Complete Short Fiction, page 262
“Not very well. Generally up. Water carries sound too fast; we get direction by knowing which wing the sound waves hit first. I don’t see how I can guide you; I don’t know which way the ship is pointing when you talk. You’ll have to find me.”
“But I can’t get any direction either, from inside the sphere.”
“Then when you reach the bottom—pardon me, Janice, the shelf—you’ll have to come outside and listen. Then you can give steering directions to Bill—for that matter, you can just have him follow you.”
“But how do I get outside? I’d have to evacuate the lock sphere again, and we’d start going up.”
“You’ll just have to be quick.”
“I suppose so.”
“Then our troubles are over,” Venzeer gloated. “As long as you don’t go deaf before you get to the bottom.”
“My wings are as good as yours,” retorted the illustrator. “Have you found all the ballast down there?”
“We haven’t counted very carefully,” Hugh responded, not worrying how the code added to the suspense of his hearers. “There were five thousand hundred-kilo ingots of copper in the tanks, as I recall. Venz found a real hill of the things before we got back together. The few Jan and I had turned up were just strays; I don’t think they mean much, but we’ve toted them back to the main pile. Just keep driving down. You can’t have gone very far sideways.”
This proved an optimistic guess. The sub had gone out of range of even the Compromise’s lights; she struck sharply on the solid surface of the shelf without having been spotted by the watchers below. It seemed to be dark, hard, semitransparent ice, level as far as Bill could tell, very different from the hillside the Compromise had originally struck. There was much vegetation, some of which was disintegrating, bubbling furiously, where crushed by the sub’s arrival. Presumably azide and enzymes, released and allowed to meet by the rupture of cell walls and organelles, were reacting to give free nitrogen—one of the known contributing causes of storms elsewhere in the ocean. The bubbles vanished almost instantly as the gas cooled and went into solution in two thousand atmospheres of pressure.
Rekchellet could not see any of this, since his sphere was still frosted, and Bill didn’t notice; it was nothing unusual to him. Venzeer heard the rushing, boiling sound briefly, and then the ship’s thrusters when he listened more carefully.
“Are you down?” he called.
“Yes,” replied Rekchellet. “You can’t see our lights, I assume. I’ll get outside. Bill, I’ll have to evacuate the lock, so you probably can’t keep us on the bottom for the next minute or two.”
“No matter.”
Even the Erthumoi could hear the sea rushing into the lock sphere, but in their armor could make no guess at the sound’s direction. Venzeer was pretty sure of it, and indicated to the others which way they should look.
“I’m outside,” the recorder called finally. “Make some kind of noise.”
Venzeer began talking. Hugh picked up one of the copper slugs and let it fall on another. Rekchellet was able to hear both sounds, but reported that the second was much clearer.
“Can you tell the direction?” asked his practical companion. There was a pause; Hugh, without instructions, continued his metal-on-metal broadcast.
“This way, I think, Bill.” Rekchellet swam slowly away from the sub.
“What do you mean, you think?” cried Venzeer.
“I can’t get rid of the feeling you may be behind me instead of in front. I keep feeling sure first you’re one way, then the other.”
“Can you feel or see any currents?” asked Janice.
“Sure. The plants show those. If I stop swimming, I’m carried past them. They lean, too.”
“Do we seem to be up or downstream from you.”
“Up.”
“That makes sense. You would have been carried down while you were out of sight.”
Rekchellet was impressed by this point; Bill was not. “You can’t expect currents to hold direction for any time,” the native pointed out. Janice had already made her point about the chaotic nature of Habranha’s weather and was not ready to dispute the voice of experience, but her husband offered what seemed to be the only sensible advice.
“Keep on the way you are, and let us know if the currents change. I’ll keep tapping.”
For fully half an hour the journey continued. To Bill’s admitted surprise, the current remained steady. Travel was slow, much slower than Rekchellet could have flown, because Bill had a great deal of difficulty steering the sub; most of its main drive had to be used to keep it near the bottom even with the lock full of water; and since the thruster itself was fixed in the hull, the Compromise had to travel almost nose down. Once, Rekchellet reported that the guiding sound was getting weaker, but after some discussion it was decided that this represented Hugh getting tired and dropping the ingot from a lower height. He and his wife standardized the dropping distance and took turns at the muscle work, and Rekchellet and the submarine continued their original direction.
Venzeer and his companions strained their eyes in the direction the Crotonite had first claimed to hear the sub’s thruster, until Hugh noticed that this was also the direction from which the current was coming, and after some hesitation mentioned the fact. Thereafter they divided their attention both ways until a faint glow became visible—downcurrent. No one discussed the directional ambiguity of sound, even though one Crotonite had been right. Tact was still the order of the day.
“Told you my wings were good enough,” was the only remark made. This was by the recorder as Bill brought the submarine to a halt as close to the pile of ingots as he could. Venzeer said nothing.
But Rekchellet’s wings were not good enough for something else. Neither were Venzeer’s or Bill’s. None of them could lift one of the ingots alone, and the various rope slings which were improvised to let the Crotonites work together proved very awkward. A hundred-kilogram mass of copper, underwater in Habranhan gravity, weighs just over fifteen kilograms. A few hundred pieces of copper were moved by the flyers, but the rest were carried from pile to tanks by the wingless members of the team. A fifteen-kilogram weight means something to a pair of Erthuma legs when swim fins are involved, but with the structure of a Habranhan submarine there is no need to swim. One can climb very easily.
It was several days’ work, and man and wife were rather exhausted at the end of the job. They didn’t argue very hard when Bill pointed out regretfully that there was no way of getting to the Solid Ocean on one main thruster. They’d just have to try again.
They also refrained from making any remarks about relative flying skills. Janice still liked the Crotonites, and even her husband admitted that the flyers had put up well with the display of their personal inadequacy, though they couldn’t have been very happy about it. Or, as Hugh remarked in an afterthought, really appreciative of what the Erthumoi had done for them.
“Why should they be?” asked his wife. “The ground crawlers were saving their own lives, too.”
III. Between
Hugh still considered them ungrateful, and so he even tried to convince his wife, until they were back in atmosphere and could talk normally again. A day after getting rid of the diving fluid, revived by appropriate relaxation, they met with Bill and the Crotonites for a planning session on the next trip. Hugh fully expected the latter to say they didn’t want Erthumoi along. He knew such a reaction would be illogical, but he still regarded Crotonites as illogical beings; after all, they had a low opinion of people who couldn’t fly, didn’t they?
Venzeer and his companion greeted them cordially, however, making the man wonder what they were hiding. The discussion lasted several hours and involved redesign of the covers for the ballast tanks, methods of fastening the individual ingots in place, and other perfectly reasonable matters. Venzeer even suggested that some progress might be expected in development of a diving fluid for Crotonites. It was agreed, however, that this was not something they should wait for.
The meeting ended with many points settled, and agreement that it would be resumed the next day. As they parted, Rekchellet handed Janice a sheet of record film.
“I thought this was worth saving,” he remarked.
The Erthuma couple looked at the picture, obviously a record from Rekchellet’s drawing pad. For a moment, there seemed nothing special about it; it was a well-done sketch of two Erthumoi, with Hugh’s and Janice’s faces easily recognizable. It was not a record of anything they remembered from the trip, though the background included the Compromise and some flying figures which might have been William and the Crotonites. The Erthumoi figures, however, looked a little strange; they were wearing cloaklike garments which neither remembered having used on either journey, even that on the iceberg, or any other time since reaching Habranha.
Janice was first to see that Rekchellet was an artist, not just an illustrator.
The garments weren’t cloaks. They weren’t even garments. He had portrayed the Erthumoi with wings.
1992
Eyeball Vectors
THE BACKGROUND WAS DARK TO BOTH ERTHUMOI and Cephallonians fifty meters down. Habranha’s sun, an M-type dwarf, had little of the blue and green light that might have penetrated that far, and here at The Cataract was usually hidden by clouds anyway. Frequent specks and threads of luminous plankton appeared in front of the travelers and fell quickly behind, but Janice had only one interest in these. Even the rare explosive ones were usually too small to be dangerous, but they did provide a little warning of Thrasher’s maneuvers.
The Cephallonian was avoiding the larger plants with his usual grace, now swerving sharply one way or the other, now diving or rising as suddenly. He could trust most animals to dodge him. The carrier in which Janice rode, on the right side of his suit, was full of water to make it match the bulk and drag-of the oxygen tanks on his left, so she was not being thrown around; but for the first time in years she was feeling motion sickness. If she couldn’t have seen what was coming, it would have been much worse. Happily the vertical currents in particular were outlined most of the time by the glowing dots, lines, and patches of Habranha’s more electric life forms.
She was not sure what nausea could do when one’s body cavities and breathing passages were full of diving fluid, and she didn’t want to find out. Eating took care enough, and vomiting might be really dangerous. The reflexes that normally let only gas into the human windpipe had had to be blocked to let her use the pressure-guarding liquid. No one had known how far down the Pupil Study Group’s work might lead it into the little world’s ocean, but someone had to be ready for a deep dive. It was merely funny that the someone had to be an Erthuma rather than a Cephallonian. The cetaceoids had personal limits of a few kilometers, and their technology had never produced anything like the pressure fluid.
Janice tried to keep her mind off the possibilities by conversation. This took much attention, since it had to be by code; human vocal cords don’t work in liquid.
“Can you spot them yet, Thrash?” she keyed.
“Not certainly,” replied the Cephallonian. He could speak normally, since there was water inside his suit as well as outside, and the translator could handle sounds in both water and air. “There’s something which seems big enough ahead of us and, I think, at the surface, but I can’t make it out clearly. Too many verticals and density variants around to distort the sound, and too much suspended, floating, and swimming junk besides. It does seem to have edge behavior like the raft, though; surface waves are damped as they approach it, if I’m interpreting correctly. That could be the deck.”
Janice didn’t want to hear about vertical currents. They were the main cause of her discomfort. An ocean should be quiet near the substellar point of a tide-locked planet, where only simple evaporation ought to be taking place, but Habranha had its own ideas about practically everything. Very little on this world was simple.
She and her husband had learned this the hard way earlier, in the Sclera section near the edge of the dark hemisphere. The ice there was water, relatively pure except for trapped silicate dust. Ammonia stayed mostly in liquid solution at that low temperature; near the dark rim, an Erthuma could breathe the air without too much discomfort—for a while, as it also contained traces of hydrogen cyanide. The planet, however, was largely ice, like Titan or Triton in the Solarian system; and since it was close enough to its small sun for the ice to melt on one hemisphere, there was a very deep ocean made principally of water but holding much dissolved ammonia and suspended solids such as silicate grains, various phases of water ice, and an enormous variety of biological material. Warm water could not be depended upon to rise, or cold to sink; ammonia and other content could rule otherwise. An iceberg might be carried up or down in a density current and change phase as it reached a pressure boundary, either abruptly or at some unpredictable later time when it finally yielded to internal stresses, shattering to fragments or to dust and releasing or absorbing enough heat to invalidate the most detailed calculations. The weird behavior in the ocean was reflected in the overlying atmosphere; native Habranhan meteorologists were far more skillful than the visiting aliens who were sometimes arrogant enough to try to teach them their own art. They still, however, had poorer prediction scores than did those aliens on their own worlds. Hence the arrogance.
Far from the ice hemisphere, past The Iris, the ring-shaped floating continent of merged icebergs, and on to the center of The Pupil, the ice-free sunward ocean, it seemed as though things should be simpler. They weren’t. Janice Cedar, her husband Hugh, and the two Cephallonians who formed with them the Pupil Study Group knew now they were all in trouble, though they had not yet accepted that they were doomed.
“How far?” she asked. Some seconds passed before Thrasher’s voice came from the translator. “I can’t be sure. If it’s really the raft, then I’d say about twenty kilometers. I can’t get any of my own echoes, though. All I’m spotting seems to be wave sounds from the source, so distance is guesswork. That’s why I think it’s at the surface, and can hope it’s what we want. Why don’t you try calling? Your low-frequency stuff gets through better, and an answer would give us travel time. Hugh’ll be listening, I expect.”
If he weren’t, the woman thought, it wouldn’t matter; The Box will be. And I hope it isn’t really twenty kilometers; the tracker says it should be seventeen point seven one, and even this turbulence shouldn’t have thrown it that badly off. She switched to her outside transducer and tapped out a here-we-are. The Box’s response, at Thrasher’s distance guess, should take about fifty-five seconds, but one would have to allow a bit more for human reaction and decision time if Hugh were involved.
After a minute and a half, the cetaceoid voiced the more pessimistic interpretation. “Not the right target, I guess. I hope you’re not getting worried.”
“Should I be?”
“Well, frankly, if that’s not the raft, I have no idea which way we should be going. I suppose we can trust your tracker? It said we should head this way when we came back up—or at least you told me it did when I got my senses back. You seemed pretty sure of it. That was as rough a dive as I’ve ever made, though, and even this leg of the swim has been pretty snaky.”
“It isn’t a planetary range instrument, but it should be good within a few centimeters in what we’ve logged so far. The raft should be just under eighteen kilos, in the direction we’re heading right now—or were half a second ago.” Thrasher had swerved again to avoid a larger than usual patch of luminous weed. It took him several seconds more to come up with an answer. He might have been concerned with the weed, a type that was normally highly charged, or with something entirely different.
“Then why no response to your call?”
“Hugh and The Box could both be busy, and Splasher probably wouldn’t have heard it even if she’s there. She could be away for any of a hundred reasons.”
“But you’re not worried?”
Janice repeated her evasive counter. “Should I be?”
“Well, I’m getting a little tired. Fighting turbulence is work. It’s lucky the downs are denser so our buoyancy helps, and the ups less dense with the same result.”
“That’s not luck. It’s laws of physics.”
“I know. But isn’t it lucky the laws are on our side?” The woman might have answered this if she had had the use of her voice, since several responses occurred to her at once. However, spelling out philosophy via code key seemed hardly worth the trouble. The Cephallonian paused only briefly for an answer, and gossiped on. “Can’t you imagine what these verticals would be like in decent gravity?”
Janice could, but didn’t want to. Decent gravity for either of them was roughly five times that at Habranha’s surface, and convection currents are driven by gravity as well as density difference. Also, she was getting just a little worried. If Thrasher were actually tired, they could really be in trouble, something more immediate than the basic problem of the whole group. Swimming even two or three kilometers alone would take her hours, and the thought of towing her huge companion would have been funny if it weren’t so grim. She was of fairly standard Erthuma-female proportions, a hundred and fifty-four centimeters standing height by forty-five kilograms of mass. Thrasher, while much better streamlined hydrodynamically, had over ten times her mass, and even adjusted to neutral or slightly positive buoyancy would have represented a hopeless task for towing.
Deserting him never occurred to her.
Her own buoyancy was set slightly positive, of course. Her companion’s should be even more so now that a lot of his oxygen must have been used. Habranha’s partial pressure of the gas was high by Erthuma standards, allowing Hugh and Janice to make do with filters when out of water, but not by Cephallonian ones, though the swimmers could survive at low activity without extra supplies.
