Judas Unchained

He unzipped the sleeping bag and stretched. The cool air gusted over him, and he reached for his cord pants. Once he’d fastened the belt around his waist, he picked up his checked shirt and grinned knowingly. Very carefully, he slipped his arms into the sleeves. There was no ripping sound from any of the stitches. “Man, some progress!” Both of his large toes stuck up through holes in his socks as he shoved his feet into his boots. “Ah well, then again, maybe not.” They definitely still needed darning. He patted the pocket on his old dark gray fleece where his small needle and thread packet was stashed. “Maybe tomorrow.”

He was pressing down on a giggle as he pushed the curtain aside and stepped out of the crude shelter. “Morning,” he called out cheerfully to Orion, who was sitting beside the fire he’d just rekindled. Their metal mugs were standing on a shard of polyp above the flames, wisps of steam rising from the water inside.

“Five teacubes left,” Orion said. “Two chocolate. Which do you want?”

“Variety is the spice of life, man, so let’s go for tea today, shall we?”

“Okay.” Orion gave the little gold cubes of chocolate a wistful look.

“Fine, thanks,” Ozzie said. He sat down on one of the ebony and maroon polyp protrusions, wincing as he straightened his leg.

“Excuse me?” Orion said.

“The knee, thank you, it’s a lot better, but I’m gonna have to keep up with the exercises to loosen it up. It’s still plenty stiff after yesterday.” He gave the perplexed boy a happy look. “You remember yesterday, right? The walk down to the end spire.”

“Yes.” Orion was becoming petulant. He couldn’t figure what the joke was.

Tochee emerged from the jungle, its manipulator flesh coiled around various containers it had filled with water.

“Good morning to you, friend Ozzie,” it said through the handheld array.

“Morning.” Ozzie took the mug that Orion proffered, ignoring the boy’s scowl. “Did you find anything interesting?” he asked the big alien.

“I have detected no electrical power circuit activity with my equipment.” Tochee held up a couple of sensors. “The machinery must be very deep inside the reef.”

“Yeah, if there is any.”

“I thought you said there was,” Orion protested.

“Something generates gravity. My guess is, it’s too sophisticated to be anything like a machine. Specific quark lattice, folded quantum fields, gravitonic-molecular intersection assembled at a subatomic level, something like that. Who knows, who cares. It’s not why we’re here.”

“What are we here for, then?” Orion asked in exasperation.

“The Silfen community.”

“Well, they’re not here, are they.” The boy waved his arm around in a broad half circle to illustrate the absence of the humanoid aliens. Tea sloshed out of his mug.

“Not yet.” Ozzie picked up one of the bluish gray fruits they’d gathered and started peeling it.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Okay, think on this. Nobody here believes we crashed here on Island Two by accident, right? I mean, what are the odds, man? The gas halo is big in anyone’s language. And the old Pathfinder, face it, we’re not talking Titanic here.”

“A natural collision was unlikely,” Tochee said.

“So we’re not here by accident. And what did we find yesterday? What’s at the end of the reef?”

“Spires,” Orion said doubtfully.

“Which we all decided would make excellent landing areas for flying Silfen.” Ozzie bit into the coarse fruit, grinning at his companions.

“They’ll come to us!” Orion smiled brightly.

“That is an excellent deduction, friend Ozzie.”

“Many thanks.” Ozzie wiped some of the juice from his beard. “It’s worth a try, anyway. I can’t think of any other reason for today.”

The tiniest of frowns flickered over Orion’s face, but he let the comment go. Ozzie couldn’t quite work out if the boy and Tochee were real or not. Temporal reset was not something he believed in. There were many ways of manipulating spacetime within a wormhole so that time appeared to flow faster around the observer, but traveling back in time was a fundamental impossibility. So if this day on the reef was an artificially generated reality, it was a perfect one, which logically meant his companions would replicate their real selves down to the last nuance. Then again, they might be sharing the dream—in which case why didn’t they remember the yesterdays? Of course, maybe there was some kind of closed temporal loop subsect operating inside the gas halo, a microcontinuum operating in parallel to the universe but with different time flow laws. He wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible. Intriguing idea to try to analyze, though it was a very long time since he’d attempted math that complicated. And today, he decided, wasn’t the day to begin again.