“Oh.” Jeanette was surprised to hear she had friends besides Beverly and Duke. She rarely saw the other independent operators to whom Rantoul High Colony was home base, but perhaps their spirit of independence formed a stronger bond than she had realized. Of course, she would have done the same for any one of them—had done, lending a hand where she could to keep the contracts out of the hands of the corporations—but this was the first time she needed help herself. Her vulnerability was unsettling. “Will I have enough to pay my hospital bill?”
“Don’t worry about it. The Seattle Aquarium is taking care of it. They were really concerned about you. Dr. French had a big argument with Maisie Johnson about sending a rescue flight to pick you up while you were on your way back. He was willing to pay for it, but there was no trajectory solution for any of the available ships.”
“That was sweet of him, but he should have let Chipper handle it,” Jeanette said. “Dr. French is a brilliant biologist, but he just doesn’t twig to orbital mechanics.”
“That’s what Maisie said, too. Once he heard you had that octopus with you—”
“Oscar! What happened to Oscar?”
Suddenly, Duke laughed. “I was wondering when you were going remember him,” he said. Despite her concern for the octopus, Jeanette felt herself dimpling into a broad smile as she laboriously turned herself around to face him. She could see the good news on his face; he was grinning at her, waiting for her to ask.
“Well?”
Instead of answering her directly, he ceremoniously lifted the television from the side table and unfolded it. He punched a comm code into the television before handing it to her. The image looked like OceanLab as she had last seen it, vague mist and transparent balls of water floating in front of a wall of buttons and knobs. The spacesuit mounted on the wall looked like hers.
She was relieved when Beverly moved around to stand next to Duke. That way she didn’t have to keep rolling back and forth to see them both. “Mark Blevin wanted us to send him down to Seattle,” Beverly said.
Duke snorted. “No way! When I found him in your suit with you, I thought I’d keep him in a tank at the shop, but as soon as we got him into g, he just slumped to the bottom of the tank and wouldn’t budge. He’d never make it on Earth.”
“Not used to controlling his buoyancy,” Beverly explained.
“That makes sense,” Jeanette said. “He was bom in zero g, never knew anything else. But where is he?”
“Leroy partitioned off a section of his maintenance hanger up at South Cap,” Duke said. “He already had a full-video phone hookup in there. Blevin stopped his squawking when we promised to send him six hours of video a day.”
“And some blood and tissue samples,” Beverly added. “Oscar turned out to be a good patient. He doesn’t complain when you poke him; he just watches.”
“Gonna tell her about Molly?” Duke asked.
Jeanette’s raised eyebrows communicated the inquiry to Beverly.
“You missed Molly,” Beverly said. “We shipped her home yesterday. She’s a big female octopus, actually Oscar’s distant cousin. Dr. Blevin was worried about how long Oscar would live after all he’d been through, so he didn’t waste any time. Molly arrived just a couple days after you got back, first-class cargo from Seattle. I’m afraid your aquatic boyfriend is fickle, Jeanette. He had his hand up her skirt before he even said hello!”
“That’s not true!” Duke protested. “Oscar was the perfect gentlemen. He showed her how to fly in zero g—.”
“Just strutting his stuff,” Beverly said. “Showing off, buzzing around her like a rocket-powered zebra.”
“Did she answer his zebra stripes?” Jeanette asked.
“Well, yes,” Beverly said.
“Then Duke is right; he was a perfect gentleman. That’s their mating display. And he had to reach under her mantle because that’s how they do it. Oscar has two tentacles especially adapted to deposit his packet in the correct place.”
“Oh, all right,” Beverly said. “Spoil my joke, if you must. Anyhow, the aquarium got their sample. ”
“Oscar must be feeling all right if he’s still interested in females,” Jeanette said. “But I can’t see him! Where is he?”
Duke reached over to the television she was holding and switched on its pickups. “Call him.”
She called, carefully using the same tone she had used when she greeted him on regular visits to OceanLab. A whoosh came from the television—no rude noise this time; apparentiy Oscar had learned better control over his jet in air—and suddenly the screen was filled with his eye turret. Black pupil slits rimmed with swirls of gold stared back at her. A second later he backed off and party-whistled in the air with ripples of green and gray flashing along his body. He moved back into close view and patted the top of his eye turret with a tentacle tip, then curled the tentacle into a rough approximation of the letter J.
“He just said hello to you,” Duke said.
Jeanette was startled. She waved to the television and returned the greeting. “He’s all right, breathing air?” she asked.
“We were going to fill his new tank with water, but Oscar seems to like it just the way it is.”
Beverly added, “As long as he keeps his gills wet, he’s probably getting more oxygen than he would in pure water. You can tell when he’s feeling a little dry because he’ll find a water bubble and stuff it under his mantle.”
It felt so good to see Oscar alive and well, Jeanette found her eyes were misting over. She pressed her fingers against the television screen.
“His vocabulary is growing at an astounding rate,” Beverly said.
“He knows words?”
“A couple hundred at least; more every day. Mostly familiar things, water, bubbles, different kinds of fish, and names for the people he’s met. Duke taught him your name by showing him your picture and drawing your first initial on the screen. That’s when it clicked. We think he already had a rudimentary concept of language because he communicates his feelings with his color displays, and he uses his eyes and tentacles to refer to objects at hand. But when Duke showed him a symbol that referred to something that was not present—you, I mean—he twigged to the idea of words as abstractions. That same day he invented his own sign language and started teaching it to us. He talks about you all the time, but I’ve never been able to figure out what he’s saying.”
“But how could a cephalopod—”
“That’s what Dr. Blevin is so excited about,” Beverly said. “They discovered octopi were among the most intelligent creatures on Earth long ago, but what Oscar can do eclipses his terrestrial cousins.” She sighed. “I’m afraid groundhog girls like Molly will always be nothing more than sex objects to him. He couldn’t get her interested in any of the things he had to show her; all she wanted to do was hide. Like all octopi, she has the thirty-lobed brain—”
“Thirty?” Jeanette said. She kept smiling and waving to Oscar through the television screen. He responded with writhing tentacles and patches of color shifting in complex patterns.
“—Uh, huh, they use it mostly for motor control, posture, and color displays. I’ve been studying up on the material Mark Blevin sent. Oscar’s cranial lobes are much larger, way out of proportion to terrestrial octopi. Since he doesn’t have to invest so much of his mind in maintaining posture in a gravity field, he seems to pay attention to other things.”
Oscar darted away from the television, and returned seconds later with one of the maintenance bots that normally inhabited Rantoul’s zero-g caigo holds. The robot’s manipulators were missing, and the joystick controls from a space suit had been added. With a wave and a flash of yellow-green, he jetted off on the robot.