Time

She probably hadn’t explained it as well as Dan could. She tried again.

No. You die we die…

Dan Ystebo:

At JPL, at the appointed time, Dan logged on for his daily uplink to the Nautilus.

There had been nothing but inanimate telemetry for days. He wasn’t even sure — couldn’t tell from the muddled telemetry — if Sheena was in fact still alive.

Maybe this would be his last contact. He’d be glad if he could spare himself any more of this shit.

He was clearing his desk. He looked around the cubicle he was dismantling, the good old geekosphere: a comfortable mush of old coffee cups and fast-food wrappers and technical manuals and rolled-up softscreens, and the multi-poster on the partition that cycled through classic Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea scenes.

Dan was going back to Key Largo. He planned to resign from Bootstrap, get back to the biorecovery and gen-eng work he’d started from. To tell the truth he was looking forward to moving back to Florida. The work he would do there would be all for the good, as far as he was concerned. None of the Nazi-doctor ethical ambiguities of Bootstrap.

But he was hoping to hang around JPL long enough to be with Sheena when she died. And the bio-signs in the telemetry indicated that wouldn’t be so long now. Then the Deep Space Network radio telescopes would be turned away from the asteroid for the last time, and whatever followed would unfold in the dark and cold, unheard.

Here was a new image in his softscreen. A squid, flashing signs at him, a mixture of the passing cloud and a sign he’d taught Sheena himself, the very first sign: Look at me. Dan. Look at me. Dan. Dan. Dan.

He couldn’t believe it. “Sheena?”

He had to wait the long seconds while his single word, translated to flashing signs, was transmitted across space.

Sheena Six.

“Oh.” One of the young.

The squid turned, strong and confident, and through a forest of arms predator eyes seemed to study him.

Dying.

“Sheena Five? I know.”

Water. Water dying. Fish. Squid. Danger near. Why.

She’s talking about the habitat biosphere, he realized. She wants me to tell her how to repair the biosphere. “That’s not possible.”

Not. Those immense black eyes. Not. Not. Not. The squid flashed through a blizzard of body patterns, bars and stripes pulsing over her hide, her head dipping, her arms raised. / am large and fierce. I am pa.rrotfi.sh, sea grass, rock, coral, sand. I am no squid, no squid, no squid.

He had given Sheena no sign for liar, but this squid, across millions of miles, bombarding him with lies, was doing its best.

But he was telling the truth.

Wasn’t he? How the hell could you extend the fixed-duration closed-loop life-support system in that ball of water to support more squid, to last much longer, even indefinitely?

But it needn’t stay closed-loop, he realized. The Nautilus hab was sitting on an asteroid full of raw materials. That had been the point of the mission in the first place. In fact Sheena 5 had already opened up the loops a little, replacing hab membrane leakage with asteroid water.

You’d need machinery to get at all that stuff. But there was machinery: the rocket-propellant factory, the pilot plant for the production of other materials, the firefly robots to do the work.

If he could figure a way to do this. If he could figure out how to reengineer all that equipment to process carbonaceous ore into some kind of nutrient soup, maybe, for the hab biosphere. And if he could find a way to train these new squid. He’d had years to work with Sheena; he’d have weeks, at best, with these new guys. Still…

His brain started to tick at the challenge.

But there were other problems. When the comms uplink shut down in a few weeks, he wouldn’t be able to run the operation.

In that case, he realized, he’d just have to train the squid in the principles of what they were building. How to run it, repair it for themselves. Even extend it.

It might work. Sheena had been smart.

It would be a hell of an effort, though. And for what?

What’s this, Ystebo? Are you growing a conscience, at last? Because if you are, that damn piece of calamari up there knows how to play on it.

And besides, he thought, maybe I can convince Reid Malen-fant that this is the best thing to do, a way to keep the greater goals of the project in progress, with official sanction or not. If the squid, by their own efforts, refuse to die, maybe we can turn around public opinion one more time.

Do it now, justify later. Isn’t that what Malenfant says?

“I’ll help you,” he said. “I’ll try. What can they do, fire me?”

Dan placed a call to Malenfant. And then a second, to Florida, to tell the people there he wouldn’t be joining them just yet.

The squid turned away from the camera.

Emma Stoney:

Cornelius Taine came to Emma’s office.

“We think it worked,” he said, breathless. “We found him.”

Emma was not glad to see Taine once more. “Found who? What are you talking about?”

Cornelius handed over a document. It was a report prepared by a professor of physics from Cal Tech. Emma leafed through it. It was heavy on text and laden with equations, difficult to skim.

Cornelius said, “It’s an analysis of material found on a softscreen. The math was difficult to decipher. Unconventional formalism. But it’s all there.”

“WhatisT

Cornelius sat down and visibly tried to be patient. “It’s a sketch of the foundations of a theory of quantum gravity, which is a unification, awaited for a century, of general relativity and quantum theory, the two great pillars of physics.”

“I thought we had that. String theory.”

“String theory is part of it. But string theory is mathematically dense — after thirty years the theorists have only extracted a handful of predictions from it — and it’s limited besides; it doesn’t incorporate curved space in a natural way. And—”

Emma pushed the report away. “What does this have to do with us?”

He smiled. “Everything. The material turned up in a Foundation School in Australia, their Northern Territory. Produced by one of the inmates there.”

Inmates. “You mean one of the Blue children?”

“Yes. A ten-year-old from Zambia.”

He handed over a photograph. A frightened-looking boy, strong white teeth, round eyes. “My God,” she said. “I know this boy.”

“I know.” Taine looked at the image hungrily. “He’s the one we’ve been looking for. Don’t you see?”

“No, I don’t.” She thought over what he had said. “You’re saying that finding this one boy was the objective of the whole program?” She pushed away the report. “Cornelius, I’m amazed you’ve come to me with this. In case you’re not aware of it, we’re being shut down up on Cruithne. In three months of surface operations we’ve discovered nothing to justify the diversion of the mission away from Reinmuth, with all the complication that brought us.”

“We’ve gone over this many times,” he said tightly. “You’re well aware that the firefly robots have been restricted to a small area around the Nautilus. We have been marking time. There’s a lot of surface area to explore. And besides, we know there’s something to be found. We have the Feynman radio message—”

“Sure,” she said harshly. “Or maybe all we were picking up was the Fermilab air-conditioning turning itself on and off. What do you think?”

He eyed her, eyes bright, mouth small and tense. He seemed to be rocking back and forth in his chair, almost imperceptibly. “Emma, there is much, much, you’ve yet to understand about what’s .going on here. Remember we believe we are fighting for the destiny of the species.”

She sighed. “So now what?”

“Now we have to go get him.”

“We?”

“Perhaps he will remember you.”

Sheena 6:

Sheena 6 was the smartest of the young.

It was no privilege. She had to work hard to absorb the new signs and concepts Dan sent to her.

And there was much work to do.

She learned to use the glovelike systems that made the firefly robots clamber over the asteroid ground, that strange place beyond the ship wall where there was no water. The mining equipment, designed to extract methane and water for the rocket fuel, was adapted to seek out essentials for the phytoplankton — nitrates and phosphates. No more sacks of water and dirt were fired to Earth. Under her command, fireflies took apart the methane rocket plants at the poles and began to haul the parts over the surface for new uses.

Even in the hab itself there was much to do.-Dan showed her how to keep the water pure. Oxygen could be produced by the great metal cells, to keep the water fresh and vitalizing. There were beds of charcoal filters through which the water was pumped. But the charcoal had to be replaced by carbon extracted from asteroid material, burned in sun fire.

Dan also tried to show her how to interpret the elaborate automatic monitoring systems that checked that the closed loops remained healthy. But this was no use to her. Squid senses were delicate. If the water was unbalanced, she could see, taste, smell it as it passed through her mantle, over her gills. She could see the twisting polarization of the light caused by murky pollutants. She could even hear the tiny cries of the plankton. She knew when the water was unhealthy. It was enough that she had the means to fix it.

The processes were complex. But at heart, she learned, there was a simple principle. Her world, this droplet of water clinging to a rock, was so small it could not sustain itself. She took food out of it by feeding on krill; so she must find ways, direct or indirect, of returning raw materials for that food to the world.

Very well.