Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  “Fucking barbarians. And the other one?”

  “That was recorded by a Woods Hole oceanographic vessel from a blue whale stranded and dying on a sandbar on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia. Some kind of virus had interfered with its internal navigation, apparently, and it beached itself. It died not long after.”

  “Both dying sounds…” Prothero was silent for a long time, his brow furrowed. Finally he stirred, picked his nose. “What do you think?”

  “I still think the creature was merely repeating, parrot-like, a whale sound it had heard.”

  Prothero made a face. “Just tell me what you think it means. I mean, to the whales that made the sound. We’ll deal with the Baobab later.”

  “My first thoughts were that it might have been a cry for help, or maybe a growl of warning or fear. Or the equivalent of a whale death-scream.”

  “Did you find any other matches?”

  “Only partials. Some matched the first part of the Baobab’s sound, some matched the second.”

  “Play those.”

  She played a few of them.

  “Hmmm. Notice how all these whale utterances tend to fall into one of two categories. Two words. Some sound like one word; some like the other.” Prothero scratched himself. “So tell me under what circumstances those partials were made, starting with the first. What was going on when it was recorded?”

  “That sound was made by a pod of three blue whales, all together, when one was attacked by a gang of orcas. The blue whales managed to drive off the killer whales through ramming and blows of their tail flukes. They made those sounds as they were doing it.”

  Another grunt from Prothero.

  Wong reached toward her equipment. “Let me replay the other, similar sounds.”

  Prothero waved his hand. “You don’t have to. I already know what they mean.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah,” said Prothero. “You hear it all the time in pods of whales as they’re traveling together. Lone whales never make the sound. It’s one of the first ‘words’ I was able to translate.”

  Wong was surprised. “You’ve already translated some blue whale speech?”

  “Yeah. Don’t tell anyone.” Prothero made a face. “I intend to publish someday.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “That sound is the whale referring to itself. It means ‘me’ or ‘I.’”

  “Wow. So what do you think the initial sound means?”

  “It’s a verb. That much I’m sure of.”

  “Whales have verbs?”

  “Sure they do. All they do is move. Everything to a whale is movement or activity. I think the entire blue whale language is made up of verb-like sounds.”

  “Okay.” This did not sound very scientific to Wong, but she was in no mood to argue with Prothero.

  “It’s a verb, and it’s used by whales that are dying, or whales that are trying to drive off attacking orcas. I think it’s pretty obvious what it means.” He gave her a superior smirk. “You don’t get it?”

  “No.”

  “It means kill.”

  “Kill?”

  “Exactly. Think about it. What’s a whale’s going to say that’s dying in agony from a Japanese harpoon? Kill me. What are whales saying as they chase a gang of orcas? Kill, kill! That’s what the Baobab was saying over and over to us, that’s the Baobab’s message to us. Kill is the first word and me is the second.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Wong.

  Prothero shrugged. “It may be crazy, but that’s the message it’s sending. It’s telling us something, urgently. And that something is: Kill me.”

  33

  BARRY FRAYNE WAS tired. It was ten o’clock at night and the exo lab had been going almost nonstop since noon, when the long, string-like tentacle had arrived and Glinn had ordered Dr. Sax to prepare it for study. Frayne reported directly to Sax, and his lab contained the front-line workers, the prep guys, the bio grunts. Each guy—and as it happened they were all guys—was a specialist in a particular area of biological lab preparation. Under Sax’s scrutiny, they had done sections for microscope, TEM, and SEM studies; they had set up biochemical assays; they had done pre-dissections and dissected out unusual inclusions and organelles for analysis. All of this had then gone out to specialized labs elsewhere on the ship. They were, you might say, the heavy lifters, the prep cooks who got everything ready for the PhDs to work on.

  Frayne at least had an MA, but the other three guys just had college degrees. Didn’t matter: they were all good at what they did.

  The gross and fine anatomy of the tentacle, or root, or spaghetti, or worm—a lot of crazy nicknames had been proposed—was stunningly different from any biological organism Frayne had seen before. It was hard to tell whether it was even a plant or animal, or perhaps it was neither. It had cells, or membrane-enclosed packages with interior cytoplasm—that, at least, looked normal. Beyond that, nothing was recognizable. Inside the “cells” there were no normal-looking organelles, no nuclei, endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria, or Golgi bodies. Nor did the thing have the types of organelles you’d expect to see in plant cells: chloroplasts, dermata, vacuoles, or rigid cell walls. There were things inside the cells, of course, but they looked like complex inorganic crystals. They glittered like diamonds in the light of the microscope, and seemed to come in different colors, although that appeared to be iridescence or light refraction. Frayne had isolated a bunch and sent them off to be analyzed. He was curious to know what they were.

  The narrow tentacle had no blood vessels that he could see, nor phloem or xylem channels for the movement of fluid. Instead, it had an incredibly dense and complex tangle of fine microfibrils like nerves or wires, wrapped in bundles. They were very hard to cut and seemed to be stiffened with something equivalent to plant cellulose, though of a different material, more like inorganic mineral than woody fiber. But what was strangest of all was that, when you really got down to it, there was nothing in the tentacle that actually looked like living tissue. It looked instead like an incredibly finely built machine.

  Sax had been in and out, supervising the work. He knew she’d seen the same things he had—she must have. But she’d kept her thoughts to herself.

  Now he finished up on the microtome, placed it on a slide, sealed it, labeled it, and slotted it into the holder. It was the last one, and they were almost through—as long as Sax didn’t come back with yet another last-minute request.

  “Hey, Barry, take a look at this.”

  Frayne looked up and walked over to where one of his co-workers, Waingro, was standing over the main length of tentacle, getting ready to slide it back into cold storage. The thing lay coiled like a thin rope in its shallow tray.

  “What’s up?”

  “Look at it. It’s shorter.”

  “Of course it’s shorter. We’ve been cutting off sections.”

  “No,” said Waingro. “I mean, before the last break we took, I could swear it was longer.”

  While they were talking, Reece, another lab assistant, came over and stared down.

  Frayne turned to him. “What do you think? Is it shorter?”

  Reece nodded. “Yup.”

  “You…you think someone swiped a piece?” Frayne asked. He was alarmed. They had locked the lab when they left for their last break, but they hadn’t locked up the tentacle. They weren’t working in sterile conditions—that would have been an unacceptable impediment to the speed being demanded of them. They were taking their chances that the thing didn’t infect them with some exotic disease or pathogen. But that seemed highly unlikely, given how far from human biology the thing clearly was. Still, when they left the lab, they always locked it as a precaution.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Reece. “Make somebody a hell of a souvenir.”

  Frayne felt a swell of irritation. “Let’s take it out and measure it. We’d better be sure.”

  Still gowned up and wearing latex, the four unlocked the spec
imen tray and removed the thing. It was hard and stiff, like a piece of cable. They kept it under refrigeration, but it sure didn’t look like it would deteriorate or rot if kept at room temperature. It wasn’t edible to any earth-origin microbes. And coming up from four hundred atmospheres to one didn’t seem to have altered it at all. The thing was, essentially, weird as shit.

  Working with care, they laid it out on the long, stainless worktable, which had built-in measuring marks.

  “Six hundred eighty centimeters,” said Frayne. He pulled a clipboard down from the wall and scanned it. “It was originally eight hundred and nine.” He started adding up in his head the pieces they had removed; thirty centimeters for sectioning; forty for dissection; ten for biochemical assays; five for miscellaneous.

  “We’re forty-four centimeters short,” he said. He looked around. “Did anyone forget to log a removal?”

  No one had. And Frayne believed them: they were all careful workers. You didn’t get to be on a project like this if your lab work was sloppy.

  “Looks like someone couldn’t be bothered to make a request through ordinary channels. Liberated a piece for themselves.”

  “You think they just came in and cut off a piece?” asked Stahlweather, the fourth assistant.

  “What else am I to think?”

  “But the lab was locked during break.”

  “So? Lot of people have keys. Especially the ones who think themselves important enough not to have to follow the rules.”

  Heads nodded all around.

  “I’ll have to put in a report about this to Sax and Glinn,” said Frayne. “They’re not going to be happy about it. And this happened on our watch.”

  “Maybe Glinn did it.”

  “Or that asshole Garza.”

  More nods. This was a likely explanation. And it would deflect blame from them.

  Frayne looked around. “Time to close up shop. The top brass won’t like the fact that somebody liberated a piece of that thing. But you know what? We followed procedure. And you guys put in a good day—well done.”

  “Speaking of liberation…” Reece climbed onto a stool and reached up to the top of a cabinet, slipped his hand deep out of sight. Waingro was smiling knowingly.

  Reece produced a gallon jug of red wine. “I think we owe it to ourselves to have a little party.”

  Frayne stared. “What, with that rotgut?”

  “And what if Sax comes back?” Stahlweather asked. “Now that we’re at the work site, it’s ix-nay on any drinking.”

  “Come come, the speakeasy is open for business. Sax isn’t coming back—not tonight.” Reece’s smile grew broader. He reached up again to the hidden store and brought down a bottle of brandy, another of triple sec, and a bag of oranges and lemons. “Sangria, anyone?”

  34

  IT WAS BY now after dawn and Patrick Brambell was mightily relieved to be alone in his medical quarters, without Glinn or his assistant, Rogelio, breathing down his neck. He wanted to be alone, to think, to contemplate, to figure this thing out. He never could think clearly when there were other people around, and he was particularly relieved that he’d gotten rid of the shadowy presence of Glinn, lurking in the background like a specter. That, and the four workers in the adjoining exobiology lab, who—hours before—had grown as boisterous as a bloody frat party and he’d almost had to go tell them to pipe down.

  In the silence, he got back to work.

  In front of him, arranged with precision on the gurney, were the remains of Alexandra Lispenard. It was a singularly gruesome sight, much of it looking like coarse-ground hamburger mingled with mashed bits of flesh, shot through with shreds of clothing, strands of hair, and fragments of bone. Having arranged and rearranged just about every piece over the course of the last several hours, he had become thoroughly numbed and now gazed upon the scene not with horror but with scientific detachment.

  The problem, he mused, was simple. If the crushed DSV was indeed a pellet—a shite—then the creature had to have absorbed some nourishment from it, the same way an owl ate a rodent whole, digested its flesh, and expelled the bones and fur. Nothing else made sense. The DSV seemed intact, nothing missing or dissolved, and besides it was hard to imagine the creature eating metal, glass, or plastic. It seemed much more likely it had digested or absorbed some of Lispenard.

  He wondered exactly what that might be. It could have been her blood: naturally, the body was completely drained of blood, all five liters of it. But he remembered from the video of the recovery of Paul that there had been a faint cloud of blood trailing away from the crushed DSV when it was first discovered.

  So the creature probably hadn’t absorbed the blood. It had washed away.

  What he needed to do was weigh the body and see how much, if any, was missing. That could help him determine what had been absorbed.

  He called up Lispenard’s chart on his computer and noted that her weight had been fifty-eight point eight kilograms. With the blood gone, that would lighten the remains by five kilograms, for a total weight of fifty-three point eight kilograms. The amount of wet clothing embedded in the remains, he calculated, was about one kilogram.

  The gurney came with a built-in scale. He unlocked its weighing latch, activated the keypad, and waited while the digital screen ran through the kilograms.

  It stopped at fifty-three point three kilograms.

  So the body was missing about one and a half kilograms of weight. Some of that might be pieces they’d missed, or other liquids, such as lymph or bile, that had dispersed into the ocean. But some, if not most, of that liquid would have been replaced by salt water. Brambell was pretty sure he’d gotten every last piece of her. They’d been fanatical about it, and the pieces had sort of clung together in a stringy way, one leading to the next.

  What part of the human body weighed one point five kilograms?

  The answer came to him immediately. The brain.

  Brambell exhaled loudly in chagrin at his stupidity. Here he had carefully assembled the face and skull on the gurney: ears, nose, lips, hair, the works. But he’d forgotten about the brain. Where was it? He bent over the gurney, but there was no trace of it. Could they have overlooked it when extracting the body from Paul?

  No. Impossible.

  Could the brain, which was also watery, have dissolved and drifted away in the extreme water pressure?

  The feeling he’d had when they’d taken apart Paul, back on the hangar deck—the feeling that something wasn’t quite right—came back again now, full force.

  He picked up a pair of rubber tweezers and leaned over the assembled cranium, turning over the largest pieces of skull. The inside of the cranium was totally clean—licked clean, one might even say. Even the dura membranes normally found inside the cranium were gone—gone completely. And those were tough.

  He pulled the tray of surgical tools close and carefully dissected the first two cervical vertebrae, C1 and C2. They had survived the crushing fairly intact. He quickly located the main anatomical points, the dens of axis and the transverse ligament of axis. With the utmost care he rotated C1 and teased apart the partially crushed mess to expose the vertebral foramen. There, inside, he found the spinal cord enclosed in the thecal sac. The top of it, right where the cord emerged from C1 and connected to the medulla oblongata, looked precisely as if it had been cut with a scalpel. Indeed, it had a seared aspect that suggested heat had been involved.

  “Bloody hell,” Brambell muttered to himself. He was utterly discomposed. Had the creature eaten the brain? But no: that didn’t seem likely, given such a clean-cut removal. Rather, the bastard had—with almost surgical precision—taken the brain.

  Brambell backed away from the gurney, a feeling in the pit of his stomach that was not good. He took a few deep, shuddering breaths. And then, recovering himself, he did a quick bioassay of the brain stem. Then he pulled off his gloves, hung up his apron, washed his hands, straightened his lab coat—and went off to look for Glinn.

  35
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  GIDEON CREW STOOD with Glinn and Manuel Garza at the foredeck rail. They were speaking in low tones. Their conversation was about the nature of the Baobab, but as usual it seemed to wander into wild speculations and crazy theories. It frustrated Gideon that, even now, they had so little hard evidence on the thing. They didn’t know even the basics: was it a machine or a life-form, or some bizarre combination of the two? Was it intelligent—or just a dumb plant? This lack of information was becoming a serious problem on board ship, because the resulting vacuum was being filled with rumor and speculation.

  At least the remarkable weather was still holding, the ocean as calm as a millpond. Every day brought them closer to summer, and the calving of the icebergs seemed to be accelerating in the advancing spring weather. As Gideon looked out, he counted six stately bergs dotting the sea. The rising sun hung low, casting a golden pathway over the water. The calmness of the scene belied the turbulent atmosphere on the ship.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen?”

  Gideon turned to see Dr. Patrick Brambell approaching, looking neat as a pin, but with such a concerned expression on his normally placid face that Gideon grew instantly alarmed.

  “Dr. Brambell?” said Glinn.

  Brambell came up with tentative steps, hands clasped together. “I’ve completed the autopsy,” he said. “Of Lispenard,” he added, unnecessarily.

  Gideon felt a tightness in his chest. He had viciously suppressed all thoughts of Alex, which otherwise seemed to erupt regularly out of nowhere and stagger his peace of mind. But this he had to hear. He waited.

  “Well?” Glinn asked when Brambell didn’t go on.

  “The brain is missing,” said Brambell.

  “What do you mean, missing?”

  “Absolutely missing. Not a trace of it, not a trace.” The words came tumbling out, his Irish brogue heavier than usual. “It appears to have been removed at the brain stem, severed as if with a scalpel, and with evidence of the application of searing heat. I did a quick section and bioassay, and found that the proteins at the site of the removal had denatured—proof of heat.”