Stephen Baxter - Time

“Did you know she was pregnant before the launch?”

“No. I swear it. If I’d known I’d have taken her off the mission.”

She looked skeptical. “Really? Even given the launch window constraints and all of that technical crap? It would have meant scrubbing the mission.”

“Yes, it would. But I’d have accepted that. Look, Congress-woman. I know you think I’m some kind of obsessive. But I do notice how the world works. A mission like Bootstrap needs public support. We’ve known the ethical parameters from the beginning.”

“But we’re not sticking to those parameters any more, are we? We’d got to the point where the bleeding-heart public would have accepted Sheena’s death. The asteroid colony, a permanent tribute to a brave and wonderful creature. But this has changed everything.”

It was true. Since the latest leak, support for Bootstrap’s Cruithne project and its grandiose goals had evaporated.

All the tabloid-fed hysteria, the religious ravings, the pompous and hostile commentaries, made no sense, of course. If to abandon ten or a thousand sentient squid was a crime, so was abandoning one.

But when, she thought sourly, had sense and rationality been a predominant element in public debates on science and technology?

Malenfant spread his hands. “Look, Representative, we spent the money already. We have the installation on Cruithne. It’s working. Baby squid or not, we have achieved the goal, begun the bootstrap.”

“Malenfant, we are soon going to have an asteroid full of sentient-squid corpses up there. People will think it is … monstrous.” She blinked. “In fact, so will I.”

He thought that over. “You’re talking about shutting us down?”

“Malenfant, the practical truth is you’re already dead. The body hasn’t gone cold yet, is all.”

“It isn’t your decision. The FAA, the White House people, the oversight committees—”

“Without me, and a few others like me, Bootstrap would have been dead long ago.” She hesitated, then reached for his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Malenfant. Really. I had the same dream. We can’t sell this.”

“We’ll do it with decency,” Emma said slowly. “We won’t kill Sheena. We’ll let her die in comfort.”

“And the babies?”

She shrugged. “We’ll turn away the communications dishes and let nature take its course. I just hope they forgive us.”

“I doubt that,” Malenfant said, and he began pacing again, back and forth, compulsively. “I can’t believe we’re going to be blocked by this: this one small thing.”

Maura said to Emma, “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes.” Emma looked up and contrived a smile. “We’ve been lower than this. We’ll manage.”

Meaning, Maura realized, she will manage Malenfant. Bring him through this. You don’t deserve your friends, Malenfant, she thought.

They began to go through details.

Sheena 5:

She could feel the soft tug of Cruithne’s gravity field pulling her to the dark base of the habitat. She drifted, aching arms limp, dreaming of a male with bright, mindless eyes.

There were no fish left, scarcely any krill or prawns. The water that trickled through her mantle was cloudy and stank of decay. She felt life pulse through her, ever faster, as if eager to be done. And she seemed so weak, as if her muscles themselves were being consumed; it was a long time since the great ring muscles of her mantle had been strong enough to send her jetting freely, as once she had done, through this ocean she had brought across space.

But the young wouldn’t let her alone. They came to her, shook her limbs, seeking guidance. She summoned the will to open her chromatophores.

I am grass. I am no squid.

No. Smart eyes swam into her vision. No. Danger near. You die we die. They were flashing the fast, subtle signals employed by a shoal sentinel, warning of the approach of a predator. There was no predator here, of course, save the ultimate: death itself, which was already consuming her.

And it would soon consume these hapless young, too, she knew. Dan and Bootstrap had promised to keep her alive. But they would shut down the systems when she was gone. She wondered how the young knew this. They were smarter than she was.

When they swam out of her field of view, oddly, she forgot they were there, as if they ceased to exist when she could not see them. Her mind itself was weakening. She knew she could never hunt again, even if she had the strength.

But then the children would return, clamoring, demanding.

Why, they said. Why here now this. Why die.

And she tried to explain it to them. Yes, they would all die, but in a great cause, so that Earth, the ocean, humans, could live. Humans and cephalopods, a great world-spanning shoal. It was a magnificent vision, worthy of the sacrifice of their lives.

Wasn’t it?

But they knew nothing of Dan, of Earth. They wanted to hunt in shoals and swim through the ocean, unhindered by barriers of soft plastic.

They were like her. But in some ways they were more like their father. Bright. Primal.

She could see them chattering, rapidly, one to the other, too fast for her to follow.

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.