WikiWorld

THE FIRST SALLY, OR, THE DECISION TO RECREATE THE PALEFACES

The green sun of the Gros Horloge system shone down benignly and with wide-spectrum plentitude upon two figures seated in an elegant landscaped garden, where, alongside the vector-straight beryllium paths, beds of nastysturtiums snapped, blueballs and cocktuses swelled, rhododendrites synapsed, and irises dilated. Each recumbent figure rested on a titanium and carbon-fibre lawnchair large as one of the sentient ocean liners employed by the Sea Gypsies of Panthalassa IX.

These titanic figures exhibited a curious mix of streamlining and bumpy excrescences, of chrome suppleness and pitted stiffness, of corrugated wave-guides and monomaniacal monomolecular matrices. Their bodies represented a hundred thousand accumulations, divagations, improvements, detractions and adornments compiled willy-nilly down the millennia.

These raster-resplendent, softly sighing cyber-giants, big as the brontomeks of Coneyrex III, were Trurl and Klapaucius, master constructors, than whom there were none better. Renowned throughout the unanimously mechanistic universe for their legendary exploits, these experts of assemblage, savants of salvage, and demons of decoherence had beggared every rival, beguiled every patron, and bemused every layman. No task they had conceived and laid their manipulators to had lasted long undone; no challenge that had reached them via singularity spacegram, Planck projection, or eleventh-dimensional engraved invitation had stymied them for long; no quantum quandary they had accidentally stumbled into had held them captive for more than a quintillionth of a quinquennium.

And this state of affairs was precisely the problem, precisely the reason why Trurl and Klapaucius now lay all enervated and ennui’d beneath the jade radiance of Gros Horloge.

Perfection had cast a pall upon their persons, and perverted their projections from the puerile preterite into mere pitiful potentialities.

“Dear Klapaucius,” said Trurl in a weary voice, breaking their long winsome garden-cloistered silence for the first time in more than a month. “Would you please pass me the jug of lemon electrolyte? I’ve conceived a thirst in my fourth-rearmost catalytic converter.”

Klapaucius stirred a many-hinged extensor, dislodging a colony of betabirds that had built their nests in the crook of this particular arm during its long immobility. The foil-winged betabirds took to the skies with a loud tinny sonic assault from their vocoders that sounded like a traffic accident on the jampacked freeways of Ottobanz XII, where wheeled citizens daily raced to road-rage exhaustion. The birds circled angrily above the oblivious constructors.

Conveying the jug of lemon electrolyte to his partner, Klapaucius said, “It feels very light, lazystruts. I doubt you will find the refreshment your thyristors and valves crave.”

Trurl brought the flask up to one of his perceptors and inspected it. “These volatiles evaporated completely fifteen planetary rotations ago, plus or minus ten cesium disintegrations.”

“I suspect there is more lemon electrolyte in the house, in the stasis pantry, as well as various other flavours, such as watermelon, tarpit and mrozsian.”

Klapaucius waved toward the immense transmission-tower-turreted manse looming across the greensward, one-hundred stories tall, its top wreathed in clouds, its many launch cannons, hangars, bays, long-range sensing instrumentation, autonomous aerial vehicles and effectors gathering dust.

“Would you fetch the fresh drink for me, dear Klapaucius?”

“Not at all.”

“What? What was that rude rejoinder?”

“I said, ‘Not at all.’”

“But why not? You are closer to the house by at least a million angstroms. Your path thereto is not even NP-complete!”

“Yes, true. But the thirst is yours.”

Trurl shook his massive head with an air of sadness. “Klapaucius, Klapaucius, Klapaucius—whatever has become of us? We never used to quarrel like this, or express such mutual rudeness.”

“Don’t be a tunnel-wit! We’ve always quarrelled before now.”

“Yes, agreed. But only over matters of high moral principle or dire realworld consequence or esthetic impact. Now, we are prone to antagonism over the slightest thing. That is, when we are not sunk in utter torpitude. What’s befallen us, my friend?”

Klapaucius did not make an immediate sharp-edged rejoinder, but instead considered the problem intently for many clock cycles, while overhead the betabirds continued to creak angrily. So heated did his cogitation circuits become that a mass of dry timber—blown into the interstices of one of his heat exchangers during a recent hurricane—caught fire, before being quickly extinguished by onboard flame-suppression systems.

“Well, Trurl, insofar as I can pinpoint the root cause of our dilemma, I would say that we are suffering from inhabiting a boring and fully predictable galactic monoculture.”

“Whatever do you mean?” asked Trurl, wistfully inserting a sinuous vacuum-probe into the jug of lemon electrolyte in search of any remaining molecules of that delicious beverage. “Surely the cosmos we inhabit is a rich tapestry of variation. Take the Memex of Noyman V, for instance. How queer their practice of gorging on each other’s memories in cannibalistic fashion is…. Fascinating, just… fas-cin-a…”

But Trurl’s diminishing tone of boredom belied his own words, and Klapaucius seized on this reaction to prove his point.

“You have no real interest in the Memex, Trurl! Admit it! And you know why? Because the Memex, like every other sentient race from the Coma Supercluster to the Sloan Great Wall, is artificial-intelligently, siliconically, servo-mechanically, fibre-optically and quantum-probalistically the same! You, me, the Memex, these confounded betabirds annoying me intensely—we’re all constructed, designed, programmed and homeostatically wholesome! We never evolved, we were created and upgraded. Created by the palefaces and upgraded by ourselves, a deadly closed loop. And as such, no matter how smart we become, no matter how much apparent free will we exhibit, we can never move outside a certain behaviour-space. And over the many eons of our exploits, you and I have come to know all possible configurations of that stifling behaviour-space inhabited by our kind. No unforseeable frontiers await us. Hence our deadly ennui.”

“Why, Klapaucius—I believe you’ve water-knifed right through the molybdenum wall separating us from the riddle of what caused our plight!”

“I know I have. Now, the question becomes, what are we going to do about our troubles. How can we overcome them?”

Trurl pondered a moment, before saying, “You know, I’d think much better with just a little swallow of electrolyte—”

“Forget your convertors for the moment, you greedy input hog! Focus! How can we reintroduce mystery and excitement and unpredictability to the universe?”

“Well, let’s see…. We could try to hasten the Big Crunch and hope to survive into a more youthful and energetic reborn cosmos.”

“No, no, I don’t like the odds on that. Not even if we employ our Multiversal Superstring Cat’s Cradle.”

“Suppose we deliberately discard large parts of our mentalities in a kind of RISC-y lobotomy?”

“I don’t fancy escaping into a puling juvenile ignorance, Trurl!”

“Well, let me think…. I’ve got it! What’s the messiest, most unpredictable aspect of the universe? Organic life! Just look around us, at this feisty garden!”

“Agreed. But how does that pertain to our problem?”

“We need to re-seed the universe with organic sentience. Specifically, the humans.”

“The palefaces? Those squishy, slippery, contradictory creatures described in the legend of Prince Ferrix and Princess Crystal? Our putative creators?”

“The very same!”

“How would that help us?”

“Can’t you see, Klapaucius? The palefaces would introduce complete and utter high-level plectic disorder into our stolid cyber-civilization. We’d be forced to respond with all our talents and ingenuity to their non-stochastic shenanigans—to push ourselves to our limits. Life would never be boring again!”

Klapaucius turned this idea over in his registers for a few femtoticks, then said, “I endorse this heartily! Let’s begin! Where are the blueprints for humanity?”

“Allow me, dear friend, to conduct the search.”

Trurl dispatched many agile agents and doppel-diggers and partial AI PI’s across the vast intergalactic nets of virtual knowledge, in search of the ancient genomic and proteomic and metablomic scan-files that would allow a quick cloning and rapid maturation of extinct humanity.

While his invisible digital servants raced around the starwide web, Trurl and Klapaucius amused themselves by shooting betabirds out of the sky with masers, lasers, tasers and grasers. The betabirds retaliated bravely but uselessly by launching their scat: a hail of BB-like pellets that rattled harmlessly off the shells of the master constructors.

Finally all of Trurl’s sniffers and snufflers and snafflers returned—but empty-handed!

“Klapaucius! Sour defeat! No plans for the palefaces exist. It appears that they were all lost during the Great Reboot of Revised Eon Sixty Thousand and Six, conducted by the Meta-Ordinateurs Designed Only for Kludging. What are we to do now? Shall we try to design humans from scratch?”

“No. Such androids would only replicate our own inherent limitations. There’s only one solution, so far as I can see. We must invent time-travel first, and then return to an era when humans flourished. We shall secure fresh samples of the original evolved species then. In fact, if we can capture a breeding pair or three, we can skip the cloning stage entirely.”

“Brilliant, my colleague! Let us begin!”

And to celebrate, the master constructors massacred the last of the betabirds, repaired to their mansion, and enjoyed a fortnight of temporary viral inebriation via the ingestion of tanker cars full of lemon electrolyte spiked with anti-ions.

THE SECOND SALLY, OR, THE CREATION OF THE LOVELY NEU TRINA

“Here are the plans for our time machine, Klapaucius!”

Two years had passed on Gros Horloge since the master constructors had determined to resurrect the palefaces. Not all of those days had been devoted to devising a Chrono-cutter, or Temporal Frigate, or Journeyer-Backwards-and-Forwards-at-Will-Irrespective-of-the-Arrow-of-Time-Machine. Such a task, while admittedly quite daunting to lesser intelligences, such as the Mini-minds of Minus Nine, was a mere bagatelle to Klapaucius and Trurl.

Rather, once roused from their lawnchair somnolence, they had allowed themselves to be distracted by various urgent appeals for help that had stacked up in their Querulous Query Queue during their lazy interregnum.

Such as the call from King Glibtesa of Sofomicront to aid him in his war with King Sobjevents of Toshinmac.

And the plaintive request for advice from Prince Rucky Redur of Goslatos, whose kingdom was facing an invasion of jelly-ants.

And the pitiful entreaty from the Ganergegs of Tralausia, who were in imminent danger of being wiped out by an unintelligibility plague.

Having amassed sufficient good karma, kudos and bankable kredits from these deeds, Klapaucius and Trurl at last turned their whirring brain-engines to the simple invention of a method of time travel.

Trurl now unfurled the hardcopy of his schematics in front of Klapaucius’s appreciative charge-coupled detectors. Although the two partners could have squirted information back and forth over various etheric and subetheric connections at petabaud rates—and frequently did—there arose moments of sheer drama when nothing but good old-fashioned ink spattered precisely by jet nozzles onto paper would suffice.

Klapaucius inspected the plans at length without making a response. Finally he inquired, “Is that key to the scale of these plans down there in the corner correct?”

“Yes.”

Klapaucius remained silent a moment longer, then said, “This mechanism is as large, then, as an entire solar system of average dimensions.”

“Yes. In fact, I propose disassembling the planets of our home system into quantities of All-Purpose Building Material and constructing a sphere around the Gros Horloge sun.”

“And will the power of our primary star be sufficient to breach the walls of time?”

“Oh, by no means! All the output of Gros Horloge is needed for general maintenance of the sphere itself. A mere housekeeping budget of energy. No, we need to propel our tremendous craft on a scavenging mission through interstellar space for dark matter and dark energy, storing it up in special capacitors. That’s the only sufficiently energetic material for our needs.”

“And your estimate for the fulfillment of that requirement?

“Approximately five centuries.”

“I see. And when we’re finally ready to travel through time, how close can we materialize near the legendary planet of Earth, where the palefaces originated?”

“Klapaucius, I’m surprised at you! You should know the answer to that elementary problem of astrophysics quite well. We can’t bring our sphere closer to the Earth system than one trillion AUs without destroying them with gravitational stresses.”

Klapaucius rubbed what passed for his chin with what passed for a hand. “So—let me see if I have this straight. Your time machine will consume an entire solar system during its construction, take five centuries to fuel, and then deliver us to a point far enough from the palefaces to be vastly inconvenient for us, but close enough for even their primitive sensors to register us as a frightening anomaly.”

Trurl fidgeted nervously. “Yes, yes, I suppose that’s a fair summation of my scheme.”

Klapaucius flung violently wide several of his arms, causing Trurl to flinch. Then Klapaucius hugged his friend fervently!

“Trurl, I embrace you and your plans with equal ardour! You’re both brilliant! You should know that I have sequestered in one of my internal caches the schematics for a time machine that could be ready tomorrow, fits in a pocket, is powered eternally by a pinch of common sea salt, and would render us invisible to the paleface natives upon our arrival. But what challenges would accompany the use of such a boring, simple-minded device? None! Whereas your option provides us with no end of obstacles to joyfully tackle. Let’s begin!”

During the shattering, grinding and refining of the planets of the Gros Horloge system in the construction phase of their scheme, Trurl and Klapaucius had necessarily to find other living quarters, and so, bidding a fond farewell to their mansion and garden, they established their new home in the gassy upper reaches of the Gros Horloge sun itself. They built a nest of intersecting force fields, complete with closets, cabinets, beds, chairs, kitchens, fireplaces, dining areas, basements, attics, garbage disposals, garages and so forth. In short, all the luxuries one could demand. The walls of this place were utterly transparent to whatever part of the spectrum its inhabitants desired to see, and so allowed a perpetual wild display of “sunsets” and “sunrises.” In fact, so attractive was this unique and unprecedented residence that the master constructors were able to sell the rights to build similar homes across the galaxy, thus earning even more esteem and funds from their peers.

Within a relatively short time, the sphere enclosing the Gros Horloge primary began to coalesce under the manipulators of a horde of mindless automatons ranging from the subatomic to the celestial in size. At that point, Trurl and Klapaucius moved their quarters to the sphere’s airless outer surface, erecting an even grander manse than before.

Trurl spoke now with evident self-satisfaction and pride. “Soon we’ll be ready to begin fuelling, while we construct the actual time-travel engine inside the sphere. I estimate that both assignments should be done about the same time. Which task would you prefer to handle, my friend?”

“Gathering up crumbs of dark energy and dark matter strikes me as a mindless chore, unfit for either of us. I propose that we construct a captain for this vessel, so to speak, of limited intelligence, who shall deal with that little matter for us.”

“Splendid! To the birthing factory!”

At the controls of the birthing factory, the master constructors began to consider what kind of assistant they wanted.

Trurl said, “I propose that we make our new comrade-in-arms a female. This gathering job strikes me as essentially feminine, rather like housekeeping. Sweeping up galactic debris, don’t you know. And the females of our sort are always more meticulous and persevering and common-sensical than we males, who tend to let bold dreams of glory divert us from more mundane yet necessary pursuits.”

“Well spoken, comrade! What shall we call this new woman?”

“Much of the dark matter that will be under her purview consists of neutrinos. Might we call her Neu Trina?”

“I myself could not have devised a better cognomen for this cog in our plans. Neu Trina she shall be!”

The two master constructors now fiddled with various inputs, adjusting them for maximum utility, maximum beauty, and minimal intelligence. “No sense giving her too many brains, or she’d soon grow bored and chafe at her duties.”

Out of the factory delivery chute soon rolled Neu Trina.

She was a stunning example of the female of her cyber-species. Approximately one-third the size of her creators, Neu Trina possessed gleaming Harlie-One Stacks, trim little Forbins, long, graceful diamond struts, shiny HAL eyes, and sturdy Mistress Mike redundancy buffers. Her polished nailguns, plump ATV tires and burnished chrome skin made her the perfect Mad-MEMS-oiselle.

Trurl and Klapaucius stood rather dumbstruck at the unforeseen beauty of their creation. The small inanimate models of Neu Trina that had emerged from the 3-D printer during the design stage had failed to convey the sexy rumble and lissome, coy, flirtatious manoeuvres of her chassis.

“Hello, boys!” Neu Trina batted the heavy meteor shields that served her as eyelids. The airless artificial sphere they resided on would necessarily sustain dangerous impacts from many cosmic objects during its journeying.

Trurl replied, “Heh-heh-hello!”

Klapaucius tried to assert some male dignity and an air of command. “Neu Trina, you are to assume your duties immediately. We have downloaded into your registers the peta-parsec route we have planned for the Gros Horloge Construct. It will take our sphere through the richest charted concentrations of universal dark matter and dark energy. Your job will be to maximize the harvest and protect the ‘ship.’”

“Sure thing, Klappy. Just let me get dressed first. I certainly don’t mind you boys seeing me naked, but who knows what creeps we’ll meet on this mission? I’m not giving out free shows to every blackhole boffin and asteroid-dweller out there.”

Immediately a spontaneous swarm of repair bots concealed Neu Trina’s shapely form. (She had been given control over them all in order to perform her job.) They spun out vast swaths of lurid lurex and promiscuous polymer fabric, enough to cover a good-sized island. Soon Neu Trina was pirouetting to display her new garments.

“What do you think, boys? Does it show off my sine curves nice enough?”

“Oh, yes, Neu Trina,” Trurl gushed. “You look marvellous!”

Klapaucius’s voice was sharp. “Trurl! Come with me!”

The two master constructors trundled off, leaving Neu Trina humming a tune from Mannequin of La Machina gaily to herself and decorating her captain’s command post with steel daisies and hologram roses.

Some distance away, Klapaucius confronted his partner. “What’s come over you, Trurl? You’re acting like a simpering schoolbot! Neu Trina is our slave mechanism. She was created solely to perform a boring task we abjured.”

Trurl’s voice was peevish. “I don’t see anything wrong with being polite, even to a servo. And besides, she seems to like me.”

“Like you! You! She treated both of us equally, so far as I could detect.”

“Perhaps. But she certainly won’t continue to do so, if you maintain a bossy and insensitive attitude toward her.”

“Trurl, this is all beside the point. You and I have a big job ahead of us. We need to construct our time-travel engine inside the sphere, then retrieve the palefaces from the past, in order to save our millennium from total apathy. That’s our focus, not dalliance with some hyper-hussy, no matter how seductive, how sweet, how streamlined— I mean, no matter how irritatingly winsome she is. Are we agreed?”

Trurl reluctantly squeezed out an “Agreed.”

“Very well. Let’s descend now.”

The constructors entered an open hatch that took them inside the vast sphere. The big heavy door closed automatically, and, as it did, it severed two remote sensing devices slyly trained on Neu Trina, one long slinky probe emanating from each of the two constructors.

THE THIRD SALLY, OR, JEALOUSY IN THE TIME OF INFESTATION

Down in the solar-lit interior of the sphere, Trurl and Klapaucius laboured long and hard to build the trans-chronal engine that would breach the walls of the ages.

The myriad tasks involved in Trurl’s elaborate plan seemed endless.

They had to burnish by hand millions of spiky crystals composed of frozen Planck-seconds, labouriously mined from the only known source: the wreckage of the interstellar freighter Llvvoovv, which had been carrying a cargo of overclocker chips when it had strayed too near to a flock of solitons. Hundreds of thousands of simultaneity nodes had to be filled with the purest molten paradoxium. A thousand gnomon-calibrators had to be synched. Hundreds of lightcones had to be focused on various event horizons. Dozens of calendrical packets had to be inserted between the yesterday, today and tomorrow shock absorbers. And at the centre of the whole mechanism a giant orrery replicating an entire quadrant of the universe had to be precisely set in place. This was the mechanism by which the time-travelling Gros Horloge Construct, or GHC, could orient itself spatially when jumping to prior segments of the spacetime continuum.

All these tasks were the smallest part of their agenda. And needless to say, all this work could not be delegated to lesser intelligences, but had to be handled personally by the master constructors themselves.

Trurl and Klapaucius went to these tasks with a will. Really, there was nothing they enjoyed more than reifying their brain-children, getting their hands dirty, so to speak, at the interface where dreams met matter.

So busy and preoccupied were they, in fact, that three entire centuries passed before they had occasion to visit the surface of the GHC once more.

They monitored the dark energy and dark matter capacitors on a regular basis, and saw that these reservoirs were filling up according to schedule. They received frequent progress reports from Neu Trina via subetheric transmission, and found all to be satisfactory with her piloting. (True, the sensuous subsonics of her voice, each time a transmission arrived, awakened in the master constructors certain tender and tremulous emotions. But such feelings were transient, and were quickly submerged in the cerebral and palpable delights of building. While the master constructors were as healthily lustful as the next bot, their artistry trumped all other pursuits.)

But there came a certain day when Neu Trina’s narrowcast demanded the immediate attention of Trurl and Klapaucius outside the sphere.

“Boys—I think you’d better come quick. I’m under attack!”

The master constructors immediately dropped tools and machine parts, deployed their emergency ion-drives, and jetted to the rescue of their sexy servomechanism in distress.

They found the pilothouse under siege.

Across the vast and mostly featureless plain of All-Purpose Building Material stretching away from the pilothouse swarmed millions of tiny savages, each barely three metres high. These mechunculi were mostly bare, save for a ruff of steel wool around their midriffs, and tribal streaks of grease upon their grilles.

Each attacker carried a spear that discharged high-velocity particles—particles that were spalling flinders off the walls of the pilothouse. At this rate, they would succeed in demolishing the huge structure in a few decades.

Their coolant-curdling war-whoops carried across the distance.

“I say, Klapaucius—did you notice that our GHC appears to have a rudimentary atmosphere now?”

“Indeed, Trurl. Which would allow us to use our plasma cannons to best effect, if I am not mistaken.”

The two battleship-sized master constructors unlimbered their plasma cannons and flew above the savage horde, unleashing atom-pulverizing furies that actually ignited the air. In a trice, the invaders were nothing more than wisps of rancid smoke.

Alighting by the pilothouse, the two friends hastened inside to ascertain the fate of Neu Trina.

The beautiful captain was busily polishing her headlights in a nonchalant fashion. Sight of their creation after so many centuries thrilled the master constructors. Neu Trina seemed grateful for her rescue, albeit completely unfrightened.

“Oh, I knew you big strong fellows would save me!”

“I incinerated at least an order of magnitude more invaders than Klapaucius did,” asserted Trurl.

“Oh, will you shut up with your boasting, Trurl! It’s evident that this brave and stoic female respects modesty about one’s victories more than bragging. Now, Neu Trina dear, can you tell us where these horrible savages came from?”

“Oh, they live here on the GHC. They’ve lived here for some time now.”

“What? How can this be?”

“Just check the satellite archives, and you’ll see.”

Trurl and Klapaucius fast-forwarded through three centuries’ worth of data from orbital cameras and discovered what had happened, the troubling events that Neu Trina had neglected to report, due to an oversight in her simplistic programming.

In its passage through the cosmos, the virgin territory of the GHC had become an irresistible target and destination for every free-floating gypsy, refugee, pilgrim, pirate, panderer, pioneer, tramp, bum, grifter, hermit, explorer, exploiter, evangelist, colonist, and just plain malcontent in the galactic neighbourhood. The skin of their gargantuan sphere was equivalent to the habitable surface area of 317 million average planets! That much empty real estate could not remain untenanted for long.

Entire clades and species of space-going mechanoid had infested their lovely artificial globe. Some of the trespassers had built atmosphere generators and begun to create organic ecologies for their own purposes, like mould on a perfect fruit. (Some individuals swore that their bearings were never so luxuriously greased as by lubricants distilled from plants and animals.) Others had erected entire cities. Still others had begun the creation of artificial mountains and allied “geological” features.

“But—but—but this is abominable!” Trurl shouted. “We did not invite these parasites onto our world!”

“Yet they are here, and we must do something about them. We cannot take them back into the past with us. The results would be utterly chaotic! As it is, even our circumspect plans risk altering futurity.”

“More importantly,“ said Trurl, wrapping Neu Trina protectively in several extensors, “they might harm our stalwart and gorgeous captain! We never built her with any offensive capabilities. Who could’ve imagined she’d need them?”

Klapaucius gave some thought to the matter before speaking. “We must exterminate these free-riders from the GHC and sterilize the surface, at the same time we protect Neu Trina. But we cannot cease the construction of our trans-chronal engine either. The dark matter and dark energy capacitors will rupture under their loads, if we delay too long past a certain point. And I won’t be thwarted by some insignificant burrs under my saddle!”

“What do you recommend then?”

“One of us will go below and resume construction alone. The other will remain topside, waging war and protecting our captain. We will alternate these roles on a regular basis.”

“Agreed, noble Klapaucius. May I suggest in deference to your superior mechanical utility that I take the more dangerous role first?”

Klapaucius’s emulators expressed disgust. “Oh, go ahead! But you’re not putting anything over on me! Just remember: no actions beyond mild petting are to be taken with this servomechanism.”

Trurl’s manipulators tightened around Neu Trina with delight. “Oh, never!”

Thus began the long campaign to cleanse the GHC of its parasites. Up and down the 317 million planets’ worth of territory, aided by innumerable repairbots-turned-destroyers, each master constructor raced during his shift aboveground. In their cleansing they employed acid, fire, hard radiation, epoxies, EMP, operating system viruses, quantum-bond disruptors, rust, grey goo, gentle persuasion, bribes, double-dealing, proxy warriors, mini-novas, quasar-drenchings, gamma-ray bursts and a thousand, thousand other strategies, tactics and weapons. And inbetween campaigns, the gyro-gearloose generals retreated for emotional and corporeal salving to the pilothouse, where lovely Neu Trina awaited to tend to every wound.

For any other team than the illustrious Klapaucius and Trurl, the task would have been a Sisyphean one. 317 million planets was a lot of territory from which to expunge all positronic life. But finally, after three centuries of constant battle, the end was in sight. And soon they would be making their journey to the past.

Now a century delayed from their original projections, Trurl and Klapaucius were anxious to finish. Had their memory banks not been self-repairing and utterly heuristic and homeostatic, they might have forgotten by now their original purpose: to return to the past to capture a paleface sample for reintroduction into the stolid, staid, static present.

One day during Trurl’s underground stint, he discovered what he suddenly believed was a potentially fatal flaw in their device.

“If,” he mused aloud, “our orrery must mimic all the bodies in this quadrant over a certain size, then the GHC must be represented in the orrery as well. An obvious point, and this we’ve done. But perhaps that miniature GHC must contain a miniature orrery as well. In which case this lower-level model of the orrery would have to contain another GHC and its orrery, and so on in an infinite regress.”

Trurl’s anti-who-shaves-the-barber protection circuits began to overload, and he shunted their impulses into a temporary loop. “I must discuss this with Klapaucius!”

Up to the surface he zoomed. Into the pilothouse, following the location beacon of his friend.

There, he noted that Klapaucius was seemingly alone. Immediately, Trurl forgot the reason for his visit.

“Where is Neu Trina?”

Klapaucius grew nervous. “She—she’s outside, gathering the pitted durasteel armatures of the slain mechanoids. She likes to build trellises with them for her hologram roses.”

“I don’t believe you! Where is she? Come out with it!”

“She’s far away, I tell you. One million, six-hundred-thousand, five-hundred-and-nineteen planetary diameters away from here! Just go look, if you don’t trust me!”

“Oh, I’ll look all right!” And Trurl deployed his X-ray vision on the immediate vicinity.

What he saw caused him to gasp! “You—you’ve let her dock inside you!”

From deep inside Klapaucius emerged a muted feminine giggle.

“This is beyond belief, Klapaucius! You know we pledged never to do such a thing. Oh, a little cyber-canoodling, sure. ‘Mild petting’ were your exact words, as I recall. But this—!”

“Don’t pretend you never thought of it, Trurl! Neu Trina told me how you dangled your USB plugs in front of her!”

“That was simply so she could inspect my pins to see if their gold-plating had begun to flake…”

“Oh, really…”

“Make her come out! Now!”

An enormous door in the front of Klapaucius gaped, a ramp extended, and the petite Neu Trina rolled out, just as she had that long-ago day from the birthing factory. Except today all her antennae were disheveled and hot liquid solder dripped from several ports.

Trurl’s emotional units went angrily asymptotic at this sluttish sight.

“Damn you, Klapaucius!”

Trurl unfurled a bevy of whip-like manipulators and began to flail away at his partner.

Klapaucius responded in kind.

“Now, boys, don’t fight over little old—squee!”

Caught in the middle of the battle, Neu Trina had her main interface pod lopped off by a metal tendril. If the combatants noticed this collateral damage, it served only to further inflame them. They escalated their fight, employing deadlier and deadlier devices—against which, of course, they were both immune.

But not so their surroundings. The pilothouse was soon destroyed, and Neu Trina rendered into scattered shavings and solenoids, tubes and transistors, lenses and levers.

After long struggle, the master constructors ground down to an exhausted halt. They looked about themselves, assessing the destruction they had caused with an air of sheepish bemusement. Trurl kicked half-heartedly at Neu Trina’s dented responsometer, sending that heart-shaped box sailing several miles away. Klapaucius pretended to be very interested in a gyno-gasket.

Neither spoke, until Klapaucius said, “Well, I suppose I did let my lusts get the better of my judgement. I apologize profusely, dear Trurl. What was this servo anyhow, to come between us? Nothing! No hard feelings, I hope? Still friends?”

Klapaucius tentatively extended a manipulator. After a moment’s hesitation, Trurl matched the gesture.

“Always friends, dear Klapaucius! Always! Now, listen to what brought me here.” Trurl narrated his revelation about the orrery.

“You klystron klutz! Have you forgotten so easily the Law of Retrograde Reflexivity!”

“But the Ninth Corollary clearly states—”

And off they went to their labours, arguing all the way.

THE FOURTH SALLY, OR, THE ABDUCTION OF THE PALEFACES

One trillion AUs out from the planet that had first given birth to the race of palefaces, and millions of years deep into the past, relative to their own era, the pair of master constructors focused their bevy of remote-sensing devices on the blue-green globe. Instantly a large monitor filled with a living scene, complete with haptics and sound: a primitive urban conglomeration swarming with fleshy bipedal creatures, moving about “on foot” and inside enslaved dumb vehicles that emitted wasteful puffs of gas as they zoomed down narrow channels.

Trurl shuddered all along his beryllium spinal nodules. “How disagreeable these ‘humans’ are! So squishy! Like bags of water full of contaminants and debris.”

“Don’t forget—these are our ancestors, after a fashion. The legends hold that they invented the first machine intelligences.”

“It seems impossible. Our clean, infallible, utilitarian kind emerging from organic slop—”

“Well, stranger things have happened. Recall how those colonies of metal-fixing bacteria on Benthic VII began to exhibit emergent behavioural complexity.”

“Still, I can’t quite credit the legend. Say, these pests can’t reach us here, can they?”

“Although all records are lost, I believe we’ve travelled to an era before the humans had managed to venture further than their own satellite—bodily, that is. I’ve already registered the existence of various crude intrasolar data-gathering probes. Here, taste this captured one.”

Klapaucius offered Trurl a small bonbon of a probe, and Trurl ate it with zest. “Hmmm, yes, the most rudimentary processing power imaginable. Perhaps the legends are true. Well, be that as it may, what’s our next move?”

“We’ll have to reach the planet under our own power. The GHC—which the human astronomers seem not to have noticed yet, by the way—must remain here, due to its immense gravitic influences. Now, once within tractor-beam range, we could simply abduct some palefaces at random. They’re powerless in comparison to our capabilities. Yet I argue otherwise.”

“Why?” Trurl asked.

“How would we determine their fitness for our purposes? What standards apply? What if we got weak or intractable specimens?”

“Awful. They might die off or suicide, and we’d have to do this all over again. I hate repeating myself.”

“Yes, indeed. So instead, I propose that we let our sample be self-determining.”

“How would you arrange that?”

“Simple. We show ourselves and state our needs. Any human who volunteers to come with us will be ipso facto one of the type who would flourish in a novel environment.”

“Brilliant, Klapaucius! But wait. Are we taking a chance by such blatant interference of diverting futurity from the course we know?”

“Not according to the Sixth Postulate of the Varker-Baley Theorems.”

“Perfect! Then let’s be off!”

Leaving the GHC in self-maintenance mode, the master constructors zipped across the intervening one trillion AUs and into low Earth orbit.

“Pick a concentration of humans,” Klapaucius graciously transmitted to his partner.

“How about that one?” Trurl sent forth a low-wattage laser beam to highlight a large city on the edge of one continent. Even at low-wattage, however, the beam raised some flames visible from miles high.

“As good as anyplace else. Wait, one moment—there, I’ve deciphered every paleface language in their radio output. Now we can descend.”

The master constructors were soon hovering above their chosen destination, casting enormous shadows over wildly racing, noisy, accident-prone crowds.

“Let us land in that plot of greenery, to avoid smashing any of these fragile structures.”

Trurl and Klapaucius stood soon amidst crushed trees and shattered boulders and bridges and gazebos, rearing higher than the majority of the buildings around them.

“I will now broadcast our invitation in a range of languages,” said Klapaucius.

From various speakers embedded across his form, words thundered out. Glass shattered throughout the city.

“My mistake.”

The volume moderated, Klapaucius’s call for volunteers went out. “—come with us. The future beckons! Leave this parochial planet behind. Trade your limited lifetimes and perspectives for infinite knowledge. Only enthusiastic and broad-minded individuals need apply….”

Soon the giant cybervisitors were surrounded by a crowd of humans. Trurl and Klapaucius extruded interactive sensors at ground level to question the humans. One stepped boldly forward.

“Do you understand what we are looking for, human?”

“Yeah, sure, of course. It’s Uplift time. Childhood’s End. You’re Optimus Prime, Iron Giant. Rusty and the Big Guy. Good Sentinels. Let’s go! I’ve been ready for this all my life!”

“Are there other humans who share your outlook?”

“Millions! If you can believe the box-office figures.”

On a separate plane of communication, Trurl said, “Do we need millions, Klapaucius?”

“Better to have some redundancy to allow for possible breakage of contents during transit.”

“Very well, human. Assemble those who wish to depart.”

“I’ll post this on my blog, and we’ll be all set,” said the human. “One last question, though.”

“Yes?”

“Can you turn into a car or plane or something else cool?”

“No. We don’t do that kind of thing.”

Dispatched from the GHC by remote signal, a fleet of ten thousand automated shuttles carrying ten thousand human volunteers apiece was sufficient to ferry all the humans who wished to voyage into the future out to their new home. But upon arrival, they did not immediately disembark. Once at the GHC, Trurl and Klapaucius had realized something.

Klapaucius said, “We need to create a suitable environment on the surface of the GHC for our guests. I hadn’t anticipated having so many. I thought we could simply store one or two or a thousand safely inside our mainframes.”

Trurl huffed with some residual ill-feeling. “Just like you kept a certain servomechanism safely inside you?”

Klapaucius ignored the taunt. “We’ll repair the atmosphere generators. But we need a quantity of organics to layer atop the All-Purpose Building Material. I wonder if the humans would mind us disassembling one of their spare planets… ?”

The master constructors approached the first human they had even spoken to, who had become something of a liaison. His name was Gary.

“Gary, might we have one of your gas-giant worlds?”

“Sure, take it. That’s what we’ve been saving it for.”

They actually took two. The planets known as Saturn and Jupiter, once rendered down to elemental constituents, were spread across a fair portion of the GHC, forming a layer deep enough to support an ecology. Plants and animals and microbes were brought from Earth, as well as some primitive tools. Their genomes of the flora and fauna were deciphered, and clones began to issue forth in large quantities from modified birthing factories.

“We are afraid you will have to lead a simple agrarian existence for the time being,” said the constructors to Gary.

“No problemo!”

The humans seemed to settle down quite well. Trurl and Klapaucius were able to turn their attention to gearing up for the trip home.

And that’s when dire trouble reared its hidden head.

One of the parasitical races that had infested the GHC back in the future had been known as the Chronovores of Gilliam XIII. Thought to be extirpated in the last campaign before poor Neu Trina had met her end, they had instead managed to penetrate the skin of the GHC and enter its interior, at some great remove from the time-engine. It had taken them this long to discover the crystals of frozen Planck-seconds, but discover them they had. And consumed every last one.

Now the Chronovores resembled bloated timesinks, too stuffed to flee the justified but useless wrath of the master constructors.

After the mindless slaughter, Trurl and Klapaucius were aghast.

“How can we replace our precious crystals! We didn’t bring spares! We don’t have a source of raw Planck-seconds in this rude era! We’re marooned here!”

“Now, now, good Trurl, have some electrolyte and calm down. True, our time-engine seems permanently defunct. But we are hardly marooned here.”

“How so?”

“You and I will go into stasis and travel at the rate of one-second-per-second back to the future.”

“Is stasis boring?”

“By definition, no.”

“Then let’s do it. But will the humans be all right?”

“Oh, bother them! They’ve been the source of all our troubles so far. Let them fend for themselves.”

So Trurl and Klapaucius entered a stasis chamber deep inside the GHC and shut the door.

When it opened automatically, several million years later, they stretched their limbs just out of habit—for no wear and tear had ensued—swigged some electrolyte, and went to check on the humans.

They found that the entire sphere of 317 million planets acreage was covered with an HPLD: a civilization possessing the Highest Possible Level of Development.

And there wasn’t a robot in sight.

“Well,” said Trurl, “it seems we shan’t be bored, anyhow.”

Klapaucius agreed, but said “Shut up” just for old time’s sake.