Phase Space (34 page)

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 glove-like 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 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.

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 coughed, 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.