The boy would be given a Naming Ceremony as soon as he said his first word. Both Archimedes and I expected that to happen earlier than average. The Deltans quite reasonably considered language to be the difference between them and animals, and the first use of language was the proof that the child had, for want of a better word, a soul. The Deltan word didn’t quite mean the same thing, but it was close enough.
Diana was still eyeing me, so I decided to give her a break. I told Archimedes that I was going to go for a cruise around, then took off.
I brought the drone up to a kilometer altitude and rotated slowly. It was still early in a beautiful spring day, and dew sparkled on the trees and grass. This part of Eden was mostly forest, but there were enough meadows and open areas to allow grazing animals to make a living. I was making a point of recording panoramas like this whenever I could. Someday, maybe ten thousand years in the future, the Deltans would be civilized, and would probably have done something to Eden similar to what humans had done to Earth in the twentieth century. It would be nice to be able to show them what their world had once been like. I wondered if I would still be hanging around here by then.
Wow, I needed to shake off this melancholy mood. I enjoyed hanging with Archimedes, but once in a while it triggered images of my parents and sisters. When that happened, a change of scenery was in order.
I instructed the drone to fly back to Camelot and take up station-keeping, and I switched to a drone stationed at one of the Lagrange autofactories.
The armaments project was overdue for inspection, anyway. I had a section, carefully separated from everything else, where I was experimenting with explosives and munitions manufacture. I was playing with the idea of a shell powered by plastics instead of gunpowder. A primer triggered by an electrical current would remove the need for a hammer. Using ethylene glycol as the binder would result in a compound that was usable under all environmental conditions, including extreme cold. And the stuff didn’t become unstable with age. Oh, and it was easier to work with safely than gunpowder.
I moved on to the main autofactory area. Four replicant matrices were currently nearing completion, to give life to the version-3 Heaven vessels lined up nearby. I hadn’t decided yet if I wanted to upgrade myself as well. Granted, the threes were significantly faster than my version-2 hull; but I had no immediate need for speed. Everything in the Delta Eridani system was accessible by drone. I seldom had any need to fire up my SURGE drive. Come to think of it, I hadn’t left orbit around Eden in years.
Despite my ongoing reluctance to replicate, I felt a moral obligation to get more of me out into the universe. Besides the simple fact that more Bobs exploring meant more interesting revelations, there was the implied promise to Dr. Landers to perform the task that he’d resurrected me for. By extension, I had a responsibility to what was left of the human race. Riker was doing a magnificent job of getting them off-planet. It was up to the rest of us to find places for them to go.
My brooding was interrupted by a text from Marvin. There’s been an attack.
I sent the drone back to station-keeping and re-entered my VR. Marvin was waiting.
“Gorilloids?” I asked, sitting down.
“No, I think it might be our Giant Claw. A foraging party was out gathering food when one of them was grabbed. They say they couldn’t really see it, except they got the impression it was really big. It flew away with the victim, and everyone else high-tailed it back to Camelot.”
“What do you mean, they couldn’t really see it? Did it jump out of a tree?”
“Um, no, that’s the thing. They were looking right at it but couldn’t make it out. The Deltans didn’t really have a word for it, and the translation routine was having fits, then finally settled on invisible.”
“Ah, jeez. So a giant flying thing that can become fully or partly invisible, or maybe blend in…” I trailed off as I watched Marvin’s eyes get bigger. “Umm…?”
He flipped through the archives and pulled up a video segment from my early investigation of Eden, back before I’d even found the Deltans. The video depicted what I’d named a hippogriff. About the size of a robin, this little critter had four legs and a set of wings. It was predatory, and it could hide in plain sight because it could…
… change its coloration to match the environment. Oh, crap.
“They’d be a lot bigger than this little guy, but what the Deltans sort of saw would fit the bill.” I nodded at Marvin. “Good catch. But we still don’t know where it comes from, right?”
Marvin shook his head. “I’m still searching outward from Camelot. I’ve reached the ocean in one direction, but still lots of land left at the other compass points. I’m biasing it towards the original Deltan territory, although that’s not a sure thing either.”
“The big question,” I said slowly, “is whether any of our drones saw it.”
“I already checked. There weren’t any in the area. Everything we could spare is out searching. Somehow this thing snuck inside our perimeter.”
“Wonderful. Wonder-freaking-ful. I haven’t just brought the Deltans back to the fire, I’ve put them back in the frying pan. Some sky god!”
*
I watched from a distance as the tribal elders gathered to discuss the recent death. I wasn’t invited to attend, since I was probably the subject under discussion, and I didn’t feel like forcing the issue. Archimedes was told to be there, and he looked nervous enough for both of us. He and Diana exchanged frightened looks before he left.
The meeting went on for quite a while, and there was a lot of gesticulating and yelling. I’d probably never mentioned directional microphones to the Deltans, so I guess I couldn’t blame them for not realizing that I could hear everything.
Archimedes passed on my theories, which in retrospect probably made things worse. But it would have come out sooner or later. The central theme of the meeting, though, revolved around whether I was malicious or just an idiot. Either way, a lot of people believed that they’d been safer back at the old site.
Objectively, that wasn’t true. They’d been slowly going extinct, and wouldn’t have lasted more than another generation or so. But explaining population trends to essentially innumerate people was a losing game. They understood death when it happened in front of them, far better than they understood attrition.
The meeting took about two hours. When Archimedes came back to his spot, he looked very hangdog. He sat down and accepted a piece of jerky from Diana.
“They’re about evenly split,” he explained. “Half think you’ve led us here to be food for the flying things. The other half ask how you could have known about these things if we didn’t know. And we’re from here.”
I thought about that and sighed. If the Deltans had been human, those would have been the two camps, but the split wouldn’t have been fifty-fifty. Deltans were surprisingly rational.
“You’re not in trouble, are you?”