At last, under Sheena’s control, simple valves clicked open. Through firefly cameras, the images were relayed to the laser projectors cupped over her eyes. Sheena could see a flame erupt from the nozzle, flaring up into the sky. And now combustion products emerged, ice crystals that caught the sunlight, receding in perfectly straight lines. It was a fire fountain, quite beautiful.

Humans could control operations from Earth from now on. Asteroid water and raw, unprocessed rock would be swallowed into giant bags and, pushed by rockets like this test rig, steered through the empty ocean of space toward Earth, as if by a squid’s mantle jet.

Dan would tell her there was much celebration within Bootstrap. He did not say so, but Sheena understood that this was mainly because she had finished her task before dying.

She turned away from the waldo glove and the imagers, the human machines, and sought out her young.

They were growing explosively quickly, converting half of all the food they ate to body mass.

At first they had been asocial, foraging alone in the beds of sea grass. But already — though still tiny — they had developed shoals. She watched the males fighting — aggressive signaling, fin beating, chasing, and fleeing — miniature battles that prefigured the greater conflicts to come at breeding time.

Some of the young were already hunting the smaller fish, adopting behavior patterns her kind were hatched with, even talking to each other in the simple, rich sign language that Dan said was hardwired into their brains by millions of generations of ancestors: / am large and fierce. Look at my weapons. I am sea grass; I am no squid. I am strong. Look at me!

She knew that Dan must be aware of the existence of the young by now. The growing imbalance in the small ecosphere could surely not be ignored. But he said nothing; and she volunteered nothing.

Most of the young were dumb. Four were smart.

She took the smart ones to one side. She swam at the heart of their small shoal. She was growing old now, and she tired easily. Nevertheless she taught the smart ones how to hunt, sophisticated techniques beyond their dumber siblings.

She taught them how to lure foolish fish. They would hold up their arms with blanched tips, waving them, distracting the attention of the fish from the far more dangerous tentacles, waiting to strike.

She taught them how to stalk, gradually approaching a fish from behind, where its vision was poorest.

She taught them how to chase, pursuing fleeing prey with careful watchfulness until close enough to make the final, decisive lunge.

She taught them to hunt, disguised. They would mimic sar-gassum weed, hanging in the water with arms dangling, ready to dart out at incautious fish. Or they would swim backward with false eye spots and arms held together and waved like the tail of a fish.

They practiced on the smaller fish, and some of them eyed the other squid, their siblings.

She taught them about the reef, the many creatures that lived and died there, how they worked together, even as they competed and fought and hunted. She tried to teach them about predators.

She role-played, swooping down on them like a moray eel, trying to catch tiiem with her arms and beak. But they were young and agile and easily evaded her, and she sensed they did not believe her stories of monsters that could nip off a squid’s arms, or even swallow a squid whole, enhanced brain or not.

And she taught them language, the abstract signs Dan had given her. As soon as they had the language their mantles rippled with questions. Who? Why? Where? What? How?

She did not always have answers. But she showed them the machinery that kept them alive, and taught them about the stars and the sun, and the nature of the world and universe, and about humans.

The young ones seemed to understand, very quickly, that Sheena and all her young would soon exhaust the resources of this one habitat. The habitat had been designed to support one squid, herself, for a fixed period of time, a time that was almost expired. Already there had been a number of problems with the tightly closed environment loops — unpredictable crashes and blooms in the phytoplankton population, depletions or excessive concentrations of trace elements — and corresponding impacts on the krill and the fish.

The young were very smart. Soon they were able to think in ways that were beyond Sheena herself.

For instance, they said, perhaps they should not simply repair this fabric shell, but extend it. Perhaps, said the young, they should even make new domes and fill them with water.

Sheena, trained only to complete her primary mission, found this a very strange thought.

There weren’t enough fish, never enough krill. The waters were stale and crowded.

This was clearly unacceptable.

So the smart young hunted down their dumb siblings, one by one, and consumed their passive bodies, until only these four, and Sheena, were left.

Michael:

His memories were jumbled.

When tourists had come to the village they would take snapshots with their cameras, and sometimes they would send them to the village. Michael would see himself in the pictures, a person who no longer existed, smiling up at somebody who was no longer there, like two ghosts. Sometimes the pictures would arrive out of order, so he would see himself in a T-shirt with a hole in it, and in the next picture there he would be, a little shorter maybe, with the T-shirt magically fixed.

When he had been taken out of the village he had understood almost none of what happened to him, and his memories had become jumbled, like the snapshots.

But there was still a sky above him, with stars and a Moon, even though they were in different places from when he was in the village.

And -when he closed his eyes — on his pallet at night, in the stillness of his blanket, with no sound or sensation — he could feel deep inside himself that time wore on, passing inexorably, measured invisibly by the evolution of his own thoughts. It didn’t matter that his memories didn’t make sense, that what had happened to him had no logic or explanation. It was enough that he knew, deep inside, that the universe still worked.

The rules, here in the School, became simple.

Food was everything.

You could not be sure when another meal might come, so you had to eat or hoard every scrap of food you could find.

In fact it was better to hoard as much as possible, to hide it in your clothes or in a cache, like Michael’s store in the wall of the dormitory hut, to make it last longer.

If you had food you had power. If another had food, they had power over you.

There were other rules.

For example: at night the children were not allowed to go outside their dormitory room to relieve themselves. There was always a Sister or a Brother in the dormitory to ensure this was so. There was a single slop bucket at night, set in the middle of the floor. It was not big enough and soon filled up. If it spilled on the floor, you would be punished. If you made a mess, if you wet your bed or relieved yourself where you shouldn’t, you would be punished. Many of the younger children were quite clumsy, and so would often knock over the bucket or otherwise mess the place up. They were punished often.

At night Michael would hear children crying in pain as they tried to resist the temptation to use the bucket. And he would hear Anna’s quiet, grave voice, helping them stay quiet, overcome the discomfort.

New children, arriving here in their shirts marked with crude blue circles, would often cry and complain, and suffer when they broke the rules. They soon learned, however.