The kids exchanged an expression. Collie Baxter said, “I think it’s time.” Baxter was a year younger than Joanie, and like most of the other NextGen, followed her lead.
“Time for what?”
“For you to meet some friends.” Even among these, Collie had a reputation as a computer wizard. He was bigger than Cadzie, resembled a shaved bear, and his attitude was either truculent or . . what? Guilty?
Mysterious, Cadzie thought. And more serious than playful.
They led Cadzie and Aaron back to the dam, up through the back entrance and the spiral staircase. And from there to the observation booth. “What do you see?” Joan asked.
“Horseshoe Falls? The dam? Oh, hey!” An arc of ruby torpedoes flashed out of the water below the dam. They rose like rockets, keeping formation, over the rim of the dam and into the water upstream.
Joan snapped, “No, not just the speedfish!” She handed him a fat pair of night-vision goggles.
“That’s only the second time I’ve ever seen speedfish. Wow, they went right over the dam!”
He fiddled with the lens rocker, and now, finally saw something unexpected. Squid-shapes, crawling up the dam’s sloping wall. “What in the hell are those?”
Aaron’s single eye stared. Then he began to curse under his breath.
Joan’s lips twisted with a sheepish, lopsided grin. “We call them cthulhus.”
“Lovecraft? As in ‘In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’?”
“We . . um . . .” Joan cleared her throat. “Among the Starborn, we call the dam R’lyeh. Just among us.”
Aaron bit the word, “Cute.”
“When we first built the dam, it seemed to interfere with their ability to travel upstream . . we thought there must be a spawning ground up there, but now we know they only breed in brackish water, so we really don’t know why they want to go up this stream. They really want to, though. Just watch.”
Cadzie brought up his phone. “Cassandra, what am I looking at?”
“No formal name. Called cthulhus by the Starborn. Aquatic animals who breed in brackish water. First observed fifteen years ago.”
“They are using tools. What other tool-using activities do we know of?”
There was a noticeable pause. “Very few,” Cassandra replied in her never-changing voice.
“Have they been studied?”
“Ask Joan. I can’t tell you,” Cassandra said.
“What do you mean you can’t tell me?” Cadzie demanded. “You know who I am!”
“I have no knowledge to give you,” Cassandra said.
“That’s the weirdest conversation I ever had with Cassie,” he told Joan. “You heard?”
She frowned, a troubled expression. Or perhaps one of exasperation. Cadzie couldn’t tell. “I heard.”
She didn’t say anything else, and that was even more puzzling. He lifted the night glasses and looked more carefully. The creatures were big; maybe two meters long, but they could reach much farther. There was a gap where the ladder of the steps was replaced by smooth concrete. And . . were they carrying something?
As he watched open-mouthed, one of the squids extended a rigid pole of some kind (what was that? Bamboozle?) across a gap too wide for its sinuous arms to bridge, and then shimmied across, rather like an ape with more arms than a statue of Kali.
“Holy cow,” he heard himself mutter. “Those things are smart.”
Aaron snarled. “How could I not know this? Joanie? I knew the cthulhus were here, but—tool users? Fifteen years you hid this!”
“Yes, they are smart.” She ignored her father. “We estimate them to be as smart as chimpanzees. Maybe dolphins, but with better tool-using.”
“What the hell?” Cadmann watched them again. The pole-user looked as if it was chewing the far end of the bamboozle, and when it finished it climbed onward, and the next creature in line began the climb. The chewing action seemed to have fixed it in place. Regurgitating some kind of adhesive substance, perhaps? Something else?
He sat down, hard. “All right. What are we really looking at?”
“They communicate across a greater harmonic spectrum than dolphins, with what seem to be more discreet data packets, apparent repetition of words and phrases.” Joanie’s voice was flat.
“They have language?” He felt like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach.
“We think so, yes. It’s more complicated than the dolphin signals, so we’re confident that it is some form of communication.”
Her voice had been—formal, as if she’d been lecturing to a class. Cadzie waited a moment, but when it was clear that Joanie wasn’t going to say anything else, he spoke into his phone. “Cassandra. Tool-using creatures that resemble squid. Short summary. What do we know about them?”
“I have no knowledge to give you.”
“Cassandra. Do you mean you don’t know, or that you can’t tell me what you know?”
“I have no knowledge to give you.”
The room spun, and he felt as if he wanted to puke. He turned to Joan, fighting the urge to tense his fingers into claws. “How long have you known about them? I mean, wow. You just discovered them, right? That’s why Cassandra doesn’t know. This is huge.”
Collie looked sheepish. “Ummm . . no. We’ve known about them for, ah . . fifteen years.”
“I’ve known they existed for more than sixteen years,” Aaron said. “Maybe a bit more. Nobody ever told me there was any reason to learn more about them.” He looked quizzically at Joanie. “Apparently there was?”
“What the hell! You just found out they were intelligent though, right?”
“Ah . . no.” She couldn’t meet his eyes. “We’ve known that, since we first found them. You got there late that night, Aaron.”
Cadmann stared at her, disbelieving. There had to be a silver lining to this cloud, but he was having trouble finding it. “Are they . . herbivores?” Pretty please.
“Ah . . no.”
Cadzie chewed his lip. “Are they at least aquatic . . no, obviously they’re amphib.” What a mess. “Christ. I don’t believe this. All right. Tell me, please, that they’ve never hurt a human being.”
Joan looked away. “I can’t say that, either.”
“What? Who? When?”
“Jennifer? Tell him.”
Cadzie had barely noticed when the older woman entered. Jennifer Sharpton was one of the first Starborn, Aaron’s age, wearing a shapeless muumuu over a thin muscular frame. She’d been one of the den mothers when Cadzie had been a Grendel Scout. What was she doing over here on the mainland? At the dam?
“It was sixteen years ago,” Jennifer said slowly. “We lost Archie. My boyfriend. The cthulhus killed him at Surf’s Up. Aaron was there.”
Aaron gave a long, slow lizard blink. Somehow, Cadzie found his confusion comforting. “Long time ago. But yes, cthulhus killed Archie because he had a grendel painted on his board. Haven’t thought about it in a long time.”
“Archie’s surfboard had grendels painted on both sides,” Jennifer said. “Not the smartest thing to do, but at the time we thought it was . . cool. Wild grendel sightings are fewer here than in waterways not used by cthulhus. We figure this means cthulhus and grendels are natural enemies from way back.”