“Many large flying creatures are passing,” Tochee said. “I do not think they are birds.”

Ozzie shook his head to try to clear the lethargy away. Big mistake. He clamped his jaw hard to combat the sudden feeling of nausea. “Where?”

Tochee’s tentacle straightened to point toward the bow.

Orion was already struggling against the thick folds of his sleeping bag as Ozzie maneuvered around him. He slowed himself with a couple of tugs, then gripped the decking firmly with his right hand. It left his head sticking clear of the raft, making him think of a medieval soldier peering cautiously over the castle rampart to watch an invading army approach. A gentle breeze blew his Afro about. Tochee and Orion moved up beside him.

“Wow,” Orion whispered. “What are they?”

Ozzie used his retinal insert to zoom in. The flock must have been spread out over half a mile, hundreds of leather-brown spots slowly swirling along behind a tight little cluster. It was like watching a speckly comet, with a loose tail undulating slowly in the wake of the nucleus. They were over a mile away, tracing a wispy line against the infinite blue of the gas halo atmosphere. His e-butler brought a host of enhancement programs on-line, isolating one of the spots. The image was slowly refined, bringing the creature out from its original fuzzy outline.

“Holy crap!” Ozzie muttered.

“What is it?” Orion demanded.

Ozzie told his e-butler to display the picture on the handheld array. He turned the unit to the boy. “Oh!” Orion said softly.

It was a Silfen, but not like any they’d seen in the forests as they walked the paths between worlds. This one had wings. At first sight, it was as if the simple humanoid figure was lying spread-eagled at the center of a brown sheet.

“I should have guessed,” Ozzie said. “Yin and yang. And we’ve already seen the fairy folk version.” The flying Silfen did look uncannily like a classical demon. With the sun behind it, Ozzie saw the wings were actually a thick membrane that stained the light a dark amber. They were divided into upper and lower pairs that seemed to overlap; certainly there was no crack of sunlight between them. The top set were fixed to the Silfen’s upper arms right down to the elbow, allowing the forearms to move about freely. A filigree of black webbing sprouted from the upper arms in a leaf-vein pattern, stretching the membrane between them. On the legs, the longer, second set of wings extended as far as the knee, then bent outward, leaving a broad V-shape between their curving edges so the lower legs were free. The Silfen would still be able to walk on land. A long whip-tail extended out from what on a human would be the coccyx, tipped by a reddish kitelike triangle of membrane.

The Silfen wasn’t flying the way planet-bound birds did. Here in the gas halo it simply soared. The big membranes were sails, allowing it to catch the wind and cruise along where it wished.

Watching the flock as they glided along in huge lazy spiral curves, Ozzie felt an enormous pang of envy. They had what was surely the ultimate freedom.

“We should do that,” Orion said wistfully. “Sew ourselves into the sail and fly along. We could go wherever we wanted, then.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie agreed. He frowned, the boy’s idea making him concentrate on what he was seeing, rather than just gawping in envious awe. “You know, that’s wrong.”

“What is?” Tochee asked.

“This whole arrangement. The Silfen body is designed to walk in a gravity field, just like ours, right. So if you’re going to modify one to flap around the gas halo, why leave the legs and arms? This isn’t a modification to allow them to live here permanently. What they’ve produced is like a biological version of our Vinci suits. It’s temporary, it has to be. You don’t need legs here, and you couldn’t carry those wings about very easily on a planet.”

“I guess,” Orion said dubiously.

“I’m right,” Ozzie announced decisively. “It’s another part of their goddamn living-life-through-the-flesh stage. A great one for sure, but we’re still not seeing the final them, the adult community.”

“Okay, Ozzie.”

He ignored the boy, thinking out loud. “There’s got to be a place where they get these modifications when they arrive. Somewhere in the gas halo. Somewhere with sophisticated biological systems.”

“Unless this is a natural part of their phase,” Tochee said.

“Excuse me?”

“On my home, we had small creatures that moved through several phases between hatching and the adult breeding form: aquatic, to land, to burying. They changed accordingly for their environment. Their fins would fall off allowing them to grow primitive legs; then they would develop powerful front claws to dig, allowing their hind legs to wither away. Some of our scientific theorizers speculated that our own manipulator flesh was simply an advanced version of the morphosis mechanism. They were not popular linking us with the creatures, although I can appreciate the logic in their thoughts.”

“I get it,” Orion said. “When the Silfen come here they just grow themselves wings, and when they leave, they shrivel up and drop off again. Hey! I wonder if this is their birth stage, or the mating stage?” The boy sniggered the way only young teenagers could at the idea of mating.

“Could be,” Ozzie agreed reluctantly, suddenly intrigued by the idea of sex while flying. “Either way, it involves some heavy-duty biological manipulation. Let’s hope they’re additions. We need some serious help here, guys.”

“Then ask them,” Orion said. He pulled his friendship pendant out from his grubby T-shirt. The greenish glow at the center was bright enough to be seen in the full light of the gas halo’s sun. “Wow,” he muttered. “There must be a lot of them in that flock.” He checked his safety rope was secure around his waist, and pushed off the Pathfinder. “Yo! Hey, we’re here! Over here!” His arms semaphored wildly. “It’s me, Orion, your friend. And Ozzie and Tochee, too.”

Ozzie hesitated for a second. The resemblance to demons was just uncomfortably close…He crawled back along the raft to his pack while Orion kept on shouting and waving. The boy would never attract their attention like that; they were too far away. Though, at the back of his mind, Ozzie suspected the Silfen flock already knew they were here. He pulled a couple of flares from the pack, and headed back up to the prow.

“Get back here,” he told Orion. As soon as the boy was back holding on to the raft, Ozzie fired a flare, deliberately angling it to the side of the flock. Without gravity holding it back, the brilliant red star flew an impressive distance before dwindling away. The Silfen flock seemed oblivious to it. Ozzie cursed under his breath. “All right then, if that’s the way it’s gotta be.” He pointed the second flare tube right at the flock and fired. This time the dazzling point of light almost reached the edge of the flock before it burned out.

“They had to have seen that!” Orion said. “They just had to.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie said. “You’d think.” But the Silfen showed no sign of changing direction.

“Fire another one,” Orion said.

“No,” Ozzie said. “They saw it. They know we’re here.”

“No they don’t, they haven’t come to help.” The boy’s voice was whiny from desperation. “They’d come and help if they saw us. I know they would. They’re my friends.”

“I’ve only got a couple more flares left. It’d be a waste.”

“Ozzie!”

“Nothing we can do, kid. They’re not interested. If there’s one thing I do know about the Silfen, you can’t force them to do anything.”

“They have to help us,” Orion said forlornly.

Ozzie stared after the flock as it soared along its twisty course away from the Pathfinder. “I wonder what’s so important they’ve got to go see,” he muttered to himself. Even with his inserts on full magnification he couldn’t see anything significant in the direction they were heading. There had to be something fairly close, surely? Not even a Silfen could survive indefinitely without food and water. Or maybe they hunted the avian creatures who lived in the gas halo.