Stephen Baxter - Time

Sheena 6 hovered close to her mother. What had those darkening eyes seen? Was it really true that Sheena 5 had been hatched in an ocean without limits, an ocean where hundreds — thousands, millions — of squid hunted and fought, bred and died?

Sheena 5’s arms drifted purposelessly, and the soft gravity of Cruithne started to drag her down for the last time.

Sheena’s young fell on her, their beaks tearing into her cooling, sour flesh.

With time, the Nautilus hab was stabilized. As long as the machines survived, so would the hab’s cargo of life.

But it was too small.

It had been built to sustain one squid. There were four of them now — four of Sheena’s young.

The shortage of food wasn’t the only problem. At times Sheena 6 ached with the need to rip open the mantle of her most foolish brother.

So Sheena, under instruction from Dan, went to work. Under her guidance the firefly robots began to assemble new engines, new flows of material. Dan tried to teach her sign labels for the chemical processes involved.

Here was a small plant, for instance, that burned hydrogen and carbon dioxide to produce water and carbon monoxide. Then the carbon monoxide burned with further hydrogen to produce water and ethylene, and then the ethylene was used to produce polyethylene and polypropylene …

The truth was she understood little. But she understood the end product.

Plastics.

With plastics she could make anything. She had the firefly robots toil over the plastic sheets and artifacts, cutting and joining. The shining sheets spread around the rocket at the pole and the glimmering habitat of Nautilus.

These toy factories had been intended as trials of technologies and manufacturing processes that would have supported a human colony on Cruithne. But no humans had come to Cruithne.

Soon there were four habs, linked by tunnels, one for each of Sheena’s young, the smart survivors.

The habs filled up with water from melted asteroid substance. The krill and diatoms bred happily to fill the volume available. The habs were splashes of water and life on the asteroid’s crumbling, coal-dark surface; they looked like living things themselves, spawning and breeding.

But already another cephalopod generation was coming: sacs of eggs clung to asteroid rock in all the habs.

So they extended the habs further.

And the greater volume required more power. Sheena extended the solar cell arrays that coated the surface of the asteroid, around the pole.

But this wasn’t enough. So Sheena 6 found a way to make glass from Cruithne silicon compounds, and ceramics to make frames that held great wings of solar receptors in space, away from the surface.

Unremarked by humans, the young of Sheena swarmed over their asteroid.

The third generation emerged from their shells and started to look at their expanding world with new, curious, resentful eyes.

Perhaps a fifth of them were smart. A fifth seemed a small number.

As the young hunted their mindless brothers, Sheena wondered if there were ways to increase that proportion. And to make the squid smarter.

And live longer.

Sheena 6 thought about the future.

It wouldn’t stop, Sheena 6 saw, more generations of young and more habs, until the asteroid was full, used up. What then? Would they turn on each other at last?

But there was nobody to discuss her ideas with.

The truth was, Sheena was isolated. Her siblings, even her own young, were remote from her.

This new shoal had been hatched in the strangeness of space, and they swam in asteroid water, not the oceans of Earth. That was true of Sheena 6 also, of course, but she had worked with humans, with Dan, as had her mother before her. Perhaps she was closer to Earth than they were.

Sheena 5 had talked about the great shoals of Earth, their dreaming songs of the million-year-deep past. These new squid cared nothing for Earth, nothing for the past. And their dreams, their dances and songs, were of the future.

The siblings found new ways to control the firefly robots. They had begun to send firefly robots to explore the asteroid, places neither Sheena 5 nor even Sheena 6 had seen. They signed pictures to each other Sheena 6 couldn’t recognize: great starburst explosions, squid writhing and dying.

It seemed they had found something on the far side of the asteroid. Something strange.

They would not discuss it with her. When she sent a firefly robot crawling over there to investigate, they turned it around and sent it back.

The siblings took to wearing sigils on their chromatophore-rich hides. Bright circles. Dan told her they were blue.

Sheena 6 swam restlessly through the Nautilus hab, alone.

She longed for the shoal. But she had never known the companionship of the true shoal; she had been born too late to have shoaled with the great clouds of squid on Earth, too early to join with these new, bright-eyed creatures of space. She was neither one nor the other.

She had no purpose. She may as well die.

Still, the restlessness burned in her, and curiosity itched.

What was it that the others had found on the far side of the asteroid?

She sent another firefly, but it too was turned back.

Once, Sheena 5, her mother, had crossed space, traveled between worlds. Perhaps it would be appropriate if Sheena 6 — the closest of Sheena 5’s young, the last to have communicated with a human — were to do something similar.

She. gathered her remaining machines and began to plan something new.

Michael:

There were legs before Michael when he opened his eyes. Pillars

of cloth. A man’s legs.

He tried not to move. He closed his eyes again. Perhaps if the man thought Michael was asleep he would go away, choose someone else. There was a strange, unearthly silence in the room. He imagined the others lying rigid, feigning sleep as he did.

The Brothers hardly ever came here. The Sister, in her glass-fronted office at the end of the dormitory, would only come out if someone had done something wrong, like spill the slop bucket.

It was never good when something unusual happened, because it meant that somebody was going to get hurt. All you could do was find ways to stop it being you.

But tonight, it seemed, it was Michael’s turn.

The man’s voice barked. It was the language they spoke here, not Michael’s language, and so he didn’t understand. Best not to say anything.

But the man was still speaking to him, angrier now, too loud for him to ignore, to feign sleep.

And now a fist the size of a child’s head came down and grabbed Michael’s grubby T-shirt. He felt the cloth dig under his arms, and he heard a seam rip. Michael was lifted up, bodily, his legs dangling.

He hung there limp. A face like a cloud, puzzled and angry, loomed before him.

He was set down on his bare feet, hard. He stood there and looked up at the man. It wasn’t one of the Brothers. The man turned away and spoke some more, this time to the Sister, who was standing at the end of Michael’s bed.

The Sister took hold of Michael’s hand. He made a fist so she couldn’t take his fingers, but she shook his hand, hard, until his fingers uncurled, and then she grabbed them and squeezed them tightly.

The Sister dragged him out of the dormitory. It was early morning. The gray of dawn had washed out, leaving the sky an empty blue, as always, and the bleached buildings of the School stretched away around him.

The Sister took him to a smaller building, a place he’d never been into before. She opened the door and pushed him inside.

He thought it was the cleanest place he had ever seen. The walls were white and so smooth they looked like skin. There were gleaming metal fixtures set in the roof, and bright strip lights that turned the air gray.