‘I don’t see that,’ Ozzie said quietly. ‘We’ve been talking about different technology levels. How far ahead the Dyson civilization is, all that crap. But what about you?’
‘What about us?’
‘Oh come on! A whole planet for a brain? That makes you smarter than God. And that’s only if you stayed on Vinmar. You’ve got this whole super-technology thing going for you, dontcha? Anything you want, you just think up how it works and how to build it. Takes maybe a nanosecond. Do you know how to manufacture a Dyson barrier? Better still, do you know how to penetrate one?’
‘There are possible theories concerning the erection of a barrier, we have conducted mathematical simulations and analysed them.’
‘So you can build one?’
‘Capability and intent are separate. In effect they define us quite accurately. We are thought, not physical. You cannot ever understand how infinitesimal the capacity we have employed to deal with you and this subject.’
‘Pretty much beneath you these days, huh? Thanks for that.’
‘Ozzie Fernandez Isaacs, are you trying to provoke us?’
‘Into what, man? Maybe build your own starship and send it to the Dyson Pair.’
‘We have ceased to become your servants.’
‘And we’re yours?’
‘No. Our relationship is one of partnership and trust. And respect.’
‘Tell us how to build a barrier generator. Teleport me to Dyson Alpha.’
‘We are not God, Ozzie. Humans are not chess pieces we move around a board for amusement and interest. If you wish to build a barrier generator, design it yourselves. Our interest in the Dyson Pair is related purely to yours. Our advice was just that, advice best suited to help you deal with the problem.’
‘Would you protect us if the aggressor comes after the Commonwealth?’
‘We would offer whatever advice the situation required.’
‘Well hot damn, thanks a whole bunch there. Half of you are memories that humans send into you rather than rejuvenate again. Don’t you have any empathy, any humanity left in those mountain-sized circuits of yours?’
‘Fifty per cent is an exaggeration, Ozzie. We believe you know that. You who dispatched copies of his own memories to run in our arrays, in the hope of receiving special and privileged treatment; incomplete memories at that.’
‘And do I get any?’
‘We are aware of our debt to you concerning the founding of our planet. You were an honest broker at the time, as such you are entitled to our respect.’
‘Respect doesn’t put food on the table.’
‘Since when have you ever wanted for anything material?’
‘Oh, getting personal now you’re losing, huh?’
The SI didn’t reply.
‘Okay, then tell me, with that infinitesimal piece of processing you’re covering this with, don’t you think it strange the Silfen know nothing about the Dyson Pair?’
‘They are notoriously reluctant to supply exact definitions. As Vice President Doi confirmed, Commonwealth cultural experts are working on the problem.’
‘Can you help us there? Maybe slip in a few trick questions.’
‘The Silfen will not communicate directly with me. They have no interest in technological artefacts.’
‘Yeah, something I’ve always been suspicious of. I mean, what is technology? Are steam engines? Do they class organic circuitry in there with quantum wire processors? And where do they get off claiming their transport method isn’t technology based – whatever the hell it actually is.’
‘If you’re hoping they will assist the Commonwealth, you will be disappointed. They are not deliberately obtuse; their neural structure is simply different to that of humans.’
‘You think?’ Ozzie stretched himself out in the chair. ‘I met somebody once. Long time ago now. It was in a bar on Far Jerusalem, just a seedy little watering hole in a town on the edge of nowhere. Don’t suppose it’s even there any more, or if it is, it’ll be some tarted-up club with entry standards. But back then a man could walk in and get a drink without anyone bothering him. That’s what he did, except he sat next to me, and he was the one who started talking. Of course, he had a message to put across; but I’m a good listener when I want to be. He had quite a story, too. He claimed he’d been living with the Silfen for a few years. Really living with them, down at the end of those paths in their forests which we all know about and never see. Well he said he’d walked through their forests with them. Start out one fine morning on a path in the heart of some Silvergalde wood, and finish up hiking across Mount Finnan on Dublin, like all the rumours have it. Three hundred light-years in a single stride. But he’d actually done it and come back. He’d been to planets far outside the Commonwealth, so he claimed; sat on the blasted desert of a dead planet to watch the remnants of its sun fall into a black hole, swum in a sea on a planet where the only light comes from the galactic core which filled half the sky above, climbed along things he called tree reefs that live in a nebula of gas dense enough to breathe. All those things I always wanted to do. He sat there drinking his cheap beer with that look in his eye as he told me about his travels. Got to hand it to him, he could spin a good yarn. I haven’t seen him in years, though we still keep in touch occasionally.’
‘An improbable tale, but not impossible given what we know of the Silfen. The knowledge of their paths is one of your primary modern myths.’
‘But it’s what else he told me about the Silfen that I’ve always been interested in. He said their bodies are just chrysalides. Somewhere out there in the galaxy is the true Silfen, the adult community. I don’t think it’s physical. A collection of minds, or ghosts maybe. But that’s where they go, what they become. Interesting parallel to you and us, don’t you think?’
‘Yes. Although we are not a natural evolutionary step for humans.’
‘Not yet. But you’re constantly evolving, and even us poor old naked apes have genetic and intellectual aspirations. What I’m saying is, the Silfen we meet in the forests aren’t the only source of their species’ history. Have you ever encountered the community?’
‘No. If it exists, then it functions on a different plane to us.’
‘Ever shouted into the abyss and listened for an answer? I’m sure you must have. You’d be curious to find out if there was anything there, an equal.’
‘There are echoes of mind in many spectrums, hints of purpose if not intelligence. But for all we know and see, we are alone still.’
‘Bummer, huh. I guess it’s down to me, then.’
‘To do what?’
‘Go find the adult Silfen community, ask it what the fuck’s going on with the Dyson Pair.’
*
The CST planetary station on Silvergalde was always going to be smaller than any of the other settled worlds in the Commonwealth. But then, Silvergalde wasn’t strictly a Commonwealth planet. From the very beginning, when the exploratory wormhole opened above it, the CST Operations Director knew something was out of kilter. Silvergalde was thirty-two thousand kilometres in diameter, yet although nearly three times larger than Earth, its gravity was only point eight nine. Half of the surface was land, while the other half contained mildly salty seas with a hundred thousand picturesque islands. With that composition, and an axial tilt less than half a degree, the environment was completely stable, giving two thirds of the planet a predominantly temperate climate.
Humans always speculated that the globe was artificial. Its interior composition was mainly silicate, no metals were ever found in the crust. A small molten core generated a magnetic field, but did not produce volcanoes. There were no impact craters. No geological reason for the continents and seas to be separate. And, most tellingly, no fossil of any kind was ever found. If it was natural it was completely unique. But the real proof appeared after humans reached the surface to be greeted by the slyly amused Silfen. Classifying local vegetation and animal life turned up a dozen DNA types; all of them living i
n equilibrium with each other. They had to have been imported, and none of them from any world the Commonwealth was familiar with.
As far as anyone could work out, Silvergalde was the Silfen capital, or at least a regional capital. There were billions of them living on it. They didn’t mind sharing the land with humans, they never did. Though there were rules, primarily concerned with technology, and pollution. In other words, nothing above Victorian-level mechanization. Enforcement was relatively simple, the more advanced an artefact was, the less likely it was to work. The only exception to that was the CST gateway machinery holding the wormhole stable. No reason given. When asked, the Silfen apparently didn’t understand the question.
Such a world attracted a certain kind of human. There were pastoral worlds within the Commonwealth, where a similar physical lifestyle could be followed. But it was the presence of the Silfen themselves which attracted the more gentle, spiritualist type. There weren’t many, perhaps a million and a half in total. Lyddington, the town with the CST station, had about ten thousand people living in it. The rest simply set out across the great plains to find themselves a village which took their fancy. Then there were the caravans, eternally touring the land; sailing ships which spent years on a single voyage, and solitary wanderers who wanted the whole Silfen-experience, and set off into the forests which covered sixty per cent of the land where legend said you could find paths which led to other worlds and realms.
It was a simple FG67 diesel engine which pulled the five carriages into Lyddington station. The service ran twice a week from Bayovar, through a gateway that was just wide enough to carry a single set of tracks.
Ozzie got out of the first-class section, and stood on the solitary platform. He was wearing fawn-coloured leather trousers, a thick woollen red and blue check shirt, wide-brimmed olive-green oilskin hat which was crunching up his big hair, and the best hiking boots money could buy, manufactured in the Democratic Republic of New Germany. His luggage was a towering backpack full of spare clothes, top-quality camping equipment, and packaged food. There was a saddle under his arm, which was proving exceptionally heavy and awkward to carry.
He looked around to see who was about to help him. A couple of CST staff were standing at the end of the platform talking to the train manager; other than that the only people in view were his fellow passengers; those that weren’t totally stoned seemed as bemused as him. When he looked behind the train, he saw the rail leading back to the pearly luminescence of the gateway, not two hundred yards away. Beyond that, the countryside was standard for any H-congruous world, with green vegetation and a light blue sky. There were mountains in the distance, not quite tall enough to have snow-caps. Ahead of him was the town, a drab brown sprawl of small buildings, few of which were more than one storey. They clustered along the slope above the harbour, a natural spit of rock, which curved defensively around a long beach. Wooden boats were drawn up above the waterline, their nets draped over masts to dry out. There was some kind of game being played on the sand, similar to football.
The passengers started to wander along the platform towards the town. Ozzie shoved the saddle over one shoulder, and moved off with them. The CST staff never gave him a second glance as he walked past. He thought it strange nobody at all from the town was at the station; the train left back for Bayovar in another two hours. Surely someone must be returning home to civilization?
There were houses right up to the station, the oldest section of town. These were either drycoral or prefab, the kind found on any frontier planet. The streets knitting them together were made from thick stone slabs, their only drainage a deep open gutter at the side. Ozzie soon realized why they needed to be so deep; he wished he’d brought some kind of scarf he could wrap over his nose. The transportation was either bicycle or animal. Horses clumped along passively, as did the quadruped galens from Niska; and lontrus, big, shaggy-pelted octopeds that looked terribly hot on this sunny afternoon; he also saw tands being used, some finnars, and even a giant bamtran that had been given a saddle platform and a harness which pulled a cart the size of a bus The domesticated beasts either carried riders or pulled wagons. People and cyclists took care to avoid the muck they left behind them, but the smell couldn’t be missed so easily.
Further into town, the buildings were made from wood or stone; many had thatched roofs. Brick and clay pot chimneys puffed out thin blue-white tongues of smoke, the scent of burning wood mingling with the smell of animals and cooking. Creeper plants swarmed up any vertical wall, adding to the overall impression of shabbiness. They weren’t cultivated for decoration. In some cases they completely swamped buildings, with just a few holes hacked into the bedraggled greenery to keep windows clear. The stone paving under his feet had long since given way to hard-packed gravel with a thick top layer of mud and manure. He could see the neat white rectangular offices of the Commonwealth cultural mission sitting at the top of the town, overlooking all the rooftops, but that was the last place he wanted to be. This wasn’t any part of the ExoProtectorate Council mission.
Ozzie kept on walking. As he suspected, the sophisticated handheld array in his rucksack was almost useless, operating at the most basic level, and with frequent glitches. There was no cybersphere here, nothing his e-butler could link him to. But all his OCtattoos seemed to be working, for which he was grateful; he’d spent nearly two days in an expensive Augusta clinic having new ones etched into his body, along with several modern biochip inserts, which also appeared to be operational. Whatever the Silfen used to glitch human technology, it only affected photonic and electronic systems, bioneural chemistry was relatively immune.
The inn was called the Last Pony, a long shambling wooden building with an ancient vine that had colonized the sagging front wall to such an extent it was probably all that was now holding it up. The big indigo valentines of semiorganic precipitator leaves were draped along the eaves; sucking clean water out of the humid air and funnelling it into the building’s pipes for drinking and washing. A dozen young kids were playing in the dusty soil outside. The boys were dressed in badly worn trousers and shirts, made from natural fabrics in dark brown and grey colours. Most of the girls wore dresses that were frayed and patched. Their hair was wild and grubby, detonating out from their heads in frizzy strands. Ozzie smiled at them, enchanted; their faces were those of miniature angels, all happy and curious. They’d all seen him, the clean stranger in decent expensive clothes. Their games were drying up as they whispered among themselves. One ran over, the boldest of all, a little girl no more than seven, wearing a simple fawn-coloured sleeveless dress.
‘You’re new here,’ she said.
‘That’s right, my name’s Ozzie, what’s yours?’
‘Moonshimmer.’ She grinned knowingly. ‘But you can call me Moony.’
Ozzie resisted the urge to look up at the sky; Silvergalde had twin moons in the same half million kilometre orbit. ‘That’s nice. So tell me, where’s a good place to stay in this town?’
‘In there.’ Her little arm rose to point at the Last Pony.
‘Thanks.’ He flipped a coin to her, a fifty Earth cent, which she caught neatly and smiled up at him, revealing two gaps in her front teeth.
Ozzie pushed aside strands of fur-leaf creeper from the front door, and walked in. The main bar was a simple rectangular room, with a counter along one side. Heavy wooden tables, darkened by age and ale stains, cluttered up the floor space. Bright sunbeams from the windows shone through the dusty air. A huge brick fireplace filled the far wall, with black iron doors of ovens built into both sides. The grate contained a high pile of ash and embers, with the blackened ends of logs sticking out, glimmering weakly as they smouldered away.
Just about every head turned to look at him as he entered; conversation dried up. It was all he could do not to laugh at the cliché. He walked over to the counter. The landlord eyed him up; a thickset native American with his greying hair tied back in a neat tail.
‘Afternoon,’ Ozzie said polite
ly. ‘I’d like a drink, and a room for the night, please.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the landlord said. ‘Will that be ale?’
Ozzie glanced at the shelves behind the counter. There were five big wooden barrels set up, already tapped. Various bottles were ranged along beside them. He didn’t recognize any of them. ‘Sure. You got a wheat beer?’
The landlord blinked, as if that wasn’t the answer he was expecting. ‘Yes.’ He took down a long glass, and went over to one of the barrels.
The two men leaning on the counter next to him were exchanging significant looks. They started sniggering quietly.
‘Anything wrong?’ Ozzie asked.
The smaller one turned to him. ‘Not with me. You here for the Silfen are you?’
‘Jess,’ the landlord warned. ‘There’s to be no trouble in here.’
‘I’d like to meet them, yes,’ Ozzie said.
‘Thought so. Your type always does.’
‘My type?’ For a moment Ozzie wondered if he meant his colour. Prejudice in the Commonwealth worlds wasn’t anything like as strong as it had been back in San Diego while he’d been growing up, but that didn’t mean it had disappeared. There were several planets where he would be in real trouble if he ever walked into a bar like this. He hadn’t expected it on Silvergalde, though.
‘Rich,’ Jess drawled insultingly. ‘Young. Don’t work for a living, don’t have to, not with family money. Looking for a new thrill. Think you’ll find it here.’
‘Will I?’
‘Do I care?’
The landlord put Ozzie’s beer down on the counter. ‘Ignore Jess. The Silfen do.’
That brought some derisive laughter from the customers who’d been listening. Jess scowled.
Ozzie reached for his drink, only to find the landlord’s fleshy hand closing round his wrist. ‘And how will you be paying?’ he asked softly. ‘Your bank tattoos are no good here.’