Abyss Deep

by Ian Douglas

  The sample I’d collected had been taken to the lab, where it had gone into the bio-­secure compartment for Bob to do remote analyses on it. Since we didn’t know what might be in that chunk of cuttlewhale I’d brought back, I’d coated it with sealant in the Haldane’s airlock to avoid exposing the crew to any possible microorganisms, opening it up again only when it was safely inside the secure biological containment compartment in the lab. Through Bob, I’d run a standard spectrographic analysis first . . . then done a chem series. The whole process had taken me perhaps twenty minutes.

  “What the devil,” Second Lieutenant Regan said, “is Ice Seven?”

  “It is, sir, a very, very special kind of water ice. . . .”

  Dr. Montgomery nodded. “That would explain a lot.”

  “It’s created under extremely high pressure,” I went on. “Here, I pulled this down off the Haldane’s Net.” I showed them the chart I’d been studying before the meeting.

  We’re all familiar with ordinary ice, of course . . . water that freezes at zero degrees Celsius, becoming a solid. But it turns out that, depending on the temperature and on the pressure, water can freeze in a great many different ways—­fifteen that we know of for sure, plus several variants, and there are almost certainly others.

  Ordinary ice, which forms as hexagonal crystals, is known in exotic chemistry as Ice Ih. All the ice found within Earth’s biosphere is Ice Ih, with the exception of a small amount in the upper atmosphere that occurs as a cubic crystal called Ice Ic.

  But compress Ice Ih at temperatures of sixty to eighty degrees below zero and it forms a rhombohedral crystal with a tightly ordered structure known as Ice II. Heat Ice II to minus twenty-­three degrees . . . or cool water to that temperature at something just over thirty atmospheres, and it becomes Ice III.

  And so it goes, running up the list of exotic ices all the way to Ice XV, which forms at pressures of over 10,000 atmospheres and at temperatures of around 100 degrees Kelvin—­or minus 173 degrees Celsius.

  Still with me?

  On Earth, the deepest point in the ocean is in the Marianas Trench, the Challenger Deep, which reaches 11 kilometers down and has a pressure of 1,100 atmospheres . . . which translates to just over one ton per square centimeter. We wouldn’t hit 10,000 atmospheres until we were ten times deeper—­an impossible 100 to 110 kilometers down, assuming there was a terrestrial ocean that deep.

  Using the download, I gave the assembled personnel a quick overview of exotic ice chemistry. I’m not an expert, by any means, but I was drawing on research downloads from the sick bay AI, which pretty much covered the basics. I had to explain to the non-­technical ­people present that temperatures were given in degrees Kelvin, meaning degrees Celsius above absolute zero, with 273oK marking the freezing point of water. Pressure was given in pascals, or in millions of pascals—­MPa—­or in billions of pascals—­GPa. One atmosphere of pressure was equal to 101,325 pascals.

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  Chemical Breakdown of Exotic Ices

  Ice Ih:Normal crystalline ice, formed in hexagonal crystals. Formed from water at normal pressures cooled to 273ºK [0ºC.] Nearly all ice within Earth’s biosphere is Ih.

  Ice Ic: Metastable variant of Ih with a cubic crystalline structure, and its oxygen atoms arranged in a diamond pattern. Produced at temperatures between 130º and 220ºK, but is stable up to 240ºK. It is sometimes found in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

  Amorphous ice: Ordinary ice lacking a crystal structure. Formed in low-­, high-­, and very-­high-­density variants, depending on pressure and temperature. Commonly found on comets, outer-­planet moons, or elsewhere in space.

  Ice II: Formed from ice Ih when it undergoes pressure at 190º to 210ºK. Rhombohedral crystalline structure.

  Ice III: Formed from Ice II when heated, or by cooling water to 250ºK at a pressure of 300 MPa [very approximately, 3,000 standard atmospheres]. Tetragonal crystalline structure. Denser than water, but the least dense of all high-­pressure ice phases.

  Ice IV: Metastable rhombohedral crystalline phase, formed by heating high-­density amorphous ice at a pressure of 810 MPa [8,100 atm].

  Ice V: Most complex of all exotic ice phases, with a monoclinic crystalline structure, formed by cooling water to 253ºK at 500 MPa [5,000 atm].

  Ice VI: A tetragonal crystalline phase formed by cooling water to 290ºK at 500 MPa. Exhibits dielectric changes [Debye relaxation] in the presence of an alternating electrical field.

  Ice VII: Cubic crystalline structure with disordered hydrogen atoms, exhibiting Debye relaxation.

  Ice VIII: A more ordered cubic crystalline form with fixed hydrogen atoms, formed by cooling Ice VII to temperatures below 278ºK

  Ice IX: A tetragonal crystalline phase formed by cooling Ice III to temperatures between 208ºK and 165ºK. Remains stable at temperatures below 140oK and at pressures between 200 MPa and 400 MPa [2,000 to 4,000 atm].

  Ice X: Highly symmetrical ice with ordered protons, formed at 70 GPa [700,000 atm].

  Ice XI: A low-­temperature form of hexagonal ice, formed at 240ºK and with an orthorhombic structure, sometimes considered to be the most stable form of ice Ih. It forms very slowly, and has been found within Antarctic ice up to 10,000 years old.

  Ice XII: Dense, metastable, tetragonal crystalline phase formed by heating high-­density amorphous ice to temperatures between 77ºK and 183ºK at 810 MPa.

  Ice XIII: A proton-­ordered form of monoclinic crystalline ice V, formed by cooling water to temperatures below 130ºK at 500 MPa.

  Ice XIV: The proton-­ordered form of ice XII, formed below 118ºK at 1.2 GPa [120,000 atm], with an orthorhombic crystalline structure.

  Ice XV: The proton-­ordered form of ice VI, formed by cooling water to temperatures between 80oK and 108oK at a pressure of 1.1 GPa [110,000 atm].

  “ ‘Hexagonal crystals,’ I think I understand,” Ortega said with grim humor. “Some of this is pretty thick. But ‘proton-­ordered’?”

  “Let’s just say that ice comes in a lot of different forms,” I said, “and those forms can have different chemical, electrical, and even nuclear effects. Here, maybe you should just see the biostats I got in the lab.”

  I pulled the worksheet down from the lab AI and spread it out for their in-­head inspection. “This,” I told them, “is the biochemistry of a cuttlewhale.”

  I then proceeded to explain . . . and hoped to hell that I wasn’t making their eyes glaze over. I was afraid I’d already done that with the exotic ice table.

  It turns out that some exotic ices are pretty weird, and appear only under extreme conditions. Ice IX, for instance, forms at pressures of around 3,000 atmospheres and temperatures around 165 degrees Kelvin. Ice X doesn’t form until pressures hit 700,000 atmospheres. We’re not certain, but we think that at pressures of around one and a half terapascals—­that’s almost 15 million atmospheres, or more than 15,500 tons per square centimeter—­water actually becomes a metal. We’ve never worked with that kind of pressure directly. Even at the core of the Earth, pressures are estimated to reach “only” 3.5 million atmospheres; Jupiter’s core may hit around seven terapascals—­or 70 million atmospheres—­enough to create metallic hydrogen.

  But what we had in the lab was a sample of Ice VII, and compared to some of the exotic ices we knew, it was pretty tame. The stuff forms at about a thousand atmospheres, and at surprisingly high temperatures—­around minus 3 degrees Centigrade. Odd things happen to the water’s hydrogen molecules at that pressure, and the hydrogen bonds actually form interpenetrating lattices. That means there are unusual electrical effects in the material, though we don’t understand yet what those might be.

  “Electrical effects?” Haldane’s chief engineering officer, Lieutenant Mikao Ishihara, sounded skeptical. “What electrical effects?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not an electrical enginee
r . . . and so far as I could find through Haldane’s databases, we haven’t studied natural electricity in exotic ice at all. It’s an entirely new field.

  “But there’s more,” I went on. “That ice sample I collected is not pure. Take a closer look at the biostat imagery.” I showed them photomicrographs of the ice . . . backlit white sheets through which darker chains and blobs appeared. A lot of it was diffuse, almost not there at all, like wisps of gray smoke caught frozen in solid ice.

  “You can see here . . . and here. That spectrographic analysis I ran picked up substantial amounts of sulfur, iron, copper, carbon, potassium, manganese . . . a whole soup of elements strung through the ice matrix almost like . . . nerves? Blood vessels?”

  “Speculation, Mr. Carlyle,” Chief Garner’s voice said over the conference link. “We don’t know . . .”

  “No, Chief, I don’t. But it’s highly suggestive.”

  “But what you haven’t explained,” Walthers said, “is how a creature made of ice could be that . . . that flexible. Those things were like giant snakes! Ice would shatter if it moved like that!”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “I wondered about that too . . . but it turns out that there are different ways that ice can freeze, quite apart from the fifteen different forms of exotic ice we’ve been talking about. The variants are called amorphous ice. The ice we’re familiar with on Earth has a rigid, crystalline structure, but that’s actually rare out in space. In places like comets or in the subsurface ice of places like Europa or Pluto—­throughout the universe, in fact—­amorphous ice is the rule.

  “There are different types of amorphous ice. They generally require low temperatures with very sudden freezing, like ice cream. If you freeze ice cream too slowly, you get conventional ice crystals. Pressure is also important.

  “One type of amorphous ice—­it’s called LDA, for low-­density amorphous—­has a melting point of around one hundred twenty or one hundred forty degrees Kelvin—­that’s around minus one hundred fifty Celsius. Above that temperature, it’s actually an extremely viscous form of water. You might get that effect by manipulating the pressure in various ways too. A sudden lowering of pressure will cause sudden cooling, for instance.”

  “Actually, that problem is trivial,” Ortega said. “You don’t need LDAs. We’ve had pumpable ice technology for centuries, now, with tiny ice particles suspended as a slurry in brine or refrigerants. The ice flows like jelly.”

  “A gigantic worm made of ice,” Montgomery said, staring off into space. “With viscous-­water-­jelly muscles . . .”

  “Maybe,” I said. “This is all still guesswork. But there’s also this. . . .”

  I showed them more test results, these from samples of strands running through the Ice VII that also appeared to be water ice . . . but they were different.

  “These structures appear to be a different type of exotic ice,” I told them. “Specifically, Ice XI, running everywhere through the main body of the sample. We’ve found Ice XI on Earth—­inside the Antarctic ice sheet. It’s actually a stable form of Ice Ih, with an orthorhombic structure and—­here’s the important part—­it’s ferroelectric.”

  That meant that the polarization of its atoms could be reversed by an external electrical field, that it could actually store electricity like a natural capacitor, and that it could carry an electrical current.

  You could actually use such a system to store electronic data.

  “We used to use ferroelectric RAM in some computers on Earth, and for memory in RFID chips,” Chief Garner pointed out. “It’s old tech, but it works. You can also use ferroelectric effects in memory materials—­in a matrix that has one shape when an electrical current is running through it, and a different shape when the current is switched off.”

  I nodded. “I think that the cuttlewhales are gigantic electrical motors, using organic electricity to generate movement in their analog of musculature. I think they have a kind of built-­in computer RAM, probably billions upon billions of bytes of it, probably distributed throughout their bodies. And I have the distinct feeling that a cuttlewhale isn’t so much a life form as it is a . . . a machine. Something created by, manufactured by . . . something else.”

  Consternation broke out around the table, and in the in-­head connection as well. “Wait a second, Carlyle,” Walthers said. “You’re saying the cuttlewhales are machines?”

  “Robots!” Hancock said. “They’re fucking robots!”

  “Something like that,” I admitted. I held up a cautioning hand. “Look, I’m not saying they’re not the product of natural evolution. They may well be. But we shouldn’t discount the possibility that somebody else designed and assembled them. It would be very hard to explain how various ices could come together by chance in a way that worked so elegantly . . . complete with distributed natural data processing based on old AI models.”

  “Be careful, Mr. Carlyle,” Ortega told me. “That’s the argument used by the so-­called Creationists of a few hundred years ago . . . that life on Earth was too complex to have been brought about by accidental, natural processes. Given enough time, natural processes can manufacture some wonderful things.”

  “Of course, sir,” I said. “But . . . there’s something else you all should consider.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sunlight, sir. On Earth, it only penetrates about one hundred fifty meters into the ocean. Actually, most light goes no deeper than the top ten meters . . . but by the time you reach one hundred fifty meters, it’s completely dark. Here, with the red sunlight, it’s probably less . . . and under the ice, on the nightside of the planet . . . well, there’s no light entering the ocean at all.”

  “So?” Walthers demanded. “What are you getting at?”

  “Eyes,” I replied. “The cuttlewhales have eyes. Six of them. If they evolved far enough down that they developed under high pressures, why do they have eyes?”

  “Those might not be eyes,” Ortega said, but he sounded unsure. “I wish you could have picked one of them up and brought it along. We might know more. . . .”

  “Sorry, sir, but I wasn’t going to wait around out there on the ice any longer than I absolutely had to. But . . . I wonder. If the cuttlewhales were designed, if they were manufactured somehow by another intelligence . . . maybe they were given eyes in order to explore the surface remotely.”

  “Huh,” Garner said. “Like our remote probes.”

  “That is an enormous leap, Carlyle,” Walthers said. “Kind of a leap of faith, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so, sir. But it’s something to think about.”

  “Over a long-­enough period of time,” Ortega said, thoughtful, “a deep-­benthic life form might move to the surface and evolve vision . . . then migrate back to the depths. . . .”

  I shrugged and spread my hands. “Look, all of this is pure speculation at this point. I’m just suggesting that we should keep in mind the possibility that the cuttlewhales are . . . artificial. That would certainly have an effect on our mission, wouldn’t it?”

  “To say the least,” Montgomery said. She still looked like she was in shock. “Just where would they have evolved in Abyssworld’s ocean? Or . . . where would they have been created, if that’s the right term? How far down?”

  I shook my head. I had numbers, but no proof, nothing solid. “Well, you need a water pressure of around a thousand atmospheres to turn ordinary water into Ice VII. That’s not too extreme, as exotic ices go. You find that at a depth of ten thousand meters on Earth . . . or about eleven thousand meters on Abyssworld. Eleven kilometers down . . .”

  “That’s only a thousandth of the way to the sea floor,” Walthers pointed out.

  “My God. What are the pressures like at the bottom of Abyssworld’s ocean?” Ortega asked.

  “I was wondering about that myself, sir,” I replied, “and I did some simple calcs.
On Earth, water pressure increases by one atmosphere—­that’s over a hundred thousand Pascals—­for every ten meters you descend. Abyssworld’s gravity is only ninety-­one percent of Earth’s, and there’s a direct one-­to-­one correlation between the weight of the water and the pressure it exerts, so call it nine hundred ten thousand atmospheres.

  “That’s a skull-­crushing thousand tons or so pressing down on every square centimeter.”

  “What happens to water ice at that depth?” Garner asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody does. One possibility is that the bottom of Abyssworld’s ocean—­maybe even the bottom three or four or five thousand kilometers of it—­isn’t liquid water anymore. It might be a highly compressed slurry or ice-­slush composed of several exotic ices, kind of like the jelly Dr. Ortega mentioned. Heat from the planet’s core might create convection currents, so it would be constantly circulating. It certainly would be a very strange environment. We don’t know enough, though, to know how strange.”

  “What kind of life might we find down there?” Montgomery asked.

  It was a rhetorical question, I knew, but I couldn’t resist answering. I’d been wondering a lot about the same thing.

  “Just about anything is possible, ma’am,” I told her. “With heat from the planet’s core, with water and various nutrients, salts, metals, stuff like that from sea-­floor vents, there’s no telling what might have evolved down there.”

  For the first time in our discussion, one of the Brocs chimed in, its words written out by the ship’s AI within our in-­heads. IT IS VITAL THAT YOU REMEMBER, D’drevah wrote, THAT MOST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE LIVES IN PLACES LIKE ABYSSWORLD’S DEPTHS, AND NOT NAKEDLY EXPOSED ON THE ROCKY SURFACES OF PLANETS LIKE M’GAT OR EARTH.

  I thought again about the Medusae of Europa.

  “Okay,” Walthers said. “That’s all well and good, but I don’t see how it will affect us. We don’t have the technology to explore such depths.”

  “We might be able to probe those depths with sonar,” Montgomery suggested.