Ocean Under the Ice Read online

  Ocean Under the Ice

  [Book 4 of the Rocheworld Series]

  by Robert L. Forward and Martha Dodson Forward

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The authors wish to thank the following people, who helped us in several technical areas: Julie Forward Fuller, Eve Forward, Brian Kirk, Vonda McIntyre, Gerald David Nordley, and Vernor Vinge.

  The “Christmas Bush” motile was jointly conceived by Hans P. Moravec and Robert L. Forward, and drawn by Jef Poskanzer using a CAD system.

  All final art was expertly prepared by that terrific team in Marina Del Rey, California — MultiGraphics.

  PROLOGUE

  The wind was not blowing as hard now, but it still had enough force to whistle as it widened the grotesque tunnels it had carved in the icy promontory. The bulging mound of compacted snow loomed above the dark waters below, themselves nearly frozen and greasy-looking with irregular sheets of ice. The wind had created the huge lump it was now destroying; shaping and scraping the surface with hard-frozen dust as abrasive as diamonds; undercutting the exposed surfaces at the vulnerable base of the bulge. Finally the critical point was passed. With a horrendous crack, the snowy mound separated along a nearly vertical fissure, and splashed into the cold ocean waters.

  In the city, Silver-Rim heard the splash. The icerug had never seen an iceberg form, but it was aware of what had caused the explosive sound. The red-colored sunlight flooding down from the rising Sun-God onto Silver-Rim’s acre-sized carpet warmed and invigorated the icerug as its velvet textured cyan-colored body absorbed the weak red sunlight and turned the energy into food.

  On the opposite side of the sky from the Sun-God was the strange new moon that had arrived from outer space many seasons ago. Almost as big as the other moons, it was not a sphere, but a flat circle. And instead of orbiting the Night-God like all the other moons, it wandered as it willed. Right now, it seemed to be moving closer to Ice.

  With its attention now directed outward, Silver-Rim noticed that it was easy enough to move, this morning. Silver-Rim had been composing a new song, so intently that it had paid no attention to the weather. Now it realized too that the wind was not blowing ice-dust into its eye and that it was able to stand upright on its pedestal without having to lean into the wind. An unusually substantial meal of country-raised flesh added to the icerug’s sensation of comfort, and Silver-Rim noted that it was indeed a good day. Silver-Rim glided across its carpet toward the massive stone Grand Portal that led to the Great Meeting Hall; in the distance it could see Clear-Eye making for the same entrance. Clear-Eye’s carpet, a brilliant blue, was easy enough to distinguish even at a great distance, and Silver-Rim’s large orb was unusually keen, even for an icerug. The two met at the entrance, glided side by side down the glittering hall upon their parallel travel strands, and entered the music room chatting companionably.

  “Hear this, now, Clear-Eye, I’ve been working on this melody all night.” Silver-Rim flipped open its dressy cloak, and two of its four tentacles reached for the long, narrow harp with the thick strings. The tentacles stretched and shortened themselves as they plucked the strings, and the deeply rumbling notes of the new melody sounded sweet to both of them.

  CHAPTER 01 — SAILING

  Six lightyears distant from the Sun, a spacecraft sailed through the sparse “wind” of photons emanating from the red dwarf star Barnard. The most visible portion of the spacecraft was its gigantic circular lightsail, a vast expanse of highly reflective aluminum foil, three hundred kilometers across. As the dim red photons from Barnard bounced off the reflective surface of the sail, they each gave the sail a tiny push. Together, the pushes added up to a significant light pressure force that was able to increase or decrease the orbital speed of the lightsail around the red sun, allowing the spacecraft to move either inward or outward through the Barnard planetary system so that its human crew could visit the multitude of planets and moons that orbited around the star. The crew called the spacecraft Prometheus — the bringer of light — for it had arrived at Barnard traveling on a beam of blue-green laser light — transmitted across the vast interstellar distance between Sol and Barnard by a gigantic sun-pumped laser.

  Almost lost in the vast expanse of the lightsail was the habitat that held the exploration crew, a cylinder as big as an apartment building, connected by tension lines to the rigging. On the hydroponics deck of the habitat, Nels Larson — lounging comfortably in his regeneration tank — was giving instructions to his hydroponics deck crew, Cinnamon Byrd, Deirdre O’Connor, and Katrina Kauffmann. Cinnamon had just awakened from her sleep shift and was sipping quietly from her breakfast drink-ball squeezer full of hot pseudo-coffee. Around the circumference of her drink-ball was painted a scene of white snow-capped Alaskan mountain peaks interspersed by valleys filled with glowing blue-green glacier fields. Her personal robotic imp on her shoulder, its multicolored laser lights twinkling among its multibranched green-laser-illuminated metallic “twigs”, was carefully plaiting a braid of her dark straight hair below her left ear. When the motile finished braiding, it curled up the two short braids around Cinnamon’s ears and settled itself down in a band across the top of her head like a set of twinkling earphones. One tiny twig from the motile, tipped with a deep red laser, reached in behind her ear. From there it could monitor her pulse and vital signs, and using laser reflection spectroscopy, even measure the chemical constituents of the blood flowing through the capillaries just under her light reddish-brown skin. Another twig curved down to one side of her mouth where its tip could pick up her slightest whisper.

  Deirdre’s imp was in its usual place, in a six-pointed star holding up a mass of dark curls sitting on top of her head. One of its secondary twigs was extended down near her mouth, while another touched her ear. Deirdre’s shoulder, which was normally occupied by her pet, Foxx, was empty; but there was a large lump in Deirdre’s right breast pocket. She leaned against a stanchion, a quiet, slender figure — unobtrusive in a soft brown coverall and gleaming brown pseudo-leather ankle boots. As she held her own hot coffee close to her nose, her sleeves revealed the glint of gold, from the thin torques which encircled her wrists. These, along with the strange flat stone in one ear-lobe, Deirdre wore always, without thinking of them. She squeezed the drink-ball expertly, to inhale the aroma without actually dispensing any liquid.

  Katrina stood nearer the regen tank, her dark-blue eyes warm with compassion and interest. It was seldom the petite biologist was able to look down into another person’s face. Nels had been patiently sitting in the strange fluid for some weeks, and planned to spend another eight or ten. It had been the alien flouwen who had taught him how to activate the leg growth genes in his DNA that had been blocked by a chemical accident to his pregnant mother, and had devised the chemical solution that would fool the cells in his leg stumps into thinking they were in a mother’s womb. He hopefully expected that the result would be a serviceable pair of human legs, rather than the flippers he had been born with. He’d lived 40 years with the result of that accident to his mother, and he regarded this experiment with scientific interest as well as personal desire. If the regeneration process worked on him, it would work on anyone, and the whole world would benefit for centuries to come from the knowledge that had been gained from the flouwen. Now he spoke to his hydroponics deck crew, enlisting their aid in making sure the small buds from the flouwen were well cared for.

  “With the ‘Littles’ on board, we now have three more mouths to feed,” he said. “And with me stuck in this regen tank, it’s going to be up to you three to carry the full load.”

  A deep voice spoke from the laser-illuminated spider-shaped imp sitting on Nels’s right shoulder. It was the distinctive voice persona of the ship’s m
ain computer, James. “I can assign a ‘Christmas Branch’ subset of the ship’s motile to hydroponics shift duty.”

  “That won’t be necessary, James,” said Katrina. “The three of us can easily manage the lab. Besides, the Christmas Bush has a lot to do just now, taking care of both Nels and John.”

  Cinnamon agreed. “John is a long way from recovering from that lung-full of ammonia-water he got on Rocheworld, and a sub-branch has to be inside his lungs at all times, keeping the air passages clear. You and your motiles are busy enough, James. We humans should do our part in keeping the ship running. We’ll handle the hydroponics deck.” Then, not really appreciating that she was about to add to James’s workload, since she and the rest of the crew had been taking James and its ever-present imps for granted for decades, Cinnamon finished her coffee, and tossing her drink-ball lightly into the air, she whispered out of the side of her mouth to the imp on her ear, “Done.”

  A one-sixth-sized segment of her personal imp detached itself from her hairband. Its three bottom “feet” blurred as they vibrated into motion, flying the butterfly-sized motile through the air to the squeezer, where the fuzzy fingers of its three front “hands” caught the container in its leisurely low-gee trajectory and pushed it off through the air toward the central shaft. The imp hadn’t gone far before it was met by a larger imp that had flown up from the galley. The galley imp took the drink-ball back down to the kitchen where it would be cleaned and stored until Cinnamon asked for another cup of coffee.

  “I’m mostly concerned about the food supply for the three flouwen,” insisted Nels. “I’d like you to check and see how all the flora and fauna are doing in the flouwen habitat tank. Now that we have left Rocheworld, and can no longer get flouwen food supplies from its surface, it’s important that they not only survive, but thrive, in order to give the flouwen adequate variety in their diet. I want the three Littles happy with their meals.”

  “We’ll check that first,” reassured Cinnamon, reaching over to adjust the collar on Nels’s coverall. “Anything else before the Christmas Bush gets you ready for your sleep shift?”

  “I keep worrying about potential problems, but when I check them out on my control console, I find that one of you has anticipated me and have taken care of it.”

  “We intend to keep it that way,” replied Deirdre. She heard a rustling sound in the corridor and looked around.

  The Christmas Bush had arrived, walking along the carpeted corridor using two of its six main appendages as legs, the fine fibers at the tips of its hexfurcated feet gripping the carpet securely. Two of its “hands” were carrying some objects. It stopped near Nels’s tank and rearranged appendages until it was implanted firmly into the carpet on just one “leg”, leaving four “arms” and a bushed-out “head”. In this configuration, with its multicolored laser lights glittering from the green-illuminated branches, the meter-tall robotic motile looked very much like a small artificial Christmas tree. This Christmas tree, however, was bearing some most unusual gifts in its branches, a bar of soap, a squeezer full of hot water, some washcloths and towels, and a custom-fabricated bedpan. Although Nels weighed almost nothing in the low acceleration environment of the lightsail propelled spacecraft, he still had a significant mass and it took a full-sized Christmas Bush to hold his body in the proper positions while it assisted Nels in taking care of the necessities of bodily hygiene.

  Cinnamon spoke up. “Although I mostly trained as an EMT, I’ve learned to give a good sponge bath. If James could use the Christmas Bush elsewhere, I’d be glad to take over.”

  Nels’s pale skin suddenly flushed all over, the blond hairs on his arms standing out in sharp contrast to the reddening skin underneath. The blush extended up his forehead and under his long blond swept-back hair.

  “Ah-ah…” he stammered in panic.

  The smaller “twigs” on the bushed-out top portion of the Christmas Bush vibrated into invisibility, moving the air around it and causing the voice of James to emanate from the “head” region of the motile.

  “Thank you for the offer. But I think it best that I handle it,” replied James. One of the “hand” branches of the motile elongated by a factor of three and reached up to pull a curtain around Nels sitting in his tank. As the curtain drew closed, Deirdre turned and grinned wickedly at Cinnamon, who winked but said nothing. The constant presence of their personal imps tended to make all the humans just a little watchful of their speech, and these two were more reserved than most.

  Katrina, Deirdre, and Cinnamon now left Nels and bounced off down a long corridor on the hydroponics deck in low gravity leaps, their feet occasionally pushing against the looped carpet that lined the floors, walls, ceilings, and shafts throughout Prometheus. After using the central shaft stanchion to swing themselves around a corner into another corridor, they brought themselves to a halt by planting their feet firmly into the carpet and bending their knees in a controlled flexing motion that absorbed their energy and momentum. They were now standing motionless before the thick clear window of the large habitat tank that held the three flouwen. The wedge-shaped tank reached from floor to ceiling along one whole wall of the corridor. It was two meters high, six meters long, and varied from two meters wide near the central shaft to six meters wide near the outer walls.

  Placed in the middle of the corridor was an out-of-place sofa, dragged up from the lounge area and put facing the tank window. There was a couple relaxing in the thick pile sofa, held in place in the low gravity by Velcro “sticky-patches” on the back belt-line of their coveralls. The small black woman with the trim razor-creased uniform was Space Marine Major General Virginia Jones, Commander of the Barnard Star Expedition, while the large older white man was her second in command, Colonel George Gudunov.

  When Deirdre saw the two mission commanders there, she moved around behind Cinnamon and remained quiet, letting Cinnamon greet them. Wakened by the bounding trip down the corridor, Deirdre’s familiar was back on her shoulder, its bushy reddish-brown tail nearly indistinguishable from Deirdre’s locks. Foxx belonged to a once rare, but now prospering, squirrel-like marsupial species that Deirdre had discovered in the forests of South America and saved from extinction. Katrina and Deirdre moved close to the tank, looking intently at the small, flat, light-brown creatures visible on the plants in the rear.

  “Look you, Katrina, that gingersnap species is doing almost too well. It’s the balance that’s tricky, to keep the water clean, and with exactly the right proportion of nutrients.”

  “Right,” murmured Katrina. “I’ll do a thorough analysis.” She bounded off to the lab, and Deirdre bent closer, to watch the little plants undulating in the stream of hot “smoky water” loaded with hydrogen sulfide and minerals. The artificial volcanic vents were modeled after the ones occurring naturally on Rocheworld, and were carefully designed to sustain the plant life, which in turn nourished small animals, much enjoyed as food by the flouwen. The hot-water vent-field was blocked off from the cold water in the larger part of the tank by a maze of clear floor-to-ceiling baffles, backed up by circulation pumps operating through holes in the tank sides. Deirdre automatically checked the thermometers: the liquid, ten percent ammonia by weight, was well below freezing in the habitat, and boiling hot near the vents. All was well within the little world; they would not yet need the supply of dried and frozen flouwen food they had brought with them from Rocheworld.

  George was eating his evening-shift dinner from his flip-lidded free-fall tray, while General Jones was on her morning-shift coffee break, enjoying a drink-ball squeezer of coffee and a croissant. Her drink-ball had two stars and the words “THE BOSS” painted on it. The two commanders were conversing quietly about crew rosters and science schedules, while keeping a relaxed eye on the contents of the tank. Inside the tank the brightly colored flouwen swam around and around in hypnotic swirling motions.

  “That smells heavenly, Jinjur,” said Cinnamon, inhaling the delicious aroma of the freshly-baked algae-flour c
roissant. “The galley imp must have let Arielle into the kitchen again.”

  She was putting another tray into the oven when I left,” replied Jinjur. “If you hurry, there may still be some left.”

  “Order one for me too,” added George, flipping up one of the lids on his tray to take a peek inside. “I’ve got a little algae-butter left in my condiments compartment.”

  After whispering a command to her imp, Cinnamon moved across the carpet to the tank window. She crooned a melodic greeting as her light-brown fingers touched the cold glass.

  “Good morning! Good morning! Isn’t it a lovely morning! Good morning! Good morning to you!…” Cinnamon’s imp picked up her song and passed it by digitally-coded laser beams to the central computer James, who translated the words into flouwenese, shifted the tune down in pitch to the flouwen’s middle range, then passed it along as a sonar signal to the alien creatures in the tank.

  The flouwen swimming in the habitat tank were shaped like amorphous blobs of living jelly, each as big as a very large human. Their bodies were brightly colored, and shimmered internally like a liquid opal. Each of the flouwen in the tank had been budded off from a “primary” body, which was still back on Rocheworld, a gigantic multiton creature many meters across. A normal-sized flouwen was too large and heavy to be accommodated on human vehicles, but three of the flouwen had budded off a portion of themselves in order to go exploring with the humans. The buds still retained the personality and memory of the primary body, although they were slightly diminished in mental ability because of their smaller size. On their return to Rocheworld, the buds would rejoin the primary body and pass on the knowledge they had gained.

  One of the buds, called Little Red by the humans, was a bright flame-red color. His primary back on Rocheworld, Roaring*Hot*Vermillion, was called Loud Red by the humans. The second was Little White, with a partially transparent opalescent milky-white color. He had budded from the flouwen, Clear^White^Whistle, given the name White Whistler by the humans because of his white color and high pitched whistling tones when he spoke. The third was Little Purple, with a deep grape-colored purple hue. The oldest of the three, he was many thousands of years old. He had budded from Strong#Lavender#Crackle, called Deep Purple by the humans.