The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (97 page)

One of Tochee’s manipulator flesh arms poked up, a very human gesture it’d developed to attract their attention. When Ozzie turned to check the alien, mauve patterns were flickering in its forward eye segment. SOMETHING AT THE FIRST CURVE. POSSIBLY A TREE.

Ozzie ordered his retinal implants to zoom in. The air was shimmering from the heat of the rocks and the air, but some dark smudge was visible beside the river just as it turned out of sight. Could be, he wrote.

They started off along the canyon, and almost immediately came across the ancient fire. It was a simple circle of stones, their inner sides blackened. The ash had blown away long ago, leaving just darkened sand inside.

“Look!” Orion cried and ran off. He stopped a few yards past the fire circle and picked something out of the sand. His smile was victorious as he held up his trophy.

“Son of a bitch,” Ozzie grunted. The boy had found a soda can. Its coloring had bleached badly over the years, but the familiar logo was easily visible.

“Are we on Earth?” the boy asked excitedly.

“Sorry, man, no way.”

“This must be somewhere in the Commonwealth, though. We even had soda on Silvergalde.”

Ozzie scratched at his large fuzzy beard. “I think it’s just litter. You know what people are like, the biggest hooligans in the universe. But hey! It proves we’re on the right path.” He didn’t want to crush the boy’s fragile hope.

Orion gave the can a vexed look, and chucked it back onto the sand.

An hour later they stopped and set up camp for the night. Ozzie and Orion pitched their tent on a small rise several hundreds yards from the river, then set about washing socks and shirts before the last of the light vanished. Ozzie would have loved to dive right in and give himself a decent clean, but even though they still hadn’t seen a single living creature on this world, he just couldn’t quite bring himself to trust the water. Too many late student nights with a pizza, a couple of six-packs, some grass, and a bad sci-fi DVD. God only knew what lurked along the bottom of the river, maybe nothing, but he certainly wasn’t going to wind up with alien eggs hatching out of his ass, thank you. All of a sudden, the long evenings spent lazing around in the Ice Citadel’s hot pools didn’t seem so bad after all.

They were making their way back up to the tent when Orion stopped and said, “There’s a light.”

Ozzie looked down the canyon where the boy was pointing. A tiny golden spark was shining a long way downstream. He wasn’t even sure it was on their side of the river. His retinal insert zoom function couldn’t get a clear image; no matter how high the magnification, it remained a flickering blur. When he switched to infrared, it barely registered. Not a fire, then.

“Probably someone else walking the path,” he said with a reassurance he didn’t feel.

Tochee had seen the light as well, though the alien’s eye was unable to focus on it either. They kept watching it as they ate their evening meal of tasteless fruit and cold water, but it wasn’t moving. Ozzie and Tochee took turns through the night to make sure it didn’t come any closer. It was Ozzie who got the midnight to morning shift. He sat on a flattish rock beside the tent, dressed in his cords and checked shirt, with his sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders like a blanket. The river murmured away quietly, and occasionally he heard a low rattling wheeze from Tochee that he classed as alien snoring; other than that there was only the deep silence he would always associate with this world.

A brilliant multitude of stars shone down through the cloudless, moonless sky. He’d never seen so many before, not even when he went worldwalking on new Commonwealth worlds before they were contaminated by civilization’s light pollution. One hazy nebula, four or five times larger than Earth’s moon, kept drawing his attention. It bent sharply at one end, with a reddish spike protruding away from the main haze. He couldn’t remember any astronomical phenomenon remotely like that being close to the Commonwealth. The Devil’s Tail, he named it. Shame nobody would ever know.

In the wilderness hours just before dawn he heard voices. He sat up immediately, unsure if he’d been drifting off to sleep. They could have been the start of some dream. But they weren’t human voices, or at least not ones speaking any language he recognized.

The spark of light hadn’t moved. He switched his inserts to infrared and slowly scanned around, turning a complete circle.

The voices came again. Definitely not a dream. They swept past him, causing him to turn so fast he almost lost his balance. Several of them babbling together. A nonhuman language. They sounded urgent. Frightened.

But it was only the sound. Nothing moved in the canyon. Nothing physical.

Almost he asked: “Who’s there?” Except that really was the stuff of late-night horror DVDs. Dumb.

Whispers slithered past him, somebody—something—whimpering into the distance. Ozzie dropped the sleeping bag and held his arms out, concentrating on his hands, trying to feel air being stirred, the tiniest hint of movement. He closed his eyes, knowing that a visual sense was no longer any use to him. Listening, stroking the air. The sound came again, conjuring up the old phrase “voices on the wind.” He heard what was said, and repeated it back to them softly. It made no difference. They carried on past him, paying no attention.

That was how Orion found him as the first wave of a pale dawn lifted over the canyon wall: standing motionless with arms outstretched like some religious statue, mumbling words in an alien tongue. The boy clambered out of the tent, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he yawned. “What are you doing?”

Ozzie sighed and let his arms down with a suspiciously yogalike sweeping motion. He gave Orion an inscrutable grin. “Talking to the ghosts.”

Orion’s head whipped around, trying to find … anything. “Are you all right? Did you hit your head or something?”

“Not since that bar on Lothian, and that was years ago. This world is haunted.”

“Ow come on, Ozzie, that’s not funny. Not here. This whole planet is creepy.”

“I know, man. I’m sorry. But I did hear something, like a bunch of people or aliens.”

“The Silfen?”

“No, I know their language. I don’t know what these guys were saying, but you get a feel from the tone. They were sad, or frightened. Maybe both.”

“Hey, quit it! I don’t like this.”

“Yeah. I know. I think that’s the point, man.”

“The point of what?”

“Whatever I experienced.” He frowned. “What did I experience? Accept there’s no such thing as ghosts, so … some kind of projection? Bit childish just to spook travelers. I mean, why not go the whole hog and put a white sheet over your head and jump out on them from behind a rock?”

“You said the Silfen did have an afterlife,” Orion said quietly.

Ozzie gave him a thoughtful look. “You really do pay attention, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.” The boy shrugged as he smirked.

“Okay then, let’s think about this. None of our electronics are working, so the ghosts can’t be any kind of normal projection, holograms, sound focus, that kind of crap. The Silfen are active here, which implies it must be happening with their knowledge or consent.”

“Unless it’s them doing it,” Orion said, suddenly excited. “There’s nothing alive here. We haven’t seen any animals or insects. Maybe this is their afterworld, where all the Silfen ghosts live.”

Ozzie grimaced, and looked around the stark, massive canyon. “Somehow I think not. I’d expect something a little more impressive. But I could be wrong.” He finished up by looking along the canyon. “Yo, can’t see the light anymore, either.”

Tochee slithered up between them, raising a limb of manipulator flesh. WHAT’S HAPPENING? the patterns in its eye asked.

“This should test our vocabulary,” Ozzie muttered.

By midmorning, they could see the black pillars ahead were indeed trees. Even by this world’s standards they were giants, perfect thin cones reaching over a hundred fifty yards into the air. They had been planted in a double row, half a mile to the side of the river, forming an impressive avenue down the canyon.

“Somebody does live here, then,” Orion said as they drew near to the start of the avenue.

“Looks that way.” Ozzie tilted his head back to see the tops of the first trees. “You know, either they’re made out of a wood harder than steel, or there’s hardly any wind here, ever.”

“Is that important?”

“I dunno, dude. But it’s definitely a spike on the bizarro graph.”

Orion giggled. “This whole place is a spike.”

“I’m not arguing.”

An hour later, when the canyon walls straightened out, allowing them to see ahead for miles, they made out a group of figures walking along the avenue ahead of them. Seven people, a long way in front, moving at a steady pace.

BIPEDS LIKE YOU, Tochee’s patterns declared. THEY MADE THE LIGHT LAST NIGHT.

Could have done, Ozzie wrote.

THEY MOVE SLOWER THAN US. WE CAN CATCH THEM TODAY IF WE INCREASE SPEED.

Ozzie had been thinking the same thing. Of course if he really wanted to attract their attention there were several flares left in his backpack, though he didn’t want to use them for anything less than a genuine emergency. And the group in front would have to be looking around at the right moment. He was slightly surprised they hadn’t seen them already, especially given the way Tochee’s fabulous technicolor coating clashed against the drab ironstone.

Speeding up will be hard on us. We will reach them eventually.

AGREED.

In the afternoon, when they’d been walking down the empty avenue for several hours, they came to the first ruin. A small stream wriggled across the canyon, running from the base of the cliff wall down to the river, crossing through the avenue at right angles. At some time long ago, a simple curved stone bridge had carried the path over it. Now all that was left were the solid foundations on either side, sticking up from the dusty ground like a set of broken teeth.

There were gentle grooves in the stonework, resembling the trails snakes left in sand. Ozzie couldn’t tell if they were natural wind-erosions or ancient carvings. Thinking about the trees again, he suspected carvings. How long it would take for them to wear away like this he had no idea. Centuries, at least.

“I wish my arrays were working,” he sighed. “They could carbon date this right down to the afternoon it was built.”

“Really?”

“Pretty close, yeah.” It was always slightly unnerving how little Orion knew about technology. He had to be careful what he said, especially jokingly, which wasn’t an Ozzie trait. But the boy tended to take everything he said as gospel.

They splashed through the little stream, and carried on walking. Ozzie resisted the urge to carve his name into the bridge. He was mildly surprised that no one else had, especially the guys who’d left the soda can.

By the time they made camp they’d passed another ruined bridge, as well as a big circular depression in the ground whose edges were made from tight-fitting stone blocks. Neither archaeological remnant provided any clue as to what kind of creatures had built them. A bridge was a pretty basic design for any species, as were sturdy foundations, which is what Ozzie suspected the circle to be.

Through the day, they’d managed to close the distance on the group of travelers in front of them to about a mile. Once they got the tent up, the gold light became visible in the gathering darkness.

“That’s just about where they are,” Orion said. “You should fire a flare, Ozzie. There’s no way they can’t see it now.”

Ozzie gazed at the steady point of light. “They know we’re here. If they don’t want to talk to us, there’s no sense in trying to force them.”

Orion nodded cheerfully, and cut into one of the big fruits. “I get that about people now, you can’t rush somebody who doesn’t want to be rushed, right?”

“You’re learning.”

“So I let the girl set the pace.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And she’ll always find a way to tell me when she’s ready to go to bed? You’re sure about that?”

“Uh, yeah.” Ozzie was beginning to dread evenings around the campfire. The boy did have an amazingly one-track mind. “But, look, man, it’s going to be subtle. You’ve got to be alert and in tune.”

“Like how do you mean?”

“Okay, if she’s happy for the date to go on as long as you want, that’s a good sign.”

“I thought you said don’t try to get her to bed on the first date?”

“Yes, yes, that’s right. But this is the second date, or later.”

“Okay. So it goes on all night. Do I ask them home, or will they ask me?”

“I don’t know, man. It depends on the girl, okay? Use your judgment.”

“But, Ozzie, I haven’t got any, that’s why I ask you.”

“Want another line to use?” He’d found that was always a good way to make Orion stop, although the cost to his own dignity was always painfully high.

“Yeah!”

“All right. But you’ve got to have a ton of self-confidence for this one, okay, show no fear. ‘Is it me or do you always look this good?’ ”

“Maybe,” Orion said dubiously. “But you’d have to have a good follow-up line.”

“Hey, I’m just showing you how to open the door, once you’re in the room you’re on your own.”

The voices returned in the deep of night. This time they were slightly louder, occurring more frequently.

Orion woke with a start as one set of voices passed right beside the tent. Ozzie was already sitting up in his sleeping bag, listening to what was spoken and the way it was said.

“It is ghosts, isn’t it?” Orion said solemnly.

“Kinda looks that way, yeah. You scared, man?”

“Ozzie! It’s ghosts!”

“Right. Well, I’m scared, just in case you wanted to know.” He wriggled out of his sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. The night air was alive with sound, hundreds of voices that swirled chaotically around their little camp. He walked out into their midst, turning—into daylight. His feet were standing on a lush carpet of blue-green grass that covered the canyon floor, along with trees and thick bushes. The avenue of trees had been replaced by a road built from stone cobbles. Strange five-legged bovine animals pulled wooden carts along it, piled high with barrels and some local version of hay. The drivers were aliens that looked like pear-shaped jellyfish, with hundreds of slender tendrils emerging from their lower half, serving as both legs and arms. Individually weak, the wax-white tendrils would twine together to produce a stronger limb for whatever use was required. Dozens of them were sliding along the road, the tips of their tendrils twisting and scrabbling like impaled worms to move them forward. They called to each other in low gurgling voices.