The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Trip tried to cut the tension. “You probably don’t want me writing about this, then.”

  Meg didn’t respond. Something in her unsmiling face, which was still in shadow, sent a prickle of nervousness down his spine. Before either of them could speak again, Gary’s gloved hand emerged from the sea, clutching an octopus, which had wound itself around his upper arm. Ellis surfaced a second later, wetsuit glistening, holding an octopus of his own.

  “Looks like they’ve got their prizes,” Meg said. She glanced at Trip’s hands. “You’ve been biting your nails. Are you nervous?”

  When she looked back up at him, Trip held her gaze. “Not any more than you are.”

  They helped Gary and Ellis onto the tender. As they headed back, the octopuses, each in its own bucket, writhed at their feet, curling into defensive balls whenever they were touched. Meg did not speak to Trip again.

  When they returned to the sloop, it was already late in the afternoon. Trip was climbing into the dive cockpit when he heard shouts. At the entrance to the engine room, Stavros and Kiran were yelling at each other, and the captain had bitten his own lip out of agitation. “You stupid malaka,” Stavros said. “If we wind up stranded here, it’s all your fault—”

  Kiran was equally furious. “Bhenchod, I’m not the one who sabotaged the engine.”

  “Sabotage?” Trip looked between the two men. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the fan belt,” Kiran said. “I tried to replace it, but it snapped whenever the engine engaged. When I looked closer, I found out why. The ball bearings in the pulley are damaged. And the package of extra bearings is missing from my spare parts kit. I took an inventory just last week, and it was definitely there. Which means that somebody stole it.”

  “What about the engine?” Trip asked. “You really think that it was sabotaged?”

  Stavros nodded, the blood shining on his lip. “Whoever did it will answer to me.”

  “In any case, we’ll find a workaround,” Kiran said, speaking more calmly than before. “I can cannibalize parts from another pulley. But it means we won’t be leaving until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  This announcement cast a pall over the rest of the day. As Stavros and Kiran worked on the engine, Gary prepared a tank for the octopus he had caught, installing it next to the first one, while Ellis took his own specimen into the lab for closer examination. The two octopuses in the salon took no visible interest in each other, glowing gently in their separate containers as evening fell.

  When it was time for dinner, Gary proposed that they eat on deck, which would put some distance between themselves and the body in the galley. Outside, the lights in the water were brighter than ever. As they ate around a folding table, bundled up in parkas and gloves, Gary raised the question that they had all been avoiding. “When this is over, how many of you are coming back?”

  When no one answered, Gary took a sip from his water glass. “I know it’s hard to talk about this, but back on shore, we aren’t going to have another quiet moment. We need to discuss this now.”

  “We all know that you want to respect Ray’s wishes,” Stavros finally said, a red scab on his lower lip. “As for me, I go with the Lancet. Her destination makes no difference to me.”

  “Or me,” Kiran said. “Not everyone here feels the same loyalty to Ray that you do.”

  “This isn’t about loyalty,” Gary said. “It’s about seeing that important work isn’t lost. We’ve made significant discoveries here, and we need to make sure that they’re released to the public.”

  Trip glanced at Meg, who did not look back. “I’ve only been here for a few days, but I know something about situations like this,” Trip said, not sure if his opinion counted. “Your first obligation is to the living.”

  Ellis grunted. “Personally, if Ray were able to speak his mind, I don’t think he’d care either way. Now that he’s dead, he can’t profit from any of it. They don’t award the Nobel Prize posthumously.”

  After a prolonged silence, Dawn, who had tucked her hair up into a baseball cap, tried to change the subject. “I’ve been watching these octopus lights for days now, and I have no idea what they mean. What are they?”

  Ellis shifted easily into professorial mode. “It could be a way of coordinating group activities, like mating. Or some kind of hunting strategy. Most people don’t appreciate how intelligent octopuses are. They have big brains with folded lobes, the largest of any invertebrate, and show signs of memory and learning.” He looked thoughtfully at the lights. “Of course, they only live for three or four years. If they had a longer lifespan, who knows what they might be capable of doing?”

  The crew fell into silence. As they looked out at the water, Kiran played with his cigarette lighter, its nervous flame mirroring the lights in the sea, which seemed unfathomably ancient. Trip, thinking of corpse lights in a graveyard, was reminded of a passage from Coleridge: They moved in tracks of shining white, and when they reared, the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes—

  After a moment, Meg cleared the table and took the dishes below. The others were talking and drinking, the mood finally beginning to lighten, when they heard a scream and a crash from the salon.

  In an instant, they were out of their chairs. They found Meg standing in the salon, a pile of broken dishes at her feet. She was staring at the two tanks that had been set up in one corner. Her face had lost most of its color.

  “Look,” Meg said, pointing toward the tanks with a trembling finger. “Look at this.”

  Trip followed her gesture with his eyes. The last time he had bothered to look, each of the tanks had held a single octopus. Now the nearest tank was empty, and in the other, the water was clouded by a blue fog.

  When the haze cleared, he felt a wave of nausea. One of the octopuses had killed the other. The survivor’s color had deepened to crimson, while the remains of its neighbor were shriveled and gray. Billows of octopus blood had polluted the water, and a foamy scum had gathered on the surface.

  A second later, Trip realized what else was happening, and felt a cold hand take hold of his insides.

  The surviving octopus was eating its companion. As he watched, the octopus used its beak to amputate one of its victim’s arms at the base. Wrapping its mouth around the severed arm, it devoured it, the arm disappearing inch by inch into its chitinous maw. The octopus twitched, its arms jerking in brief convulsions as it swallowed its fierce meal, its eyes hooded and glazed.

  Ellis looked accusingly at the others. “Who put the octopuses into the same tank?”

  “I don’t think anyone did this,” Stavros said. “It must have escaped on its own.”

  “That’s impossible,” Kiran said. He went over to the empty tank. Both tanks had been made from plastic buckets, the lids secured so that a narrow gap remained above the rim, allowing air to circulate. The gap, which was less than an inch wide, seemed much too small for an octopus to pass through.

  As the surviving octopus finished eating one arm and began to snip off another, it occurred to Trip that there was an easy way to resolve the question. “The security cameras. We switched them on last night.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Ellis said. Going into the library, he returned a minute later with a videotape. A television was mounted to one wall of the salon. Ellis inserted the tape into the video player and pressed the rewind button. As he did, Trip noticed that his knuckles were badly bruised.

  Before he could ask about this, an image of the salon appeared on the television set. The videotape opened with footage that had been taken only a few moments ago, of the entire crew standing around the tanks. As the tape rewound, the crew went up the steps, walking backwards, except for Meg, who stayed behind. The broken dishes on the floor flew back into her arms and reassembled themselves, and then she, too, was gone. The tanks alone remained onscreen.

  As the video rolled back, the predatory octopus appeared to regurgitate its victim’s arms and refasten them. An instant later, both o
ctopuses were alive, struggling in the tank, and then—

  “I don’t believe it,” Trip said, his eyes wide. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  Ellis remained silent, although he did not look away from the screen. He rewound the tape to the point where the octopuses were back in their separate tanks, then allowed the action to play out normally.

  For a few seconds, the octopuses floated in their tanks as before. Then the nearest octopus, one of the specimens that Ellis and Gary had captured earlier that day, extended one arm after another to the rim of its own bucket, until the tips of four arms protruded slightly through the narrow gap.

  Nothing else happened for a long moment—and then the octopus began to squeeze its entire body through. Watching it was like witnessing a baffling optical illusion. First one arm was threaded through the gap and down the outside of the tank. Three other arms followed. The octopus flattened itself, the edge of its mantle passing through, followed by its head, which grew pancaked, like a balloon that was only halfway inflated, as the octopus pulled itself the rest of the way out. Then it was on the countertop and slithering toward the other tank.

  The octopus moved quickly, gathering and splaying its arms as it crawled across the counter. Its color deepened from pink to red. As it approached, the second octopus, still inside its tank, grew pale, its normally smooth skin becoming rough and pebbled. When the first octopus reached the tank, it hooked the end of one arm over the rim, compressing its body until it was flat enough to slip through the gap, which was narrower than a letterbox. Within seconds, it had entered the second tank.

  The struggle did not last for long. There was an entanglement of arms and beaks, the water growing blue with blood. Trip was unable to see how one octopus killed the other, but the thought of what was happening there made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

  In less than a minute, it was over, and one octopus lay dead at the bottom of the tank. The survivor drifted in the bloody water, its arms coiling and uncoiling. Then, inevitably, it began to feed.

  III

  “I don’t believe it,” Trip said again. Looking away from the carnage onscreen, he saw sickened expressions on the faces around him. As if following a common impulse, the crew turned from the television to look at the tanks, and experienced a collective shudder. The remaining octopus had abandoned its meal and was pressing its head against the wall of its tank, watching them, or so it seemed, with its gelatinous eyes. The nodules on its arms were glowing brightly.

  Lowering his gaze, Trip saw something that should have been obvious before. Streaks of moisture were visible on the countertop between the two tanks, marks from where the octopus had dragged itself across the intervening space. Something in the nearly invisible trail, which was rapidly drying out, made what they had just witnessed seem even more hideous.

  Ellis was the first to regain some semblance of composure. “I should have been more careful. Octopuses are notorious for squeezing through tight spaces. The hardest part of the body is the beak, and the rest is highly compressible. If a gap is wide enough for the beak to pass through—”

  Kiran stared at him. “You’re saying that this isn’t strange? I’m sorry, but I’m a little freaked out by this.”

  “I’m not saying that this wasn’t unusual,” Ellis said. “I’m only saying that it can be explained. As for the cannibalism, I have no professional opinion. The important thing is that we fix the tanks.”

  Using a hooked rod, which he held at arm’s length, Kiran transferred the surviving octopus to its old tank. The octopus seemed sated, its eyes filmy and glazed, as it slid, twitching slightly, into the water. Kiran fastened a rectangle of wire mesh across the top of the bucket, so that the gap between lid and rim was sealed off, then did the same to the octopus in the wet lab next door. There seemed to be no way that either octopus could escape again.

  Even after these precautions had been taken, an aura of uneasiness lingered over the yacht. An hour later, when Trip went to bed, it was a long time before he fell asleep, and when he did, he was troubled by nightmares. In one dream, he was seated at the desk in his cabin, the door closed. As he reviewed his notes, oblivious to the danger, an octopus squeezed beneath the door, slithered across the carpet, climbed his chair, and touched the back of his neck with one clammy arm. Before he could react, the octopus pressed its parrotlike beak against his throat, and then—

  Trip awoke, the sheets twisted like tentacles around his legs. It was still dark outside. As he tried to remember what had awakened him, he looked at his hands, which were visible in the faint light from the octopus school, and was shocked by the sight. His fingernails and cuticles were ragged, and a sour taste in his mouth told him that he had been chewing his nails in his sleep.

  He was studying the damage that he had done, noticing that his fingers were bleeding in a few places, when he remembered what had pulled him from sleep in the first place. It had been a scream.

  As he sat up in bed, he found that he could hear voices coming from the stateroom across the hall. Trip pulled on his shoes and went quietly into the corridor, taking care not to disturb Ellis and Gary, who were asleep. Through the door of the adjoining cabin, he heard voices. He knocked. “Is everything okay?”

  The voices ceased at once. After a moment, he heard the shuffle of footsteps, and the door opened a crack. “It’s all right,” Meg said softly, peering through the gap. “Go back to bed.”

  “It isn’t all right,” Dawn said, appearing behind Meg. “Tell her this needs to stop.”

  “What needs to stop?” Trip asked. As he spoke, he saw a line of blood trickling down the crook of Meg’s arm. Impulsively, he came forward, pushing the door open. The two women fell back. “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing.” Meg’s voice was nearly a mumble. “It isn’t any of your business—”

  “Don’t give me that,” Dawn said, seizing Meg’s wrist in one hand. “Look at this.”

  Trip saw a series of gashes running along Meg’s inside elbow. The cuts were parallel and shallow, and while none had grazed a major vessel, they were bleeding freely. “Did someone attack you?”

  “Nobody attacked her,” Dawn said, her voice on edge. “She did this to herself.”

  Trip turned to Meg, whose face was closed off with embarrassment. “Is that true?”

  Meg yanked her arm away from Dawn, sending droplets of blood to the floor. “It’s no big deal. Sometimes I cut myself when I’m stressed. I’ve done it since I was a teenager. It’s never deep enough to be dangerous. I don’t see why you’re making a federal case out of this—”

  Trip noticed a knife on the bedside table, its blade smeared with blood. “Did you take this from the kitchen?”

  Meg sighed. “I was going to replace it. I never meant to use it on anyone but myself.”

  “I don’t care about the knife,” Dawn said. “We’ve been friends a long time. I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this from me—”

  The women resumed their argument. Trip was about to slip away when he remembered the medical kit that Ellis had used to bag Ray’s hands. “Hold on,” Trip said. “We need to do something about those cuts.”

  He went back to his cabin, where the others were still asleep, and found the medical kit among Ellis’s things. When he returned to the other stateroom, Dawn seemed calmer, and Meg was cupping a hand casually beneath her elbow, catching the blood in the hollow of her palm.

  Opening the medical kit, Trip took out a roll of tape and a gauze pad. He was about to close the kit again when he saw something tucked beneath the dressings. He reached inside. Fishing the object out, he found that it was a pack of ball bearings, the package cool and heavy in his hand.

  “From the spare parts kit,” Trip said. He looked at the others. “Do you think—”

  He broke off. The women were looking at the door, their expressions wary. Trip saw that a shadow had fallen across the floor. Rising to his feet, he found himself facing a solitary figure in the d
oorway.

  “That’s my medical kit,” Ellis said, his voice calm. “What are you doing with it?”

  “A minor emergency, but everything should be fine.” Trip held up the package of ball bearings. “What the hell are these?”

  Ellis regarded the package. “I stole them from the spare parts kit. I was fairly sure that what I had done to the engine would keep us here another day, but I wanted to be on the safe side—”

  “You sabotaged the engine,” Trip said. He had already forgotten about Meg. “Why?”

  Ellis gave him a look of contempt. “You know why. I wanted to keep the yacht here a day or two longer. There was no way to make Ray listen to reason, so I took things into my own hands.”

  “By attacking my ship?” It was Stavros. He was standing in the doorway, drawn by the noise, with Gary watching from over one shoulder. “We could have been stranded here for weeks—”

  “You don’t understand,” Ellis said. Going to the window, he thrust his finger toward the octopus lights. “Ray was rushing ahead to meet a meaningless deadline. I wanted to document a natural phenomenon that might never be seen again. I don’t have to defend the choice I made.”

  Gary pushed past the captain. “Are you listening to yourself? You’re worse than Ray. You only cared about your own career, even if it threatened everything we were doing here. Did you kill Ray, too?”

  “I didn’t kill Ray,” Ellis said fiercely. “I can’t believe you’re accusing me of this—”

  Without warning, Ellis punched the wall of the stateroom, hard, so that the bulkhead rang with the blow. As the others fell back, he punched it again. Before anyone else could speak, Kiran appeared, breathless, at the stateroom door.

  “I don’t know what the commotion is about, but you need to break it up,” Kiran said. “There’s something you all need to see.”