CHAPTER THREE
Felix is very excited. The next candidate world he steps into has liquid water oceans, and he spends a moment standing outside the gatehouse on a windswept cliff, smelling the salty air from the sea.
A spectacular aurora fades in the north -- scarlet, streaked by violet, encompassing a third of the sky. Felix wonders whether anything could live under such a fierce bath of cosmic rays.
The sun is rising, a cheerfully fat red giant with strands of arcing fire glinting at its edges, its face festooned by sunspots. The sky turns yellow, then a vivid orange that glimmers with wide, diffuse decks of suspended dust.
The newest parts of Felix shine in the ruddy morning light, but most of him is too tarnished to reflect. His armour is a mottled brown and grey collage of repairs and stains, cracks and scratches. A dew of antibiotic drips from his arm, leaving tracks in the grime.
An insect whizzes by Felix's head. He blinks, tracking it with a smile. It's a tiny, flitting thing with an exoskeleton and two pairs of translucent double wings. "I've got a good feeling about this place," Felix says to no one in particular, made heady by the promise of this rich ecosystem.
Uncomfortable with the idea of another aquatic adventure, he turns on heel and walks directly away from the water, proceeding down an escarpment of fallen boulders and gullies of rock layered in jagged bands of deep black and stark white. More winged insects buzz about.
He climbs out of a gully and thrills to see a rolling purple prairie extending before him. The inky grasses wave in the wind, rippled whorls chasing one another to the hazy horizon. Felix takes a sample stalk and examines it, delighted to find familiar green chlorophyll working along with a novel molecule bound to a dark, nearly black, pigment to absorb the widest spectrum from the fat red star's feeble light.
Felix makes a note.
He wades deeper into the prairie. He notices bands of baldness where no grasses grow, and tracks them back to the seaside cliffs where they seem to correlate to the zebra stripes in the rock face. "Curious," says Felix.
He walks on, his legs swishing through the grass. He sees many insects, some the size of birds. They seem to have no interest in him. When his passage frightens them out of their hiding places they bolt to the skies in the same old flocking patterns Felix knows well from Solar worlds.
Flocks are flocks.
Felix pauses. He feels a tremor through the soil. He looks up and scans the horizon, spotting a rising bloom of dust to the south. He dares to wonder hopefully: a stampede?
There is a disturbance in the grass. He can see it in a wave propagating directly toward him, far ahead of the rumbling dust cloud. The grass near him begins to rustle and whisper and then a second later a flurry of little tawny creatures bursts into view and rushes past him toward the cliffs. The herd parts around Felix, the grass slapping at his shins with their frenzied passage.
Felix looks up again as the rumbling grows louder. Something is pursuing these creatures -- a fleet of tall shadows, indistinct behind the veil of dust kicked up by their travel.
He looks down as the last of the dog-sized animals scampers past him, leaving him alone once more. He decides to find out what all the ruckus is about, hands on his hips as he awaits the arrival of the chasers.
He squints, magnifying his vision.
Eight quadrupeds hidden behind streaming sheets of long, natty hair bear eight riders: small tawny or blonde creatures like those that fled, but sitting upright, wearing cloaks and helmets, and brandishing weapons whose metal fixtures catch the sun and gleam.
Felix is beside himself with joy. He can barely contain his urge to dance around on the spot as the cavalry draws nearer, closing in on his position, the soil jumping and rattling beneath his feet. He can make out the faces of the little riders now: pinched, badger-like, binocular eyes ringed by flanges of black fur.
Felix chuckles. They're adorable.
The lead rider levels his weapon at Felix. Felix wonders if the little fellow is going to try to impale him with his crude, mediaeval implement. His mount gallops hard, consuming the distance. Felix steels himself.
And then, suddenly, the riders veer east in a wide arc, steering clear of Felix. He is disappointed to have been ignored.
The lead rider's weapon glints in the sun again. Felix looks back at it, puzzled. The weapon barks and flashes, and Felix watches a projectile sail out of it.
"What a cute little musket," comments Felix, dodging the shell easily.
He is blown off his feet by the powerful explosion that erupts when the shell strikes the ground. The impact tears apart the field, throwing up a massive blanket of ejecta, including Felix, followed by a rapidly swelling ball of fire. Felix crashes to the ground, still stupefied by the initial concussion, and then winces and cowers as intense flames wash over him, the leading edges of his armour glowing and deforming.
"Holy Zoran!" cries Felix as clods of smoking dirt drop all around him. His ears are still ringing from the electromagnetic pulse. He sniffs at the air and frowns, tasting the particulate debris and ambient radioactivity. His eyes widen in shock.
An atomic weapon?
Little badger things with atomic weapons?
Felix runs across the prairie and into the hills of striped stone, pursuing the riders at his fastest sprint. He comes to the cliffs just in time to see them force their prey over the edge, plummeting to the rocks below. The little tawny things screech as they fall.
Felix wonders whether the riders have spotted the gatehouse, but it appears they haven't. Instead they've spotted Felix again, and all eight train their weapons on his position.
"Hello," says Felix. "I represent Solar life --"
He leaves off to leap out of the way as the weapons fire with eight nearly simultaneous pops. He hits the ground and rolls right into a run, pelting away from the cliffs as fast as his legs can carry him.
He dives into a gully an instant before the first shock waves blast overhead. Then debris, then flames, then heavier chunks of debris. Felix covers his head. The electromagnetic pulses make him dizzy.
When the dust clears he peeks out. The rocks themselves are burning, pouring streams of sickly ochre and black smoke into the sky. The riders gallop through the ragged hole they've torn in the hills, reloading their weapons.
Felix makes a break for it.
The next blasts falls well short of him, but the shock waves still make him stumble. He runs faster. When he does risk a glance over his shoulder the riders are lost to the horizon, white smoke running up in billowing curtains from the flaming grasses, a brown miasma rising up behind from the burning cliffs.
He comes to a forest of taller plant life, a high ceiling of purple-black leaves supported by bifurcated trunks of something distinctly not wood. He approaches the first trunk and feels its hard, smooth bark. He raps his knuckles on it, and the trunk rings like a bell.
It's metal.
The canopy is very, very high considering the lack of competition -- the forest floor is barren, without shrubs or even moss. There are no insects on the ground, but Felix can hear and see them buzzing up higher among the dark leaves.
He walks on.
In a dense thicket of closely growing trunks he comes upon a set of camouflaged woven-fibre ladders leading up into the canopy. Felix climbs. He passes through a layer of purple leaves and emerges on the periphery of a village of mud-brick huts set on a massive platform of interlaced branches. Felix sets foot on the platform with an experimental application of weight. The platform groans in a metallic way but stands firm.
No one has noticed him. The villagers go about their business. Here, the little tawny creatures stand upright. Some carry simple, earthenware pottery. Others whittle arrows or pound plants into pulp with little metal pestles. All seem busy. Felix sees that they are not covered in fur, but rather a many-layered coat of stiff, pearlescent fibres that look as if they might be made of something not entirely unlike keratin. The tips are tinged scarlet. The creatures' bellies are covered by a dark yellow, bony armour which looks grown rather than forged.
None of the creatures has the black rings around the eyes that distinguished the riders with the weapons. They are also somewhat shorter; the tallest among them might come up to Felix's thigh.
Felix also notes that there appears to be three different kinds of animal, ranging from sturdier, beefier sorts to more willowy figures, with a more ambiguous type falling in the middle. The differences are emphasized by three different modes of clothing, which Felix speculates may be representative of a need to cover three disparate styles of reproductive anatomy.
He listens to them chatter to one another. Like many kinds of Solar life, they take advantage of the medium of their atmosphere to propagate oscillations encoding their language: clicks and rhythmic retroflex grunts, glottal jerks, palatal hums -- interesting but not inherently novel ways of pairing up airways and tongues. Also like Solar life they complement their speech with visual cues: flicking micro-gestures with the digits and a unique flashing of the eyes in step with certain phrases.
Felix strains his ears to the limit to collect everything he can, his mind whirling to find the patterns of syntax in the noise. He monitors a dozen conversations at once, his eyes darting to associate objects and actions with words...
He is noticed. A tawny-brown badger-like thing in a loincloth is pointing at Felix. The creature is as still as a statue, and it is this particular lack of motion that seems to attract the attention of the others.
The rest of the village freezes in mid-stride, staring dumbstruck at Felix as he emerges into their midst with an apologetic shrug.
"Hello," he says, his mouth twitching to emulate the chittering, clicking sounds of their language. "I represent Solar life. My name is Felix, and I come in peace."
At this utterance every one of the little tawny creatures drops to all fours and dashes away. In a heartbeat Felix is standing alone in a circle of huts, cooking fires burning unattended. He raises his brow and peers into the nearest fire pit: the kindling material is bricks of dried leaves mixed with metal shavings.
The creatures chitter amongst themselves inside their homes. Felix listens. He looks into the infrared to watch the blobs of heat interacting inside the huts, squabbling and interrupting one another. He sits down cross-legged in the middle of the village so as to appear less intimidating, and wonders how long it will take one of them to come meet him.
He observes with an amused smile an anxious operation to ferry two of the fatter creatures from one hut to another by way of a distraction -- someone banging on pottery on the opposite side of the village.
The fat creatures confer with the tallest of them in one hut, and then a few moments later the tallest one is shoved outside by the fat ones. They push at his blonde back, causing him to stagger forward into the clear. He adjusts his little orange sash with great dignity.
"Hello," chitters Felix.
The tall one freezes, eyes locked on him. After an interval he relaxes somewhat, and takes another tentative step forward on clawed toes. "Hello?" he echoes, then licks his nose nervously with a long, pink, articulate tongue.
"How do you do?" asks Felix pleasantly.
The tall badger-like fellow considers this. "What are you?"
"I am..." Felix trails off, searching through his limited vocabulary. "I am a visitor. A happy visitor."
"A happy visitor?"
"A visitor who does no harm."
The blonde creature makes a face. "You speak like a child."
"Talking is strange. No -- talking is new. Talking is new?"
"Where do you come from?" he snaps, flaring a set of sharp quills on the backs of his little hands in what is apparently a show of aggression.
Felix points up.
"The sky?"
"Yes, I come from the sky."
The tall badger-like fellow widens his eyes at this, then licks his nose again. "Are you from the Deep Forces Who Made The World?"
"No," says Felix conversationally. "I'm Felix."
The creature slowly lowers his quills. "Why have you come here?"
"To make a happy visit."
"What do you want?"
"I lack the talk. I wish to become with you not-enemies."
"You want to be friends?"
"Yes, I want to be friends."
"What if we don't want your friendship?"
"I would depart. Do you wish me to depart now?"
The creature licks his nose again, shuffles in place, then says, "Wait!" and scampers off back into the hut to consult with the fat ones. When he pokes his head out again he beckons at Felix to follow him.
Felix ducks low and squats in the door of the cramped hut. "We are the ruling family of this village," says one of the fat ones solemnly. "I am called Pebbles," he continues with great pomp. "This is my wife, Vapour, and our husband, High Grass. We are known as People."
The quill-plated badgers kneel down ceremoniously and extend their long, prehensile tongues. Felix sticks out his own tongue. They continue to look at him in solemn expectation. Sheepishly, Felix bends down toward his hosts and they all touch tongues together.
They straighten and dust off their knees, chittering happily.
They offer him their food, but Felix explains that he is too efficient to need it. The subsequent conversation is stilted and slow, but Felix devours every phoneme of the language until he begins to really glean its structure: the triple gender system, the simple but odd conjugation of verbs, the forest metaphors, the emotional twitching of the six-part cornea to indicate mood or, sometimes, tense.
He manages to convey that he travels on behalf of his kind, and attempts to explain that he plies space to discover what it holds. They stare uncomprehending when he mentions space, and it becomes clear that they have no notion of the world beyond their own planet, or even that their planet is round.
He asks why the forest floor is bare. "The hot rocks," they tell him. He asks how it is that cliffs can burn. "The hot rocks," they tell him.
Felix asks if he may have a closer look at one of the People. The fat ones shove High Grass forward. He licks his nose nervously. Felix gently touches the rows of pearlescent, red-tipped plating that form the hide, blinking as he adjusts his eyes to different wavelengths. He looks up. "This red deposit...this is lead, isn't it?"
The People look at him in confusion. Elements are elements -- their names are just sounds when you lack a periodic table.
"It is," decides Felix. "Your hide is composed of layers of lead shielding. This place..." He trails off as the connections become obvious: the dust-hung sky; the burning cliffs; forests that shy away from a somehow lethal ground; the metal shavings as a heat source; primitive people with atomic power -- "This whole place is made of concentrated thorium and uranium!"
"Nonsense names," says Pebbles. "They are the hot rocks."
"My congratulations," whistles Felix. "Your physiology must be truly amazing, living in this soup of radioactivity. The mere fact of your existence inspires hundreds of exciting questions. Via which sensory organs do you perceive radiation? How is the germ-line shielded against alpha particle damage? How do you metabolize all the lead? On and on. How wonderful!"
The fat ones preen. Tall Grass licks his nose. "You think we are wonderful?"
"I have a soft spot for advanced forms of life," admits Felix. "Your hot rocks may explain how you have a such nice, warm planet around such a cold, cranky star. Forgive me if I violate taboo, but will you tell me how you reproduce?"
All three of the little tawny People make a sudden snorting sound and look at their feet. High Grass whispers, "We are scandalized, Felix. We are decent People. It is barbaric to discuss sacred snuggling in the company of a wife."
"I'm terribly sorry," says Felix.
Vapour demurely departs, leaving Pebbles and High Grass fidgeting uncomfortably. Felix is patient, his expression expectant. At length High Grass volunteers a sparse description of the three-way fertilization process which generates an egg to be housed in the lead-infused body of the community's Matron until the season for migration to the birthing grounds among mountains of aluminium and lead.
"When does this season come? I would very much like to see it."
"The season is now," says Pebbles heavily.
"May I migrate with you?"
Pebbles looks at his feet again. "We cannot migrate. The Noble People have forbidden it. We are driven back by their steeds and their guns."
"Why?"
"They have decreed our line ended," says High Grass. "We lack the ocular rings of purity. The way to the mountains is blocked to us. Have you not noticed we have no young?"
"I'm unacquainted with normality on your world. I could not assume the generations live together."
"But how else could it be?"
Felix smiles, the leathery material around his lips crinkling at the corners. "There are as many ways to live as there are stars in the sky. Nature's capacity for invention is limitless." He slaps his thighs genially and then backs out of the hut to stretch to his full height. "Thank you very much for indulging me, and for your generous hospitality. I'll be moving along now."
The ruling family catches up with him as he crosses the platform, darting around his long strides. "Please, Giant Felix -- don't go! You've been sent by the Deep Forces to help us, it's certain!"
Felix pauses. "I've been sent by Solarkind. We're neighbours in the galaxy. I stopped by to say hello and to learn what I could. That's it."
"Please," begs High Grass, "won't you at least come and see our Matron? Won't you visit her and give her blessings?"
Felix sighs, then nods. High Grass cocks his head, perplexed. "Sorry," says Felix. "Among my kind moving the head up and down like that indicates affirmation."
"Follow me."
He allows himself to be led to the largest hut in the village, and he guesses that holding eggs in your body is a position of high esteem among the People. When he ducks his head inside, however, he's not sure what to guess anymore.
The Matron is grotesquely swollen with eggs, her limbs disproportionately tiny twigs sticking out from the four corners of her taut bellied girth. Her little head lolls on top, gibbering while she licks flying insects out of the air as they hover at the ceiling. Her entire body is rusty red, suffused with lead, glistening and encrusted with a film of translucent mucus. The hut smells terrible.
High Grass bows his head. "Felix, this is the Matron."
"Charmed, I'm sure."
"She is sick," says Pebbles. "She is too full of eggs. When she dies our every hope dies with her, as all of our matron nymphs have been slaughtered by the Noble People. She is our last chance."
The Matron groans in a queer way and then expels a viscous, lumpy waste fluid from two bulging sacs beneath her forepaws. The smell inside the hut decreases in quality exponentially. Felix closes his nose.
"That's very sad," he admits, his voice now muffled and nasal.
Pebbles and High Grass clasp their hands together earnestly. Pebbles says, "We know you can help us." Their six-part eyes twinkle as they quiver with emotion in a way that's almost mammalian.
Felix turns around. The entire village is gathered outside the hut, looking up at him with the same imploring eyes.
"Faeces," mutters Felix.
This is how he finds himself escorting a parade across a parched valley, pacing slowly beside an ambling wood-metal cart loaded up with the giant Matron and pulled by a team of six People. Twelve more flank the procession carrying metal-tipped spears. The fat members of the ruling family had wished them all a prosperous journey at the edge of the forest. High Grass, the tallest in the village, has been persuaded after much argument to accompany the procession.
"We're going to die," says High Grass. He snorts nervously, then snags an insect out of the air with his tongue.
He's right, of course. That very night under the scarlet light of the aurora they're attacked, not by Noble People but by a toothed predator that scampers like lightning on eight jittering legs. As soon as it appears in the light of their fire the People gather into a tight huddle, with highest ranking People in the core and lower ranking People on the exterior. This cluster of animals proceeds to dart around in an incredibly nimble, coordinated fashion, evading the predator.
The dance between predator and prey is well rehearsed and beautiful. It seems ritualistic rather than lethal.
But it is no ritual. The predator is fierce. Felix approaches to intervene but it's too late: a member of their guard has been snatched away to disappear screaming into the burgundy night.
The curtains of aurora undulate and shine, unconcerned.
The next morning Felix's staff catch up with them. The People are initially shy of the strange little homunculoid triad. "My staff will help defend us," explains Felix.
"They would share this danger?" asks High Grass.
Felix shrugs. "They have no feelings. They are expendable."
"Are they your slaves?"
Felix pauses. "No. They are my organs."
The aluminium and lead mountains crinkle the horizon, mauve through the haze. The procession marches onward, the wheels of the carriage squeaking and grinding, the pullers' pearlescent plating spiked outward to permit the passage of cool air near the skin. The route is chosen carefully, skirting the edges of the rocky patches where no vegetation grows, maintaining a course through the cool purple fields.
"Tall Grass, why has your clan been forbidden to reproduce?" asks Felix.
Tall Grass answers immediately, "No ocular rings. Yet one of ours intermarried with a noble wife, and her egg bore a child with only one ocular ring. It was judged an abomination and sacrificed to the Deep Forces, and the families of all three parents were banished from the birthing grounds forever."
Felix considers this. "You can interbreed, then? You're not a different species?"
"Of course not," replies Tall Grass, rising to his fullest badger height. "We are all of us People."
Felix nods. "Of course." He changes the subject. "How long have you had atomics?"
"Do you mean the hot rock cascade?"
"Yes."
"Our kind has always used the hot rock magic, since before telling. It is a gift and curse from the Deep Forces, and it has been given to every race of People before us."
"There were others?"
"When a big explosion comes, perhaps in a landslide, we see a hole into the world, and it shows us their things. Sometimes we see their buildings in there, or their go-go chariots, or their magic boxes that spit baby lightning forks. They had all sorts of crazy stuff." He snorts. "Sometimes we see them, too. We see their shadows, that is. Outlined on the walls."
Felix shakes his head sadly. "You poor dears," he says. "Living in a world where fission is easy...it's not fair. You should've had more time to develop before wielding that kind of power."
"We can blow up every life in the world," says High Grass. "The high priests for every clan agree. They say history repeats itself, over and over again, and every great civilization has burned. One day we will be great, and then we will burn, too."
"That's a fairly dark philosophy."
"It is a sacred cycle of life and death. It is what it is. It will happen to you, too. Nothing is forever."
"Not even your Deep Forces?"
"The Deep Forces are beyond forever."
Felix smirks. "Quite."
At midday they are startled by a blaze of light from the south-west. When the glory clears a tall mushroom cloud is blooming on the distant horizon behind them. The land and the air take turns to rumble.
The People look for a moment, then press on. "There is a war there," says High Grass, explaining their blase reaction to Felix. "The big bombs are common. Slave armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands clash in service of the Great Club of Nations and the Unified Bloc of Clans."
"Why there?" asks Felix.
"The land is holy," says High Grass simply. "Here now, we arrive..."
They crest a hill and Felix looks where High Grass points: nestled in the foothills at the mouth of a highway into the hills is a black fortress, a series of looming domes bristling with cannon muzzles, rising from behind a deep moat lined with brick battlements reinforced in metal cages. The surrounding grounds are pockmarked by craters from the small nuclear blasts of past sqirmishes. Behind the fortress a high wall extends in either direction as far as the eye can see, blocking every pass. Soldiers mounted on hairy beasts burst from the stables and form up in a line, then one breaks free and rides toward the parade of People.
She is a tall Noble Person, her black-ringed eyes held high beneath her gleaming helmet. She meets them at the top of the hill, baring her yellow teeth even before her mount has stopped. She sniffs. "Your clan of lesserkind is banished from the birthing grounds. Turn back now or be cheated of your rightful cancer."
She slows midway through this delivery, her eyes flicking over to Felix and then finally resting there. "What, may I ask, are you?" she demands with contempt.
"I represent Solar life. My name is Felix, and I come in peace."
"I've seen you before, monster. You evaded my fire."
"Yes. That was before I understood what it was. I assure you that won't be necessary now."
The mounted Noble Person makes an ugly face, then settles back into her saddle with her head held high. "Because you intend to comply with the law and leave this place?"
"No," says Felix politely. "Because I have the ability to inhibit nuclear reactions." He taps the side of his head, and gives her a little smile. "Good day to you, madam."
Felix walks past her. The People stare after him nervously.
"Stop!" barks the mounted Noble Person. "I command you, freak! Stop now."
Felix keeps walking. Unwilling to be left behind, the People begin hauling the cart onward with renewed vigour in order to catch up. The Noble Person seems frozen, her mouth hanging open and her long tongue lolling limp. She suddenly snaps out of it and draws a long, heavy musket, priming and cocking it in a rapid, practiced manoeuvre. "Stop or your Matron dies!" she bellows, swivelling the muzzle at the cart.
Felix does not stop. Her weapon cracks loudly. The People screech.
The pellet hits the Matron on the side of her gigantic belly. It sinks into the quill-mail flesh and then rebounds. It drops into the carriage, smoking. The Matron belches wetly.
When the People see that she has not been injured they start to laugh -- a staccato, snorting wheeze accompanied by a shaking of the digits. High Grass points to the Noble Person and guffaws, in his way. She yells, "Silence, lesserkind!"
High Grass manages to chitter, "Without the hot rock fire you are just a Person. You have one spear, we have eleven. Shall we cheat you of your rightful cancer?"
The Noble Person flees.
As they proceed down the road to the gate and draw nearer to the fortress they are met with volleys of shells. The shells land on the rocks and bounce, or break open. None explode. There seems to be a bit of a panic in the fortress -- apparently reliance on a single kind of ordnance has left them without other vectors of attack.
"How can you do this?" whispers High Grass. "How can you do this and claim you are not from the Deep Forces? This is powerful magic."
"Any craft or skill beyond one's own experience," says Felix philosophically, "may lend a false impression of magic. My mind, you must understand, is based on a science written in the language of nature itself. Thus, I have the ability to interact with my local environment in ways that may seem baffling to you, but I assure you that the process is purely material and mechanical."
They both flinch as a shell sails right over their heads, whistling. It drops to the rocks with a sad clunk.
One of the guards is struck by another shell; his arm is broken and his chest-armour cracked. The other guards load him into cart behind the Matron, and just as they finish Felix's rusted grey staff member is squashed into a tangle of debris by another large shell. Felix frowns.
The procession stops at the gate. A row of archers stands before it, arrows tense in their bows. A group of three Noble People approach and take up positions just out of the line of fire. "Abomination!" cries one, pointing at Felix.
"It's pronounced Fe-lix."
"Kill him!"
A volley of arrows flies at Felix. Their depleted-uranium tips penetrate his armour, sticking into him in a dozen places. His expression darkens. "Ouch!" he grunts, yanking an arrow out of his neck. Amber fluid gutters from one of his split cables.
He turns around to see that the two pullers nearest him have also been felled. They lie on the ground, their heads shaking slowly. One of them paws at his wound, which bubbles as air whistles out around the shaft of the arrow.
Felix's head snaps back to face the Noble People.
"That's enough," he declares. "There will be no more violence or I will be forced to demonstrate my own martial talents."
"Abomination!"
"Your spirit of diplomacy is notably lacklustre. This is your final warning: order your guards to disarm or I will disarm them for you."
"Fire! Fire, you fools!"
There is a flurry of motion as Felix leaps into action, his limbs blurring. In less time than it takes to draw one deep breath every noble guard has been disarmed. They stagger back, clutching their broken paws, bows bent at their feet, craning their heads to watch Felix flip through the air. The Noble People are knocked from their mounts, which rear up and flee. Felix drags the riders by the legs into a rough pile and then stands over them, arms crossed.
He looks up at the gate, then back down at his charges. "Order the gate opened," he says quietly.
When he doesn't get a positive response he lurches forward toward them. The Noble People squirm back. One of them voids his waste fluid messily. Felix repeats his command, and it is relayed with a hoarse series of clicks by the fattest Noble Person. He clutches a musket to his chest, chewing on its handle for comfort.
Felix leans down and scoops up the weapon. He turns it over in his hands idly as he watches the great gates grind open. He takes apart the stock and peers inside the barrel. "Very nice," he says, looking down at the Noble People. "This beryllium trigger is ingenious. Quite impressive indeed."
The gates boom against the wall as they stop, yawned open, the pass beyond beckoning.
He drops the weapon and gestures at the People to move. They begin pushing the cart through the gate, the Matron muttering to herself and licking insects out of the air. High Grass stops before Felix, looking up at him between furtive glances at the huddle of frightened Noble People. "You're coming with us, of course?"
"No, I have to be moving on," says Felix. "Good luck."
"But they'll attack us from the rear. They'll send in troops to kill us all. Without your protection we're doomed!"
Felix sighs, and squats down to bring his face level with the blonde badger. "I'm afraid this is a problem you'll have to work out on your own. I'm just a surveyor. I'm not here to save your world. I'm only here to assess the ecosystem."
High Grass pauses and licks his nose. "What do you mean?" he asks seriously. "What have you been sent here to judge?"
"I have been sent to judge whether your world poses a threat to my kind or, conversely, whether it might be suitable for integration into our society."
A visible shudder of anticipation runs through High Grass' quills. "You mean there might be more -- more like you, masters of the Deep Forces -- coming into the world?"
"I doubt it. I should imagine the Panstellar Neighbourhood will elect to quarantine your civilization until it matures. We will leave you be."
High Grass sags. "Then we're alone. We're doomed."
Felix touches his little spiky shoulder tenderly. "Don't underestimate yourselves. This world poses unique challenges, but the People are clever. My own native world was once threatened with atomic self-extinction."
High Grass perks up. "Really?"
Felix nods. "We prevailed, against that and worse." He pauses, looking up into the bright orange sky at the point he knows the Solar Nebula lies. "Much worse," he says somberly.
Felix and his staff watch as the cart laden with the swollen Matron and the injured guard draws further along the path winding between the foothills, at last disappearing behind a curve. He looks down, slightly surprised to see the Noble People and their archers still hugging the ground at his feet. The fattest of the Noble People looks up at him. He croaks, "Please don't kill me."
Felix shrugs. "Okay," he says.
As he walks back toward the seaside cliffs and the gatehouse, impotent shells dropping around him, he pities the poor People but at the same time is forced to admire their tenacity. Could Human Beings have prospered if they had wielded the power of atomics in the Dark Ages? Felix reckons not.
If the People do survive this atomic infancy, what manner of creature will they be forced to become in order to best such stacked odds? Quite possibly, one too fierce to tolerate.
He passes back through the forest, and crosses the prairie. He steps over the ragged, still smoldering gaps in the uranium-thorium zebra-striped cliffs, and arrives at the gatehosue which is, thankfully, intact. Ants scurry about their business in glittering black streams.
Felix prepares his report.
Beware the atomic badgers. Sincerely, F.
