Hal Clement - Noise

Had anyone described the job earlier to Mike he would have called it impossible. The small sail was maneuvered mainly to raise or lower very slightly the peak of the larger one; all three of its control lines needed very practiced handling. The other two were used to manipulate the slant of the larger triangle, so as to control its depth more coarsely.

Since even the child was able to do all this fairly well, Mike had no excuse to use the i-word; and to forestall any possible other risk of his suffering boredom, Wanaka had decided that ’Ao’s physical strength was not up to handling all five lines. The passenger was therefore gradually earning crew status as well as learning Finger.

He made frequent errors. The child was more than ready to provide advice, but occasionally this was wrong and even more often the man failed to get her message promptly and correctly. The other two adults, when available, often had to do incomprehensible and complex things to correct the errors. The captain was quite tolerant about all this, the child considerably less so. She was young enough still to be more conscious of what she already knew than of what she didn’t.

There was no such thing as really heaving to, though that was the theoretical aim. Malolo was either being borne more or less poleward by surface current—not precisely south; Coriolis force is ordinary inertia, and not confined to Earth—or dragged the other way by the submerged sail. The idea was to match the two effects as closely as possible to maintain latitude. Wind neither helped nor hindered significantly; it had only a little grip even on the cabin.

Besides latitude maintenance some actual maneuvering was necessary. Chance could be counted on to lead them into storms and hail, which were necessary for water, but manipulation was needed to keep them out of waterspouts that could be and had been both chemically and mechanically troublesome even when the ship was whole.

Continuous duty for everyone was not, of course, possible, and at times they had to accept inadequate control of the sea anchor while people slept, or merely rested, or attended to other necessary jobs. These times would obviously be fewer when Mike could handle an unsupervised watch, and he felt guilty at how long it was taking him to interpret reflexively the almost imperceptible shifts of the control lines.

The general asymmetry of the present craft didn’t help, either; one hull paralleling a floating cabin was not the same thing as two essentially identical hulls. Hoani had almost, at one point, asked why the cabin wasn’t set to lead, or trail behind, the remaining hull, or even to balance on top of it, but hesitated long enough to be saved from looking ignorant by another of Kainui’s phenomena.

Early on the second day after the hull-seed had been fertilized and set afloat on its tow line, everyone’s attention had been caught by an explosive sound abeam. Mike had watched with a crawling sensation along his spine as a jet of water far more massive and coherent than the usual waterspouts had climbed skyward a few hundred meters away. A wave spread outward from its base as it rose and another as it slowly collapsed. These did not travel rapidly in Kainui’s gravity but were quite high enough when they reached the “ship” to lift first one side and then the other well over a meter. If the phenomenon had occurred much closer, or if the system had lacked catamaran stability, even Mike could see that the rest of their trip would have been performed swimming. He suddenly realized that a waterspout would have had the same effect and was thankful for his earlier silence.

This was unfortunate in a way; anything that discourages a student from asking questions can interfere with education.

He rather suspected that if Malolo were more completely wrecked the natives would, after appropriate preparation, start to swim, doubtless towing what they needed; but he decided not to ask. Aside from the possibility that the question would be deemed silly, he was a little afraid of the answer.

He did raise his eyebrows at Keo, who was closest. The man had no trouble understanding the implied question.

“Very rare,” he remarked. “Only the second one I’ve ever seen. Strictly a matter of chance. A really broad sound front somewhere below gets focused just right by salinity or temperature lensing, and puts maybe a hundred atmospheres of pressure on one or two square meters just under the surface. That’s one reason we make the cities in separate, flexibly linked units, and why some of us feel safer out on sorties. Actually I’ve never heard of anything as small as a ship’s being hit directly by one.”

“Who’d have heard?” Wanaka, ’Ao, and ’Oloa spoke together. Keo simply shrugged. He might, of course, have been merely trying to keep Hoani from panicking; if so, he didn’t bother to justify himself, but simply went on. “Cities get hit every now and then, of course. That’s why we keep kinai aki on duty.”

Mike was a little startled at the use to which the term “fireman” had been adapted, but reflected that after all Kainui’s atmosphere didn’t support combustion even if the air in the floating cities did.

“Do cities get really damaged by these things?” he asked.

“Bad air leaks usually, float damage fairly often. I’ve never heard of a city’s actually sinking—or being missed,” he added hastily. “People have died from suffocation or poisoning, of course, when too much air got in.”

“I guess I’m glad I didn’t know about them before. At least we don’t have to watch out for such things.”

“Why not?” snapped ’Ao. “Just because one happened here doesn’t mean another won’t. The laws of chance don’t have any memory!”

It was Mike’s first chance to correct a native. He wished, though, that ’Ao had been an adult. “I know they don’t, tama-iti ,” he answered. He regretted the word the instant he uttered it, but felt more need to justify himself than to apologize. “But we haven’t been watching for them so far, and I don’t see how we’d spot them coming anyway. Is there something you know about that that I don’t?”

“No. You’re right. I’m sorry. I thought—” ’Ao’s voice trailed off.

“You thought you’d caught a grown-up making a mistake, didn’t you? I don’t blame you for speaking without thinking.”

“I do,” Wanaka cut in, “but as long as it was just words, complete with apology, we’ll write it off as a lesson.”

The child’s relief showed around her mask, but she said no more just then. Instead, she flipped on her helmet and went to examine the seedling towing aft—southward, away from the sea-anchor system—of the cabin. She checked her safety line very pointedly first; the surface current being opposed by the sails was fairly strong. Mike wasn’t sure whether she was more concerned with being swept away—after all, rescue would have been fairly easy—or losing more points.

The growing ship looked like a small but oddly shaped torpedo, and was already over half a meter long. The oddness sprang from what looked like a pair of short wings sprouting from each side. These, even the visitor could see, were actually keels; there were two hulls growing, deck to deck, just barely afloat. He had not yet asked why this was, or what would be done with the spare one; he was hoping to figure at least the first question out for himself as a matter of self-respect. Like ’Ao, he was feeling a need to be right.

He could not, of course, keep his eyes on the child; control lines were his business of the moment. He had never in any language heard the phrase “The buck stops here,” but was very familiar with its underlying concept.

As it happened, although he was in charge of the sea anchor when things did go wrong some days later, it was not Mike’s fault. At least, no one blamed him aloud, and he could see plenty of excuse for himself. It happened during one of the most violent storms of the journey so far, and his eyes simply couldn’t follow the lines he was holding all the way to the deck. He didn’t know that anything had gone wrong until the foggily visible deck itself suddenly went out of sight under water.