He was pressing down on a giggle as he pushed the curtain aside and stepped out of the crude shelter. “Morning,” he called out cheerfully to Orion, who was sitting beside the fire he’d just rekindled. Their metal mugs were standing on a shard of polyp above the flames, wisps of steam rising from the water inside.
“Five teacubes left,” Orion said. “Two chocolate. Which do you want?”
“Variety is the spice of life, man, so let’s go for tea today, shall we?”
“Okay.” Orion gave the little gold cubes of chocolate a wistful look.
“Fine, thanks,” Ozzie said. He sat down on one of the ebony and maroon polyp protrusions, wincing as he straightened his leg.
“Excuse me?” Orion said.
“The knee, thank you, it’s a lot better, but I’m gonna have to keep up with the exercises to loosen it up. It’s still plenty stiff after yesterday.” He gave the perplexed boy a happy look. “You remember yesterday, right? The walk down to the end spire.”
“Yes.” Orion was becoming petulant. He couldn’t figure what the joke was.
Tochee emerged from the jungle, its manipulator flesh coiled around various containers it had filled with water.
“Good morning to you, friend Ozzie,” it said through the handheld array.
“Morning.” Ozzie took the mug that Orion proffered, ignoring the boy’s scowl. “Did you find anything interesting?” he asked the big alien.
“I have detected no electrical power circuit activity with my equipment.” Tochee held up a couple of sensors. “The machinery must be very deep inside the reef.”
“Yeah, if there is any.”
“I thought you said there was,” Orion protested.
“Something generates gravity. My guess is, it’s too sophisticated to be anything like a machine. Specific quark lattice, folded quantum fields, gravitonic-molecular intersection assembled at a subatomic level, something like that. Who knows, who cares. It’s not why we’re here.”
“What are we here for, then?” Orion asked in exasperation.
“The Silfen community.”
“Well, they’re not here, are they.” The boy waved his arm around in a broad half circle to illustrate the absence of the humanoid aliens. Tea sloshed out of his mug.
“Not yet.” Ozzie picked up one of the bluish gray fruits they’d gathered and started peeling it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Okay, think on this. Nobody here believes we crashed here on Island Two by accident, right? I mean, what are the odds, man? The gas halo is big in anyone’s language. And the old Pathfinder, face it, we’re not talking Titanic here.”
“A natural collision was unlikely,” Tochee said.
“So we’re not here by accident. And what did we find yesterday? What’s at the end of the reef?”
“Spires,” Orion said doubtfully.
“Which we all decided would make excellent landing areas for flying Silfen.” Ozzie bit into the coarse fruit, grinning at his companions.
“They’ll come to us!” Orion smiled brightly.
“That is an excellent deduction, friend Ozzie.”
“Many thanks.” Ozzie wiped some of the juice from his beard. “It’s worth a try, anyway. I can’t think of any other reason for today.”
The tiniest of frowns flickered over Orion’s face, but he let the comment go. Ozzie couldn’t quite work out if the boy and Tochee were real or not. Temporal reset was not something he believed in. There were many ways of manipulating spacetime within a wormhole so that time appeared to flow faster around the observer, but traveling back in time was a fundamental impossibility. So if this day on the reef was an artificially generated reality, it was a perfect one, which logically meant his companions would replicate their real selves down to the last nuance. Then again, they might be sharing the dream—in which case why didn’t they remember the yesterdays? Of course, maybe there was some kind of closed temporal loop subsect operating inside the gas halo, a microcontinuum operating in parallel to the universe but with different time flow laws. He wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible. Intriguing idea to try to analyze, though it was a very long time since he’d attempted math that complicated. And today, he decided, wasn’t the day to begin again.
After breakfast he made sure Orion and Tochee gathered their belongings to carry with them on the trek through the reef’s forest. Without understanding if what was happening was real or not, he couldn’t risk them losing the few essential items they still possessed if they did find a path and move on to somewhere else. So the tent and water filter pump, the few tools remaining, all came with them.
“Should we be picking fruit?” Orion asked as they wound through a section of trees that were nearly all laden with grapelike clusters of scarlet berries. “We normally pick fruit.”
“If you want to,” Ozzie said. He was concentrating on keeping his head clear of the ceiling formed by the lowest branches as he bounce-walked his way forward. The trees were large and old, producing a wide interlocking lacework of branches and twigs. Sunlight around the trunks was a gentle twilight glimmer, complemented by dry air smelling faintly of spice.
Orion gave a victorious whoop, and immediately shinned up the closest trunk. Ozzie could see him walking along the branches overhead as twigs snapped, and the occasional leaf fluttered down.
“Are you not using your sensors, friend Ozzie?” Tochee asked.
“I’ve got a few running,” Ozzie said defensively. He didn’t fancy trying to explain to Tochee that right now they might both be nothing other than figments in the Silfen Community’s dream. If they weren’t, he’d be facing a serious credibility crisis. “We’ll save the complex ones for something interesting.”
“I understand. I will continue to record the general background, it may help us determine—”
“Hey!” Orion yelped.
Ozzie couldn’t quite tell if the boy was in pain or just startled. There was a flurry of motion in the forest’s lower ceiling five meters away from him. Broken twigs and a small crowd of leaves plummeted down. Orion’s legs appeared in the rent. They swung from side to side a couple of times, and he let go, falling slowly to the thin layer of sandy soil covering the polyp. Several clusters of the red berries fell with him. He looked directly back up, a flustered expression on his face.
“What’s the matter?” Ozzie went toward the boy with an easy bounding motion. Tochee speeded up to match him, its locomotion ridges spreading out for better traction.
Orion was scrabbling backward, his eyes fixed on the tear he’d created. Stronger slivers of sunlight shone straight down through it. “There’s something up there,” the panicked boy gasped. “Something big, I swear it.”
The front of Tochee’s body lifted off the ground as the alien aligned its pyramid eye on the gap. “I see nothing, friend Orion.”
“Not right up there, more off this way.” Orion pointed.
“What sort of size are you talking about?” Ozzie asked nervously. The boy’s behavior was making him jittery. Was that intentional? Or were they out of the illusion now? If so…His hand slipped down toward the sheath where his knife hung.
“I don’t know.” Orion clambered to his feet. “It was this shape moving, that’s all. A dark shape. My size, maybe bigger.”
Tochee had begun sliding in the direction Orion indicated, winding slightly from side to side in short economic movements. Its colorful fronds were standing proud from its hide, waving slightly in sympathy with its body motion. Something about the alien’s intent and confidence reminded Ozzie of native American hunters. When he looked up again at the ragged ceiling of branches and leaves there was nothing to see, just the occasional flutter of the leaves, the chiaroscuro dapple in perpetual random motion.