“Yeah!”
“All right. But you’ve got to have a ton of self-confidence for this one, okay, show no fear. ‘Is it me or do you always look this good?’ ”
“Maybe,” Orion said dubiously. “But you’d have to have a good follow-up line.”
“Hey, I’m just showing you how to open the door, once you’re in the room you’re on your own.”
The voices returned in the deep of night. This time they were slightly louder, occurring more frequently.
Orion woke with a start as one set of voices passed right beside the tent. Ozzie was already sitting up in his sleeping bag, listening to what was spoken and the way it was said.
“It is ghosts, isn’t it?” Orion said solemnly.
“Kinda looks that way, yeah. You scared, man?”
“Ozzie! It’s ghosts!”
“Right. Well, I’m scared, just in case you wanted to know.” He wriggled out of his sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. The night air was alive with sound, hundreds of voices that swirled chaotically around their little camp. He walked out into their midst, turning—into daylight. His feet were standing on a lush carpet of blue-green grass that covered the canyon floor, along with trees and thick bushes. The avenue of trees had been replaced by a road built from stone cobbles. Strange five-legged bovine animals pulled wooden carts along it, piled high with barrels and some local version of hay. The drivers were aliens that looked like pear-shaped jellyfish, with hundreds of slender tendrils emerging from their lower half, serving as both legs and arms. Individually weak, the wax-white tendrils would twine together to produce a stronger limb for whatever use was required. Dozens of them were sliding along the road, the tips of their tendrils twisting and scrabbling like impaled worms to move them forward. They called to each other in low gurgling voices.
One of the carts was heading straight for Ozzie. He waved his arms frantically. “Hey, watch what…” The driver obviously couldn’t see him, or the tent, or Orion standing at his side. He grabbed a frozen Orion and hauled him aside, falling off the side of the road—into nighttime.
“Fuck me!” Ozzie grunted. He raised his head and looked around. Nothing had changed, stars glittered in the night sky, casting a faint illumination. The avenue of trees stood impassively along the side of the quiet river, marking the course of the old road.
“Wow!” Orion gushed. “Cool.”
“Uh?”
Starlight showed the boy’s wide smile. “Don’t you get it? This canyon is a time machine, like the Silfen paths are wormholes. How smooth is that?”
“That was just an image, man,” Ozzie said, somewhat stiffly as he clambered back to his feet, brushing sand off his shorts. “It’s showing us what used to be here.”
“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.