Engine City by Ken MacLeod Page A

of meters along the beach, he held out an arm stiff with a pointing finger. It started at the angle to the ground he’d pointed at before, then swung smoothly up and around, until it was aimed at a bright red star about halfway up the sky to the east. They joined him in sighting along their arms at the star. Just to make sure they were looking at the right one, he poked a finger in the sand and dotted out the pattern of the stars around it, completing the picture with the one he’d pointed at, jabbing his finger in deep, then pointing again. He pointed at his chest again, then at the sea, then at the star again. Elizabeth and Gregor nodded vigorously. The selkie’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a grin that would have been frightening had they just encountered him.
    He laid a hand first on Gregor’s shoulder, then on Elizabeth’s—it was like being a child again, looking up at him—and said something, then walked away into the waves.
    “You know what I just figured out?” Gregor said, as the selkie’s back vanished.
    “What?”
    “The way he was pointing downward earlier, and at the start just there? He was pointing to where the star was in the morning, when it was below the horizon.”
    She stared at him. “Could you do that?”
    Gregor had been a navigator for twenty years. He had a more direct and practical knowledge of the sky than most astronomers. He thought about it for a moment and shook his head.
    “Which means,” said Elizabeth, “that I may have been wrong about the selkies. They’re not as smart as we are. They’re smarter.”

    A storm blew up later that night. Gregor and Elizabeth had already stowed some of their kit in the whaling station’s gloomy rooms, but they decided to spend the night in the skiff. With its field on it was less moveable than a rock. Its encircling view-screen picked up enough light from outside to give them a clear view, even with the interior lights on. They sat exhausted, gazing outward. It was like watching black-and-white television—white the surf, black the waves—but interesting.
    “Wonder how the selkies are doing,” Elizabeth said.
    “They can ride it out,” said Gregor. “Like seals.”
    “But they’re not like seals. They’re not that aquatic. I can imagine them huddled on a beach somewhere. Poor things.”
    “They look tough.” He grinned. “ ‘Hardy Man,’ all right.”
    Elizabeth saw Gregor’s gaze drift back to the plastic tray in which they’d placed the anomalous octopod’s bones. Of all the specimens they’d collected, this was the one they could least afford to lose. They had not cared to examine it further with the crude instruments—scalpels, tweezers, pliers, hammers—that were on hand. They hardly dared to think about it. Not thinking about it was making them dizzy.
    “This is big,” he said. “This is evidence, the first solid evidence we’ve had of the aliens for a start, and it looks like evidence that they’ve settled the selkies here. Or that they’re still doing it.”
    Elizabeth smiled wryly. “The long-awaited invasion?”
    “Something like that.” Gregor sighed. “Whatever. We have to report back.” He reached sideways and clasped her right hand, intertwining their fingers. “The journey’s over.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “It’s the next journey I’m worried about.” It had been a good journey, almost a holiday. It could even have been the beginning of a retirement, or the resumption of their true careers after a long interruption. They’d always promised themselves that someday they would pay their home planet, Mingulay, the attention of a Beagle voyage. Marine biology had been, for both of them, their first love. When they’d both been twenty years younger, eighty-odd years ago, Gregor had found in the structures of the cephalopod brain the key to his family’s generations-long Great Work—to reverse-engineer the control program of the lightspeed drive, hitherto monopolized by the kraken navigators who plied the fixed trading routes of the Second Sphere.