Icarus
Names: IcarusIckIckyChicken Boy
First appears in Book 3: All These Worlds, chapter 6 (Launch)
Appearances
What you know
Book 3: All These Worlds
- Ch 6Icarus, another of Bill's newest clones, shares Bill's temperament and mainly wants quiet time for astrophysics research.
- Ch 17Icarus and Daedalus are travelling through interstellar space, keeping their accelerations synchronized for their mission.
- Ch 17Icarus is still calculating a safe minimum tau for the mission, since no one has attempted anything like it before.
- Ch 17Icarus and Daedalus agree that after their delivery they will head for the galactic core, Sagittarius A-Star.
- Ch 69Icarus and Daedalus approach GL 877 at near light speed, each pushing a planet-sized payload toward opposite poles.
- Ch 69Icarus warns all local Bobs to flee GL 877 before impact.
- Ch 69Icarus dedicates the destruction of the Others' home system to the Pav and the other species the Others exterminated.
Book 5: Not Till We Are Lost
- Ch 1Icarus and Daedalus have been accelerating toward Sagittarius A* for fifty-two years Earth time, on a twenty-six-thousand-year trip.
- Ch 3Icarus orders Guppy to begin maximum safe deceleration so they can stop and investigate the anomalous system.
- Ch 3Icarus and Daedalus plan to send a preliminary report about the anomaly back to Bill.
- Ch 5Icarus and Daedalus took over five years to decelerate before reaching the anomalous system.
- Ch 5Icarus identifies the anomaly as a wormhole, having read up on alternative space travel as a hobby.
- Ch 8Icarus theorizes that wormhole endpoints must be physically carried to their destination before they can be used.
- Ch 8Icarus flies through the second wormhole and emerges seventeen hundred light-years away.
- Ch 12Icarus and Daedalus survey all 342 gates by drone in about three weeks, mapping their destinations.
- Ch 12Icarus decides to follow the wormhole network around the galaxy rather than continue sub-light to the core.
- Ch 14In six months Icarus and Daedalus made eight hub hops, about sixty degrees around the galaxy, into the Perseus Arm.
- Ch 14Icarus thinks the builders used a 500-degree circle, placing hubs five of their degrees apart.
- Ch 18Icarus wonders whether the purple biospheres evolved independently or were imported by colonists, possibly wiping out native life.
- Ch 24Icarus discovers he is arachnophobic, unlike Original Bob, which he attributes to replicative drift.
- Ch 28Icarus and Daedalus are held in orbit by tractor beams; even a released drone is captured.
- Ch 32Icarus and Daedalus are heading for the galactic center.
- Ch 37Icarus and Daedalus are being held in the Sentry System, unable at first to communicate with the sentries holding them.
- Ch 37Icarus teaches the sentries numbers, arithmetic and logic, then asks via pictures to leave before their power fails.
- Ch 43Icarus thinks they may need a full archaeological dig on an abandoned planet to find answers.
- Ch 48Icarus and Daedalus give Gunther a drone, roamers and technology files, and begin building an autofactory in orbit.
- Ch 52Returning from Centaurvania cost Icarus and Daedalus another eight years before they reached Hub Zero.
- Ch 52Icarus decides to build mannies and takes deep SUDDAR scans of wormhole satellites, avoiding touching the gates.
- Ch 54Icarus and Daedalus walk Roanoke in mannies and find them far more real than VR.
- Ch 54Icarus and Daedalus are learning the Roanokians' written language first, though they have found an audiotape library.
- Ch 56Icarus and Daedalus translated Roanokian from text alone, unlike Bob with the Deltans or Phineas and Ferb with the Pav.
- Ch 56Icarus sends a cargo drone through the DMZ gate to question the sentries in spoken Roanokian.
- Ch 60After failing at the DMZ system, Icarus and Daedalus visited a fully colonized but completely empty star system.
- Ch 60Icarus and Daedalus decide to travel seven light-years to Sagittarius A* before reporting back to Bill at Roanoke.
- Ch 65Icarus and Daedalus photograph and measure Sagittarius A* thoroughly before heading back toward the antimatter fountain.
- Ch 65Icarus identifies their vessel to the station as the Roanokian vessel Croatoan.
- Ch 68Icarus and Daedalus apply for Federation vessel registrations, lying on the form, and are restricted in movement until approved.
- Ch 68Frustrated by the queue, Icarus automates his questions to the Archivist.
- Ch 70Icarus contacts Bill by SCUT to report that he and Daedalus found the Pan Galactic Federation of 114 species.
- Ch 71Icarus and Daedalus are bringing a wormhole endpoint toward Bobiverse space, allowing a delegation to the Federation within a decade.
Connections
- copy ofBill
- ally ofDaedalustravelling together toward the galactic center
- friend ofDaedalustravelling partners
- enemy ofThe Others
- ally ofBill
- copy ofBob Johansson
- member ofBobiverse
- enemy ofSentry shipscaptors
- ally ofGunther
Key moments
- Book 3 · Ch 6Planet-moving mission launches
After a successful short-range test of the mover-plate arrays on Epsilon Eridani 1 and an ex-moon of Epsilon Eridani 3, Bill sends his clones Daedalus and Icarus off on a possibly suicidal Hail Mary mission.
- Book 3 · Ch 17Icarus and Daedalus plan a trip to the core
En route on their high-tau mission, Icarus and Daedalus decide that once their 'delivery' is complete they will travel to the galactic core.
- Book 3 · Ch 69GL 877 destroyed
Icarus and Daedalus release two relativistic planetary masses into GL 877 from opposite poles, causing the star to explode and sterilize the Others' system.
- Book 3 · Ch 70Victory and the end of the Others
Bill tells Herschel and Neil that the Battle of Sol is won at heavy cost, and reveals that Daedalus and Icarus have destroyed GL 877, ending the Others.
- Book 5 · Ch 1Voyage to the galactic core
Fifty-two years into their near-light-speed journey toward Sagittarius A*, Icarus and Daedalus discuss the chance that FTL will be invented behind them and the growing lag in news from home.
- Book 5 · Ch 1Daedalus's SURGE-lens telescope
Daedalus reveals he has made the SURGE drive field into a refracting lens and has begun surveying passing star systems for planets, signals and anomalies to report home.
- Book 5 · Ch 3Anomaly detected; deceleration begins
Daedalus shows Icarus microwave emissions from a passing system that appear artificial. Icarus has Guppy begin decelerating and coordinate with Dae's Guppy so they can stop and investigate.
- Book 5 · Ch 5Discovery of the wormhole
Approaching the radiation sources, Daedalus notices the stars within a ring of empty space are seen from a different angle. Icarus realizes it is a wormhole held open by the two flanking stations.
- Book 5 · Ch 5The abandoned civilization
Spy drones and then a powered fly-in reveal an inhabited-looking system that ignores them completely. Drones landed on the home planet find spotless, empty cities, as if the inhabitants packed up and left.
- Book 5 · Ch 8Probing the wormholes
A drone sent through one wormhole fails to emerge from the other, showing they lead elsewhere. Daedalus crosses to a system eleven light-years away and finds no further wormholes.
- Book 5 · Ch 8Icarus reaches the hub
Icarus flies through the second wormhole and finds himself 1,700 light-years away in a system detecting hundreds of wormhole signals, a major hub.
- Book 5 · Ch 12Decoding the gate addresses
Icarus and Daedalus find the radio frequency that makes wormhole satellites reply with address packets, identify source and destination fields, and map them to galactic coordinates.
- Book 5 · Ch 12Plan to follow the network
Seeing long-distance links, Icarus proposes using the network to travel around the galaxy, choosing a destination about seven degrees around as the next hub.
- Book 5 · Ch 14Mapping the hub network
Icarus and Daedalus hop along hub systems, mapping thousands of systems. Connection counts peak at one hub, which they name Hub Zero, the likely center of the empire.
- Book 5 · Ch 14Entering Hub Zero's gates
After mapping six hubs spinward, they return to Hub Zero, face over a thousand gates with no clue to the home planet, and pass through one at random.
- Book 5 · Ch 18Discovery of the purple planets
Surveying Hub Zero's systems, Icarus and Daedalus find a system with purple, retinal-based plant life and abandoned cities built by non-humanoid inhabitants.
- Book 5 · Ch 24The spider world
Icarus and Daedalus survey a planet whose cities are cable webs built by a spider-like species. Icarus, unexpectedly arachnophobic, wants to leave quickly.
- Book 5 · Ch 24Accosted at last
Back at Hub Zero, they pass through another randomly chosen gate and are immediately accosted.
- Book 5 · Ch 28Captured by sentries
Passing through a gate from Hub Zero, Icarus and Daedalus fail to give a valid response to automated sentry ships and are towed by tractor beam to an asteroid station.
- Book 5 · Ch 28The dead prisoner
Surveying their prison, they find another long-held automated ship that has run out of fuel and died, hinting at their own fate.
- Book 5 · Ch 37First contact with the sentries
Icarus and Daedalus establish communication with the sentries through pixelated images, teaching math and logic and negotiating permission to leave.
- Book 5 · Ch 37Escape with the alien probe
With the sentries' consent, Icarus and Daedalus return through the gate to Hub Zero, using drones to push the dead alien probe with them.
- Book 5 · Ch 37Alien probe revived
After a week of careful surgery installing a Casimir generator, the alien probe powers up and scans them with SUDDAR, and Icarus begins teaching it too.
- Book 5 · Ch 43Learning to talk with Gunther
After more than a week of lessons, Icarus and Daedalus can converse with Gunther and learn about its centaur creators.
- Book 5 · Ch 43Survey of an abandoned purple world
En route to Centaurvania they survey Gunther's first destination, an abandoned civilization with purple retinal-based plants, and probe a second wormhole there.
- Book 5 · Ch 48Gunther returns to a ruined home
Icarus and Daedalus follow Gunther to Centaurvania and find its technological civilization collapsed long ago, with only villages remaining.
- Book 5 · Ch 48Gunther stays to rebuild
Learning nearly seven hundred Earth years have passed, Gunther decides to rebuild its people; the Bobs supply equipment and technology before moving on.
- Book 5 · Ch 52Icarus and Daedalus choose Roanoke
Back at Hub Zero, Icarus and Daedalus agree to investigate one civilization closely and pick Roanoke, the intact world near home.
- Book 5 · Ch 52A library is found on Roanoke
Drones and roamers map a Roanoke town, observe automated maintenance, and discover a book repository that a roamer manages to enter.
- Book 5 · Ch 54Scanning the Roanoke library
Roamers scan the library's books while Icarus and Daedalus, in mannies, study Roanokian writing and the planet's abandoned state.
- Book 5 · Ch 54SUDDAR sweep finds no Roanokians
A three-day planetary SUDDAR survey finds no hidden population, convincing Daedalus that the whole population left in an orderly manner.
- Book 5 · Ch 56Questioning the sentries in Roanokian
Using a drone speaking Roanokian, Icarus learns from the DMZ sentries that all member civilizations went through a gate, and that Security Central has been silent for millennia.
- Book 5 · Ch 60Following the antimatter caravan
Icarus and Daedalus follow an automated transport delivering antimatter to a space station, then trail it back through wormholes to the galactic core.
- Book 5 · Ch 60Discovery of the antimatter fountain
In the galactic core they find the antimatter fountain and contact the Central Antimatter Works of the Pan Galactic Federation, which gives them communication protocols.
- Book 5 · Ch 65Visit to Sagittarius A*
Icarus and Daedalus reach the galaxy's central black hole and record every possible measurement before starting the seven-year trip back.
- Book 5 · Ch 65The galaxy faces destruction
Questioning the Central Antimatter Works by SCUT, Icarus learns the Federation emigrated to escape the galaxy's imminent destruction and is sent to the Capital Archives.
- Book 5 · Ch 68Arrival at the Federation capital
Icarus and Daedalus reach the Federation capital via Hub Zero, bluff their way into a registration application and are permitted to contact the Archivist.
- Book 5 · Ch 68Questioning the Archivist
Through a frustrating queue, Icarus learns the Federation's 114 species fled the galaxy's imminent destruction, plus the fountain's history and Federation's founding.
- Book 5 · Ch 70Icarus reports to Bill
Icarus and Daedalus call Bill and tell him the Federation fled the galaxy because the dwarf galaxy Nemesis will sterilize it in about a hundred thousand years.
- Book 5 · Ch 71The moot on Nemesis
Bill calls a huge moot where he and Icarus reveal the abandoned Federation, the coming galactic collision and the Federation's flight to the Large Magellanic Cloud.
- Book 5 · Ch 71Post-moot discussion
Over the buffet, the Bobs discuss the Federation wreckage on Jabberwocky, FAITH's political crisis and plans to contact the Federation via WormNet.