Ocean Under the Ice

by Robert L. Forward

  “The icerugs in my field of observation are no longer fighting. They are moving slowly and are filling up their respective territories. There are no more loud voices.”

  “Perhaps this means there is peace now!” said Shirley eagerly.

  Splish‘s mechanical reply was precise. “Peace is not a word the icerugs have in their dictionary. They have probably annihilated the enemy and the war is over for that reason.”

  This came as a shock, even after all they had seen. But all were anxious to know the condition of the formerly friendly icerugs, and Thomas and Richard volunteered to investigate. George agreed, but insisted on going along. For the first time in the long history of their explorations, he also insisted on supplying each of them with a weapon. It was a recoilless hand launcher for laser-beam-riding rocket-propelled explosive bullets — accurate in any gravity field from zero to five gees.

  “Keep it concealed in your chestpack — unless you need it — and I’m pretty sure you won’t. But in the aftermath of war, sometimes situations become … uncertain.”

  The three men were dropped off on the lake front ice shelf, Arielle keeping the Dragonfly aloft above them. They were cheered by the sight of icerug nodes active again upon their carpets, although there were many empty areas.

  “There’s Pink-Orb,” said Richard, pointing to the plum-colored carpet. “But the node is not coming to greet us. I’ll give a shout.” The friendly deep hail from the glassy-foil speaker cone of Richard’s suit imp seemed to surprise the alien, who turned slowly in the center of its carpet. Another call from Richard, and Pink-Orb moved in their direction, slowly. To their horror they saw that the beautiful large pink eye of the alien was gone, replaced with a blob of scar tissue on the end of the eye-stalk. The node moved cautiously, stopping frequently to reorient itself.

  “Thomas and George are with me, Pink-Orb. Is there any sight left to you?” asked Richard anxiously. The alien gave a forlorn-sounding moan.

  “None at all. My other wounds, though deep and serious, are healing rapidly. But I will never see a star or moon again. Fortunately, my last blow killed the invader. It was one of the last of them, I think.” The alien’s voice was firm and cool now, and Thomas, who had only heard about the savage battles, was stunned.

  “Were there no survivors or captives at all?” Thomas asked.

  “What are captives?” asked Pink-Orb curiously. That stopped Thomas.

  George asked, “What about the Presider, Golden-Glint? And the musicians Silver-Rim and … he was going on, but Pink-Orb waved a tentacle in protest.

  “The Presider was one of the first killed, so I know of that death. Of the rest, I only learn as I am told, from my nearby neighbors. My career here in the city as an astronomer is at an end. I shall have to retire to the country, where it is easier for a cripple to live. I hope to be out there in time to benefit from the season of high tides, which is due in the next twenty days. The expected deluge should produce a rain of rich foods for me.”

  “Will we be unwelcome if we go into the city to see the damage done by the battles?” asked George.

  “No one is ever unwelcome in our city, unless they mean harm,” said the alien gravely.

  “Like the old warning: Trespassers Will Be Eaten,” muttered Richard. But he could feel only respect and compassion for this profoundly wounded alien intelligence, and offered, “Shall I visit you at your new location, at the time of the quadruple conjunction? I could describe the sight to you, and we could compare data.”

  “That would a generous gift to me,” said Pink-Orb. “One which I cannot repay…”

  “We are sharing knowledge,” said Richard. “Information is valuable only to those who can use it. We, ourselves, have much to learn, always.”

  Pink-Orb seemed satisfied with Richard’s vague words, and they agreed to meet at the time of the middle and the largest of the five upcoming eruptions. The three humans then continued into the city, looking around for traces of the war. There were surprisingly few.

  “Actually, the buildings and all look in pretty good shape,” said Thomas. “I guess ice is not going to be affected by anything less than a bomb or fire. But you said they had both of those?”

  “Yes, but they were only intent on each other’s bodies,” stressed George. “They didn’t seem to be trying to take or hold territory. You didn’t see them, Thomas, it was not like any battle of the sort we know. It was just a series of mutual assassinations, single-minded murders every one.”

  They encountered several icerug nodes moving through the city on their carpet threads, all of them bearing lumpy scars covering new wounds and moving with difficulty. It was also apparent how much fewer there were of them; only individuals, intent on their own affairs, none of the gossiping clusters that had previously made the city center hum with their deep voices. The three humans grew more and more depressed, but continued their walk. They entered into the Grand Portal and went down into the room of musical instruments. Here George was delighted to see Silver-Rim; Deirdre and David would be glad to know the musician had survived, although it had lost a tentacle.

  “Yes, my other injuries will mend, but for me the loss of a tentacle is severe indeed, and will affect my music. Fortunately, the other tentacles will stretch, so I shall be able to adapt. My greatest loss is Clear-Eye. The invaders butchered my brightest student in one of the first attacks. We had no idea of danger until we found ourselves in the middle of a battle.”

  Thomas was struck again by the lack of emotion in these sentient creatures. Silver-Rim’s report was factual, but not grief-stricken. This was borne out in further conversation; the injured icerugs would heal, would grow new flesh and incidentally devour every trace of their enemies. The areas and tunnels belonging to those in the city who had been killed would be taken over and utilized in orderly manner.

  “Then we shall be able to resume our normal activities,” concluded Silver-Rim. “I shall send word through the Conveners that I can accept a new pupil. Some of the younglings in the country escaped the war and will be eager to come to the city. And, of course, in the interval between the high tides, new younglings will appear. We shall survive as we always have.”

  After a few more words, the humans left, sobered by the toll the brief conflict had taken on the icerugs, and still puzzled by the necessity for it, but on the whole reassured. Back on Victoria, George stowed their weapons, feeling rather humble. Thomas and Josephine then presented the rest of the crew with a schedule for the upcoming maximum high tides.

  “There is going to be a series of five high tides and geyser eruptions. They happen every 111.5 Zulu days, when Barnard, Zouave, Zuni, and Zulu all line up in a quadruple conjunction. We were in space looking down at the top of the geyser the last time this happened. It was at noon, when Barnard was in eclipse behind Gargantua. This upcoming conjunction will occur at midnight, when Barnard, Zouave, and Zuni are all over the outer hemisphere of Zulu, and this time we’ll be underneath the geyser, looking up.”

  “Have we really been here over a hundred days?” exclaimed George.

  “A hundred Zulu days,” Thomas replied. “Over two Earth months.”

  Arielle’s first concern, as always, was with the safety of her airplane. “I take Dragonfly west — out of fallout,” she announced firmly.

  “Although Victoria should be safe this far out in the country, I wish I could move her too,” replied George. “But she’ll just have to ride out the storm.”

  Cinnamon, Deirdre, and Katrina, however, were eager to know when, between surges, it would be safe for them to go out collecting.

  “Your suits will protect you against small debris,” Shirley warned. “But a hundred-kilo coelashark, falling at terminal velocity, will be bad news. You’d better plan those trips carefully!”

  * * *

  The view of the first eruption from the viewport window of the Victoria was eerily beautiful, seen from a distance, but lacked the spine-tingling awesomeness of the sight close up. Still
, Deirdre watched all of it, until it was time to suit up and go out hunting.

  “We’ll head out onto the distant ice where the icerugs don’t go,” declared Katrina. “That way we’ll not deprive them of any food.” Deirdre thought grimly that lack of food was not one of the icerug nation’s particular problems, just now, but she agreed. The three humans stayed within sight of each other as they moved away from Victoria into a changed countryside. The frozen drifts and scoured, icy hillocks glittered with freshly fallen snow. Scattered about were tiny bits of weed, broken shells of minute beauty, stalks of seaweed from twig-size to tree-size, strange sea creatures of every size and shape, and, inevitably, coelasharks. They found a large mature specimen just twenty minutes after leaving the ship, and they pounced upon the beast with glee.

  Carefully avoiding the multiple rows of extremely sharp teeth, Katrina pried open the jaw, and Cinnamon extracted the vermicysts and dropped them into the sample bag Deirdre was holding. Then, as they had agreed beforehand, Cinnamon, their ichthyologist, carefully sliced opened the great belly of the creature to expose the interior. The three biologists stared eagerly at the glistening vitals, Cinnamon exposing them with careful slices, while Katrina used biopsy punches, scalpels, and shears to take samples and put them into bags that Deirdre carefully labeled. All of them regretted that limits of space prevented their carting back the whole coelashark.

  “Built much like an Earth fish,” remarked Cinnamon. “Mostly swimming muscle.”

  “But look you, Cinnamon, at how these grand thick fibers support the wee short legs. Considerable strength there.”

  Cinnamon nodded in agreement and reached inside with a gloved hand. “This is probably the gut, but what’s this pouch here after the stomach?” She squeezed it. “Pebbles inside. Possibly a gizzard for grinding up the big chunks that the teeth bite off.” She poked around some more. “Gills here. Where’s the heart? Hmmm. Looks like three hearts. Take one for a sample.” Katrina cut out and bagged a heart, while Cinnamon poked lower.

  “This must be the flotation bladder, but it’s completely deflated.”

  “I wonder. Did it collapse because of the fall? Or did the coelashark empty it on purpose earlier?”

  “Here’s something blobby that’s full of blood — probably functions like the kidney or liver or both. I’ll take a sample of that, too.”

  “But is it male, or female, or neither?”

  “I don’t see a recognizable reproductive organ,” puzzled Cinnamon. “But I may be looking in the wrong place. “In an male octopus, the sex organ is in the tip of one of the eight tentacles — like having a penis for a finger. For all we know, this coelashark could have a penis in its right front flipper.” At the thought, she looked carefully at the construction of all four legs of the coelashark. They were identical. Katrina cut one leg off and Deirdre bagged it after looking at it carefully.

  “The bottoms of the feet are rough and show cuts, as though they’ve been abraded recently.”

  Together, and working with practiced ease, they thoroughly dissected the fast freezing flesh, but without finding any clue as to the animal’s sexuality. Lastly, they cut off the head, and used a battery-powered bone saw to cut it in half down the middle to reduce the weight, while keeping representative samples of the brain, eyes, and hearing organs.

  “Terrible small brain cavity,” remarked Deirdre as she bagged the half head, with its half of a brain showing.

  “More bone than brain,” agreed Cinnamon. Finally Deirdre stood up.

  “Right. We’ve got bits of the beast in plenty, but nothing that seems to be involved in reproduction. Perhaps one of the organs we’re seeing is not what we think.”

  Together they loaded the samples into an insulated carrying case, and started back to the Victoria, leaving the remains of the coelashark on the ice. No icerug was in sight, and soon the still-falling sleet and snow covered the stiffening carcass.

  On the way back, Deirdre’s long sight glimpsed another large object some distance away, and she hurried over to examine it. A little closer she slowed down; the object was evidently another coelashark, but this one was in poor condition.

  “Must have been ejected a few weeks ago,” thought Deirdre. “Decay is advancing nicely.” The body of the fish had softened in outline and looked pulpy. There was a sort of greenish-brown, seaweed-colored pus oozing from several places in the flesh, and only a biologist would have used the word ‘nicely’. She looked at the spectacle with detached interest and curiosity, and then the hair on the back of her neck tingled with the strangest of thoughts; how, in this land of perpetual snow and frost, could the coelashark be decaying? With scrupulous care, she collected a sample of the pus and a portion of the less rotten flesh, and returned to the others. As they hurried back to Victoria, she presented them with the question that was baffling her: why was the coelashark decaying at all? The bits and pieces of the one they had dissected were already freezing solid, but the isolated specimen she had found, untouched for some time, was rotting. Cinnamon was as puzzled as Deirdre by the phenomenon, but Katrina put it aside.

  “We’ll know a lot more when I can get these samples under the tunneling array microscope,” she assured them confidently. “We’ll get all the answers then.”

  Deirdre shook her head. “It’s a touching faith you have, in your equipment, Katrina. And terrible good it is, too, on showing us what. Yet it’s at a bit of a loss, is it not, at telling us why?”

  David monitored their transfer through the airlock. Deirdre handed him her collection of sample bags to store in the Christmas Branch’s cold storage container while she took off her exploration suit.

  “This looks like a bag of gacky pus,” remarked David, holding it up to the light. “I’ve never seen an uglier color in my life.”

  “It is pus,” said Deirdre coolly. “And to a biologist, no color is ugly.”

  * * *

  As the time for the expected largest eruption neared, the three biologists talked with the flouwen about the advisability of another expedition to the sea bottom.

  “We’d like to have you watch the behavior of the coelasharks,” said Cinnamon. “To try to understand how many of them are affected by the worms and commit suicide. The parasites can’t make all the coelasharks do it, or soon there would be no hosts for future generations of worms. There must be some coelasharks that are resistant and engage in reproductive behavior — and the time of the highest tides might be the trigger — as it is for many ocean dwellers on Earth. Perhaps you can catch them in the act.”

  “But it’s really dangerous,” worried Katrina. “The big coelasharks are very strong, but they get caught in those eruptions and killed.”

  *Coelasharks DUMB!* scoffed Little Red.

  #Yes, they are,# agreed Little Purple. #Mean, and strong, but stupid.#

  “You must keep in contact through the sonar-radio transponder link at all times,” insisted Katrina. “And take extremely good care not to get into a battle with the coelasharks. Even if you didn’t get hurt, it might distract you from the danger of the eruption.”

  “Besides, you’ve a serious job to do down there,” said Cinnamon soothingly. “We want you to watch the coelasharks who don’t go near the geyser, and see if any of them are pairing off, or chasing each other without trying to bite, or producing eggs, or small replicas of themselves.”

  The instructions and warnings continued all the time the flouwen were suiting up. Thomas and Josephine had calculated that the Dragonfly had just two hours to take the flouwen to the lake, put them in the water, and fly to safety beyond the reach of this highest eruption.

  Arielle was adamant about the timing of this mission: “Fish, rocks, seaweed, all kinds of junk fall out there! I not like dents in Dragonfly!” The flight to the seashore was uneventful, and as the humans and flouwen exited the airlock, they paused briefly, to look at the flat dark water. Its surface was covered with brash ice, pocked with small irregular plates of frozen sleet. A fine, powder
y mist of ice-dust blew around them in the wind, and when a small clot of the stuff hit the water, it melted slowly and reluctantly. There was no fresh snow falling, just then, but the eruption would change that. Still chattering cautions, Katrina helped the others ease the flouwen into the sluggish water, while Shirley and Sam threw an expendable sonar-radio transponder out into the lake.

  “And mind you keep sending those reports! I want to hear your voices every minute!”

  *Tired of hearing yours,* said Little Red rudely, but Little White said, ^We understand. Report begins when we get there,^ and Katrina was satisfied with that.

  The flouwen checked their communications link through the transponder, and then headed for the depths. The humans reboarded the Dragonfly, which headed off to a safe distance, with the biologists keeping contact with the flouwen through the commsat link to the transponder.

  * * *

  Back at Victoria, Richard suited up and went out across the basalt knob to visit Pink-Orb, who had moved out near the knob to be closer to his human colleague. It was nearly two hours to midnight, and Gargantua was approaching full moon phase. On the illuminated face of the giant planet was a circular shadow moving slowly toward the center of the giant planet. Richard made his way to the area that Pink-Orb now occupied, and stepped onto the carpet to let the alien know that he had arrived. He could hear a deep rumble from off in the dimly-lit distance, and his suit imp translated it for him.

  “Richard. You have come as you promised. I will meet you in the middle of my carpet.”

  Richard felt the carpet lift beneath him, and bending his knees slightly to keep his balance, he was borne off on a wave. Soon he could see the central node of the icerug coming toward him, gliding over its rolling sea of flesh on its pedestal. As the human and the alien came together, the alien reached out to touch Richard with a tentacle, as if to reassure itself that Richard was really there. It was the first time that Richard could recall an icerug touching a human. Instead of letting go, the icerug held onto Richard’s hand as the ugly lump on the end of its eye stalk stared blindly upward at the massive planet hanging overhead.