Ocean Under the Ice

by Robert L. Forward

  “S’wonderful, Deirdre,” said George rather thickly through a big bite of bread and algae-butter.

  “Sets you up for the day,” acknowledged Deirdre, taking a generous bite of her own cooking.

  Replete, George outlined the upcoming day’s plans. George had been promised a visit with the Presider to one of the intermediate level meetings, to see how this extraordinary civilization was governed. Deirdre would go with David to visit the musicians, while Richard hoped to meet with Pink-Orb, the icerug astronomer and expert on tidal phenomena, to observe and measure the geyser eruptions at close range.

  “From what I’ve heard so far, this is the most leisurely government that ever existed,” remarked George. “Seems to be just meetings. Some of them vertical in the chain of command, and some of them horizontal between adjacent areas at the same level. The Presider spoke of doing nothing but attending one meeting after another, but never said anything about any action being taken.”

  There were dissenting noises from several voices, and Richard summed them up: “Oh, I don’t know, sounds pretty normal to me.”

  The four explorers were soon busily arranging the contents of their chestpacks, belt pouches, and suit pockets. Richard and Deirdre carefully checked every item they had carried the day before, to be sure that there had been no damage done by the icequake. Aware that Foxx would be confined in her suit for some hours, Deirdre sent the little animal flying about the cabin, exercising small muscles so that they would be content to stay still, then directed it to its litter box in the storage area of Deirdre’s bunk. As the russet body shot back from the bunk area onto Deirdre’s shoulder, it sailed past Shirley in the weak gravity, and she made a half-hearted grab for the tiny animal — missing.

  “Doesn’t that get to be a nuisance, having to pack extra water and all, to take her along?” she asked.

  “Not to me,” was the cool reply. Arielle watched the small animal’s acrobatics rather wistfully; she had seen Deirdre asleep, with the soft fur draped limply over her throat. No wonder she could slumber so deeply, with that hair-trigger guardian so close. David’s chestpack was bulging unwontedly, and Richard watched, curious, as yet another peculiar object was stuffed in.

  “Is that a saw I see, David?” he said.

  “Never know when it mightn’t be useful,” David replied. Deirdre’s ears pricked up. David had some project in mind, but was not divulging it — now why was that? She mulled the thought briefly, and gave it up. Too many other things to think about, and her own hours among the icerugs were too precious to her to waste in thinking of her fellow humans.

  The last things loaded were the three flouwen in their drysuits. Thomas and Cinnamon winched them down from the airlock on Victoria and helped them into the airlock on Dragonfly, where they would stay until they reached the shores of Manannan Lake. They had explored the smaller lake earlier, and had found an underwater connection between the two. Today they would repeat their surveys in the larger lake, while at the same time observing the geyser action from underwater.

  “Make sure you stay well away from that geyser when it starts spouting!” warned Cinnamon as she shut the outer airlock door on the three flouwen. “You might get hurt.”

  *Geysers can’t hurt me!* bragged Little Red. *Nothing can hurt me!*

  ^You were torn in two once,^ Little White warned. ^Next time you could be in many pieces.^

  #Pieces so small you couldn’t put yourself together again,# added Little Purple.

  Instead of retorting, Little Red, for once, was silent, perhaps thinking of the long period when two large pieces of himself had remained separated back on Rocheworld, each piece thinking he was the only Roaring*Hot*Vermillion. Then the humans had come, and had enabled his two pieces to join up again into a single whole personality, with two divergent memories of that long period of isolation from himself.

  Once the three flouwen were on board, Arielle smoothly launched the Dragonfly from the icy surface, and headed for the icerug metropolis. It didn’t take long for her to find a bare spot on the distant shore, far from Windward City, where the flouwen could enter Manannan Lake easily. Even Babble, lowered down from the cargo hull underneath the Dragonfly, had no problem entering the water from the low ice shelf. The flouwen slipped into the water during the waning hours of daylight, and the seven and a half hour “night” on Zulu begun, well lit by the large half-moon Gargantua hanging permanently in the sky above.

  The airplane took off and Arielle, again avoiding the swirling clouds with masterly precision, flew the plane with its long and slender wings toward the icerug city.

  “Look for a plum-colored carpet right about there along the shore front,” said Richard, pointing with his finger at the map showing on the touch-screen. Arielle noticed the green splotch on her navigation display and the plane tilted slightly as she changed its heading.

  “There it is!” said David, who had picked out the slightly more purplish-blue-green plum shade from all the rest of the blue-green carpets.

  “Going down! Get ready to hop!” said Arielle. As she spoke, the plane dropped with the smoothness of an elevator, to hover a half-meter above the surface. George, David, Deirdre, and Richard jumped out onto the ice and walked to the edge of the plum-colored carpet.

  “Strange color, is this,” mused Deirdre. “Should be more blue-green for the best sunlight absorption. The reddish color might be due to a recessive gene.”

  Pink-Orb’s node soon appeared, gliding swiftly straight for them. “Greetings! Greetings! Greetings! No doubt you have come to this spot to observe the approaching eruption of the great geyser-god Manannan. My mathematical models have predicted that the tide will be higher than normal, so the resulting geyser eruption will be well worth the seeing. In fact, I have been allocated this area on this side of the lake so that I may accurately measure the height of each eruption.” Pink-Orb held up a device made of pieces of shaped, polished, and engraved slivers of fine stone, with lenses and mirrors on it.

  “A quadrant!” exclaimed Richard. “Like a sextant, but covering ninety degrees instead of sixty.”

  “How can you be so sure?” asked Deirdre. “It may look like a quadrant, but it could be anything — even a musical instrument — for all you know.”

  “Form ever follows function,” said Richard, pulling his own sextant out of his chestpack. The iris in Pink-Orb’s eye widened as it saw the metal device, and soon the two scientists were comparing the similarities of their two devices.

  “How do you use it?” asked Richard.

  “When a geyser eruption starts, I place the telescope in front of my eye, and adjust the angle-arm on the quarter-circle until the image of the top of the geyser is on the fine line inside the telescope, while at the same time observing on the same line, either the horizon with this mirror in this position. Or, if the horizon is not visible, the center of the bubble with the mirror in this position. After the sighting is complete, I can read the angle from this engraved scale on the quarter-circle. Knowing the angle, and the distance to the base of the geyser, I can use angle tablets to calculate the height of the geyser.”

  “Quarter-circle and angle-arm are obviously their terms for the sextant’s arc and index arm, and the device even has a bubble level to create an artificial horizon. It’s definitely a quadrant, Deirdre,” concluded Richard.

  Deirdre was satisfied.

  “What do you use for the liquid in the bubble level?” asked Richard.

  “A light oil with a very low freezing temperature,” replied Pink-Orb. “We get it from one of the internal organs of the coelasharks.”

  “Coela-liver oil,” thought George.

  “I too have come to observe, and measure the approaching eruption with my sextant,” said Richard. “And while the others will probably watch the eruption when it occurs later on tonight, they also have other tasks.”

  “We had better get moving,” said George, heading for the Grand Portal of the Great Meeting Hall, just visible a kilometer awa
y around the lake. David and Deirdre followed, leaving Richard with Pink-Orb.

  “You mentioned mathematical models,” said Richard to Pink-Orb. “Does that mean you can predict the conjunction times of the various moons, and the height of the tides?”

  “Very accurately,” replied Pink-Orb. “My model includes the orbital parameters of all the major moons of Gargantua and their tidal effects on Ice. It also includes an elastic model of the rocky core of Ice so that I can separate the core tides and their phase delays from the ocean tides. It also includes a model of the geyser itself, which has its own response delays and resonances. This particular eruption will be larger than normal, since the Sun-God is in the same part of the sky as the Near-God and their tides will reinforce each other.”

  “That will be some time from now,” remarked Richard. “Around midnight.”

  “Yes, but there are no clouds in the sky now, so I shall use the time to measuring the positions of the minor moon-gods that are visible. With enough measurements, the errors average out, enabling a more precise calculation of their true orbits to put into my mathematical model. But I can’t do it with this instrument. Much too small and inaccurate. Would you like to see my telescope?”

  “Certainly!” replied Richard with alacrity.

  “Step on my carpet and I will take you there,” said Pink-Orb. “It is near the center of my area.”

  Richard stepped on the plum carpet, and instinctively assumed a slightly bent-knee surfer’s stance, as he felt himself lifted and borne off on a wave, while Pink-Orb’s node glided along beside him. He could easily see the figures of George, David, and Deirdre trudging along the far side of Pink-Orb on their way into the city, but no sign of any telescope.

  “I don’t see any telescope. Do you?” he muttered over their private suit-to-suit imp link.

  “Be patient, and learn,” Deirdre cautioned him over the link. “And remember not to be interfering — no suggesting ways to make it bigger or better.”

  “I’ll try,” promised Richard, trying to maintain his balance on the slippery surfaced wave. After they had gone a hundred meters on Pink-Orb’s elongated isosceles-triangle carpet, they came to a strangely depressed region, perfectly circular and about thirty meters in diameter, with a pointed bulge in the middle, as though there were a short pole sticking up from below the surface.

  “Here is my observatory,” said Pink-Orb with pride as they glided up to the edge of the depression and stopped. “Let me uncover it for you.” As Richard watched in astonishment, the carpet covering the depressed area opened and withdrew, exposing an open mesh of ropes that covered a deep hemispherical pit. In the center of the pit was a gigantic open-work telescope supported by a massive mount. The support for the rope canopy rose from the top of the mount. As he watched, the flesh around the periphery of the pit pulled the rope canopy to one side to allow the telescope beneath a clear view of the skies.

  “Wow!” exclaimed Richard as he took in the size of the telescope. “What a monster! The main mirror is nearly two meters in diameter and the focal length must be twenty meters or so.”

  The voice of Josephine came in over Richard’s imp. “It is similar to the large telescopes Sir William Herschel used to make in the 1700s. But significantly larger than any Herschel attempted. No doubt the lower gravity of Zulu compared to Earth makes it possible.”

  Pink-Orb started to describe the various features of the telescope. “The mirror is made of mercury, warmed until it was liquid, then allowed to freeze while under constant rotation. By keeping the telescope shaded when not in use, it stays cold enough to keep the mercury frozen.”

  “That would give you a perfect parabola,” admired Richard. “Just what you need for a good telescope. Much better than grinding lenses, like Herschel did. That only gives you a spherical surface, which then needs to be laboriously figured into a parabola. I see it’s on an azimuth-altitude mount.”

  “Yes,” replied Pink-Orb. “I use this telescope for accurate position measurements of the moon-gods with respect to the background stars. I have another telescope nearby on a polar mount for use during longer periods of observation, when searching for transient weather features on the major moon-gods.”

  “How do you rotate it in azimuth?” asked Richard. “That mount must weigh a couple of tons!”

  “In this manner,” said the node of Pink-Orb. Far below, portions of its body rose up off the bottom of the pit and pushed against some posts built into the base of the telescope. The massive mount started to turn slowly. “It floats on a thin film of oil.”

  Pink-Orb began to go down a spiral ramp around the inside of the pit, and Richard found himself following the node down the spiral while standing on a level platform made of plum-colored velvet. “We have some hours yet before the conjunction. Let me show you the azimuth and altitude rulings. They are the finest ever made on Ice.”

  * * *

  As George, David, and Deirdre approached the Grand Portal, they met the Presider, in its elaborate ribboned cloak and skirt, advancing to meet them across its peacock-colored carpet. With ceremonial dignity, the Presider welcomed George, and was still talking as the two of them started off to the first “meeting.” It was a regional meeting of the one hundred or so Local Association Leaders of the Inner North North-West portion of the nation. The meetings were led by the Convener of that region, while the Presider usually attended as an observer.

  The sounds of musical instruments led David and Deirdre through the Grand Portal and into an anteroom that looked like a storage and repair area for musical instruments, with many tools and devices for holding, shaping, and assembling various musical instruments. Off in large side tunnels were storage areas with different drums, harps, chimes, and strange resonating devices. In one corner was what looked like “useful junk”; scraps of patterned drum skin, hollow cylinders of ice chipped at the ends, cracked “boards” of cross-plied, compressed, and dried seaweed that served as the icerugs equivalent of wood, chipped beams of polished stone, and many coils of gut and fiber string, slightly frayed in spots.

  There were two icerugs in the anteroom, apparently tuning the musical instrument between them. Their large eyes turned to look at them. The taller node lifted a monocle of ice with its tentacle of cyan, through which the wide band around its iris shone like silver. The smaller icerug’s eye was an almost colorless light-blue, in contrast to its carpet covering which was a vivid electric blue-green.

  The cyan-colored node spoke first, in the characteristic booming voice of the icerugs.

  “I am named Silver-Rim, and this is Clear-Eye. You, the human called Deirdre, were here before. You … applauded … our music by striking the ends of your appendages together to make a sharp noise. It was a strange thing to see, and new to us. I understand that it was meant to be a complimentary gesture; therefore we accept it.”

  Deirdre noted, with interest, that there was no implication in these words of either humility or gratitude; an accurate delineation of these aliens should include that fact. David’s eyes had already fastened upon the huge, fantastically carved stone frame before him, with its thick, regularly spaced strings fitted so close together that human fingers would have fumbled over them.

  “Greetings,” he said, mindful of George’s instructions. “I am named David. I was told of your fine performances yesterday, and wanted to see, and hear for myself, your splendid instruments. That is a truly beautiful instrument, and a most unusual sort of harp. I imagine you obtain tones of extreme depth from such a … fine instrument.” David felt unsure of himself as he struggled to spout the fulsome phrases the aliens seemed to expect. Fortunately, Deirdre took over.

  “Careful words they like, David, but not blarney!” To the icerugs she spoke directly: “David is interested in music, and makes it for his own pleasure and ours. May we ask a demonstration of some of your instruments?”

  Clear-Eye moved behind the giant harp without a word, and reached two tentacles towards the rope-like strings.
With strength and speed, the appendages plucked half a dozen of the central strands, which visibly quivered as they filled the ears with a deeply throbbing chord. Amazed, David bent nearer, studying the strings which more nearly resembled cables. His fingers itched to touch them, but he forbore to do so without an invitation, which was not forthcoming either then or later.

  “I’ve never heard such a bass note, from a string — sounds more like a drum. May I ask what these strings are made of?”

  “These thickest ones in this … size one harp, are made from the gut of a coelashark. It is the largest harp in our orchestra.” The computer translation of the instrument’s name was clumsy, thought David, but probably as accurate as was possible in the circumstances. Making noises of genuine admiration, he moved along the wall to the next instrument, a tall and extremely narrow sort of drum. Without being asked, Clear-Eye thumped its surface with a tentacle balled up at the end into a very efficient mallet, and the resultant boom created pleasant reverberations in the human interiors.

  “Wow!” was their mutual reaction, and the icerug craftsmen took them into the tunnels to show them more of the instruments stored there, playing each of them briefly. Deirdre was struck by the artistry of construction, and looked closely to verify her opinion that each was unique — a one-off creation. The surfaces, of natural materials, were polished to a high sheen, but retained the grain, patterns, and whorls of stone, skin, and dried seaweed.

  David, after hearing so many variations of sound in the lower registers, asked curiously, “Do you sometimes use other ranges in your music? Those in the soprano?” He stopped when his imp said that the word was not easily translatable, and remembering these creatures’s skill with mathematics, repeated the question, substituting vibrational frequencies for musical terms. “Those notes which involve vibrations of one thousand cycles per second or higher?” This, the computer could easily convert into vibrations per icerug time units.