Hal Clement - Noise

The stock of metal grew very slowly, of course, but it did grow, and eventually Wanaka developed a new worry. Did they now have too much of the stuff to be safe? At Muamoku’s latitude, if they decided to go there, the ocean would be decidedly less salty and Mata would float correspondingly lower. Sadly, there was no way of calculating “correspondingly,” since there was no precise measurement of Mata ’s depth-versus-displacement function on hand.

And would it be a good idea to bring the material back to the city at all? The captain found herself developing a touch of Mike’s fear of looking silly, with much better reason for it than he usually had. Spending weeks or seasons collecting something completely useless, however excusable by the circumstances, would certainly make her colleagues and competitors smile behind their masks, and in a city there’d be no masks to hide the smiles.

Maybe it would be better to get away from this creature and simply cruise around, remaining in deep-south latitudes, of course, but not going as far as the ice, or even the calms, hoping to find another ship rather than a city, and trade off some of this stuff before going home.

She could tell, with perfect truth, why it might be of unheard of value. The opposite possibility would be obvious to any competent trader, so there would be no need to mention it aloud, and practically any skipper would be willing to take at least some of her stock on chance, she was sure.

So she finally ordered the loading to stop. Plimsoll marks didn’t grow automatically on hulls, and the paint certainly provided none; there was no more magic in nanotechnology or pseudobiology than in “real” life. She and Keo spent some time trying to calibrate Mata ’s still unmeasured displacement. Their guesses were based mainly on the assumption that it wouldn’t differ much from Malolo ’s. Memory provided some highly imprecise estimates of those.

It also took a day or so for her really to make up her mind to abandon the vast supply of fresh water now floating in its pods beside her ship. She did not actually let it go, finally; she moored it to the remains of Malolo , still anchored to the nameless organism by her sea-anchor equipment.

She couldn’t quite decide whether to hope that someone would find it, or not. She wasted no actual time on the question since she had no real faith in the efficacy of hope.

Mike suspected a little of this, though much less of it came up in conversation. He was mainly going by the length of time it was taking the captain to announce decisions.

She hesitated only once more. ’Oloa, on request, reported that their latitude was forty-three degrees south, which agreed with the rudely measured apparent height of the noonday suns. Wanaka decided to wait until it was just forty-five before leaving the scene. She offered no explanation, though even Keo raised an eyebrow. ’Ao showed no reaction; Mike wondered whether she was afraid of losing more points, or was genuinely indifferent. He himself would have preferred, by now, to get on with whatever might be going to happen next.

He was therefore somewhere between relieved and delighted when ’Ao, who was again spending most of her time at Mata ’s masthead, called out, “City! A hand south of east!”

What they all saw was certainly city-sized, looming indistinctly through a kilometer or so of haze. Even to the Earth native, however, and at this distance through the haze, there was something about it that did not suggest human design. It was not very dark in color, rather a light gray, with an occasional brief sparkle that might have meant fabricated metal. Unusually for him, he expressed the doubt aloud.

“Are you sure, ’Ao?” he asked. “I’ve only seen Muamoku, I know, and I suppose cities differ from each other, but still—” He doubted this on-the-spot conclusion even as it left his lips. Cities on Kainui all had the same environment and faced the same engineering design constraints. They should be pretty similar. He did not end his sentence, and closed with “Are you sure?” again.

“What else could it be?” the child responded indignantly. “There’s nothing else in the world anywhere near that big.”

“You mean that high out of water,” Keo corrected.

“Of course I do. Metal-fish are bigger ,” granted the child. Even Mike could feel her effort to make the lack of precision seem unimportant. “But I couldn’t have seen a metal-fish or anything except a city that far anyway.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” the captain interjected soothingly, “but how about Mike’s question? Are you really sure that’s a city? We’re heading within a few degrees of it; keep your eyes bright and let us know when you spot anything strange.”

Everyone noticed the “when,” but only Mike wondered whether the captain, too, thought there was something odd in the sighting or whether mere wish might be involved. He felt pretty sure by now that Wanaka was in no real hurry to reach a city. She was not actually an indecisive person—no one in her position could be—but, at the moment, would have been very pleased with any source of data that might make decisions less nebulous.

“Don’t spend all your time looking at that hump. Check for ships in the neighborhood,” she added to ’Ao after a few minutes. Hoani conceded her a point; there had always been scores of full-sized ships and smaller vessels busy, and visible if close enough, within a few kilometers of Muamoku. He had seldom known just what they were about, but they had been there. Of course, Mata was too far yet to let ’Ao spot such an entourage, but he, too, followed Wanaka’s order as well as he could from deck level.

The captain’s next command, only a few minutes later, fully restored Mike’s normal tendency to keep his question count low. It was called to the masthead, but not to ’Ao.

“’Oloa! Look as closely as the haze will let you for the next few minutes, and see whether you can figure how much of that thing’s motion is due to wind alone. A city’s floats wouldn’t reach very deep. You know what the shallow currents are from this metal-maker’s drift. Is there any sign that the big thing is being influenced by deep currents as well as wind?”

The doll’s tiny voice was inaudible over the background noise, of course, but ’Ao reported that it had acknowledged the command and was presumably obeying.

The object was farther away, and much larger in size, than anyone had guessed at first. One side of its water line was now almost on Mata ’s course as she was borne along by the metal source; the other, Keo and Wanaka judged as their viewing angle changed and gave them a better idea of its size, must extend at least two kilometers to the left of it. It was certainly not following surface currents, though the wind should be having some influence on anything that size; its peak seemed three hundred meters or more above the sea, though estimation was difficult. As it neared, the general gray tone showing through the haze became patchier. The spots reflecting the sparkles of sunlight remained too small to show any details, but did grow brighter.

“Hadn’t we better get out of this mess so we can maneuver, before it’s too close?” suggested Keo. Wanaka shook her head slowly.

“Anyone spotted any boats?” she asked, loudly enough to be heard aloft. No one had. ’Ao, however, saw something .

“There are floating things. Not boats. Some of them are almost black. Some of them might be ice floes—but remember I’ve never actually seen one of those. Just pictures. These are sort of humped up out of the water, and I thought ice floes were pretty flat. If they’re mostly ice, they must go too deep to get over this creature we’re on; but if they’re shallow-draft enough to float over it, maybe we’d better get clear. We’re not actually aground on it, but it sometimes humps up enough to push on the keels, and it’ll drag on them if we’re sailing. I can feel that from up here.”