Noise

by Hal Clement

  Hinemoa was right; he’d better get food and sleep. He had no trouble in finding either the air lock or, once inside that, his former quarters, and never knew just how long he slept. He was awakened by ’Ao’s shaking his shoulder. He sat up in some surprise.

  “You’re back already? Hinemoa said you youngsters would have to swim.”

  “Most of us did. A few stayed on the ships. I’m going back pretty soon, but the captain wanted me to talk with you.”

  “Important, I expect.”

  “She says so. At least, she wants you to tell me anything you think is important that’s happened since the launch.”

  “I don’t know for certain what’s important. She’s right about there being only seven ships in their fleet. Hinemoa admitted they couldn’t make more, but wouldn’t say why. They use their gold mainly for ballast, to keep the low end of the city pointing down. You can see how much they’d need for that. Tonnes and tonnes. No other city could use even a tiny part of what they have to collect, and Aorangi needs that badly so I don’t see yet what they’d trade any of it for. If Muamoku or any other city were collecting gold itself, then maybe something could be worked out, but these people have a lot of gold-fish tethered to the city and except for times like right now they always have plenty for themselves.”

  “All right. I’ll tell her all that. Anything else? And do you think you’d have a chance to swim back to Mata ? Or would they try to keep you? Or can’t you guess because they haven’t said anything about it to you?”

  Mike thought for a moment, and answered very slowly, still thinking between words.

  “I don’t know whether they’ll care if I get away. Hinemoa told me a lot, and may have been assuming I’d never be able to pass it on. Perhaps we’ll find out when she doesn’t let you go back.

  “There’s another point, though. If I stay, I might be able to find out some of whatever Hinemoa wouldn’t tell me. If whatever holds them down to such a small fleet turns out to be something Muamoku can provide, there would be a good trading base. I think I’d better stay at least until the ships can dock again, and find out all I can in the meantime. Tell Wanaka that, anyway. If you’re back here soon because they won’t let you off the iceberg, we’ll think of something else. Pono?”

  “Pono, Kahuna. If they won’t let me go back to the ship I’ll come right back here to tell you, and we can think some more. If you’re not here I’ll leave a note and then go looking for you.” The child left before Mike could think of a good way to thank her for the compliment. He rather feared she might be praising his skill at mercantile intrigue.

  He was awake now anyway, decided he’d probably slept long enough, and ate again slowly and thoughtfully. It seemed likely that his muscles would be wanted by now, and while he might possibly come up with something useful just sitting here thinking, it seemed a safer bet that he’d pick up worthwhile information from company. Also, it might be a good idea to do some more heavy labor; there was no telling what this gravity might have done to his muscles by now.

  He donned his armor and opened the door, to be met by another child who had apparently been waiting patiently for him.

  “You can pull better with these, Hinemoa thinks,” the youngster said as he handed the man a pair of well-spiked soles evidently designed to strap to his armor boots.

  “Thanks, I probably can. Should I wear them inside, or not until I’m out of the city?”

  “Now is all right. The floors will heal. Shall I show you the way?”

  “Thank you, I know it. But stay with me if you like. Is the ice being brought in? Do they need me?”

  “Yes. Your strength will help a lot more than mine, but I’ll go and help, too.”

  Aorangi was only a couple of hundred meters from the ice pack by now—actually much less, Mike realized as he remembered the very shallow slope of the submerged ice. Several large chunks showing above the water between city and ice sheet were clearly being supported by something underneath, and were being towed and pushed by waders rather than swimmers. Everyone he could see, even his young guide, he now noticed, was equipped with the same extra-traction equipment the youngster had brought him; it was evidently not a special-order job after all.

  He learned very little during the next several hours, since very little was being said by anyone. He kept an eye out for ’Ao, but didn’t see her. No ships were visible, but the water was probably too shallow for them between city and pack ice, he guessed. ’Ao might, of course, have been confined in some way to keep her out of his sight, but he managed to keep from worrying about the possibility. There were many children helping with the transportation, especially close to the cap where the loads were deeper in the water and closer to floating, but most of them seemed older than ’Ao.

  He’d listen and think, since the muscle work didn’t interfere with either, until someone relieved him. This determination resulted in his putting in a very full day’s work. He was beginning to wonder if they might let him work until dropped when someone—not Hinemoa—who had been near him for several hours told him that it was up to him to decide when he needed food or rest; the job was organized only in the sense that everyone knew what had to be done. He thanked his informant and returned to his quarters. There was a brief note there, in something less than perfect spelling: “No trouble. I’m going back to Mata again. We’re to the west. Get to us even if you have to sneak away, the captain says. No people on the shore there, but some of the other ships are around. If you think you can swim far enough, get in the water out of their sight. Don’t wait for night if you can help it. You’ll be hard to recognize swimming anyway.”

  Mike wondered how long ago the message had been left, how long the captain might be willing to wait for him, what she was planning, and whether he should take a chance on swimming in his present state of fatigue. The thought of nearly three thousand kilometers of water below influenced his decision, for no good reason since his armor would keep him afloat anyway and he could drown just as readily in two meters. He ate lightly, rested for an hour, and then sought the outdoors again.

  Sneaking was not really necessary. There were, as he already knew, several pits being served by the ice carriers. People were traveling in many directions between the holes and the source to the south, and no one showed any suspicion of him even when he passed the westernmost pit and kept on going. The Aorangi people evidently knew that what they were doing was important and didn’t believe in letting themselves be distracted from it.

  It was a long walk; Aorangi had risen some distance in the water, and the “shore” was averaging at least half a kilometer farther than before from the center. Once past the hummocky central area that Mike was now sure had never been submerged he could see a wide stretch of ocean and, fairly soon, four of the ships, drifting with sails down or possibly, he realized, at anchor. They were spread far enough apart to make the invisibility of the others reasonable.

  The northernmost of the four he could see was easily recognizable as Mata, leaving the suspicion that the other three were all still farther north. Heading in that direction until the nearby ones were out of sight would be pointless if that were the case; he’d merely come in sight of the others. He might as well start swimming from here. After a little thought he removed his traction soles, and after a little more ran their straps through his tool belt; they might be needed again if he had to come back ashore.

  After his first step toward the sea, he thought the time might already have come; he slipped and fell at once. He snatched the coral spikes that were also still in the belt, but by the time he had them properly in his grip, the grip was inadequate. Even with the shallow slope of the ice and Kainui’s feeble gravity, he had picked up enough speed to tear them from his hands as he jabbed them into the ice, and just barely had time to close his helmet before reaching the water.

  He wondered what Wanaka would say about that. She, or at least someone aboard Mata, had certainly seen him; the larger sail was already rising and the bows
turning toward him. In less than five minutes, he judged, he was climbing aboard. If anyone on the nearest Aorangi vessel had noticed him, the fact was not yet evident.

  Greetings were brief. Both sails were now up, and the bows pointing almost northwest. Even this seemed unnoticed from the other ships. Didn’t they care, or did they merely lack relevant orders? There was no point in asking Wanaka or Keo, presumably, but perhaps ’Ao might have heard something to explain it while she was ashore. He’d ask later, if the little one when she came down from her station didn’t bring the matter up herself.

  Their course puzzled Mike, who now knew enough to recognize that this was not the top-speed heading. He did ask about this, since it seemed a perfectly reasonable question.

  “I’m hoping the gold-fish is still afloat, and we’ll have time to pick up more,” was the answer.

  “I thought we had a pretty good load now.”

  “No. We were asked to put the rest of it ashore before the last launch, and nearly all our other metal as well.”

  “And we’re getting them some more? Didn’t ’Ao tell you they had a lot of tethered fish?”

  “Yes. It’s not for them. I’m hoping to get us some more.”

  Mike, reverting to type, didn’t ask why, but did have another question. “Since we don’t know it’s still there, how long will we look for it?”

  “One day. Then close enough to pure north to reach Muamoku latitude as soon as possible.”

  Mike’s relieved feelings must have showed on his face, but the captain didn’t seem to notice. He asked permission to sleep and went to the cabin without thinking to ask about the water supply. The trivial thought did slip across his consciousness that the captain obviously would never say “up” north. Kainuian charts weren’t pictorial.

  He learned, after waking up many hours later, that the breakers had been essentially full this time; there seemed to have been no effort to drain them again and, he was told, no evidence that the previous emptying had been done by violence. The drain taps must have been used, and since Mike himself had found them closed, shut again by whoever had done the job. That left another minor question or two: why had it been done at all in the first place, and why not again?

  It did not occur, and never would have occurred, to Mike that Wanaka and Keo had only his own report as evidence that the tanks had ever been emptied at all, or that the captain would ever have allowed mere courtesy to interfere with getting the answer to an obviously important question, or even that she would have regarded the term “mere courtesy” as an oxymoron like “only theory.”

  Aorangi had made a great deal of progress south while they were there. They had sailed for several days longer than on the fish-to-city trip when ’Oloa told them that they were in the neighborhood of the gold source. To Wanaka’s unconcealed delight, this was still afloat and took less than four hours to find.

  ’Ao was left at the masthead this time, with Mike on deck and only the other two mining. Now that they knew the system, however, things went much faster. The fish still showed no signs of imminent submersion when they had taken aboard all they dared; Mike wondered whether another design flaw was showing up or merely that its leaves were slower picking up energy this far south. He raised the question, but no one could either choose between the possibilities or suggest a better one.

  Then at last at Mata headed north. Not exactly north, but a compromise between best sailing speed and shortest distance to the desired parallel, as directed by the doll. ’Ao’s time on the masthead had been wasted; there had been no sign of another ship.

  Mike hinted once or twice, but Wanaka offered no explanation why she had collected a cargo with no obvious use. He did not resent the time spent at the fish, however, even though he was having increasingly frequent spells of homesickness. For one reason, he had now been fully and formally accepted into the crew, would receive an appropriate if rather small share of the trip’s profits, and there were plenty of worlds where gold, for various historical and technological reasons, still had significant exchange value. The expense of interstellar travel came mostly from paying off ship construction mortgages; time of flight meant more to freight charges than mass of cargo.

  There was one world he knew of less than a hundred parsecs from Kainui where most of the value of any art form stemmed from its permanence. Maybe Wanaka knew about this, too, but Mike as usual chose not to ask. It was not, he told himself, merely that it was embarrassing to have something explained to him when he should have figured it out for himself; there was the triumph of actually figuring it out for himself.

  Even he was beginning to feel bored when ’Oloa reported that they were at Muamoku’s latitude, and Mata pointed her bows westward. For all they could know eastward might have been better, but there was no way to tell. The city might have been just out of sight in the haze in either direction, or halfway around the planet. As the doll would have said and even ’Ao now understood too well to ask, “One equation, at least three unknowns.” West was the standard way to go in that stage of a navigation problem, because cities in general had an eastward drift and the odds were slightly in favor of a shorter trip if ships went to meet them.

  Mata’s crew settled down to an almost unvarying, though busy, routine. The tacks were short, since the wind came generally from the northwest, and they did not want to be carried farther than city-spotting distance from the parallel they were following. ’Ao spent most of her waking time at the masthead, though it seemed very unlikely that she would sight anything for which Wanaka would want to dump any of the gold—though maybe, Hoani thought, she hoped to trade some of it for something of more certain value. That would presumably be to ships of other cities. If she had told even her husband about what was in her mind, which Mike considered most probable, the mate had been equally secretive.

  It was unlikely that they would meet any homeward bound Muamoku craft, of course, since these would be traveling in the same direction and at comparable speed. Mike had no way of guessing the chances of encountering representatives of any other city. The two they had seen prior to the Aorangi event had both been met in the first few days of their now nearly year-long trip, which would discourage even the most inexperienced and optimistic statistician from risking a public opinion.

  They had been tracing the parallel for over four weeks of Kainui days when ’Ao did sight a ship, however. Wanaka and Keo eyed it carefully, since ’Ao had not reported its course along with its presence; maybe it was actually bound for Muamoku as well.

  But it wasn’t. ’Ao had not reported the course because it was hove to, and she hadn’t been able to believe her eyes.

  “What sort of fish?” the captain finally called.

  The child still hesitated, but finally, “I can’t see any,” came back.

  “That’s silly. Why else would anyone be hove to in the daytime?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t see anything but the ship itself.”

  The adults fell silent. Mike had an idea, but details were still coming together and he didn’t dare announce it yet. Mata’s crew simply stared, all but Hoani with minds as open as their eyes.

  “No signal flags,” the child finally reported.

  Mike almost spoke. Wanaka did. “Not pirates, I hope. How many on deck, can you see?”

  “Just one. It looks—well, I’d say young. Maybe my size. I can’t be sure, because I don’t know how big the ship is.”

  There were a number of clicks that he felt must be audible as drifting items connected in Mike’s brain. He forced himself to speak.

  “There’ll be someone else out to take the tiller in a few moments,” he said. “Wait and see. They’ll turn on an intercept heading after that happens.”

  “You’re sure? You know they’re pirates?” asked Keo.

  “I’m about ninety percent sure of what I said, but I’m equally sure they’re not pirates.”

  “Why? Who or what are they? What do you think they want of us?” Wanaka asked.

/>   “Put your trading hat on. You wanted gold, when we first met them.”

  “You think these are—but I wanted to sell gold. Then I found out no other city would want to buy it; it’s good for nothing but ballast, and regular cities can use sea water if they need that.”

  “But you’ve thought of another use for it, or you wouldn’t have collected another load. I don’t know what you have in mind, but you wouldn’t have mined that fish again just for jewelry.”

  “But these folks wouldn’t know what I have, and if they don’t know and come for us anyway, they don’t care. How do you know they aren’t pirates?”

  “You haven’t recognized that ship yet?”

  “Recognized it? How—?” The captain’s eyes turned back to the other craft. Two more people—adults this time—had appeared on its deck, and one had taken the tiller from the child. The other was working sails, and it was already moving toward Mata. Mike allowed himself to smile, and went on.

  “I don’t know very much about Kainui ships, so I can’t guess what the chances are of two looking so much alike, but this one is a single-outrigger just like the Aorangi ones. It has its leaf deployed, you can see; why would that leaf be so much smaller than ours?”

  “Why would they have a leaf at all? Aorangi, if that’s what you’re trying to tell us this is, uses a different power system!”

  “Which they can’t use on their ships; it takes up a lot of their city and would act as a sea anchor. Their gold-fish did have leaves, remember. Why do they have so few ships? Why do those ships stay so close to their city except in emergencies? Having a spread of boats around the city to help slightly off course homing ships doesn’t apply to them. They even gave up early in their search for the very important wandering fish we found.”

  “Where did this one get the leaf it has?”

  “From you; remember? You gave them a clipping of ours, and told them how to feed it. It’s still growing. That’s if they weren’t able to modify one of their own leaves on short notice.”