singularly or in huge flocks. Those that had come close enough to see clearly so far had fallen into two categories: a genus with a screwlike spiral wing running the length of their bodies, and others that Orion had named Fan Birds, resembling biological helicopters. They might have been edible, but some of the spiral birds were quite large, almost Tochee’s size, with long sharp tusks that Ozzie didn’t really want an up-close and personal look at. Besides, he couldn’t figure out how to catch one.
The fact that there were so many indicated they must have easily accessible food sources, which was an encouraging prospect. He’d seen a quantity of free-flying trees, globular dendrite-style structures made out of what looked like blue and violet sponge, four or five times the length of Earth’s giant sequoias. He had more hope for them than the birds; they must have some kind of internal water reserve. As yet, none of them had been close enough to try for a rendezvous, especially with Tochee in its weakened state. They probably only had one chance at being towed toward a rendezvous, and the distance was decreasing with each passing day, so he would have to make a very careful choice.
What he really wanted was the kind of reef that Johansson had described. If for no other reason, Johansson had walked home back to the Commonwealth after being on one. So far there’d been no sign of anything like that. There were a myriad of specks everywhere he looked, but he had no way of judging the size and nature of them until they got within range of his retinal inserts.
His handheld array wasn’t helping much, either. For the third time in an hour, Ozzie reviewed the data it was displaying in his virtual vision. Nobody was using the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit in. Nobody had responded to the distress signal he’d been broadcasting constantly since their arrival. Although how far such a signal would travel through the atmosphere of the gas halo was a moot point.
Ozzie sighed in disappointment—once more. According to the clock in his virtual vision it was four hours since he’d last had a drink; when he checked the antique watch on his wrist it read the same. It was time to make that decision he’d been delaying in the hope of a small miracle.
His pack was tied to the decking a couple of meters away from the cradle he’d rigged up for himself. He wriggled out of the shoulder straps and glided over to it. The filter was inside, with its little length of tube coiled up neatly.
Orion stirred inside the nest he’d constructed out of rope and his sleeping bag. He started to say something, then saw the filter in Ozzie’s hand. “Oh, no. You can’t.”
“What’s gotta be done’s gotta be done,” Ozzie replied sadly.
“I’m not going to,” the boy announced with complete finality. “The Silfen made this place. So we don’t have to do that.”
“Are they near?” Ozzie asked patiently.
Orion pulled out his friendship pendant. He had to cup his hands around the little gem before he could see the diminutive jade spark at the center.
“Don’t think so.” The boy sighed gloomily.
“Figures.” Ozzie rummaged farther through his pack until he found an old polythene bag. He stared at it despondently. “Guess this is it then.”
“I’m not going to.”
“Yeah, you said.” Ozzie pushed off from the decking, and hauled himself hand over hand around to the nominal underside of the raft, which put a modest barrier between himself and his companions. This was difficult enough without an audience. It took a while for his reluctant body to cooperate, but he eventually managed to pee into the bag.
He screwed the filter onto the top of his water bottle. Looked at the polythene bag. “Oh, just do it, you wimp,” he told himself. The end of the tube went into the bag, which he constricted to keep the fluid around the intake. He began pumping the filter, squeezing the simple trigger mechanism repeatedly until there was nothing left in the bag.
“Oh, that is just massively gross!” Orion exclaimed as Ozzie reappeared around the edge of the raft.
“No it’s not, it’s just simple chemistry. The filter removes all impurities, the manufacturer guarantees it. You’ve been drinking identical water to this ever since we started.”
“I have not! It’s pee, Ozzie!”
“Not anymore. Look, old-time explorers had to do this the hard way when they got lost in the desert, you know. We’ve got it easy, dude.”
“I won’t do it. I’m sticking to fruit.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Ozzie popped the cap on his water bottle, and deliberately took a big swig. It tasted of nothing, of course; but what he thought he could taste was a different story. Damn that kid! Putting ideas in my head.
“Is that safe?” Tochee asked.
“Don’t you start.”
“It’s disgusting, is what it is,” Orion said. “Grossly gross.”
“I don’t know if you two have actually noticed,” Ozzie said, suddenly fed up with the pair of them, “but we are seriously up shit creek without a paddle. From now on, the two of you are saving your piss as well.”
“No way!” Orion yelped.
“Yes.” Ozzie held the bottle out toward Orion. “You want this?”
“Ozzie! That’s yours.”
“Yeah. I know. So you start saving your own.”
“I’ll save it, but I won’t drink it.”
“My digestive organs do not function as yours,” Tochee said. “There is no separation mechanism for me. Will your most excellent filter work for that?”
Orion gave a horrified groan, and turned away, jamming his hands over his ears.
“I guess there’s only one way to find out,” Ozzie said glumly.
Sharp motion woke Ozzie, something poking him repeatedly on his chest. He removed the band of cloth he’d wrapped around his eyes to give him some darkness. A tentacle of Tochee’s manipulator flesh was poised in an S-bend right in front of his face, ready to prod him again.
“What?” Ozzie grunted. It was difficult to get to sleep in freefall; he resented being roused. His virtual vision clock told him he’d been asleep for a mere twenty minutes. That only made him more grouchy.
“Many large flying creatures are passing,” Tochee said. “I do not think they are birds.”
Ozzie shook his head to try to clear the lethargy away. Big mistake. He clamped his jaw hard to combat the sudden feeling of nausea. “Where?”
Tochee’s tentacle straightened to point toward the bow.
Orion was already struggling against the thick folds of his sleeping bag as Ozzie maneuvered around him. He slowed himself with a couple of tugs, then gripped the decking firmly with his right hand. It left his head sticking clear of the raft, making him think of a medieval soldier peering cautiously over the castle rampart to watch an invading army approach. A gentle breeze blew his Afro about. Tochee and Orion moved up beside him.
“Wow,” Orion whispered. “What are they?”
Ozzie used his retinal insert to zoom in. The flock must have been spread out over half a mile, hundreds of leather-brown spots slowly swirling along behind a tight little cluster. It was like watching a speckly comet, with a loose tail undulating slowly in the wake of the nucleus. They were over a mile away, tracing a wispy line against the infinite blue of the gas halo atmosphere. His e-butler brought a host of enhancement programs on-line, isolating one of the spots. The image was slowly refined, bringing the creature out from its original fuzzy outline.
“Holy crap!” Ozzie muttered.
“What is it?” Orion demanded.
Ozzie told his e-butler to display the picture on the handheld array. He turned the unit to the boy. “Oh!” Orion said softly.
It was a Silfen, but not like any they’d seen in the forests as they walked the paths between worlds. This one had wings. At first sight, it was as if the simple humanoid figure was lying spread-eagled at the center of a brown sheet.
“I should have guessed,” Ozzie said. “Yin and yang. And we’ve already seen the fairy folk version.” The flying Silfen did look uncannily like a classical demon. With the sun behind it, Ozzie saw the wings were actually a thick membrane that stained the light a dark amber. They were divided into upper and lower pairs that seemed to overlap; certainly there was no crack of sunlight between them. The top set were fixed to the Silfen’s upper arms right down to the elbow, allowing the forearms to move about freely. A filigree of black webbing sprouted from the upper arms in a leaf-vein pattern, stretching the membrane between them. On the legs, the longer, second set of wings extended as far as the knee, then bent outward, leaving a broad V-shape between their curving edges so the lower legs were free. The Silfen would still be able to walk on land. A long whip-tail extended out from what on a human would be the coccyx, tipped by a reddish kitelike triangle of membrane.
The Silfen wasn’t flying the way planet-bound birds did. Here in the gas halo it simply soared. The big membranes were sails, allowing it to catch the wind and cruise along where it wished.
Watching the flock as they glided along in huge lazy spiral curves, Ozzie felt an enormous pang of envy. They had what was surely the ultimate freedom.
“We should do that,” Orion said wistfully. “Sew ourselves into the sail and fly along. We could go wherever we wanted, then.”
“Yeah,” Ozzie agreed. He frowned, the boy’s idea making him concentrate on what he was seeing, rather than just gawping in envious awe. “You know, that’s wrong.”
“What is?” Tochee asked.
“This whole arrangement. The Silfen body is designed to walk in a gravity field, just like ours, right. So if you’re going to modify one to flap around the gas halo, why leave the legs and arms? This isn’t a modification to allow them to live here permanently. What they’ve produced is like a biological version of our Vinci suits. It’s temporary, it has to be. You don’t need legs here, and you couldn’t carry those wings about very easily on a planet.”
“I guess,” Orion said dubiously.
“I’m right,” Ozzie announced decisively. “It’s another part of their goddamn living-life-through-the-flesh stage. A great one for sure, but we’re still not seeing the final them, the adult community.”
“Okay, Ozzie.”
He ignored the boy, thinking out loud. “There’s got to be a place where they get these modifications when they arrive. Somewhere in the gas halo. Somewhere with sophisticated biological systems.”
“Unless this is a natural part of their phase,” Tochee said.
