The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (98 page)

One of the carts was heading straight for Ozzie. He waved his arms frantically. “Hey, watch what …” The driver obviously couldn’t see him, or the tent, or Orion standing at his side. He grabbed a frozen Orion and hauled him aside, falling off the side of the road—into nighttime.

“Fuck me!” Ozzie grunted. He raised his head and looked around. Nothing had changed, stars glittered in the night sky, casting a faint illumination. The avenue of trees stood impassively along the side of the quiet river, marking the course of the old road.

“Wow!” Orion gushed. “Cool.”

“Uh?”

Starlight showed the boy’s wide smile. “Don’t you get it? This canyon is a time machine, like the Silfen paths are wormholes. How smooth is that?”

“That was just an image, man,” Ozzie said, somewhat stiffly as he clambered back to his feet, brushing sand off his shorts. “It’s showing us what used to be here.”

“I
smelled
them, Ozzie, it was like vinegar. That was real, not an image. We were there in the past. Anyway, you thought we were there, why else did you dive for cover?”

“I was surprised, that’s all, and I didn’t know what level the image extended to. People have gotten themselves hurt in TSI, you know, man.”

“You were scared.” Orion flung his arms wide, laughing wildly at the canyon wall. “Hey, you scared Ozzie.
Bad
time machine.”

“This is not—” Ozzie got a grip, although he’d noticed the smell, too. He looked along the avenue, checking on the golden light from the other group. It was still there, unmoving. The ghost voices had come back, slipping sinuously through the air. “Damn, this place is weird.”

“Ozzie!” Orion gasped.

One of the jellyfish aliens was slipping past them, wrapped in its own little nimbus of daylight. Tochee pushed its icewhale fur blanket aside, rearing up on its locomotion ridges in shock as the seemingly solid apparition glided along.

WHAT WAS THAT.

Tochee’s eye patterns were shining so brightly Ozzie half expected Orion to see them. He shrugged—they certainly didn’t have anything like the vocabulary for time-traveling spooks. When he glanced around, the lone jelly alien had gone.

“I think we’d better get off the avenue. It’s only a few hours to dawn. We should try and get some rest.”

“Oh, Ozzie, this is wonderful. We might wind up finishing this journey before we started. I could go back to Silvergalde and stop my parents from ever leaving.”

“Look, man, I know you think a time machine is a groovy thing, but take it from me there are quantum fundamentals that prevent it from happening. Okay? I know what this looks like, but it isn’t real.”

Orion was about to answer when a small mechanical car appeared, with two jelly aliens sitting in the cab. Smoke and steam belched furiously from stumpy chimneys in its rear. The boy drew in a sharp breath and swayed backward. “I think maybe you’re right. We’ll get run over here.”

Ozzie was sorely tempted to just stand there and let one of the apparitions glide right through him. But they looked so damn real!

The three of them gathered up their packs and hurried away from the avenue. As soon as they were outside the line of trees the voices faded away, although they never fell completely quiet. Ozzie and Orion sat against a boulder, wrapping their sleeping bags around them. Every now and then opalescent light would burst out of the avenue, silhouetting the bottom of the trees as the long dead aliens walked their old road. After a while Ozzie stopped trying to figure it out, and closed his eyes.

“I’ve got a theory,” Orion said eagerly as they munched on their tasteless breakfast. “I think Sara walked down this canyon. That’s why she’s still alive after so long. The canyon brought her into the future.”

“It’s not a time machine,” Ozzie said for what must have been the tenth time. “Time cannot flow backward, you cannot move back through time. It is a one-way current. Period, dude.”

“She moved forward.”

“Okay, not so difficult. Even we can do that.”

“Can we?” Orion was fascinated.

“Well … in theory, yeah. The internal structure of a wormhole can be modified so its time frame is desynchronized. In other words, you go in at one end, and a week later you come out of the other. But, for you, only a second has elapsed. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s been happening on the Silfen paths. It certainly makes sense, especially when you think of people like Sara.”

“Have you done it with your wormholes?”

“No. It’s very complicated. We don’t have the technology to match the math yet.” He grunted in disapproval. “Maybe we will by the time you and I make it back.”

That morning they walked parallel to the avenue of trees, keeping a good three hundred yards distant. They kept noticing movement on the path. It was almost subliminal. Shadows that flickered between the trunks, vanishing when any attention was focused on them. The apparitions certainly weren’t as vivid during the day.

A couple of hours after they started, they realized they were finally catching up with the other travelers. The group had remained in the avenue. They now looked as if they were walking into a strong wind, leaning forward to push on doggedly, their cloaks streaming out behind them.

“They’re Silfen,” Orion said. “I’m sure they are.”

Ozzie zoomed in. The boy was right. “Another spike,” he muttered.

“Are we going to talk to them?”

“I dunno.” Ozzie was torn. They hadn’t seen any sentient creature since leaving the Ice Citadel world. On the other hand, the Silfen never made a lot of sense at the best of times. “Let’s see where they’re at when we catch up with them.”

As they hiked on, a big gap slowly became visible in the avenue up ahead. They could see the trees carry on on the other side, but for over a couple of miles the canyon floor was empty. “I can’t see any fallen trees,” Ozzie said as he scanned the ground. “Looks like the people who planted them wanted a break.”

“Is there anything built there?” Orion asked.

“Can’t see any ruins.”

They were catching up quite quickly with the Silfen group now. Ozzie estimated they should be level with them just before the gap in the avenue. The dark spectral shadows still flitted along the path, accompanied by the occasional mournful gabble. He was fairly sure it was the same language he’d heard the jelly aliens use when he’d been inside the projection.

When they were only a few hundred yards behind the Silfen, Tochee raised a tentacle. THAT IS NOT NATURAL, its patterns claimed. The tentacle was now pointing directly at the canyon wall in the long gap.

Ozzie studied the rock, trying to see what Tochee was looking at. Some of the vertical crevices did look a bit too regular … He shifted his sense of scale, and gasped with astonishment; the edifice was so large he hadn’t recognized it for what it was.

Millennia ago, the cliff had been carved with the profiles of the jelly aliens. There were two of them, a mile apart; each one must have measured nearly half a mile high. Entropy had slowly gnawed away at them, rock falls and slippage pulling away huge segments, distorting the outline. The piles of scree along the cliff base below them were exceptionally tall. But even after nature’s vandalism, the shapes were still distinct enough for him to identify. Between them was a palace that used to stretch nearly the entire height of the cliff. He assumed it was a palace, though it could easily have been a vertical city or temple, possibly even a fortress. The architecture was vaguely reminiscent of Bavarian castles he’d seen built to crest rugged Alpine peaks, although in this case one built by termites. It was almost as though the curving turrets and half-moon balconies had grown out of the rock, not that there were many of them left, and none were complete. Overall, there was even less of it remaining than the giant statues that guarded it on either side. Flying buttresses protruded from the sheer surface, curving upward to end in jagged spikes as whatever structure they once supported had snapped off to plummet onto the vast foothills of rubble strewn along the base. Stairways and pathways zigzagged all over the exposed surface. Hundreds of rooms were visible as small cavities where their front halves were missing. Thousands of open black caves showed where passages tunneled back into the rock linking interior rooms and halls.

“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.”