For We Are Many (Bobiverse #2)
Dennis E. Taylor
Dedication
I would like to dedicate this book to all the people who love good old-fashioned space opera.
Acknowledgements
I am truly amazed and grateful for how We Are Legion (We Are Bob) was received by science fiction fans. The response has been both overwhelming and humbling. Thank you. It has been quite the journey…and along the journey I have had great help.
First I would like to thank my agent Ethan Ellenberg for not only taking me on but guiding me through all this. Your help has been invaluable and I am grateful. To Steve Feldberg who saw the potential in We Are Legion and the series…thank you so much for the opportunity you have given me. Betsy Mitchell – thank you for editing my manuscripts and for the words of encouragement.
It takes a “village” of sorts to create a novel, everyone from beta readers, critiques, artists, editors, publishers and now a narrator. To Ray Porter, thank you for bringing Bob Johansson to life.
I’d like to particularly mention the members of the Ubergroup and Novel Exchange group on scribophile. I appreciate your input. And to my beta readers – thank you.
Thanks in particular to: Sandra and Ken McLaren Nicole Hamilton Sheena Lewis
Patrick Jordan Trudy Cochrane And my wife Blaihin ...for reading the raw draft and early versions.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
— Herman Melville
1. Sky God
Bob
February 2167
Delta Eridani
An angry squeal erupted from the pile of deadwood. The two Deltans paused, poised to retreat. Seeing no further response, they resumed pelting the area with rocks. The individual I had named Bernie, his fur erect along his spine and ears straight out with excitement, chanted, “Here, kuzzi, kuzzi, kuzzi.”
I moved my observation drone to the rear to get out of their line of sight. They were okay with me observing the hunt, but I didn’t want to distract them when even a slight misstep could result in injury or death. Mike glanced up at the movement, but the Deltans otherwise paid no attention to the football-sized drone.
Someone must have scored a direct hit with a rock. Screaming like an irate steam engine, the pigoid erupted from the entrance to its den. The two rock-throwers sprinted out of the way and the other hunters moved up. Each braced the butt of his spear on the ground and placed a foot on the end to hold it in place.
The pigoid reached the hunting group in less than a second, screaming in rage. The Deltans held their positions with all the courage of medieval pikemen facing a cavalry charge. Even though I watched the action remotely via a floating observation drone, I could still feel my nether regions puckering up in fear. At times like this, I wondered if I hadn’t gone a little overboard with the level of detail in my virtual-reality environment. There was no reason for me to even have nether regions, let alone for them to pucker.
The pigoid crashed into the waiting spears without slowing. Fast, yes. Smart, not so much. I’d never seen a pigoid try to dodge the spear points. One of the hunters, Fred, was thrown to the side as his spear bowed and then snapped. He screamed, either in pain or surprise, and blood spurted from his leg. A distracted part of my mind noted that Deltan blood was almost the same shade of red as human blood.
The other Deltans held fast, and the pigoid was lifted right into the air by the leverage of their spears. It hung in midair for a moment, then crashed to the ground with a final screech. The Deltan hunters waited for any more movement, lips drawn back to show their impressive canines. Occasionally, a pigoid would get back up after this level of mistreatment and wade in for another round. No one wanted to be caught with their guard down.
Bernie sidled up with his spear in one hand and a club in the other. Stretching as far as he could with the spear, he poked the pigoid in the snout. When there was no reaction, he turned to his fellow hunters and grinned.
Not literally, of course. The Deltan equivalent of a grin was an ear-waggle, but I was so used to the Deltan mannerisms that I no longer needed to consciously interpret. And the translation software took care of speech, converting idiom and metaphor between English and Deltan. I had assigned arbitrary human names to individuals to help me keep track of everyone.
Truthfully, humans and Deltans would never communicate without a translator. Deltan speech sounded to human ears like a series of grunts, growls, and hiccups. According to Archimedes, my main contact among the Deltans, human speech sounded like two pigoids in a mating frenzy. Nice.
The Deltans looked like a kind of a bat/pig mashup—barrel bodies, spindly limbs, large mobile ears, and snouts not too different from a boar’s. Their fur was mainly gray, with tan patterns around the face and head unique to each individual. The Deltans were the first non-human intelligence I’d ever encountered, in only the second star system I had visited since leaving Earth more than thirty years ago. It made me wonder if intelligent life was perhaps as common as Star Trek would have us believe.
Bill regularly transmitted his news blogs from Epsilon Eridani, but they were nineteen years old by the time I received them. If any of the other Bobs had found intelligence, Bill might not even have received the reports yet, let alone re-transmitted them to the rest of us.
I returned my attention to the Deltans as they began to organize their post-hunt routine.
The hunters checked on Fred, who was sitting on a rock, swearing in Deltan and pressing on the wound to staunch the bleeding. I moved the drone in to get a close look, and one of the group moved aside to give me a better view.
Fred had been lucky. The gash from the splintered spear was jagged but not deep, and appeared clean. If the pigoid had gotten its teeth into him, he’d be dead.
Mike made a show of trying to poke the wound with his spear. “Does that hurt? Does that hurt?”
Fred showed his teeth. “Yeah, funny. Next time you can have the bad spear.”
Mike smiled back, unrepentant, and Bernie slapped Fred on the shoulder. “Come on, don’t be a baby. It’s almost stopped bleeding.”
“Right, let’s get this thing hung and bled.” Matching action to words, Mike unwound his rope from around his torso. He flipped the rope over a convenient tree branch, and Bernie tied the rear legs of the carcass.
Knot-making skills, not so good. The rope-work was rudimentary, and probably slipped occasionally. I made a mental note to teach Archimedes some sailing knots.
Mike and Bernie strung up the carcass and proceeded to field-dress their kill, while the other Deltans started a Giving-Thanks chant. As I watched, I had one of those incongruous moments where I half-expected them to attach a hunting tag to its ear. Wrong century, wrong planet, wrong species, of course.