Heaven's River

by Dennis E. Taylor

  “Acknowledged.”

  Once the drones were ready, I would send them along Bender's projected path at 5% c, looking for anything unusual. Meanwhile there is no reason for me to wait around I treated myself to one last long look at the planet Eden rotating below me, and left orbit heading for Gamma Leporos A at 5 g.

  Travel between stellar systems is uneventful. Thank god. It's hard to think of something eventful out between the stars that wouldn't leave me as a cloud of free-floating atoms. I consider limiting myself to 0.75 c so that I could continue to interact with the Bobiverse in general. SCUT allowed instantaneous communications over BobNet, but if my tau got to high, or to low (there was some argument about how we should be expressing tau) I wouldn't be able to interact in real time, even frame-jacked. But I was just too impatient to test my theory, and anyway the Bobiverse was starting to get weird and cliquish these days. Bobs were getting less Bob-like. I'm going off in directions that I think would have left original Bob baffled. Well if they hit the singularity or something while I was out of touch, hopefully Bill would leave a note with instructions.

  I passed the time by reviewing my archived surveillance vids of the Deltans. A primitive race of humanoids, the Deltans resembled a sort of bipedal pig-bat mash up. I more or less adopted them and become the great sky god for a generation or two, before joining the tribe in android form. It had been 63 years since I walked out of Camelot for the last time. After Archimedes' funeral. I desperately missed my friends and the feeling of family that I got from living among them. Bill had scolded me on more than one occasion about the dangers of transferring my affections to a bunch of alien primitives. Well, tough.

  As it turned out, things got interesting before even got up enough tau to drop out of touch. About two months subjective time into the voyage, something triggered one of the monitoring scripts that I'd set up. We were playing baseball in the Bob Moot VR when a Guppy popped in unannounced. Every Bob on the field stopped dead. Having someone's Guppy show up in the moot couldn't be anything but interesting. Metadata indicated that he was mine, so I put down the bat and gave them a raised eyebrow. As usual, he completely ignored it. Facial expressions didn't mean much to the Guppy interface. Or sarcasm, metaphor, irony, body language, or social conventions for that matter.

  Guppy stared back waiting for me to say something. Well, apparently, that was enough.

  “Astronomical monitoring has picked up an anomaly. You asked to be advised immediately.” ‘Anomaly’ to Guppy could mean anything though. Mario's Guppy had once reported an entire dead planetary ecosystem as an ‘anomaly’.

  Luke and Marvin rushed over and hovered. They knew I was following Bender's trail and this might be news. I glanced at them, then said to Guppy, “Elaborate.”

  “System Eta Leporos displays unusual infrared signature, together with periodic dimming of the star’s light.”

  Luke and Marvin exchanged a glance, then Luke said, “Like a Dyson Swarm signature? You think there's some sort of mega-structure? Bender would have investigated that.”

  By now most of the field was gathering around us. Baseball was doubtless done for the day, an opinion that Bill shared.

  “Alright guys, I think were done. I’ll waive the five-inning minimum for this week. To the pub!”

  The players gave a ragged cheer, then began to pop out of the baseball VR. I dismissed Guppy, then transferred to the pub VR with Luke and Marvin and signaled the resident Jeeves for my usual. We grabbed a table and Luke glared at me. “Okay, talk.”

  “Hmm. Well, you guys know I've been scanning for anything unusual around me as I follow Bender's original flightpath. My theory is that he saw something and changed course, and we've just been unable to pick up the faint bend in the Bussard trail.”

  “Yeah yeah, get to the punchline.”

  I gave Lucas a smile that said I'm going to draw this out as much as I can, and continued. “Granted, I had no idea what Bender might've been watching for and what he might've seen, so I've been basically looking for everything I could possibly imagine. I've had to double Guppy's memory so he could keep up.”

  “And you found a megastructure signature?”

  “I appear to have found something that could be interpreted that way. The question is, do I commit to a course change to investigate? If it turns out to be a false alarm I’ll basically have to almost start over from Delta Eridani. Forget the time required to circle around - eventually between all our follow-up trips we’ll have trashed up the interstellar medium so much we’ll never learn anything.”

  “I think you have to, Bob” Marvin said. “If it comes down to it, I can order the Delta Eridani AMI to build a new Heaven vessel and matrix. Then I'll clone myself into it. That'll be faster than you circling around, or one of us heading over.”

  “Fair enough, give me a second.” I popped back into my personal VR. Guppy was, as usual, standing at parade rest. For the millionth time, I wondered if I should retire the Admiral Akbar image. And for the millionth time my juvenile sense of humor balked.

  “Turn us to heavily anomaly, Guppy. Let me know estimated travel time when you're done. Low priority, don't pop in the moot for that.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  I popped back to Marvin and Luke to find Luke tasting my beer. “Hey, boundaries? Guys?”

  “What I gonna give you germs?” Luke grinned at me. “That’s a pretty good red. I was a little surprised since I remember us says a mostly dark beer drinker.”

  “Blame Howard.” Vulcan has a thriving beer industry and Howard keeps transferring the templates into VR. “He introduced me to this last time I visited.”

  Marvin nodded slowly. “He’s setting up interstellar trade routes.”

  I frowned. “With transit times of years? You can't…”

  “Turns out you can, oh great all-father. Stasis pods are highly effective for preserving beer.”

  I glared at Marvin, both for the correction and the glib dig. “I thought he got rid of his interest in the distillery.”

  “He did. Gave it all to original Bridget and Stephan, and her kids inherited it when she died. But they specialized in hard spirits. Remember the great Romulan presidential scandal?”

  The thought made us all laugh. Cranston had deserved every bit of what was done to him and had never been able to come up with any evidence that Howard engineer the whole thing.

  “Howard and Bridget bought up a few microbreweries on Vulcan,” Marvin continued. “And it would seem they have some kind of natural talent for the creation and marketing of the devil's brew. Or maybe just good business sense. They’re now one of the three biggest breweries in the Omicron2 Eridani system.”

  “Hmm.” I tapped my chin with a finger as I thought it through. A nervous tic that I seem to have developed all my own. Original Bob had never done that. Nor did any of my clones. “Well, you can't print liquids, and there's no point in emailing the recipe without having the actual ingredients available, so I guess physical exports are the only way.”

  I raised my glass in salute. “Here's to Howard: the family entrepreneur.”

  I glanced around the pub as I slowly sipped my beer. There seemed to be a lot more variation in dress and style these days, and the clumps of Bob's had a tendency to match as if we were self-filtering by fashion sense. I could swear that some of them were just short cosplay. Oh, there were no Klingons or Chewbaccai strutting around, but some of the clothing was reminiscent of TNG uniforms or Jedi robes. There was even a Bob in a suit and tie. Why in god's name would anyone voluntarily wear a suit and tie?!

  I frowned and tilted my head in the direction of the suit, glancing at Marvin. He replied with a baffled smile and a shrug. “Don't ask me, Bob. Replicative drift seems to be accelerating. I think we’re approaching 15 to 20 generations and it's no longer just a matter of enhanced or suppressed attributes of original Bob. The differences are accumulating, and some clones are going in completely new directions.”

  “Uh-huh. And the al
most-cosplay outfits?”

  Marvin's bemused expression didn't change. “Some of those are probably just for fun or making an ironic commentary, but the rest, well, I'm not sure if the clothes are influencing the attitudes or the other way around. The TNG guys are talking about forming an actual organization in the vein of Starfleet to monitor – that’s that words they’re using - the Bobiverse’s effect on biologicals.”

  “Oh, good grief. And how are they going to do that? Pass laws, create a police force?”

  “I think it's just discussion, Bob. No one is actually pushing for organizational changes. At least not yet.”

  “Is this anything to do with Thor and his lobby group, after the war with the Others?”

  “Not really, no. Thor and his group were stating their preferences - not trying to impose anything on the rest of us. This,” Marvin made a small gesture toward the TNG guys “has a more intrusive feel about it, if you get my drift.”

  I shook my head, refusing to give the matter any more psychic energy. I raised a hand in Jeeves appeared with another beer.

  I popped into my personal VR sporting a pleasant beer buzz and a not so pleasant feeling of foreboding. I dismissed the beer buzz, but couldn't do the same for the foreboding. Bill was right that I didn't go to moots often enough, but today's revelations hadn't been the kind of thing that would encourage me to do so. I'd recently added an outside patio to my library, complete with deck furniture. The weather was perpetually late summer or early fall with warm sun and a cool breeze. Loons called across the lake, competing with geese and other waterfowl.

  Sighing with contentment, I settled into a lounge chair, then invoked Guppy. “Fire up Spike and Jeeves, please. Then update me on the course change.

  Jeeves appeared at my elbow with a pot of coffee and some small sandwiches with no crusts. Spike appeared on my lap, right where she'd been when I suspended her program. I scratched the cat’s ear and should begin purring. Finally, sandwich in one hand and coffee in the other, I was ready for business. “Status?”

  “En route to Eta Leporos. Travel time: approximately 35 years, including time required to change direction.”

  “Wow, that's a hike. Will we be in SCUT range we get there?”

  “Negative. It will be necessary to construct and deploy an intersystem relay station.”

  Crap, more wasted time. Well, it couldn’t be helped. I wasn’t about to do a side hop to some nothing system just to build a communication station so I could still access BobNet. Of course, if Eta Leporos us had no suitable raw materials when I got there, I was going to look pretty foolish.

  “All right, Guppy. Send orders to the trailing drones to adopt a minimum time flight plan to get to where we changed course. I want the whole area mapped in detail, looking for a Bussard trail.”

  “Acknowledged. They will require approximately 24 months.”

  “Noted. Let me know when they arrive and start mapping, and give me the completed report as soon as it's received.”

  Guppy blinked huge fish eyes and disappeared. I settled back into my La-Z-Boy and put my hands behind my head. First problem: communications. I could maybe build a communications relay station when I reached Eta Leporos and send it back along my route to the halfway point. That was suboptimal though. Beside the uncertainty of materials availability at my destination, I’d be out of touch for years. More years, I mean.

  Instead, I could direct the Delta Eridani factory to build a full-sized relay station with a surge drive and send it out. That would be faster, since I could get started immediately, but this option would still leave at least some gap during which I'd be incommunicado. To handle that gap, I could take one of the drones in my hold, modify it to act as a SCUT relay station, and drop it off en route with orders to decelerate to zero velocity. It wouldn’t be ideal - no repair or upgrade capability, for starters. And not a lot of bandwidth, with the size limitation. Well, I wouldn't be running any moots from Eta Leporos anyway. I could live with that. And I could stock it with some spare roamers in case of breakdowns. Anyway, it only had to operate for a couple of years, until the much larger and more powerful station from Delta Eridani was in position. And investment of equipment was minimal - I have enough spare drones and roamers in my hold for basic necessities.

  Okay one problem solved. I queued up the required tasks on my TO-DO.

  Next, the Bender problem.

  Item one: there is a good chance that Bender had veered off and headed for Eta Leporos. But if that turned out to be wrong, I'd receive the report from my trailing drones long before I got there. I’d let Marvin know and be able to swing around to pick up the trail again, so for the sake of argument, consider that a given.

  Item two: Eta Leporos displayed characteristics suggesting a spacefaring intelligence lived there - one that had built or was building a megastructure. That thought brought back memories of the Others. I shuddered at the possibility of another protracted interstellar war.

  Item three: if you accepted that a spacefaring civilization and built some kind of megastructure and Bender had changed course to investigate it, then it was highly probable that something had happened to Bender in Eta Leporos. Otherwise he’d have built a space station which would be transmitting his logs back toward human space via radio by now. He’d also have long since received the SCUT plans already be on BobNet thanks to instantaneous communications.

  Conclusion: caution is highly indicated.

  I chuckled at the dried bureaucrat tease in that statement. Still, it was true. We normally approach to system at a tangent rather than diving straight for the star but we retained enough velocity to turn in system in minimal time. Maybe a parking orbit in the Oort would be a better first step this time, and HEAVY use of exploration scouts. Not cloaked, though. Cloaking interfered with SUDDAR, our subspace version of radar.

  I rubbed my eyes with thumb and forefinger, an action that had no real point in VR except that it felt good, and started an inventory of onboard assets. I would have to do some in-flight manufacturing. Wouldn't that be fun.

  3. Trouble

  Bob

  September 2331

  Outskirts, Eta Leporos

  I came to a stop, relatively speaking, more than 50 AU out from Eta Leporos the definitions of Kuiper and Oort regions were completely arbitrary, especially for a system other than Sol, but there were some practical differences. For instance, matter became increasingly scarce farther out, and metallic deposits became harder to find. The physics of stellar system formation seem to produce some consistent patterns, one of which was that the heavier elements tended to be closer in, and all the ice and frozen gases congregated farther out. In the Kuiper and Oort zones, it was almost all frozen clumps of condensed gases ejected from the inner system when the sun ignited. But, like raindrops, they generally condensed around something.

  My first task would be to send scouts out to look for useful materials. This part fell within my original design. A Von Neumann probe needed to find raw materials, refine them, and use them to manufacture more Von Neumann probes. Of course, I’d long since exceeded my original design specifications, but it was still relaxing, like doing a routine and mindless task. This process would take a while though, which was making me antsy.

  After years in interstellar space, it might seem odd to be fretting over a question of months, but I’d been frame-jacked way down for most of the trip. I was here now, and I want to get moving on my search. And not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted to see if there was really a megastructure in the system. The Others’ Dyson sphere was the only other piece of mega engineering we'd ever seen, and that had been only partly constructed. That the Others might be here seemed unlikely but it would certainly be a worst-case scenario.

  My current orbit was too far out to resolve anything in the inner system with the onboard telescope. That was frustrating and my immediate urge was to send in some observation drones. But Bender had probably just gone charging in and that presumably had not worked out
well for him. So, like it or not, a slow careful exploration of the system was in order.

  I spent the time deploying my printers and setting up a proper orbital auto factory. Regardless of what I found in the system proper I would still have to set up a local communication station. In my idle moments, I checked my message backlog. It was HUGE after a few decades out of touch, but I was mostly interested in messages from my trailing drones. I filtered for those. The drones launched from Delta Eridani after I’d left had indeed found that Bender's trail turned toward Eta Leporos, and only a fraction of a light month before the point where I’d made that same turn. The fact made me feel more confident about my deductions, and about my plan of action. And slightly smug.

  It took four months to locate enough material to even make a start on my plans. Transport drones brought mined material back to the auto factory, which slowly turned out finished parts according to the schedule and plans that had given Guppy. Roamers assembled drones from the parts and slowly constructed the relay station. A year after arriving I finally had enough exploration drones to begin the actual search for Bender. In all that time I hadn't contacted anyone, other than having a couple of email exchanges with Bill. First, because I didn't want people breathing down my neck, demanding constant updates. And second, because with the small temporary relay station all I would be able to manage would be audio and video streams. BobTime? FaceBob? It didn't sound likely to catch on.

  I ordered local drones to trace an expanding spiral looking for Bender's trail into the system. The cross-section they had to examine wasn't all that big - not for devices with a 4 light-hour detection radius.

  And finally, success. Bender had reached here. And Bender had apparently entered the system. I plotted his approach vector and assigned some drones the task of following his flight path. The closer I got to possibly finding Bender the more excited I got, but at the same time I became more nervous. The whole history of our interactions with the Others kept coming back: unpleasant surprises, Bobs getting blown up… Hal got blown up by them what, twice? Three times? I didn’t want stories to be told around VR campfires about the demise of Bob one, but if it did happen, I wanted the other Bobs to know.