We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 4: Chapter 17: First Day in Heaven’s River

Book 4: Chapter 17: First Day in Heaven’s River

Bob

June 2334

Heaven’s River

Five furred mannies packed into a full-sized drone’s cargo bay, breathing vacuum. Bill, Garfield, Bridget and I formed the primary expedition group, and Will was running the backup manny. Once we made it into the interior of Heaven’s River, we would hide the extra manny in case of future need. We hoped we wouldn’t lose anyone in the operation and find ourselves needing the spare. If we lost two, we would probably abort and re-evaluate our entry strategy.

The cargo door stood open, giving us a view of a solid wall of, well, something. Even with my eyes cranked up to full photomultiplier setting, I couldn’t make out detail. It could be concrete or smooth rock. It might even have color. Direct center on the framed view was an even darker circle, which I knew led through a hundred yards of tunnel to the gap between the inner and outer shells.

We couldn’t activate any lights, of course. The cargo drone had the usual ice core to keep its heat signature down, but having the cargo bay open was doubtless interfering with that tactic. At the levels of sensitivity that such things operated under, even the small amount of infrared radiating from the dark side of the topopolis strand would be adding to our heat load. Our mannies weren’t heat sunk either, so we glowed like miniature stars in infrared. We had to make the traverse to the entry tunnel as quickly as possible. While it was unlikely that any Boojum would pick that exact moment to do a sweep, we were all firm believers in the power of Murphy.

“Moving into position,” Gandalf said over the intercom. “Bob, you jump when I say. Everyone else, follow at three-second intervals. Roamers will catch you if you screw the pooch. Don’t do that.”

I winked at Garfield, who was second in line. I wasn’t sure how the autonomous systems translated that, but he smiled back. Or the Quinlan equivalent.

“Now.”

I crouched, aimed, and launched. The Quinlan form wasn’t particularly what you’d call a leaping-friendly physique, but the O/S adapted without effort. I sailed the short distance to the hole in the wall and caught the edge. I had three seconds to get out of Garfield’s way, so I scrambled into the darkness.

I felt the slight vibration as Garfield landed behind me. Very tiny, dim LED lamps lit the path forward. I didn’t have any physical experience with zero-G movement, but the underwater reflexes of the manny seemed to translate well. I was able to move down the tunnel with only the occasional touch to correct my course.

The tunnel was a tight fit. The Gamers had done the minimum amount of cutting required to get us through. Good strategy—the less we disturbed the regolith, the better. Fortunately they’d allowed room for Quinlan plus backpack. Quinlans didn’t go in for clothes, except some ceremonial decorations, but the most common fashion accessory by far was a backpack. Lots of pockets, and given the Quinlans’ preferred method of getting around, the backpacks were designed to be waterproof and watertight when closed. We had designed ours to look as nondescript as possible, and used, so we wouldn’t look like we’d just walked out of a sporting-goods store.

We each had a standard kit consisting of common Quinlan items like dried snacks, a comb, some first-aid supplies, and a claw-file. But the most important item, and one we anticipated actually needing, was a good supply of the local money. All strictly mundane from a Quinlan point of view.

“Everyone’s in,” Gandalf reported. “Good luck.”

We would be in constant contact through SCUT, but from this point on there would be no possibility of any physical intervention. We were truly on our own. If one of us “died,” they were off the team, at least until they could catch up to the rest of us in the spare.

Will could substitute if one of us couldn’t be available to run their manny at any point. For that reason, he had to monitor the party’s progress so that he was always up to date on current events, but it would only take a few seconds once a day to review logs.

I came out of the tunnel and grabbed a convenient anchor cable that the Gamers had laid for us, alongside more of the low-power lights. I moved a few yards along to make room for the others, then looked up. And froze in place.

Heaven’s River consisted of a stationary outer shell made of regolith interwoven with structural members and some kind of 3D carbon-fiber mesh, and a rotating inner shell made of a combination of metal and ceramics forming some kind of metamaterial, reinforced with the same carbon mesh. What I hadn’t realized, or maybe hadn’t paid attention to before, was the fact that the space between the two shells was only about ten yards. Since the structure was fifty-six miles in radius, the curve of either shell wasn’t discernible from my vantage point. But I could tell which way was which because the inner shell was rotating.

At over a half a mile per second.

From my point of view, I was standing about ten yards from a surface moving at about nineteen hundred and fifty miles per hour. Telling myself this was an illusion didn’t help. And it didn’t matter how smooth that surface was; if I came into contact with it, it would be like leaning against a giant grinding wheel. Not to mention that I’d get kicked into a spin that would probably rip my limbs off. And my part in the expedition would be over before it even started. ???öB??

I unlocked my gaze and said to the others, “Be really, really careful coming out of the tunnel. Seriously.”

In another minute, we were all gathered on the inner surface of the outer shell, collectively holding on to the anchor cable. Each person spent a few solid seconds staring at the spectacle. I didn’t hurry them. It was important for the point to sink in.

“Moving along now.” Matching action to words, I began moving along the surface, being very careful to keep my grip on the rope and my feet on the ground. I knew for a fact I couldn’t actually hear the shell rotating above my head or feel its vibrations. If there had been any vibration strong enough to be transmitted through the bearings, the whole thing would have already ripped itself apart. Still, my mind inserted a bass hum into the silence.

The tunnel, by necessity, couldn’t be too close to the Boojum entry bay or someone would inevitably spot activity. And we’d had to be extremely careful about cleaning up after ourselves during excavation. The Heaven’s River maintenance ecosystem included scavengers that patrolled the space between the shells, looking for detritus. So we had a significant hike from the tunnel to the elevator assembly. Most of the mechanism was sunk into the outer shell—the inner shell was still only thirty feet away, but a rail system just ahead of us would accelerate a container to mate with the inner shell when going in, or decelerate the container to mate with the outer shell when coming out.

Over the months since our first venture using drones, the Gamers had continued to analyze the circuitry that controlled the rail system. Things that could be bypassed had been identified, things that could be replaced with our components had been reverse-engineered. Unfortunately, at the end of the exercise, we couldn’t be confident that activating the elevator wouldn’t set off alarms somewhere. So we were still going to have to ride to the inner shell, one at a time, in a small mining drone.

The Gamers had brought in two of the drones to dig down into the regolith in order to get at the rail system. Now they would be used to fly in the expedition members. As mentioned, if we lost two mannies, we were hooped.

We worked our way down the trench, still holding onto the rope. At the end was a complex set of structural girders, with what had to be magnetic bearings along the working rails. With the amount of study and brainstorming we’d done, the structure was as familiar as the inside of my own Heaven vessel.

“Another vulnerable point, people,” Gandalf said. “You have to go one at a time. While it is extremely unlikely that the elevator system will be activated, if it does, we’ll almost certainly lose someone. Even if you don’t get run over by a rampaging elevator, just having the elevator’s maglev bearings active will probably trash the drone. So let’s keep our flippers crossed.”

“Oh, ha ha,” Bridget replied. “They aren’t flippers.”

Of course the biologist would get all uppity about that.

We kept to the same order, so I was first through the mechanism. There wasn’t much to it. Climb in, let the hatch close, try to avoid claustrophobia (it made a closet feel spacious), wait for the drone to fly to the elevator terminal, and rinse, repeat.

The flight was harrowing, because I felt like nothing more than a sack of potatoes. If something went south, I’d be metal filings before I even realized it. The drone had to fly a carefully calculated semicircular path with a radius of fifty-six miles, with no deviation of more than a couple of feet, while accelerating from zero to nineteen hundred and fifty miles per hour. Piece of cake.

About two minutes in, there was a clang, and I yelled “Fuck!” No one heard me, of course, because I was in a vacuum. And in space, no one can hear you curse. Rolling my eyes at my own irrelevant commentary, I asked, “What the hell was that? Am I dead?”

“Sorry, Bob,” Gandalf replied. “Slight miscalculation. You glanced off one of the support struts. The drone will need its paint touched up.”

“And its cargo area hosed out,” I muttered to myself.

After several eternities, the cargo door opened, and I stepped out onto the same maintenance platform that I’d previously visited through the spy drones.

“I’m here,” I announced, probably unnecessarily. The drone had already lifted off and was heading back to pick up its next passenger. There wasn’t enough room in the rail system to fly both drones, one coming and one going, so this would be a long, slow operation. Kind of a combination terror/boredom thing, both at the same time.

We had to use the manual airlock systems, so the air cycling took a long time. Once through the airlock, I found myself in the same long corridor, with the same exhortations for idiots. I sat the manny down and started checking my logs.

After about two hours, everyone was through. Terror slash boredom. I signaled silently, and we moved to the end of the corridor.

“Gandalf, any particular instructions?” He would be monitoring our video and audio feeds, so he knew where we were.

“No,” he replied. “There are no alarm switches on the emergency staircase. Still don’t know about the elevators. Of course, you can always volunteer to test it …”

On the one hand, the stairs would probably be a better idea. On the other hand, they’d flown a spy drone up the stairwell, and it was twenty stories to the top. That sounded suspiciously like exercise.

But getting caught at this stage would not only be a huge setback, it would be embarrassing as hell. With a heavy sigh, I headed for the stairs.

Ten minutes later, we reached the top. I cracked open the stairway door and peered out. No guards, drones, or orcs. We slipped through the stairwell door and paused as one to take in the view.

The foyer was huge, and the front façade was impressive. This whole building had been designed with the idea in mind that many, many Quinlans would be coming and going. It wasn’t quite Grand Central Station, but it was definitely a full-on transit hub. The ceiling was high, the floor was some kind of faux marble, there was art on the walls, and there were sculptures. I couldn’t see anything out-and-out abstract, but the Quinlans definitely applied spin to their literalist tendencies. The paintings tended toward an Escher or Dali kind of surrealism. The sculptures reminded me more than anything else of West Coast native art—basic shapes, intricately decorated.

One thing was sure—this was no phlegmatic, stolid culture.

I noticed one additional detail. The station featured a roll-up door at the front, originally meant to allow the maximum space for entry. It appeared management wasn’t just depending on electronic alerts to keep the natives out. The door mechanism had been welded into immobility. No one would be opening that door, or even repairing it. It would need to be cut out and replaced.

I pulled up my map, and the heads-up pointed me to a corner of the entrance hall, via a path that would keep me out of view of any cameras. Garfield was already on his way there, having had enough of art.

The drones had cut a small hole in a wall panel, down near floor level on the inside. It was below grade on the outside, though, so some tunneling had been required. The Gamers had bolted on a hatch, presumably so that wildlife wouldn’t start making itself at home.

Garfield opened the hatch and looked through, then motioned to me. I peered into the gloom on the other side and realized I was looking at an earthen tunnel. We would basically have to crawl out on hands and—oh, wait, Quinlans were quite comfortable on all fours. Well, score one for us.

Still, we’d be working our way up a trench on the outside to get to ground level. I wondered if it would be worthwhile to ask why, but I figured it was more about keeping our comings and goings as invisible as possible. Opening and closing an obviously bolted-on door in plain sight would attract all kinds of attention, none of it the good kind. Assuming there was a good kind.

I couldn’t help feeling like I was in a World War II flick, playing ze French Resistance. But eventually, we were outside. This was my first real look at the inside of Heaven’s River. I stopped and gawked like a tourist. I could feel the others do the same as they came through, but I wasn’t willing to spare any cycles to acknowledge the fact.

With a radius of fifty-six miles, Heaven’s River didn’t at all resemble the usual depictions of O’Neill cylinders where the landscape looms like a cliff in two directions. The land in the spin direction was just starting to show a curve at the point where it faded out into the distance. The fact that it curved up instead of dropping like a normal horizon was disconcerting, but you had to really be looking for it to notice.

Clouds formed in several layers, indicating that there was real weather in the habitat. The clouds cast shadows on the land below or on lower cloud layers. I engaged my telescopic vision (no, really) and spotted a rainstorm in the middle distance. The thunderhead formed a horizontal cyclonic pattern oriented along the axis of the topopolis. Expected, but still freaky for someone raised on a planet.

Within range of clear sight, rolling hills dominated, interspersed with valleys and plains. I saw occasional stands of trees, but no real forests in the immediate area. I knew from the scans, though, that terrain varied significantly. I wasn’t surprised. Given more than three hundred billion square miles of available space, making it all farmland would take a supreme failure of imagination.

And it wasn’t a sterile diorama. We could clearly see herds of, well, something, in the open areas. Slow waves propagated through the herds as some unseen stimulus caused brief mass movements. Vast flocks of bird-equivalents wheeled and darted across the sky, unfazed by issues of Coriolis force or odd horizons.

And snaking through the lowlands was the river. Or to be more accurate, one branch of one of the four rivers. Interestingly, the meandering path, with all the splitting and rejoining, meant that they were, collectively, considerably longer than four billion miles of total length, not even counting the tributaries. I could feel myself boggling at the thought and had to remember that this was just a question of scale, not technology.

I finally managed to tear my gaze away long enough to glance at my companions. Each one was standing, silently taking in the panorama. I smiled for a moment, glad that being a bunch of computer simulations hadn’t dulled our collective sense of wonder.

Garfield looked up and grunted, and I followed his gaze. The sky was actually blue, which seemed odd, and there was something that looked like a sun, which seemed really odd. “Does anyone know how they manage the fake sky?” he asked of the group in general.

Bill turned to follow Garfield’s gaze. “Wow, nice. The Skippies have all the SUDDAR scans. I’ll ask them.”

He had spoken in English, given the words Skippies and SUDDAR. “Should use Quinlan, Bill,” Bridget said. “Even if you have to phoneticize the occasional English word. We can’t afford to stand out.”

Bill nodded—well, the Quinlan equivalent—by way of reply.

“I’ve seen simulations of objects on ballistic trajectories in an O’Neill cylinder–type of environment,” Bridget continued. “They behave in a very counterintuitive manner. Are we going to have problems with that?”

“Not really,” Bill replied. “It’s all about the radius of the structure. Those simulations—I’ve seen them, too—are all based on a radius of a few hundred yards to maybe a quarter mile. With a fifty-six mile radius, this structure will give us something so close to real planetary gravity that we won’t normally notice a difference. You could play a game of baseball, for instance, and not have to worry about the ball acting funny.”

“That’s good,” Bridget replied. “The Quinlans will have grown up with it, but if we acted surprised at some behavior, it might ‘out’ us.”

“Are the natives going to be that suspicious? And observant?”

“We don’t know, Gar. Don’t forget, this may look like a pre-industrial society, but they come from a civilization at least as advanced as Earth in the 21st century. And we don’t know what politics are going on in the background. What if, as seems quite possible given the welded door back there, there’s an adversarial relationship between the general population and the Heaven’s River management? They might be on the lookout for strangers behaving oddly.”

“Huh. I guess I hadn’t thought that through,” Garfield said. “Okay, boss lady.”

The entrance foyer was located a mile or so downriver and slightly uphill of the nearest village. I pointed in that direction. “We should head to, uh …”

“Garack’s Spine,” Bill replied. “No idea why it’s named that. Most locals just refer to it as Garack. It’s situated on the Arcadia River. The other three, in order, looking spinward, are Utopia, Paradise, and Nirvana.”

“No theme there,” Garfield commented wryly.

“As usual,” Bill replied, “these are English names that are the closest we could come to the Quinlan concepts. But yes, there is a theme, including the name Heaven’s River. I think this was intended to be just that.”

I broke the brief silence that followed. “All very interesting, but right now we have to figure out what to do with Will’s manny.”

“I vote for a five-person group,” Will said.

“Not a good idea, Will,” Bridget replied. “A sabbat larger than four would attract attention. Not look at the perverts level, more like hey, look at the five-person sabbat level. We don’t want to stand out.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m supposed to be backup driver anyway. How about I just go back in the tunnel and plug up the entrance?”

Bill nodded. “That’ll work. Also hides the tunnel, which is a bonus.”

“Great,” I said. “Well, let’s go. We need a place to stay, until we can get our bearings.”

Will headed back to the tunnel, and the rest of us set off toward the village, Bill in the lead. Bridget kept veering off and investigating. Flora, fauna, insect life, it was all fascinating. Well, biologist, right? Howard always complained about her monomaniacal focus, but it was one of the things he loved about her.

The local flora didn’t look all that strange. I’m sure Bridget was cataloguing all the ways in which it was unique, but to a non-professional like me, it was just plants. This ecosystem had evolved around chlorophyll, so even the colors reminded me of Earth.

The insect life, not so much. Exoskeletal body plans seemed to be the rule for the small fauna that filled that particular part of the ecosystem, but that was about where the resemblance ended. The local insects seemed to go in for a radial body structure rather than bilateral symmetry. The contortions that evolution went through to enable flight with that kind of material to work with had produced some truly bizarre structures. I was glad I’d never been prone to creature-feature nightmares.

We’d been walking for about ten minutes when Bridget called for us to stop. “My fault, guys. I’m supposed to be the expert, and I’ve already screwed up.”

The rest of us glanced at each other quizzically before turning back to her. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. You’ve screwed up how?”

“Quinlans aren’t great walkers. Not for long distances, anyway. We should have gone down on all fours by now, and even so, we should be resting more often.”

“Jeez, Bridge, we’re alone—”

“If we can see the village, the village can see us. I don’t know if they have telescopes or something similar, but if they do, we’re already behaving oddly.”

“So we should go quadruped—”

“More than that, Garfield. Do you smell that?”

Garfield frowned, and we all sniffed the air. “What’s that?” he asked. “Water?”

“Yep. Running water. It smells different than standing water—”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, Bill. Even Earth animals could tell the difference. It’s only a surprise to creatures with atrophied smellers, like humans.”

“Okay. So, water …”

“Even more than they are inclined to travel on all fours, Quinlans are inclined to travel in water.”

“Ohhhh ….” Bill said. “So we should be swimming.”

“Yup. This way.” Without waiting for further discussion, Bridget marched off in the direction of the water. Well, marched to the extent that something like a fat weasel could be said to march. More of a determined waddle.

After a few moments, she dropped to all fours. The rest of us followed suit. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that we were able to move considerably faster this way. And some of the odd design details of the Quinlan backpack started to make more sense.

In less than a minute, we’d come upon a small stream. “Doesn’t look big enough to swim in,” Bill opined.

“Not for a human, flailing around with those gangly limbs in all directions,” Bridget replied with a laugh. “But with the tail, we’re basically torpedoes. Watch.”

Bridget dove into the stream with hardly a ripple. There was a sort of surge in the stream’s surface, like those movies involving an underwater monster. Less than two seconds later, she popped up about thirty yards upstream. “Ta-dah!”

I thought back to our swim together on that first day on Quin, and felt excitement overtake me. Perhaps that was part of the Quinlan persona, but it was also part Bob. I’d never been a good swimmer, nor very comfortable in the water. I considered swimming to be something you did as an alternative to drowning. Now, in an android replica of a semiaquatic species, I could own that water. Or something like that.

Bridget shot past us in the downstream direction, undulating just at the surface. I laughed with delight and dove in. I heard other splashes behind me, but didn’t try to count them. Anyone who declined would be left behind and would have to hoof it.

I caught up to Bridget and slapped her tail. She responded by smacking me on the head with the appendage, then shooting off around a submerged rock.

So, that’s the way it’s going to be, is it? We shot through the water, upstream, downstream, looping around the others, tagging and being tagged. The stream, so small from land, seemed an entire country from this perspective, with the third dimension available to maneuver in.

One by one, the others joined the game, until the water was frothing with Quinlan bodies dodging, breaching, and chasing each other. The game lasted almost ten minutes, until my heads-up display informed me that a proper Quinlan would be exhausted and would need to spend some quality time floating. I could have ignored it—the android body never got tired—but Bridget would have something to say in that case.

I rose to the surface and turned onto my back. The motion seemed natural, and I’d seen images from the spy drones of Quinlans floating in this pose. “Otters,” I muttered, as the others popped up one by one. We linked up, grabbing with forepaws or hindpaws to form a raft of Quinlans, slowly rotating as we floated downstream.

“Okay, that was insane,” Bill exclaimed. “Bridget, you might want to let Howard know about this. He’ll probably be able to figure out a way to turn it into a business.”

“Heaven’s River tours?” Bridget waggled her ears at him, a sign of amused agreement to a Quinlan. “I think they’d be popular, and not just with the Bobs. Maybe even some of the second-wave replicants. It might jar them out of their VR-only existence.”

“Heads up, people. You’re coming up on the village.”

At Will’s announcement, we all turned to look downstream. Sure enough, we were around the last bend and would soon be floating through the small burg. We unlinked and torpedoed to the nearest pedestrian dock.

Shore infrastructure was one of the many differences between Quinlan culture and anything else we were used to. They used waterways the way humans would use sidewalks and roads, which meant that there were pedestrian docks and boat docks where the waterway was wide enough. The latter were little different from what you’d find on Earth, or for that matter, on Pav or New Pav. Quinlans used mostly sailboats of a generally catamaran-like design, although I’d seen images of a couple of more barge-like variants that used the local beasts of burden to turn a paddle wheel.

Interestingly, this town did not have canals, so roads were the only method of moving around. I frowned for a moment, then realized that the actual soil wouldn’t be all that deep. If the Quinlans tried to dig canals, they’d likely run into shell material before they got deep enough to matter. All terrain contouring would have to be baked into the shape of the shell during construction.

The pedestrian docks were essentially a set of half-submerged ramps that allowed the Quinlans to swim up then walk out. They could shoot out of the water like a penguin and land on their feet, but it was considered impolite in crowded situations, since you could easily find yourself in a pileup for the same patch of dock. The Quinlans had a word for the move—poot—which the Skippies had translated as up-diving.

We walked up the ramp and moved out of the way quickly. The ramps were busy, and Quinlans seemed to have a low tolerance for queuing up. Most simply dove off the nearest edge, and at any moment a few more impatient souls took to up-diving, braving the black looks of their peers. As I watched, one miscreant hopped out of the water, only to be straight-armed right back in by someone occupying that particular patch of space-time. As we headed for solid ground, I could hear voices raised in anger behind me.

“Want to stay and watch the fights?” Garfield muttered with a smirk.

“Better not,” Will interjected. “Hugh commented that Quinlans are inclined to mob. A simple fight between two people can escalate quickly for no good reason.”

“More so than humans?” Garfield asked.

“Maybe. How about that? Humanity dethroned as Most Likely to Be Stupid in Large Groups.”

I grinned but didn’t bother to respond. Will had ended up with a particularly negative view of the human species after his adventures in getting the last of them off the dying Earth. Other than our relatives, whom he continued to dote on, he had very little time for the general run of humanity.

“Head’s up,” Bridget interjected. “Cops.”

We all prairie-dogged—brilliant move, way to play it cool, guys—as a heavyset Quinlan sporting an ornate sash swaggered up to us. I struggled to keep my face and ears impassive. A waddling swagger was a truly impressive sight.

He took a moment to look us over, his gaze lingering on Bridget. She stared back at him impassively, neither challenging nor acquiescing. I had to admit, it was a nice balancing act.

But if he talked down to her, we might be leaving town in a hurry. Or on a rail.

“You folks just passing through?”

I stepped forward. By prior agreement, I would be the spokescritter for the group. “We are, good sir. We’re on a sabbatical, making our way slowly downriver.”

“Where from?”

“Hand of Ar,” I replied. “I doubt you’ve heard of it. Our last few stops hadn’t.”

I was taking a chance, but maybe not a large one. Quinlans were far more mobile than Anglo-Saxon peasants, for instance, but mass transportation was still unknown, as far as we could tell. And the high-speed transport built into Heaven’s River was inaccessible to the residents in every segment we’d investigated.

“More sabbatarians.” The cop screwed up his face in apparent distaste. “If you plan on staying for more than a couple of days, you’ll have to register with the magistrate. Otherwise, stick to the transient hotels and eateries along the docks. And don’t cause trouble, or you’ll be leaving earlier than planned.” He gave us a final once-over, nodded again, and swaggered away.

“Did you notice the weapon?” Bridget asked.

We muttered acknowledgements. “Couldn’t tell exactly what particular style of sword,” I said. “But the scabbard had a certain short-sword look to it.”

“That means they do some metalwork. Which means they have metal. Other than the money, I mean.”

Garfield cocked his head quizzically. “Uh, maybe I should have read the prelims more thoroughly. This is a surprise why?”

“What’re they going to do, mine it?” I glared at him. “It’s like Ringworld, right? No mineral wealth, no oil deposits. Unless they actually scavenge from the structure, they’re limited to recycling what they already have. And there’s very little actual metal in the structure, even if they were that stupid.”

“Which means metal is going to be very valuable.”

“The megastructure administration could be supplying metal in small quantities,” Bill said. “Maybe pushing out nuggets at stream heads, for instance. Although that would produce messy industries engaged in harvesting it.”

Bridget nodded. “In any case, dedicating all that metal to a sword tells me that the sword is really, really necessary. Either as a symbol, or a threat, or a weapon.”

We’d been walking through the village as we talked, looking for a motel, or local equivalent. Without warning, a Quinlan quartet spilled out of what might have been a bar. The ball-o-Quinlans was rolling around like a bunch of angry cats, kicking and biting and scratching. And swearing. Quinlan cursing was both inventive and energetic. The Quinlan language allowed some forms of declension that went well with cursing, including a noun form that indicated it was the subject of an action.

One of the Quinlans was ejected from the mass, mostly by accident, and leaped to his feet. He glared around, teeth bared, and spotted Bridget, who had the bad luck to be within arm’s reach. He snarled at her and cocked his arm for a full claw rake.

Without so much as a lead-up, Bridget popped him straight in the snout. He went over backward with a shriek of dismay and the other Quinlans stopped in mid-action.

Bridget showed her teeth to the group. “Anyone else?”

The group untangled and helped their fourth, who was holding his snout, to his feet. “What was that?” one of them said.

“My business card,” Bridget replied. “I have more than enough for everyone.” She paused, and when no response was forthcoming, she stalked off without waiting for us.

We made to follow, and I shrugged at one of the combatants as I walked past. He muttered to me, “When mating season comes, friend, choose carefully.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, so I didn’t respond.

Garfield, meanwhile, had moved ahead and turned into an establishment with a carving of a bed over the door. By the time I caught up, he was engaged in earnest conversation with what must be the proprietor.

We waited, and moments later he rejoined us. “We’re in luck. This establishment has private rooms large enough for our group. Highly sought-after, according to our host, which is why he wanted a ruinously high nightly rate. We compromised on an only mildly scandalous weekly rate.” He held up a key. “Only one key, though, so I am the keymaster.”

Bill chuckled and Bridget, as usual, rolled her eyes. I had to wonder what life was like for her with Howard. Even for a Bob clone, he had an unusually high dose of referencitis. I hoped the eye rolls were pro forma. On the other hand, she was getting the references.

The room was “cozy,” that being the generally accepted euphemism for smaller than a closet. It consisted of a door at one end, a window at the other, and four bunk beds, two on each wall, between the door and window. And not generous bunk beds, either. A tall Quinlan wouldn’t be able to stretch out. Fortunately, we’d all gone for average dimensions, so it wasn’t an issue.

There was enough room between the beds for two people to stand at the same time, but we wouldn’t be having town hall meetings in that space. Bathroom facilities were shared by the entire floor and weren’t what I’d call luxurious either. Fortunately, the Quinlans seemed to have the concept of flush toilets, so we wouldn’t have to adjust our olfactory senses. Unfortunately, the Quinlan language didn’t have a concept of bath separate from swim, so there was a certain species-level bouquet, shall we say? Will uploaded a patch, at everyone’s request, which tuned the odor out of conscious awareness.

The short walk to our room had been interesting and instructive. This hotel seemed to cater to sabbatarians. All the rooms that we’d gotten a look at were laid out the same as ours, and most seemed to be occupied by foursomes. I wondered aloud if four was a magic Quinlan family number of some kind, and received a no from Bridget and a lecture. “The Quinlans have a complicated system that I’d characterize as a networked endogamy. People belong to a marriage group with potentially multiple male and female partners, but they could belong to more than one group. There are rules about your status and financial obligations within the group based upon whether you lived with that group or with another one.”

“So what’s with the foursomes, then?”

“It may be a cultural norm, or instinctive. Or a little of both.” Bridget shrugged. “It might simply be the practical minimum number necessary to raise a family.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That seems like an odd requirement. Why?”

Bridget made a face before explaining. “Quinlan children are raised in a crèche until they’re about five, because they aren’t sentient until then.”

“Neither are human children,” I said.

Bridget laughed. “A lot of people would agree with you, but of course that isn’t true. Human children start trying to talk in their first year. Look, humans solved the brain size problem by being born physically underdeveloped—intelligent but helpless, requiring a lot of parental support in the early years. Quinlans solved it by being born animalistic but pretty much fully mobile almost right away, with brains that mature late. By the time they start to learn to think and talk, they can already take care of themselves.”

“Wow, I can see some problems with that.”

“Yes, Bill, and you’ve almost certainly gotten it right. The children, who are called juniors, have to be kept penned up or they basically just run rampant. And someone has to care for them. So Quinlan families have to be big, to muster the resources.”

“And to make sure no one decides to eat their young,” Garfield said, sotto voce.

“Not wrong,” Bill muttered back.

Bridget smiled at them. “I have a theory that their belligerence and hair-trigger tempers as adults are related to their early development process. Humans learn cultural norms early, while they’re still helpless and dependent. Quinlans, not so much.”

“Huh. Food for thought,” I said. “Let’s get back to civilization before we continue, okay? My cultural norms include coffee.”

The others laughed, and we started to settle in. We did Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock for bunks, and I got one of the uppers. No biggie, right? Well, unfortunately, with the Quinlan body’s short stride, ladders were an adventure. I almost fell off the first time I tried to climb up, and Bill had to brace me. I glared at Garfield, who was already comfortable in the other upper and bared my teeth. He laughed.

“It’s late enough,” Bridget said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

Sleep was code for leaving the mannies in standby mode while we returned to VR. Each manny had a basic AMI that would alert us if something required our attention. Otherwise, the mannies would sleep like, well, like the dead.

We all doffed our mannies and gathered in my VR, Will grabbing the beanbag chair as usual. Jeeves showed up with everyone’s favorite refreshments, and we all spent a few moments enjoying the return to civilization.

“It’s going to be slow,” Bridget said. “But the first thing we have to do is find a library or hall of records or something similar. Let’s see what they have in written form. The Skippies were doing a general once-over and may have missed something that didn’t have A History of Quin in the title. And of course, they had to be careful. A group of Quinlans grabbing books won’t set off the kind of gossip that a bunch of floating balls and mechanical spiders would.”

“Assuming they have something like spiders,” Will said.

“They do. More crab-shaped, though.”

“Whatever. Anyway, we ransack their written records and try to get enough info to be able to interrogate locals without sounding like aliens.”

“Which we are.”

“Not the point,” I said. “We have to get a bead on management without revealing ourselves. It might be that we end up contacting them. It might also turn out that we have to spy on them, too. But we can’t do anything until we have at least the basics.”

“I’m just as happy if we end up actually doing what we told the cop—heading downstream.”

“I understand, Bridge, but the point for me is to find Bender. Or find out what happened to him. Let’s not lose track of that.”

“Are you sure we can’t just scan for him?”

Garfield answered, “We did a simulation. The problem is that the megastructure uses optoelectronics very similar to our technology. So every mile of topopolis will take us about twelve hours to scan, and then it’s another six hours to examine the scans in detail. That’s over a million years, worst case, just for the scanning.”

“Can’t we just build a whole bunch of scanners?”

“Yes, but we also have to build a whole bunch of us to process the scans. Even using the most efficient bootstrapping methods and ignoring questions of material availability, we’re still looking at more than a hundred and fifty years if we bring that level of resources to bear on the problem. And anyway, we don’t have that much raw material in the system, so we’d be bringing in units from out-system. So add some more time for that.”

Bill nodded and took up the story. “On the other hand, an investigative strategy might net us good results in less than a decade, at least according to Hugh.”

“Based on what?” Bridget frowned at Bill. “He can’t possibly have any statistics to work from.”

“He kind of does. Population of Heaven’s River, number of people we can contact per year, number of people who will hear about us per year … It’s a networking theory thing. Eventually there’s more than a fifty-fifty chance that we will either contact someone or be contacted by someone. Hugh says less than a decade.”

“Hmmph.” Bridget shook her head. “Okay, fine. I’m not thrilled with the alternative timeline anyway.”

“And hey, if anyone wants a break, I’m available,” Will said, grinning. “That downstream thing looked like just too much fun.”

I stood, signaling the end of the meeting. “We have six hours until we’re scheduled to wake our mannies. Take care of whatever you need to.”