Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  And now, quickly, she began to sense the resistance of lightspeed’s soft membrane. The water turned softly blue before her, and when she looked back, the world was stained red.

  At length she passed into daylight.

  The day seemed short. She continued to gather her pace.

  Determined, she abandoned that which she did not need: lantern-corpuscles, manipulators, even some mentation components: any excess mass which her impellers need not drag with her.

  A bow, of speed-scattered light, began to coalesce around her.

  The day-night cycle was passing so quickly now it was flickering. And she could sense the Cycles themselves, the grand, slow heaving of the Ocean as her world tracked around its sun.

  The light ahead of her passed beyond blue and into a milky invisibility, while behind her a dark spot gathered in the redness and reached out to embrace half the world.

  Time-dilated, she forged across the surface of her Ocean and into the future; and ninety-five Cycles wore away around her.

  Light’s crawl was embedded, a subtle scaling law, in every force governing the structure of Sun-Cloud’s world.

  The sun was much larger than Sol – ten thousand times more so – for the fusion fires at its heart were much less vigorous than Sol’s. And Sun-Cloud’s world was a thousand times smaller than Earth, for the electrostatic and degeneracy pressures which resisted gravitational collapse were greatly weaker.

  Lightspeed dominated Sun-Cloud’s structure, too. If she had been a single entity, complete and entire, it would have taken too long for light – or any other signal – to crawl through her structure. So she was a composite creature; her mind was broken down into modules of thought, speculation and awareness. She was a creature of parallel processing, scattered over a thousand fragile corpuscles.

  And Sun-Cloud’s body was constrained to be small enough that her gravitational potential could not fracture the flimsy molecular bonds which held her corpus together.

  Sun-Cloud, forging across the Surface of her Ocean, was just two millimetres across.

  At last, a new light erupted in the bow that embraced her world.

  With an effort, she slowed. The light-bow expanded rapidly, as if the world were unfolding back into its proper morphology. She allowed some of her impeller corpuscles to run free, and she saw their tiny wakes running across the Surface, determined, red-shifted.

  Now that her monumental effort was done she was exhausted, depleted, her impellers dead, lost or dying; unless new impellers joined her, she would scarcely be able to move again.

  Ninety-five Cycles.

  Everybody she had known – Cold-Current and the rest – all of them must be gone, now, absorbed into the Song’s unending pulse.

  It remained only for her to learn what mystery awaited, here in the remoteness of the future, and then she could Dissolve into the Song herself.

  … From the darkling sky, the new light washed over her.

  Her optic corpuscles swivelled upwards.

  She cried out.

  Sun-Cloud felt her world shrink beneath her from infinity to a frail mote; the Song decayed from the thoughts of a god to the crooning of a damaged sub-corpus.

  Above her, utterly silently – and for the first time in all history – the stars were coming out.

  To human eyes, the skies of this cosmos would have seemed strange indeed:

  The stars spawned from gas clouds, huge and cold. Hundreds of them formed in a cluster, companions to Sun-Cloud’s sun. Light and heat crept from each embryonic star, dispersing the remnant wisps of the birthing cloud.

  It took five billion human years for the light to cross the gulf between the stars.

  And at last – and as one speculative thinker among Sun-Cloud’s people had predicted, long ago – the scattered light of those remote suns washed over an unremarkable world, which orbited a little above the photosphere of their companion …

  The stars were immense globes, glowing red and white, jostling in a complex sky; and sheets and lanes of gas writhed between them.

  Orange-Dawn had been right. This was wonderful, beyond her imagining – but crushing, terrifying.

  Pain tore at her. Jagged molecules flooded her system; her corpuscles broke apart, and began at last their ancestral war.

  She struggled to retain her core of rationality, just a little longer. Exhausted, she hastily assembled sub-corpora, and loaded packets of information into them, pale images of the astonishing sky. She sent them hailing down into the Ocean, into the Deep, into the belly of the Song itself.

  Soon a new voice would join the Song: a merger of her own, and Orange-Dawn’s. And it would sing of suns, countless, beyond imagining.

  Everything would be different, now.

  She fell, gladly, into the warm emptiness of Dissolution.

  MANIFOLD

  The first time Kate had come here, to his son’s home, Malenfant had shown her an image of a planet: blue, streaked with white cloud.

  Kate’s heart had thumped. ‘Earth?’

  He shook his head. ‘And not Pluto either. This is a live image of Neptune. Almost as far out as Pluto. A strange blue world, blue as Earth, on the edge of interstellar space …’

  Saranne said uneasily, ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Not Neptune itself. Triton, its moon. Look.’ He pointed to a blurred patch of light, close to Neptune’s ghostly limb. When he tapped the wall, the patch moved, quite suddenly. Another tap, another move. Kate couldn’t see any pattern to the moves, as if the moon was no longer following a regular orbit.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘Triton has started to … flicker. It hops around its orbit – or adopts another orbit entirely – or sometimes it vanishes, or is replaced by a ring system.’ He scratched his bald pate. ‘According to Cornelius, Triton was an oddity – circling Neptune backwards – probably created in some ancient collision event.’

  ‘Even odder now,’ Mike said dryly.

  ‘Cornelius says that all these images – the multiple moons, the rings – are all possibilities, alternate outcomes of how that ancient collision might have come about. As if other realities are folding down into our own. Other realities, from out there in phase space.’ He searched their faces, seeking understanding.

  Kate took a breath. Neptune: a long way away, out in the dark, where the planets are cloudy spheres, and the sun’s light is weak and rectilinear. But out there, she thought, something strange is stirring: something with awesome powers indeed, beyond human comprehension.

  ‘I wonder,’ Malenfant said, ‘if we are out there somewhere. Versions of us and those we love, with different destinies. Lost in phase space.’

  SHEENA 5

  Sheena didn’t mean it to happen.

  Of course not; she knew the requirements of the mission as well as anyone, as well as Dan himself. She had her duty to NASA. She understood that.

  But it felt so right.

  It came after the kill.

  The night was over. The sun, a fat ball of light, was already glimmering above the water surface.

  The squid emerged from the grasses and corals where they had been feeding. Shoals formed in small groups and clusters, eventually combining into a community a hundred strong.

  Court me. Court me.

  See my weapons!

  I am strong and fierce.

  Stay away! Stay away! She is mine! …

  It was the ancient cephalopod language, a language of complex skin patterns, body posture, texture, words of sex and danger and food; and Sheena shoaled and sang with joy.

  … But there was a shadow on the water.

  The sentinels immediately adopted concealment or bluff postures, blaring lies at the approaching predator.

  Sheena knew that there would be no true predators here. The shadow could only be a watching NASA machine.

  The dark shape lingered close, just as a true barracuda would, before diving into the shoal, seeking to break it up.

&nb
sp; A strong male broke free. He spread his eight arms, raised his two long tentacles, and his green binocular eyes fixed on the fake barracuda. Confusing patterns of light and shade pulsed across his hide. Look at me. I am large and fierce. I can kill you. Slowly, cautiously, the male drifted towards the barracuda, coming to within a mantle length.

  At the last moment the barracuda turned, sluggishly.

  But it was too late.

  The male’s two long tentacles whipped out, and their club-like pads of suckers pounded against the barracuda hide, sticking there. Then the male wrapped his eight strong arms around the barracuda’s body, his pattern changing to an exultant uniform darkening. And he stabbed at the barracuda’s skin with his beak, seeking meat.

  And meat there was, what looked like fish fragments to Sheena, booty planted there by Dan.

  The squid descended, lashing their tentacles around the stricken prey. Sheena joined in, cool water surging through her mantle, relishing the primordial power of this kill despite its artifice.

  … That was when it happened.

  As she clambered stiffly down through the airlock into the habitat, the smell of air freshener overwhelmed Maura Della.

  ‘Ms Della, welcome to Oceanlab,’ Dan Ystebo said. Ystebo, marine biologist, was fat, breathy, intense, thirtyish, with Coke-bottle glasses and a mop of unlikely red hair, a typical geek scientist type.

  Maura found a seat before a bank of controls. The seat was just a canvas frame, much repaired with duct tape. The working area of this hab was a small, cramped sphere, its walls encrusted with equipment. A sonar beacon pinged softly, like a pulse.

  The sense of confinement, the feel of the weight of water above her head, was overwhelming.

  She leaned forward, peering into small windows. Sunlight shafted through empty grey water. She saw a school of squid, jetting through the water in complex patterns.

  ‘Which one is Sheena 5?’

  Dan pointed to a softscreen pasted over a scuffed hull section.

  The streamlined, torpedo-shaped body was a rich burnt-orange, mottled black. Wing-like fins rippled elegantly alongside the body.

  The Space Squid, Maura thought. The only mollusc on NASA’s payroll.

  ‘Sepioteuthis sepioidea,’ Dan said. ‘The Caribbean reef squid. About as long as your arm. Squid, all cephalopods in fact, belong to the phylum Mollusca. But in the squid the mollusc foot has evolved into the funnel, here, leading into the mantle, and the arms and tentacles here. The mantle cavity contains the viscera and gills. Sheena can use the water passing through her mantle cavity for jet propulsion –’

  ‘How do you know that’s her?’

  Dan pointed again. ‘See the swelling between the eyes, around the oesophagus?’

  ‘That’s her enhanced brain?’

  ‘A squid’s neural layout isn’t like ours. Sheena has two nerve cords running like rail tracks the length of her body, studded with pairs of ganglia. The forward ganglia pair is expanded into a mass of lobes. We gen-enged Sheena and her grandmothers to –’

  ‘To make a smart squid.’

  ‘Ms Della, squid are smart anyway. They evolved – a long time ago, during the Jurassic – in competition with the fish. They have senses based on light, scent, taste, touch, sound – including infrasound – gravity, acceleration, perhaps even an electric sense. Sheena can control her skin patterns consciously. She can make bands, bars, circles, annuli, dots. She can even animate the display.’

  ‘And these patterns are signals?’

  ‘Not just the skin patterns: skin texture, body posture. There may be electric or sonic components too; we can’t be sure.’

  ‘And what do they use this marvellous signalling for?’

  ‘We aren’t sure. They don’t hunt cooperatively. And they live only a couple of years, mating only once or twice.’ Dan scratched his beard. ‘But we’ve been able to isolate a number of primal linguistic components which combine in a primitive grammar. Even in unenhanced squid. But the language seems to be closed. It’s about nothing but food, sex and danger. It’s like the dance of the bee.’

  ‘Unlike human languages.’

  ‘Yes. So we opened up Sheena’s language for her. In the process we were able to prove that the areas of the brain responsible for learning are the vertical and superior frontal lobes that lie above the oesophagus.’

  ‘How did you prove that?’

  Dan blinked. ‘By cutting away parts of squid brains.’

  Maura sighed. What great PR if that got broadcast.

  They studied Sheena. Two forward-looking eyes, blue-green rimmed with orange, peered briefly into the camera.

  Alien eyes. Intelligent.

  Do we have the right to do this, to meddle with the destiny of other sentient creatures, to further our own goals – when we don’t even understand, as Ystebo admits, what the squid use their speech for. What it is they talk about?

  How does it feel, to be Sheena?

  And could Sheena possibly understand that humans are planning to have her fly a rocket ship to an asteroid?

  He came for her: the killer male, one tentacle torn on some loose fragment of metal.

  She knew this was wrong. And yet it was irresistible.

  She felt a skin pattern flush over her body, a pied mottling, speckled with white spots. Court me.

  He swam closer. She could see his far side was a bright uniform silver, a message to the other males: Keep away. She is mine! As he rolled the colours tracked around his body, and she could see the tiny muscles working the pigment sacs on his hide.

  And already he was holding out his hectocotylus towards her, the modified arm bearing the clutch of spermatophores at its tip.

  Mission Sheena mission. Bootstrap! Mission! NASA! Dan!

  But then the animal within her rose, urgent. She opened her mantle to the male.

  His hectocotylus reached for her, striking swiftly, and lodged the needle-like spermatophore among the roots of her arms.

  Then he withdrew. Already it was over.

  … And yet it was not. She could choose whether or not to embrace the spermatophore and place it in her seminal receptacle.

  She knew she must not.

  All around her, the squid’s songs pulsed with life, ancient songs that reached back to a time before humans, before whales, before even the fish.

  Her life was short: lasting one summer, two at most, a handful of matings. But the songs of light and dance made every squid aware she was part of a continuum that stretched back to those ancient seas; and that her own brief, vibrant life was as insignificant, yet as vital, as a single silver scale on the hide of a fish.

  Sheena, with her human-built mind, was the first of all cephalopods to be able to understand this. And yet every squid knew it, on some level that transcended the mind.

  But Sheena was no longer part of that continuum.

  Even as the male receded, she felt overwhelmed with sadness, loneliness, isolation. Resentment.

  She closed her arms over the spermatophore, and drew it inside her.

  ‘I have to go into bat for you on the Hill Monday,’ Maura said to Dan. ‘I have to put my reputation on the line, to save this project. You’re sure, absolutely sure, this is going to work?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Dan said. He spoke with a calm conviction that made her want to believe him. ‘Look, the squid are adapted to a zero-gravity environment – unlike us. And Sheena can hunt in three dimensions; she will be able to navigate. If you were going to evolve a creature equipped for space travel, it would be a cephalopod. And she’s much cheaper than any robotic equivalent …’

  ‘But,’ Maura said heavily, ‘we don’t have any plans to bring her back.’

  He shrugged. ‘Even if we had the capability, she’s too short-lived. We have plans to deal with the ethical contingencies.’

  ‘That’s bullshit.’

  Dan looked uncomfortable. But he said, ‘We hope the public will accept the arrival of the asteroid in Earth orbit as a memorial to
her. A just price. And, Senator, every moment of her life, from the moment she was hatched, Sheena has been oriented to the goal. It’s what she lives for. The mission.’

  Sombrely Maura watched the squid, Sheena, as she flipped and jetted in formation with her fellows.

  We have to do this, she thought. I have to force the funding through, on Monday.

  If Sheena succeeded she would deliver, in five years or so, a near-Earth asteroid rich in organics and other volatiles to Earth orbit. Enough to bootstrap, at last, an expansion off the planet. Enough, perhaps, to save mankind.

  And, if the gloomier State Department reports about the state of the world were at all accurate, it might be the last chance anybody would get.

  But Sheena wouldn’t live to see it.

  The squid shoal collapsed to a tight school and jetted away, rushing out of sight.

  Sheena 5 glided at the heart of the ship, where the water that passed through her mantle, over her gills, was warmest, richest. The core machinery, the assemblage of devices that maintained life here, was a black mass before her, lights winking over its surface.

  She found it hard to rest, without the shoal, the mating and learning and endless dances of daylight.

  Restless, she swam away from the machinery cluster. As she rose the water flowing through her mantle cooled, the rich oxygen thinning. She sensed the subtle sounds of living things: the smooth rush of fish, the bubbling murmur of the krill on which they browsed, and the hiss of the diatoms and algae which fed them. In Sheena’s spacecraft, matter and energy flowed in great loops, sustained by sunlight, regulated by its central machinery as if by a beating heart.

  She reached the wall of the ship. It was translucent. If she pushed at it, it pushed back. Grass algae grew on the wall, their long filaments dangling and wafting in the currents.