The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (136 page)

“I don’t believe it,” Trip said, his eyes wide. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

Ellis remained silent, although he did not look away from the screen. He rewound the tape to the point where the octopuses were back in their separate tanks, then allowed the action to play out normally.

For a few seconds, the octopuses floated in their tanks as before. Then the nearest octopus, one of the specimens that Ellis and Gary had captured earlier that day, extended one arm after another to the rim of its own bucket, until the tips of four arms protruded slightly through the narrow gap.

Nothing else happened for a long moment – and then the octopus began to squeeze its entire body through. Watching it was like witnessing a baffling optical illusion. First one arm was threaded through the gap and down the outside of the tank. Three other arms followed. The octopus flattened itself, the edge of its mantle passing through, followed by its head, which grew pancaked, like a balloon that was only halfway inflated, as the octopus pulled itself the rest of the way out. Then it was on the countertop and slithering toward the other tank.

The octopus moved quickly, gathering and splaying its arms as it crawled across the counter. Its color deepened from pink to red. As it approached, the second octopus, still inside its tank, grew pale, its normally smooth skin becoming rough and pebbled. When the first octopus reached the tank, it hooked the end of one arm over the rim, compressing its body until it was flat enough to slip through the gap, which was narrower than a letterbox. Within seconds, it had entered the second tank.

The struggle did not last for long. There was an entanglement of arms and beaks, the water growing blue with blood. Trip was unable to see how one octopus killed the other, but the thought of what was happening there made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

In less than a minute, it was over, and one octopus lay dead at the bottom of the tank. The survivor drifted in the bloody water, its arms coiling and uncoiling. Then, inevitably, it began to feed.

III

“I don’t believe it,” Trip said again. Looking away from the carnage onscreen, he saw sickened expressions on the faces around him. As if following a common impulse, the crew turned from the television to look at the tanks, and experienced a collective shudder. The remaining octopus had abandoned its meal and was pressing its head against the wall of its tank, watching them, or so it seemed, with its gelatinous eyes. The nodules on its arms were glowing brightly.

Lowering his gaze, Trip saw something that should have been obvious before. Streaks of moisture were visible on the countertop between the two tanks, marks from where the octopus had dragged itself across the intervening space. Something in the nearly invisible trail, which was rapidly drying out, made what they had just witnessed seem even more hideous.

Ellis was the first to regain some semblance of composure. “I should have been more careful. Octopuses are notorious for squeezing through tight spaces. The hardest part of the body is the beak, and the rest is highly compressible. If a gap is wide enough for the beak to pass through—”

Kiran stared at him. “You’re saying that this isn’t strange? I’m sorry, but I’m a little freaked out by this.”

“I’m not saying that this wasn’t unusual,” Ellis said. “I’m only saying that it can be explained. As for the cannibalism, I have no professional opinion. The important thing is that we fix the tanks.”

Using a hooked rod, which he held at arm’s length, Kiran transferred the surviving octopus to its old tank. The octopus seemed sated, its eyes filmy and glazed, as it slid, twitching slightly, into the water. Kiran fastened a rectangle of wire mesh across the top of the bucket, so that the gap between lid and rim was sealed off, then did the same to the octopus in the wet lab next door. There seemed to be no way that either octopus could escape again.

Even after these precautions had been taken, an aura of uneasiness lingered over the yacht. An hour later, when Trip went to bed, it was a long time before he fell asleep, and when he did, he was troubled by nightmares. In one dream, he was seated at the desk in his cabin, the door closed. As he reviewed his notes, oblivious to the danger, an octopus squeezed beneath the door, slithered across the carpet, climbed his chair, and touched the back of his neck with one clammy arm. Before he could react, the octopus pressed its parrotlike beak against his throat, and then—

Trip awoke, the sheets twisted like tentacles around his legs. It was still dark outside. As he tried to remember what had awakened him, he looked at his hands, which were visible in the faint light from the octopus school, and was shocked by the sight. His fingernails and cuticles were ragged, and a sour taste in his mouth told him that he had been chewing his nails in his sleep.

He was studying the damage that he had done, noticing that his fingers were bleeding in a few places, when he remembered what had pulled him from sleep in the first place. It had been a scream.

As he sat up in bed, he found that he could hear voices coming from the stateroom across the hall. Trip pulled on his shoes and went quietly into the corridor, taking care not to disturb Ellis and Gary, who were asleep. Through the door of the adjoining cabin, he heard voices. He knocked. “Is everything okay?”

The voices ceased at once. After a moment, he heard the shuffle of footsteps, and the door opened a crack. “It’s all right,” Meg said softly, peering through the gap. “Go back to bed.”

“It
isn’t
all right,” Dawn said, appearing behind Meg. “Tell her this needs to stop.”

“What needs to stop?” Trip asked. As he spoke, he saw a line of blood trickling down the crook of Meg’s arm. Impulsively, he came forward, pushing the door open. The two women fell back. “What happened?”

“It’s nothing.” Meg’s voice was nearly a mumble. “It isn’t any of your business—”

“Don’t give me that,” Dawn said, seizing Meg’s wrist in one hand. “Look at this.”

Trip saw a series of gashes running along Meg’s inside elbow. The cuts were parallel and shallow, and while none had grazed a major vessel, they were bleeding freely. “Did someone attack you?”

“Nobody attacked her,” Dawn said, her voice on edge. “She did this to herself.”

Trip turned to Meg, whose face was closed off with embarrassment. “Is that true?”

Meg yanked her arm away from Dawn, sending droplets of blood to the floor. “It’s no big deal. Sometimes I cut myself when I’m stressed. I’ve done it since I was a teenager. It’s never deep enough to be dangerous. I don’t see why you’re making a federal case out of this—”

Trip noticed a knife on the bedside table, its blade smeared with blood. “Did you take this from the kitchen?”

Meg sighed. “I was going to replace it. I never meant to use it on anyone but myself.”

“I don’t care about the knife,” Dawn said. “We’ve been friends a long time. I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this from me—”

The women resumed their argument. Trip was about to slip away when he remembered the medical kit that Ellis had used to bag Ray’s hands. “Hold on,” Trip said. “We need to do something about those cuts.”

He went back to his cabin, where the others were still asleep, and found the medical kit among Ellis’s things. When he returned to the other stateroom, Dawn seemed calmer, and Meg was cupping a hand casually beneath her elbow, catching the blood in the hollow of her palm.

Opening the medical kit, Trip took out a roll of tape and a gauze pad. He was about to close the kit again when he saw something tucked beneath the dressings. He reached inside. Fishing the object out, he found that it was a pack of ball bearings, the package cool and heavy in his hand.

“From the spare parts kit,” Trip said. He looked at the others. “Do you think—”

He broke off. The women were looking at the door, their expressions wary. Trip saw that a shadow had fallen across the floor. Rising to his feet, he found himself facing a solitary figure in the doorway.

“That’s my medical kit,” Ellis said, his voice calm. “What are you doing with it?”

“A minor emergency, but everything should be fine.” Trip held up the package of ball bearings. “What the hell are these?”

Ellis regarded the package. “I stole them from the spare parts kit. I was fairly sure that what I had done to the engine would keep us here another day, but I wanted to be on the safe side—”

“You sabotaged the engine,” Trip said. He had already forgotten about Meg. “Why?”

Ellis gave him a look of contempt. “You know why. I wanted to keep the yacht here a day or two longer. There was no way to make Ray listen to reason, so I took things into my own hands.”

“By attacking my ship?” It was Stavros. He was standing in the doorway, drawn by the noise, with Gary watching from over one shoulder. “We could have been stranded here for weeks—”

“You don’t understand,” Ellis said. Going to the window, he thrust his finger toward the octopus lights. “Ray was rushing ahead to meet a meaningless deadline. I wanted to document a natural phenomenon that might never be seen again. I don’t have to defend the choice I made.”

Gary pushed past the captain. “Are you listening to yourself? You’re worse than Ray. You only cared about your own career, even if it threatened everything we were doing here. Did you kill Ray, too?”

“I didn’t kill Ray,” Ellis said fiercely. “I can’t believe you’re accusing me of this—”

Without warning, Ellis punched the wall of the stateroom, hard, so that the bulkhead rang with the blow. As the others fell back, he punched it again. Before anyone else could speak, Kiran appeared, breathless, at the stateroom door.

“I don’t know what the commotion is about, but you need to break it up,” Kiran said. “There’s something you all need to see.”

They went into the salon, where the lights had been turned up. Kiran pointed toward the tank that housed the octopus.
“Look—”

Staring at what was there, Trip felt his anger dissolve into a sickening sense of horror. When they had caught this octopus the day before, they had made sure that all of its arms were intact. Now two of its arms were missing, leaving only a pair of stumps behind. The water was full of blood, but the severed arms were gone. Trip had no desire to find out what had become of them, but it was already too late.

The octopus was eating itself. As Trip watched, the octopus bent one of its remaining arms until the base was pressed against its gaping mouth. With a snip of its beak, it severed the arm, which fell away in a cloud of blood. Without a pause, the octopus swam after it, positioning itself so that one end of the amputated arm was in its mouth, and began to devour it like a length of spaghetti. Trip found himself remembering the line from Hesiod that Stavros had quoted:
The boneless one gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home.

Ellis and Gary were looking at each other, their heated exchange apparently forgotten. “Autophagy,” Ellis said.

Gary nodded, although he was visibly repulsed by the sight. “I should have known. Let me check the other specimen.”

“Hold on a second,” Trip said to Ellis. “You’re saying you’ve seen this before?”

“Not exactly, but I’ve heard of it,” Ellis said. “Octopuses are occasionally known to cannibalize themselves. It’s called autophagy. Nobody knows what causes it, but it seems to involve a viral infection of the nervous system. It’s a disease. When you have several octopuses in a single tank, if one starts to eat itself, the others will follow. Death ensues within days.”

Gary returned to the salon. “The third octopus looks fine. It was never in contact with this specimen, so maybe—”

Ellis shook his head. “If we’re dealing with infectious autophagy, it may have spread to the entire school. For all we know, this is what brought them to the surface. The lights are coordinating their behavior. It’s a mass suicide.”

Although his voice remained calm, Ellis was clearly upset. He thrust his bleeding knuckles into his mouth. Trip looked at him, then looked back at the maddened octopus, which had finished eating its own arm. Finally, he looked at his own hands, and felt the last piece fall into place.

“We need to discuss something right now,” Trip said to the others. “Where’s Meg?”

Meg was brought from the stateroom, a fresh bandage on her inside elbow. The crew sat around the table in the salon, looking at Trip. Through the windows, the lights seemed to press against the yacht on all sides.

Trip laid his hands on the table, showing them to the others. “You see this? I’ve been biting my nails for the past couple of days. It’s something I haven’t done in years, but ever since we entered this part of the ocean, I’ve been gnawing them like a maniac. Why? I’m not sure, but I can guess.”

Before anyone else could speak, Trip turned to Ellis. “A moment ago, you punched the wall so hard that your knuckles started to bleed. Is this something that you normally do?”

If Ellis saw where this was going, he was not inclined to play along. “I was upset. I don’t think it means anything.”

“But it wasn’t the first time you’ve done it. I saw the bruises on your hands. This is part of a larger pattern of behavior, and it’s been happening to all of us.” Trip turned to Meg. “Meg, you felt the urge to cut yourself. Stavros, I saw you bite your lip until it drew blood.”

Gary was looking at him with open skepticism. “What exactly are you trying to say?”