Noise

VIII Orchestration

“I’m not quite sure whether all this theorizing depends on whether the berg, or whatever it is, is rising or sinking. Can you straighten me out, Mike? Someone”—Hoani was grateful that no names were mentioned—“suggested a while ago that it must be rising because a lot of the lower slopes seemed to have been smoothed by wave action. Then I hear that the top used to be up in the lightning region and is now lower.”

Mike hesitated, all his old uncertainties back in full force. Certainly the berg was both rising and falling over a period of a few minutes, unless it was merely the water falling and rising; but over a long term there was no way yet to be sure. Before he could think of any sensible answer he was rescued by what he regarded as the second least likely source.

“It could have been a lot bigger before, and turned over more than once like the others,” suggested ’Ao.

“Did the others show any signs of being grown by people, like this one?” asked the captain.

“Not that I saw, unless their coral counts—I know it was all irregular on the others—but does that mean they weren’t?” Mike’s impression of the child’s intelligence was rising with each word, though he had never regarded her as stupid. Wanaka showed no change of expression, but her next question was directed to Keo.

“You’ve been trying to tell whether this one is rising or sinking. I haven’t seen enough change myself to mean anything, but I haven’t been as careful as you. Has there been any motion you could distinguish from ordinary wave motion or float oscillation?”

“No. Not yet. We haven’t been here very long, though. I don’t see that it’s important; the thing’s certainly not going to roll over on us anytime soon.”

“It’s important just the same. We’ll take some”—she hesitated for just a moment—“water pods, and set them just at the edge of this thing, a hundred meters or so apart, all the way around it. We can probably get them back, since they float, and if we don’t, you say there’s plenty of hail up in that crater. We’ll learn the size and shape of this thing, too, while we do that. Mike and ’Ao, start collecting coral spikes; we can drive them into the ice at the water’s edge to hold the pods. Give each one a couple of meters of mooring line; there has to be some change of height because of waves, and we don’t want the floats washed away. The anchor spikes will be the real reference, of course, and the pods will make them readily visible. Get to it. Keo, to the sails, dead slow. I’ll take the helm.”

Mike was not quite as certain as Keo about the stability of the berg, but didn’t argue. With the child, he started collecting coral spicules.

The project took more than two days. It proved quicker to let swimmers do most of the work; maneuvering the ship next to the ice was extremely tricky, neither waves nor wind nor bobbing ice, if that were actually involved, being very cooperative. The berg proved not to be quite circular, and they didn’t measure the hundred-meter separation of the marks very carefully since no one thought that data important. Its circumference seemed to be about seven kilometers.

When they got back to their starting point there was no sign that the first marker had either risen or fallen significantly. The berg’s water line was not, of course, perfectly definable since the sea was never smooth, but all agreed that no certain change could be seen.

“So far.” ’Ao’s morale was now very high, and she still hoped for points. The captain simply nodded. Mike took a chance.

“If it’s melting at all rapidly, and it does seem to be shedding those spicules all the time, and they’re less dense than water, the whole thing ought to sink a little, rather than rise and tip over,” he remarked.

“How about if they’re less dense than water but denser than ice?” countered ’Ao. Mike started to answer, hesitated, and lost his chance to answer as Wanaka spoke.

“Depending on how fast it’s losing ice as well as coral below. We don’t know how far down the thing goes into saltier water, only that it’s deep enough to have been carried north by deep currents. Right, ’Oloa?”

“No, Captain. In the last two days its northward drift has slowed and stopped. It is now drifting back to the south at about half a meter a second.” Wanaka’s eyebrows rose.

“And there’s no way to tell whether it’s the current that’s changed or the depth of the ice and coral,” ’Ao added at once. “Two unknowns, one datum.”

“Or both,” added Mike.

“And it’s certainly much too deep for us to find out by diving,” Keo put in.

“So we keep sailing around it until the water line changes,” Wanaka stated firmly.

“And if it doesn’t, when do we try something else?” asked the mate.

Wanaka’s rather grim smile could just be made out behind her mask. “Until we get a better idea,” she gestured. “All hands, start thinking.”

Mike’s courage again rose far enough.

“Shouldn’t one or two of us get back ashore and study the structure more carefully while we wait?”

“If we keep circling, those ashore won’t always be in sight from the ship,” returned the captain. “Still—” She thought for several seconds. Then, “Well, if two of you are roped together and you stay well away from the edge, nothing too serious should happen.”

“Mike and me,” cried ’Ao at once. Wanaka shook her head negatively. “If Mike falls, you won’t be much good on the other end of the rope. Sorry. You’ve been growing up nicely and we’re proud of you, but not that way. The shore party will have to be both adults, and I can’t very well leave Mata. That pretty well narrows it down.”

’Ao made one more try. “Keo’s too light to handle Mike, too. It might as well be—” Wanaka shook her head again.

“You’re right in a way, but Keo’s a lot heavier and stronger than you are, dear. You’re thinking yes or no rather than how much. I’m afraid it’s still no, but no one blames you for trying. Also, it looks as though I am going to need ’Oloa here.” The child shrugged and gave up. Mike was tempted to support her request; she would certainly be able to reach places neither he nor Keo could manage. However, the two of them should be able to mark such places and have the lightweight examine them later.

Armor consumables were checked, safety lines examined and attached, Mata stood in as close to the ice as her crew dared, and the men plunged into the sea. They had to swim a hundred meters or more to the right before being able to get ashore; being generally wave-worn didn’t make the rim slope uniform. They picked up a pair of spicules each and dragged themselves out of reach of the waves, made sure of the line connecting their suits, waved to the ship, and started away from the sea. Mata was hove to; the captain felt no particular hurry about the next circumnavigation, both men assumed.

The climbing at this point was much more difficult. The ice slope was shallower, smoother, and generally wet. Waves traveled fifty meters or more up the slope from where they broke. They found it better to crawl most of the time, hitching along by digging a coral spike into the ice ahead of them and pulling themselves toward it. They were over two hundred meters from the sea before reaching humps of any size, and were still scarcely ten meters above Mata’s deck.

It was easier to go around the humps than over them, however, and this quickly put the men out of sight from below. ’Ao quickly climbed to her masthead station and was in sight for a few more minutes; but finally, after a farewell wave from both parties and a loud-as-possible yell from Mike, all contact was lost. Wanaka, they knew, would not be considering them for the moment; a waterspout was bearing down on the area where the ship had last been visible, as though ordinary noises weren’t interference enough. Thunder remained at standard background level; they were still far below lightning risk as far as either could judge, though the sky flickered as usual.

The general ice slope was getting steeper now, and its imbedded coral spicules regular enough in arrangement to be helpful in travel; in many areas they were projecting slightly above the ice itself. At the steepest places they would almost have formed steps if they had been closer together. It was quite possible to walk most of the time, even for Keo.

All travel was suspended for some minutes when the waterspout actually tried to climb onto the ice—both men looked uneasily for fragments of Mata—and died from lack of feed. The column collapsed over some hundreds of square meters of the berg’s area and washed both men some distance back toward the sea. They were relieved by catching a glimpse of the still floating ship by managing to stop themselves well short of the ocean, and for Mike because the captain was not close enough to comment on a possible reason, other than rising, why the lower parts of the berg had been smoothed as though by wave action.

Distance was too great to tell whether they had been seen from aboard, and it seemed to both the climbers that the best thing to do just now was to continue their exploration. It seemed unlikely that Wanaka would have ordered them back even if they had been in touch; falls had been foreseen and the safety lines had worked, after all.

A little farther up the general slope they discovered a few hailstones in the occasional hollows. They wondered why these had not been visible lower down or during the earlier climb, decided that waterspouts were a plausible answer, that more extreme rise and fall of iceberg or ocean wave might be another, and that the rain that normally accompanied the hail in thunderstorms might well be a third; and Mike filed yet another possible reason for the smoothed-out lower slopes of the berg.

The only problem, he reflected aloud to Keo after making a cautious test around his mask, was the presence of liquid salt water in some of the hollows still holding hailstones. The mate’s experience with frozen puddles on Earth was nonexistent, but even he could see that water produced by melting in the ice hollows should have been fresh, though probably carbonated. For that matter, he added, if the hail-filled hollow they had seen earlier had been exposed to rain as well, it should certainly have looked quite different.

Neither of them had any way of measuring the actual temperature, and neither knew enough to consider the effects of even slightly salty spray. Their ignorance might, just possibly, have been bliss, but made no difference in the long run.

Higher up still, another hail-filled “crater” was found. Very careful checking showed that the hailstones were not cemented together, at least near the surface of the deposit; like those in the other pit, they could easily be removed by the handful.

They ate and slept near what seemed to be the highest area of the berg. The arrangement of the coral here was just as it had been lower down. The region was fairly flat; from its center they couldn’t see ocean. The whole mass was not nearly as high as they had judged from below. Their line of sight would not have reached sea level now less than three kilometers away. Even from the edge of the plateau that formed the top of the berg, where the slope was steeper than any they had faced lower down, the water itself could not be seen; too many humps and bumps intervened. Mata was not in sight, but could easily have been, and probably was, too close to see. The captain’s suspicion that the whole structure had been artificially grown was becoming more and more plausible to Mike, from the way the spicules were arranged. Keo seemed never to have doubted it seriously.

They wandered for half a day over the plateau without finding anything more to cause deep thought. They found two more craters, both nearly full of hailstones. There seemed no particular reason to retrace their original path up, since there had been no arrangement about where to meet Mata, and with breathing, eating, and drinking stores running rather low the pair finally just headed downhill—with normal care, of course. If the ship were continuing to circumnavigate the berg, they’d be spotted soon enough, they assumed. If it weren’t; or didn’t seem to be, they’d have to decide for themselves when to start their own circumambulation. At least, there’d be no question about which way to go; the captain had assured them she’d circle to the right as she saw the ice mass, so going to their right was their safer alternative.

Actually, both were out of food when the catamaran hove into view. She was only a short distance from the ice, and ’Ao saw them from her masthead almost as soon as they sighted the vessel.

What the men did not see was the pods that had been left around the berg’s circumference to mark the water line. Keo noticed their absence first, and wondered aloud whether they had served their purpose in the last two-plus days and been recovered, or had been lost in some way. The latter was no worry, except as a matter of policy, of course; there was even more fresh hail on the berg than they had realized before, though it would have to be carried an inconvenient distance. Keo was more concerned than Mike, of course, his upbringing being what it had been.

They were more than a hundred meters from the edge, but the ice between was smooth. They took the easiest way to the water, still roped together of course. Neither was able to keep from a certain amount of spinning, and Mike almost failed to close his helmet in time. Their joint splash impressed ’Ao more than it did the captain, but they were aboard in moments. Mike let the mate report first. He did it tersely, and ended with a question.

“Are we still heading south?”

“Yes, more or less. About one-sixty. At more than two meters a second now, ’Oloa says.”

“What happened to the markers?”

“We recovered them when they started to float. You don’t have to make up your mind now, Mike; this thing is sinking. And waves aren’t the only things that can round off the ice, I expect you now realize.”

“Yes,” he replied. “Waterspouts, rain, and probably things I haven’t thought of yet. And it’s sinking because a lot of ice is melting down below.”

“And it’s going south because?”

Mike was silent for some seconds.

“Because it’s got a better grip on the deep currents!” ’Ao offered.

“If it’s melting enough down below to sink, how is it reaching farther down?” asked Wanaka. The child was silent in her turn. She even glanced at Mike, who had nothing to say either.

Keo expressed a thought with no obvious connection to the problem. “Hadn’t we better get away from here?”

“I—don’t—think—so,” the captain answered slowly and thoughtfully. “Maybe staying around will give us our best chance of finding out what our cargo is worth.” All waited for some seconds for a more detailed explanation, but the next one to speak was the child, in very excited tones.

“You think there are people here!” she exclaimed.

“Unless you or Mike or Keo can come up with a purely natural answer to what’s been happening, yes. You can’t disprove miracles, of course, but sane people don’t count on them. If you can’t find a simple natural explanation, people are the next best. Always.”

“So do we tie up, or keep circling?” asked Keo practically.

“Circle. I certainly want to talk to anyone here, but I want us to have a choice, too. Besides, we don’t know how much up-and-down oscillation this thing may have at max.”

“When do you expect to see the people?” asked ’Ao.

“About an hour after they see us, if they haven’t already. That’s another reason to keep moving. I can’t guess where they are, except it’s probably not on this chunk of ice, and don’t know which way they’ll be coming from, and if we tie up it could be on just the wrong side.”

“Why don’t you think they’re on the berg?” asked Keokolo.

“Because you and Mike and ’Ao didn’t find any sign of them except the evidence that this thing was grown.”

“But there’s something like four square kilometers there, a lot of it too bumpy to let us see anyone else from more than a few meters, even without the haze. The fact that we didn’t see any tunnel openings doesn’t mean a thing.”

“But if there are people here they’ll maintain some sort of watch, and they’d have seen us long ago.”

“Maybe they did, and are just hoping we’ll go away again,” suggested ’Ao. That thought stopped the captain for a moment, and probably earned the child a few more points.

“That might be,” Wanaka said slowly. “The iceberg-sellers, I’ve heard, didn’t like either guests or passengers; there were tricks to maneuvering them they didn’t want others to know. Still, if there’s anything this piece of ice doesn’t resemble, it’s a water-for-sale chunk. For one thing, it’s far too big. If there are people here hoping we’ll go away, they can change their minds when we don’t.” It wasn’t quite an order, but was certainly a clear decision.

But even Wanaka began to wonder as the days went by, Mata and the berg drove ever southward, and the temperature began to drop farther and farther.

The ice continued to sink; they attempted no actual measurements, but Mike estimated that a good dozen vertical meters of ice had settled below the water level since their first trip “ashore.” The best evidence was the change in the shoreline; from a relatively smooth oval, it had become indented with more than a dozen bays—they were not nearly steep-walled enough to be called fjords—reaching two or three hundred meters toward the interior.

There had also been enough thunderstorms and waterspouts to confirm the notion that these could be responsible for rounding off the berg’s humps and projections; waves weren’t necessary, though they might help. The berg was definitely melting; excursions by swimmers suggested that Mata could easily have collected a full cargo of melted-out coral spikes if anyone could have seen any value in them.

The spikes were still floating when they melted free; they were still less dense than the water, though that could simply mean that the surface layers of the ocean were now noticeably saltier. Mata was certainly floating a trifle higher. The berg was sinking nevertheless, so an even more impressive amount of ice must be melting. The southward speed was increasing, no longer by very much but enough to make it harder to understand why the melting berg could get a better grip on any deep current. The wind certainly wasn’t helping; there was practically none of that now. The ship was reaching the mid-latitude zone of calms, and there was less and less free choice involved in Wanaka’s still solid determination to stay with the shrinking, sinking growth—as she still claimed it to be. It was now by far the largest source of fresh water within reach, though of course there were still thunderstorms enough to prevent worry. Even in a zone of calms and with lower temperature, water vapor is less dense than air—especially Kainui’s air—and an ocean needs very little outside heat to spawn thunderheads.

The real surprises came when they were on the west side of the ice. These were, first, the sight of four sailing craft appearing almost simultaneously through the haze in a formation that neatly cut Mata off from the open sea; and moments later more than a dozen sound-armored human forms walking easily toward them on the ice from the opposite direction. Mike’s first, unvoiced, question was how such a maneuver could possibly have been timed, considering Kainui’s long-range communication problems. What the other adults were thinking he had no idea, and it didn’t occur to him to wonder about ’Ao or her doll.

The child had sighted and reported the ships; the walkers had been spotted moments later by Keokolo from the deck. Mike felt sure that ’Ao wouldn’t be blamed for missing them; her job after sighting the ships was to report any details she possibly could about them.

And it was quite evident that the members of the shore party had all appeared at almost exactly the same moment from behind a single ice mound, along a surprisingly level and low ice surface that seemed to continue away from the ocean. More coordination? How?

Well, the people had probably been in sight of each other, of course; but how about the ships?

If Wanaka had had any idea of making for the open sea she must have abandoned it at once. Not only was the wind extremely weak and there was no way to tell whether they could outsail the others, but Mata was a trading ship; traders didn’t flee from other vessels without strong evidence that they were pirates. The only such evidence to be expected at the newcomers’ present distance would be the presence of very large crews on their decks, and ’Ao quickly reported that there seemed to be only three or four people on each one and that cabin size was no greater than usual. Wanaka glanced upward, not at the girl but at the pennants floating from Mata’s mast. These had been unchanged for many days, and Mike had been told that they signified the unknown nature of some of their present cargo.

Any behavior other than staying hove to for possible bargaining would be suspicious, even though they were being approached by a small fleet rather than a single vessel and even though the fleet happened to be spread out so as to cut Mata off from any reasonable escape route. That could be as purely chance as the appearance of the four vessels all at once.

Yes, thought Mike, that was a good way to put it, considering the number of other craft they had sighted since leaving Muamoto. Not much of a chance.

Keo was watching the captain intently, Mike saw, but offering no suggestions. She was the captain; he was only her husband. There was no way to guess what he might be thinking, until the situation changed abruptly. The two ships farthest from them, the ones in the middle of the arc, changed course at almost the same moment, the one on the left of the line as seen from Mata to starboard, the other to port. Keo relaxed visibly as their path to freedom began to open—slowly. The wind was very low, as he had noted, but Mata could sail very close to it. Wanaka’s reaction was less obvious, but her attention turned from the approaching ships to the people on the ice, now collected in a group partway up the smooth hummock that had concealed their approach.

Most of these, it could now be seen—the adults; there were three or four in the group of about ’Ao’s size—were carrying what might have been spears, though Mike had never seen such an implement on the planet. His brief uneasiness was dispelled when several of the poles were raised vertically and waved from side to side to display signal banners that had not been obvious in the feeble wind.

Hoani was still unable to read these, but the captain gestured Keo to the sails and took the tiller, heading Mata toward the ice. The people on shore watched with little apparent interest as the mate swam ashore with mooring lines. He was also carrying a number of the coral spikes, which he drove into the ice a few meters from the water and used for rather frail-looking bitts.

’Ao had descended from her perch, but so far had offered neither comment nor question.

“Want me to talk to them?” asked Hoani.

“We’ll wait ’til the ships arrive. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about—you were worried, weren’t you, Mike? But if they all represent one city it’ll be better to find who’s in charge before we start bargaining, and if they don’t it’ll be better to have them all together bidding against each other. I wish I could even guess what this metal is. If some of them know and we don’t, we could get badly taken.”

Mike, for the first time since leaving Muamoku, had a little trouble with the end of this speech. She was, he suspected, using some highly specialized trader’s slang.

“But don’t our banners say we don’t know? I thought that’s what you told me when we first loaded the metal.”

“Yes. I wouldn’t try to fool anyone on that point. Never try to play any game from ignorance. Right, ’Ao? But I’m hoping there’s more than one city in this group. If they start bidding against each other we can find out a lot, and there’s no way they can help that even though they’ll know we are. It would be nice to head for home, whenever we can find it, with something worthwhile aboard. We’d like to stay with our kid again for a while, but goodness knows what we’ll owe the school when we do get back.” Keo nodded silently.

“Keo, Mike, furl the sails,” Wanaka ordered. Mike couldn’t guess whether she had completely ceased to worry or was merely trying to give that impression, but the order didn’t surprise him. The next one did.

“Mike, get ashore and talk to them. Find out what you can, especially about their connection with these ships. Feel free to tell them anything you want about us and our cargo and you, but don’t say anything about ’Oloa beyond that she’s ’Ao’s doll, and not even that unless they ask. They’ll see right away that there’s something strange about you; no doubt they have already. They’ll certainly know after the first couple of sentences that you’re not a trader. They must be sure already that you’re not from any city on Kainui. Let them wonder about why you can handle languages so well—and if they ask, tell them. Keep them talking until those ships get here. Don’t worry about hiding any secrets except about the doll.”

The catamaran’s port hull was toward the ice and almost aground, so Mike simply slipped into the shallow water. There was a murmur among the masked, sound-armored figures, and even ’Ao, behind him, gave a rather shocked gasp. He did not, for some time, understand why; he did not even give the event a thought. He had been trying to decide how to open the conversation, but could think of nothing but a standard self-introduction. He chose to use unmodified Maori, and to follow the captain’s implied advice toward frankness as closely as possible.

“Kei ti pehea koutou? I’m Mike Hoani. My captain is Wanaka from Muamotu. What’s your city?” The answer came in almost identical speech, uttered by one of the group whose hands were now empty, his or her pole having been laid on the ice. Mike did his best to find some visible clue to this one’s identity, since it would be discourteous not to recognize the speaker later. The main possibility seemed to be a colored pattern a little like ’Ao’s on the armor, fortunately applied to both chest and back, as he could see from some of others who weren’t facing him directly. Less fortunately, the pattern was extremely complex; Mike hoped he could remember enough of it.

“This is Aorangi, I am Hinemoa. We know of Muamoku, and have occasionally met crews from there. But surely you aren’t of that birth?”

Mike relaxed, slightly relieved at hearing a personal name that indicated the speaker was female but not inclined to put too much trust in the clue until he learned more about the current evolutionary status of the language. He explained in detail his origin and reasons for being on Kainui.

“Why did you come to speak to us, rather than your captain?” The question’s tone suggested mere curiosity rather than indignation, but Hoani felt there might be a minor breach of courtesy implied by the words themselves. He tightened up slightly, but answered with what he believed to be the truth.

“I know many of the tongues the people of the islands used when our ancestors were still on Earth. The captain has formed the habit of having me greet strangers first. The languages in the different cities of Kainui have changed through the years.”

“True. But how is it you’re so far south? It has been many years since we spoke to a crew from Muamoto.”

“Our original ship was lost, and we drifted with an unfamiliar metal-fish while the new one’s seed grew. That’s why our banners say that we don’t know some of what we’re carrying—at least, so the captain told me; I haven’t learned to read them myself. Perhaps you can tell us what we are carrying, and whether it’s worth the trouble. If not, maybe the people in the approaching ships can do it for us. We also have some iron, copper, and titanium.”

“If we can’t I doubt that they can. The ships are of our own city, Aorangi.”

“Your eyes are keen.” A compliment never hurt, even Mike knew.

“Not that keen. We recognize them because we expected them now.”

Mike was not as quick as some, but not entirely stupid. Something said earlier suddenly clicked into place in his mind.

“This is Aorangi where we are standing? On Mata we had not recognized it as a city, though we made the opposite mistake about some other coral-and-ice structures we met farther north.” The listeners seemed more amused than indignant, Mike noted with some relief. “I—we had never thought of using ice for anything that big. You must have grown it much farther south than this. Might I ask why you are so far from the pole now? Isn’t the sea here pretty warm for your city?”

Glances were exchanged among the others, and Hinemoa’s answer was hesitant.

“The reason is somewhat embarrassing. It has to do with faulty rigging.”

“I apologize, and will restrain my curiosity. I assume you are now heading south intentionally.”

Actually, Hoani had been able to read a good deal into Hinemoa’s words. For one thing, she was speaking the least altered Maori that he had so far heard on the planet. The term “rigging” meant a great deal more to him now than it had before Malolo’s session with current-riding and controllable sea anchors. Aorangi might be a good deal more maneuverable than any of the floating metropoli nearer the equator. Why? More specifically, why would the ability be useful? Was there something about the polar regions that made precise position of importance to a city and its inhabitants? Was the city’s ice-based construction a cause, an effect, or a coincidence?

Also, was Hinemoa telling the whole truth? If the ships now drawing near were making a rendezvous planned in advance, how could the planning have been worked? Hinemoa had claimed, or at least implied, that the city had been out of full control long enough to get this far north—so far north that it was losing a lot of its structure to melting. Could that possibly be true?

Quite suddenly, in spite of Wanaka’s permission to be frank, Mike began to feel just a little uneasy. One of her hopes, that of getting the traders of the approaching ships to bid against the people of the iceberg for her cargo, seemed gone (well, maybe not; traders were likely to be traders rather than government agents). There was still no evidence that the people of Aorangi were piratically inclined, but Mike suddenly felt uneasy. He decided to pass the conversational buck to the captain. She might know no more about this city and its people than he did, but at least she knew the planet’s general customs that, considering the universal trading background, were probably fairly uniform. She should certainly have a clearer idea than did Mike of just where the boundary between ordinary trading and piracy generally lay.

He hoped.

He shifted the conversation as unobtrusively as he could back to the question of Mata’s cargo. Hinemoa and all her companions listened intently as Mike described the metal-fish where they had spent so much time while their replacement ship was growing. Some of the details were accepted with no visible surprise, though fairly obvious interest, including the fact that vast amounts of drinkable water were produced compared to the tiny amount of metal, the location of metal pods in the same pockets as the water, and the fact that so few of the pockets contained metal at all. It began to look as though Wanaka’s cargo might have only curiosity value here; none of the listeners seemed ready to suggest what it might be.

“I’ll ask the captain to bring a pod for you to see,” he finally said. He turned, took a couple of steps toward the water, and called out the suggestion.

“They can’t identify the metal from my description. We’d better show them a sample.” Wanaka nodded and spoke to the child, who disappeared briefly into a hold and returned with one of the pods, which she proffered to the captain. The latter gestured that she should keep it, said a few words inaudible to Mike over the thunder but apparently telling the child to accompany her ashore. Both flipped their helmets closed and stepped from Mata’s deck. The child had to swim, of course, but her burden didn’t seem to interfere.

Mike suddenly suspected what had caused the disturbance when he had come ashore himself; he had waded in open water with his helmet unclipped. The space had, it was true, been narrow enough to cross in a few steps, but he wondered how many points that would have cost him with Wanaka, and what the natives of the ice city had thought. The latter, he suspected, might have the more serious effect. He hoped his alien origin might be regarded as an excuse, but didn’t dare count on it.

Kainui’s people were not, as far as he had been able to tell, any more xenophobic than his own; but it might be unsafe to assume they were much less, and human beings have a tendency to be less tolerant of, or at least less empathetic toward, actions they regard as stupid than toward merely hostile ones.

’Ao, who had carried the pod ashore, now handed it to Wanaka, who held it up to give the local group its first close look. They had appeared expectant, Mike judged; now their talk stopped completely, though he was slow to realize that the cause was irrelevant to the specimen. One of the group gave a loud call, and pointed out to sea. Mike let his own gaze follow.

There were now seven of the local ships in sight, not four. More interesting, a wave two or three meters high was sweeping in just beyond the three newcomers; and as everyone watched, the eight vessels including Mata were lifted on it and borne toward the berg, swept past the watchers on the ice hummock, and came to rest in what had just become a shallow bay.

The wave receded. Water poured back out the channel. The bay was now a lake. No one but Mike seemed in the least surprised; Wanaka, of course, had a trader’s face.