The town was large but ramshackle, there obviously being no building code or zoning bylaws. It also didn’t limit itself to a single level, since dragons were very much arboreal. Businesses that needed terra firma clustered on the ground while everything else snaked its way up trees in all directions, either attached to the trunk or branches or suspended by ropes. It seemed like anarchy, but a few seconds of examination revealed an underlying order. This was a medieval village built in three dimensions. There were even hotels of a sort, which mostly consisted of suspended pods with access to running water, both hot and cold. It was interesting that when sentients built a civilization, one of the first things they did was engineer for running water. There was probably a PhD thesis in there somewhere, but I’d leave that for someone else.

  Bridget had mentioned that dragon towns ranged from medieval village to Renaissance city in both size and knowledge. There actually was a city named Nirvana, and it actually was a college town—something Bridget had picked up through one of the spy drones.

  The dragon civilization was very old and relatively static. They had apparently achieved a level of technology that was comfortable, and settled in. The towns on this floater could be hundreds of years old and probably hadn’t changed much in all that time.

  We had an unlimited supply of money, of course, since we could just order more from the drone. It was a far cry from the situation in Heaven’s River, and I intended to enjoy the freedom—starting with a covered sleeping berth and hot water.

  The water wasn’t piped to each pod but was accessible in a central area. It came from a containment vessel higher up in the trees, which produced water pressure from a gravity feed. The hot water was more accurately described as warm, but it seemed to be heated using solar heating of clay pipes painted black. These people, for all that they were barely past the Stone Age in many ways, were not by any means stupid. In fact, they seemed to be quite clever at ad hoc engineering.

  The hotel proprietor, a crusty old curmudgeon of a dragon, took payment and pointed us to a room with a liberal dose of opinion at no charge. The flow didn’t seem to have any logical cohesion, just a spew of complaints about everything, including the weather; the quality, size, and quantity of trout being caught; volcanic activity; and so on. But eventually he ran down, and we made our escape.

  The pods were suspended in a row below a stout branch of a tree. And these trees were huge. In the lower gravity and thicker atmosphere of Jabberwocky, they grew tall, wide, and strong. You could walk along most of the main branches and even squeeze past people going in the opposite direction. The clawed feet also allowed a good grip on the tree bark, so going a little off vertical wasn’t really a problem.

  I inspected the pod close up and realized it was anchored both to the branch above and to a weighted net below so that movement and swaying were kept to a minimum, especially when landing or launching. Again, pretty good engineering when they needed it.

  We settled in, doffing our frontpacks, and I took a moment to examine the interior. This pod was literally like a giant birdhouse, with a single opening for a door and some holes for ventilation. A spongy floor material completed the décor and functioned as a bed. I checked the database out of curiosity. Private residences tended to be similar, with different rooms suspended individually. Families would usually own all or part of a branch.

  Out the front door, the sun of Jabberwocky was just sinking below the horizon. I couldn’t get a complete view with all the foliage and other construction, but what I could see was spectacular. I remembered the sunsets on Vulcan, which were also mind-blowing, and wondered if perhaps that was simply the natural order of things. Maybe humans had gotten used to a pale, insipid version back on old Earth.

  Bridget patted the floor beside her, and I took the hint. We curled up like a couple of cats, which seemed to be the normal dragon sleeping habit for couples. “Tomorrow I want to examine the floater tendrils. I have a theory … ” she said, wiggling to get comfortable.

  I grunted, content to do whatever she wanted. I closed my eyes; then we left the drannies on auto and returned to our mannies in Trantor.

  Chapter Forty-One:

  A Disturbing Discovery

  Bill

  July 2343

  Sol System

  Ihadn’t visited Charles in more than eight years. Maybe not surprising, though. He had webcams going so anyone could look in on the progress of the Earth project at any time. It was one of the more popular BobTube video feeds.

  The reclamation crew was making great strides with Terra, and two hundred years after humanity nuked the planet into a new ice age, more than fifty percent of the globe was now completely ice-free. Another fifty years, and they estimated they’d be back to normal preindustrial temps. The high CO2 levels helped as well, although there was a project underway to reduce that as well.

  “I’ve been getting caught up on your progress, Charles. The planet is coming along nicely.”

  Charles waved the comment off. “The tensor field printers are going to make all the difference, Bill. We might have to take some liberties with cell structures, but we collected enough DNA to recreate ninety-eight percent of species, if you include insects. Even some that were already extinct in Original Bob’s time.”

  “And the climate … ”

  “Back to interglacial. Weather patterns are still all over the place, but that will smooth out as the atmosphere and ocean temps settle into some kind of regular pattern.”

  I stood and idly poked a globe of the moon, hanging on display, which showed oceans and clouds. “Is this real time?”

  “Pretty close. It started as a dare or something, but some group decided to terraform the moon. It’s going well, and they’re even starting to get a magnetic field going.”

  “What? How? With next to no rotation—”

  “They’ve got a lunar day down to about fifty hours. Mover plates. Not just for destroying stars.” Charles smiled as he said this, but I still noticed a reserve that didn’t used to be there. Did he suspect what I was really here for? Starfleet had never attempted any kind of attack in Sol. Did Charles wonder about that, too?

  “Venus as well,” I said, pointing at one of the other globes.

  “Uh-huh. Day length at about a hundred hours and still coming down. And Mars.” He pointed at the fourth globe. “All different problems, but a lot of the same tools. We’d like to bring humanity back to the solar system eventually, and we want to give them options.”

  “Hmm,” I said, frowning.

  “What?”

  “The thing is, Charles … ” I shifted in my chair. “Long term, I’m not sure if it’s going to be as attractive for humans. The flying cities are a controlled environment, and other than considerations of gravity, it really doesn’t matter what the planetary environment is like. The O’Neill Corp is building megastructures, and those will be able to orbit any star that isn’t too variable. Engineers are even talking about using a fusion light source like the Quinlans did, which would do away with the need for a star at all. Add mover plates, and humanity becomes a truly interstellar species.”

  “Hmmph. There will always be the back-to-nature types and the keep-it-simple types.”

  “True enough.” I eyed him and got a blank look back. Normally, two Bobs would be relaxed and chatting away by now, but we were still essentially talking business. There was no animosity, just no real friendliness, either. Well, moving on … “So do you mind if I wander the system a little? Just to get a look around?”

  Charles waved a hand dismissively. “Take as long as you want.”

  I was walking along the shore of Mare Humorum accompanied by Benny, one of the lunar terraforming crew. He had volunteered immediately to show me around and seemed quite proud of the work they were doing. Ironically, the lunar maria, which had turned out to be lava beds, were actually the low points topographically, so they were now catching up with their names. The waters lapped slowly against the beach, moving languidly in the one-sixth gravity.

  Our mannies were the new standard exploratory model, which meant vacuum-hardened with high-capacity repair systems. The lunar atmosphere was still too thin to keep the temperature swings in the reasonable range—CO2 would still occasionally sublimate out of the air at night in some places.

  I kicked at the ground. The lunar dust had succumbed to a couple of years of rain, and what hadn’t washed down into the ground was more the texture of sand and gravel. Some lichen was growing in patches, but nothing else. Of course, I’d literally written the book on terraforming, so none of this was a surprise.

  “We’re trying to move the schedule along a lot faster,” Benny was saying. “You were developing the process as you went, so slow and cautious made sense. Now”—he gestured to the land around us—“we can multitask and overlap stages.”

  I nodded while wondering how I was going to subtly bring the conversation around to my goal. Subtlety was not a Bob Johannson trait.

  “So, Benny, have any of the crews found anything interesting while digging the Earth back out?”

  “Interesting? Like what?”

  “Oh, I dunno. A lot of stuff could get buried.” Then I had a minor flash of genius. “For instance, there was some speculation that Dr. Landers might have had an extra Bob Johannson backup stashed away where FAITH monitors wouldn’t find it.”

  Benny laughed. “Oh, nothing like that, no. Although we did find some powered-down mining equipment. Remember Rudolf Kazini? Yeah, he’s part of the crew now. You should meet him. He’s, honest to God, the stereotypical Russian—accent, vodka swilling, and all. And he thinks mannies come directly from God.”

  I laughed. That was at least one piece of good news. “Any other replicants?”

  “Uh … ” Benny’s face fell. “We dug out the old institute building, but the replicant computer room had collapsed. No way to recover them. And there was that Homer backup that someone found … ”

  Aha. I had to be casual, though. Don’t scare him. Don’t make him lock up. “I thought Homer destroyed all his backups.”

  “I’m sure he thought he did. But someone named Gerry found one. Or says he did.”

  “Interesting. Do you know where I can find Gerry?”

  Benny shook his head. “He was a collateral descendant, from several generations up. If I remember right, he was working with the asteroid-mining group. You could check with them.”

  And I would. But meanwhile, the moon tour was honestly very interesting. I looked up at the Earth, floating in the sky at first quarter, softened by the new atmosphere, and smiled. Howard would monetize this in a heartbeat.

  The asteroid-mining group wasn’t hard to find. They were a little, ehm, odd by regular Bob standards, though. Maybe it was a bit of a cosplay thing, but their private VRs were apartments in their main moot, which was made up to look like the asteroid Ceres in The Expanse. Okay. Made sense, I guess, for asteroid miners. But how bored did you have to be …

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t tell me where Gerry was. In fact, Gerry hadn’t been heard from in decades. The Homer backup story was generally considered to be an urban myth, though, and the general consensus was that Gerry had just decided to go Von Neumann-ing.

  I had another theory, though. One far less appealing.

  Chapter Forty-Two:

  Flying Around

  Howard

  September 2343

  Jabberwocky

  Iopened my eyes to find myself still entwined with Bridget’s dranny. I was contemplating the situation and feeling my dranny’s sleepiness slowly dissipate when Bridget opened her eyes. Vertical pupils, it turns out. I hadn’t actually noticed before.

  “So what shall we do with our day?” I asked her.

  “Coffee.”

  “Uh, we just had coffee. Back home. No coffee here.”

  “Not quite true, Howard. Dragons don’t have caffeine as such. They use alcohol instead. A hot drink, mostly ethanol, with some spices for flavor. It’s called tuev.”

  “Seriously? Isn’t flying under the influence kind of a problem?”

  Bridget sat up and stretched, sort of like a cat—extended forelimbs, then arching her back until the stretch worked its way back to her, uh …

  Apparently, flight wasn’t the only thing that worked on male dragons. Bridget’s gaze trailed downward, and she smiled.

  Sometime later, I stretched and said, “So tell me about tuev?”

  “The dragons metabolize alcohol. It doesn’t make them drunk. It’s like sugar in this biosystem, only more so.”

  “Huh. So a good stiff martini in the morning gets you ready for the day?”

  “Uh-huh. Just like back home, sort of.” She chuckled. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  We stepped out onto the “porch,” which was really just a horizontal pole attached to the pod. I had a momentary image of myself as a parakeet in a cage, and I had to suppress the urge to ask for a cracker. Bridget would have killed me, and no one would prosecute.

  A short hop with only a couple of wingbeats got us onto the main branch, and we joined a procession of dragons, many looking like they also needed that first cup of wake-me-up. We ended up in front of an open-air kiosk where a harried-looking vendor was trading coins for a cup of something. I looked down at the coins in my hand and realized that they were copper and iron. Interesting. Just like Heaven’s River. Apparently, it wasn’t just biology that tended to stick to a theme.

  When my cup of life arrived, I took a tentative sniff, then a small sip. “Jesus,” I muttered, “what is this stuff? Everclear?”

  “Almost pure ethanol, like I said,” Bridget replied via intercom. “And keep your voice down. You just spoke in English.”

  I ignored the admonishment but switched to intercom. “This stuff is safe?”

  “For dragons, yes. One cup of it would melt a human liver into a green sludge.”

  We hopped up onto a convenient log and perched, slowly sipping our morning tuev. I had to admit, it did seem to produce the same effect as coffee, assuming Bridget had gotten the biology of the drannies right.

  Just one of many things I would never, ever say out loud.

  We were interrupted by a commotion at ground level, near the base of the first tree. A crowd was swiftly gathering around two groups of dragons who seemed to be having a disagreement. Lots of pushing and yelling were involved. Instead of swooping down with the masses, we stayed put and swiveled our ears forward. Dragons had good hearing to begin with, and we had the enhanced android version, so we had as good a seat as if we’d joined the onlookers on the ground.

  Dragon insults and cursing weren’t particularly inventive, depending more on volume and repetition to get the point across, but from the few coherent words that occasionally got uttered almost by accident, I was able to determine that one group was Alexander sympathizers who were trying to drum up grassroots support, with the endgame of peacefully joining up. They weren’t getting a lot of chance to talk, though.

  I glanced sideways at Bridget and saw she was as surprised as I was. “This wasn’t in the briefing materials?” I asked.

  “The Alexander thing is a developing story, apparently. This is new. Up until now, he’s just been attacking and taking over the occasional floater.”

  “For what? What’s the point?”

  Bridget gave me a hard look. “Poor Howard. And Bobs in general. You’re so civilized and empathetic toward others that you just can’t understand that some people are just assholes. This is no different from any number of tin-pot dictators in Earth history. Little men, mostly, who measure their worth by the number of people and amount of resources they control.”

  I shook my head, feeling suddenly combative. “And again, to what end?”

  “This isn’t an instrumental goal, Howard. The control is the endgame. It’s not for anything.”

  I sighed and silently conceded the argument. There was simply too much evidence from history that she was right.

  Meanwhile, the argument had ended with the Alexander sympathizers being physically hoisted into the air and tossed over the side. While they could have just circled around and come back, it probably would have resulted in a repeat performance but with more spear action. Anyway, there was something in the briefing about how being tossed over the side had broader social implications. Like being branded or discarded.

  We continued to sip our morning booze while the crowd slowly dispersed. People started filtering back up the tree, including back to the kiosk. I buttonholed one individual as she bought a tuev and some kind of breakfast wrap.

  She gave us the once-over, and a faint look of distaste came over her features. “Foreigners,” she muttered. Then she shrugged and said, “Alexander’s conquest keeps getting bigger, and it’s getting closer. He calls it a nation, apparently. A lot of people are nervous, and some have decided that a preemptive surrender is a good strategy. Maybe they can fly to his nation and join up directly, now that they’re baseless.”

  Baseless, I remembered, was what you were if you got tossed overboard. It meant not having a home, which technically included Bridget and me. Foreigners.

  “Rumor has it they’ve set fire to floaters that defied them,” she continued. “That seems far-fetched, though. No one would be that stupid.”

  I could see the shocked look on Bridget’s face and quickly checked my briefing notes. I’d been thinking of the floaters in an overly casual context, apparently. Dragons had an almost religious reverence for them, and burning one would be like … like sacking the capital city of your enemy. Something humans had done with casual abandon all throughout history. Except that floaters were living, breathing beings, not just a patch of ground.

  “Doesn’t that just create a whole tribe of committed enemies?” Bridget asked.

  “If they live. Word is the Alexandrians surround the floater and kill anyone trying to escape.” Our companion gave us a skeptical look and a slight tip of her cup before moving on.