Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star

“A librarian!” Orion grinned at Ozzie.

“That’s nice,” Ozzie said pointedly. Now that the translator was relaying everything they said to Tochee, it was becoming both difficult and embarrassing to explain away Orion’s outbursts of laughter. The boy seemed to find a lot of Tochee’s culture amusing. Ozzie had to admit, the alien’s life did seem to be rather, well… prim and proper.

“How did you know you were on another planet?” Orion asked. “Do your people have space travel?”

“I realized the planet was different to my own when I saw the sun in the sky was a different color, and at night the star pattern was different,” Tochee said. “We do not have space travel.”

“Why not?” Orion waved at the gadgets Tochee was holding in its manipulator flesh. “You’ve obviously got the technology level.”

“We do not have the need. We do not have the internal nonlogic which you possess, the constant desire to explore without reason.”

“You wanted to find the legends,” Ozzie said. “Wasn’t that an unreasonable pursuit?”

“Yes. And in that wish I demonstrated a wild aberration from my kind. If verification of my elder parent’s story was required, then my colleagues and I should have begun a systematic investigation. I went by myself because I believed my colleagues would show no interest.”

“Wild!” Orion was giggling again. Ozzie flashed him another warning glare.

“I’m interested that your people don’t consider spaceflight to be necessary,” Ozzie said. “If you’ve reached an advanced technological level, are you not finding diminishing resources to be a problem?”

“No. We do not build anything beyond our ability to sustain it.”

“That’s very admirable. Our species is nothing like as rational.”

“From what I have witnessed on my travels, that attitude seems to be in the majority.”

“Yeah, but there are varying degrees. I’d like to think we’re reasonably restrained, but by your standards we’re probably not.”

“That makes neither of us right, nor wrong.”

“I hope so, after all, we all have to share the same galaxy.”

“I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.”

Ozzie gave the big alien a quick thumbs-up. They were approaching another steep incline that was half rock. Tochee could scale such obstacles with the greatest of ease, while he and Orion had to scramble up, sweating with the effort. Ozzie glanced toward the sea on his left. They’d been walking along the top of the coastal cliff for two days. It varied considerably in height, but it was a good twenty meters high here, and there didn’t seem to be a beach at the bottom. Not that there was an easy path down in any case.

“Up we go, then,” he told Orion. The boy pulled a face, and retied the band of faded blue cloth that was holding his long hair back away from his eyes. They both started to clamber up, jamming feet into narrow crevices, hands gripping precariously at strong tufts of grass so they didn’t lose their balance when the weight of the rucksacks pulled at them. Tochee flowed up the incline, its ridges of locomotion flesh clasping at the rock and vegetation as it went. Ozzie hadn’t asked, but he figured the big alien could probably slide straight up a sheer cliff.

Once they were on top, they began walking along the edge of the cliff again. The ground was sloping down again now. He knew they were on an island, the small central hill with its crown of jungle had been in sight on his right for the whole two days of their trek. His array’s inertial guidance unit was plotting their wide circular course around it. He hadn’t told Orion yet, but in another mile and a half they’d be back where they started.

“Is that an island out there?” Orion asked.

Right on the horizon there was a small dark smudge. When Ozzie zoomed in, it resolved into a solid little peak rising out of the sea, much like the one they were on. “Yep, that makes five. This is some kind of archipelago.”

“We haven’t seen any ships,” Orion said.

“Give it time, it’s only been two days.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” There hadn’t been any night since they arrived on this world. In fact, the bright sun’s position hadn’t moved at all. The planet was tide-locked, with one face permanently pointing toward the sun. Ozzie wasn’t sure how the climate could function normally with such a setup. But then the gas halo was hardly a natural phenomenon. Between them, he and Tochee had used every sensor they had to scan the multitude of twinkling specks that were orbiting through the gas with this planet. The other specks weren’t planets, that was for certain, although there was very little else they could discover about them. They weren’t emitting any radio or microwave pulses, at least not strong enough to be detectable at any distance. That just left Johansson’s brief description to fall back on. Giant lengths of some coral variant that was home to vegetation. He wondered if the Silfen used them as cities, or nests, or if they even bothered with them at all. Maybe they were just there to keep the gas in the halo fresh and breathable, as forests and oceans were to planets.

As for their measurements of the halo itself, the best they could come up with was that it had a circular cross section roughly two million kilometers in diameter that orbited a hundred fifty million kilometers from the star. What contained the gas was unknown, but had to be some kind of force field. The idea of building a transparent tube this big was mind-boggling, and introduced a whole range of engineering and maintenance problems. Exactly where the power came from to generate a force field on such a scale was also unknown, although Ozzie was pretty sure the builders must have tapped the star’s power. Frankly, there was little else that could provide the kind of energy level required. Why anyone would create such an artifact in the first place was beyond him. It lacked the practicality of a Dyson sphere or a Niven ring. But then, if you had the ability to do this, you probably didn’t actually need to. And if it was the Silfen home system, he strongly suspected the answer to such a question would be: why not. He didn’t really care, he was just happy someone had done it—and he’d seen it.

“Ozzie, Tochee, look!” Orion was racing on ahead of them through the grass. There was no cliff here, the ground had dipped until it was almost level with the sea. A big sandy beach curved away ahead of them. The boy ran onto the sand. A dead fern frond was standing on top of a low dune at the back of the beach like a brown flag. Ozzie had stuck it in there when they started their exploratory walk.

The boy’s delight crumpled as he pulled the frond out of the sand. “This is an island.”

“ ’Fraid so, man,” Ozzie said.

“But…” Orion turned to look at the small central mountain. “How do we get off?”

“I can swim to another island,” Tochee said. “If you are to come with me, we must build a boat.”

Orion gave the sea a mistrustful look. “Can’t we call someone for help?”

“Nobody’s listening,” Ozzie said, holding up his handheld array. The unit had been transmitting standard first contact signals since it started functioning again, along with a human SOS. So far, the entire electromagnetic spectrum had remained silent.

“If this is where the Silfen live, where are they?” the boy demanded.

“On the mainland, somewhere, I guess,” Ozzie said. He stared out to sea. Three islands were visible to his retinal inserts on full zoom, though he wasn’t sure of their distance. If they were the same size as this one, they’d be nearly fifty miles away. Which given he was now only a couple of yards above sea level should have put them far over the horizon on any Earth-sized planet. He wondered if this one was the same size as Silvergalde.