It wouldn’t stop, Sheena 6 saw, more generations of young and more habs, until the asteroid was full, used up. What then? Would they turn on each other at last?
But Sheena 6 was already ageing. Such questions could wait for another generation.
In the midst of this activity, Sheena 5 grew weaker. Her young gathered around her.
Look at me, she said. Court me. Love me.
Last confused words, picked out in blurred signs on a mottled carapace, stiff attempts at posture by muscles leached of strength.
Sheena 6 hovered close to her mother. What had those darkening eyes seen? Was it really true that Sheena 5 had been hatched in an ocean without limits, an ocean where hundreds – thousands, millions – of squid hunted and fought, bred and died?
Sheena 5 drifted, purposeless, and the soft gravity of Reinmuth started to drag her down for the last time.
Sheena’s young fell on her, their beaks tearing into her cooling, sour flesh.
Dan Ystebo met Maura Della once more, five years later.
He met her at the entrance to the Houston ecodome, on a sweltering August day. Dan’s project in Africa had collapsed when ecoterrorists bombed the Brazzaville dome – two Americans were killed – and he’d come back to Houston, his birthplace.
He took her to his home, on the south side of downtown. It was a modern house, an armoured box with fully-equipped closed life support.
He gave her a beer.
When she took off her resp mask he was shocked; she was wasted, and her face was pitted like the surface of the Moon.
He said, ‘An eco-weapon? Another WASP plague from the Chinese –’
‘No.’ She forced a hideous smile. ‘Not the war, as it happens. Just a closed-ecology crash, a prion plague.’ She drank her beer, and produced some hardcopy photographs. ‘Have you seen this?’
He squinted. A blurred green sphere. A NASA reference on the back showed these were Hubble II images. ‘I didn’t know Hubble II was still operating.’
‘It doesn’t do science. We use it to watch the Chinese Moon base. But some smart guy in the State Department thought we should keep an eye on – that.’
She passed him a pack of printouts. These proved to be results from spectography and other remote sensors. If he was to believe what he saw, he was looking at a ball of water, floating in space, within which chlorophyll reactions were proceeding.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘They survived. How the hell?’
‘You showed them,’ she said heavily.
‘But I didn’t expect this. It looks as if they transformed the whole damn asteroid.’
‘That’s not all. We have evidence they’ve travelled to some of the other rocks out there. Methane rockets, maybe.’
‘I guess they forgot about us.’
‘I doubt it. Look at this.’
It was a Doppler analysis of Reinmuth, the primary asteroid. It was moving. Fuzzily, he tried to interpret the numbers. ‘I can’t do orbital mechanics in my head. Where is this thing headed?’
‘Take a guess.’
There was a silence.
He said, ‘Why are you here?’
‘We’re going to send them a message. We’ll use English, Chinese and the sign system you devised with Sheena. We want your permission to put your name on it.’
‘Do I get to approve the contents?’
‘No.’
‘What will you say?’
‘We’ll be asking for forgiveness. For the way we treated Sheena.’
‘Do you think that will work?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re predators, like us. Only smarter. What would we do in their position?’
‘But we have to try.’
She began to collect up her material. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We have to try.’
As the water world approached, swimming out of the dark, Sheena 46 prowled through the heart of transformed Reinmuth.
On every hierarchical level mind-shoals formed, merged, fragmented, combining restlessly, shimmers of group consciousness that pulsed through the million-strong cephalopod community, as sunlight glimmers on water. But the great shoals had abandoned their song-dreams of Earth, of the deep past, and sang instead of the huge deep future which lay ahead.
Sheena 46 was practical.
There was much to do, the demands of expansion endless: more colony packets to send to the ice balls around the outer planets, for instance, more studies of the greater ice worlds that seemed to orbit far from the central heat.
Nevertheless, she was intrigued. Was it possible this was Earth, of legend? The home of Dan, of NASA?
If it were so, it seemed to Sheena that it must be terribly confining to be a human, to be trapped in the skinny layer of air that clung to the Earth.
But where the squid came from scarcely mattered. Where they were going was the thing.
Reinmuth entered orbit around the water world.
The great hierarchies of mind collapsed as the cephalopods gave themselves over to a joyous riot of celebration, of talk and love and war and hunting: Court me. Court me. See my weapons! I am strong and fierce. Stay away! Stay away! She is mine! …
Things had gone to hell with startling, dismaying speed. People died, all over the planet, in conflicts and resource crashes nobody even kept track of any more – even before the first major nuclear exchanges.
But at least Dan got to see near-Earth object Reinmuth enter Earth orbit.
It was as if his old Project Bootstrap goals had at last been fulfilled. But he knew that the great artefact up there, like a shimmering green, translucent Moon, had nothing to do with him.
At first it was a peaceful presence, up there in the orange, smoggy sky. Even beautiful. Its hide flickered with squid signs, visible from the ground, some of which Dan even recognized, dimly.
He knew what they were doing. They were calling to their cousins who might still inhabit the oceans below.
Dan knew they would fail. There were almost certainly no squid left in Earth’s oceans: they had been wiped out for food, or starved or poisoned by the various plankton crashes, the red tides.
The old nations that had made up the USA briefly put aside their economic and ethnic and religious and nationalistic squabbles, and tried to respond to this threat from space. They tried to talk to it again. And then they opened one of the old silos and shot a nuclear-tipped missile at it.
But the nuke passed straight through the watery sphere, without leaving a scratch.
It scarcely mattered anyway. He had sources which told him the signature of the squid had been seen throughout the asteroid belt, and on the ice moons, Europa and Ganymede and Triton, and even in the Oort Cloud, the comets at the rim of the system.
Their spread was exponential, explosive.
It was ironic, he thought. We sent the squid out there to bootstrap us into an expansion into space. Now it looks as if they’re doing it for themselves.
But they always were better adapted for space than we were. As if they had evolved that way. As if they were waiting for us to come along, to lift them off the planet, to give them their break.
As if that was our only purpose.
Dan wondered if they remembered his name.
The first translucent ships began to descend, returning to Earth’s empty oceans.
THE FUBAR SUIT
I know I’m still lying here in the regolith, on this dumb little misshapen asteroid, inside my fubar suit. I know nobody’s come to save me. Because I’m still here, right? But I can’t see, hear, feel a damn thing.
Although I sometimes think I can.
I’m going stir-crazy, inside my own head.
I know they’re coming to kill me, though. The little guys. The nems told me that much.
So I have a decision to make.
Them or me.
She drifted in blue warmth, her thoughts dissolving.
… Consciousness burst in on her, dark and dry, dispelling the fug of her prenatal dream. She gasped and co
ughed, expelling fluid from her lungs.
She was turned around, by huge, confident hands. She was held before a looming face, smiling, wet. Her mother.
There were people all around, naked, thin, anxious. Even so, they smiled at this new birth.
Her eyes were clearing quickly. She – they – were in some kind of huge hall, a vast cylindrical space. The roof, far above, was clear, and some kind of light moved beyond it. There was water in the base of the hall, a great trapped river of it, dense with green. The people were clustered at the edge of the water, on a smooth, sloping beach. Children were playing in the water, which lapped gently against the walls.
Adults clustered around, plucking at her fingers and toes, which grew with a creaking of soft, stretching skin. The growth hurt, and she cried. She squirmed against her mother, seeking an escape from this dismal cold.
Her mother put her down, on the sloping wall.
Still moist from birth, she crawled away, towards the water.
One of the children came stalking out of the murky water on skinny legs. It was a boy. He spoke to her, pointing and smiling. At first the words made no sense, but they soon seemed to catch. Brother. Sister. Mother. River.
She tried to speak back, but her mouth was soft and sticky.
The boy – her brother – ran back to the water. She followed, crawling, already impatient, already trying to stand upright.
The water was warm and welcoming, and full of sticky green stuff. She splashed out until her head was covered.
Swimming was easier than crawling, or walking.
Her brother showed her how to use her fingers to filter out the green stuff. Algae, he said. She could see little knots and spirals in the green mats.
She crammed the green stuff into her mouth, gnawing at it with her gums, with her growing buds of teeth, sucking it into her stomach. She was very, very hungry.
Her name, they said, was Green Wave.
I was born at the wrong time, in the wrong place.
In the year 2050, when I was eighteen years old, no American was flying into space. We’d ceded the high frontier: the Moon to the Japanese, Mars to the Russians, the asteroid belt to the Chinese. America, without space resources, got steadily poorer, not to mention more decadent. A hell of a time to grow up.
I come from enterprising stock. One of my ancestors made a fortune hauling bauxite on twenty-mule trains out of Death Valley. He also got himself killed, however. Another ancestor was one of the first in the Texas oil fields. And so on.
We lost all the money, of course, long before I was born. But we’re a family with one hell of a tradition.
But when I grew up we were rattling around in a box, with no place to go.
I served in the Army. I studied astronomy. I tried to figure an angle: some place out there the Russians and Chinese hadn’t got locked up yet.
Finally I settled on the Trojans: little bunches of asteroids outside the main belt, sixty degrees ahead of and behind Jupiter, shepherded by gravity effects. The density of the rocks there is actually greater than in the main belt.
Not only that, the asteroids out there are different from the ones in the belt, which are lumps of basalt and metal. The Trojans are carbonaceous: that is, coated in carbon compounds. And they have water.
And nobody had been out there, ever.
I started to raise money.
My ship, when assembled, was a stack of boxes fifty metres long. At its base was a big pusher plate, mounted on shock absorbers. Around that there were fuel magazines and superconducting hoops. There were big solar-cell wings stuck on the sides.
The drive was a fusion-pulse pusher. It worked by shooting pellets of helium-3 and deuterium out back of the craft, behind the pusher plate, and firing carbon dioxide lasers at them. Each fusion pulse lasts two hundred and fifty nanoseconds. And then another, and another: three hundred microexplosions each second. My acceleration was three per cent of G.
My hab module was just a box, with a reconditioned Russian-design closed-loop life support, and an exercise bicycle.
It was a leaky piece of shit. For instance I watched the engineers fix up a ding in a reaction-control thruster fuel line with Kevlar and epoxy, the way you’d repair your refrigerator. I spent as little as I could on my ship, and a lot on my suit, which is a Japanese design. I called it my fubar suit, my safety option of last resort.
In the event, I was glad to have it.
I was looking at an eighteen-day trip to the Trojans.
I said goodbye to the investors, all of whom had bought a piece of my ass at no risk to themselves. I said goodbye to my daughter. That was hard. I’d said goodbye to her father long before.
I called my ship the Malenfant, after that great explorer. I wasn’t exploring, of course, but I always had a little romance in my soul, I think.
When I left Earth orbit, the glow of my drive turned Pacific night into day.
On her second day, she woke up a spindly-legged girl almost as tall, already, as her mother. She spent as long as she could in the water, dragging at the algae. They all did, most of the time.
There was never enough to eat. Sometimes the algae was so thin she could barely taste it sticking to her fingers. She was hungry, the whole time, and she kept on growing.
Her brother touched her shoulder. ‘Get out,’ he said. His name was Sun Eyes.
‘What?’
He took her hand and pulled her from the river. Everybody else was clambering up the curving bank too.
Something was approaching, under the surface of the water, from the darkness at the end of the hall. Something big and sleek and powerful, that churned the water.
Green Wave was one of a row of skinny naked people, waiting by the edge of the water. ‘What is it?’
Sun Eyes shrugged. ‘It’s a Worker.’
‘What’s a Worker?’
‘One of those.’
A lot of her questions were answered like that.
The river wasn’t really a river, more a long, stagnant pond. The Workers, coming by once or twice a day, stirred up the liquid. Maybe it was good for the algae, Green Wave speculated.
Anyhow, when a Worker came along, the people had to get out of the way.
As soon as it had gone, she joined the rush to splash back into the water. But the algae was thinner than before.
‘The Workers take away the algae,’ said Sun Eyes.
‘Why? Can’t they see we’re hungry?’
Sun Eyes shrugged.
‘I don’t like the Workers,’ said Green Wave.
Sun Eyes laughed at her.
The facts of her life were these:
This place was called Finger Hall. It was a cylinder, roofed over by some material that allowed in a dim, murky light during the short day. The river ran down its length. The Hall was maybe ten times as tall as an adult human.
The Hall, it was said, was one of five – five Fingers, in fact, lying parallel. The Halls were joined at one end by a big cavern, as her own fingers were joined at her hand. Her mother said she saw this Palm Cavern once, early in her life, three or four days ago. Her brother had never left Finger Hall.
The only drink was river water. The only food was river algae.
That day, her brother spent a lot of time with a girl. And there was a boy, Churning Wake, who started paying attention to Green Wave. He even brought her handfuls of algae, the only gift he had.
This was her second day. On the third, she came to understand, she would be expected to pair with somebody. Maybe this kid Churning Wake. She would have a baby of her own on the third or fourth day, maybe another.
And on the fifth day –
Her mother was five days old. She was thin, bent, her breasts empty sacks of flesh. Green Wave brought her algae handfuls.
An old man died. His children grieved, then carried his body to the edge of the water. He had been seven days old.
Soon a Worker clambered out of the water. It was a wide, fat disc, half the height of an adul
t, and its rim was studded with jointed limbs.
The Worker cut up the body of the old man, snip snip, into bloodless pieces. It loaded the chunks of corpse into a hatch on its back, and then closed itself up and slid smoothly back into the water.
‘Why did it do that?’ Green Wave asked.
‘I don’t know,’ her mother said. She was wheezing. ‘You have a lot of questions, Green Wave. His name was Purple Glow, because on the day he was born –’
‘Is that it? We’re born, we eat algae, we die? In seven days? Is that all there is?’
‘We care for each other. We tell the children stories.’
‘I don’t like it here.’
Her mother laughed, weakly. ‘Where else is there?’
I spent the first week throwing up, and drinking banana-flavoured rehydration fluids.
The sun turned to a shrunken yellow disc, casting long shadows. Even Jupiter was just a point of light, about as remote from me as from Earth.
There wasn’t a human being within millions of miles. A hell of a feeling.
I found it hard to sleep, listening to the rattles and bangs of my Russian life support. I wore my fubar suit the whole time.
I’d aimed for the largest Trojan, called 624 Hektor. At first it was just a starlike point, but it pulsed in brightness as I watched it. When I got a little closer, I could make out its shape.
624 Hektor: take two big handfuls of Moon, complete with craters and dusty maria. Mould them into egg-shapes, each a hundred miles long. Now touch them together, sharp end to sharp end, and let them rotate, like one almighty peanut.
That’s 624 Hektor.
Nobody knows for sure how it got that way. Maybe there was a collision between two normal asteroids which produced a loosely consolidated, fragmented cloud of rubble, which then deformed into this weird compound configuration: two little worlds, made egg-shaped by their mutual attraction, joined in a soft collision.
It was exhilarating to see something no human had witnessed before. For a while, it was as if I really was Reid Malenfant. I sent a long radio letter to my kid, telling her what I could see.
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