“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.”
“And in between? What then? Is that when we sing?”
“Walking the path you hear many songs. Songs to treasure. Songs to fear. Come, Ozzie, come listen to the broken song of this world. Here lies the melody you desire to walk farther amid the tangle of mystery that is all of us.”
The Silfen had joined hands. Now the tall woman held out her hand to him. Orion was giving him a nervous look. Tochee’s eye patterns asked: WHAT NOW?
“Tell our friend I don’t know,” Ozzie told Orion. “But I’m going to find out.”
“Ozzie?”
“It’ll be fine.” He put his hand out to the Silfen woman. Her skin was warm and dry as her four fingers bent supplely around his hand. In an obscure way he found that comforting.
Together they started walking toward the vertical ruins. At the foot of the huge pile of shattered stone was a featureless black globe. It was as high as a Silfen was tall. Ozzie wasn’t sure if it actually rested on the ruddy sand or floated just above it.
“Now you will know this planet’s song,” she said as they approached the sphere. “All it used to sing comes from within its last memory.”
Ozzie almost hesitated. Then he saw the planet floating at the center of the sphere. He peered forward like an eager child.
It wasn’t the image of the planet, it was a ghost just like the aliens who haunted the roadway along the canyon. Long ago it had floated blissfully in space, known to the Silfen who walked their paths through its bucolic forests. Its inhabitants, the jellylike aliens, built themselves a peaceful civilization, advancing their knowledge as did most species. They had even begun to explore their solar system, sending crude ships to land on planets and moons.
Which was when the imperial colonizers arrived. Vast starships plunged into the star system on fusion flames, curving into orbit around this quiet happy world. They had taken decades to cross interstellar space, and were hungry for their prize, a new world on which to reestablish their old empire.
The war of conquest was as short as it was futile. The planetary inhabitants resisted as best they could, modifying their instrument-carrying rockets to assault the huge invaders above their beautiful planet. Some damage was inflicted on the big ships, which goaded the imperialists into fierce retaliation.
In the forests and glades below the Silfen hurried down their paths to regain the peace and freedom denied to those whose home this was. But even the elfin folk whose life was one of happiness and fey interest in the worlds they passed through were troubled by the horrific violence erupting around them. In penance, they watched.
Ozzie was shown the dark armored starships sending their missiles and kinetic projectiles hurtling down onto the planet below. Explosions ripped through the sleeping clouds, distorting the world’s air. Waves of destruction rolled out. Solid ground rippled like water. Oceans rose in rage. Towns and cities were blasted apart. Aliens died in the tens of thousands in the first few seconds. Ozzie knew them. He felt their death. Their grief. Their fear. Their loss. Their sorrow. Their regret as their homes disintegrated. Their bitterness as their children were torn apart before them. Every one of them was there for him to identify and experience. And the deaths multiplied as the empire’s weapons cast this world into smoking, radioactive oblivion before the starships departed in search of new worlds, worlds easier to subdue.
Ozzie fell back from the globe, curling up into a fetal ball as the tears flooded down his cheeks to stain the dead world’s dry sandy soil.
He wept for hours as the terrible anguish of countless deaths soaked through him. He hated it as he had hated nothing in his life before. Hated what was done. Hated the blind stupidity of the imperialists. Hated the Silfen for standing by and doing nothing. Hated the waste of so much life, so much promise. Hated knowing what a better universe it could have been if only the quiet simple aliens whose world this once was had survived and finally met the gaudy flawed human race as the Commonwealth expanded. Hated that such a meeting of unalike minds would never happen.
Late in the afternoon, when his tears had long since dried up, he stopped his pitiful whimpering lament, and rolled onto his back, blinking up at the cloudless sky. Orion and Tochee gazed down anxiously at him.
“Ozzie,” Orion pleaded, his own face close to tears. “Please don’t cry anymore.”
“It’s hard not to,” he croaked. “I was here. I was with every one of them when they died.” He started to tremble again.