begin. It ends as you end.”
“And in between? What then? Is that when we sing?”
“Walking the path you hear many songs. Songs to treasure. Songs to fear. Come, Ozzie, come listen to the broken song of this world. Here lies the melody you desire to walk farther amid the tangle of mystery that is all of us.”
The Silfen had joined hands. Now the tall woman held out her hand to him. Orion was giving him a nervous look. Tochee’s eye patterns asked: WHAT NOW?
“Tell our friend I don’t know,” Ozzie told Orion. “But I’m going to find out.”
“Ozzie?”
“It’ll be fine.” He put his hand out to the Silfen woman. Her skin was warm and dry as her four fingers bent supplely around his hand. In an obscure way he found that comforting.
Together they started walking toward the vertical ruins. At the foot of the huge pile of shattered stone was a featureless black globe. It was as high as a Silfen was tall. Ozzie wasn’t sure if it actually rested on the ruddy sand or floated just above it.
“Now you will know this planet’s song,” she said as they approached the sphere. “All it used to sing comes from within its last memory.”
Ozzie almost hesitated. Then he saw the planet floating at the center of the sphere. He peered forward like an eager child.
It wasn’t the image of the planet, it was a ghost just like the aliens who haunted the roadway along the canyon. Long ago it had floated blissfully in space, known to the Silfen who walked their paths through its bucolic forests. Its inhabitants, the jellylike aliens, built themselves a peaceful civilization, advancing their knowledge as did most species. They had even begun to explore their solar system, sending crude ships to land on planets and moons.
Which was when the imperial colonizers arrived. Vast starships plunged into the star system on fusion flames, curving into orbit around this quiet happy world. They had taken decades to cross interstellar space, and were hungry for their prize, a new world on which to reestablish their old empire.
The war of conquest was as shor
t as it was futile. The planetary inhabitants resisted as best they could, modifying their instrument-carrying rockets to assault the huge invaders above their beautiful planet. Some damage was inflicted on the big ships, which goaded the imperialists into fierce retaliation.
In the forests and glades below the Silfen hurried down their paths to regain the peace and freedom denied to those whose home this was. But even the elfin folk whose life was one of happiness and fey interest in the worlds they passed through were troubled by the horrific violence erupting around them. In penance, they watched.
Ozzie was shown the dark armored starships sending their missiles and kinetic projectiles hurtling down onto the planet below. Explosions ripped through the sleeping clouds, distorting the world’s air. Waves of destruction rolled out. Solid ground rippled like water. Oceans rose in rage. Towns and cities were blasted apart. Aliens died in the tens of thousands in the first few seconds. Ozzie knew them. He felt their death. Their grief. Their fear. Their loss. Their sorrow. Their regret as their homes disintegrated. Their bitterness as their children were torn apart before them. Every one of them was there for him to identify and experience. And the deaths multiplied as the empire’s weapons cast this world into smoking, radioactive oblivion before the starships departed in search of new worlds, worlds easier to subdue.
Ozzie fell back from the globe, curling up into a fetal ball as the tears flooded down his cheeks to stain the dead world’s dry sandy soil.
He wept for hours as the terrible anguish of countless deaths soaked through him. He hated it as he had hated nothing in his life before. Hated what was done. Hated the blind stupidity of the imperialists. Hated the Silfen for standing by and doing nothing. Hated the waste of so much life, so much promise. Hated knowing what a better universe it could have been if only the quiet simple aliens whose world this once was had survived and finally met the gaudy flawed human race as the Commonwealth expanded. Hated that such a meeting of unalike minds would never happen.
Late in the afternoon, when his tears had long since dried up, he stopped his pitiful whimpering lament, and rolled onto his back, blinking up at the cloudless sky. Orion and Tochee gazed down anxiously at him.
“Ozzie,” Orion pleaded, his own face close to tears. “Please don’t cry anymore.”
“It’s hard not to,” he croaked. “I was here. I was with every one of them when they died.” He started to tremble again.
“Ozzie! Ozzie, please!”
He felt Orion’s hand grasp his own, in desperate need of reassurance. A boy lost light-years from home, abandoned by his parents, on an adventure that had become a nightmare for too many months. The frail human touch was what he needed not to fall into that black infinity of horror. And how much of an irony was that, the superindependent Ozzie needing someone?
“Okay,” Ozzie said weakly, and gripped the boy’s hand roughly. “Okay, give me a moment here, dude, yeah.” He tried to sit up, only to find his body barely responding. Tochee’s manipulator flesh slid under him, helping to shift him upright. He looked around at the canyon, almost fearful of what he would see. “Where are the Silfen?”
“I don’t know,” Orion said. “They left ages ago.”
“Huh. Finally got something right. I’d kill the bastards if they’d stayed.”
“Ozzie, what happened? What did you see?”
He put a hand up to his forehead, surprised at how hot the skin was, as if he’d come down with a fever. “I saw what happened to this world. Some aliens arrived in starships and… and nuked it to shit.”
Orion gazed around uncertainly. “Here?”
“Yeah. But a long time ago, I guess.” He looked at the ruined palace city, feeling a fresh wave of sadness.
“Why did they show that to you?”
“I don’t know, man, I really don’t. They thought it was what I wanted, for my song. Song, hell!” A dismissive grunt escaped from his mouth. “I’d say we’ve got some serious translation problems here. Reckon I’m gonna sue someone in the cultural department when we get home for like a trillion dollars. I’m never going to recover from this.” Ozzie stopped, knowing just how true that was. “But then, I guess that’s the whole point. It’s a memory that belongs to the Silfen. They’re the ones who watched it all. And they did nothing.” He scooped up some of the sandy soil, then let it trickle away through his fingers, mesmerized by the drifting grains. “This is for them, it’s their grief, not mine, not the people whose world this used to be. It’s about them. Nobody else knows or cares, not anymore.”
“So what do we do now?”
Ozzie eyed the black globe wearily. “Leave. There’s nothing here for us.”
TWENTY-ONE
Even now, after all these years, Elaine Doi still got a thrill ascending to the rostrum. From the floor of the Senate Hall it looked imposing, a broad raised stage at the front of the seats, with a big curving desk made from centuries-old oak where the First Minister sat directing debates. In reality, when you came up the stairs at the back, the lights shining down from the Hall’s domed roof were so bright you had trouble seeing the last step. The purple carpet was worn and threadbare. The grand desk was despoiled with holes drilled in to accommodate modern arrays, portals, and i-spots.
In the past there had been countless occasions during working sessions when she had to come up here to make a policy statement or read a treasury report. The massed ranks of senators had heckled her mercilessly, their cries of “shame” and “resign” echoing around the Hall, while the reporters in their gallery to the right of the rostrum had grinned like wolves as they recorded her dismay and feeble rejoinders and fluffed lines. Despite all that, she’d been the one they ultimately paid attention to, the one controlling the debate, pushing through her legislation, doing the deals that made government work, not to mention scoring political points off her opponents.
Today, of course, the seven hundred senators in attendance fell into a respectful silence and stood in greeting that was tradition whenever the President got up to address them. They would have shown that much consideration if it had just been her monthly statement of review, but this time she could feel the genuine trepidation running through the Hall. Today they were looking to her to provide leadership.
Her ceremonial escort of Royal Beefeaters saluted sharply and moved away to stand guard at the back of the rostrum. She always thought their splendid scarlet uniforms added a real touch of class to these moments. Although they were technically assigned to the presidency as a courtesy from King William during the founding of the Commonwealth, the executive security office had long since taken over their funding and organization.
“Senators and people of the Commonwealth, please be silent for your Honorable President Elaine Doi who wishes to address you on this day,” the First Minister announced. He bowed to Elaine and returned to stand behind his desk.
“Senators, fellow citizens,” she said. “I thank you for your time. As I am sure you are aware from media reports, our Starflight Agency ships—the Conway, the StAsaph, and the Langharne —have now returned from Dyson Alpha. What their investigations discovered there was unpleasantly close to our worst-case scenarios. Commander Wilson Kime has now confirmed that the Dyson aliens, the Primes as they appear to be called, are indeed hostile in nature. Even more worrying, he discovered that these Primes have turned their considerable industrial prowess to the construction of large wormholes that can reach immense distances across this peaceful galaxy.
“This day we thank and pay tribute to him and his crews for the dangerous flight they undertook on our behalf. To learn what they did under such perilous conditions was a show of tremendous courage, which should give the Primes considerable pause for thought when they come to consider our resolve. However, we should never forget that they received help from a most unexpected source.
“After enduring horrors which we cannot begin to imagine, Dr. Dudley Bose sacrificed whatever was left of himself to warn us of the Primes’ true intent. Expressing t
he debt of gratitude which every human alive today owes to this great man, and his shipmate Emmanuelle Verbeke, goes beyond words. I am informed that their re-life procedure goes well, and we can only give thanks to whatever gods we believe in that they will soon rejoin our society so we may embrace them with the welcome they so richly deserve.
“In the meantime there is much to be done if we are to safeguard this wonderful Commonwealth of ours. My fellow citizens, after centuries of peaceful expansion, we now live in a time when our civilization faces the possibility of a uniquely hostile encounter. If this should happen we cannot rely on others, our friends the Silfen, nor the High Angel, to come to our aid. Humanity must do what we always do in times of darkness, and meet the challenge with the courage and resolution we have shown again and again throughout history that is our birthright.
“To that end, I have today signed executive decree one thousand and eighty-one, which transfers a new responsibility to the Starflight Agency, that of physically defending the planets and stars which make up the Common-wealth by whatever means necessary. It will henceforth be known as the Commonwealth Navy. Into this great venture we pour our trust and hopes for the future. I have faith that those men and women who serve will bring about a swift and resounding conclusion to the threat which is rising out among the distant stars. No task they face will be more difficult, nor so rewarding. To that end, I have the honor of promoting Wilson Kime to the post of admiral, and appointing him to lead our new navy. It is a heavy burden, and one which I am sure he will carry with the fortitude and leadership qualities which he has already demonstrated so ably.
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