“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.