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
