by Neil Clarke
Is this the whale’s brain? Ricci asked.
I ignored the question. Ricci knew it was the brain—she’d been studying my notes, after all. She was just trying to smooth my feathers by giving me a chance to show my expertise.
Not every brain looks like a brain. Yours and mine look like they should be floating in the primordial ocean depths—that’s where we came from, after all. The organ in front of us came from the clouds—a tower of spun glass floss threaded through and through with wispy, feather-like strands that branched and re-branched into iridescent fractals. My mobility control leads were made of copper nanofiber embedded in color-coded silicon filaments: red, green, blue, yellow, purple, orange, and black—a ragged, dull rainbow piercing the delicate depths of an alien brain.
Ricci repeated her question.
Don’t ask dumb questions, Ricci.
She put her hands up in a gesture of surrender and backed away. Not far— no room inside the pouch to shuffle back more than one step.
The best I can say is it’s brain-like. I snapped the leads into my fist-sized control interface. The neurons are neuron-like. Is it the whole brain? Is the entire seat of cognition here? I can’t tell because there’s not much cognition to measure. Maybe more than a bacterium, but far less than an insect.
How do you measure cognition? Ricci asked.
Controlled experiments, but how do you run experiments on animals this large? All I can tell you is that most people who study these creatures lose interest fast. But here’s a better measure: After more than ten years, a whale has never surprised me.
Before today, you mean.
Maneuvering takes a little practice. We use a thumb-operated clicker to fire tiny electrical impulses through the leads and achieve a vague form of directional control. Yes, it’s a basic system. We could replace it with something more elegant but it operates even if we lose power. The control it provides isn’t exactly roll, pitch, and yaw, but it’s effective enough. The margin for error is large. There’s not much to hit.
Navigation is easy, too. Satellites ping our position a thousand times a second and the data can be accessed in several different navigational aids, all available in our dashboards.
But though it’s all fairly easy, it’s not quick. My anger didn’t last long. Not in such close quarters, especially just a few hours after realizing I was in love with her. It was hardly a romantic scene, both of us swathed head-to-toe in protective clothing, passing a navigation controller back and forth as we waggled slowly toward our destination.
In between bouts of navigation, I began telling Ricci everything I knew about the organ in front of us: A brain dump about brains, inside a brain. Ha.
She was interested; I was flattered by her interest. Age-old story. I treated her to all my theories, prejudices, and opinions, not just about regenerating pseudoneuronal tissue and my methods for culling it, but the entire scientific research apparatus down belowground, the social dynamics of hab I grew up in, and the philosophical underpinnings of the research exploration proposal we used to float our first forays out here.
Thank goodness Ricci was wearing a mask. She was probably yawning so wide I could have checked her tonsils.
Here. I handed her the control box. You drive the rest of the way.
We were aiming for the equator, where the strong, steady winds have carved a smooth canyon bisecting the ice right down to the planet’s iron core. When we need to travel a long distance, riding that wind is the fastest route.
Ricci clicked a directional adjustment, and our heading swung a few degrees back toward the equator.
What does the whale perceive when we do this? Ricci waggled the thumb of her glove above the joystick. When it changes direction, are we luring it or scaring it away?
Served me right for telling her not to ask simple questions.
I don’t really know, I admitted.
Maybe it makes them think other whales are around. What if they want to be together, just like people, but before now they didn’t know how. Maybe you’ve been teaching them.
My eyebrows climbed. I’d never considered how we might be influencing whale behavior, aside from the changes we make for our own benefit.
That’s an interesting theory, Ricci. Definitely worth looking into.
Wouldn’t it be terrible to be always alone?
I’d always considered myself a loner. But in that moment, I honestly couldn’t remember why.
Once we’re in the equatorial stream, we ride the wind until we get into the right general area. Then we wipe off the appetite suppressant, and hunger sends us straight into the arms of the nearest electrical storm.
The urge to feed is a powerful motivator for most organisms. Mama chases all the algae she can find, and gobbles it double-time. For us on the inside, it’s like an old-style history doc. Everyone stays strapped in their hammocks and rides out the weather as we pitch around on the high seas.
I always enjoy the feeding frenzy; it gets the blood flowing.
I’d just settled to enjoy the wild ride when Ricci pinged me.
Two crews tried surgical interventions on the regenerated tissue. Let me know what you think, okay? Maybe now we can convince them to let you help.
The message was accompanied by bookmarks to live feeds from the supply ships. The first feed showed a whale wedging itself backward into a crevasse, its petals waving back and forth as it wiggled deeper into the canyon-like crack in the ice.
The other feed showed a whale scraping its main valve along a serrated ridge of ice. Its oval body stretched and flexed, its bladders bulged. Its petals curled inward, then snapped into rigid extension as the force of its body crashed down on the ice’s knife edge.
Inside both whales, tiny specks bounced through the sinuses. I could only imagine what the crew was doing—what I would do in that situation. If they wanted to live, they had to leave. Fast.
A chill slipped under my skin. My fault. If those whales died, if those crews died, I was to blame. Me alone. Not the two crews. They were obviously desperate enough to try anything. I should have contacted them myself, and offered whatever false apologies would get them to accept my help.
But chances are it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, except they would have had me to blame. Another entry in my list of crimes.
Frost spread across my flesh and raised goosebumps. I tugged on my hammock’s buckles to make sure they were secure against the constant pitching and heaving, dialed up the temperature, and snuggled deeper into my quilt. I fired up my simulation model and wandered through towering mountains of pseudoneural tissue, pondering the problem, delving deeper and deeper through chains of crystallized tissue until they danced behind my eyelids. Swirling, stacking, combining, and recombining …
I was nearly asleep when I heard Ricci’s voice.
“Hey, Doc, can we talk?”
I thought I was dreaming. But no, she was right outside my hammock, gripping the tethers and getting knocked off her feet with every jolt and flex. Her goggled and masked face was lit by a mad flurry of light from the bolts coruscating in every direction just beyond the skin.
“Are you nuts?” I yanked open the hammock seal. “Get in here.”
She plunged through the electrostatic barrier and rolled to the far side of my bed. When she came up, her hair stood on end with static electricity.
“Whoa.” She swiped off her goggles and breather, stuffed them in one of the hammock pouches, then flattened the dark nimbus of her hair with her palms and grinned. “It’s wild out there.”
I pulled my quilt up to my chin and scowled. “That was stupid.”
“Yeah, I know but you didn’t ping me back. This is an important situation, right? Life or death.”
I sighed. “If you want to rescue people, there are vocations for that.”
“Don’t we have a duty to help people when we can?”
“Some people don’t want to be helped. They just want to be left alone.”
“Like you
?”
“Nothing you’re doing is helping me, Ricci.”
“Okay, okay. But if we can figure out a way to help, that’s good too. Better than good. Everyone wins.”
Lying there in my hammock, facing Ricci sprawled at the opposite end and taking up more than half of the space, I finally figured out what kind of person she was.
“You’re a meddler, Ricci. A busybody. You were wasted in the sciences. You should have studied social dynamics and targeted a career in one-on-one social work.”
She laughed.
“Listen.” I held out my hand, palm up. She took it right away, didn’t hesitate. Her hand was warm. Almost feverish. “If you want to stay in the crew, you have to relax. Okay? We can’t have emergencies every week. None of us are here for that.”
She squeezed my hand and nodded.
“A little excitement is fine, once in a while,” I continued. “Obviously this is an extraordinary situation. But if you keep looking for adventure, we’ll shunt you back to Jane without a second thought.”
She twisted the grip into a handshake and gave me two formal pumps. Then she reached for the hammock seal. She would have climbed out into the maelstrom if I hadn’t stopped her.
“You can’t do that,” I yelled. “No wandering around when we’re in a feeding frenzy. You’ll get killed. Kill us too, if you go through the wrong bladder wall.”
She smiled then, like she didn’t believe me, like it was just some excuse to keep her in my hammock. And when she settled back down, it wasn’t at the opposite end. She snuggled in right beside me, companionable as anything, or even more.
“Don’t you get lonely, Doc?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Not much.”
Our hammocks are roomy, but Ricci didn’t give me much space, and though the tethers absorb movement, we were still jostling against each other.
“Because you don’t need anybody or anything.” Her voice in my ear, soft as a caress.
“Something like that.”
“Maybe, eventually, you’ll change your mind about that.”
What happened next wasn’t my idea. I was long out of practice, but Ricci had my full and enthusiastic cooperation.
Down belowground, I was a surgeon, and a good one. My specialty was splicing neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus. My skills were in high demand. So high, in fact, that I had a massive support team.
I’m not talking about a part-time admin or social facilitator. Anyone can have those. I had an entire cadre of people fully dedicated to making sure that if I spent most of my time working and sleeping, what little time remained would be optimized to support physical, emotional, and intellectual health. All my needs were plotted and graphed. People had meetings to argue, for example, over what type of sex best maintained my healthiest emotional state, and once that was decided, they’d argue over the best way to offer that opportunity to me.
That’s just an example. I’m only guessing. They kept the administrative muddle under veil. Day-to-day, I only had contact with a few of my staff, and usually I was too busy with my own work to think about theirs. But for a lot of people, I was a billable-hours bonanza.
But despite all their hard work, despite the hedonics modeling, best-practice scenarios, and time-tested decision trees, I burned out.
It wasn’t their fault. It was mine. I was, and remain, only human.
I could have just reduced my surgery time. I could have switched to teaching or coaching other surgeons. But no. Some people approach life like it’s an all-or-nothing game. That’s me. I couldn’t be all, so I decided to become nothing.
Until Ricci came along, that is.
When the storm ended, the two of us had to face a gauntlet of salacious grins and saucy comments. I didn’t blush, or at least not much. Ricci had put the spark of life in a part of me that had been dark for far too long. I was proud to have her in my crew, in my hammock, in my life.
The whole hab gave us a hard time. The joke that gave them the biggest fits, and made even Vula cling helplessly to the rumpus room netting as she convulsed with laughter, involved the two of us calling for evac and setting up a crèche in the most socially conservative hab down belowground. Something about imagining us in swathed in religious habits and swarming with crechies tweaked everyone’s funny bones.
Ricci weathered the ridicule better than me. I left to fill the water kegs, and by the time I returned, the hilarity had worn itself out.
The eight of us lounged in the rumpus room, the netting gently swaying to and fro as we drifted in the bright directional light of the aquapause. Water spilled off the skin and threw dappled shadows across the room. Vula had launched the media drones and we’d all settled down to watch the feeds.
More than once I caught myself brainlessly staring at Ricci, but I kept my goggles on so nobody noticed. I hope.
Two hundred kilometers to the northwest and far below us, the seventeen remaining whales congregated in the swirling winds above a dome-shaped mesa that calved monstrous sheets of ice down its massive flanks. A dark electrical storm massed on the horizon, with all its promise of rich concentrations of algae, but the whales didn’t move toward it, just kept circulating and converging, plucking at each other’s skin.
Three hundred kilometers west lay the abandoned corpses of two whales, their deflated bladders draped over warped sinus skeletons half-buried in slush.
Our media drones got there too late to trap the whales’ death throes, and I was glad. But Vula and Bouche trapped great visuals of the rescue, showing the valiant supply ship crews swooping in to pluck brightly colored body bags out of the air. Maybe the crews put a little more of a spin on their maneuvering than they needed to, but who could blame them? They rarely got a job worth bragging about.
One of Bouche’s media broker friends put the rescue feeds out to market. They started getting good play right away. Bouche fired the media licensing statement into the middle of the room. The numbers glowed green and flickered as they climbed.
“Look at these fees,” she said. “This will underwrite our power consumption for a couple years.”
“That’s great, Bouchie,” I murmured, and flicked the statement out of my visual field.
Night was coming, and it presented a hard deadline. If the whales didn’t move before dark, they’d all die.
Ricci moved closer to me in the netting and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I turned my head and touched my lips to her temple, just for a moment. I was deep in my brain simulation, working on the problem. But I kept an eye on the feeds. When the whales collided, I held my breath. As the bladders stretched and budged, I cringed, certain they’d reach their elastic limit and we would see a whale pop, its massive sinuses rupture, its skin tear away and its body plunge to splatter on the icy surface below. But they didn’t. They bounced off each other in slow motion and resumed their aimless circulation.
Hours passed. Eddy got up, extruded a meal, and passed the containers around the netting. Chara and Treasure slipped out of the room. Vula was only half-present—she was working in her studio, sculpting maquettes of popped bladders and painfully twisted corpses.
Eddy yawned. “How long can these whales live without feeding?”
I forced a stream of breath through my lips, fluttering the fringe of my bangs. “I don’t know. Indefinitely, maybe, if the crews can figure out a way to provide nutrition internally.”
“If they keep their whales fed, maybe they’ll just keep stumbling around, crashing into each other.” Vula’s voice was slurred, her eyes unfocused as she juggled multiple streams.
“I’m more worried about nightfall, actually,” I said.
Ever since we’d dragged ourselves out of my hammock, Ricci had been trying to pry information from emergency response up the beanstalk, from the supply ship crews who were circling the site, and from the whale crews. They were getting increasingly frantic as time clicked by, and keeping us informed wasn’t high on their list of priorities.
> I rested my palm on the inside of Ricci’s knee. “Are the other crews talking to you yet?”
She sat up straight and gave me a pained smile. “A little. I wasn’t getting anywhere, but Jane’s been giving me some tips.”
That woke everyone up. Even Vula snapped right out of her creative fugue.
“Is Jane helping us?” Chara asked, and when Ricci nodded she demanded, “Why are you keeping her to yourself?”
Ricci shrugged. “Jane doesn’t know anything about whales.”
“If she’s been helping you maybe she can help us too,” said Eddy.
“Yeah, come on Ricci, stop hogging Jane.” Bouche raked her fingers through her hair, sculpting it into artful tufts. “I want to know what she thinks of all this.”
“All right,” Ricci said. “I’ll ask her.”
A few moments later she fired Jane’s feed into the room and adjusted the perspective so her friend seemed to be sitting in the middle of the room. She wore a baggy black tunic and trousers, and her hair was gathered into a ponytail that draped over the back of her chair. The pinnas of her ears were perforated in a delicate lace pattern.
Treasure and Chara came barreling down the access sinus and plunged through the hatch. They hopped over to their usual spot in the netting and settled in. Jane waved at them.
“We’re making you an honorary crew member,” Eddy told Jane. “Ricci has to share you with us. We all get equal Jane time.”
“I didn’t agree to that,” said Ricci.
“Fight over me later, when everyone’s safe.” Jane said. “I don’t understand why the other crews are delaying evacuation. Who would risk dying when they can just leave?”
Everyone laughed.
“This cadre self-selects for extremists.” Eddy rotated her finger over her head, encompassing all of us in the gesture. “People like us would rather die than back down.”
“I guess you’re not alone in that,” said Jane. “Every hab has plenty of stubborn people.”
“But unlike them, we built everything we have,” I said. “That makes it much harder to give up.”
“Looks like someone finally made a decision, though.” Ricci maximized the main feed. Jane wheeled around to join us at the netting.