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 seem 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 of everyone's request which tuned the odor out of conscious awareness. A 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 seem 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. “It seems like an odd requirement. Why?
Bridget made a face before explaining. “Quinlan children are raised in a creche until they’re about five, because they aren't sentiment 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 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 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 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 the 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 bodies 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 it 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 spend 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 Quinn in the title. And of course, they have 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, Bridget. 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 12 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
