“You know, Bob, you may have been right,” Bridget said, interrupting my reverie.
“About?”
“When you said to have anger management issues. We saw several fights during the brief time we were in town, and no one seemed surprised. Quinlans are just naturally belligerent. Moreso even than humans.”
“I don’t know about belligerent,” Will replied. “They seem… well, polite is too strong a word. Agreeable, maybe?”
“Okay, how about short-tempered?”
“Yeah, hair-trigger temper sounds about right.”
“So, any luck on finding out anything new?” I asked.
“I found a bookstore. I was perusing when I suddenly had to leave town.” Garfield glared at me.
“Cool. What kind of titles?”
“Mostly fiction. Some philosophy and soft sciences, how-to’s, stuff like that.” Garfield shifted his grip from a forepaw to a hindpaw, and put his hands behind his head. “It's a little jarring, because this is an actually in 18th century society. The people, at least some of them, are aware of higher tech. They just don't have access to it. But it's like no one wants to bring it up.”
“Some kind of threat from management?”
“That's all I can think of. But that implies that management is watching.”
“Which brings up the question of how.”
“Huh.”
I took a moment to dunk my head and cool off. The Manny could handle far more temperature variation than an actual Quinlan, but we were wired up to experience reality in as Quinlan-like a manner as possible. The sun felt good, but so did a nice soaking.
“I wish we had SUDDAR scanning capability built into the Mannies. We could just scan everything and look for hidden cameras.”
“Or mobile cameras,” Garfield said. “Artificial birds and such.”
“That seems like a stretch,” Bill said. “On the other hand, roamers…”
“Hmm. Yeah. So, we have to avoid looking suspicious, while looking suspiciously at everything.”
I looked around and made a gesture encompassing the group.
“Also, no more English conversations out loud. Any discussions like we’re having right now should be held on intercom.”
“Starting now,” Bridget added. “I don't think anyone will be suspicious of a group of Quinlans quietly floating downstream.”
The water was calm and undisturbed, the pace slow. I had a mental image of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer floating down the Mississippi. For all the potential issues, life as a Quinlan was probably idyllic. As a natural predator, Quinlans could feed themselves as they traveled. We didn’t know how deep the Heaven’s River ecosystem was, compared to the original Quinn biosphere, but it was a safe bet that it was self-sustaining. That meant at least some predator prey action. And with no social media or devices, there would be no notion of being constantly online. You could literally float down the river every day looking for the next town. Or even sleep midstream, if you preferred. It was like Eden, in many ways. A slower, more relaxed pace.
I idly watched the shoreline as we floated. Details changed, but the broad strokes didn't. Occasional farms were visible, but agriculture didn't form anything like as large a part of the Quinlan lifestyle and diet as with humans. I spotted small homesteads, a slight curl of smoke giving them away as often as any visible structures. Use of fire would be an unfortunate side effect of a pre-industrial civilization, but presumably there was some kind of filtering for the air. We’d floated past a couple of splits and merges in the river system, plus the occasional feeder. I couldn't help being impressed. The amount of detail work that had been put into this place was truly amazing. A Quinlan could spend their whole life exploring, and still not know every bend and turn, never mind a billion miles worth of different towns and villages on four different rivers. As prisons went, if it was indeed a prison, it could be a lot worse.
The sun moved in the sky, gaining on us in its own downstream journey. A 21-hour day meant we'd have slightly less time than we would expect to find a place to land and seek lodging. There was no inter-town communication system that we knew of, and anyway, once we left the Garrick gendarmes, probably wouldn't give a hoot.
We hadn't come up on another town by nightfall, so we pulled ourselves out of the water and formed a small nest from the local underbrush. According to Bridget, the Heaven’s River ecology was complete enough to include large herbivores and their predators, which included a couple of animals that might be inclined to see Quinlans as a food group. Our Mannies were completely believable, right down to smelling like Quinlans, but that could be turned off. We left the Mannies on standby and returned to virt.
“So, kiddies, what have we learned today?” I asked.
“Quinlans are short tempered, and cops even more so,” Bill replied.
“Useful information, but not particularly getting us closer to finding Bender,” Garfield added.
“I did a search through the Skippies’ online databases for uses of the word ‘Scatter’ and all variations and declensions,” Will said. “Filtering out all the mundane usages, we have quite a few references. No good definitions, because everyone seems to know what everyone means when the word is used, but from context, it's not a good thing. And seems to happen to anywhere from one person up to large groups.”
“Interesting. Not sure if it relates to our situation necessarily, but anything might be useful at this point.” I looked around at my friends. “Intercom the rest of us if you think of something else. Otherwise, see you all in six hours.”
20. Just in Case
Marcus
July 2334
Poseidon
Melleb blew out a loud breath and put the tablet down on his already crowded desk.
“Interesting times, but are you sure you aren't being a little bit paranoid?”
Melleb was the son of Kyle and Gina, two of my closest friends from the early days of Poseidon. He took his sheer size from his father, and his Polynesian complexion from his
