Читать книгу Time - Stephen Baxter - Страница 17

The courting began.

The squid swam around each other, subtly adopting new positions in time and space: each female surrounded by two, three, four males. Sheena enjoyed the dance, the ancient, rich choreography – even though she knew courting was not for her: it never could be, after she had been selected by Bootstrap.

Dan had explained it all.

… But now, regardless of Dan’s strictures, regardless of the clamouring mind she carried, he came for her: the killer male, one tentacle torn on some loose fragment of metal, bearing his wound proudly.

She should swim away. But here he was next to her, swimming back and forth with her. She fled, a short distance, but he pursued her, swimming with her, his every movement matching hers.

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

She felt a skin pattern flush over her body, a pied mottling of black and clear, speckled with white spots. It was a simple, ancient message. Court me.

He swam closer.

But the other males, still orbiting her, began to encroach, their eyes hard and intent. The hunter, her male, swam up to meet the most bold, his arms flaring, head dark, bright bands on his mantle. Get away. She is mine! The male refused to back off, his body pattern flaring to match the hunter’s. But the hunter raised his body until his fins bumped the intruder’s, who backed away.

Now he came back to her. She could see his far side was a bright uniform silver, a message to the other males: Keep away, now. Keep away. She is mine! But the side closest to her was a soothing uniform grey-black, a smooth texture into which she longed to immerse herself, to shut off the clattering analysis of the brain the humans had given her. As he rolled the colours tracked around his body, and she could see the tiny muscles working the pigment sacs on his hide.

Now he faced her, open arms starfished around his mouth. His eyes were on her: green and unblinking, avid, mindless, without calculation. Utterly irresistible. And already he was holding out his hectocotylus towards her, the modified arm bearing the clutch of spermatophores at its tip.

For a last instant she remembered Dan, his rigid human face peering out of glass windows at her, the little panels he sent into the water flashing their signs. Mission Sheena mission. Bootstrap! Mission! Dan!

She knew she must not do this.

But then the animal within her rose, urgent.

She opened her mantle to the male. He pumped water into her, seeking to flush out the sperm of any other mate. And then his hectocotylus reached for her, striking swiftly, and lodged his needle-like spermatophore among the roots of her arms.

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.

The male was withdrawing. All around her, the squid’s flashing songs pulsed with life.

She knew, compared to a human’s, her life was short: flashing, bright, lasting one summer, two at most, a handful of matings. And she was alone: she did not know her parents, would never know her young, might never see this mate of hers again.

And yet it did not matter. For there was consolation in the shoal, and the shoal of shoals: the ancient songs that reached back to a time before humans, before whales, before even the fish. The songs, poetry of light and dance, made every squid aware she was part of a continuum that stretched back to those ancient seas, and on to the incomprehensible future; 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 squid 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. Dan understood nothing of the shoal – not really – but he had stressed that much to her. Sheena was different, with different goals: human goals.

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

Flaring anger at the humans who had done this to her, she closed her arms over the spermatophore, and drew it inside her.