Ocean Under the Ice

by Robert L. Forward

  “Get down!” yelled Richard, as the top of the tunnel started to push down on the top of his head. Bright-Eye was now lying flat upon its own carpeted path, its eye stalk contracted until its eye was resting beside its larger globular head. The tough sixed-lobed nictitating membrane of the eye was closed tightly shut over the vulnerable eyeball. The ice itself was echoing, in grotesque parody, the groaning sounds of the terrified icerug.

  Richard had heard those sounds from ice before, from icebergs and glaciers, as they deformed and stretched, before succumbing to the irresistible forces that shaped them. What chance had puny humanity against such elemental power? Deirdre was alarmed, he saw, but she had no real inkling of the tremendous danger they were in. The humans, first stooping, and then kneeling in the slowly contracting ice tunnel, were forced to the floor along with the icerug by the slowly collapsing ceiling.

  “Deirdre! Make an arch!” gasped Richard, crawling towards the vulnerable eye and head of the alien and curving his body over them. Deirdre slithered over to cover the icerug’s eye, and interlinking one arm and one leg with Richard’s, added her strength to his, endeavoring to use their combined muscles and bones in a probably futile attempt to resist the deadly, increasing contraction of the ice.

  “Increase suit pressure!” shouted Deirdre to her suit imp, and Richard understood. Instantly, both people demanded pressure increases within their carefully engineered suits, and soon — yawning violently to alleviate ears popping with pain — they were answered with many atmospheres of internal suit pressure. The tough glassy-foil suits stiffened, swelling until the elbow joints were locked and rigid. The pressure from the ice above grew. Foxx’s small body trembled and chittered against Deirdre’s throat; however, at a soft command, the animal was still.

  The entire head of Bright-Eye was now glowing in fright, and in the weird blue bioluminescent glow, Deirdre was amazed to see her gloved hands slowly sinking into the ice. She knew that even with the stiffened sleeves of the suit helping to keep her elbow joints from bending, the bones in her wrists and forearms weren’t strong enough to do that. Once her arms had penetrated into the ice above her elbows, however, the ice froze about the suit material, adding support. The same thing was happening to Richard. They were both sinking into the ice. But instead of her torso crushing down on the vulnerable eye of the icerug they were trying to shield, Bright-Eye’s eye and head sections seemed to sink into the ice too, until finally Deirdre’s chest was supported by the icy floor of the tunnel, while the Bright-Eye’s eye was safe in a cavity in the ice below her. Deirdre was now completely encased in ice and could no longer even move her helmet to look around.

  At this point the distressed sounds of moving ice ceased, and the three felt all motion within the now-shrunken tunnel stop. The sudden silence registered in Richard’s mind, and he felt a surge of hope; they were still alive, although in such perilous circumstances he could hardly comprehend them. Trapped, cut off from everyone, and surrounded by unyielding ice meters thick — they had little chance of escape.

  Less knowledgeable about the severity of their situation, Deirdre attempted to relax her quivering muscles and assess their predicament.

  “Right, Richard, make an arch, you said, and that we’ve done. A fine, sturdy one, too! How long will it take to dig us out, d’you think?”

  “Assuming they find us,” said Richard, trying to sound calm.

  “Only a small segment of the tunnel has collapsed,” said the booming voice of Bright-Eye, slightly muffled by the close proximity of the ice close around them. The voice of the alien was now steady and sure, and devoid of panic. “I will have us out shortly.”

  The humans’s view of their surroundings vanished in a blur of aquamarine, as Bright-Eye enveloped their inflated suits with dissolving chemicals from its own body. Then, in the same way that it had melted away the ice under the humans’s stiffened hands and feet, and from under its own head and eye to form safe cavities in the ice, the alien set to work dissolving the constricting ice around them, melting it away with amazing speed, and depositing the resultant water into the ocean below through its distant waste tunnel. It was less than an hour later when the humans again stood upright, their suits restored to normal pressure, with Bright-Eye standing tall beside them, poised on its pedestal on its ribbon of aquamarine.

  “I owe you my life,” it said. “I owe you flesh. My students owe you flesh. My Center owes you flesh. My nation owes you flesh.” Deirdre was slightly appalled at this, wishing that her suit translator could find another word than “flesh”. Deirdre picked up a word that the translation program had used. “Students?” As all three creatures proceeded slowly along the tunnel, feeling almost a comradeship after their shared danger, Bright-Eye explained.

  “I and my laboratory are part of the Center of Scientific Studies. I seek new ways to use the natural materials we have available, and new combinations and uses for the products which we make ourselves. I have young icerugs about me, to learn what I can teach them, and they of course have ideas of their own. They help support me with their flesh, and the rest of my need for flesh is provided by the Center of Scientific Studies, from what they collect routinely from their portion of the assessments levied by the Governing Council. My students are many, just now. For your acts of preserving the life of their teacher they will be willing to provide you with some of their flesh whenever you wish it.”

  Richard and Deirdre exchanged a look, but could think of nothing to say. Fortunately, the widening tunnel they were traveling along soon opened into a spacious room, lined with shelves of reading plates and filled with strange equipment. The functions of some of them were instantly recognizable from their shapes, while others were so strange that neither human would have hazarded a guess at its purpose.

  “A grand analytical balance, with a double-pivot knife-edge suspension system,” said Deirdre, pointing to a double-pan scale, complete with stacks of graduated weights lined up before it. “Very accurate, that’ll be.”

  Bright-Eye’s booming tones called a sort of greeting to the several icerugs in the laboratory, each busy with its own eye directed at some task. They collected about the newcomers, and at the conclusion of Bright-Eye’s introduction of the two humans, and a narrative of the recent rescue by them, each of the students declared its debt of flesh. The apprehensive humans were relieved to discover that this was apparently simply an acknowledged debt that could be called in at any time; no alien actually presented them with a portion of itself. Bright-Eye was eager to have its students see and understand the flashlights of the humans. Both humans produced their permalights and turned them on. They noticed that the icerugs turned to avoid the light directly coming into their own eye.

  “Their eyes are more sensitive than ours, and well I know I don’t like one of these shining right in my own eyes, indeed,” murmured Deirdre. After that, both humans were careful to direct the powerful beams onto the floor, or the work at hand, rather than the aliens themselves. Demonstration of the tool led to explanation and analysis. The quick intelligences of the aliens soon led them to discussion of how they could construct such a device with icerug materials. Various substances were brought, manipulated, and discarded.

  Richard found that the icerug laboratory did have an oven of sorts, well insulated from the freezing cold room by blocks of volcanic tuff and heated by endothermic chemical reactions. It could reach a few hundred degrees, high enough to carbonize seaweed, bone, and flesh, but not high enough to melt any metal except mercury.

  “With sheets of carbon made from seaweed and nickel-iron sheets from an asteroid, and a little concentrated ocean water or dilute acid, like you use to dissolve rock, we can make a battery,” said Richard. “Then all we have to do is try different carbonized threads and nickel-iron slivers until we find the right length and thickness to make a good, long-lasting incandescent filament.”

  It didn’t surprise Richard that a carbonized thread of seaweed fiber turned out to be the best filamen
t. Until tungsten filaments came along, that had been Edison’s conclusion too. Edison had found that the most practical and least expensive filament for an incandescent lamp was a piece of tough bamboo fiber baked until it was black.

  Richard was going to reconfigure one “hand” of his suit imp to act as a combination voltmeter and ammeter, but soon found that was unnecessary. Just as the early pioneers in electricity had learned to do, the icerugs soon found they could “feel” the amount of voltage generated by a battery by the strength of the “taste” produced in the tips of their tentacles when they put them across the battery terminals. At Deirdre’s insistence, Richard didn’t access Josephine’s electrochemical tables to suggest different elements for the battery, but let the icerugs experiment for themselves. With surprising speed, the icerugs soon fitted together a crude but working battery-powered light of their own, and then set immediately to improve the power and life of the battery, using the tiny glowing filament itself as a rough indicator of the strength of the electrical current flow. Fortunately, they could see well into the infrared, and so could observe significant changes in the heat radiation emitted from a filament that looked completely black to the eyes of the humans.

  While the students worked away at their tasks, Deirdre studied intently the workings of an intricate instrument near her, made almost entirely of ice, within a framework of carefully shaped and polished stone. The beauty of it reminded her of sculpture, but she knew, almost instinctively, that it must be a form of microscope. One of the students, seeing her interest, quietly indicated the tiny, but finely shaped discs of ice which served as lenses, and the large condensing lenses that focused the concave light from the observer’s body onto the sample being observed, and with a thrill of delight she recognized that a peculiar looking piece of gleaming bone was a focussing knob.

  Meanwhile, Richard and Bright-Eye completed assembly of yet another trial flashlight, and one of the younger aliens reached a tentacle to connect it to the now refined source of battery power. With what the humans felt to be satisfaction and pleasure, the icerugs contemplated their glowing handiwork raptly. However, almost immediately, they began its disassembly, booming quietly between themselves.

  Their suit imps at this point chimed simultaneously, and Richard and Deirdre glanced at each other. It was a simple time signal, indicating they should begin the trek back to rejoin the Dragonfly, which would be flying in shortly. With surprise, each noted the other was worn with fatigue; mutual concern therefore made it easier to speak to Bright-Eye of their intention to depart. The alien left its students at once, to lead them swiftly back along the tunnels with their ever-increasing bundles of varicolored strands, then up to the surface via an exit tunnel not too far from the Grand Portal. Here in the city the ice was smooth and polished underfoot, and the two humans were soon walking briskly through the narrow ice corridors between blue-green icerug bodies towards George’s waving arm in the distance at the landing field. In the sky above, the Dragonfly could be seen descending from the sky as Barnard started to rise over the horizon.

  “Let’s get a move on,” called George through their imp link. “The flouwen have already been picked up by the Dragonfly and are ready to be taken back to the lander so they can get out of their suits and freshen up.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Richard, breaking into a ground-covering lope.

  CHAPTER 09 — RAINING

  The Dragonfly returned to the Victoria and went through the usual routine; the humans climbed the ninety rungs of the Jacob’s ladder to the airlock door, while the flouwen rode up on the winch elevator. From the airlock, the flouwen were sucked back into their tank, to empty their waste vacuoles into Josephine’s efficient sewage treatment system that could cope with anything but heavy metals, and to refresh every cell with clean, freezing-cold ammonia water.

  #K-k-k-keeeek-k-k-k# exclaimed Little Purple with pleasure, as he placed his purple-colored body about the jet coming from a nozzle in the top of the tank, and expanded himself out into a purple balloon. Filled almost to bursting, he slowly let the refreshing liquid percolate through his thinned-down body.

  *My turn!* complained Little Red, trying to push a red pseudopod between the neck of the purple balloon and the jet nozzle. Little Purple continued to expand until the ballooning sides of his body touched the cylindrical wall of the habitat on all sides. Then, closing off the intake hole, in order to trap the body-full of clean fluid inside, he finally moved down to the center of the tank and let Little Red have the jet. Meanwhile, the patiently waiting Little White went to the habitat taste-screen, to put onto Josephine’s extensive memory his recollection of all the flouwen had observed during their exploration trip.

  Little White wasn’t the only one providing input to Josephine. Many of the humans — those not taking showers or eating — were also busy at touch-screens. Some were adding comments to the video pictures taken by their helmet monitors and automatically transmitted back though the commsat links. Others were relating experiences and thoughts inadequately captured on either video or audio, while others were making recommendations for the next excursion.

  The three who had visited the city center, George, Deirdre, and Richard, carefully edited and annotated their experiences. They, of course, knew that their comments were simultaneously available to the imps of the rest of the crew, and comment and speculation about their reports became general. Later, Deirdre took David aside to tell him in more detail of the alien concert.

  He questioned her; “So all the instruments were percussion, or variations of stringed instruments?”

  Deirdre thought. “That’s right enough,” she agreed. “Such big drums I’ve never seen, and deeper notes than I could be sure I was hearing, perhaps just feeling with my body. And all sorts of stringed shapes, with the strings being plucked, and hit, and played with various bows. Chimes there were too, long hollow cylinders of ice, and arrays of resonating disk-like ice shapes like cymbals, but played with a soft mallet like a gong, and a marvelous sort of xylophone, with long bars of solid ice over hollow resonating chambers.”

  “But no wind instruments, not so much as a whistle?”

  “No,” said Deirdre. “And look you David, how could there be if the creatures do not breathe? They have no lungs to store air, so their mouths are used only for eating.”

  “Pity, though,” said David absently, and Deirdre looked at him sharply.

  “Hold, David. Their music is wonderful, and contents them, I’ve no doubt. Would you be giving them a synthesizer, or some such daft thing?” David grinned wickedly into the burning green eyes at the thought of an icerug confronted with the keyboard of one of his highly complex sono-video synthesizers.

  “Since they can’t blow with their mouths…” mused David. “Then any kind of wind instrument is out — even bagpipes.” The image of an icerug in a kilt playing a bagpipe jumped into both their minds, and a wry smile dimpled the corner of Deirdre’s mouth to match David’s wide grin at the thought. “But not all wind instruments. Did you say that their chimes used long hollow cylinders of ice?”

  “Yes,” replied Deirdre, a little concerned. “You’ll not be meddling, will you now, David?”

  “Of course not!” David assured her as he left. He went to a console and pulled up the video images taken by the helmet cameras during the concert. He found the frame that he was looking for and had Josephine carefully measure one of the instruments. Then he sought out George and spoke eagerly to him.

  “Shirley and Arielle have designed a survey routine for obtaining a good population density map of the entire inner pole geyser ring. I’ve set up a computer routine with Joe to carry out that procedure. On the next outing, instead of monitoring Joe, I’d like to go with you to the city to see this orchestra. The music you transmitted was full of peculiarly interesting sounds, and I’d like to know exactly how they were produced.”

  “I don’t see why not — if Arielle, Shirley, and Joe are sure they don’t need you aboard the D
ragonfly,” agreed George. He paused to recall what had been planned for the next few Zulu days. “Let’s see … we plan to return to Windward in about twenty hours, just before the next Zuni conjunction. The conjunction tide will be assisted by the Barnard tide, so it should be larger than normal, and Richard wants to see the geyser reaction close-hand. We’ll remain there about seven hours — until the tide turns and the geyser subsides, so Arielle can bring the plane in to retrieve us without danger of the wings icing up. That seven hours should give you plenty of time to learn about their musical instruments.”

  “And twenty hours will give me time to have the Christmas Branch make something to take along,” thought David as he turned to leave.

  Richard and Deirdre, after a friendly dinner with the rest of the crew in the view-port lounge on Victoria, spent half of the intervening twenty hours in deep sleep in their bunks aboard Dragonfly. Bodies that had been stressed beyond normal by the icequake needed rest. Richard gratefully shut out all distraction with white noise generated by his imp, while Deirdre had always had the gift of sinking into untroubled slumber within seconds of wishing to do so. Foxx drowsed while her mistress slept, but was eager and active the instant she awoke and headed purposefully for the galley.

  Sometime later, Arielle, on watch in the pilot’s seat on Dragonfly, lifted her head to sniff sharply. Since the weather was good, and the airplane was resting safely on the ground, she had no hesitation in leaving her post abruptly in pursuit of the tantalizing aroma. When she got to the galley, she found she had to stand in line.

  Deirdre’s round brown loaves of Irish soda bread, stuffed with pseudo-currants, were all ready to cut. When Deirdre was in the mood to make omelets as well, meaning when she was as hungry as she was now, it was simply a question of how many toppings one cared to add to the creamy scrambled algae-egg base — tiny bits of real ham, two kinds of grated algae-cheese, and chopped green onions, tomatoes, peppers, and mushrooms from the hydroponics deck on Prometheus. Steam rose from the fresh wedges of hot and fragrant bread, and the omelets came just seconds apart from the two hot skillets Deirdre alternated, skillfully, on the small stove.