Short Story: A Conversation With A Starfish

A marine biologist is invited to a remote research base following the return of a recent space expedition.

~

Thirty years of my life, my entire career, had been spent with starfish. Small,

unassuming little creatures, so docile they’ve inspired a common myth that they can’t even move (they do, in fact, using their arms to cartwheel along the sea floor – it’s incredible). I imagine I’ve spent more time among them than I have with my own kind. I’ve even got a tank of them in my living room; I used to cover it with a sheet when I brought home dates, embarrassed by my own girlish fascination, but I ended up feeling too guilty about scaring the poor things by plunging them into darkness. Silly, I’m aware. I wrote my dissertation on their behavioural patterns, published journal articles on methods for their conservation – not many people were interested. At least I had assumed so.

‘Dr Campbell, thank you for coming.’

I was certainly not expecting my research to win me an audience with the Director of the International Space Exploration Association. 

‘I-It’s no problem,’ I stammered, when what I really wanted to say was you phoned me in the middle of the night and said you were chartering me a plane; did you seriously think I wouldn’t come?

‘I’m Walter Tedrow. I’ve been reading your work.’

‘I’m not sure how useful marine biology is in space, Sir,’ I said, then quickly added: ‘But I’m happy to be here. I actually stayed up last week just to watch the rocket’s re-entry.’

‘Quite a sight, wasn’t it?’ 

He stood from behind his desk – no more than a plastic table hurriedly set up and strewn with papers – and moved to stand in front of me.

‘I’m sure you’re wondering why we’ve brought you out here,’ he said, buttoning up his lab coat. I nodded: the Saharan heat was already forming beads of sweat on my forehead even with the research base’s air conditioning. 

‘I couldn’t disclose much over the phone,’ he continued. He was moving towards the door. ‘And even now –’ he laughed – ‘I’m not sure what to say. I think, if you’ll excuse the cliché, that it might be best if I just show you.’

He led me down sterile hallways to a cavernous white room, as big as an aircraft hangar. Most of it was taken up by a glass tank not unlike the little paradise I’d built for my starfish at home. Dozens of people buzzed around it like white-coated flies, parting as Tedrow and I approached. 

‘Have a look inside, tell me what you think.’

He pushed me up to the glass, and I stared down into another world. The tank was full of slow-moving, five-limbed creatures, hundreds of them at least. They were pulsating and slimy in that familiar way, but much bigger than the starfish I had back home, easily the size of my head. Each was perfectly translucent: under their skin I could see nerves and organs, none of which I recognised, and in their central disks was a coiled tentacle writhing. Their version of intestines, maybe? In each of them, from within their bodies, tiny flashes of light sparked along their limbs in dazzling sequence.

‘The crew only took fifty or so from Europa,’ Tedrow said. I couldn’t pull my eyes from the creatures to look at him, although I imagine he was just as entranced as me. ‘But six years is a long time to be stuck on a ship. They started a breeding program.’ 

‘Europa?’ I echoed. ‘They’re aliens?’ 

Tedrow laughed beside me. ‘You didn’t think the ISEA had gotten into discovering new species here on Earth, did you?’

‘Why bring them here? Are they dangerous?’ 

‘Not at all. As far as we can tell they’re completely harmless. No venom, no stingers, no teeth. A species of pacifists.’

‘Perhaps we could learn a thing or two,’ I said with a smile.

He took me to the lab next, white and windowless. On some of the tables, tanks with one small alien in each – on others, lifeless translucent bodies split open or dismembered. I shrank back from the sight.

‘Sir, my job is to observe,’ I said sheepishly. ‘I don’t do dissection.’ 

‘I know,’ Tedrow said, undeterred. ‘I just want to show you something.’ 

He led me closer to one of the tiny tanks in which a single starfish-alien sat unmoving, each of its five limbs removed. Tubes burrowed deep into its body, connected to a machine. 

‘We’ve run exhaustive tests,’ he said. ‘They have no bones, so we’ve had to take biopsies from the organs. This one appears to be only three weeks old – but it’s one of the originals we took from Europa.’ I watched the creature begin to halfheartedly light up in our presence. The pattern was repetitive. 

‘Lots of starfish here on Earth have regenerative properties,’ I said. ‘We already know that. What’s the need for all this?’ 

‘Dr Campbell, you’re not understanding me.’ Tedrow gestured emphatically to the tortured little thing. ‘They are regenerating on a cellular level. Constantly. They do not age.’ 

It seemed the ISEA really had just brought me to the aliens for my observations; I spent the next few weeks isolated in a private office with three of my very own. One had been born here, on the farm they’d set up to birth subjects for experimentation. One was the result of breeding program-related boredom on the ship. And one had come from Europa itself. I named them according to age, after stars, of course – Swift, Vega, and old Methuselah – and kept them in a tank altogether too small for them on my desk. Tedrow wanted me to apply my knowledge of their Earthly counterparts to better understand the aliens’ behaviour, and I spent most of my time just watching them, noting similarities and differences. In other parts of the research base they’d brought on linguists to try and decode the patterns of light that sparked across their bodies. Over the weeks they expanded their live experiments and vivisections, testing the limits of the creatures’ regeneration. I didn’t pay many visits to that. For a time I was cautious, abiding by Tedrow’s one and only rule for my work:

‘Don’t let them out of the tank. We had a few incidents on the ship of the things trying to climb the crew. They’re a real pain to unstick.’

It didn’t last forever.

Over time, I started to compare the starfish-aliens’ similarities and differences not to those I had studied all my life, but to us. It seemed they and I had a lot more in common.

• 25th June, 8:44pm: Swift seems to want to play. He’s using rocks to hide behind, and each time Vega goes still for about ten seconds before exploring the tank, looking for him. Methuselah doesn’t get too involved; she seems pretty committed to staying against the glass where I am, as close as she can get to me. She seems particularly curious.

• 27th June, 9:06am: I think Methuselah has figured out that ‘knocking’ is a human way of getting one’s attention. She has started mimicking the pattern of knocks at my door with one of her arms against the glass. She’s not got eyes, of course, but I can feel her staring. 

• 30th June, 11:37pm: Methuselah has a new nightly routine. After she’s checked on Swift and Vega, who sleep beside each other in the tank’s darkest corner, she climbs the glass and begins to knock. But now she has started combining this with a pushing motion on the lid of the tank. She does this repetitively, whenever I’m looking. When I get close, she starts to light up and the knocks get more insistent. I don’t think I need to consult the linguists to figure out what she’s trying to say here.

I felt my work was pointless. Methuselah and her kind were clearly highly intelligent, far surpassing the starfish I’d studied. All I did was sit there and keep them enclosed like a prison guard while dozens of them were born each day, ready to be brought to the lab and dissected alive. What were they even hoping to achieve? A reversal of ageing? Immortality? Cures for cancer and dementia, perhaps, but at the expense of – what? Thousands of helpless, sentient minds?

One night, with great care, I lifted Methuselah out of the tank. Swift and Vega watched but made no move to escape. They were leaving this task to their oldest. I held her up to my face, gazing in awe. I could feel her slimy arms suckering onto my skin.

‘Can you understand me?’ I said softly. ‘Flash once if yes.’ 

She didn’t flash. Obviously. I’m not sure what I expected. Instead, she began to move slowly, dragging herself up my wrists and climbing my left arm. As she did so, she started pulsating with light. I let it happen, half-hypnotised by the rhythmic sequence of sparks. They had been rejected every time they’d previously tried this; perhaps my real job here was to embrace what they wanted. I watched the organs beneath her skin writhe as she reached my neck, and felt the cool sensation of her body come to rest against my cheek. One eye was open under her, and I could see right through, watching the tentacle in her central disk shift and loosen. I hadn’t been able to see before because it had been so tightly coiled, but its end was spiked with a hundred little spines.

It was painless. Yes, I could feel the tissue of my eye folding in on itself as she pushed her tentacle into the cavity, but she was slow and gentle, and the only unpleasant sensation was the coldness of her body. There was a slight prickling as the spiked end burrowed into the soft flesh of my brain. With my other eye, I looked into the tank at Swift and Vega. They were watching. 

‘Let your colleagues know there is no point in trying to decode our language,’ said a voice inside my head, as if an extension of my own thoughts. ‘This is the only way we will speak.’

‘Oh my God – Methuselah? I have so many questions.’ It felt like I was having a conversation with myself. ‘Uh, I’m sorry about the tank. Not my call.’ 

‘We’re lucky compared to the others,’ Methuselah replied. I felt my guts twist uncomfortably. So I was right, then, about their level of perception. 

‘Yes, you were. You aren’t the only one. Many of your kind are beginning to understand that we’re smarter than we appear. You, however, seem to be the only one who cares.’

‘Well, it’s – it’s my job,’ I said. ‘Compassion for strange-looking creatures is kind of my whole thing.’

‘Good. Then you were the right choice.’

‘Choice?’ 

I took this moment to glance into the mirror. Methuselah’s body covered half my face and through her skin I could see the dark tunnel where my eye used to be. Panic surged up but was met each time by a cold wall, unable to jolt me to action. I suspected Methuselah had something to do with that.

‘Our intelligence may be far superior, but your kind has something we do not. Mobility. Dexterity. With your hands, you were able to build cities. Create technology to speak across oceans. Even leave your own planet. The only thing you lack is longevity.’

‘Well, yes. That’s why they brought you all here, I’m afraid.’

‘Our cells are incompatible. You will never be able to regenerate as we do, not on your own.’

I stared into the mirror at Methuselah and me. I could feel her tentacle like a rod through my skull, slowly being warmed by my body heat, reaching equilibrium. 

‘So what do you want from us? You want to take our bodies?’

‘I have chosen you to speak to,’ Methuselah said, ‘so that you in turn could make a choice. We have no intention of harming your kind. In fact, we want to share. Our knowledge of the universe for your technical skill. Our long lifespans for your dexterous hands. Say the words and I will detach from you, and use my body to heal your eye. Or we can work together. Free my siblings from your experiments and usher your race into a new age.’

‘How long have you lived? I mean, have you all been watching us from Europa?’

‘I have lived for millennia. I can share it all with you.’ Methuselah’s tentacle twitched inside my head. ‘We have been waiting all those years. We didn’t know when, or in what form, but we knew that eventually, a race like yours would come. For us, this day has been planned since the beginning of time. Now – your choice.’

I studied the mirror. I looked inhuman with her on my face. Perhaps posthuman. She sensed my hesitation.

‘Wouldn’t you like to live forever?’