Free Heaven's Reach by David Brin

let’s turn the damn thing off. You can show me that food machine again. Maybe we can teach it to give us something better than greasy paste to eat.”

Harry
    H E RECONFIGURED THE STATION TO LOOK something like a Martian arachnite, a black oval body perched on slender, stalklike legs. It was all part of Harry’s plan to deal with the problem of those transumptive banana peels.
    After pondering the matter, and consulting the symbolic reference archive, he decided the screwy yellow things must be allaphorical representations of short-scale time warps, each one twisting around itself through several subspace dimensions. Encountering one, you would meet little resistance at first. Then, without warning, you’d slam into a slippery, repulsive field that sent you tumbling back toward your point of origin at high acceleration.
    If this theory was true, he’d been lucky to survive that first brush with the nasty things. Another misstep might be much more … energetic.
    Since flight seemed memetically untenable in this part of E Level, the spider morphology was the best idea Harry could come up with, offering an imaginative way to maneuver past the danger, using stilt legs to pick carefully from one stable patch to the next. It would be risky, though, so he delayed the attempt for several days, hoping the anomaly reef would undergo another phase shift. At any moment, the irksome “peels” might just evaporate or transform into a less lethal kind ofinsult. As long as he had a good view of his appointed watch area, it seemed best to just sit and wait.
    Of course, he knew why a low-class Earthling recruit was assigned to this post. Wer’Q’quinn had said Harry’s test scores showed an ideal match of cynicism and originality, suiting him for lookout duty in allaphor space. But in truth, E Level was unappealing to most oxygen breathers. The great clans of the Civilization of Five Galaxies thought it a quaint oddity at best. Dangerous and unpredictable. Unlike Levels A, B, and C, it offered few shortcuts around the immense vacuum deserts of normal space. Anyone in a hurry—or with a strong sense of self-preservation—chose transfer points, hyperdrive, or soft-quantum tunneling, instead of braving a realm where fickle subjectivity reigned.
    Of course, oxygen breathers only made up the most gaudy and frenetic of life’s eight orders. Harry kept notes whenever he sighted hydros, quantals, memoids, and other exotic types, with their strange insouciance about the passage of time.
They don’t see it as quite the enemy we oxy-types do.
    His bosses at the Navigation Institute craved data about those strange comings and goings, though he could hardly picture why. The orders of sapiency so seldom interacted, they might as well occupy separate universes.
    Still, you could hide a lot in all this weirdness, a trait that sometimes drew oxy-based life down here. On occasion, some faction or alliance would try sending a battle fleet through E Space, suffering its disadvantages in order to take rivals by surprise. Or else criminals might hope to move by a secret path through this treacherous realm. Harry was trained to look out for sooners, gene raiders, syntac thieves, and others trying to cheat the strict rules of migration and Uplift. Rules that so far kept the known cosmos from dissolving into chaos and ruin.
    He nursed no illusions about his status. Harry knew this job was just the sort of dangerous, tedious duty the great institutes assigned to lowly clients of an unimportant clan. Yet he took seriously his vow to Wer’Q’quinnand NavInst. He planned to show all the doubters what a neo-chimp could do.
    That determination was put to the test when he roused from his next rest break to peer through the louvered blinds, blinking with groggy surprise at an endless row of serrated green ridges that had erupted while he slept. Undulating sinusoidally across the foreground, they