Ocean Under the Ice

by Robert L. Forward

  “Except for its size, the eye looks just like a human eye,” remarked Richard.

  “Or a bird eye, or an alligator eye, or an octopus eye,” said Cinnamon. “There seems to be only one good way for nature to make a video camera out of jelly.”

  “This individual is named Pink-Orb,” continued Splish. “One of their chief scientists, with the specialty of astronomy. We spent many months together while I learned their language. I have built up a translation program that I believe is adequate to allow you to converse with them, although it is certainly not complete. Fortunately, many of the words and phrases that are used in ordinary conversation are honorific and polite rather than containing any real information, which makes translation easier.”

  “A sign of a civilized being,” said Reiki.

  “Can we talk with it, do you think, James?” asked Jinjur.

  “The translation program that Splish has transferred up looks adequate,” replied James. “The exploration robot has a small portable video display screen stored away in its sample hold just for this contingency. I have instructed it to take it out and display it to the alien. A picture of you and George is now on the screen.”

  The icerug came closer to the small screen. The motion brought a gasp from a number of mouths.

  “It glides!”

  “Look how the skin moves up the pedestal, over the head region, and down the other side, as if it were moving under the skin.”

  “Well,” said George. “Since we have a translation program, let’s give it a try.”

  Reiki, with her obsession for politeness, was concerned that George would say something that would offend the alien, getting them off to a bad start. However, George, to do him credit, treated the strange native with his usual ceremonial tact.

  “Greetings, great and noble one!” he started. “I am known as Colonel George Gudunov and this is Major General Virginia Jones, leader of our expedition. We are humans from the planet Earth around a distant star. We are presently in the large circle-shaped machine that you see in your sky. We wish to visit your most magnificent world to learn more about its wonders. We wish to meet you. We have come in peace, and do not desire your land or your property. We will stay for a short while, and then must leave again. But we will leave machines like the one that is there now so we can talk with you in the future, if you wish. Will our visit be welcomed?”

  The sides of the spherical head of the icerug began to vibrate visibly and a deep booming reply rang in the ears of the humans. The translation program on Splish automatically converted the booming tones and simulcast the translation over their imps.

  “Welcome, great and noble visitors from the most magnificent planet Earth. I am called Pink-Orb and my people are called coverers-of-the-ice.”

  In the sky behind Pink-Orb, clouds of water vapor began to rise up into the sky.

  “The geyser is starting to erupt, James,” said Richard. “Is it going to be a big one?”

  “No,” reported James. “It is only Zuni passing by, as it does every two Zulu days. The eruption should peak in about an hour and a half, then fade off.”

  “It will be interesting to watch it from the point of view of someone underneath it,” remarked Katrina.

  “The Munificent God of the Sea awakens,” said Pink-Orb, rolling its eye around to gauge the height of the geyser. “Unfortunately, it will not be possible to communicate during the eruption because of the noise. The great Colonel George Gudunov and the Major General Leader Virginia Jones will please excuse me while I accept the bounty that falls to me.” The node moved off to the center of its carpet-like body, and lifted its eye to the sky to watch the rising jet of water.

  The geyser rapidly built up in intensity, and shortly after that, a mixture of rain, slush, and snow began to fall. Splish was kept busy keeping the lens clean.

  Richard looked down at his planetary science screen, which contained a high-resolution image showing the geyser from above. “Wow! Look at Big Bertha blow!”

  “Big Bertha!” exclaimed Cinnamon. “That has to be the worst name for a geyser man could invent. Big Bertha was a gun — not a geyser!”

  “All right,” replied Richard agreeably. “What should we call it?”

  Reiki added in a quiet, but firm tone. “The proper choice for the name of something on some other specie’s planet, is the name that they choose for it, not one some human has chosen.”

  “The problem,” said David, “is that the word is probably a proper noun, which may or may not have a meaning that can be translated, and we can’t use the icerug word directly since we can’t imitate the icerug’s pronunciation without using a synthesizer.”

  “Manannan,” suggested Deirdre.

  “What was that?” asked Jinjur.

  Deirdre glanced up. “Pink-Orb called the geyser the Munificent God of the Sea. In Celtic myths, the god of the sea was called Manannan, and the fishermen asked him for fine rich harvests.”

  “Good enough,” said Jinjur. “Let’s change the name of the geyser to Manannan. Anything’s better than using the name of a World War One cannon. I like the sound of it, and it’ll be easy to spell in the report.”

  “There’s an accent over the final ‘a’,” said Deirdre wickedly, “but I doubt anyone will notice if you leave it out.”

  “How did you hear of such a god?” whispered Katrina curiously. “I always liked mythology myself — it’s fun to allude to those old gods in a poem — but I never heard of that one.”

  Deirdre’s did not look up as she answered briefly. “Curious about my name, I was, so I read all the books I could find about Celtic mythology. Most people are curious about their names, aren’t they? You catch any mention of what means yourself, and like to follow up the stories and what they mean. I once spent some time on the Isle of Man, named after Manannan.”

  With a roar, the geyser shot even higher than before.

  “Wow!” repeated Richard, trying to be as sincere as he could. “Look at Manannan blow!”

  “Better,” said Reiki approvingly, giving him a warm smile.

  The spray of rain and slush turned into snow as the geyser rose higher and the water had longer to fall through the frigid air. Soon the plum-colored carpet was covered with a light blanket of snow that melted almost as fast as it fell. Suddenly, something fell to the ground between the camera and Pink-Orb.

  “What was that!” exclaimed Katrina. “James. Replay that in slow motion for me.” She stared carefully at the screen on her monitor as James showed her an enlarged view of the falling object. “Looks like a piece of seaweed.”

  “It is,” confirmed James. “The spectrum, adjusted for the different lighting conditions, of course, matches that of one of the many plants seen by Splash around the volcanic vents.”

  The geyser slowed, and Pink-Orb dropped its eye and arms, and started to return. As it did so, the strand of seaweed resting on the plum-colored carpet in the foreground seemed to come to life.

  “The seaweed is moving!” exclaimed Richard.

  “No!” replied Katrina. “The carpet underneath it is moving, and carrying it along like a cork on a wave.”

  They watched as the seaweed stalk was transported by ripples in the icerug’s body toward the approaching node, where it was picked up by a tentacle and carried to Pink-Orb’s mouth.

  “It’s eating it!” exclaimed Katrina. “Pink-Orb was right to call the geyser the Munificent God of the Sea. In addition to getting nourishment from photosynthesis, it must get a portion of its food from the fallout of the geyser.”

  Pink-Orb returned to stare into the camera, the big pink eye only occasionally blinking when a large snowflake fell on it. Its mouth was busy chewing on the seaweed, but that didn’t prevent it from conversing, since it talked by vibrating the surface of its “head”.

  “I apologize to the great and mighty visitors from the sky, Major General Leader Virginia Jones and Colonel George Gudunov for the delay in returning to converse with you. We have no kno
wledge of who or what you are, but all the coverers-of-the-ice most urgently wish to meet you and learn more about your amazing machines, such as the Crawler-on-Ice-and-Water that talks with us, and the Circle-in-the-Sky that does not fall. If you come in peace to teach us about these things, you will be most welcomed.”

  George looked at Jinjur. “I think, Jinjur, that the translation program is good enough,” he said.

  “You’re right about that,” said Jinjur. “And, Pink-Orb’s invitation is a good enough excuse for me. Zulu will be the site for our next landing.”

  The duty shifts changed again, and those going off shift gathered in the lounge for dinner.

  “If it’s to be Zulu, I’ll want to modify our exploration suits,” said Shirley, as she finished her dessert of algae-ice cream cubes covered with hot chocolate from James’s chemical synthesizers. “If I add an air concentrator to take the right amounts of oxygen and nitrogen out of the Zulu atmosphere, we won’t have to carry anything but an emergency oxygen supply to be used in case the concentrator fails. But, with ambient temperatures low enough to be lethal, James and I will have to make sure the heaters are in top shape.”

  “Make sure they fit right, too,” said Katrina. “The gloves of mine are still too big, and it’s hard to make precise cuts for samples, much less pick them up, with those bulky fingers.”

  “That’s what tools are for,” said Shirley patiently. “You don’t need to use fingers at all.”

  “I know,” said Katrina stubbornly, “but when you’re working with live animals, it helps if you can give them a comforting pat occasionally.”

  Shirley sighed and Deirdre shared her feeling. “I doubt if any alien animal can interpret your ‘comforting pat’ as any more than another alien touch. As a scientist, how can you give in so easily to anthropomorphism?”

  “Oh, I don’t, really,” said Katrina hastily. “I appreciate how different they are. I just wish to be nice to them as well.” The small biochemist tucked herself more deeply into the cushions of the communal lounge and selected another colored strand for her needle. The little basket beside her overflowed with bright threads, destined to be part of the intricate pattern in the frame on her lap. “It’s not just as scientists we’re here, anyway. It’s as people living lives — and caring about the creatures around us!”

  Shirley sighed again. This was an old debate. It promised to continue indefinitely, although Jinjur’s firm command kept any unscientific meddling with the aliens at a minimum. She herself maintained a brisk attitude of detachment even from the flouwen, likeable as they were.

  Deirdre had regarded Katrina’s attempts to treat Foxx as a cuddly pet with amusement; and Foxx had handled that situation with cool disdain. Lately, however, Deirdre had been puzzling anew over their situation. Forever to be among these, and possibly other strange living creatures, was it not perhaps better to enter, albeit cautiously, into their existence as much as they could, rather than to remain aloof and disinterested observers? And yet, as she knew very well, even the slightest interaction between species might result in calamity, despite the best intentions of all concerned.

  “The planned and stated purpose of our mission is to explore, to report, to learn — lots of other things,” said Shirley firmly. “I don’t recall a single mention of — doing good!”

  The contempt in her tone aroused Carmen. “If there’s a choice, wouldn’t you do what’s right, rather than what’s wrong?” she asked with some heat.

  “Who’s to say what’s right?” asked Thomas, from the other side of the lounge. He chuckled. “Of course, if my old Gran were here, there’d be no problem. We’d just ask her. She never has any doubts!”

  “Old people on Earth seldom do,” said Carmen. “But then they still have a faith.”

  Deirdre slid from the lounge as silently and swiftly as a breath. At any hint of the discussion turning in the direction of religion, she always vanished. She swung up the central shaft and headed toward her room. Warring within her were the passionate desire to see these strange creatures for herself, and, almost as strong, the feeling that they should be left alone. By the time she reached her quarters, however, the first had won out, and she flung Foxx to the sofa and dashed off after her in a glorious game of chase, exulting in hope that she would be given the chance to explore this frozen world.

  * * *

  Before the crew could plan their landing, they had to refine and update the global survey of Zulu which Jacques had begun. Ponderously, the lightship moved into a polar orbit around the planet, while the humans and James collated the data from the multitude of sensors focused on the icy surface below. The north and south poles proved to be like their namesakes on Earth — at the height of Earth’s worst glacial period. They had permanent caps of ice, many kilometers deep, with the ocean frozen right down to the surface of the rocky core. At the leading pole, where the air and water vapor from the gas toroid fell inward on the moon, the ocean was also icebound and frozen clear to the bottom, but here the ice was thinner.

  David’s sharp eyes picked out an interesting pattern on the topography maps prepared by the laser altimeter. “Look. Here’s a series of broad bands, coming from both the north and south poles,” he indicated with a slender fingertip. “Then they become indistinct at about the equator. What causes that?”

  “The ice is flowing,” replied Sam. “It piles up at the north and south poles, and then flows thousands of kilometers to the four poles in the equatorial regions where it slowly warms up and sublimates.”

  “If an average temp of twenty degrees below freezing at the equator can be called warm,” mentioned David. “Let’s see if that pattern shows up on the trailing pole.” He flipped the picture skillfully. “No, all I see is snow.”

  “That’s because all the storms end up there, and dump most of their snow, hiding the ridge pattern. The glacier cap must be really thick there. The molecules of water on this planet really have an exciting life cycle,” continued Sam dreamily. “Start out as vapor, falling in from that big ol’ gas toroid orbiting out in space, change to storm cloud droplets that spread out over the planet, land as snow on the north, south, and trailing poles, freeze into ice, slide out to the inner and outer poles, then melt to form the geyser lakes. Geyser heats them ‘til they’re vapor again, and squirts them back out into space to form the gas toroid again.”

  Thomas, doing his regular stint of duty as lightsail pilot, usually had little to do at the navigation console, so he spent a good deal of his time engaged in astrodynamics studies. Using the powerful radar on Prometheus, he checked the exact position of a transponder that he had left on the surface of Rocheworld and one that he had in an orbiter close to Gargantua, and plotted two more points on a graph which he had been building up since they had arrived at Barnard. Each successive point was approaching closer and closer to an integer line on the graph. He grunted in satisfaction at the result. The ratio of the period of Gargantua’s circular orbit around Barnard, to the period of Rocheworld’s elliptical orbit around Barnard, to the co-rotation period of the two lobes of Rocheworld about their center of mass was exactly 480:160:1 — now to better than one part in fifteen places. Every third orbit, Rocheworld came close to Gargantua, where the gravitational pull of the giant planet added just enough energy and angular momentum to compensate for the tidal losses, locking the three periods to each other.

  He also checked the transponders on the penetrators which he had placed on the two small inner moons of Gargantua — Zwingli and Zoroaster. Zwingli, 32 kilometers in radius, was in an orbit that was 40 kilometers lower than Zoroaster, which was 30 kilometers in radius. Since the 40 kilometer difference in the orbits was less than the 62 kilometer sum of the moon radii, it would be expected that they would collide. But as Zwingli, traveling faster according to the laws of orbital dynamics, would overtake the slower Zoroaster, their joint gravitational interaction would slow Zoroaster even more, sending it outward, while Zwingli’s speed was increased, sending it inward,
just enough so the two avoided a collision. After they had passed, the gravitation attraction was reversed, restoring the two moons to their original orbits.

  “Hmmm,” mused Thomas, looking at the data. “Looks like they will be keeping up that do-si-do for another few hundred thousand years at least.”

  He then took a look at the dynamics of the whole Barnard system by bringing up a computer simulation and running the planets and moons back and forth in time at high-speed. Suddenly, he stopped the motion at a particular point.

  “That’s right!” he said to himself as he noticed a certain configuration of the moons around Gargantua. “Nearly forgot that event was coming up, because of all the excitement about meeting Pink-Orb.” He set up his screen and asked James to connect him with George and Jinjur at the control console.

  “Yes, Thomas?” replied Jinjur through their imp link.

  “I almost forgot to mention it — although I’m sure James would have mentioned it soon if I hadn’t — there is going to be a quadruple conjunction about twenty-six hours from now. That should produce an extremely high tidal stress on Zulu and activate all the geysers, especially Manannan at the inner pole.”

  “Quadruple conjunction?” queried Jinjur.

  “Well,” said Thomas. “Technically, from the viewpoint of someone on Gargantua, it’s a triple conjunction and an opposition. Three moons will be lined up on one side of Gargantua, while Barnard will be on the other side of Gargantua. Copy my screen and I’ll show you.” James set up a copy of Thomas’s display on Jinjur’s command console, and Thomas ran the moons and planets through their motions.