Hal Clement - Noise

Keokolo seemed to be doing the same thing, except that the objects he gathered were clear and glassy in appearance, and the container in which he placed them, unlike the girl’s, seemed to need no floats. Periodically one of the harvesters would return to Malolo and hand the collecting basket up to the captain, who transferred its contents quickly to something Mike couldn’t see, since the salt-stained gunwale was more than a meter above him. Wanaka would then return the bucket to the harvester.

It was a long, rather boring, and tiring process. The noise armor was heavy and much less flexible than Mike would have liked, and the harvesters seemed to be taking a completely random course over the i’a’uri ’s surface; the visitor could not even guess how nearly finished they might be. They stopped and ate for three-quarters of an hour while Kaihapa eclipsed the suns, then resumed work until the latter set. Mike had tried to calculate how many of the items being collected there might be on the vast surface of the pseudoorganism, and suspected Malolo might be there for several days; but when he suggested this aloud, the captain shook her now-exposed head negatively.

“No,” she said through her breathing mask, rather regretfully he thought. “If we’d come across it sooner we might have been able to get a full load, but as ’Ao said when she spotted it, this one is quite a bit past ripe. Its batteries are nearly full, and there’s no way to keep it from sinking out of reach after the leaves are gone. It’s a rather old design, though a very efficient collector. Its iron is very pure and its water drinkable. It’s too bad to see so much of it get away, though of course having only one cargo item to trade isn’t good policy anyway.”

Mike figuratively kicked himself for not having figured out that the pseudoorganism’s name probably came from a blend of a Samoan word for “fish” and a Tahitian one for “iron,” and added several notes to his mental collection.

“D’you think we should split it, or let it die?” asked Keokolo.

“Oh, split it. It’s still a useful type, and if it ever can’t compete with newer stuff the problem will take care of itself,” answered his wife. “We have about a third of what I want, and should get the rest before sunset tomorrow. When we do, you can show ’Ao and Mike how to divide it without depowering one of the halves.”

“I already know about that!” the child cut in.

“Your badge doesn’t say so, but you can show Keo if you want. We’ll be glad to upgrade you.”

Mike had a pretty good idea of what they were talking about. ’Ao was not the child of the adult crew members, though they were married and had a daughter in Muamoku. No children of the same Kainui family ever sortied on the same vessel with their parents or usually even at the same time, but children started their practical education early. ’Ao was not quite forty, nearly ten in Mike’s years. Family separation was a custom retained from their Terrestrial ancestors, who had placed high importance on the preservation of family lines. ’Ao’s parents and small brother were not afloat just now and none, except the brother, was likely to embark until she herself had either come home or been away long enough to justify assuming that she had been lost at sea or adopted by another city.

Mike said nothing; he listened, fitting what he heard into his increasingly detailed mental picture of the colony world’s society and, most particularly, its pattern of languages. By ancestry he was himself as pure Maori as Earth could now provide. By training he was a historian and philologist, and he had already found in trade-centered Muamoku, the only Kainuian city that hosted space craft, that he could make sense out of the Babel of mixed and evolved Polynesian languages in that one Kainuian settlement more readily than most of its citizens could adapt to that of another. He had met and talked extensively with many visitors and adoptees there, where he had stayed until embarking on Malolo a few days before.

Not all the time after the suns set was spent in talking; food, sleep, and exercise were all essential for the crew as well as their visitor; the three crew members could not all sleep at once; and maintenance of the breathing and food supply apparatus was always needed. Just now Malolo had to be kept close to, or at least in sight of, the i’a’uri. Once lost, this would be nearly impossible to find again—certainly not before it had finished ripening, released its water and iron back to the ocean, and sunk back to the deeps to collect and purify more. There was no telling when another useful pseudoorganism would be encountered, though the chances were reasonably good that it would be within a few days.

“Chance” was unfortunately the key word.

Mike’s mental notes had to be recorded more permanently. The others knew what he was doing, and the adults paid little attention to him beyond the needs of courtesy.

’Ao’s curiosity seemed more genuine. She asked many questions and explained his answers carefully to her doll, who probably didn’t understand but at least remembered. Mike questioned the child in turn, trying to learn how she had recognized the iron-fish through Kainui’s haze. She had some trouble explaining; color was understandable, but she was also trying to describe leaf pattern, which still seemed entirely chaotic to the visitor. They had not, obviously, been close enough at the time of spotting to recognize the detailed shape of the palm-wide two-meter-long ribbons of leaf. Mike still felt sure of that when the child finally sought her hammock, and still very unsure of what had actually guided her.

There were more clouds the next day than before—still all thunderheads—but the wind was lighter. Hoani had made no sense yet out of the planet’s meteorology, and wasn’t sure the colonists had either. A world with no land whatever, unless an occasional floating mass of pseudobiology or slab of coral from a detached city raft or dock counted, might be expected to have a very simple air circulation pattern. Kainui did, as far as climate was concerned, but weather was different. It seemed to be simply chaotic.

The tsunamis were as variable as usual, but even the visitor was getting accustomed to them; he had only fallen twice during the short time he had spent on deck that morning. It was the small ones that were troublesome; the really big humps of water extended beyond the range of vision and could barely be felt either tilting the ship or accelerating her up and down. Even in the low gravity the Earth native was usually quite unconscious of such small changes. It was when the deck really tilted that his troubles came.

When the kumu’rau was deployed he had had to develop a separate set of reflexes, since the scaly-looking strip of tissue, ten meters wide and two hundred long, trailing from Malolo ’s stern greatly modified the catamaran’s response to waves in general; that was today’s problem. The “tree-leaf” was deployed when they were not under way by daylight.

On the i’a’uri the swimmers were affected only by the very smallest, most local bumps. These changed the depth of the jelly mass as it humped and hollowed, and meant that a collector floating at a set depth was sometimes within reach of the mass and sometimes not. No one had suggested that Mike should try collecting, and the other two seemed not to be bothered by the irregular motion.

The drinking breakers were now full, so Keo was also collecting iron today. This time they were trusting their guest without a safety line, and ’Ao was working with visibly greater speed. Mike wasn’t sure whether he should feel guilty or not. If Malolo couldn’t get the load Wanaka wanted before their iron mine sank again, perhaps he should; and even he could see the change in the leaves. They were lighter in color and shrinking in length. He had worked out for himself that they must be using radiation from the suns to make something like ATP or azide ion or some other battery molecule, and that the pseudoorganism’s hunger for whatever it was must be almost appeased. He himself must therefore be somewhat at fault for delaying the harvest and decreasing the amount of cargo the crew could collect, though he couldn’t think of any way just then to frame an apology. He wished he could do something helpful himself.