Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (28 page)

Meanwhile our latest clients have received a lot of mail questioning some odd shapes they've seen in recent ads. You wouldn't think anyone would notice such things, but you'd be surprised what some people will notice. A few such individuals have pointed out that the shapes are really letters in a language only known to Satan and his minions. Other inquiring minds suspect a prize awaits anyone who can decode a secret clue. Other people . . . you get the drift.

So to all you worried folks out there with excess time and imagination, I don't have all the answers, but here's what I think. I think Uncle Joe's paintings contain directions, or coordinates, or whatever you want to call them; but I think some of those shapes had an entirely different purpose.

Maybe I'm a romantic, or maybe it's because things are going so well with Deborah and me, but I think Joe spent seventy-five years painting love letters.

Stephen Baxter

Sheena didn't mean it to happen.

Of course not; she knew the requirements of the mission as well as anyone, as well as Dan himself. She had her duty to NASA. She understood that.

But it felt so
right
.

It came after the kill.

The night was over. The sun, a fat ball of light, was already glimmering above the water's surface.

The squid emerged from the grasses and corals where they had been feeding. Shoals formed in small groups and clusters, eventually combining into a community a hundred strong.

Court me. Court me.

See my weapons!

I am strong and fierce.

Stay away! Stay away! She is mine!
. . .

It was the ancient cephalopod language, a language of complex skin patterns, body posture, texture, words of sex and danger and food; and Sheena shoaled and sang with joy.

. . . But there was a shadow on the water.

The sentinels immediately adopted concealment or bluff postures, blaring lies at the approaching predator.

Sheena knew that there would be no true predators here. The shadow could only be a watching NASA machine.

The dark shape lingered close, just as a true barracuda would before diving into the shoal, seeking to break it up.

A strong male broke free. He spread his eight arms, raised his two long tentacles, and his green binocular eyes fixed on the fake barracuda. Confusing patterns of light and shade pulsed across his hide.
Look at me. I am large and fierce. I can kill you.
Slowly, cautiously, the male drifted towards the barracuda, coming to within a mantle-length.

At the last moment the barracuda turned, sluggishly.

But it was too late.

The male's two long tentacles whipped out, and their clublike pads of suckers pounded against the barracuda hide, sticking there. Then the male wrapped his eight strong arms around the barracuda's body, his pattern changing to an exultant uniform darkening. And he stabbed at the barracuda's skin with his beak, seeking meat.

And meat there was, what looked like fish fragments to Sheena, booty planted there by Dan.

The squid descended, lashing their tentacles around the stricken prey. Sheena joined in, cool water surging through her mantle, relishing the primordial power of this kill despite its artifice.

. . . That was when it happened.

As she clambered stiffly down through the airlock into the habitat, the smell of air freshener overwhelmed Maura Della.

"Ms. Della, welcome to Oceanlab," Dan Ystebo said. Ystebo, marine biologist, was fat, breathy, intense, thirtyish, with Coke-bottle glasses and a mop of unlikely red hair, a typical geek scientist type.

Maura found a seat before a bank of controls. The seat was just a canvas frame, much repaired with duct tape. The working area of this hab was a small, cramped sphere, its walls encrusted with equipment. A sonar beacon pinged softly, like a pulse.

The sense of confinement, the feel of the weight of water above her head, was overwhelming.

She leaned forward, peering into small windows. Sunlight shafted through empty gray water. She saw a school of squid jetting through the water in complex patterns.

"Which one is Sheena 5?"

Dan pointed to a softscreen pasted over a scuffed hull section.

The streamlined, torpedo-shaped body was a rich burnt-orange, mottled black. Winglike fins rippled elegantly alongside the body.

The Space Squid, Maura thought. The only mollusk on NASA's payroll.

"
Sepioteuthis sepioidea
," Dan said. "The Caribbean reef squid. About as long as your arm. Squid, all cephalopods in fact, belong to the phylum Mollusca. But in the squid the mollusk foot has evolved into the funnel, here, leading into the mantle, and the arms and tentacles here. The mantle cavity contains the viscera and gills. Sheena can use the water passing through her mantle cavity for jet propulsion—"

"How do you know that's her?"

Dan pointed again. "See the swelling between the eyes, around the oesophagus?"

"That's her enhanced brain?"

"A squid's neural layout isn't like ours. Sheena has two nerve cords running like rail tracks the length of her body, studded with pairs of ganglia. The forward ganglia pair is expanded into a mass of lobes. We gen-enged Sheena and her grandmothers to—"

"To make a smart squid."

"Ms. Della, squid are smart anyway. They evolved—a long time ago, during the Jurassic—in competition with the fish. They have senses based on light, scent, taste, touch, sound—including infrasound—gravity, acceleration, perhaps even an electric sense. Sheena can control her skin patterns consciously. She can make bands, bars, circles, annuli, dots. She can even animate the display."

"And these patterns are signals?"

"Not just the skin patterns: skin texture, body posture. There may be electric or sonic components too; we can't be sure."

"And what do they use this marvelous signaling for?"

"We aren't sure. They don't hunt cooperatively. And they live only a couple of years, mating only once or twice." Dan scratched his beard. "But we've been able to isolate a number of primal linguistic components which combine in a primitive grammar. Even in unenhanced squid. But the language seems to be closed. It's about nothing but food, sex, and danger. It's like the dance of the bee."

"Unlike human languages."

"Yes. So we opened up Sheena's language for her. In the process we were able to prove that the areas of the brain responsible for learning are the vertical and superior frontal lobes that lie above the oesophagus."

"How did you prove that?"

Dan blinked. "By cutting away parts of squid brains."

Maura sighed. What great PR if that got broadcast.

They studied Sheena. Two forward-looking eyes, blue-green rimmed with orange, peered briefly into the camera.

Alien eyes. Intelligent.

Do we have the right to do this, to meddle with the destiny of other sentient creatures, to further our own goals—when we don't even understand, as Ystebo admits, what the squid use their speech for? What it is they talk about?

How does it
feel
, to be Sheena?

And could Sheena possibly understand that humans are planning to have her fly a rocket ship to an asteroid?

He came for her: the killer male, one tentacle torn on some loose fragment of metal.

She knew this was wrong. And yet it was irresistible.

She felt a skin pattern flush over her body, a pied mottling, speckled with white spots.
Court me
.

He swam closer. She could see his far side was a bright uniform silver, a message to the other males:
Keep away. She is mine!
As he rolled, the colors tracked around his body, and she could see the tiny muscles working the pigment sacs on his hide.

And already he was holding out his hectocotylus towards her, the modified arm bearing the clutch of spermatophores at its tip.

Mission, Sheena. Mission. Bootstrap! Mission! NASA! Dan!

But then the animal within her rose, urgent. She opened her mantle to the male.

His hectocotylus reached for her, striking swiftly, and lodged the needle-like spermatophore among the roots of her arms.

Then he withdrew. Already it was over.

. . . And yet it was not. She could choose whether or not to embrace the spermatophore and place it in her seminal receptacle.

She knew she must not.

All around her, the squid's songs pulsed with life. Ancient songs that reached back to a time before humans, before whales, before even the fish.

Her life was short: lasting one summer, two at most, a handful of matings. But the songs of light and dance made every squid aware she was part of a continuum that stretched back to those ancient seas; and that her own brief, vibrant life was as insignificant, yet as vital, as a single silver scale on the hide of a fish.

Sheena, with her human-built mind, was the first of all cephalopods to be able to understand this. And yet every squid knew it, on some level that transcended the mind.

But Sheena was no longer part of that continuum.

Even as the male receded, she felt overwhelmed with sadness, loneliness, isolation. Resentment.

She closed her arms over the spermatophore, and drew it inside her.

"I have to go to bat for you on the Hill Monday," Maura said to Dan. "I have to put my reputation on the line to save this project. You're sure, absolutely sure, this is going to work?"

"Absolutely," Dan said. He spoke with a calm conviction that made her want to believe him. "Look, the squid are adapted to a zero-gravity environment—unlike us. And Sheena can hunt in three dimensions; she will be able to navigate. If you were going to evolve a creature equipped for space travel, it would be a cephalopod. And she's much cheaper than any robotic equivalent . . ."

"But," Maura said heavily, "we don't have any plans to bring her back."

He shrugged. "Even if we had the capability, she's too short-lived. We have plans to deal with the ethical contingencies."

"That's bullshit."

Dan looked uncomfortable. But he said, "We hope the public will accept the arrival of the asteroid in Earth orbit as a memorial to her. A just price. And Senator, every moment of her life, from the moment she was hatched, Sheena has been oriented to the goal. It's what she lives for. The mission."

Somberly Maura watched the squid, Sheena, as she flipped and jetted in formation with her fellows.

We have to do this, she thought. I have to force the funding through, on Monday.

If Sheena succeeded she would deliver, in five years or so, a near-Earth asteroid rich in organics and other volatiles to Earth orbit. Enough to bootstrap, at last, an expansion off the planet. Enough, perhaps, to save mankind.

And, if the gloomier State Department reports about the state of the world were at all accurate, it might be the last chance anybody would get.

But Sheena wouldn't live to see it.

The squid shoal collapsed to a tight school and jetted away, rushing out of sight.

Sheena 5 glided at the heart of the ship, where the water that passed through her mantle, over her gills, was warmest, richest. The core machinery, the assemblage of devices that maintained life here, was a black mass before her, lights winking over its surface.

She found it hard to rest without the shoal, the mating and learning and endless dances of daylight.

Restless, she swam away from the machinery cluster. As she rose, the water flowing through her mantle cooled, the rich oxygen thinning. She sensed the subtle sounds of living things: the smooth rush of fish, the bubbling murmur of the krill on which they browsed, and the hiss of the diatoms and algae which fed them. In Sheena's spacecraft, matter and energy flowed in great loops, sustained by sunlight, regulated by its central machinery as if by a beating heart.

She reached the wall of the ship. It was translucent. If she pushed at it, it pushed back. Grass algae grew on the wall, their long filaments dangling and wafting in the currents.

Beyond the membrane shone a milky, blurred sun—with, near it, a smaller crescent. That, she knew, was the Earth, all its great oceans reduced to a droplet. This craft was scooting around the sun after Earth like a fish swimming after its school.

She let the lazy, whalelike roll of the ship carry her away from the glare of the sun, and she peered into the darkness, where she could see the stars.

She had been trained to recognize many of the stars. She used this knowledge to determine her position in space far more accurately than even Dan could have, from far-off Earth.

But to Sheena the stars were more than navigation beacons. Sheena's eyes had a hundred times the number of receptors of human eyes, and she could see a hundred times as many stars.

To Sheena the Universe was crowded with stars, vibrant and alive. The Galaxy was a reef of stars beckoning her to come jet along its length.

But there was only Sheena here to see it. Her sense of loss grew inexorably.

So, swimming in starlight, Sheena cradled her unhatched young, impatiently jetting clouds of ink in the rough shape of a male with bright, mindless eyes.

Maura Della was involved in all this because—in the year 2030, as the planet's resources dwindled—Earth had become a bear pit.

Take water, for instance.

Humanity was using more than all the fresh water that fell on the planet. Unbelievable. So, all over Asia and elsewhere, water wars were flaring up, and at least one nuke had been lobbed, between India and Pakistan.

America's primary international problem was the small, many-sided war that was flaring in Antarctica, now that the last continent had been "opened up" to a feeding frenzy of resource-hungry nations—a conflict that constantly threatened to spill out to wider arenas.