“Imagine what they could do with a clitoris.”
I turn, and catch the ghost of a smile fading on his face.
“Half his nervous system’s in the arms, you know? You could say those things literally think with their tentacles.”
Houdini retreats to a pile of fake rocks, pours himself into those cracks and crevices like epoxy. He disappears before my eyes, his boneless body mimicking not just the color but the texture of the rock pile. Gould grunts softly.
He’s wrong, though. I may just be a dumb jarhead but I knew a thing or two about those crawly beasts even before Gould’s little tutorial. When I was a kid there was this public aquarium down by the waterfront, had an octopus in a tank. Big triangular Plexi column backed onto a rock wall full of little caves and crannies. No matter how many times you paid to get in, the fucking octopus was always hiding in that rock wall; you’d see maybe an eye, a little patch of suckers, and a whole lot of empty tank. It was pathetic.
But then one night me and a couple of the guys broke into the place on a dare—it was pretty easy actually, the security guard was a bit of a stoner and kept forgetting to turn the alarm back on after he did his rounds—and my buddies went straight to the shark tank but for some reason I decided to check out the octopus. And the whole gallery was dim and green and deserted, it was great, and wouldn’t you know it the fucking thing was out and about. Right there in the open. Turns out octopuses are nocturnal. It would swell up and then phoomph—jet its way into the deep blue sea, but of course it’s in a fucking tank, right? So it just slammed into the Plexiglas like a limp water balloon. And you could just see it deflating, sinking down to the bottom all depressed, but then it would change its mind and gear up for another run, puff itself up, phoomph out into the deep blue sea—and thump into the glass and it would get all depressed and sink back down again. I watched it for a good ten minutes and it never seemed to learn. So let’s just say I’m a little skeptical of the Gospel According to Gould when it comes to cephalopod intelligence.
But the thing is, it never learned but it never gave up, either. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little fucker. It had needs and wants, it valued its freedom, you never saw it during the day but at night you’d have to be blind not to see how much it hated being in that tank. And now I’m looking at Houdini, and I’m thinking about the Ceph, and you know, there’s a part of me thinking maybe we just haven’t seen these things at night yet. I mean, if an ignorant asshole like me can drum up sympathy for an overgrown garden slug at the tender age of fourteen, who’s to say we can’t come to terms with these aliens somehow, right?
Nah. Of course not.
Had you going for a moment though, didn’t I?
Gould’s going on about ancient history. Houdini has retired under a rock so I start paying attention: something about smallpox and the Aztecs.
“Ever wonder how they felt when they saw those pustules popping up for the first time, when they saw what it was doing to them? One of the most culturally dynamic civilizations on the planet, wiped out by a bug less than half a micron across. You might be surprised how often that kind of thing happens.
“Ever wonder how history might have turned out if they’d had vaccine technology?”
I can’t say I have. It doesn’t take a gene genie to see where he’s going with this, though.
“Prophet said there might be one. For the spore.” Gould nods in my direction. “I think the data’s in that suit you’re wearing, somehow. It was the only reason he came back in, he sure as fuck doesn’t—didn’t trust Hargreave. I gotta say, even I wondered if he was getting a bit paranoid. Wear that suit long enough, you start to—anyway. If your field trip to the crash site proved anything, it proved that Prophet was right about Hargreave. Your suit, the alien tech—no way independent evolutionary tracks give you that kind of similarity down on the molecular level. Whoever you are, you’re pretty much wearing a Ceph exoskeleton. All we did was file off the serial numbers, change the chrome, and slap a dozen CryNet patents onto a black box.”
He sighs, and shakes his head.
“Let me tell you a story.”
It’s more of a conspiracy theory, actually. I would’ve rolled my eyes if Leavenworth had fed it to me a week ago. After today, though, I’m wondering if it’s paranoid enough.
There’s this company, Hargreave-Rasch. It’s over a hundred years old, even though I’ve never heard of it before. Apparently that’s the way they like it; H-R is the company behind the companies, the dark force pulling the strings behind the smiling beneficent Monsantos and the Halliburtons and the General Technics of the world.
Think about that. Think about a company that makes Halliburton look socially progressive. Think about a company that uses Monsanto as its happy face.
Hargreave-Rasch didn’t have to hide. It was so fucking scary that anyone in the know was afraid to look it in the eye.
They ran a big honking radio-telescope array out of a chunk of Arizona they’d owned since before Hiroshima. Added some outgrouped satellites up in geosync to widen the aperture, just as soon as the tech was available.
All that time they were looking for space aliens.
We’re not talking your average high school SETI project here. This was no shoestring operation put together by the tinfoil-hat crowd, nobody was holding bake sales or begging spare CPU cycles on peoples’ iBalls to crunch space static. This one project had the budget of a good-sized third-world puppet regime.
Also, according to Gould, they had a pretty good idea of where to look. Not that he ever told me how they came by that information.
They went at it for the better part of a century. They strained the whole fucking sky, squeezed every gamma burst and every X-ray and every burp of static through all the filters and algorithms that money could buy, and they came up with bupkis. They must have lost billions over the years, but they kept at it. They didn’t quit. This wasn’t a gamble, you see. Hargreave was no visionary, he wasn’t just playing the odds. He wasn’t hoping there was something out there. He knew.
Six months ago they caught something out past the orbit of Mars. Gould doesn’t know what it was—apparently he used to work for H-R himself but by then he’d left over, well, he called them “creative differences.” But something. And now, all of a sudden, we’ve got aliens invading Manhattan.
“Does that make any fucking sense to you at all?” Gould asks me.
And if I could talk I’d have to say, well, sure. It makes perfect sense. I’m a soldier, for chrissake. There wouldn’t be a need for people like me if life was all flowers and fluffy kittens. But this is Darwin’s universe, Dr. Gould. There’s never enough to go around—and if there is, you gobble it up until there isn’t, and then you fight over what’s left. You’d think a scientist would know this shit.
What did Hargreave think would happen when he went out looking for giants? Did he think they’d invite us into some big shiny galactic federation, cure cancer, and give us the secret of immortality? Of course they’re gonna kick our ass. Any soldier worth his shit will tell you: You think there’s something bigger than you out there, you fucking well keep your head down and hope it doesn’t notice.