by Hal Clement
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.
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.
Hours rolled by, however, with pods of iron still coming aboard, and Mike kept feeling better and better until shortly after the suns reached the meridian. Then the captain gestured ’Ao out of the sea as she arrived with a full bucket, and a few minutes later did the same for Keo.
“That had better do,” she said when all helmets had been flipped back. “’Ao, take down the ‘not yet’ pennant. You’ve spotted the nucleus?” Both heads nodded; that bit of body language was standard even on the colony world. “All right. Keo, get the gen kit. ’Ao says she knows mitosis; let her show you. If she messes it up, it won’t be very important with this one, so don’t interrupt her unless things get dangerous. Mike, you may go back with them and watch if you like, but you won’t be able to understand much. They’ll—or she will—be installing a chromosome unit which will make this machine grow a new nucleus and then divide. Just once.”
“They’re not built to reproduce indefinitely?”
“This is a small planet.” Hoani almost pointed out that it had a third more surface than his own, then saw the point the captain probably had in mind. Any planet is small when confronted with the exponential behavior of life. “We can’t afford to let anything reproduce uncontrolled. We could, no doubt, design a set of predators to hold down the metal-fish population, but it seems more comfortable to do our own planning than to depend on that sort of statistic, which never worked very well on Earth. Escaped Terrestrial microlife we worry about, but so far it seems to be balancing itself off. The varieties that can survive in the ocean here have both prey and predator types, and the cycles phase locally. With large pseudolife forms, phases would be worldwide, and the times when the predators reach a high count but haven’t quite run themselves out of food would be very unproductive.”
The visitor nodded. His own world had been painfully slow to learn that lesson, and was still far from being back to its calculated half billion equilibrium human population. His own child had been permitted as a result of an agreement with authorities that either both parents or the child would emigrate when the latter reached self-supporting status.
“You didn’t seem to hesitate when Keo asked you what to do this time,” he remarked, returning to the question of the iron-fish’s disposal.
“I did my hesitating earlier. I’d made up my mind when he asked.”
“So this thing you’re planting won’t reproduce itself; it will just cause the i’a’uri to divide once.”
“Right.”
“Even if ’Ao makes a mistake in the installat
ion?”
“Yes. All she could probably do wrong would either prevent it from dividing at all, or kill it—effectively, the same result. It wouldn’t be a catastrophe. I’d’ve suggested that she try the job even if she hadn’t asked to. I’m glad she did; some youngsters are afraid to try anything they haven’t done before.”
“I’ve known some who went the other way—were too eager to show off and got badly burned mentally and sometimes literally by failure.”
“So have I. We’ll hope Keo’s judgment about helping turns out to be sound. Here they come. Do you want to go with them?”
“Am I likely to do any damage?”
“Not as long as you do nothing but watch. Come to think of it, you could even help. Ask her to explain things to you as she goes along. That should make her stop to think at each step—though I think she would anyway, with Keo looking over her shoulder.”
“But how can she explain to me in the sea? I don’t—”
“You can’t speak Finger, of course. I forgot. Well, it was a good idea while it lasted. Please don’t mention that slip to Keo. Husbands are hard enough to keep properly respectful as it is. But you may as well watch ’Ao anyway, if you wish; I expect you’ll learn something, and you seem to have normal human curiosity.”
Mike nodded and donned his helmet, fastening it under the critical gaze of the captain. The child had already dived overboard; Keo entered the water more carefully, burdened with a rectangular case about forty centimeters in its longest dimension and a little less than half that in the other two. The visitor followed them over the rippling slime, ’Ao leading the way. All were swimming, the yellow tops and white soles of the child’s flipperlike foot armor providing an easy guide for the others.
