Time

She sensed the cables touch the bottom, touch the asteroid. Contact.

She flexed her suction cups to grip the surface. Slowly she contracted her tentacles, drawing herself down until she could see the smallest details of the asteroid, even her ship’s small shadow.

She had practiced this maneuver in deep space, over and over. It was probably the most important task she would ever have to complete, after all; if she failed at this one thing, the mission itself would fail.

Finally she felt a gentle pressure wave pulse through the water and through her own body, letting her know that she had come to rest.

The asteroid, this great black whale of space, was her prey, and she, the hunter, had captured it.

Pride surged, chromatophores pulsing over her body.

Gabriel Marcus

Some minor planets, of course, already have roles in astrology. Since these worlds weren’t known to the ancients, their roles are the subject of modern interpretation and some debate.

So it is proving with Cruithne.

Perhaps we can take some guidance from the derivation of the name. The Cruithne was the old Irish name for the Pictish people. In the twelfth-century Irish document “List of Pictish Kings,” Cruithne is given as the eponymous ancestor of the Pictish people, and it was his seven sons who gave their names to the divisions of the Pict kingdom in Scotland.

But the Cruithne was also used by the Irish to describe a group of aboriginal people living in Ireland before the coming of the Gaels. They seem to have been at one time the predominant power in Ulster.

A further blurring of the name’s meaning comes from the fact that some early writers claim that Pictish lineage was traditionally taken from the mother’s line, not the father’s. So perhaps Cruithne — if such an individual existed at all — was not a man, but a woman.

As far as its astronomical properties go, Cruithne is again an unusual world.

Perhaps uniquely among astrological subjects, it wanders far from the plane of the ecliptic and far from the traditional Houses; in fact at times it can be seen, by telescope, above (or beneath) Earth’s poles. And yet it is intimately linked to Earth; we know that its peculiar “horseshoe” orbit is dominated by Earth’s gravity.

And, of course, the most direct link of all has now been established, as the squid, Sheena, has become the first Earth creature since the Apollo astronauts to reach another world.

Cruithne: mother-father, person, and people — linked to Earth by spidery webs of influence and life. Little wonder that this tiny, remote, ambiguous world is causing such a stir in astrological circles.

It is of course true, but irrelevant, that the name Cruithne was a late choice among the Australian astronomers who named the minor planet. An earlier suggestion was an irreverent nickname for one of their number, the Chunder Wonder. We can be grateful — if not surprised — that destiny guided the correct choice.

Sheena 5:

She could not leave her water habitat; yet she was able to explore.

Small firefly robots set off from the habitat, picking their way carefully over the surface of the asteroid. Each robot was laden with miniature instruments, as exquisite as coral, all beyond her understanding.

But the fireflies were under her control.

She used the waldo, the glovelike device into which she could slip her long prehensile arms and so control the delicate motions of each firefly. Cameras mounted in the carapace of the firefly brought her a view through her laser eyecup of what the firefly was seeing, as if she were swimming alongside it. The gravity was so low that a careless movement would have sent the little metal devices spinning away from the surface, to be lost forever. So the limbs of the fireflies carried hooks and suction devices to ensure that at every moment they were anchored to the thin re-golith. And, with delicacy and care, she was able to ensure the fireflies avoided ravines and deep craters, and so were never in danger.

Her fireflies scuttled hundreds of yards from the slumped membrane of Nautilus.

Sheena thought all this was remarkable.

She had come to awareness in a universe that was three-dimensional and infinite. Slowly she had come to understand that the ocean she inhabited was part of the skin of a giant sphere. She had seen that ocean-world from outside, seen it diminish to a pale dot of light.

And now she had come to a world that was so small she felt she could enclose its curve in her outstretched arms, and her eyes picked out the starry universe through which this little world swam. Entranced, munching absently on the krill the currents brought to her beak, she watched the new world — her world — unfold.

Her world. She had not expected to feel like this, so triumphant. Her weariness, her edgy isolation, were forgotten now. She pulsed with pride, her chromatophores prickling.

And she knew, at last, she was ready.

Emma Stoney:

Mission control for the Nautilus was not what Emma had come to expect from cliche images of Houston — the rows of gleaming terminals, the neat ranks of young, bespectacled engineers sweating through their neat shirts as the astronauts ran into yet another crisis in orbit. That was the manned space program. This was rather different. The JPL flight operations room was cluttered, cramped, the decor very dated. There were big mass storage units and immense filing cabinets, some of them open to reveal yellowing files, mounds of paper. Everything looked stale, aging.

Dan had a cubicle to himself. He had a softscreen draped over his lap, and he wore a virtual-reality helmet that fitted tightly over his head, like a swimming cap, hiding his eyes behind rubber pads. There was kipple everywhere: pictures of the Nautilus leaving orbit, shots of the ship splashing against the rock, pinups of Sheena 5 herself, and a lot of the usual techie junk, toy spaceships and plastic aliens and soda cans and candy wrappers and movie posters.

Dan turned to them and smiled. It was disconcerting, with his eyes concealed. “Yo, Malenfant, Emma. Welcome to the geeko-sphere.” Maybe, for him, they were floating against coal-black Cruithne. But she noticed he seemed to be able to work his softscreen, despite its awkward draping over his lap, without glancing down. “You want coffee, or soda? There’s a Shit machine—”

“Just give me some news, Dan,” Malenfant said. “As good as possible.” His voice sounded tight with stress.

Dan pushed his VR hood off his face. His eyes were reddened and sore, and the mask had left white marks across his forehead and cheeks. “Pay dirt,” he said. “The carbonaceous ore contains hydrogen, nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ammonia—”

“Water?” Emma asked.

He nodded. “Oh, yes. As permafrost and hydrated minerals. Twenty percent by mass, by God. Every prediction fulfilled, exceeded in fact.”

Malenfant smacked his hands together. “It’s a warehouse up there.”

Dan plastered a big softscreen over the posters and photos and memos and other crap on the wall, and tapped its surface. Up came an image of the asteroid’s surface — gritty and crumpled, Emma thought, like roadside slush — and there was one of the microrobots they were calling “fireflies.”

As she watched, a tiny puff of vapor vented from the base of the firefly. It jetted sharply up away from the asteroid ground, swiveled neatly, then shot out a little dart that trailed a fine cable, like fishing line. The dart buried itself in the loose rock. The line went taut and began to haul itself in, neatly dragging the firefly back to the surface.

“The fireflies are working great,” Dan said. “We should be able to find a hundred applications for these babies: in LEO, other asteroids, even on the Moon. The propulsion system is neat. It’s a digital propulsion chip: a little bank of solid rocket motors, and you can address the motors individually, pop pop pop, to get a high degree of maneuverability and control.”

Emma asked, “And Sheena is running these things?”

“Oh, yes.” Dan grinned proudly. “She has a big waldo glove in the habitat she can fit her whole body right inside. Of course that took some designing. Because she lacks bones, Sheena doesn’t have a good sense of where her arms are in space. So the wal-does feed back information about pressure and texture. She does a fine job. She can run eight of these babies at once. In many ways she’s smarter than we are.”

“And yet we sent her out there, to die,” Emma said.

There was an uncomfortable silence, as if she’d been impolite to mention such a thing.

Dan pulled his VR mask over his face and started to scroll through more results from the asteroid, and Emma went in search of a coffee machine.

Sheena 5:

And on Cruithne, Sheena laid her eggs.

They were cased in jelly sacs, hundreds of them in each tube. There was no spawning 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 anchored itself to the surface of Cruithne. The gardens of egg cases dangled there, soft and organic against the hard machinery.

Small schools of 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.

She had no instinct to return to the eggs, to cradle them. But she knew this was an unusual circumstance; this small ball of water, collapsed to a fat lens against the asteroid, was no enriching ocean. So she developed a habit of visiting the eggs every few hours, of squirting gentle water jets over them to keep them aerated.

All this was out of sight of Dan’s cameras. She did not tell him what she had done.

Michael:

More children arrived, but now they seemed bewildered and frightened. They always had blue circles crudely stitched onto their shirts or jackets. The children would complain and cry until they learned the first of the rules Michael had learned, which was never to complain or cry.

Some children were taken away, too.

Many were taken by concerned-looking people who would put their arms around a frightened child. Michael didn’t know what this meant. Perhaps it was a trick.

The children taken away all had white skin. The children who were brought in mostly had black or brown skin. Soon, most of the children who were left behind, including Michael, had brown or black skin. He didn’t know what this meant either.

One day he saw a Brother wearing a gold ring.

Michael was fascinated by the gold, the deep luster of the time-stretched electrons in its structure. He came forward and stared at it. The Brother smiled at him and held out his hand so he could see.

Then, without warning, the Brother swung back his arm and slammed his fist into the side of Michael’s head. Michael could feel the ring dig into his flesh, warm blood spurting. The Brother smiled and walked away.