through. Thousands of ships above the asteroid flared briefly as their hulls vaporized inside the giant geyser of radiation. Wormhole generators imploded with spasms of gravitronic twists. The entire asteroid quaked as two hundred eighty-seven collapsing wormholes wrenched at it, then shattered. Energy contained within the generators and wormholes was released in a single backlash, enhancing the already lethal deluge shining on the interstellar wormhole.
MorningLightMountain watched in horror as the massive wormhole linking the staging post back to its original system wavered and fluctuated. It diverted hundreds, then thousands of immotile group clusters to producing the correct command sequences that would calm and contain the instability. Slowly, the wild shivers of energy were tamed and refocused. The output from the surviving segments of the generator mechanism were remodeled to compensate.
It surveyed the wreckage of the staging post. One asteroid and its whole equipment complement were lost completely. Thousands of ships were ruined or disabled. Clusters of cargo units spun off into the void, molting chunks of equipment that effervesced from every surface. Over three thousand immotile group clusters of varying sizes were irradiated and dying. Nearly a hundred thousand motiles were dead or dying.
Everything could be replaced, and rebuilt, though such an effort would take time. Losing a quarter of its wormholes would definitely slow its original plan for expansion across the human worlds. Back in the home system, many immotile group clusters began to consider defenses against another suicide attack.
Meanwhile, MorningLightMountain began to realign the surviving wormhole routes to each of the twenty-three new worlds it had taken into its domain. After a while, ships flew again, carrying what remained of its supplies down to the planets. With the humans fleeing down wormholes inside their guarded cities, motiles faced little resistance in their advance across the new lands outside.
TWENTY-FIVE
As more and more time went by, so Ozzie’s confusion grew. He simply did not understand the planet they were on. For a start, the climate didn’t change, it was always the same muggy warmth with a slow breeze continually blowing in the same direction. With a tide-locked planet there should have been strong winds redistributing the heat received by the sunside to the cold of the darkside; big circulation currents that would blow perpetually around the globe, not this gentle zephyr. Of course, the island could be situated in the middle of a doldrum zone, which meant the winds were actually out there, somewhere over the perturbingly distant horizon.
Ozzie had set up small meteorological models in the handheld array, which broadly confirmed that theory. However, the modeling didn’t take into account the fact that the planet was orbiting inside a gas halo. Quite how that would affect the atmosphere close to the surface was a complete unknown. The array certainly didn’t have the kind of algorithms necessary to solve that interaction problem.
Then there was the remote gray cloud bank that was just visible squatting above the horizon. Every time they went back up the central hill to collect more wood, he checked its position. It never moved. And that was the direction from which the breeze emanated.
He also made an effort to work out the distance to the nearby islands. Using the array’s inertial guidance function he measured the sight angle from both sides of the island he was on. This rough trigonometry put the closest forty-five miles away, which made the planet improbably massive.
The gas halo itself was an even bigger enigma. He couldn’t figure out the bright specks floating around inside it. Spectrographic sensor analysis showed they were composed of water.
“Does it really matter?” Orion asked as Ozzie launched into another round of muttering about the latest batch of results from his sensors. “We know we have to get to another island to find a path out of here. So who cares what’s in the sky?”
“Yes it does matter,” Ozzie ground out. “I don’t understand how spheres of water like that form. It can’t be through droplet collision, they’re too big. Some of them are hundreds of miles across.”
“So? You said the gas halo is breathable. Why shouldn’t it have water in it?”
“That’s not the point, man. You should be asking, why is it there?”
“So why is it there?”
“I don’t fucking know!”
“It was placed there,” Tochee said through his array. “Given this whole gas halo is artificial, the builders have incorporated the water spheres for a purpose.”
“Thank you, Tochee,” Ozzie said; he turned to Orion. “And I’d like to find out what that purpose is. To do that I need some basic information.”
“Like what?” the boy asked.
“The water vapor content of the gas halo. The pressure of the gas halo. How much evaporation is going on from the water spheres. Their temperature. That kind of thing. But with this equipment, I can’t even get started.” Ozzie waved an annoyed hand at his little collection of sensors.
“But why is it important?” Orion persisted.
“Because there are a lot of forces at work here that we can’t see. If I understood more about the gas halo, I might be able to get a decent handle on this weird planet.”
“It’s just big, you said so. Bigger than Silvergalde.”
Ozzie gave up. “Yeah, man, that’s what it looks like, for sure.” He gave the sky with its multitude of glinting specks a challenging stare. “Ah, to hell with it, we’ve got more pressing problems, right?”
“The preparations are nearly complete,” the array said. “We need one more harvesting trip for the fruit.”
“Sure.” Ozzie gave their completed craft a distrustful look. When they’d set about building a boat, he’d envisaged some kind of skiff, with a smooth hull of tight- fitting planks, a curving sail, himself standing by the tiller steering them to the next island. After all, with his harmonic blade working again, carpentry should be easy; but the encyclopedia files in the array had been brief on actual shipbuilding techniques. They’d wound up with the kind of raft that looked about as buoyant as a brick.
The first day had been spent cutting down one of each of the five tree varieties that grew on the hill, which Tochee then dragged down to the beach. One by one they were pushed out to sea. Most of the palm trunks sank lower and lower in the water as they became saturated. Only one kind floated properly, the gangly trees with their long bushy gray fronds. Naturally the least common on the island.
They had devoted the next five days to felling just about the entire population growing on the hill. Ozzie and Orion took turns wielding the harmonic blade, chopping the branches from the fallen trunks, to leave relatively smooth boles that Tochee pulled down the hill.
After that stage came the rope weaving, a subject that was covered in slightly more detail by the encyclopedia files. The dried palm fronds they used were tough and sharp, and Ozzie and Orion had bleeding fingers within minutes of starting. They had to bring out the sewing kit and modify their old gloves to cope with the fronds. Even Tochee’s manipulator flesh wasn’t immune to the razorlike edges. Eventually, though, they had enough rope to lash the logs together. Three thick bundles, five- and-a-half yards long, provided the buoyancy, with a decking of more trunks at right angles holding them together. Their sail was made from the ubiquitous palm fronds woven into a square, which looked more like a piece of wicker floor matting than any recognizable fabric.
Orion thought the raft was fantastic, a genuine adventure waiting to happen. Tochee expressed its usual quiet approval for their endeavors. That just left Ozzie feeling like the one who had to tell them Father Christmas wasn’t real. He kept thinking it was something a bunch of eight-year-olds would build over a long boring summer.
Ozzie picked up his backpack, and the three of them headed back inland to look for more fruit. There were several types they’d discovered on the island, all of them found on bushes and mini-palms that grew close to the shoreline. He was soon snipping them off their stalks with his pocketknife and filling the backpack.
Orion and Tochee were rustling through the thick vegetation on either side of him. They were both excited at the prospect of leaving the island. Ozzie wished he could share their mood. Every time he gazed up at the gas halo he knew something here didn’t make sense. Why build such a phenomenal artifact, and then stick something as mundane as a planet in the middle of it? The gas halo was surely intended for life that could fly, God’s own aviary. The water spheres and Johansson’s airborne coral reefs were way stations for creatures that had no need of gravity, that lived as physically free as it was possible to do. He supposed that if the true core of the Silfen civilization had a physical location, it couldn’t have created a more appropriate home for itself.
“An entire universe that is so small, yet so large within that it can never be known,” Johansson had said of it. “A haven of mystery cloaked in the pinnacle of scientific development. How I marveled at such a paradox.”
Ozzie struggled to remember what else the man had said. Something practical, at least. But Johansson hadn’t been one to deal in specifics. Though there had been the intimation that he’d returned directly to the Commonwealth from here.
It took Ozzie about forty minutes to fill his backpack. “This ought to be enough,” he said.
“Groovy,” Orion said with a grin, biting into one of the dark purple fruits that was flavored like a mild raspberry. The thick juice dribbled over his lips, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.
Ozzie took a moment to look at the boy. Orion was just wearing a pair of ragged shorts, cut off from an old pair of trousers. He was nothing like as skinny as when they started off down the paths too many months ago; the walking and physical work had put a lot of muscle on him. His pale skin was heavily freckled, partially sunburned, slightly tanned, and of late almost permanently dirty. Wispy hair from his first beard was curling around his chin; while his ginger hair was fizzing outward in knotted strings that were beginning to rival Ozzie’s own Afro for unruliness. In short he was becoming a proper little savage; all he needed was a spear and a loincloth and three millennia of human civilization would have passed him by completely.
My fault, Ozzie thought guiltily, I should have been firmer with him at the start, sent him back to Lyddington. Or failing that, insisted on some kind of schooling.
“What?” Orion asked, looking around to see what Ozzie was staring at.
“When did you wash last?”
“I had a swim this morning.”
“With soap and water.”
“There’s none left, you said it weighed too much to carry from the Ice Citadel.”
“Oh, yeah, right. What about toothgel? Have you been using any?”
“There’s only one tube left, and it’s yours. My teeth are fine. What is this?”
“We need to do something about your hair. There’s things living in it, man.”
“Speak for yourself.”
Ozzie pulled at his beard, suddenly very conscious of the example he’d been setting. “All right, tomorrow we both start getting back into the personal hygiene groove. Deal?”
