Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  But there was still a sky above him, with stars and a Moon, even though they were in different places from when he was in the village.

  And -when he closed his eyes — on his pallet at night, in the stillness of his blanket, with no sound or sensation — he could feel deep inside himself that time wore on, passing inexorably, measured invisibly by the evolution of his own thoughts. It didn’t matter that his memories didn’t make sense, that what had happened to him had no logic or explanation. It was enough that he knew, deep inside, that the universe still worked.

  The rules, here in the School, became simple.

  Food was everything.

  You could not be sure when another meal might come, so you had to eat or hoard every scrap of food you could find.

  In fact it was better to hoard as much as possible, to hide it in your clothes or in a cache, like Michael’s store in the wall of the dormitory hut, to make it last longer.

  If you had food you had power. If another had food, they had power over you.

  There were other rules.

  For example: at night the children were not allowed to go outside their dormitory room to relieve themselves. There was always a Sister or a Brother in the dormitory to ensure this was so. There was a single slop bucket at night, set in the middle of the floor. It was not big enough and soon filled up. If it spilled on the floor, you would be punished. If you made a mess, if you wet your bed or relieved yourself where you shouldn’t, you would be punished. Many of the younger children were quite clumsy, and so would often knock over the bucket or otherwise mess the place up. They were punished often.

  At night Michael would hear children crying in pain as they tried to resist the temptation to use the bucket. And he would hear Anna’s quiet, grave voice, helping them stay quiet, overcome the discomfort.

  New children, arriving here in their shirts marked with crude blue circles, would often cry and complain, and suffer when they broke the rules. They soon learned, however.

  Michael had one possession he cared about. It was the flashlight Stef had given him. Michael used the flashlight sparingly, and the new batteries had hardly dimmed.

  At night, he would crawl under his bed, in utter silence. He had some pieces of scrap metal into which he had knocked small holes with a headless nail.

  He shone the flashlight on one metal scrap and looked at the spot of yellow light he cast on the wall. He saw a bright central spot surrounded by a band of half shadow, and darkness beyond. Then he put another scrap in that spot, punctured by a second hole, so that the light he cast was stretched thinner.

  The spot of light cast by the second hole was different. He saw the central spot and the outer darkness, but between them there were intricate patterns of light and dark, concentric rings. There was color here, blue and orange and red rings overlapping. The rings, in the silent dark, were quite beautiful. He was seeing waves, like ripples on a pond, places where the bits of light — photons — were washing against each other, falling together in the bright places or nudging each other out of the way in the dark.

  He found a scrap of cellophane, bright blue, and put that over one of the holes. Now he saw a simpler system of concentric rings, painted in blue only. He found the blue circles comforting. He imagined they were doors painted on the wall, and that he might pass through them, to go home to the village, or somewhere even better.

  He kept pulling his apparatus apart. Perhaps he could stretch it so much that only one light bit at a time, one photon, would pass through the holes. He never managed that, but it didn’t matter; he could see in his mind what the result would be.

  He would see a stream of photons speckling against the wall, nudging and jostling, working together to make the glowing bands.

  But one photon, alone, separate from the others, was like a thrown stone. What was affecting itl How could it know which parts of the wall to land on, and which not?

  The answer was obvious. The photon was being nudged and jostled into the right place, just as it had been when part of a flood. So there must be things coming from the holes to jostle the photon, even when only one photon at a time passed through the holes. Those things behaved exactly like photons, except he could not see them.

  They were ghost photons, he thought. Partners of the “real” one, the one he could see. The real photon reached forward in time, inquiring. And a flood of ghosts from the future came crowding back in time, along every possible path it could take. And yet they were real, for they jostled the genuine photon just as if it were part of a dense, bright beam.

  For every photon, there was an uncounted flood of ghosts, of possible futures, just as real as the photon he saw.

  And so, surrounding every person, there must be a flood of future ghosts, representing all the unrealized possibilities, all equally real.

  Michael, with his flashlight and metal scraps, surrounded by ghosts, smiled in the dark. Perhaps the future Michaels were happy.

  One day a Brother found his food cache, and the flashlight, and the scraps of metal, all buried in the wall.

  The children in the dormitory were made to stand in a line, before their beds, while the Brother barked at them. Michael did not understand the words, but he knew what would happen. The Brother wanted the owner of the cache to step forward. If nobody volunteered as responsible, all the children would be beaten. And then, when the Brothers were gone, the other children would beat Michael.

  Still, he waited. Sometimes a child, one who was not responsible, would step forward and take the punishment for another. Anna often did this, but today she was not here. Michael had done it once, to spare a sickly boy.

  Today, nobody came forward.

  Michael took a step.

  His punishment was severe.

  And later the Brother stamped on the flashlight, smashing it. Michael was made to sweep up the pieces, the bits of broken glass, with his bare hands. The fragments of glass that stuck in his fingers made them bleed for days.

  Shit Cola Marketing:

  Adopt a baby space squid!

  Thanks to Shit’s commercial tie-up with the Bootstrap corporation we can offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchasers of Shit Cola or other Shit products to become official adopters of one of the infant squid on the asteroid Cruithne.

  Every squid is different. We have recognition software, designed in conjunction with leading scientists, that can distinguish your baby squid by its shape, markings, and characteristic movements. You can name him/her, monitor his/her progress, even (pending legal approval) send him/her messages and tell him/her something of yourself.

  Numbers are limited!

  To apply, laser-swipe one hundred pull tabs from cans of Shit Cola or related soft drink products and mail the codes, together with your completion in no more than ten words of the phrase: Shit will be the downstream drink of choice because… to the following e-address…

  Maura Della:

  When the storm broke about the baby squid, Maura flew straight

  out to Vegas to confront Malenfant and Emma.

  She found them in Emma’s office. Emma was sitting at her desk, her head in her hands. Malenfant was hyped up, pacing, hands fluttering like independent living things.

  Maura said quietly, “You fool, Malenfant. How long have you known?”

  He sighed. “Not long. A couple of weeks. Dan had suspicions before we got confirmation, the actual pictures from Cruithne. Imbalances in the life-support systems—”

  “Did you know she was pregnant before the launch?”

  “No. I swear it. If I’d known I’d have taken her off the mission.”

  She looked skeptical. “Really? Even given the launch window constraints and all of that technical crap? It would have meant scrubbing the mission.”

  “Yes, it would. But I’d have accepted that. Look, Congress-woman. I know you think I’m some kind of obsessive. But I do notice how the world works. A mission like Bootstrap needs public support. We’ve known the ethical parameters fr
om the beginning.”

  “But we’re not sticking to those parameters any more, are we? We’d got to the point where the bleeding-heart public would have accepted Sheena’s death. The asteroid colony, a permanent tribute to a brave and wonderful creature. But this has changed everything.”

  It was true. Since the latest leak, support for Bootstrap’s Cruithne project and its grandiose goals had evaporated.

  All the tabloid-fed hysteria, the religious ravings, the pompous and hostile commentaries, made no sense, of course. If to abandon ten or a thousand sentient squid was a crime, so was abandoning one.

  But when, she thought sourly, had sense and rationality been a predominant element in public debates on science and technology?

  Malenfant spread his hands. “Look, Representative, we spent the money already. We have the installation on Cruithne. It’s working. Baby squid or not, we have achieved the goal, begun the bootstrap.”

  “Malenfant, we are soon going to have an asteroid full of sentient-squid corpses up there. People will think it is… monstrous.” She blinked. “In fact, so will I.”

  He thought that over. “You’re talking about shutting us down?”

  “Malenfant, the practical truth is you’re already dead. The body hasn’t gone cold yet, is all.”

  “It isn’t your decision. The FAA, the White House people, the oversight committees—”

  “Without me, and a few others like me, Bootstrap would have been dead long ago.” She hesitated, then reached for his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Malenfant. Really. I had the same dream. We can’t sell this.”

  “We’ll do it with decency,” Emma said slowly. “We won’t kill Sheena. We’ll let her die in comfort.”

  “And the babies?”

  She shrugged. “We’ll turn away the communications dishes and let nature take its course. I just hope they forgive us.”

  “I doubt that,” Malenfant said, and he began pacing again, back and forth, compulsively. “I can’t believe we’re going to be blocked by this: this one small thing.”

  Maura said to Emma, “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yes.” Emma looked up and contrived a smile. “We’ve been lower than this. We’ll manage.”

  Meaning, Maura realized, she will manage Malenfant. Bring him through this. You don’t deserve your friends, Malenfant, she thought.

  They began to go through details.

  Sheena 5:

  She could feel the soft tug of Cruithne’s gravity field pulling her to the dark base of the habitat. She drifted, aching arms limp, dreaming of a male with bright, mindless eyes.

  There were no fish left, scarcely any krill or prawns. The water that trickled through her mantle was cloudy and stank of decay. She felt life pulse through her, ever faster, as if eager to be done. And she seemed so weak, as if her muscles themselves were being consumed; it was a long time since the great ring muscles of her mantle had been strong enough to send her jetting freely, as once she had done, through this ocean she had brought across space.

  But the young wouldn’t let her alone. They came to her, shook her limbs, seeking guidance. She summoned the will to open her chromatophores.

  I am grass. I am no squid.

  No. Smart eyes swam into her vision. No. Danger near. You die we die. They were flashing the fast, subtle signals employed by a shoal sentinel, warning of the approach of a predator. There was no predator here, of course, save the ultimate: death itself, which was already consuming her.

  And it would soon consume these hapless young, too, she knew. Dan and Bootstrap had promised to keep her alive. But they would shut down the systems when she was gone. She wondered how the young knew this. They were smarter than she was.

  When they swam out of her field of view, oddly, she forgot they were there, as if they ceased to exist when she could not see them. Her mind itself was weakening. She knew she could never hunt again, even if she had the strength.

  But then the children would return, clamoring, demanding.

  Why, they said. Why here now this. Why die.

  And she tried to explain it to them. Yes, they would all die, but in a great cause, so that Earth, the ocean, humans, could live. Humans and cephalopods, a great world-spanning shoal. It was a magnificent vision, worthy of the sacrifice of their lives.

  Wasn’t it?

  But they knew nothing of Dan, of Earth. They wanted to hunt in shoals and swim through the ocean, unhindered by barriers of soft plastic.

  They were like her. But in some ways they were more like their father. Bright. Primal.

  She could see them chattering, rapidly, one to the other, too fast for her to follow.

  She probably hadn’t explained it as well as Dan could. She tried again.

  No. You die we die…

  Dan Ystebo:

  At JPL, at the appointed time, Dan logged on for his daily uplink to the Nautilus.

  There had been nothing but inanimate telemetry for days. He wasn’t even sure — couldn’t tell from the muddled telemetry — if Sheena was in fact still alive.

  Maybe this would be his last contact. He’d be glad if he could spare himself any more of this shit.

  He was clearing his desk. He looked around the cubicle he was dismantling, the good old geekosphere: a comfortable mush of old coffee cups and fast-food wrappers and technical manuals and rolled-up softscreens, and the multi-poster on the partition that cycled through classic Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea scenes.

  Dan was going back to Key Largo. He planned to resign from Bootstrap, get back to the biorecovery and gen-eng work he’d started from. To tell the truth he was looking forward to moving back to Florida. The work he would do there would be all for the good, as far as he was concerned. None of the Nazi-doctor ethical ambiguities of Bootstrap.

  But he was hoping to hang around JPL long enough to be with Sheena when she died. And the bio-signs in the telemetry indicated that wouldn’t be so long now. Then the Deep Space Network radio telescopes would be turned away from the asteroid for the last time, and whatever followed would unfold in the dark and cold, unheard.

  Here was a new image in his softscreen. A squid, flashing signs at him, a mixture of the passing cloud and a sign he’d taught Sheena himself, the very first sign: Look at me. Dan. Look at me. Dan. Dan. Dan.

  He couldn’t believe it. “Sheena?”

  He had to wait the long seconds while his single word, translated to flashing signs, was transmitted across space.

  Sheena Six.

  “Oh.” One of the young.

  The squid turned, strong and confident, and through a forest of arms predator eyes seemed to study him.

  Dying.

  “Sheena Five? I know.”

  Water. Water dying. Fish. Squid. Danger near. Why.

  She’s talking about the habitat biosphere, he realized. She wants me to tell her how to repair the biosphere. “That’s not possible.”

  Not. Those immense black eyes. Not. Not. Not. The squid flashed through a blizzard of body patterns, bars and stripes pulsing over her hide, her head dipping, her arms raised. / am large and fierce. I am pa.rrotfi.sh, sea grass, rock, coral, sand. I am no squid, no squid, no squid.

  He had given Sheena no sign for liar, but this squid, across millions of miles, bombarding him with lies, was doing its best.

  But he was telling the truth.

  Wasn’t he? How the hell could you extend the fixed-duration closed-loop life-support system in that ball of water to support more squid, to last much longer, even indefinitely?

  But it needn’t stay closed-loop, he realized. The Nautilus hab was sitting on an asteroid full of raw materials. That had been the point of the mission in the first place. In fact Sheena 5 had already opened up the loops a little, replacing hab membrane leakage with asteroid water.

  You’d need machinery to get at all that stuff. But there was machinery: the rocket-propellant factory, the pilot plant for the production of other materials, the firefly robots to do the work.


  If he could figure a way to do this. If he could figure out how to reengineer all that equipment to process carbonaceous ore into some kind of nutrient soup, maybe, for the hab biosphere. And if he could find a way to train these new squid. He’d had years to work with Sheena; he’d have weeks, at best, with these new guys. Still…

  His brain started to tick at the challenge.

  But there were other problems. When the comms uplink shut down in a few weeks, he wouldn’t be able to run the operation.

  In that case, he realized, he’d just have to train the squid in the principles of what they were building. How to run it, repair it for themselves. Even extend it.

  It might work. Sheena had been smart.

  It would be a hell of an effort, though. And for what?

  What’s this, Ystebo? Are you growing a conscience, at last? Because if you are, that damn piece of calamari up there knows how to play on it.

  And besides, he thought, maybe I can convince Reid Malen-fant that this is the best thing to do, a way to keep the greater goals of the project in progress, with official sanction or not. If the squid, by their own efforts, refuse to die, maybe we can turn around public opinion one more time.

  Do it now, justify later. Isn’t that what Malenfant says?

  “I’ll help you,” he said. “I’ll try. What can they do, fire me?”

  Dan placed a call to Malenfant. And then a second, to Florida, to tell the people there he wouldn’t be joining them just yet.

  The squid turned away from the camera.

  Emma Stoney:

  Cornelius Taine came to Emma’s office.

  “We think it worked,” he said, breathless. “We found him.”

  Emma was not glad to see Taine once more. “Found who? What are you talking about?”

  Cornelius handed over a document. It was a report prepared by a professor of physics from Cal Tech. Emma leafed through it. It was heavy on text and laden with equations, difficult to skim.

  Cornelius said, “It’s an analysis of material found on a softscreen. The math was difficult to decipher. Unconventional formalism. But it’s all there.”