Small-five stared into the steady, unwavering otherglow of her computer, proboscis tapping aimlessly against its side in an endless, idiot drawl. She envied its composure.
Three years. One and a half to waste on idiot child-thoughts, one and a half to regroup and reinvent and rethink all her old ideas. Three years of her life gone, just like that.
Of course, she had about a hundred of those left over, minus around a decade or possibly plus several. But it was the principle of the thing.
She glimmered to herself sourly as she reviewed what of her ideas she’d managed to pin down into light for the umpteenth time. There they all were, pinned down and preserved like a Fiskupid embedded in ice: a complete and thorough exploration and documentation of the life history of every Small-five, every faint-marks, every Outward-spreading, every sister and mother and daughter. There was even a subchapter devoted to the peculiarities of the cycles of the males, including an up-to-date speculation that the birthed fathers returned to the cold poles to shepherd and safeguard the pregnant fathers-to-be as they grew.
All of it was firmly cited, founded in strong base principles, expanded upon many minor details that were often casually overlooked, and possessed a clear sense of direction and progression.
It was, essentially, worthless regurgitation.
Not nearly as bad as her first idea of course – Small-five winced inwardly as she recalled the conversations she’d had with Dim-glow back then.
It won’t work, she’d said, in that clean, careful way that she seemed to consider most things nowadays.
I’ll need more detail than THAT, Small-five responded.
You’ve said it yourself, you’re having problems with even the most basic issues, just the problems with tricking the biology into working. The engineering involved would be ridiculous. An expedition to the very fringes of the pole is hard going and dangerous and a big investment. Settling a permanent outpost of any size is nearly impossible. Settling a large-scale facility that needs to pump unadulterated chemicals from near the polar core an unspecified thousands of miles, in mass volume, without contamination or disruption? We’ve reached beyond impossible, at least at our current technological scope. Dim-glow’s sides roiled with sluggish disagreement. And the level of attention a mass draw in those waters would draw enough superpredators to turn every day into a bloodbath, even with top-notch Safety work. Go on, ask All-fin how much she’d like a year-round posting down there. Go on.
Small-five gave in, feeling a prickling wince crawl along her back as she recalled the return of the expedition that had been her other two sisters’ voyage outside Far-away-light. Nine-point and All-fin had been badly shaken, but had considered themselves lucky – six of the Safety wardens (All-fin included) had come back missing chunks of themselves, and one aspiring Research youth hadn’t come back at all, lost in the ice floes.
There has to be a way to do it, she said, and knew that moment marked her argument caving in and revealing its core of unreasonable stubbornness.
Maybe, said Dim-glow. But it won’t be today, or tomorrow. Maybe daughters of yours will solve this problem someday. For now, just let it go. There’s no way to raise infants artificially.
Small-five was looking at a specific page of her tables now, and wasn’t sure how she’d arrived there. It was a small, nondescript graph that hadn’t been cited anywhere in her analysis yet stubbornly refused removal, no matter how much editing she did.
It was a timeline that followed the activities of a tracking tag over half a year, where it ended suddenly. The tag had been lost in the open oceans near the poles, and had not been recovered.
Her sides were pulsing most unevenly, she realized dimly, and calmed down as much as she was able. It must be all this sitting around. So much reading and writing and citing and prodding; it was a wonder her proboscis hadn’t blunted itself on the buttons of her computer.
And so, in the grand tradition of frustrated academics, Small-five decided to clear her head with some exercise. She swam out of her little research nook in one of the darker branches of Far-away-light’s library with such a violent surge that an observer (absent at the time) would’ve confused it with frightened escape.
By the time the tunnels of Far-away-light lay behind her and she hovered in the grip of the uplifting currents that scoured its sides, her mood had evened some. Every year the memories of the ice closing in faded a bit more, but she was sure she’d see the end of her first decade before she felt entirely comfortable so far from open water. Not that open water didn’t have its share of bad memories.
No, she was headed to where she could relax. The captive reefcolony that sat atop the bulging head of Far-away-light, where the sun shone through the waves and life sat so near at all sides that you could eat by opening your mouth and swimming forwards. It was quiet in that special way that only the noisiest places could be – quiet inside – and there was enough room that she wouldn’t run face to face with anyone and have to ruin her terrible mood by spreading it around.
It wasn’t the end of the world, she reminded herself. No adult her age was expected to write much more than what she had created. No adult her age was supposed to create a work of learning and insight that was all original research, every page a new and novel concept. A solid, stable, perfectly suitable re-shining of a complicated topic with added spines and lights was typical and worthwhile and would make that little graph that wouldn’t die unexceptional and usual.
Entirely usual.
Small-five found that she was sick of exercise, and departed the reefcolony with the same graceless haste that she’d arrived, nearly running over a subadult as she did so. That was an added nuisance right there; that year’s crop of juveniles was fresh in. How many years would it take for her to get used to things that were smaller than her? They looked so fragile, so delicate. And always, always, always, so starved.
They shouldn’t have to do that. But they had to. What a terrible, awful thing it was, to put the food that made you…you where there was almost nothing to eat, and so many hungry mouths to strain at you without end. And the worst of it all was that Dim-glow was right; there WASN’T any way to change it, and she knew it. She was at the tail-tip of half a year of studying the chemical structure of the cocktails of polar nutrients that had combined to swell her brain triple in size, and all of her conclusions told her the same thing: give up. The substances were too ridiculously complex to synthesize, too deceptively frail and ferociously remote to transport; the infants were too skittish and too finicky in their habitats to survive the guiding presence of adults or accept a cultivated home.
Their lives were a cruel joke: a fiendishly complicated process with a product so simple that it stood no hope of bettering itself. And some days, Small-five thought that she was the only one of all her sisters and mothers (no daughters yet) that ever thought this way. It seemed narcissistic, but the alternative – that behind every shimmering glowshine lay the same bone-aching, soul-grinding awareness of the unfairness of it all – was too grim for her to contemplate.
She was contemplating it again, wasn’t she? No, that wasn’t the sort of thing she should allow at all. Back to work. Back to studying. Back to learning and growing and oh sisters, she’d never thought she’d get this sick of being able to think. Thinking was meant to give you ideas, ideas were meant to make you feel smart, being smart was meant to light a glow under your skin that flickered without light. Not leave you with a terrible aching cramp in your mind that throbbed just behind your eyes and made you feel as though you’d stared at the sun.
Fine then. If she couldn’t think, she’d research.
Small-five wriggled her way back into her chamber at the rim of the library’s guts and curled herself around her most recent chemistry worksphere. Inside it gaped the empty space of a vacuum, contaminant-free and crisply inhospitable, and inside THAT lay a small, perfectly sliced piece of flesh from an infant, a sample retrieved from her latest expedition with the other Populists. It had been only a few weeks old when she found it, floating free in the water half-out of a Raskljen’s mouth. The predator had made itself scarce in the face of her glaring glowshine and aggressive posture, but it had been all too late for the little sister, just in time for a specimen.
It was perfectly preserved, as fresh as it had been the moment she sealed it. And now, as Small-five carefully manoeuvered a much smaller worksphere into place, it was about to change.
The workspheres were simple to attach to one another, yet required the entry of a ten-digit code to comingle; a design that suited the sorts of things kept in them. Rare tissue samples (or sentimental ones; Small-five was sure she had a chunk of blubber from All-fin’s side as a post-surgery souvenir her sister had refused to accept), live organisms, organs, bacterial cultures, strange Fiskupids (Nine-point had told her last year that Research was hoping to create a sort of viral cocktail that would supercharge Fiskupid production in reefcolonies for single generations at a time, permitting controlled habitat increase and increased building material). And in this case, the last portion of a small sample of water drawn from the far, far south that her sisters had brought back home to her, several years ago, after a dangerous expedition. The strange chemicals in it had been concentrated, then concentrated again. As a juvenile, her body had intaken less than a third of this sphere’s volume to transform her mind completely.
There wasn’t much left, but she’d been saving it for a day like this, when she’d be too depressed to do anything much beyond mope and handle incredibly rare chemical compounds that she’d slowly squandered over more than a year, learning nothing and gaining nothing and oh get ON with it!
She merged the workspheres, watched half of the liquid splash against the flesh. She selected her tools, carefully probed the sphere’s interior through the airlocked entries. And she watched as the readouts began to appear, and pulsed irritably as they wandered far and wide. Hormones were being triggered in dead flesh, moribund dna was twitching, feebly attempting to synthesis proteins in cells that were bags of tissue. As was proper, and normal, and expected. But the numbers were all wrong. Too large a reaction.
Maybe the flesh was too old – no, she’d used older.
Maybe the worksphere had malfunctioned, but no, the tissue still read as usable by all measurements. She carefully transferred it to another sphere, just to be safe, and watched as the same numbers, the same graphs came tumbling back to her.
Maybe the sample of polar water had gone off…and that was when Small-five knew she was missing something obvious, because that couldn’t physically happen, and the worksphere she’d kept the sample in had been top-grade, certified by a Maintenance chief personally.
She was missing something. She’d spent a full day without rest now, but she’d still missed something. It was right in front of her, sitting behind the big blue wall of hazy infinity, but a half-glimpse farther than her eyes could reach. Maybe if she just shone a bit brighter…
Small-five stared at the workspheres, eyes running over the data they were sliding into her computer, aimlessly racing along othershine displays, no longer reading, simply needing.
And then there it was, teeth rising out of the blue. Small-five looked, and she saw what wasn’t there.
The worksphere that contained the fleshsphere had no serial number filled out, no data entry. Which meant…
Small-five carefully, delicately, tenderly flipped the worksphere over and read the tiny note slapped on in hasty othershine: a gift for All-fin, who nearly was No-side.
She’d just used half of her last extant sample of polar nutrients on a piece of nondescript adult bellyfat with a strip of muscle. And somehow, it was taking every pinch of self control in her body not to break into hysterical rippling laughter that would probably never end.
Fine. Fine. So she’d wasted it! It didn’t matter, she could just fill out a new chart. Sure, a single sample meant nothing, but… well.
Well.
Small-five didn’t rest for the next three days. She was too busy running tests. At one point, she left her tiny library and acquired a small medical clamp, which she used to excise a tiny strip of tissue from her shoulder.
The results came back the same. All of them. And now she had no more nutrients to test with, but she wasn’t worried. If what she’d discovered had any chance of being correct, she felt confident that the head of Research would personally swim to the pole and back to collect samples with her teeth.
Research, no, that could come later. This was a matter of Populism. Populism to the bone. What would faint-marks think of this? What would her sisters? What would…what did she think about it? Did she even know yet.
Well, it was best to keep it quiet until it was completely certain. The first people to know would have to be the most important ones. Just in case she’d missed something, because she was certainly tired enough to do that sort of thing.
faint-marks. Outward-spreading. The chief of Populism, the ancient mother-leader of Far-away-light. They would be the first to know about what she’d learned, the first to read it and judge it and dismiss it for lack of thought or evidence, but perhaps compliment her on her eagerness – if she left out the part about how it was an accident.
No, best to tell them that. Tell them everything. They might need to know it.
Small-five finished writing. Her proboscis hovered above the buttons, wavered, and struck decisively, and with such force that her computer ceased functioning even as it sent the message.
Now, why had she done that? And then all that she’d just seen became real for the first time, and Small-five knew, really knew, what she’d learned, the idea she’d created. It slipped out across her sides with dazzling energy, the last effort on the last hour of the final day of her learning.
Populism-chief, mother-leader… the poles work their magic on more than adolescents! Our flesh is as fluid as their minds! So hard to learn this lesson – so little reason to travel there, and never a sane reason to hunt – but it is known! Small-five has learned this! Small-five-point-burst-of-light has learned this of us, of all of us! Ever mother, every sister, every daughter-to-be! All of us, adults, and yet still aching to change deep inside!
And with that, Small-five fell into a deep and insensate resting-state, the most secure and comforting that she’d ever know, where she faced the deep blue wall and saw the teeth appear and was not afraid, felt them pass through her without harm.
When she finally stirred herself, it was in the grasp of six Safety wardens, unarmed but twice her mass each. She reacted with surprise, then inquiry, then outrage, and finally moved through to fear. And to all she did, their sides remained darker than the depths of the poles.
She was taken, she realized, in the middle of the night. Through the depths of the library, then lower still she was hurried, the Safety wardens forming around her sides in a tight, blotted mass that hid her glowshine away beneath packed muscles and dark silence. The corridors grew close, then jagged – down here the reefcolony that formed Far-away-light had not been groomed, not been tamed for years. More than once one of Small-five’s shadows clipped a fin against the walls and drew blood, but not so much as a flicker of pain gleamed from them.
At last the tunnel terminated, in a tiny, inky-black opening surrounded by jagged-edged shells. Her escort paused, and a shadow near the exit detached itself and began to blink slowly.
It was faint-marks. Small-five tried to speak, but her glowshine was still buried.
never come back, said the chief of Populism, her voice as soft and indistinctly lit as ever. and remember: we could have killed you.
And with that, the Safety wardens surged forwards, proboscises shoving, and Small-five was forced through the opening.
It was much too small.
Instinct saved her, sent her swimming in a frenzy, hurling herself in a blood-blinded panic. She slammed into muck and twisted herself upwards, away from the ocean floor, away from what she could no longer see. Water rippled around her on unseen fangs, and somehow she found the speed to move yet faster, in terror of the unknown even as it fell away, far away below her, with nothing but the taste of her blood to satisfy its hunger. She shone harder, harder, harder, and still the world was a blackened haze.
She swam anyways. What else could she do?
When light returned, it was with the dawn. Every glowshine tube in her body had been ruptured.