Звезда Пандоры

“We never walked through that,” Orion said abruptly. He was facing back the way they’d just come. Behind them was the rounded top of a modest mountain, its crown roughly covered by a jungle of palms and big ferns with a few spindly gray trees that might result if pines were crossed with eucalyptus. The whole patch couldn’t have been more than a kilometer across.

Ozzie was working out what to say when an electronic bleep emerged from deep inside his backpack. The sound, so integral to Commonwealth society, was profoundly shocking here. He and Orion looked at each other in surprise.

“Link to my wrist array,” Ozzie told his e-butler. There were function icons appearing in his virtual vision that hadn’t been there since the day he rode out of Lyddington. His inserts were regaining their full capacity. He shrugged off the backpack as if it had caught fire. His e-butler confirmed that his inserts were receiving a signal from his wrist array. He shook the contents of his backpack onto the ground, heedless of the mess. A tiny red power LED was shining on the side of his burnished wrist array. He slipped it around his hand and the malmetal contracted snugly. The OCtattoo on his forearm made contact with the unit’s i-spot. Lying amid the pile of clothes and packets he’d tipped out was a handheld array. He picked it up and switched it on. Its icons appeared immediately in his virtual vision. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. His e-butler started to back up insert files in both arrays. He let it do that while his virtual hands rearranged icons for the handheld array. Its screen unfurled to its full extent, measuring half a meter wide. “Please,” he prayed, and translucent amber fingers plucked symbols out of the linguistic files he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months.

On the screen, the spiky flower patterns that Tochee used were displayed in the deepest purple that the screen’s resolution could manage.

Tochee became very still. HELLO, its forward eye segment projected.

“Our electronic systems are working again,” Ozzie said out loud. The handheld array translated into a series of patterns that it flashed up.

I UNDERSTAND.

“Are those Tochee’s speaking pictures?” a fascinated Orion asked, peering at the screen.

The array translated, and Tochee produced an answer.

“That is correct, small human one,” the array said. “They sit in an incorrect visual spectrum. However I can read them.”

Orion whooped exuberantly and gave a massive victory jump, punching the air. “It’s me, it’s me, Tochee. I’m talking to you!” He gave Ozzie a radiant smile, and they high-fived.

“I am aware of the communication,” the array translated for Tochee. “I have wished for this moment for a long time. My first true speech is to thank you, large human one, and small human one, for the companionship you have given me. Without you I would remain at the cold house. I would not like that.”

Ozzie gave a small bow. “Our pleasure, Tochee. But this isn’t one way, man. We would have had difficulty leaving the Ice Citadel without you.”

Orion rushed over to Tochee, who extended a tentacle of manipulator flesh that the boy squeezed happily. “This is great, it’s wonderful, Tochee. There’s so much I want to tell you. And ask, as well.”

“You are kind, small human one. Large humans two, three, five, fifteen, twenty-three, and thirty also showed some consideration for my situation, as did other species at the cold house. I hope they are well.”

“Which ones are those, Ozzie?”

“I don’t know, man. I guess Sara is large human two, and George must be in there somewhere.” His virtual hand pulled the translation routines down out of stasis, slotting them into the large processing power of the handheld array. “Tochee, we need to improve our translation ability. I’d like you to talk to my machine, here.”

“I agree. I have my own electronic units that I want to switch on.”

“Okay, let’s go for it.”

The big alien reached around with its manipulator flesh, and removed one of the heavy bags it was carrying. Ozzie, meanwhile, picked several sensor instruments out of his pile, switching them on one by one. “Man, I came this close to leaving these back at the Ice Citadel,” he grunted.

“What have you got?” the excited boy asked.

“Standard first contact team stuff. Mineral analyzers, resonance scanners, em spectrum monitors, microradar, magnometers. Things that’ll tell me a lot about the environment.”

“How are they going to help?”

“Not sure yet, man. It kinda depends on what we find. But this place is different from the others we’ve walked through. There must be a reason the Silfen have stopped screwing with electricity.”

“Do you think…” Orion stopped, and looked around cautiously. “Is this the end of the road, Ozzie?”

Ozzie very nearly told the boy not to be stupid. His own growing uncertainty stopped him. “I don’t know. If it is, I would have expected something a little more elaborate.” He gestured out at the rolling landscape. “This is more like a dead end.”

“That’s what I thought,” the boy said meekly.