Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 29

"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 ma.s.s 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 Jura.s.sic-in compet.i.tion 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, s.e.x, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 spermatoph.o.r.es 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 spermatoph.o.r.e 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 spermatoph.o.r.e 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 spermatoph.o.r.e, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 bulls.h.i.+t."

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, rus.h.i.+ng out of sight.

Sheena 5 glided at the heart of the s.h.i.+p, where the water that pa.s.sed through her mantle, over her gills, was warmest, richest. The core machinery, the a.s.semblage of devices that maintained life here, was a black ma.s.s 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 cl.u.s.ter. 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 s.p.a.cecraft, 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 s.h.i.+p. It was translucent. If she pushed at it, it pushed back. Gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

And so on.

In Maura's view, all humanity's significant problems came from the world's closure, the lack of a frontier.

Maura Della had grown up believing in the importance of the frontier. Frontiers were the forcing ground for democracy and inventiveness. In a closed world, science was strangled by patent laws and other protective measures, and technological innovation was restricted to decadent entertainment systems and the machinery of war. It was a vicious circle, of course; only smartness could get humanity out of this trap of closure, but smartness was the very thing that had no opportunity to grow.

America, specifically, was going to h.e.l.l in a handbasket. Long dwarfed economically by China, now threatened militarily, America had retreated, become risk-averse. The rich cowered inside vast armored enclaves; the poor lost themselves in VR fantasy worlds; American soldiers flew over the Antarctic battle zones in armored copters, while the Chinese swarmed over the icebound land they had taken.

And, such were the hangovers from America's dominant days, the US remained the most hated nation on Earth.

The irony was, there were all the resources you could wish for, floating around in the sky: the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, free power from the sun. People had known about this for decades. But after seventy years of s.p.a.ceflight n.o.body had come up with a way to get into Earth orbit that was cheap and reliable enough to make those sky mines an economic proposition.

But now this NASA back-room wacko, Dan Ystebo from JPI, had come up with a way to break through the bottleneck, a s.p.a.ce Squid that could divert one of those flying mountains.

Maura didn't care what his own motives were; she only cared how she could use his proposals to achieve her own goals.

So when Dan invited her to JPL for the rendezvous, she accepted immediately.

Maura looked around Dan Ystebo's JPL cubicle with distaste, at the old coffee cups and fast-food wrappers amid the technical manuals and rolled-up softscreens. Dan seemed vaguely embarra.s.sed, self-conscious; he folded his arms over his chest.

One softscreen, draped across a part.i.tion, showed a blue-green, rippling s.p.a.cecraft approaching an asteroid. The asteroid was misshapen and almost black, the craters and cracks of its dusty surface picked out by unvarying sunlight.

"Tell me what I'm getting for my money here, Dan."

He waved his plump hand. "Near-Earth asteroid 2018JW, called Reinmuth. A ball of rock and ice half a mile across. It's a C type." Dan was excited, his voice clipped and wavering, a thin sweat on hisbrow as he tried to express himself. "Maura, it's just as we hoped. A billion tons of water, silicates, metals, and complex organics-aminos, nitrogen bases. Even Mars isn't as rich as this, pound for pound..."

Dan Ystebo was out of his time, Maura thought. He would surely have preferred to work here in the 1960s and '70s, when science was king, and the great probes were being planned, at outrageous expense: Viking, Voyager, Galileo. But that wasn't possible now.

JPL, initiated as a military research lab, had been taken back by the Army in 2016.

It hadn't been possible to kill off JPL's NASA heritage immediately, not while the old Voyagers still bleeped away forlornly on the rim of the Solar System, sending back data about the sun's heliopause and other such useless mysteries.

And Dan Ystebo was making the best of it, in this military installation, with his n.a.z.i-doctored s.p.a.ce Squid. He would probably, Maura realized, have gen-enged her and stuck her in a box if it got him a mission to run.

She said, "Before somebody asks me, tell me again why we have to bring this thing to Earth orbit."

"Reinmuth's...o...b..t is close to Earth's. But that means it doesn't line up for low-energy missions very often; the orbits are like two clocks running slightly adrift of each other.

The NEOs were never as easy to reach as the s.p.a.ce junkie types like to believe. We'd have to wait all of forty years before we could repeat Sheena's trajectory."

"Or bring Sheena home."

"...Yes. But that's irrelevant anyhow."

Irrelevant. He doesn't understand, she thought. This had been the hardest point of the whole d.a.m.n mission to sell, to the House and the public. If we are seen to have killed her for no purpose, we're all finished.

...And now the moment of rendezvous was here.

The firefly spark tracked across the blackened surface. The gentle impact came unspectacularly, with a silent turning of digits from negative to positive.

There was a small splash of gray dust.

And then she could see it, a green fragment of Earth embedded in the hide of the asteroid.

Beneath the translucent floor Sheena could see a grainy, gray-black ground. Dan told her it was a substance older than the oceans of Earth. And, through the curving walls of the s.h.i.+p, she was able to see this world's jagged horizon, barely tens of yards away.

Her world. She pulsed with pride, her chromatoph.o.r.es p.r.i.c.kling.

And she knew, at last, she was ready.

Sheena laid her eggs.

They were cased in jelly sacs, hundreds of them in each tube. There was no sp.a.w.ning ground here, of course. So she draped the egg sacs over the knot of machinery at the heart of her miniature ocean, which had now anch.o.r.ed itself to the surface of Reinmuth.

Fish came to nose at the eggs. She watched until she was sure that the fish were repelled by the jelly that coated the eggs, which was its purpose.