“I’ll help you,” he said. “I’ll try. What can they do, fire me?”

Dan placed a call to Malenfant. And then a second, to Florida, to tell the people there he wouldn’t be joining them just yet.

The squid turned away from the camera.

Emma Stoney:

Cornelius Taine came to Emma’s office.

“We think it worked,” he said, breathless. “We found him.”

Emma was not glad to see Taine once more. “Found who? What are you talking about?”

Cornelius handed over a document. It was a report prepared by a professor of physics from Cal Tech. Emma leafed through it. It was heavy on text and laden with equations, difficult to skim.

Cornelius said, “It’s an analysis of material found on a softscreen. The math was difficult to decipher. Unconventional formalism. But it’s all there.”

“WhatisT

Cornelius sat down and visibly tried to be patient. “It’s a sketch of the foundations of a theory of quantum gravity, which is a unification, awaited for a century, of general relativity and quantum theory, the two great pillars of physics.”

“I thought we had that. String theory.”

“String theory is part of it. But string theory is mathematically dense — after thirty years the theorists have only extracted a handful of predictions from it — and it’s limited besides; it doesn’t incorporate curved space in a natural way. And—”

Emma pushed the report away. “What does this have to do with us?”

He smiled. “Everything. The material turned up in a Foundation School in Australia, their Northern Territory. Produced by one of the inmates there.”

Inmates. “You mean one of the Blue children?”

“Yes. A ten-year-old from Zambia.”

He handed over a photograph. A frightened-looking boy, strong white teeth, round eyes. “My God,” she said. “I know this boy.”

“I know.” Taine looked at the image hungrily. “He’s the one we’ve been looking for. Don’t you see?”

“No, I don’t.” She thought over what he had said. “You’re saying that finding this one boy was the objective of the whole program?” She pushed away the report. “Cornelius, I’m amazed you’ve come to me with this. In case you’re not aware of it, we’re being shut down up on Cruithne. In three months of surface operations we’ve discovered nothing to justify the diversion of the mission away from Reinmuth, with all the complication that brought us.”

“We’ve gone over this many times,” he said tightly. “You’re well aware that the firefly robots have been restricted to a small area around the Nautilus. We have been marking time. There’s a lot of surface area to explore. And besides, we know there’s something to be found. We have the Feynman radio message—”

“Sure,” she said harshly. “Or maybe all we were picking up was the Fermilab air-conditioning turning itself on and off. What do you think?”

He eyed her, eyes bright, mouth small and tense. He seemed to be rocking back and forth in his chair, almost imperceptibly. “Emma, there is much, much, you’ve yet to understand about what’s .going on here. Remember we believe we are fighting for the destiny of the species.”

She sighed. “So now what?”

“Now we have to go get him.”

“We?”

“Perhaps he will remember you.”

Sheena 6:

Sheena 6 was the smartest of the young.

It was no privilege. She had to work hard to absorb the new signs and concepts Dan sent to her.

And there was much work to do.

She learned to use the glovelike systems that made the firefly robots clamber over the asteroid ground, that strange place beyond the ship wall where there was no water. The mining equipment, designed to extract methane and water for the rocket fuel, was adapted to seek out essentials for the phytoplankton — nitrates and phosphates. No more sacks of water and dirt were fired to Earth. Under her command, fireflies took apart the methane rocket plants at the poles and began to haul the parts over the surface for new uses.

Even in the hab itself there was much to do.-Dan showed her how to keep the water pure. Oxygen could be produced by the great metal cells, to keep the water fresh and vitalizing. There were beds of charcoal filters through which the water was pumped. But the charcoal had to be replaced by carbon extracted from asteroid material, burned in sun fire.

Dan also tried to show her how to interpret the elaborate automatic monitoring systems that checked that the closed loops remained healthy. But this was no use to her. Squid senses were delicate. If the water was unbalanced, she could see, taste, smell it as it passed through her mantle, over her gills. She could see the twisting polarization of the light caused by murky pollutants. She could even hear the tiny cries of the plankton. She knew when the water was unhealthy. It was enough that she had the means to fix it.

The processes were complex. But at heart, she learned, there was a simple principle. Her world, this droplet of water clinging to a rock, was so small it could not sustain itself. She took food out of it by feeding on krill; so she must find ways, direct or indirect, of returning raw materials for that food to the world.

Very well.

In the midst of this activity, Sheena 5 grew weaker. Sheena 6 tried to pummel her awake, a few hours longer.

At last, though, Sheena’s black eyes clouded. Her young gathered around her. Look at me. Court me. Love me.

Last confused words, picked out in blurred signs on a mottled carapace, stiff attempts at posture by muscles leached of strength.

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.