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 onto the anchor cable. Each person spent a few solid second 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 begin 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 that 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've already ripped itself apart. Still, my mind inserted a base hum into the silence.
The tunnel, by necessity, couldn't be too close to the Boogen 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 30 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 to Manny's we were pooped.
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 56 miles with no deviation of more than a couple of feet, while accelerating from 0 to 1950 mph. 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 set the Manny down and started checking my logs.
After about two hours, everyone was through terror/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 20 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.
10 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. The 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 and 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 have 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 the 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 and 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 the 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 can 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 56 miles, Heaven’s River didn't at all resemble the usual depictions of O'Neil cylin
ders, 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 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 300 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 4 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'd 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’Neil cylinder type of environment,” Bridget continued. “They behave in a very counter-intuitive 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 may be a quarter-mile. With a 56-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, Garfield. 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…”
“Garrick’s Spine,” Bill replied. “No idea why it's named that. Most locals just refer to it as Garrick. 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, biologists, 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 cataloging 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 seem 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 10 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.”
“Geeze, Bridget, 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.”
“Ohhh,” Bill said. “So we should be swimming.”
“Yep. 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 w
addle. 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 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 30 yards upstream.
“Ta-da!”
I thought back to our swim together on that first day on Quinn, 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’d considered swimming to be something you did as an alternative to drowning. Now, in an android replica of a semi aquatic 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.
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