Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (30 page)

. . . But it needn't stay closed-loop, he realized. The Bootstrap hab was sitting on an asteroid full of raw materials. That had been the point of the mission in the first place.

His brain started to tick at the challenge.

It would be a hell of an effort, though. And for what? His NASA pay was going to run out any day, and the soldier boys who had taken back JPL, and wanted to run nothing out of here but low-Earth-orbit milsat missions, would kick his sorry ass out of here sooner than that.

To tell the truth he was looking forward to moving to Africa. He'd live in comfort, in the Brazzaville dome, far from the arenas of the global conflict likely to come; and the work there would be all for the good, as far as he was concerned. None of the ethical ambiguities of Bootstrap.

So why are you hesitating, Ystebo? Are you growing a conscience, at last?

"I'll help you," he said. "What can they do, fire me?"

That wasn't translated.

The squid turned away from the camera.

Dan started to place calls.

Sheena 6 was the smartest of the young.

It was no privilege. There was much work.

She learned to use the glovelike systems that made the firefly robots clamber over the asteroid ground. The mining equipment was adapted to seek out essentials for the phytoplankton, nitrates and phosphates.

Even in the hab itself there was much to do. Dan showed her how to keep the water pure, by pumping it through charcoal filters. But the charcoal had to be replaced by asteroid material, burned in sun fire. And so on.

With time, the hab was stabilized. As long as the machines survived, so would the hab's cargo of life.

But it was too small. It had been built to sustain one squid.

So the firefly robots took apart the rocket plant at the pole and began to assemble new engines, new flows of material, sheets of asteroid-material plastic.

Soon there were four habs, linked by tunnels, one for each of Sheena's young, the smart survivors. The krill and diatoms bred happily. The greater volume required more power, so Sheena extended the sprawling solar cell arrays.

The new habs looked like living things themselves, spawning and breeding.

But already another cephalopod generation was coming: sacs of eggs clung to asteroid rock, in all the habs.

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 aging. 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 armored 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 spectrography 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?"

"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 artifact 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 nuke-tipped missile at it, by God.

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.

Richard A. Lovett

It all began the morning the spammers hit my Hal 9000 alarm clock. "Good morning Dave," the clock's soothing voice began as usual, as it gently clicked to life. Only it and my sister get to call me Dave—the clock because it was just way too cool to pass up, and Sis because, well, that's what she's always called me. To everyone else, I'm David—David G. Harlin, Jr., to be precise. My father, the first David G. Harlin, was "Dave," and if anyone but Hal or Sis calls me that, I tend to sit around stupidly waiting for him to answer, even though its been twenty-some years since he and his cheap whiskey disappeared forever. Sis says that by ignoring the name, I'm trying to pretend he's still around. Me, I just think it's because old habits die hard.

"It's 7:00 a.m., time to rise and shine." Hal continued in one of a dozen follow-up messages he uses at random. "I trust you slept well." The next part of his routine normally fit seamlessly with the rest, but today there was an uncharacteristic hesitation as he accessed the Web. "No rain in the forecast, highs in the low 70s," he continued a heartbeat later. "Traffic is heavy on the Sylvan Hill, but Canyon Road appears to be a viable alternative. Remember, you have an appointment . . ." Again the pause as he consulted my office calendar.

To this point, I'd been snuggling under the sheets vaguely wondering why wakeup calls always came in the midst of the best dreams. I'd been on a beach, basking in the love of someone who seemed to have always been part of my life, even though my slowly waking mind had finally reminded me that it had been a long time since I'd had a girlfriend. Still, she seemed familiar. Was she merely a figment of the dream, or could my subconscious be urging me to pay more attention to someone I already knew? In the dream, I'd felt as though I'd been with her forever. Now I was struggling to recall the most basic aspects of her image as wakefulness blurred it to little but a vague impression of "blonde."

Suddenly, Hal was no longer his usual smooth self. "Attention!" he blared like a foghorn. "I have just received an important announcement!"

The beach and the blonde evaporated into total alertness.
Who died
, was my first thought, followed by,
What did I forget
? Was I supposed to be having breakfast with the product development team? Had I planned on calling my broker before the market opened back East?

Having secured my full attention, Hal continued in the same urgent tone: "An incredible medical breakthrough has been reported by scientists deep in the Amazon jungle. Working with a remote tribe, they have found a tiny, miracle berry that combines the benefits of Prozac, Viagra, and human growth hormone, all at once. Male or female, you can now stay healthy and vigorous into your 80s and beyond, add three inches to your penis or enhance your bust size by—" The message died as I punched the disconnect.

I'd acquired Hal three months ago at a trade show where one of my firm's suppliers was giving the clocks away as favors. If I'd preferred, I could have had Mickey Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, Marilyn Monroe, or any of several under-clad pop divas. I'd been assured that the Web connection had an unbreakable firewall, and there'd even been a written guarantee from the manufacturer, although I vaguely remembered a caveat about it applying only to existing worms, viruses, code-breakers, and net-probes. Nobody in their right mind guaranteed there wasn't somebody smart enough to beat them. It was an exponentially mounting problem. In the past year alone, I'd been forced to give up both cell phone and my fax as each in turn was so swamped in ads that they'd become useless. Was the clock next?

Luckily, there were no other smart electronics in my bedroom. I switched on an old-fashioned FM radio, disconnecting the cable input when it started blatting about berries. There aren't many stations that still bother to broadcast over the airwaves, but there are a few, and I listened to public radio, uninterrupted by even the most benign ads—which at the moment would have seemed quaint.

In the kitchen, a blinking light indicated that I had messages on my unlisted phone line. There proved to be three—one from a political candidate who instantly jumped to the top of my list of those to vote against, another from Sis, reminding me that tomorrow was Mom's birthday, and a third from Tiny Berries, which this time managed to inform me how much my bust would enlarge before I could hit the erase button.

I'd had the phone number for less than a week. It should have been at least another couple of months before the spammers started finding it. I wondered if Sis had accidentally led them to me by programming my new eighteen-digit number into her autodial, where somebody'd managed to hack it. The older fifteen-digit numbers were supposed to slow down the phone solicitors by hiding each functioning number among thousands of nonfunctionals. I was paying a premium for three extra digits designed to increase the difficulty by another factor of 1,000. But such defenses only work if nobody ever puts the number in an electronic database. Even then, they're merely stopgaps; the spammers always catch you eventually.