“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?”
“Whatever.” Orion shrugged with indifference.
Ozzie thought it was a near-perfect imitation of his own don’t-care gesture. “Good. Then there’s some files on the handheld array I’d like to go through with you.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Some background information,” Ozzie said vaguely. “You can read, can’t you?”
“Ozzie!”
“Okay, man, just checking. Tomorrow then, yeah?”
“We’re taking off tomorrow morning, you said.”
“I know. There’s not going to be much else to do on the raft, is there?”
Orion scratched at his hair, obviously perplexed by this new Ozzie. “Guess not.”