Hal Clement - Noise

When helmets could once more be removed, he had another surprise: Wanaka was taking what looked like position sights on the suns and Kaihapa. The instrument she used had no real optical parts; it was basically a simple cross staff, the arms modified with double sights to allow aiming it at both suns at once, with a tray of viscous fluid serving as a horizontal reference. Mike did manage to solve that one after a few seconds; he had, he remembered, used the trick himself when no horizon was visible, measuring the sun’s angular separation from its reflection in a horizontal surface. He could even see why no lenses were being used here. It was not just that silicon was virtually unobtainable from Kainui’s highly acidic ocean—carbon-based optics could have been grown, presumably—but because the hazy, ripply atmosphere made really precise sighting on celestial objects impossible anyway. Magnifying optics would have done nothing for accuracy.

What he didn’t see clearly was why such observations were worth making at all. True, the captain had said something about “waiting” for ’Ao, so it was obviously important to try to stay put in some sense or other; but if they were yielding to the current anyway…

Maybe it would be more profitable to go back to just who “they” might be—Wanaka had certainly used the plural gesture. Most likely “they” were ’Ao and the growing ship; but that, as he had already noticed, posed two major questions. It was just believable that the child could swim back—if she knew the right direction. The storm was not a frontal disturbance; Mike had seen no such phenomenon yet on Kainui. It was simply a local convective instability resulting partly from temperature and partly from humidity. Its winds were mostly short, random gusts and the child shouldn’t be far out of sight. Mike had no idea, however, how ’Ao could possibly know the direction.

If “they” did mean child and ship, it was even harder for him to see how the latter could be propelled, even granting that the direction was known. Though the vessel was only part-grown, the thought of a ten-year-old swimmer towing it any distance was hard to accept, not to say utterly ridiculous even granting her background. So was the idea of her separating the growing sections, assembling them properly—including attaching the deck, stepping the mast, and setting sail—and sailing.

Hoani was now, however, firmly determined not to ask; if he were being tested, he was not going to give up without trying. It didn’t occur to him that the captain must know him pretty well by now and might be doing a little research of her own.

The rest of that day, and most of the next, were as close to completely idle time as he had experienced since Malolo had left her home dock. For the first time, Wanaka and Keo left Mike alone on the hull, essentially in charge of everything, while they caught up on sleep. The closest to a general instruction he received was a “Keep your eyes open”—from Keo, not the captain. Hoani had gestured agreement, and was left alone with mist, the suns, Kainui’s twin planet, and the usual microtsunamis, waterspouts, and thunder. He had not even been told what to do about the leaf-strip if another storm were to find them.

Common sense suggested that it should be reeled in. Or did it? It had drag, Wanaka had mentioned the need for them to stay in position with respect to the ocean, and hail shouldn’t do much damage to the band of tissue. Besides all that, it would probably be impossible to reel it all in between the time the need was evident and the arrival of spout or storm.

Mike thought about it all for a while, smiled suddenly behind his mask, got to his feet with the usual difficulty, and began scanning the surrounding sea carefully for one partly grown replica of the Malolo . No, not yet a replica—probably. He couldn’t be sure about that, but at least he could watch without asking silly questions.

Some hours passed. Astronomy distracted his attention for a while as the suns disappeared behind Kaihapa while in mutual eclipse, but his attention was eventually rewarded.

Malolo junior—he wondered fleetingly, whether his suggestion would really be followed—had come quite near before he spotted it; he had allowed for its being much less than full size, but had no way to guess at its state of assembly. It was hard to see how that could possibly have changed since he had last seen it, and he was somewhat relieved to see that it hadn’t.

The growing hulls still floated in contact, on their sides, with the still very small deck sandwiched between them. Part of this was catching wind, obviously; the other part, submerged, must be playing the part of a keel. ’Ao was in the water at the near end, apparently pushing the pair of hulls to one side in order to alter its heading. They were almost exactly upwind from Mike, but not so nearly up current. The man was impressed to see how precisely the “ship” moved toward him when the child stopped her efforts. He watched entranced while it drifted to the end of the hull where he was standing. He almost failed to catch the line ’Ao tossed him, and almost as absently moored the immature vessel while the child, paying him no other attention, swam to the cabin, pulled herself out of the sea, and disappeared into the air lock.

Mike, once more alone, stayed where he was; perhaps he should have called the others when the little ship first appeared, but he had simply not thought of it. Reporting ’Ao’s return was now obviously superfluous, and anyone could see that having no one at all on watch was a bad idea.

Bad even with an apparently empty ocean, as a microtsunami immediately reminded him.

No one emerged from the cabin for some time. He spent the interval making sure the little ship was secure, and in brooding. He was mystified, and wanted in the worst way to ask questions, but could not get rid of the feeling that Wanaka had already provided at least part of an answer; and he was almost neurotic about making a fool of himself. Ship and child had arrived safely, which seemed to confirm the implication of Wanaka’s “they,” but still left unanswered several questions Mike didn’t quite want to ask because he feared he should know the answers already—she had, after all, been right about the return.

The most mysterious of all, and incidentally the most reasonable excuse for simply starting to ask questions regardless of personal face, was of course: How had ’Ao found her way back?

What could the sighting on the suns have had to do with it? There had been no way to get results to the child on a planet where the loudest sound of a bullhorn would be drowned out by thunder in a few hundred meters, the brightest portable signal light stopped by haze in a kilometer or two, and constant lightning and ionized haze made essentially all electromagnetic communication equipment useless. Hoani had no confidence in the concept of telepathy, and was quite sure that if it really occurred and the people of Kainui had reduced it to engineering practice, either their culture would be very different from what he had seen so far or the range of the phenomenon was disappointingly short.

Best to wait for more orders. One could hope that Wanaka, with the responsibilities of a captain, wouldn’t merely give him a detail-free command like, “Start it growing again,” just to see how much Mike had figured out for himself. He could answer that one with some confidence, of course, since he was quite sure the little ship was still growing—but maybe it wasn’t! How could he be sure?

Stop it, Mike Hoani. She can’t expect you to know everything .

Or would she?

With nothing, as far as he knew, left to watch for, Mike immersed himself more and more deeply in his brooding. Speculations that centered more and more, as the minutes went by, around that word “they.”