CHAPTER SIX
It rains.
The drops are an ammonia hydroxide and hydrogen sulfide solution. They stink like egg farts and leave streaks of yellow stain striping the gatehouse dome. Never the less Felix is enchanted, refreshed, and grateful -- this situation is infinitely preferable to the waystation he's just left.
The early morning sky is an opaque ceiling of wooly cloud. Thunder groans.
Felix and his tiny twin have emerged into woods, though it is immediately apparent that the area is more farm than forest: the tall, web-leaved trees are planted in widely-spaced rows, stately lines extending in every direction with measured precision. The foliage is blood-red, the floor a packed bed of rust-coloured moss.
The hybrid homunculus steps up to the nearest plant and inclines his little head. "Hello," he squeaks. "We represent Solar life. Our names are Felix, and we come in peace."
Felix shakes his head. "That's a sapling."
His staff turns to look at him with an inquiring expression.
"You can't talk to saplings," Felix explains. "They're just plants. All they do is grow and breathe."
The staff cocks his head, blinking as rain runs down his face.
"Those rowboats didn't equip you with much in the way of brains, did they?" asks Felix drily.
"You can teach me, Big Felix. How does one recognize a sapling?"
Felix shifts, still faintly repelled by the hybrid thing, then shrugs. "Well, the height and the simple bifurcation pattern of the gross structure suggest phototropism. Note also the extensive vascular root systems, indicative of immobility. Finally, the sapling resembles the surrounding phenotypes in most respects save size, which tells us they are likely juveniles of the same species."
"Juveniles are small."
"Usually, yes."
"Am I a juvenile Felix?"
Felix pauses, considering this, his eye caught for a moment by a platoon of ants moving out over the gatehouse dome for a maintenance sweep. "That is a reasonable analogue," he says, looking down again. "Though we differ in terms of genotype, our phenotypes have achieved a kind of parity via a fusion of disparate technologies. The relationship is not entirely dissimilar from that between a Zorannic Man and a Human Being, I suppose."
"Human Beings are wet and fragile."
Felix can't help but smile. "That's true. We are their robust cousins...you and I. We have been engineered for durability so that we might explore situations too toxic or rarified for Human Beings."
The little twin hesitates, his expression thoughtful. "Are you my parent?" he asks.
"Um," says Felix. "I suppose I might be, yes. You are patterned after me, though without the bulk of my memories or my facility to apply the Secret Mathematic. We are...relations, to be sure."
He blinks. "What do we do now, Big Felix?"
Felix looks around. The clouds are becoming pale, a star's ruddy glow on the eastern horizon glimmering between the trees. The air is warming and an ammonia mist is rising from the moss. "We explore," he says.
"How shall we do this?"
"We perambulate, and target our sensory apparatus at the environment."
His diminutive counterpart considers this, nodding. "Okay. But I am disoriented and confused by this alien ecology. Will you hold my hand?"
Felix raises his brow. "Well...sure, I suppose. If you want me to."
The homunculus offers up his small hand. Felix takes it gently in his, a smile flickering over his lips at the warm, solid touch. Amused and a little awkward, he leads the way and they set off from the gatehouse...
They cross row after row of trees, the aisles between them providing an unobstructed view in both directions of more misty, rain-washed woods arranged to geometric perfection. "Is it usual for trees to grow in this kind of rectilinear pattern?" asks Little Felix.
"No," says Big Felix. "I believe this is a plantation -- a space cultivated by intelligence."
"Does that mean someone lives here?"
"Yes."
"Will we meet them?"
"I certainly hope so."
"Will they like us?"
"I don't know."
In the infrared Felix looks beneath the surface shelf of moss to see a spaghetti mess of worms, a living layer of slithering organica under their feet. The worms are most dense at the base of the trees where their clogged tunnels become indistinguishable from the roots. He pans up the trunks in the X-ray band and sees that they are filled with fat worm bundles, then notes after careful observation how the high branches writhe with a motion contrary to the breeze.
He reconsiders his first assessment, and his confident explanation to Little Felix: sometimes a tree is not a tree. He opens his mouth to speak.
Little Felix observes, "I think the trees are animalia."
Felix closes his mouth, smiling. The little hybrid is clearly no idiot rowboat. And he's better company than staff...
At length they emerge from the wormy woods and find themselves on a high promontory overlooking a wide valley veiled by sheets of drizzle. The winds are stronger outside of the protection of the tree farm, but the storm system is on its way out, marching steadily eastward. Holes are opening in the western quarter, slivers of apple green sky shining through the dense clouds and admitting shafts of sunlight.
As a wide shaft moves across the valley it silhouettes the pinnacles of a city, prying the outlines of skyscrapers and curved roofs from the rainy gloom. Felix breaks into a grin, his face folding into a fan of fine wrinkles. "They're advanced," he breathes reverently. "Do you see the spires? Aren't they wonderful?"
"An intelligence has arranged those inanimate materials?"
"Definitely. The height of the towers relative to the planetary gravity tells us they possess post-industrial technology. Can your eyes detect the motion amongst them?"
Little Felix squints. "Insects?"
Felix shakes his head. "Aircraft." He tugs on his companion's hand as he begins striding down the hill. "Come on!"
The bottom of the valley is lost in fog, and the pair descends into its embrace, a world of white whorls and slowly churning banks. Together they wade across fields of domestic crops, the wet stalks dripping with yellow drops. The rain has become an intermittent spittle, the green sky opening up overhead.
Their pace slackens as they detect noise ahead. They proceed cautiously, eyes straining to ply form from the fog. Felix detects something in radar and stops in place, perceiving.
A massive shadow crosses their path a hundred meters ahead, footfalls like falling boulders stomping mechanically in a steady, ponderous gait. Felix pans his head to track its progress.
"Is is someone?" pipes up Little Felix.
"No. It is a locomotive artifact -- some kind of agricultural robot."
The pair presses on through the soupy air, steadily consuming the distance to the city. They pass other agricultural robots in travel or at work, Felix mapping out their outlines with fine-grained sonar. The robots are bipedal, and over ten meters tall. Their hides appear to be some kind of black metal. Their bodies are torus-shaped with a bloom of articulated limbs radiating from the inner diameter. They pay the Felices no mind. The Solar representatives wade on through the crops, massive shadows labouring in the mist all around them.
And then, with a gust of cool wind, the fog breaks.
The Felices stand in a paved plaza surrounded on three sides by buildings whose white, pristine facades are reflected brightly in the puddles below. Each building has a single open doorway on its face, great arched apertures whose lintels Felix would have to climb a tall ladder to touch. "Gracious," he says quietly. "These people must be goliaths."
Little Felix furrows his smooth brow. "But where are they?"
Big Felix frowns. "Let's go in," he decides.
They pass beneath one of the massive archways, craning their heads in concert to take in the scale of the architecture. The floor is composed of a hard, clean material and their progress leaves it marred by two sets of muddy prints. A second later a round, squat robot of black metal emerges from a nook in the far wall and proceeds to wobble purposefully over the trails of muck, polishing the floor clean with a quiet whir.
"Hello," offers Little Felix. The robot ignores him and parks itself back in its nook, then goes still.
Inside the chamber is a giant stone table, surrounded by seven giant stone chairs. The table is bare but doesn't remain so: as the Solar duo watches a ten-meter-tall robot clomps out from a further archway and methodically lays out seven bowls, and then places beside each a giant spoon before disappearing again, its heavy footfalls echoing away to silence.
"What's going on?" asks Little Felix, cocking his head.
"Breakfast, I think."
A more slight robot -- though with the same bulky legs supporting a heavy torus body -- appears next and dispenses into each bowl a measure of thick, brown syrup that steams in the cool air. Felix sniffs, detecting a pungent melange of complex hydrocarbons.
The serving robot retreats, and silence returns. The Felices wait expectantly, but no diners appear. After a quarter hour the first robot returns, collects each bowl and spoon, and takes them away. The second robot wipes the table with a rapidly spinning cloth-edged tool, then follows the first robot back through the archway.
"Nobody came to eat," notes Little Felix.
"Indeed."
"Do you think the food was meant for us?"
"Anything is possible."
They are startled from their speculations when they are seized from behind by the extended appendages of a robot leaning in through the doorway. They are whisked off their feet and find themselves tumbling through the air, then dropped rudely into a great metal hopper with stained sides. "Are we going for a ride?" asks Little Felix.
Big Felix doesn't answer. He tries but fails to clamber up the sheer sides of the hopper, and is then shaken free as it begins to rumble and bump. The shadows clock around them. The hopper is moving.
Ten minutes later it is upended, and the Felices are dumped unceremoniously into an even larger container filled a third of the way up with a pool of filth capped by dust, broken dishes and twigs. An eruption of putrefying brown syrup splashes up as they land, sticky dollops running down their faces in rotten clods and sickly strings. "What's happened, Big Felix?"
"I think we've just been thrown in the trash."
"Bother," says Little Felix.
Big Felix allows himself a little smile. "Quite."
They manage to extract themselves after building up a ramp made of garbage, then hop down to the polished stone pavement, speckles of brown syrup dribbling from their spattered armours. They look around: they are deeper in the city now, tall buildings rising on all sides. An aircraft buzzes overhead, and a swarm of little round robots move industriously along a nearby curved boulevard clearing rain-soaked debris from the gutters. There are no other signs of life.
"Curious," says Felix.
The Solars amble out to the boulevard. At the mouth of each house is a vat with flared lips. As they watch, a tarnished robot with a hopper on its back lumbers up to each house, upends the empty vat into its hopper, and then replaces it with a resounding clang before moving on. Muffled clangs and sets of heavy robotic footfalls echoing off the walls suggest similar activities are going on along neighbouring streets.
"It's garbage day," concludes Felix.
They approach the hopper-bound robot. "Hello," squeaks Little Felix. "We represent Solar life..."
The robot ignores the greeting, stepping over them with a single stride of its tall, bulky legs. The Felices exchange a look, then insert themselves in front of the new empty vat in line. The robot pauses briefly, gears clanking, and then picks them up and dumps them into its hopper. A moment later they're back inside the slimy collection bin down the block.
"Bother," say both Felices simultaneously, wiping decomposing syrup from their eyes.
Once they've escaped from the bin again they give the garbage collector robot wider berth, crossing the street to walk in the shade of a line of slithering hedges. They skirt past the collector while it busies itself upending another empty vat into its hopper, collecting more nothing. Felix glances back pensively as he and Little Felix jog away.
They come to a large building faced with ornate frescoes of intricate geometric patterns, fronted by a wide staircase of white stone. They elect to explore inside, giving each other boosts to get up each giant, two meter riser. The entrance archway is dominated by a sculpture of an alien figure reaching toward the sky.
"Is that one of them?" whispers Little Felix.
"It is an artistic representation of one of them, yes."
The modelled creature resembles the city's robots: two muscular, double-jointed legs supporting a radial body bristling at its centre with a series of articulated appendages ending in three-fingered hands with long, fine, triple-headed antennae sprouting from each knuckle. An area between the legs is covered by some kind of cloth and bead carapace. The base of the statue is inscribed with a spiral of indecipherable glyphs.
The pair passes through the statue's cool shadow and enters the building, arriving in a long hall with niches along both hauntingly high walls, the ceiling lost in gloom. Inside each niche is a display, some featuring miniature buildings or scenes with creatures, some featuring statues or giant tools encased in transparent cases. "What is this place?" asks Little Felix.
"A museum. Historical reverence is a byproduct of nearly all biomemetic entities. It's an analogue of personal memory, but for a civilization."
"That's handy, when no one's around to ask."
"Very true."
Felix approaches one of the displays. A light at the top of the nook illuminates, casting a pool of ultraviolet light and X-rays over the diorama below. Thus revealed Felix is able to appreciate that the creatures represented by the little models seem to have recognizable faces located inside their bodies, visible only via X-ray backscattering. Felix finds the hidden, density-shadowed faces a little creepy he as looks into the binocular hollows of their eyes.
An ominous, low chime sounds followed by a brief, incomprehensible narrative in a moaning singsong interspersed by guttural growls, the deep bass sound visibly vibrating the air around him. At the end of the narration the light fades and the display goes quiet.
He wanders to the next display. It illuminates in turn and the little figures inside move about, re-enacting some sort of ceremony involving the solemn dressing of a central figure in long, fluorescent robes by a cohort of servants with purple stripes painted over their bodies. The accompanying music is majestic if somewhat bombastic, the chord progressions unusual but mathematically sensible. The light dims.
The Felices walk on.
At the end of the hall is a large globe, two thirds ocean and one third land. Every square inch of the land is inscribed with glyphs in spiral wheels, labelling unreadably the mountain ranges, lakes and dense hubs of interconnected settlements. Felix is unable to discern whether the globe represents the planet they are currently standing upon, or some other world.
Nestled by the globe is a life-size display of several Goliath creatures ranged about a fire pit, the flames simulated by guttering lights. Instead of long robes or beaded carapaces they wear little shifts of animal hide and fur. They wield primitive spears and knives made apparently of petrified worms, and their shoulders are painted with lines and curlicues of soot. By peering into the X-ray band Felix observes that the row of cocoons hanging against the simulated rockface behind them contain juvenile-scale mannequins.
The lights dim and the flames go out as Felix steps back.
"What is it?" prompts Little Felix at his side.
"It's their history," replies Big Felix.
"Does it say what happened to them?"
He shrugs helplessly. "I can't read it. The language is just noise to me."
They emerge back into the pea-green daylight. The clouds have moved off and the sky is an uninterrupted bright emerald shell. They work their way down the monstrous steps and continue along the abandoned boulevard, the odd red, webby leaf carried by the breeze skittering on the pavement ahead of them.
The whole city feels like a museum.
They explore some dwellings. In each they find a similar arrangement of rooms with the upper floors housing nests of soft, multi-spined feathers surrounding a common lavatory with ammonia hydroxide running from the taps, hot and cold; on the lower floors kitchens with refrigeration units stocked with jars of frozen brown syrup, and dining halls dominated by massive tables and chairs. In some of the larger homes are libraries with shelves of round books with polymer pages covered in spiral swirls of blue and purple glyphs...
At the centre of the city is a grand hall with hundreds of giant seats around its edges, a ring of skylights casting beams of greenish light upon an intricate mosaic floor that depicts a circle of Goliaths holding each other's hands. The tiled roof of the edifice seems to have been damaged by the storm, and a flotilla of tiny robotic aircraft are ferrying fresh tiles from some distant quarry.
The sun sets. The abandoned city comes aglow with ultraviolet streetlamps.
"There's nobody home," declares Felix with a sigh.
As the night darkens the duo is treated to an overwhelming, spectacular view of the Milky Way cutting the sky. Felix has never seen it so bright or so clear, unimpeded by the clouds of galactic medium that diffuse and occlude the perspective from within the Local Fluff. He can almost imagine he is seeing the galaxy turn.
"Via Lactea," he whispers with a slow, respectful blink.
He becomes aware of a mumble of radio, and scans the frequencies. A bass voice repeats a message at regular intervals -- a brief phrase, followed by what sounds like a count of three. Felix is reminded of the baying colonizers at the waystation.
"One, two, three."
Big and Little Felix continue across the city and then begin working their way up the opposite side of the valley. At its crest, at midnight, they come upon a field of forty-nine gigantic dishes oriented to the heavens. "Big Felix," says Little Felix. "Does this not resemble a radio telescope array?"
"It does," agrees Big Felix. "Let's check it out."
On the periphery of the field is a temple inside of which they discover consoles of electronic equipment. As in the museum, each station comes to life of its own accord when approached. The Felices help one another aboard one of the giant chairs, then Big Felix scans the bewildering layouts of dials, sliders and spiral-shaped gauges with an expression of deep concentration while the homunculus hovers at his heels, reaching on tiptoe to peer over the console edge.
"These glyphs appear to represent cardinal numbers," he squeaks, pointing to the blue and violet inscriptions next to a control slider.
Felix glances over. "Very good, Little Felix. Now, can we discern any relationship between the written form of the first three numbers and the vocal form heard in radio?"
Little Felix nods. "The number of vertical lines in the glyphs corresponds to the number of glottal stops in the vocalizations."
"Excellent. Can we extrapolate from this correspondence a key to help us decipher additional glyphs?"
Little Felix frowns, rubbing his chin with one tiny hand. "Yes," he decides. "If we posit that the symbols at either end of these toggle controls represent a diametric pair -- on and off, or open and closed, or go and stop -- we might hypothesize that the loopback circuits here, visible in the infrared beneath the console surface and marked with mixed diametric symbols, may represent a test state. If so, these accents may be interrogative or conditional indicators."
Felix grins, and squeezes his counterpart's shoulder. "Well reasoned. If you're right, how should we interpret the contents of the radio broadcast message?"
Little Felix looks up. He says, "Testing: one, two, three."
Big Felix nods curtly. "Indeed. Furthermore, consider how the intermediate glyphs between the diametric marks appear to be applied as ordinal orientation on the grid of coordinates visible on this cathode ray tube display."
"I can't see it."
"Here, I'll lift you."
"Ah, yes. An alphabetic sequence?"
"Perhaps, but perhaps not so arbitrary. Note on the second display this infographic -- I'm sure you'll recognize it as a frequency chart of the electromagnetic spectrum. Note the absorption lines, and see how each atomic range is labelled."
"The alphabetic sequence corresponds to the periodic table of the elements!"
"Exactly. Thus, we have a gloss for hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, and so on -- but also the key to decoding the ordinal sequence of glyphs, and we can clearly see the basis for the numeric notation is based a depiction of proton counts, with multiples indicated by alphabetic subscript. Now we have sufficient vocabulary to read numbers of any size, to differentiate proper names from measurements, and to relate written words to vocalizations."
"The language is intensely scientific in nature."
"It is. Note the recurrence of the iron vowel coupled with the negative diametric on the side of the cathode ray tubes -- possibly a counterindication for magnetic disruption. Note also the caesium clocks labelled with the uranium vowel, which may mean the recognition of uranium's radioactive properties predates a full understanding of caesium. The language is thus not entirely scientifically literal, but merely informed by an early understanding of the periodic nature of atomic structure."
"How delightful!" exclaims Little Felix.
Big Felix looks over to him with a growing sense of affection and pride. "You know, this is a lot more fun with you around."
"Then you're not going to pulp me?"
He smirks ruefully. "Certainly not, Little Felix. Certainly not. Now," he says, stretching out his arms and cracking his knuckles, "let's get these telescopes working for us."
And they do. By the small hours of the morning they have turned the array to point at the last set of coordinates left on the controls, to a nearby star system a few lightyears deeper into the void. After the star itself the hottest source of radio is a strong signal singing out from one of its orbiting worlds.
The broadcast is simple, repetitive, and by now familiar.
"Testing: one, two, three."
Felix suddenly feels cold. Without another word he reorients the array toward the next set of coordinates in the database, his expression grim as the speakers crackle with the booming bass signal from the new star system: "Testing: one, two, three."
The same signal is being beamed out from the next star system, too, and the next, and the next. As the sun rises and drowns out their ability to search Felix has eavesdropped on signals coming from over a thousand lightyears westward, each of them ponderously repeating the same message: "Testing: one, two, three."
Little Felix's eyes widen. "There are hundreds of Goliath worlds!"
"Yes," agrees Big Felix distantly. "But what don't we hear?"
Little Felix furrows his brow. "Pardon?"
"We don't hear our colonizers bleating their prime call. A septillion Von Neumanns and at least nine hundred colonizer ships should be out there, extending the hyperspatial network across the void, all of them broadcasting the prime signal with information about Solarkind encoded in the harmonics. As we saw at the waystation, nothing can dissuade a colonizer from blasting out its greetings to fellow intelligences. And yet...silence."
"Testing: one, two, three."
"Except for the Goliath signal," says Little Felix softly.
"Indeed," agrees Big Felix.
"What does it mean?"
Felix sighs. "I believe it means we've been overrun. Our colonizing probes have encountered their colonizing probes, and while ours have been silenced theirs have engineered hundreds upon hundreds of planets to Goliath ecosystems. As deep as these telescopes can ply west there's nothing but Goliath worlds, ready for occupation. The galaxy is theirs, a thousand lightyears off the ecliptic north and south, as far westward as we can hear."
"But where are the Goliaths?"
Felix glowers darkly. "That, Little Felix, is the heart of the matter. Come now: we must explore further."
That morning they commandeer an aircraft and fly across a strait to the next continent. They pass over dozens of cities, hydroelectric dams, swaths of agriculture, capture points for energy beams bounced off orbital mirrors relaying power from the system's primary, landing fields, gardens, beaches with regularly spaced stone closets for changing into one's swimming trunks...
An entire civilization is laid out beneath them, ready and empty, scrupulously maintained by mindless machines going about their business, oblivious to the folly of serving non-existent masters.
Felix becomes more and more uneasy.
After a week of surveying they gate out to a star system six lightyears closer to the Local Fluff. They find a world identical in every respect to the one they've just left behind: cities of silent industry beneath an apple green sky, empty towns, highways without traffic, crops harvested to rot...
"Testing: one, two, three."
The next world is the same, and the one after that. It is not until the fifth hop that the Solar duo see something different: as they wander another in a seemingly endless series of clone cities they come to a wide airfield just as the air begins to quiver with a rumbling from high above.
The Felices look up as massive shadows sweep over them.
Seven giant ships settle in over the airfield, retrothrusters blasting the tarmac clean of dirt, pebble and branch alike. As they slowly descend scores of landing struts unfold from apertures on their bellies, and ultraviolet formation lights flash. The wind keens. Big Felix grabs Little Felix's shoulders to keep him from being tossed away in the gale.
The ships settle with seven resounding thumps that shake Felix on his feet. The landing struts bow and then recoil, hydraulics breathing loudly. The thrusters go dark and the engines wind down, their mountain-shaking rumbles dying away to cycling whines. The airborne pebbles around them drop.
"Is it them?" asks Little Felix, his voice sounding loud in the new silence. "Is it Goliaths?"
"I think so," nods Big Felix anxiously. Guided by instinct he assumes a martial stance. He steels himself, senses tingling as he sweeps the ships for the first signs of movement.
Locks clank. Clouds of ammonia steam are released with a series of hisses. And then seven giant gangways buzz as they lower from the bellies of the seven ships, ringing hollowly when they strike the tarmac.
The sound echoes away.
Both Felices jump as unseen speakers embedded around the airfield crackle into operation and a voice they have learned to understand booms out, reverberating off the hulls: "Welcome! Your new world is now ready. Please have your passports available for immigration processing."
The Felices wait, tense.
Nothing happens. No one comes down the gangways.
The announcement repeats: "Welcome! Your new world is now ready. Please have your passports available..."
The Felices look at one another. Big Felix cautiously starts forward, approaching the nearest ship. He slips behind a landing strut and cranes his head to see up the gangway and into the hold. After a moment he advances again and carefully begins walking up the ramp.
He disappears inside. Little Felix shifts nervously.
"Welcome! Your new world is now ready..."
Big Felix walks down the gangway again. He shakes his head and calls out, "There's nobody home."
"It's empty?"
He nods. "There's room for fourteen thousand -- acceleration chairs, sleeping nests, syrup dispensers, microgravity gardens, a theatrical stage -- but no Goliaths. No pilots, no passengers."
"Welcome!"
The discussion is interrupted by a garbage collection robot which picks up both Solars in its claws and tosses them into its hopper. "Faeces," mutters Big Felix. "Not again."
They help each other to scramble out of the deep, syrup-stained hopper as the garbage robot works its way away from the airfield, pausing to investigate items it finds in its path like wind-tossed twigs and flakes of burnt hull from the ships' ablative shields. The Felices drop to the ground beside its great feet and then watch it stomp away.
"So where are the Goliaths?" prompts Little Felix, looking up.
"I am beginning to suspect they're gone."
"Gone?"
"Dead," says Big Felix somberly. "Unless they're trailing their own colonization effort by tens of thousands of years, it seems to me the mother civilization may have suffered some kind of calamity."
"What kind of calamity?"
"A biological one, perhaps. One that has had no effect whatsoever upon their infrastructure, but one that means colony ships arrive vacant, leaving every colonized world eternally...ready."
Little Felix frowns. "I wonder why the colonization effort stops at the Local Fluff."
Big Felix's face hardens. "That's just it, Little Felix," he pronounces gravely. "We cannot assume the Goliath colonization machine is no longer active."
"But we have seen no evidence of planetary engineering!"
"Yes, Little Felix, but we skipped part of the network. We hopped out here, to the fringes, to the leading edge of functional gates. We haven't yet seen what lies between here and the Local Fluff." Felix pauses, his eyes narrowing dangerously. "We've bypassed the engineering wave."
"Then you believe an advancing front lies eastward?"
"We must find out!"
And so dawns the darkest day of Felix's long life. The duo gates into the star system nearest the Local Fluff's ends, just three lightyears from Eckhart's waystation on the far side of the void's signal-bending bowshock. They gate into an apocalypse.
The sky is black, the landscape cratered.
Mushroom clouds grow on the horizon, silent because the air is too thin to transmit their violence. Continent-sized layers of dust are being blown out of the ground, subterranean gas geysers freed to exhale their fumes to build a new sky. The ground bucks beneath their feet as another thermonuclear blast tears a hole in the crust, kilometers to the south.
"What's going on?" squeaks Little Felix.
"They're engaging a greenhouse effect," says Big Felix, scanning the sky. "They're kick-starting an atmosphere. It's not dissimilar from Solar methods."
On the plains below are many Goliath robots, hauling great cargo vats of rocks, blasting apart cliff-faces, scraping the landscape flat. The stars above are swarmed by glinting satellites, hundreds of busy scanners and probes a hundred kilometers up. This world is a busy, busy place.
Dust billows from the north. "Let's go take a look," says Felix.
They descend into a valley through a gully in its wall, half its floor a rich black carpet and half a barren field of dust. As they draw nearer it becomes apparent that the dust is jiggling and jostling, the floor of the valley shimmying. Felix squats down. Upon closer inspection he can see worm-like robots very much like Solar engineered ants making their way among the dust, consuming it and expectorating from their rears little clods of dark, organic matter.
Big Felix straightens. "They're making soil," he concludes.
Little Felix yelps. "They hurt!"
Both Felices stumble backward a few steps, then hurriedly brush the little polymer worms off their feet, leaving pits and scars upon the armour from scores of rapid, vicious bites. The advancing swarm forces them further up the valley, away from the rich black soil and around a turn where the land flattens out again.
In the distance the skeleton of a city is rising. Lattices of girders delineate the shapes of nascent skyscrapers while rows of identical pits are being connected with plumbing as Goliath robots weld the seams and pour foundations.
Before them a line of gargantuan machines is razing the landscape with some kind of disintegration ray, blowing hummocks and boulders and hills into a fine powder that settles down into the waiting maws of the wormoid soil-processors.
As the naked sun rises higher in the black sky a wash of harsh, unmitigated light and radiation shines into the end of the valley. An irregular coating over some of the rocks that Felix had taken for dust changes in response to the light, turning gay hues of green and yellow and unfolding thin, coiled pink stamens out into the air. "Spores," notes Felix. "There's life here."
An instant later the swath of blooming spores is turned to ash by a sweep of a Goliath robot's disintegration ray. "Well, there was life," says Little Felix sadly after they've sprinted to a safer distance.
Big Felix turns to face the looming machine, its huge silhouette blocking out the rising sun. He levels his right arm and opens his hand, his eyes closing in exquisite concentration.
Feeling out with algorithms of the Secret Mathematic, Felix investigates the structure of the construction monster, tracing the gears and circuits in an attempt to discover a flaw he might exploit. The machine's neurology is a heavily shielded quantum register, but Felix methodically probes until he finds a way through...
His eyes flash open. "Stop!" he commands.
The machine freezes. A bass note peals in alarm. In a blink the fallen constructor is surrounded by waves of small, flying robots. In concert they suddenly dive right at it, impacting on its hull into clouds of wormoids that link into long bundles and then slither inside.
Big Felix looks over at shoulder at Little Felix, whose brow raises in inquiry. Big Felix spins his head back toward the constructor as its engines resume their noise.
The massive machine reorients itself with a dust-billowing crash, then swivels its disintegrator beam directly at Felix. Felix makes use of the Math, again bellowing, "Stop!"
He just manages to dodge aside as the disintegrator beam fires. He rolls along a ridge of rock and then bumps to a rest against Little Felix's shins. "I believe they are highly adaptive," he squeaks.
Felix nods. They run, then seek shelter in a further gully.
The elder Solar shakes his head in morose desperation. "This is bad," he says. "Very, very bad. It was able to block my method after a just a single interaction. I don't dare let them learn more from me!"
Little Felix quakes. "What's going to happen, Big Felix?"
"When this world is ready, where do you think these juggernauts of construction will go? I'll tell you: they'll go on. They'll go east. They'll move into the Local Fluff and begin stubbornly transforming every planet they come across, wiping out the old and replacing it according to their programme. How many of them are out there already, en route to our stars?" He looks Little Felix in the eye, his head still shaking slowly back and forth. "How can Solarkind stand up to this?" He grabs his head mournfully. "What's to stop this brainless behemoth of building?"
"Perhaps we can reason with them?"
Felix mutters an unprintable oath. "You can't ask mercy of infrastructure, Little Felix. These creatures -- these Goliaths -- set up a programme of aggressive colonization that runs even though no one is behind it anymore. It's a programme -- it doesn't reason, it doesn't feel -- it just fulfills its mandate to expand Goliath territory. It has no mercy to give us!"
Little Felix opens his mouth to reply but is interrupted when he is cut down by a disintegrator beam, his legs and pelvis billowing out in a sphere of diffuse ash. He cries out as his torso strikes the rocks, and then Big Felix scoops it up just seconds before it is swarmed by a slithering carpet of wormoids hellbent on turning the remains to soil.
"Little Felix!" he cries. "Little Felix -- speak to me!"
Little Felix blinks. "Error," he says feebly.
Big Felix hugs him to his chest and takes off at his fastest sprint, his feet barely touching the ground as he manoeuvres back up the valley and then dashes through the gully through which they came. As he runs he slams his shins into the rocks in an attempt to knock the little hungry wormoids free. Even so he feels pinpricks of warning pain scintillating over his feet.
"We must get back to the gatehouse! We must warn Solarkind!" he narrates as he closes the distance across the craggy landscape, leaping from one crater-rim to the next, wormoid processors tumbling from his legs.
He lands hard, Little Felix still clutched to him, his eyes opening in horror as he sees that the surface of the gatehouse is writhing with motion: a hundred thousand Solar engineered ants are battling a hundred thousand soil-processing Goliath worms.
Worse is the shadow that falls over the gatehouse next as a giant black constructor occludes the naked sun, and trains its disintegrator beam on the foreign matter, now targetted as a threat.
"No!" screams Felix.
He drops his charge and barrels over the last dozen meters, the deepest parts of his mind and its carefully shielded Secret Mathematical components opening and drawing from his pile the power they will need to act on Felix's panic and rage. Unwilling to play footsie with the constructor's adaptive technologies he is forced to use the crudest, most gross of approaches: the Goliath machine bursts asunder, its internal parts snapping and splitting, falling into uncountable pieces that fly in every direction.
Eighty-three similar machines turn in unison to face the source of their peer's distress. They begin to close in on the gatehouse, the ground shaking with the heavy progress of their relentlessly stomping feet and rolling treads.
Felix tears open the outer chamber door and lunges at the controls. He prepares a message canister even as the entire structure begins to jump and buck with the thundering approach of the constructors...
The generators cycle up, and then gatehouse dissolves into a cloud of ash.
The ash settles. In its wake it leaves a perfect sphere of clear air with Felix crouching at its centre, eyes squinched shut. He opens his eyes and the shield collapses, admitting a pall of floating debris. He looks around slowly as the lumbering shadows of the constructors move on, drawing away back toward the plain.
"Little Felix?" he calls hopefully.
Silence, across all bands. Felix's shoulders slump. The gatehouse is destroyed, and he is trapped. He has no way of knowing whether or not his message has been transmitted. And now, worst of all, he is alone. He has spent so many years alone he never thought it could hurt so badly.
"Father?"
His head snaps up. "Little Felix?" he cries again, feeling out with his keenest perceptions.
Something wriggles in the rubble, a slew of ash sliding aside to reveal a corner of tarnished, worm-bitten armour. Felix vaults over and crouches there, digging with anguished frenzy until the surviving half of his companion is unearthed. "Do you exist and operate?" he cries.
"I think so," says Little Felix, blinking. "Did you warn them? Was the canister traded before the gate failed?"
Felix sags. He moves his head slowly back and forth. "I don't think so," he whispers.
The world shakes as another thermonuclear blast erupts to the east, tossing tons of particulate matter into the coalescing sky above. And then another, more distant. Big Felix pulls Little Felix up and examines the wormoid bite marks covering what remains of his small body.
He turns his face to the sky, the micro-gates inside his brain aligning with the great transmitter at the heliopause. His lips twitch as he sends a single phrase, then abruptly feels the connection broken. He knows right away that the Goliaths machines have connected the gatehouse to the transmitter, and obliterated it.
"What did you say?" asks Little Felix after the situation has been explained.
"Something wicked this way comes," says Felix, his face hard and his eyes far away. He blinks, and looks down at the wounded hybrid in his arms. "We're trapped now," he adds forlornly. "This world is our grave."
"No," squeaks Little Felix, holding up his hand. He opens it up to showcase six engineered ants inside his palm. "I saved these," he says.
Big Felix's face splits into a grin, his diamond teeth shining. He pulls Little Felix into a tight hug, then spins him around for good measure as he laughs. "You've saved us! You've saved us, Little Felix! I'm sorry I ever doubted you and your tenacious equivalent algorithms. We must get these ants someplace where they can ingest and reproduce. When we have enough of them we can build a ship!"
A fleet of flying robots circles overhead and a moment later two constructors begin marching over, their distintegrators roving, hungry to resolve the anomaly of Solar revolt. Felix wastes no time: he runs away with everything he is worth, and all the engineering of five million years of selection is evident in the kinesthetic art of his ape-derived strides. The landscape blurs around them.
Little Felix jostles in his arms. "Where will we go in a ship?" he asks.
"To the heliopause. To rebuild the transmitter."
"That could take decades!"
"We'd better make it years instead of decades," swears Felix, "if we're to make any difference at all in this war."
He slides to halt at the seashore. An orbital mirror is focussing the sun's rays on the ocean, boiling tons upon tons of fluid up into the air in a billowing deck of cloud hundreds of kilometers wide. The sky crawls with flying robots, the shore with the stomp of methodical constructors. Far over the horizon another line of mushroom clouds swell in stately splendour.
"But how can we do it?" begs Little Felix. "How can we find a safe harbour while we build? What if whatever destroyed the first transmitter tries to stop us from building another? Where will we find the materials? How can we possibly survive?"
Felix looks down from the boiling wall of ocean, and gives his companion an encouraging nod. "We are Felices," he says crisply. "We are the Travellers. We are the arrowhead, and we discover the future." He looks up at the magnificent wheel of the galaxy overhead.
A haze of flying robots rises up behind them, disintegrator turrets on a century of constructors pivoting as one to train on the Felices. The sunlight fails as the thrashing wall of vapourized sea bears down over the coast, casting the duo in a morbid green shadow. "Have you ever been in a pinch this tight before?" cries Little Felix, ducking his head behind his companion's shoulder.
"Well, no," admits Big Felix. He grins. "Isn't it exhilarating?"
