Звезда Пандоры

“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.

“Where’s that?” Orion asked grouchily.

“I don’t know. In that cloud bank we saw from the other side of the island, maybe.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, I don’t,” Ozzie snapped. “I don’t get this place at all, okay.”

“Sorry, Ozzie,” Orion said meekly. “I just thought… you normally know stuff, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well this time I don’t so we’ll have to find it out together.” He told his e-butler to call up boatbuilding files from his array’s memory.

…