by Hal Clement
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.
She and Thrasher would float, and could therefore breathe, if their strength gave out. Maybe Splasher would find them eventually, but maybe she wouldn’t, and away from the raft there was the problem of food. Worrying, of course, was never much use, but planning might be in order.
Her suit would supply her for a while, but it wasn’t a real full-recycling exploration unit. Thrasher had only the stored food and oxygen he had brought along, and with his size and metabolism those would go quickly. Neither could eat the local life, not even the sort that used DNA and ATP, and neither was carrying the fermenting units which could turn Habranhan biomass of that kind into edible “cheese.” There were four of these back on the raft, two for human and two for Cephallonian use, but none was small enough for even Thrasher to tow conveniently.
So they had to get back to the raft reasonably soon, and their only guide was her tracker. The target Thrasher was hearing had better be the raft, and its failure to respond and the distance discrepancy had better not mean trouble there. Of course, her companion had felt unsure of his distance estimate, she reminded herself; but why the silence?
She keyed out another signal and, a kilometer or so farther on, still another. Thrasher said nothing at either lack of response, but was swimming more slowly. This was a comfort in one way, as her stomach quieted down, but not in the other. How long could the old whale last?
There is no point in worrying, Janice told herself firmly. We can float for days. Maybe we’d better surface now, and just wait. Of course, the surface will be rougher still, and the motions a lot less predictable, but let’s not think of that; we’re facing a practical problem. Splasher is bound to come looking, but of course she won’t have tracking data, and when we started the test dive The Box had a clear image for only a couple of kilometers’ radius. We left the raft straight downward, with no idea of what lateral currents we might meet. She’d have to make a full circle search starting from the raft, and she couldn’t assume we’d have been able to surface. She’d have a hemisphere, not a circle, to explore.
Not so good. We’d better keep going. The closer we are when Thrasher gives out, the smaller the search volume will be, at least.
That is, of course, if we are getting closer.
“It keeps sounding more and more like the raft,” her friend remarked at this point.
“Can you make it?” she keyed.
“Eventually. I wonder why they haven’t answered you?”
The Erthuma still had no explanation to offer, but took the query as a hint to try again. She was getting just a little uneasy about this; each lack of answer made it that much harder not to worry. She had just touched the keypad when Hugh’s voice came through the transducer.
“Hi, there. How deep did you get? Any problems?”
Again his loving wife found the code frustrating. There were so many ways she’d have loved to reply to that one—
She settled for “Any trouble there? You didn’t answer the here-we-are.” She couldn’t even underline the there. Her husband could have read a lot from her voice, but she didn’t have a voice. Now the darling idiot was assuming that the dive had been uneventful, since she hadn’t answered his question.
“Sorry. We’ve been busy. The Box has been making more sense out of its echo data, and has a practically realtime chart of the currents for nearly thirty kilometers horizontally and over three down. They’re really something, aren’t they? We spotted you ten minutes ago, once The Box was able to allow for all the refraction and scattering of sound, and it could tell you were on the way back, but we weren’t in time to see you at depth. How far down did you get? Any useful material? Can we ever get out of here?”
“Of course you weren’t listening, since you could see us.”
“That’s right.” Hugh suddenly seemed to sense a touch of emotion even in the code buzzes. “You are all right, aren’t you?”
“Thrasher’s wearing out. Deep currents even worse. He got more determined to go on the worse they got. I had to use The Order.”
“You didn’t tell me that!” the Cephallonian cut in.
“I was afraid to after you woke up. I thought you’d have guessed. How’s your memory?”
“Well . . .” The translator paused. “I see. Yes, I should have figured that out. Was I really bad?”
A simple yes seemed easier than “You were starting to talk to the currents as though they were personal enemies, we were half a kilo deeper than we had planned for the test limit, and you were swearing by something that wouldn’t translate that you weren’t going to be thwarted and frustrated by something that wouldn’t translate either,” so yes was all Janice keyed.
“Splasher says she bets he’s starving,” Hugh cut in.
Thrasher also limited himself to a simple yes, more because the response delay was still nearly forty seconds than because he couldn’t have expressed himself more forcibly.
“She’s on the way with food, or will be by the time this gets to you. The Box will guide her; she can’t hear you yet herself. Better hold off reporting until she’s close enough not to need help. Relax if you feel like it.”
“We’ll surface,” Thrasher returned. “It’ll be easier to eat with the suit open.”
“I didn’t think.” The man’s voice, clearly contrite, partly overlapped the swimmer’s. “I let her go off with no human food. Do you need any, Jan? Surely you’re not out.”
“All right here. Don’t worry.” She was rather hungry, now that she thought of it and they had stopped charging through verticals, but there was a good supply of the tapelike recycled stuff in her processor. She worked the control that began delivering the strip to her mouth, and bit off a few lengths.
It was fibrous and hard to chew by design, and by the time she had dealt with it satisfactorily Splasher and her companion were able to talk directly to each other. Practically unburdened except by her environment suit and its oxygen tanks, the female Cephallonian had an impressive turn of speed.
“I can’t get echoes from you yet, but I can hear your voice. Keep talking, sweetfish.”
“Sure. We’re going up so I can open up and eat properly. I hope you brought more than concentrate. I’m starved . . .” Thrasher kept talking as ordered, but it became mere babble to Janice.
“Sorry, I wanted to travel fast. There’ll be a real feast back at the raft, if you can still stand cheese. You’d have trouble enjoying it now, anyway; it’s been stormy as ever with at least a dozen spouts since you dived, and it’s just as rough now, so don’t be too casual about opening your hood away from the raft. I think I can get your echo now.”
“Likely. I’m spotting yours, and mine should be stronger with the equipment and Janice. We’re only ten meters down now—you’re right, the waves are still—” The translator gave its burping sign for no-symbol-equivalent, which did not surprise Janice; any Cephallonian language has more words for wave conditions than clothing stylists have for colors. As far as she was concerned, the appropriate word was “terrible”; even at ten meters she was starting to feel the surface roughness. Maybe she shouldn’t have eaten, after all. She knew what the top was like; she had lived enough of it in the last few days. In theory, wind had a long reach—hundreds of kilometers from The Iris, which bore the Habranhan cities and farms, to cloudy Cataract in the strong evaporation zone under the sun. Waves should reasonably have been long and regular. Coriolis effects had to be negligible; not only were they practically at the little world’s equator, but its rotation period was over three weeks.