Ricci backed away a few steps. I don’t think I’m qualified to do this.
You’ve been qualified to draw a line since you were a crechie. When she began to protest again, I cut her off. This was your idea, remember?
Her hands shook, but the line was straight enough. The pouch deflated, draping over the skeleton of the carbon fiber struts I’d installed way back in the beginning. I pulled Ricci inside and closed the incision behind us with squirts of temporary adhesive. The wound wept drops of fluid that rapidly boiled off, leaving a sticky pink sap-like crust across the iridescent interior surface.
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 goose bumps. 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 crystalized tissue until they danced behind my eyelids. Swirling, stacking, combining and recombining…