So he showed the boy how his worked, a neat little mechanical unit that clipped onto his water bottle. Its short hose was dropped into the nearby stream, and he pumped the handle grip, pulling water through the ceramic filters. It wasn’t quite as effective at eradicating bacteria as a powered molecular sieve, but it would get rid of anything truly harmful. The kid had fun, splashing about and filling his own ancient plastic pouches from Ozzie’s bottle.

“What about toothgel?” he asked.

Orion hadn’t brought any of that, nor soap. So he loaned the boy some from his own tube, laughing at Orion’s startled expression when it started to foam and expand in his mouth. He rinsed it out as instructed, spitting furiously.

Chemistry worked here, its reactions a universal constant. When Ozzie checked his handheld array, it remained as dead as a chunk of rock. The damping field, or whatever the Silfen used, had grown progressively stronger as he approached the forest yesterday. Now, it was even affecting his biochip inserts, reducing their capacity to little more than that of a calculator. His virtual vision interface was reduced to absolute basic functions.

As a concept, it fascinated Ozzie, rousing all his old physicist curiosity. He started to ponder mathematical possibilities as they rode off down the path.

“They’re close,” Orion announced.

It was late morning, and they were riding again after giving the horse and pony a rest for a while, walking alongside them. The forest trees were darker now, pines taking over at the expense of the other varieties. Although, to counter their darkling effect, the canopy overhead was letting through a multitude of tiny sunbeams to dapple the ground. The carpet of fallen needles that covered the path gave off a sweet-tangy scent.

“How do you know?” Ozzie asked. Even the lontrus’ heavy foot pads made no sound on the spongy loam.

The boy gave him a slightly superior look, then pulled his pendant out. Inside its metal lattice, the teardrop pearl was glimmering with a strong turquoise light, as if it contained a sliver of daytime sky. “Told you I was their friend.”

Both of them dismounted. Ozzie glanced suspiciously around the gray trunks as if there were going to be an ambush. He’d met the Silfen a couple of times before, on Jandk, walking into the woods with some Commonwealth cultural officers. To be honest he’d been a little disappointed; the lack of communication ability made his human prejudice shine out, it was all too much like talking to retarded children. What some people classed as playful mischief, he thought was just plain irritating; they acted like a play group at kindergarten, running, jumping, climbing trees.

Now, he could hear them approaching. Voices flittered through the trees, sweet and melodic, like birdsong in harmony. He’d never heard the Silfen singing before. It wasn’t something you could record, of course; and they certainly hadn’t sung while he was on Jandk.

As their voices grew louder, he realized how much their song belonged here, in the forest; it ebbed and flowed with a near-hallucinogenic quality, complementing and resonating with both the flickering sunbeams and gentle breeze. It had no words, not even in their language, rather a crooning of single simple notes by throats more capable than any human wind instrument. Then the Silfen themselves arrived, slipping past the trees like gleeful apparitions. Ozzie’s head turned from side to side, trying to keep them in his sight. They began to speed up, adding laugher to their song, deliberately hiding from the humans, dodging behind thick boles, darting across spaces.

There was no doubt about what they were. Every human culture had them in folklore and myth. Ozzie stood in the middle of the giant wood, surrounded by elves. In the flesh they were bipeds, taller than humans, with long slender limbs and a strangely blunt torso. Their heads were proportionally larger than a human’s, but with a flat face, boasting wide feline eyes set above a thin nose with long narrow nostrils. They didn’t have a jaw as such, simply a round mouth containing three neat concentric circles of pointed teeth that could flex back and forth independently of each other, giving them the ability to claw food back into their gullet. As they were herbivores, the vegetation was swiftly shredded as it moved inward. It was the only aspect that defeated the whole notion of them as benign otherworldly entities; whenever they opened their lips the whole mouth looked savage.

Many skin shades had been seen since first contact, they had almost as much variety as the human race, except none of them were ever as pale as Nordic whites. Their skin was a lot tougher than a human’s though, with a leathery feel and a spun-silk shimmer. They wore their hair long; unbound it was like a cloak coming halfway down their backs, though more often they braided it into a single long tail with colorful leather thongs. Without exception they were clad in simple short toga robes made from a copper and gold cloth that shone with a satin gloss. None of them had shoes, their long feet ended in four hook toes with thick nail tips. Hands were similar, four fingers that seemed to bend in any direction, almost like miniature tentacles, giving them a fabulous dexterity.

“Quick,” Orion called. “Follow them, follow them!” He let go of the pony’s reins and slithered down the side. Then he was off, running into the trees.

“Wait,” Ozzie called, to no avail. The boy had reached the trees at the side of the path, and was running hell-for-leather after the laughing, dancing Silfen. “Goddamn.” He hurriedly swung a leg over the saddle, and half fell from Polly’s back. Hanging on to the reins, he pulled the horse along behind him, urging her into the forest proper. His quarry was soon out of sight, all he had to go on were the noises up ahead. Thick boughs stretched out ahead of him, always at head height, causing him to duck around the ends, with Polly whinnying in complaint. The ground underfoot became damp, causing his boots to sink in, slowing him still further.

After five minutes his face was glowing hot, he was breathing harshly and swearing fluently in four languages. But the singing was growing louder again. He was sure he heard Orion’s laughter. A minute later he burst into a clearing. It was fenced by great silver-bark trees, near-perfect hemispheres of dark vermilion leaves towering a hundred feet over the grassy meadow. A little stream gurgled through the center, to fall down a rocky ridge into a deep pool at the far end. As arboreal idylls went, it was heavenly.

The Silfen were all there, nearly seventy of them. Many were climbing up the trees, using hands and feet to grip the rumpled bark, scampering along the arching branches to reach the clusters of nuts that hung amid the fluttering leaves higher up the trees. Orion was jumping up and down beside one trunk, catching the nuts a Silfen was dropping to him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ozzie snapped. He was dimly aware of the song faltering in the background. Orion immediately hunched his shoulders, looking sullen and defensive. “What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t kept up? Where is your pony? How are you going to find it again? This is not a goddamn game, we’re in the middle of an unmapped forest that’s half as big as the planet. I’m not surprised you lost your parents if this is what you did before.”

Orion raised an arm, pointing behind Ozzie. His lips were quivering as he said, “The pony’s there, Ozzie.”

He swiveled around to see both the pony and the lontrus being led into the clearing by a Silfen. Instead of being relaxed and amused as the Ozzie-of-legend should have been, the sight simply deepened his anger. “For Christ’s sake.”

“This is a Silfen world, Ozzie,” Orion explained gently. “Bad things don’t happen here.”