Hal Clement - Noise

Rising wind interfered with the last part of the operation, but they lost no bags, to the captain’s satisfaction. Everything they could find and catch had been secured, and the second stage of their problem could be faced.

Navigation on Kainui was complicated by the world’s having no fixed reference points other than the rotation poles, which were too abstract to be found without rather complex celestial observation and much too far from where Malolo was now to be useful. Muamoku, the floating city that was their home port and nominal eventual goal, did not remain in one spot, though like the other cities it maintained latitude fairly well. No one really cared; as far as anyone knew, every part of the planet was like every other part except for current patterns, surface salinity, and coverage of floe ice. These varied with latitude, with minor statistical differences in frequency and intensity of storms, and with the percentage of ocean locally filmed over by fresh water or ice. There were no natural icebergs, since there were no islands or continents to build successive snowfalls up into glaciers. Even the surface water was extremely salty in many places and hence hard to freeze, but Kainui and its slightly smaller twin Kaihapa were far enough from the suns to freeze plenty of floe ice in the high latitudes in the winter hemisphere.

There had been attempts in the distant past to harvest ice from the southern cap and supply water that didn’t need desalting, but unfamiliar conditions at the polar region seemed to have caused the disappearance of too many of the ships involved.

“All right, ’Ao, what do we do with the sails now that the mast can’t be used?” Wanaka felt that she had been a little severe with her punishment and hoped that the youngster could earn the lost points back quickly. She had no intention, of course, of broadcasting her doubts by canceling or reducing the penalty.

“We use them as sea anchors under water. The wind won’t help anymore. Muamoku tries to stay at the south edge of the southern trades, and I don’t really know even that much about any other cities. We’ll have to rig a sea anchor and sink it far enough for deep flow to keep the surface current from taking us too far south. Then we can start—”

“How do we know the right latitude?”

The visible part of the child’s face showed she had spotted the trap. “We don’t need to. It doesn’t matter as long as we don’t get too near the ice. The suns will warn us of that, and I think we can check stars, too, but I expect you’ll show me all that.”

If either Wanaka or Keo was amused by the skillful return of the ball, neither let it show. The man nodded.

“You have the right idea, little one. You can help us rig the sea anchor if you’re not too tired—”

“Of course I’m not!”

“Not tonight—” the captain interrupted. “Almost time for food, drink, air check, and sleep. In the morning we’ll bend lines to the sails and get them back in the water, the sooner the better; the wind isn’t taking us the way we want to go, and certainly the surface current isn’t either. We’re drifting—can you tell me which way?—and we’re already way south of the city.”

“South and some east, I suppose. That’s what surface currents should be doing around here.”

“How were we sailing before the hull began to sink?”

’Ao blushed visibly around her mask. The catamaran had not been traveling downwind, of course, but at an angle to it that would provide maximum speed. The more ocean that could be covered by daylight, the better the chance of spotting cargo. The child thought for a moment before she could remember which tack they had been on, and risked a guess. “Well, pretty near south.” Wanaka smiled, slightly relieved.

“Not too bad. About one-sixty. All right, back to work. We can’t accomplish very much more tonight, but should do what we can of the obvious procedures before dark.”

’Ao splashed her way to the partly submerged cabin. She was still unhappy from the recent chastisement, but had learned not to argue a point when she knew she would, whether right or wrong, lose the argument. She would eat before being ordered to.

The emergency nourishment provided by noise suits was not particularly tasty, and she had been solemnly warned that people in suits outcity sometimes went dangerously long without eating or drinking when their minds were taken up with other matters. A twenty-year-old had that fact firmly impressed on him or her before ever going “outdoors”—leaving the limits of a city even in a small boat. ’Ao had no wish to lose more points on the same day, and showing initiative might even have the opposite effect.

She finished quickly, however, emerged again from the still floating cabin—Mike had wondered why the air lock sill was half a meter above deck level—swam to the formerly starboard hull, and moved cautiously along it to where the salvaged sheets of fabric had been rather hastily stowed.

“D’you know which was the big one?” Keo, who had followed her, asked. The child nodded and began working the appropriate sail out of the pile. The man took her at her word and began threading a length of cord through each grommet as it came into view.

The captain gestured to Mike to accompany her and swam to the cabin.

The passenger had been wondering why the sail could no longer be used in the normal fashion. Now he found out. The cabin had slid off the now detached deck; apparently some more quick-disconnects had been operated. The mast, still stayed, had fallen over, tilting the deck to a vertical plane as it did so. Wanaka ducked under the cabin, gesturing Mike to follow, pointed out to him a D-ring at the under edge of its floor, and made a pulling gesture. Hoani started to comply, but she stopped him, making a complex but meaningless gesture with one hand and, much more informatively, grasping his wrist with the other. Then she pointed to the opposite side of the cabin and swam toward it, motioning him to follow.

There was a similar ring on this side, which she took in her own right hand. Then she pointed back to the other side, extended fingers successively in a one-two-three gesture, and simulated pulling the ring herself.

Mike nodded comprehension, swam back to the first ring, and took hold of it. Wanaka made the gesture of approval he had seen earlier, which had clearly originated on Earth but not in any Polynesian culture, and repeated the one-two-three signal, pulling her ring at “three.” Mike did the same. He was not too surprised to see two rubbery sacks rather longer than the cabin floor begin to swell very slowly. The importance of backup had apparently taken a firm hold on Kainui. One could see why.

He had already learned that sailing craft were extremely expensive here, simple as their basic growth ought to be; now he began to see why that was, too.

The expansion of the floats was so slow that he wondered why it had been important to start both of them at once, but he never remembered later to ask. The captain swam to what Mike still thought of as the after end of the cabin, pointed out two more rings much closer to its center line, and they repeated the coordinated pull. Two more floats began to swell.

It took fifteen or twenty minutes for the filling gas bags to lift the cabin clear of the sea. Mike assumed that the gas was not coming from pressure tanks but was being generated by some form of pseudolife. There would be no way to ask until they got out of the water, however. There seemed no immediate prospect of that; all three of the crew, aided by the unskilled passenger when he could be shown what to do, were engaged in what were presumably life-or-death tasks as Malolo gradually was transformed from a sailing catamaran into something of dubious drive source, with its former mast divided in two—there were telescoping sockets along it—to form cross members connecting the remaining hull with the cabin, making the latter a highly inefficient-looking outrigger. There were connectors in the right places for this job, too.