Noise

Prologue Theme

“You still say these folks don’t have a Chamber of Commerce?” Mike Hoani made no effort to hide his skepticism.

“Right. There’s no native life that anyone had found the last I knew, but they’ve plenty of experience with pseudolife design; cities, ships, life-support equipment, are all grown just as they are at home. Their offworld trade is mostly specialized seeds, which don’t fill freighter holds very well. They haven’t much to offer to tourists; when you’ve seen one mist-shrouded floating city and a few square kilos of misty ocean with no city, you’ve pretty well covered the scenery. Most of the people I’ve met there seem friendly enough to visitors, though you may meet exceptions of course, but a few generations in one-third gee means they can’t do much visiting themselves.”

“So it’s just coincidence we popped into real space just where and just when we could see two eclipses at once?” Mike nodded at the screen. “You don’t get a small honorarium for arranging that, after we set down?”

Hi-Vac’s navigator didn’t answer at once. She, too, was staring at the image. The two partly overlapped stellar disks didn’t quite blend with each other; an M5 sun is enough cooler than an M4 to let even the human eye detect its lower surface brightness, especially when the cooler one is closer to the viewer and partially covering its twin. The double planets’ images, similarly overlapped, were less informative; they were not quite in the same direction as the suns, and showed only thin crescents, one half erased by its twin’s shadow.

“If I’d set it up,” the navigator remarked at length, “I’d have composed the picture better. Everything is practically in a straight line. A million kilometers or so that way”—her thumb gestured toward the lower left corner of the screen—“would have made it an artistic presentation.”

Mike, who was not an artist, made no comment. Intellectually, he knew that there was no disgrace in not being an expert at practically everything, but he was still a touch neurotic about displaying his own ignorance. The navigator, after a moment’s silence, went on.

“It wouldn’t be much of a problem, of course. There’s a huge locus of positions from which you can see both pairs, sun and planets, in eclipse at once, and the periods of both are short enough, goodness knows. The chances of popping into real space and being greeted by a view like this are pretty good.”

Mike nodded, somewhat doubtfully.“I suppose so. Which of those crescents is Kainui? And where do we land?”

“I don’t know, to both questions. Kainui’s just a little bit the larger, but from here I can’t tell by eyeball. Muamoku is the only place we can set down, at least usefully, but it’ll take time to find it.”

“You don’t have a chart of some sort? Aren’t there guide beacons?”

“You haven’t learned much about the place, have you? No, I don’t have a chart. Neither do the people who live there. Both planets are water worlds, though Kaihapa hasn’t been settled. Only the polar ice caps and the equatorial permanent rain belt can be distinguished from space, they’re not too clear with all the haze, and wouldn’t help anyway with the longitude problem. The cities float; they don’t stay put. Why are you going there, anyway? I thought anyone would learn something about a world before starting an expensive trip to it.”

“Research, and I’m not paying the freight. I care more about the people than their planet. I know several of the alleged reasons why they left Earth; for example, a lot of Polynesians got tired of the way oil-processing pseudolife stations were crowding the Pacific. There was never a war over the matter, just a lot of very expensive legal squabbling. I don’t know why they picked Kainui, even though it’s all ocean; it’s not an ocean you can swim in safely, I’ve heard, though I don’t know why. We know, we think, how many ships went there originally, but we don’t know how many arrived safely and succeeded in growing cities. Only one place, Muamoku, seems willing to spend energy on a landing beacon, so it’s the only place where ships can set down and expect to be in reach of anyone who can talk, buy, or sell. Whatever other cities there are seem quite willing to let Muamoku act as middleman in any off-planet trading. I’m a historical linguist by training and taste, and I’m looking for information on language evolution. All the original ships—that we know of, at least—left Earth from various Polynesian islands. We know the times they started out. Some people think there’ll be only one language by now, but I doubt it. That has to be affected by how much and in what ways the cities have been in contact with each other—trading, war, religious difference, what have you. I’m reasonably fluent in a dozen Polynesian languages, especially Maori and Tahitian, and should be able to figure out at least something of what’s happened, and when, and maybe even to whom.”

“Brute information, you mean?”

“Normal human curiosity, I’d call it.”

“Well, don’t go swimming. That’s something I do know.”

“Why not? Ocean acid, or something?”

“Yes, as it happens, but that’s not the main problem. There’s continuous seismic activity at the ocean bottom, and if you swim without armor you’re lucky to last five minutes without suffering the fate of a dynamited fish. There’s enough carbon monoxide in the air to kill you in minutes, enough carbon dust to hinder visual communication seriously, and enough ionized haze to block practically any e-m communication. A lot of my friends think they picked that world because no one else would want it. There must be some reason they don’t get rid of the CO—even I can think of pseudolife genera able to do that in a few decades. You’re a historian, you say; maybe you can find out while you’re poking around.”

The navigator stopped talking and began to manipulate controls.

Three-quarters of an hour later, Hi-Vac was hovering two thousand kilometers above the surface of the larger planet. As promised, a fairly bright reflecting belt and a roughly circular patch of white ninety degrees from it gave locations for the permanent rain and ice regions. The blurred reflection of the suns was no help; its position on the disk told about where Hi-Vac was orbiting but gave no information about anything on Kainui’s liquid surface. Mike couldn’t tell by eye whether he was looking at water or fog; he might or might not be seeing surface. The ship, under power of course, was slowly circling the planet at about thirty degrees south latitude, so the north polar cap was not visible.

More and more of the night hemisphere was coming into view, and proved, while much darker than the daylit part, to be much brighter than geometry would have suggested.

“Lightning,” remarked the navigator without taking her attention from her work.

“Shouldn’t it be sort of flickering?” asked Mike.

“When we’re closer and can see separate storms.”

“When can we communicate? You haven’t tried to use radio yet.”

“We can’t. The lightning hashes up everything electromagnetic up to near infrared; radio, even FM, is nothing but noise out to half a million kilometers. The permanent haze is charged enough to take care of most shorter waves. Only Muamoku maintains a reasonably high-powered set of laser beams aimed almost vertically, but we have to find those ourselves. I hope the place hasn’t drifted too far north or south. Guiding people like us in to where they are is not their highest priority, and if storms knock them off latitude they don’t always hurry back. The city isn’t very maneuverable, after all, and there aren’t many scheduled arrivals from outside. We’re lucky having even one city that’s willing to do it at all. They—look! RS-455 on the screen! There they are!”

It must have been a battery of lasers, not just one; the luminous spot below was changing color as the ship moved. At first the signal was brilliant blue; then it was green, then yellow. Then it shifted back to green, and the navigator altered course and speed slightly. The yellow returned and became orange, started toward shorter wavelengths again, but was finally brought to deep red by more control work.

“Now we let straight down, but try to see the city before we land on it,” was the remark.

“What do we land on?” Mike asked naturally.

“Ocean. Don’t worry, we’ll float.” “Is there tube connection, or do we moor securely enough for that?”

“We don’t. You’ll need a suit.”

“But why—?”

“They’ll probably tell you, but you may not believe it. I’m a ship-driver, not a historian, but I’ll bet you’ll get a different reason for colonizing the place in every city you visit, if you take in any others, ranging from the moral imperative not to displace alien life, through the right to practice human sacrifice freely, to the simple urge to get away from Earth’s legal systems. Probably different groups did have different reasons. I’m going by experience on other colony worlds I’ve seen, by the way; I haven’t asked this crowd. I’ve only been here three or four times. Use a rigid suit until you’re used to the pressure, and start getting ready. If you have recording equipment, keep a close eye on it. The people are as honest on Kainui as anywhere else, but silicon is more valuable here than iridium or platinum. They can get all the metals they need from the ocean, but silicon doesn’t dissolve to speak of in acid.”

“I suppose I ought to watch out for oddball diseases, too,” Mike remarked rather bitterly.

“Only if the colonists have produced them in their own bodies or labs. Evolution presumably moved in with the people, but no one’s found any native life here, big or little. And you’ll need to practice walking in the local gee.”

“You said something about that before. Why? I thought you said Kainui was only a little bigger than Earth.”

“Fifteen percent larger radius. One-third—not one-third greater—surface gravity. Most of the world’s volume is water, I think saltier than Earth’s, but still water. Ocean depth is about twenty-nine hundred kilometers.”

“So no islands.”

“Not real ones. Ice still floats. Don’t bother me for a few minutes. Red is the core of this landing signal, and I want a touch of orange. Landing right on the place would make us unpopular. Check your suit carefully; you’ll have to get to the city by boat. Outside pressure is high, and if you have leaks they’ll let more carbon monoxide in than oxygen out.”

The landing was professional; Hi-Vac settled into the water three hundred meters from the nearest part of Muamoku, so the city itself, if not its details, could be seen. Its more distant parts were lost in the mist, so Mike couldn’t even guess at its size.