Time

her great task of bringing this asteroid’s incomprehensible riches back to Earth.

But that wasn’t why she was so anxious.

To fail would mean that her young would die here, as she would, cut off from the shoal, for no reason. That was what mattered to her. To die was one thing; to die for no purpose was quite another. It was a fear that never left her, a knowledge that seemed to circle around her, like a predator, waiting for her to weaken.

Therefore — exhausted, aging as she was — she would not weaken, would not fail.

It was time. She pushed at the glove.

And she felt the eater dig its scooplike jaw into the loose soil at the surface of Cruithne.

Her first motions were clumsy. From the microcameras embedded in the eater’s upper surface she saw chunks of regolith sail up before her, dust and larger fragments. The fragments disappeared from her view, following loose, looping paths. Some of them escaped the asteroid’s tiny gravity field altogether and sailed off on new orbits of their own, new baby asteroids circling the sun.

Patiently she slowed, tried again, adjusted the angle of the scoop and the speed at which it plowed into the surface. Soon she had it right, and a steady stream of asteroid rock worked its way in through the scoop to the eater’s hopper.

Now little belts and shovels forced the captured regolith into the processing chambers. First the ore was ground up and sieved by rocking mechanical jaws and rollers and vibrating filter screens. Next, magnetic fields sucked out nickel-iron metal granules. Then the crushed ore was passed to a furnace that was powered by the sun’s focused heat.

Liquid, baked from the rock, began to gather in the condenser tanks, big low-gravity globules drifting around the thin walls.

This one roving rock eater, patiently working its way over the asteroid’s surface, would deliver pounds of precious water every day from the unpromising rock of the asteroid. The water would be processed further and used in many of the other, more complex machines. And so this asteroid would be transformed from a lump of ancient slag into something wonderful, something alive.

When she was happy with the eater’s operation, she pulled herself out of the glove. She swam down to where the pipe trailing back from the eater met the habitat membrane. And she found a trickle of fresh asteroid water.

She swam through the asteroid stream, let it wash under her carapace and through her gills. It was warm, perhaps from the heater at the heart of the rock-eating robot, and there was only a trickle of it, seeping into the great mass of the habitat. But Sheena swam back and forth through it, her hide pulsing excitedly.

She was the first creature from Earth to swim in water not of her native planet, water that had formed before the sun itself — water that had lain dormant, bound into this dark lump of rock, until she had liberated it.

She knew this was Dan’s mission, not hers; she knew she was Dan’s creature, not her own. But she was proud, because she was the first; no other creature who had ever lived or ever would live could claim this honor from her.

She swooped and pulsed her j oy.

Sheena sent the fireflies to converge at one pole of Cruithne. There, patiently, piece by piece, she had them assemble a small chemical factory, pipes and tanks and pumps, and a single flaring nozzle that pointed to the sky. Borers began to dig into the surface of Cruithne, drawing up surface regolith and the rock and ice that lay deeper within. Precious solar panels, spread over the dusty surface of the asteroid, provided power via cables strung out over the regolith.

The factory began its work, turning ancient asteroid rock into something new.

The whole process — to take ancient rock and ice, and to transform it into something new — seemed remarkable to Sheena.

At last, under Sheena’s control, simple valves clicked open. Through firefly cameras, the images were relayed to the laser projectors cupped over her eyes. Sheena could see a flame erupt from the nozzle, flaring up into the sky. And now combustion products emerged, ice crystals that caught the sunlight, receding in perfectly straight lines. It was a fire fountain, quite beautiful.

Humans could control operations from Earth from now on. Asteroid water and raw, unprocessed rock would be swallowed into giant bags and, pushed by rockets like this test rig, steered through the empty ocean of space toward Earth, as if by a squid’s mantle jet.

Dan would tell her there was much celebration within Bootstrap. He did not say so, but Sheena understood that this was mainly because she had finished her task before dying.

She turned away from the waldo glove and the imagers, the human machines, and sought out her young.

* * *

They were growing explosively quickly, converting half of all the food they ate to body mass.

At first they had been asocial, foraging alone in the beds of sea grass. But already — though still tiny — they had developed shoals. She watched the males fighting — aggressive signaling, fin beating, chasing, and fleeing — miniature battles that prefigured the greater conflicts to come at breeding time.

Some of the young were already hunting the smaller fish, adopting behavior patterns her kind were hatched with, even talking to each other in the simple, rich sign language that Dan said was hardwired into their brains by millions of generations of ancestors: / am large and fierce. Look at my weapons. I am sea grass; I am no squid. I am strong. Look at me!

She knew that Dan must be aware of the existence of the young by now. The growing imbalance in the small ecosphere could surely not be ignored. But he said nothing; and she volunteered nothing.

Most of the young were dumb. Four were smart.

She took the smart ones to one side. She swam at the heart of their small shoal. She was growing old now, and she tired easily. Nevertheless she taught the smart ones how to hunt, sophisticated techniques beyond their dumber siblings.

She taught them how to lure foolish fish. They would hold up their arms with blanched tips, waving them, distracting the attention of the fish from the far more dangerous tentacles, waiting to strike.

She taught them how to stalk, gradually approaching a fish from behind, where its vision was poorest.

She taught them how to chase, pursuing fleeing prey with careful watchfulness until close enough to make the final, decisive lunge.

She taught them to hunt, disguised. They would mimic sar-gassum weed, hanging in the water with arms dangling, ready to dart out at incautious fish. Or they would swim backward with false eye spots and arms held together and waved like the tail of a fish.

They practiced on the smaller fish, and some of them eyed the other squid, their siblings.

She taught them about the reef, the many creatures that lived and died there, how they worked together, even as they competed and fought and hunted. She tried to teach them about predators.

She role-played, swooping down on them like a moray eel, trying to catch tiiem with her arms and beak. But they were young and agile and easily evaded her, and she sensed they did not believe her stories of monsters that could nip off a squid’s arms, or even swallow a squid whole, enhanced brain or not.

And she taught them language, the abstract signs Dan had given her. As soon as they had the language their mantles rippled with questions. Who? Why? Where? What? How?

She did not always have answers. But she showed them the machinery that kept them alive, and taught them about the stars and the sun, and the nature of the world and universe, and about humans.

The young ones seemed to understand, very quickly, that Sheena and all her young would soon exhaust the resources of this one habitat. The habitat had been designed to support one squid, herself, for a fixed period of time, a time that was almost expired. Already there had been a number of problems with the tightly closed environment loops — unpredictable crashes and blooms in the phytoplankton population, depletions or excessive concentrations of trace elements — and corresponding impacts on the krill and the fish.

The young were very smart. Soon they were able to think in ways that were beyond Sheena herself.

For instance, they said, perhaps they should not simply repair this fabric shell, but extend it. Perhaps, said the young, they should even make new domes and fill them with water.

Sheena, trained only to complete her primary mission, found this a very strange thought.

There weren’t enough fish, never enough krill. The waters were stale and crowded.

This was clearly unacceptable.

So the smart young hunted down their dumb siblings, one by one, and consumed their passive bodies, until only these four, and Sheena, were left.

Michael:

His memories were jumbled.

When tourists had come to the village they would take snapshots with their cameras, and sometimes they would send them to the village. Michael would see himself in the pictures, a person who no longer existed, smiling up at somebody who was no longer there, like two ghosts. Sometimes the pictures would arrive out of order, so he would see himself in a T-shirt with a hole in it, and in the next picture there he would be, a little shorter maybe, with the T-shirt magically fixed.

When he had been taken out of the village he had understood almost none of what happened to him, and his memories had become jumbled, like the snapshots.

But there was still a sky above him, with stars and a Moon, even though they were in different places from when he was in the village.

And -when he closed his eyes — on his pallet at night, in the stillness of his blanket, with no sound or sensation — he could feel deep inside himself that time wore on, passing inexorably, measured invisibly by the evolution of his own thoughts. It didn’t matter that his memories didn’t make sense, that what had happened to him had no logic or explanation. It was enough that he knew, deep inside, that the universe still worked.

The rules, here in the School, became simple.

Food was everything.

You could not be sure when another meal might come, so you had to eat or hoard every scrap of food you could find.

In fact it was better to hoard as much as possible, to hide it in your clothes or in a cache, like Michael’s store in the wall of the dormitory hut, to make it last longer.

If you had food you had power. If another had food, they had power over you.

There were other rules.

For example: at night the children were not allowed to go outside their dormitory room to relieve themselves. There was always a Sister or a Brother in the dormitory to ensure this was so. There was a single slop bucket at night, set in the middle of the floor. It was not big enough and soon filled up. If it spilled on the floor, you would be punished. If you made a mess, if you wet your bed or relieved yourself where you shouldn’t, you would be punished. Many of the younger children were quite clumsy, and so would often knock over the bucket or otherwise mess the place up. They were punished often.

At night Michael would hear children crying in pain as they tried to resist the temptation to use the bucket. And he would hear Anna’s quiet, grave voice, helping them stay quiet, overcome the discomfort.

New children, arriving here in their shirts marked with crude blue circles, would often cry and complain, and suffer when they broke the rules. They soon learned, however.