Hal Clement - Noise

The catamaran’s deck was railed in many places and rigged with safety lines in most of the rest, but not continuously or everywhere; the need to dive overboard or climb back was random in both time and place. It was wet, since there was enough wind to break wave tops and provide spray. It was slippery. This time Mike slid.

He was not hurt, being encased in sound armor fifteen centimeters thick except near joints, but he was frightened. Surprising both himself and the witnesses, however, he did the right thing. He swung the helmet hinged between his shoulders forward over his head, latched it, and then grasped at a passing line. He managed to catch this and stop his slide before actually going overboard. The deck was still rocking, and without shame he crawled away from its edge before trying to regain his feet.

Even the child at the masthead was watching him, lookout duty ignored for the moment, and the three native faces showed expressions of approval around their breathing masks. Maybe all four, counting Mike himself, were thinking that this Hoani fellow mightn’t be too much of a burden after all, but nobody said anything. Especially Mike. He just stood up, carefully.

A mere day later, that particular wave had long gone to warm the surface water and the air above it. Mike’s reflexes had improved even in that time, and he had some attention to spare now when the lookout’s shrill voice sounded from above. It was hard to distinguish words over the endless thunder, but he followed them fairly well.

“ I’a’uri! One hand, port bow, half a kilo, past ripe!” The captain’s response was a wave, and Keokolo at the tiller simply changed heading. The breathing leaf had not yet been deployed that morning, and steering was straightforward. Mike, guided by the child’s words, made out a dark-colored patch of what might have been seaweed in the indicated direction. It seemed more than a hundred meters across. He assumed it was a sample of the pseudolife they had come to harvest, but it meant nothing specific to him until after Malolo had been brought to at its edge.

Even then he could make out no real details, except that the weed seemed to be growing on something clear suspended a meter or so under the surface.

At that point both adult crew members expressed approval of ’Ao’s judgment. She had descended from the mast without orders and was waiting with just a faint expression of anxiety visible around her mask. The passenger, who had a youngster of his own on Earth, could interpret this; the child had been afraid of being wrong. She relaxed visibly at the captain’s words.

Mike Hoani couldn’t quite decide whether he should be surprised or not. None of the crew had seemed to be, and it was reasonable that the youngster would be the first to spot the i’a’uri , whatever that was, since she spent much of her waking time at the masthead; but like Mike she was on her first sortie. Unlike him, she was barely forty years old and still carried her doll even on duty.

Her ability not only to identify the i’a’uri but to give details seemed to say more about Kainuian education than Mike had guessed so far. Apparently her instructors had more or less outgrown the notion that experience is the best teacher even though she had been sent to sea while still a child.

That was a point to be noted; it might possibly fit in with the convergent-evolution language thesis he was hoping to complete while on the planet. Different floating cities had been built by colonists from different Polynesian islands, but generations of trade among them had gradually caused a blending of tongues that was still far from complete.

Nothing much else had seemed surprising, either, during the time they had now been sailing. The weather had been fine; there had seldom been more than a dozen of the world’s immensely tall thunderheads in view at any one time, though of course the ubiquitous ionized haze hid such things long before one’s line of sight reached the distant horizon. The thermals had not forced Malolo to change her basically northward course; they were routine. Even little ’Ao had needed no verbal orders; she obeyed a simple gesture from the captain whenever the ship had driven into the hail column under one of them, darting over to the collecting sheet and standing by to sweep the hailstones either into the drinking and bathing breakers before they melted and absorbed too much carbon dioxide or, if there was too much of the material, overside.

Only one other vessel had been seen during that time. Wanaka, Malolo ’s captain, had logged—and reported to the others with some amusement, as though they couldn’t see for themselves—that it bore the same name as their own craft, but was a single-hulled double-outrigger of about twice their own tonnage flying the flag of Fou Savai’i and, like themselves, the “nothing to trade yet” pennant. Both adults seemed a little surprised that it was sailing at search speed; their own craft at the moment had its kumu’rau deployed, since the suns were high and it was rare for any craft to miss an opportunity to top off on oxygen. This of course could not be done at night, and at least some of each day had to be spent searching for metal.

The name went into Mike’s mental notebook, too. Malolo meant “flying fish” in more than one classical Polynesian language—on a planet that had no native bacteria, much less vertebrates, as far as anyone had been able to find out.

The thing ’Ao had just seen and identified had been visible enough at half a kilometer, of course. The weather was unchanged, with Kaihapa barely visible through the haze, hanging high in the western sky and the suns nearly at the meridian. There was enough wind to move the ship at a reasonable clip, but not enough to break the swells; and by now, with his improving reflexes, the seismic bumps and hollows in the ocean surface were becoming merely a minor background nuisance to the passenger. They caused the top of the mast to swerve and jiggle in a way that made him avoid watching it, but ’Ao typically held on without apparent trouble and with her doll clinging to her shoulder, neither showing any sign of being bothered.

Malolo was now hove to at the edge of twenty thousand or so square meters of rippling jelly floating just under the surface. Wanaka, the vessel’s owner and captain, was still aboard to make sure it stayed there. ’Ao, Mike, and Keokolo had flipped their helmets on and gone overboard to harvest.

The first two were connected by a safety line, since the visitor knew practically nothing of Kainui hand language, and vocal communication would have been hopeless below the surface even if helmets had been unnecessary. Noise from the ocean bottom was continuous, and deafening, and often deadly in overpressure. Mike had been told firmly to stay with the child, as though the connecting rope allowed anything else. He watched her carefully. He already knew why she avoided the nearly black leaves, which spread just at the surface and shadowed more than half the slimy stuff underneath, but he had been told practically nothing about the actual mechanics of harvesting. The items they wanted, he did know, were in the sheet of jelly itself, whose upper surface oscillated vertically under the push of the endless random microtsunamis and more regular swells, varying from half a meter to something like two and a half below that of the even more violently rippling water. Sometimes Mike found himself wading unsteadily on jelly, sometimes swimming. The meter-and-a-quarter-tall child always had to swim.

It seemed simple enough. ’Ao’s thinly gloved hands groped over the jelly and every few moments found a slit not visible to the man. Reaching a few centimeters into this she would feel around briefly and pull the hand back either empty or grasping a black purselike object ten or twelve centimeters long that reminded Mike of a shark’s egg case. This she would deposit in a circular basket being towed behind her, and resume groping. ’Oloa, the doll, clung to her shoulder still, but ’Ao paid no attention to it; she was working.