Hal Clement - Noise

“Not perfectly, of course. Who expects to be? At home, I’d carry a small pointed axe, or even two, to get a grip if I did start to slide, and I might have metal points strapped to my feet to forestall it. We don’t have anything like that on board, though I suppose those people you mentioned who tried to build and sell icebergs probably did. But look at the shape of these bits of coral; they’re fair-sized cylinders with pointed ends. Spikes, of a sort. I could use them pretty well as ice axes, though it would be nicer if they had real handles. I suggest I go ashore on the flattest place we can find, and look for some more; I want to find out why the ones we’ve been finding near this ice are all so uniform. I’m getting an idea about that.” He paused, not for breath since he was using Finger, but to his relief Wanaka didn’t ask for details. “If my suit gets a few cuts and scratches, they’ll heal, after all.”

The captain hesitated. Both Mike and Keo could practically read her mind, though neither could guess which tack she’d take.

“All right,” she said at last rather slowly. “Hook on a safety line, though. You’re not going to climb far. Keo, hold the other end, but give him plenty of slack. If you pull him off his feet you’ll make at least two enemies.”

“Three,” said ’Ao.

“If I go off my feet, the chances are it won’t be Keo’s fault,” Mike pointed out. “But do give me lots of slack. Even if I do slip there’ll be no need to haul in until I reach the water, if I haven’t stopped myself sooner, and not much then unless I’ve been knocked out.”

“You mean you’re going to keep your helmet open?” asked ’Ao in tones suggesting shock.

Mike paused. “I was. I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks. The work would be a lot easier with it open, but I’d just as soon live through it, and getting it closed while I’m sliding downhill could be awkward. It would certainly get in the way of trying to stop the slide.”

’Ao’s own reflexes in such a situation would have been wholly concerned with her helmet, so this sentence also startled her; but she said nothing. Having caught an adult in one error was enough for a few days. The second one, after all, might have some sense behind it; she herself had never slid downhill, since Muamoku used railed stairs rather than ramps between levels, and could only guess what it might feel like. The remark about tearing armor also deserved some thinking, even if armor did eventually heal itself. Eventually did not mean instantly .

Wanaka would have been very happy to read the child’s mind just then. It seemed as though the loss of points she had taken so indignantly so many weeks before had indeed been good for her.

Mike was able to give an immediate demonstration of the problems of climbing a slippery slope. He couldn’t even get out of the sea until he had found, after some search and extracted after some effort from the submerged ice near the shoreline, two pieces of imbedded coral, each about twice the volume of a fist, in the ice just below the water line. Conveniently and, to everyone involved most interestingly, they were almost exactly the same shape as those picked up floating in the last few minutes and that were still on board—rods small enough in diameter to be held in a gloved hand, and sharp and hard enough to be usable as crude ice axes. With these Hoani dragged himself away from the water’s edge and a short distance farther, to where the slope became almost level over a few square meters. There he succeeded without too much trouble in rising to his feet.

To the captain’s unexpressed impatience, he examined his surroundings for several minutes before reporting any details. When he finally began to talk, stowing his pieces of coral in two of the tool loops in his noise armor to free his hands, he raised more questions than he answered.

“The ice I can see through, this flat part, is full of coral just like my pieces. Same size, same shape. They average half a meter to a meter apart, they’re all lying horizontally and, within a few degrees, parallel to each other. My first thought is that we’d better look around for people.”

“Mine is that this thing has been grown,” Wanaka answered. Mike was relieved; this was the suspicion he had been hoping not to have to voice. “Are any of the rods really close beneath the surface you’re standing on?”

“Yes. A dozen or more have less than a centimeter of ice over them.”

“Then get down as close to one or two of them as you can. Look for details around them, especially threads connecting any of them to their neighbors. And look over the ones you have at your belt for anything similar. ’Ao, hook on to a safety line—I’ll hold it—and swim over there. Don’t try to climb out of the water, but look for more of those things where it’s shallow. They should be as near to the surface of the ice as possible. I want to melt some of them out without breaking anything .”

“How would we do that?” asked Hoani, who had kept his eyes on the captain’s fingers rather than immediately following her orders. She had looked back at him as ’Ao had leaped for a length of cord, and saw the question.

“I’ll show you when we do it. Do your own job now.”

This was as near as the captain had yet come to addressing him as tersely and impersonally as an ordinary crew member; Mike felt more pleased than embarrassed. The embarrassment would no doubt come later, when he was shown or told about the melting technique and realized he should have guessed it for himself. The effort to guess took some of his attention from his work, but fortunately Wanaka couldn’t see this. He hoped the child would not find a spicule, if that were an appropriate word for the things, too quickly; the longer she took, the better his chances of—

His safety line jerked twice. He looked toward the ship. Keo stopped pulling the line, and Wanaka shifted to Finger.

“’Ao’s found one of them just starting to float. I suppose they’re melting out all the time. There—she has another. You needn’t spend time on the ones still under ice, at least for a while. Try climbing some more—no, come back here. Keo would have to keep an eye on you, and I want everyone to look these things over. Even you. You have no experience with anything like it, I suppose, but that could turn out to be useful.”

Mike obeyed, closing his helmet again and allowing himself to slide the few meters to the water’s edge. By the time he was standing on Mata ’s deck, ’Ao was there, too, holding the objects she had picked up in each hand. The captain addressed her vocally.

“Keo and I will hold them. Take the lens and look for any trace you can find of anything even slightly like fine hair or any other fiber. Remember what Mike said and what you saw; these things are lined up with each other in the ice. I want to know whether they’re connected with each other in any way.”

“I didn’t think of that,” ’Ao replied. “If they were, I probably broke the fibers when I brought them over.”

“Maybe, but you said they’d started to float. Don’t worry about it. If you did, they’re probably sticking to the sides of the pieces, since everything there is wet. Mike may have to go back over there to study the ones still in the ice, but we’ll try this way first.”

“May I go with him this time?”

“Maybe. If you do see anything here, I’ll want you to look for the same thing still in the ice. If you don’t, maybe I’ll want you to look anyway.”

Mike silently admired the captain’s technique, but concerned himself more with what details he could see on the spicule the child wasn’t examining. He could spot nothing remarkable without the lens, other than a vague pattern that might have been scales or shingles on the main body of the cylinder. Even the lens, when his turn came to use it, showed him nothing more. There seemed little doubt that the captain was right about the objects being some form of pseudolife, but there was no sign of material connection at least between these two specimens. It was back to the main berg.