Hal Clement - Noise

At the twelfth count, the sea poured into the lake. Mata was one of the few ships just barely afloat, and like the others was swept away from the sea by the inrush. Those still grounded followed more slowly as the water rose and floated them, too. Everyone hoisted sail, and Keo and Mike followed suit without orders. The “landward” side of the lake deepened, then the new water began to slosh back toward the sea. This seemed now to be below them. Wanaka’s full attention for several seconds was focused on avoiding collisions; like the other steersmen she was not entirely successful, though nothing dangerously violent occurred; all velocities were nearly the same. Mike couldn’t help thinking about infection. The water, bearing the eight vessels, poured out and downward over the path by which it had just passed in and downward.

The native craft, sails now fully up, bore away from the city, remaining in close formation, on a course some sixty degrees left of straight out—almost straight south.

Mike looked back toward Aorangi, wondering how they were to reenter the lake. To his own relief, he didn’t ask the question. It answered itself; Wanaka ordered them to set sail. In what Mike judged to be about twenty minutes, Aorangi’s bulk was indistinguishable. The only identifiable objects were two or three waterspouts, all of them more or less ahead, strobe-lit by the lightning flickering from every direction but down, and Kaihapa, not quite low enough to be in the heaviest haze itself. It should have been a crescent, but was merely a blurred patch of light unnoticeable except when both thunderheads and lightning were all for the moment in other directions than west.

“’Ao!” called Wanaka to the masthead. “I know it’s not really necessary, but tell ’Oloa we’ll be making random course changes twice in the next two hours. When I call again, she should direct us toward where the gold-fish ought to be, as well as she can calculate.” The child nodded understanding, without stopping the endless looking around that was her duty. No one could see her lips or fingers move or hear her voice, but no one doubted that she was passing the order to her doll.

She reported nothing to the deck before the second course change. Then the captain ordered her to the cabin, placing the doll on her own shoulder. She also ordered Keo off watch, and told Mike she would have relieved him as well if the sea had not been unusually rough. Both were wearing safety lines, but the captain seemed not fully to trust these just now. There was no actual storm, but waterspouts were surprisingly numerous at the moment and she wanted two pairs of eyes to keep track of them. It went without saying that she wanted someone to heave Mata to if she herself went overboard for any reason.

Mike’s own sailing experience on Earth had nearly all been limited to calm weather, and he was getting just a little tired of one aspect of Kainui. Nowhere on his home world’s oceans, as far as he had ever heard, was there anything like the microtsunami phenomenon, and even the best noise armor—and his, of necessity, was a special-order item—could not accustom its wearer to all the properties that made it wearable or, better, livable for many days at a time. Quite the reverse. Some aspects of its complex inner structure grew less and less comfortable as time passed.

Wanaka had tacked twice, with easily two hours between the maneuvers, when she ordered Mike to ring the cabin’s signal bell and gave up the tiller to Keo, ordering him to heave to and attach a safety line to himself. Nothing had been seen of any other craft, not that even the captain had been looking very hard. The waterspout supply had thinned noticeably, as had the haze; Kaihapa was much clearer, though not, of course, noticeably higher in the west.

The captain gestured Mike toward the air lock; she seemed to feel that the quieter ocean justified leaving Keo alone on deck. Safetied, of course.

For the next few days, the routine Mike had come to know in the early part of the voyage was gradually resumed. It took a while for both Wanaka and Keo to get over a mild fear of pursuit from Aorangi, distant as the city now should be. The hints from Hinemoa that its motion was under control meant, of course, that no guess whatever about its position could be trusted; but as ’Ao put it when the question was being discussed, there were so many directions—and its inhabitants had admitted, if that were the right word, that there was too much melting going on this far north.

The word “admitted” bothered Mike slightly. Hinemoa, beyond argument, had been doing a certain amount of lying or, to use a word captain and mate seemed to prefer, selling. The launch warning she had sent had offered no hint that Mata would be launched with the others and that there was no way to prevent it; Wanaka had nevertheless been encouraged to unload a respectable part of her cargo. A more encouraging point seemed to be that, maneuverable or not, there was no way the iceberg city could possibly match Mata ’s sailing speed.

That was obvious. Mike was a little uneasy about this word as well, but told himself that paranoia could lead in only one direction and that a very undesirable one. There was no point in worrying about everything. Human minds had limits, and there was nothing to be gained by stretching these limits too far. Let reality catch up occasionally with imagination.

Apparently the captain had not been wholly taken by surprise by the launch, Mike thought again. If either of the others had, they concealed it well. Of course, Wanaka might have briefed them before Mike had joined the party that morning, but he didn’t ask, of course.

The doll did a good job of navigation, though not a perfect one. It eventually reported that they had reached the center of its error circle for the gold-fish, a circle now somewhat enlarged because a less-than-ideal wind had forced them to do a good deal of tacking. Since the object of their search would probably not be visible more than a few hundred meters away, the search rectangles couldn’t be allowed to get much bigger each time around; and quite soon each time around was getting noticeably longer.

Everyone, even from the helm, watched eagerly for signs of their target, but the most trust was placed in ’Ao. Whenever she had to rest, day or night, Mata was hove to. It was the third day before the child screamed, “Port bow!”

“You’re sure it’s the fish?” called Wanaka.

“No, it isn’t, but I think it’s Malolo . That should still be stuck in the jelly, though. We never pulled up the sea anchor after we got there, did we?”

Keo, at the helm, had swung their bow to port without waiting for orders, and within minutes everyone could see that the child was right, both as to identification and inference. She called again.

“Keo! Heave to, or we could get stuck, too.”

The captain rescinded the order.

“No, Keo. Swing to port when you can see the fish itself from where you are, and then try to follow it around its edge. I want to get an idea how big it is. ’Ao, I don’t suppose any of your young friends who identified the gold at your party happened to mention how to tell which water pods have metal under them? I can’t believe their miners would have to do a blind search the way we did.”

The child hesitated. “Not that I remember,” she admitted after a moment.

“Well, don’t worry. You couldn’t have asked without—”

“I know. I thought of that.”

“All right. Come down. When we finish this trip around and know how big this thing is, we’ll try to replace what we left on Aorangi, and then—”

“Back to Muamoku?” asked Mike, rather hopefully.

“No. Back to Aorangi. Why do you think they fooled us into getting back afloat with so much of our cargo ashore? They knew we couldn’t get back to it. I don’t know what they want gold for, but they want it.”