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CHAPTER 4
We all know Felix's holy grail.
We all know the jackpot is a post-industrial civilization with whom we might make friends -- another intelligent kind to stand with Solar life, the Pegasi and the Great Henniplasm as peers of the Neighbourhood.
After so many lifeless worlds any sign is ambrosia to him, no matter how humble. He tries to keep his expectations appropriately meagre.
He stifles a sigh as he steps out onto another barren landscape of craters and dust beneath a black sky. He wilts at the knees, his body sagging not from disappointment but rather a somatic realization of the planet's strong gravity.
He straightens, rolling his shoulders as he becomes accustomed to their new weight. He takes a breath, tastes traces of nitrogen briefly before his duo of staff step in to disinfect him. Felix holds up his arms tolerantly, to make the job easy.
The sun crests the craggy horizon. It's an unremarkable yellow dwarf. Shadows dry up from the basins, absorbed into the crater rims.
He sets off on a stroll, scanning the environment with a bored expression. The rock features are sharp and uneroded, the impact basins ancient. This is a place utterly without weather but what dust and fire flotsam provides when meteorites fall.
Felix yawns.
And then he stops short on the next rim: in the crater below there are artifacts, their rectilinear edges standing in stark contrast to the organic texture of natural relief around them. He plods down over the rocky edge and then walks a mile across the dust-coated interior before arriving at the artifacts. They make him smile, the tough skin around his black eyes wrinkling into a million lines.
A pole stands with a piece of coloured fabric hanging heavy against it, the edges dangling with long, still threads. It is not the banner of the Panstellar Neighbourhood. At its foot is a piece of derelict technology: the struts and base of a modular lander. The common constraints of economic engineering have made the object almost familiar, but upon inspection the details are clearly alien.
Intelligent spacefarers have visited this place, and left their humble mark.
On one side of the abandoned lander's base is a shiny plaque inscribed with glyphs, diagrams and a tight grid of mathematical ratios and corresponding symbols for various constants. Felix speculates that a series of sinewy lines may be a depiction of the authors as physical entities, though he finds it hard to make heads or tails of the miasma of sweeping, tapering limbs.
On the opposite side of the lander is a second plaque, this one inscribed with a diagram of the star system. Felix sees that the planet upon which he stands is represented as one partner in a binary pair. It is the second, smaller partner that is surrounded by a halo of glyphs. That, guesses Felix, is home.
Three hours later that home rises, its sunward half a blaze of sparkling blue ocean under swirls of white cloud, the disc larger than Felix's outstretched palm -- a very close companion, a swiftly cruising sky-brushing moon.
As the blue moon climbs in the black sky it is accompanied by a sussurussing of electromagnetic static. Felix listens. His hearing spans the band, panning for guideposts amongst the noise. Using a key ratio from the first plaque on the lander, he discovers a relationship between sextets of frequencies, and finds the information transmitted within each set to be mutually complementary. Added together, they form a signal carrying information.
The taste of information, so stark and crisp and bright against the bed of randomness, fills Felix with an inexplicable emotion particular, perhaps, to himself as an individual. The quest has wrought in him a special sympathy for organized patterns that may have no real analogue for us homebodies.
There are messages there -- indecipherable, opaque, bizarre -- but still wonderful, wonderful messages encoding something banal or beautiful from the experience of some living thing whose mind could watch itself think. A thing like you or me. A thing like Felix.
Felix looks up at the blue world. As it turns its dark half begins to glitter with the light of cities. His eyes widen, and he grins.
It's peers. After all this time -- peers.
He looks around quickly, narrowing his eyes and blinking through the wavelengths as he inventories the craters around him for minerals. It is clear that his first order of business is to get himself to the blue moon, and meet whomever lives there: thus he will require a spaceship.
Felix returns to camp. He calls his staff and drips communication oil into an anthole on the gatehouse...
During the months of labour that follow Felix pauses when the moon rises, its azure shine gleaming on the rows of matter printers set up around the gatehouse; he tunes into his favourite sextets of frequencies. He sits on the edge of the ant-covered superstructure and closes his eyes to concentrate. He's learned that the radio broadcasts encode no auditory data: every ounce of it is visual. Using the plaque math Felix can assemble the picture stream and see it change over time, but the significance of the squirming, sliding, flashing, quivering blobs displayed therein remain an enigma.
He hops down to help his duo of staff secure a section of hull plating to the superstructure, then holds it steady while they sew it into place. The central shield pod is almost complete. Ants swarm over the masts and booms, checking for microfractures where the nanotube bundles meet. They seal the seams, beads of structural growth culture dripping from their engineered anuses.
The smell is lost in this nearly airless place. Felix doesn't mind one bit.
They've been able to dig down to a deposit of liquid fluorine for use as an oxidizer, and Felix watches as the last ants emerge from their tunnel to add their crystallized flakes to the booster. They each drop off their contribution and then wander off aimlessly, eventually finding their way back to the gatehouse to dip themselves in new instructions.
And then it's done. The last ant disappears into the gatehouse and no more emerge beyond the regularly scheduled maintenance crawl for the gate itself. The barren field seems extravagantly empty to Felix now that the matter printers have been broken down and the all the various components of his spaceship have been drawn together in the lonely centre, a modest craft tilted hopefully toward the sky.
"Okay," says Felix, "let's go."
He climbs into the pilot chariot and his staff follow up, the copper-green one standing on the back of the matte black one to reach their protective compartment, then helps his chum up after him. A platoon of thirty-two ants march past Felix's heels and gather themselves in their own compartment. Felix snaps both lids shut, tethers himself in, then squats down and rips the igniter cord.
The fuel tank rumbles, bucks, then pours thrust through the bell-shaped booster. Felix's chariot lifts atop it. Felix grips the edges, the stars in his vision smeared by vibration. He's pressed into his tethering with four gravities, then six, then eight...
He wrestles his head sideways. The rocky horizon is drawing away, beginning to bow into a wide curve. He's on his way.
Soon he has unfurled the stellar sails and the system's primary is feeding an invisible stream of hot particles into the little ship, sending it hurtling toward the blue moon. Days pass. Every kilometer closer makes him giddier in anticipation.
He is immersed in a bath of radio. There are patterns in the flopping cascade of ropey tendrils depicted there -- a grammar, a syntax -- but for Felix still a bewildering lack of meaning.
He drinks in the sunlight, mending and dreaming...
The blue moon swells, its face cut by bands of white cloud. Between them Felix catches glimpses of brown and green continents, the shine of cyan ice shelves near the poles. As he draws nearer he is able to discern the odd tiny glimmer in space around the moon: technological satellites in geosynchronous orbit, winking as they turn and catch the light.
The gossamer stellar sails fold in as gravity takes over. Soon the moon has lost its curve and become a wall of rippling water and churning cloud filling his vision from horizon to horizon. Felix ducks down beneath the protective shield as his ship picks up speed and the air at its nose begins to burn...
He's jolted once as the parachutes blast free and jolted again as they catch the gathering sky to slow his descent.
The cloud deck rushes up at him and he plows through it, the sudden cooling causing billows of steam to roil out in the ship's wake. The wind whistles keenly. The ocean beneath him grows until he can make out white-capped waves, marching in fractal interference patterns in every direction.
An instant later the craft plunges into the sea with an explosion of spume.
When it bobs back to the surface, twisted, scarred and bent, Felix releases the dissolving agent to eat the hull, disconnects the protective pocket containing the ants so he can strap it over his shoulder, frees his staff to swim beside him, and then begins kicking and stroking his way toward shore. An hour into his journey he hears a high-pitched whine and cranes his head to watch two powered aircraft swoop over him, bound for the region where he splashed down, their wings enormously wide in order to tease lift from the thin atmosphere.
Like vultures, they circle. Felix's head in amongst the waves is very small, and they do not seem to notice him. After twenty minutes they accelerate higher and turn back toward a continent Felix can just barely make out as a haze on the horizon ceilinged by a ridge of fluffy cumulous clouds.
Felix resumes swimming.
It's nightfall as he walks out onto a smooth, sandy beach ringed by exceedingly tall, green plants that favour needles over leaves. The evening is brightened by the great face of the dusty-tan companion planet looming in the sky. Felix chews on a few of the needles, and examines their contents critically: again, good old fashioned chlorophyll is at work.
Sometimes it's the great similarities, rather than the bizarre differences, that Felix finds most intriguing when comparing ecosystems.
He releases the ants, who swarm ahead of the heels of his staff as they set out to investigate their situation. They pass hot springs and geyser jets, outlets of an active geothermal crust. Small animals can be heard scuffling in the undergrowth, giving the staff wide berth. At last Felix comes to a tall ceramic wall and he turns to follow it as it meanders away from the coast, the platoon of ants teased out across its glazed face.
When the sun rises again they've made their way to a modest hill: the vista illuminates and Felix sees that he is within a giant walled compound with a kind of palace at its centre, a spire-encrusted keep girdling a quiver-like assembly of tightly packed towers and narrow, filigreed minarets.
Such wonderful architecture is made possible by low gravity, he marvels.
He makes for the palace. When he gets closer he finds a ceramic tiled path, and he's not on the path long before he's forced to jump back into the prickly bushes to hide as two organisms round the bend and stroll toward him.
They are bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical, like most forms of complex life Felix has encountered (with the notable exception of Pegasi staff, who are radially symmetrical and multi-legged). The creatures are amber or golden brown and, in places, translucent. Felix can see their organs working inside of them, including a vertebrae-like cage of protection extending around what appears to be a brain at the base of the neck. Their heads are small and unremarkable aside from having three wide, blinking eyes set equidistantly around the horizontal axis.
The most striking feature, however, is the arms -- or, rather, the fingers. Fully two thirds of the creatures' personal space by volume is occupied by six long, articulated tentacles radiating from two small, almost ridiculously slight-looking shoulders. The tentacles wave in front of them, weaving intricate, fleeting patterns in the air.
Felix recognizes the patterns from the broadcasts: they're talking.
The long-fingered creatures proceed past his hiding spot, and Felix leans out after them with his eyes wide to catch every flick and swoop of the spatially-defined conversation. The structure is elegant and logical -- he just wishes he knew what in space any of it means.
He can't very well step out and introduce himself without any understanding of how to speak. This language is worlds away from the primitive chittering of the badger-things: it's a nuanced, mature, abstracted, high concept channel of communication and Felix is profoundly lost without a wider context.
That night he tunes into the radio broadcasts again and finds his salvation in a transmission that seems to be designed for children: the patterns of sweeping limbs are slower and more deliberate, bracketed by repetition or variation and, most importantly, interspersed with trinocular panoramas of objects as they appear across a certain narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, rendering the images to Felix's eye as a grade from urine yellow to lime green.
Never the less, he is able to follow along: the boat on the ocean transports objects and passengers, the farmer on his land plants seeds and eggs for the rainy season, the steam carriage goes chuff-chuff-chuff all the way to some kind of festival...
Felix looks down at his stubby, Human-form fingers. He frowns. If he's going to be understood here he's going to need to grow a little. He bends down and tosses a few graphite- and clay-rich flakes of shale into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully.
The next morning Felix and his support party press on closer to the palace, his fingertips tingling as they extend molecule by molecule. In a clearing where several ceramic tile paths meet he finds a great fountain filled by a host of carved animal figures. It is not clear to Felix whether the depictions are naturalistic or fantastic, but he does note that their dirt-streaked, moss-clung surfaces are not at all dissimilar from the look of his own armour when viewed in the yellow-green band.
He climbs up into the fountain and sits between two statues, his staff clambering up after him to hide behind his back. Nestled thus he is able to observe dozens of conversations throughout the day as groups of the long-fingered stroll by or stop to watch the streams of water tumbling down into the ornate basin. Few of them pay Felix any notice at all, though he experiences a moment of triumph when he realizes he's comprehended the tone and content of a snide comment from one of the passersby as they point at him and exclaim, "Modern art is unfit for civil vision; behold this and I dare you to contradict me!"
"Your authority is justly inflated and dark," agrees the critic's companion as they walk on.
The next to take notice of Felix is a diminutive juvenile. While her guardians or parents or teachers converse she stares at Felix, her head-pod twisting to expose each blinking eye in turn. When she is led away she keeps one eye trained on Felix, tugging reluctantly on her escorts' limbs as she struggles to straggle.
Felix delights -- if there is one constant in form across all diverse kinds of life, it's the insatiable curiosity of the young; thus, he is not entirely surprised when the juvenile turns up again at dusk when the clearing around the fountain has emptied. A wide-winged aircraft passes overhead, its condensation trail glowing as it catches the last rays of the setting sun. The child cranes her head up to look at it, then focuses on Felix as she gets closer to the fountain.
She plants herself before him, fingers quivering. After a long pause she knits patterns into the air in front of her, and Felix reads them. She says, "I saw you move."
Carefully, slowly, Felix raises his hands to display the long, multi-knuckled tendrils extending from six of his fingertips. He says, "Nonsense. I am an excellent statue. I never move."
"Contradiction with respect to authority: you're moving right now, which I dare you to explain."
"I admit that I am not a real statue."
"That's obvious. With limp sacs: you will describe your nature."
"I don't understand limp sacs."
"With respect to authority, then: you will describe your nature."
Felix nods to himself, fully grokking the interrogative protocol for the first time. "I am a traveller called Felix from a faraway world."
"You weave words like a baby," declares the child, who then raises her head-pod to stare at a spot over Felix's shoulders. "And you have no authority sacs like a baby, too." She straightens, her head cocked to one side. "With a craving for definition: you will state whether you are an exotic baby."
"I am an adult," replies Felix. "It's just that my kind speak differently than you...um, individuals."
"The King's Fingers."
"I don't understand the King's Fingers."
"Our kind. We are the King's Fingers. With a desire for common nomenclature: you will identify your kind."
"I'm an example of...Solar...life," explains Felix, approximating the proper name as best he can by defining it in terms of oscillations in a medium -- a ripple signature. "I'm what's called a Human Executive, or Zorannic Man. I am honoured and pleased to meet one of the King's Fingers." Felix bows.
"With locked laughter: you will explain why you bent over like that."
"It is a gesture of respect where I come from."
"You're funny. I like you."
"I like you, too."
"I have to go home to feed now or the guardians will tweak my ridge. With devotion: you will state whether you will be here at the fountain tomorrow."
"I will," nods Felix.
The child scampers away.
When the sun rises again and the idle strollers return to chat around the fountain Felix pays redoubled attention to the twin sacs positioned behind each of the King's Fingers' shoulders. He notes how they vary in their level of inflation and pigmentation from the soft, transparent sacs of youngsters to the rigidly swollen black pustules of the palace's high officials. The sacs do not simply ripen with physical maturity, however, as evidenced by clearly aged, decrepit specimens with soft sacs; invariably, these individuals show marked deference toward those with darker, harder authority sacs.
Felix is now able to catch more of the content of their conversations than ever: about weather, chiefly, though a close second would be polite debates over the relative merits of hypothetical mergers between various institutional entities whose names Felix hears repeated over and over again.
"Ownership split between the Consolidated Information Bank of Brothers and the Combined Interested Parties of the North would propagate a just stewardship nexus, in my most cute opinion."
"You are too modest. Even your cute opinions are akin to a cloudy midnight, so bloated is your authority."
"You make my ridge blush with your accuracy, my precise companion. Also, I predict rain tonight."
Shortly after midday Felix's friend returns, this time accompanied by an adult with modestly turgid sacs. The child, who has still not given Felix any name to know her by, explains to the adult that Felix is not in fact a statue but rather an alien being. The adult is dubious. The child demands that Felix speak up for himself, but he does not. The child stamps her little feet and laces her words rapidly and with aggressive emphasis, renewing her demands. Felix stays absolutely still, and says nothing. The child throws a tantrum, fingers beating on the tiles, and is eventually carried away by her guardian.
It is two days later when last chatters have departed for their evening meal and the yellow sun has blushed the western sky that Felix's little friend returns once more. "You played the statue," she accuses. "I got in trouble."
"I'm sorry," offers Felix. "I'm not ready to talk to an adult yet. I don't know enough about how they'll respond. Excellent children, like yourself, can be expected to be more open minded."
"That was very rude."
"I'm sorry," says Felix again.
She forgives him quickly, and draws out from her skirts a folding chart depicting the local star system. She points to each planet in turn and asks (or, rather, states her wish to be told) whether it is the home of the wondrous if ugly Solars.
"None of them is my home. Our worlds circle foreign stars that lie far to the east. I could show you the brightest of them on a map of your sky."
The child steps back from the fountain's edge, startled by Felix's reply. "The True Knowledge is that the lesser stars were not touched by the King, so they have no life. This is a fact with full authority."
Felix chooses his next finger-tangled words carefully. "That authority may be imperfect. The fact is disproved by my existence here today."
The child falls silent, then squeezes shut her eyes and trembles. As Felix watches, the little soft sacs behind her shoulders swell slightly. An inky bloom squirts into the sac fluid, diffusing through and darkening it from pale yellow to a bronze amber. She opens her eyes, then slowly weaves her words with quaking digits: "I never thought of that. If the True Knowledge is incomplete, if it is flawed or even wrong -- then anything is possible. Anything."
"Even me," nods Felix. "Even you." Though the gesture means nothing to her he has to smile: a race where credibility is weighed according to a visible metric, a biological response marking a history of epiphanies. How splendid!
He recognizes that if he's to be taken at all seriously he will have to grow a pair of authority sacs, and over the next days he grows some. His child friend is introduced to his staff, and she finds the little stubby-fingered mutes delightful. Felix and the youngster discuss many topics, giving him at least a kindergarten-level grounding in the basics of this world: kilowatts as currency, hot spring steams harnessed for power, the philosophy of Universal Service brought millennia ago by the Righteous Weaver, a personification of the King in mortal fingers...
When she stays late Felix learns that the knuckles of her tendrils are bioluminescent, and after the sun sets she describes her words in points of light. The arrangement of these points, Felix realizes, is the basis for the abstracted form of language seen in the radio broadcasts.
"With amiability," he opens, "you will state your name."
"With bemusement: you will explain how knowing a name relates to friendship."
"It is a custom among my kind."
"My name is Third Female," the child tells him indifferently. "But friends familiar with my identity know me by my image."
"With curiosity: you will explain your image."
In response the child whips her tendrils through the air in a rapid, flashing movement that describes, for a fleeting instant, a shockingly vivid representation of her own head that drifts in the fading afterimage. "You're quite the artist!" exclaims Felix, his own extended knuckles glowing in turn.
Third Female is confused by this, however. "It's my image, not art. Even babies know how to say their image."
"Show me mine," says Felix.
Her fingers flash again, the shining knuckles delineating a rapid portrait of Felix's armoured face that's gone almost as soon as formed. He copies her, and she praises his efforts. "The angle of the shadow outlines you draw is supposed to show your authority," explains Third Female. "Though sometimes you exaggerate it a bit when doing somebody else's image, to be polite."
"I see," says Felix.
For the next eight days Third Female does not visit. She returns early on the ninth day, and though it is before the evening meal the clearing around the fountain is abandoned. Something is amiss. The ants suddenly swarm free and stream down Felix's leg, disappearing into the crannies of the surrounding statues. Felix's staff stiffen. Third Female moves tentatively, nervously, hovering further from the edge of the basin than her normal habit. Her head is angled low, her forward eye locked on the glimmering surface of the water.
"I'm sorry," she weaves simply.
Felix raises his long fingers and says, "With compassion: you will state what troubles you, my friend."
She looks up at him, her eyes jittering. A second later adults burst into view on all sides of the clearing, needles flying free from branches tossed aside by their coordinated, rapid passage. One rushes in front of the fountain and scoops Third Female away, then a ring of them close in around Felix with long, shiny silver weapons pointed at the base of his neck. The weapons hum with energy as they cycle up, their tips glowing dangerously. Airborne green needles from the trees drift down around them in a slow-motion rain.
"You will not move!" flash sets of limbs on every side. "Compliance or death!"
Felix sighs. "Hello," he says, his fingers moving very slowly. "I represent Solar life. My name is Felix, and I come in peace."
"Compliance or death!"
"I choose compliance."
"You will stop moving now! With all urgency and righteousness: you will state whether you understand these instructions."
"I don't know how to say that without moving," weaves Felix, who then staggers back as he's shot. The projectile shatters on his chest, leaving a splatter of milky fluid. He dabs his unextended pinky into it and tastes the substance, guesses that it might be a sedative geared toward the local biology. "I'm sorry," apologizes Felix, so they shoot him again.
A bank of harsh yellow lights illuminate around the clearing. Felix winces, his pupils struggling to stop down fast enough. Giant silhouettes lumber in front of the spotlights, occulting the beams as jets of steam roil from their backs. Large wheels crunch over vegetation, snapping twigs and pulping needles.
The armed contingent of King's Fingers back away to let the machines through. The machines wheel up to Felix and extend webs of mechanical fingers, puffs of steam squirting from their knuckles as they flex. The fingers squirm their way into the cluster of animal statues and close around Felix loosely, then rapidly constrict to ensnare him. Felix's matte black staff member is caught against his master's leg, and the little body buckles and breaks. The remaining staff member avoids the binding mechanical fingers entirely, slipping into the fountain pool with a quiet splash.
Felix is lifted out of the fountain accompanied by the tinny sound of clanking gears. The machines rumble and pour forth more clouds of steam. The adults on the ground track his unwilling progress with the muzzles of their weapons.
He is captured. "Bother," says Felix.
The machines carry him to the palace, then descend into its lowest levels. King's Fingers wearing plastic gloves and insulated bodysuits oversee the operation as he is hoisted into place on a metal bed and then clamped rudely into place under a blaze of golden lights.
A battery of instruments is shoved at him, humming and clicking. He is scanned by three great glassy eyes, rotated and then scanned again. The long, multi-knuckled mechanical arms fly around him, steam pumping from their bases as they articulate. They hiss and clank, buzz and grumble as one set of arms switches out for another. At last, the final fingers draw away and leave him alone in a small void surrounded by an inflated plastic bubble.
The bubble rustles. A translucent flap pulls aside, admitting a cluster of King's Fingers in matching black skirts and protective plastic aprons misted with an antibacterial film.
"Hello," says Felix, his extended fingers wiggling.
The King's Finger with the darkest authority sacs addresses himself to the others with a quick flick of his tendrils: "There shall be no imprints made. This situation is classified as top secret. With imperative passion: you will state your recognition of my authority in this matter."
"So stated," agree the others each in turn.
He turns to face Felix. "With righteousness: I dare you to state your purpose."
"I come in peace."
"With a plea for exactitude: you will define your mission."
"I gather intelligence for my kind."
"You are a spy."
"I am a scout."
"Your correction is impertinent. Our scans show your authority sacs are meaningless facsimiles. Do not insult me, or you will suffer the wrath of the King's Fingers!"
Felix looks around so far as his strapped-in head can accommodate. "That can scarcely be worse than the King's Fingers' hospitality."
"I warn you, if you do not offer your fullest service in this inquiry we will be obliged to break your knuckles in a manner designed to elicit the maximum amount of agony."
"You cannot cause me discomfort," explains Felix patiently. "I have full control over my somatic systems, and may disengage sensation at will. Pain will gain you nothing. With respect: I offer that we enter into a civilized discourse as intelligent beings."
"You insult me, slave."
"I assure you, I am no one's slave."
"Your correction is ridiculous. We have scanned you. There is nothing you can hide from our True Knowledge. It is obvious to us that you are not an intelligent being, but rather an artifact."
"It's a hazy line, really."
"With righteous craving for correctness: you will name your designers!"
"I am Solar. Like your own brand of life, ours is tiered. At the root of Solar life are the carbon-based microbes that enable multicellular life; it is that muticellular life, in turn, that has given rise to me."
"With urgency: you will describe this life."
"Our forms are varied. The architects of our culture include Homo sapiens sapiens, Pan troglodyte sapiens, Texo sapiens zorani --"
"Nonsense and doublespeak! With insistence: you will name your continent of origin!"
"North America."
"There is no such continent with the contours you describe!"
"That's true. There used to be, though."
This is but the first in a long series of brusque interviews that fill the next days. Felix is grilled by various individuals with contrasting styles of interrogation. The bright lights burn all hours of the day as part of an apparent attempt to deprive Felix of sleep. He is offered water but nothing else, and his captors display in their posture a mix of frustration and fear at his polite refusals. "I'm not really thirsty right now," he says, "but thanks none the less."
"With indulgence: I dare you to describe how you arrived on our planet!"
"I came by way of a hyperspatial gateway constructed by microscopic Von Neumann probes on your sister world over the past eight years. Don't bother trying to fool around with it, though. I keep the gatehouse locked."
"You will give us the key!"
"That seems unlikely."
"We will destroy it so that you might return no intelligence to your masters!"
"I'll build a new one."
"We will stop you!"
"Again, unlikely, but on the off chance that you succeed do understand: another will come in my stead."
They crush his fingers, beginning with the smallest, sixteenth knuckles and working their way back toward the palm, testing his claim to control pain. Felix surprises them not only by his lack of discomfort, but also by his rapid, stubborn healing. By an effort of will and no small expenditure of fuel he is able to grow the extensions back almost as fast as they are mutilated.
His captors harden the plastic dome and suck out the atmosphere, but Felix doesn't suffocate. He waves cheerfully from within.
They subject him to a heat ray, then frigid cold.
"Honestly," says Felix, "I can't believe you're not satisfied yet. It should now be sufficiently clear that you cannot compel me. Your only option is to have a reasonable conversation. I am a patient fellow, but if this treatment keeps up I'll have no choice but to pick up and leave."
He is left alone for three days, his only company the unblinking eyes of the cameras.
He hears the slither and scrape of someone entering the hall where he's kept, and he turns his head to see. His plastic inner sanctum is unsealed and a blurry shadow pokes through the flap to resolve as Third Female, Felix's little friend from the fountain. "Hello!" says Felix.
"With great sadness: you will state whether you hate me now."
"Not at all. Make yourself comfortable. I've missed our chats."
"I know they've been cruel to you."
"Don't worry about it. I'm a trooper."
"They're watching us now."
"Naturally."
"They think you'll tell me the truth."
"They're right. Of course, I've been telling them the truth, too, so the point is largely academic."
"You really are a visitor from space."
"I really am."
"Even though it is contrary to the True Knowledge, you are an intelligent thing who didn't come from here."
"That's exactly correct, my friend."
She glances over her shoulder at her own left authority sac, as if expecting it to deflate immediately upon her making such heretical suggestions. Her head rotates to focus the smallest of her three eyes at Felix. "With respect, with my mother eye pointed at you," she says, her fingers shaking, "you will explain why the King lied to us in our Holy Textiles and said things such as you could not be real."
Felix hesitates. "I don't know," he admits. "I'm sorry."
His next interview is special, and this can be discerned from the sudden doubling of security forces outside of the hall. Felix blinks out of the infrared and back into the visible spectrum as a cohort approaches his plastic cage. The flap unseals and a very old and wizened King's Finger shuffles slowly inside, weighed down by the grotesque girth of his distended, opal black authority sacs.
He looks over Felix with rheumy eyes, blinking. At last he turns his body and signs for Felix to be released from his bounds. Obediently, the clamps around his legs, torso and head snap open. Felix sits up and rubs his neck ruefully. "Thank you," he says.
"I am the World Lover," says the distinguished visitor, his fingers moving in deliberate, palsied swoops. "I come on behalf of King's Fingers on every continent and of all creeds, to seek civil parley with a Solar for the mutual benefit of our respective authorities."
"It's a pleasure to meet you."
The King's Finger before him shifts into a lowered posture, a kind of kneeling attitude with his spindly elbows on his knees. "Without gossip but rather economy: you will state for what reason the Solars send scouts into space."
"We wish to inventory the contents of the galaxy."
"With curiosity and no fear of correction: you will define the goal of said exercise."
"Our kind cohabits space with two other kinds, and we would collectively know our neighbours so that we might enter into relations with them."
"With moral suspicion: I dare you to state the profit of such relations."
"It makes existence less dreadful, knowing we don't face space alone. We engage in a trade of unique artifacts, learning and culture. Also, we negotiate the use of new territories to our combined benefit and satisfaction."
"With anxiety: you will define the nature of these new territories."
"New star systems. New planets, new moons. I chart the galaxy, and in my wake our kinds come to occupy it. They are fruitful. This is an era of expansion."
"You form colonies."
"Certainly. Even now there is a vast cloud of Von Neumann probes numbering higher than either of us can comfortably tally, expanding the borders of our effort parsec by parsec. The colonizers follow them, reshaping planets into worlds. I follow the colonizers, witnessing the situation first hand and transmitting reports back to my kind via hyperspatial gate. It is a continually growing sphere whose origin is the Solar Nebula, far to the east in the densest quadrant of this Local Fluff."
The wizened King's Finger's head-pod droops. After an interval he weaves, "I feel astray from all authority. I have lived my life believing the King spoke literally, but now I understand he can only have been speaking in riddles when he described the cosmos. Otherwise, you could not exist. It is a troubling shift of perspective."
"Prophets can be like that," agrees Felix sympathetically. "You know -- tricky. Don't imagine for an instant that all Solar prophets agree."
The World Lover blinks. "With bemusement: you will explain how prophets could differ when any conflict could be rendered correct by a comparison of authority."
"We do not display our authority. It is merely implied by our station in life, or by the persuasiveness of the arguments we make, or by the independent verifiability of our claims. Our authority is collective, its constituent elements at times ambiguous or entirely all odds."
The World Lover is shocked. "Anarchy..." he signs vaguely, shuddering.
Felix shrugs. "We get on."
"I cannot accept that directionless rogues from space may overwhelm us, and make our history trivial. We have lived and suffered and learned, and won this world from nature. The King would never permit such an injustice to occur."
"The galaxy is rife with injustice, World Lover. I once walked on a world where mighty cities lay in ruin along every coast, left to decay at least eight thousand years ago. There was no obvious sign of global war, or a great natural calamity -- just a decaying infrastructure of high technology. Why their long civilization finally failed is a mystery. I found no evidence they had ever left their own planet. No doubt they also looked up at the stars and wondered about them in their time, but they never made contact. They lived an entire history that the galaxy has forgotten, or never knew. Now nothing remains but graves and weathered artifacts."
"They must have been damned."
"Not necessarily. There are vastly more ways to die in this universe than there are to survive. As far as I can see most histories peter out rather than proliferate. It takes a remarkable effort to leave the birth star. Few succeed, which is why space is such a lonely place."
The World Lover is silent for a spell, his eyes closed. At last he says, "The King's Fingers will never have the opportunity to take that test. The race has already been run, and it is you who come to visit us. It will never be the other way around."
"Yes," agrees Felix.
"You are the conquerors, and we are the vanquished. If anything you weave is true, this fact has a correctness that is both lightless and leaden. I can feel my sacs tighten, and I know I am right."
"It isn't like that," objects Felix. "There is no coming invasion."
"It doesn't matter," says the World Lover. "Our race may never recover from the indignity of being anything less than the apex of the King's Creation. Our blackest authority is now rendered suddenly more questionable than the nocturnal false-inkings of adolescents."
"There's hope there," says Felix seriously. "Adolescents have infinite room to grow."
The World Lover's response is brisk, his angles perfunctory: "Mollifying flattery -- spare me it." He seems to sulk for a moment then, his fingers drooping and twitching randomly. Finally he turns his head slowly and says, "With reluctant duty: I dare you to explain what happens next."
"In time, others of my kind will visit. If they find the reception inhospitable they will visit in secret. They will determine how, if at all, you might fit into our society. There would be no coercion. Should you wish to be left alone, we would retire and then re-poll your leaders every few generations. In the meantime, we will begin taming other worlds in this region now that our hyperspatial network is operational. Ultimately, you would find yourself in a bubble, surrounded by Panstellar culture."
"A cage," corrects the World Lover. "Not a bubble but a cage, like at the zoos where we view lesser animals for idle pleasure."
Felix does not bother to deny it. He squares his shoulders and says, "The choice is yours."
"It is in truth an ultimatum."
"I can't help that," says Felix. "We are, like you, victorious predators. Time has allowed us to widen our field to include your own. There may be no inherent justice in that, but there it is. I suggest you take solace in how friendly we are. The Solars are a jolly sort. We make it our business to be good neighbours."
"Yet you claim you could leave this facility at any time."
Felix blinks. "That is correct."
"'That is correct,'" the World Lover echoes, then lets his fingers tickle pensively at the base of his neck. "Such a simple answer. Confess to me, Felix Solar: you must be considering the opposing military force that might be engaged against any effort to escape."
"Yes, certainly."
"You must, in turn, have ample confidence in your ability to prevail or you could not have answered so unreservedly."
"This is true, World Lover."
The World Lover leans in close. "Our technological triumphs are toys to you. I dare you to contradict me."
"Yes," admits Felix.
The World Lover sits back again, elbows balanced on his spindly knees. "Then your attitude toward us a kindness. And attitudes change." He inclines his head-pod. "You come to us claiming the powers of a Prince of Heaven, ascended from predators. With righteous logic: I dare you to claim the Solars commit no sins!"
"I cannot make that claim."
"That is why I am afraid," says the World Lover evenly.
Perhaps the World Lover expects him to argue, for he seems surprised when Felix merely nods seriously. "You are correct to be afraid," he says. "Out of respect for your intelligence I'm being plain with you. I can offer you no better comfort than our promise."
There is a long moment of stillness.
The World Lover finally says, "You are free, Felix. I ask you to go. Report back to your kind what you will, and leave us to consider these corrections to the True Knowledge. Go with discretion. Go in secret. Go now."
"I will do as you say, and consider you the King's Fingers' first interstellar ambassador."
The World Lover seems discomfited at the title. "You have no idea what I face, as the bearer of this news." He turns away from Felix and orders the doors opened. Pneumatic locks retract into the walls with a series of hisses and bangs. The guards outside step away from a staircase that leads back to the surface, protective barriers of plastic unzipped and hanging loose.
Felix stretches out his stiff arms and then crouches springily a few times to loosen up his calves. He walks up beside the World Lover in order to be visible to an eye for speaking. He says, "I very much hope our kinds can learn to get on. I'm sure there's a lot we could learn from one another. It could be a new renaissance for both civilizations."
The World Lover says nothing, his fingers limp, his eyes narrow. He inclines his head toward the door curtly.
Felix doesn't move. He has a point yet to impress upon his host. "Either way," he says, "do understand: this galaxy is being colonized. The time is now to choose your role."
The World Lover gazes at him, expressionless. Felix turns to go. He's only taken a few steps, however, when the World Lover reaches out and catches his elbow with one long, speckled digit. Felix turns.
"With a craving for justice," he says slowly, "you will explain what would happen should you encounter a civilization even greater than yours -- one older and stronger, whose abilities render your triumphs to toys."
Felix hesitates. "We would hope they have a sense of mercy comparable to our own."
The World Lover's eyes narrow to mere slits. "I dare you to describe the alternative."
Felix sighs. "We would do what any life would do," he says carefully. "We would fight."
The World Lover shakes his fingers in affirmation, his two largest blinking eyes fixed squarely on Felix's own. "And your comeuppance may find you, Solars," he weaves with great dignity, "and then you too would know the pain of the King's Fingers."
Felix is uneasy. "It may be," he admits.
The World Lover turns away from him. Felix pauses a moment, but can think of nothing more to add. Somberly, he walks out of the hall and climbs the steps from the palace dungeons, the World Lover's bitterness weighing down his heart.
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