Engineering Infinity (41 page)

“See, but what bothers me is, ‘And
if you wrong her, shall she not revenge?’ Lars, you took away the job she loved
and was born to do, and -”

“You’d feel she was more of a
person if she said, ‘All you fleshy bastards can just die?’“

“Maybe.” Stephanie sighed. “I
still think of her as a fast computer running smart software inside a tough,
pretty mannequin. I wish she’d never -”

Nicole knocked on their door. “No
need to come up on the deck but there’s something you urgently need to see.”

They wore their parkas hood down
and without hats through
Clarke’s
unheated
corridors, but slipped out of them in the bathygraphy room. “It’s easiest to
see on the combined display, over here,” Nicole said, “but the truth is it’s so
plain that a World War II destroyer’s sonar could have picked it up. All the
meson scanning, x-ray boundary analysers, and phase-shifted sonar just add more
vivid detail. Now just look.” Stephanie leaned forward to peer into the
holographic barrel.

Beside her, Lars said, “What the
hell are those? And how big are they?”

Stephanie found the scales and
legends. In an almost perfectly circular area about four hundred kilometres
across, a bull’s-eye in the much bigger circle of mat, arranged in equilateral
triangles about a kilometre and a half on a side, towers two kilometres high
and a hundred meters across reared up from the ocean floor. “Hunh,” Stephanie
said, “how big is a redwood?”

“Good comparison,” Nicole said. “Because
up at the top these things, that green mist in the holo represents crowns - or
one big canopy, I guess - of filaments, some as thick as your thigh, some
thinner than your hair,” Nicole said. “At a guess, they’re the roots for
upside-down trees.”

“Upside-down trees?”

“Well, not trees per se, but that
canopy looks like a feeding structure attached to those trunks, if that’s what
you want to call them, and since it’s all more than a kilometre below the
surface, it’s not leaves. So a trunk with roots on top is an upside down tree,
at least till we have a better name. Anyway, I’m going to swim down and have a
look.”

Lars looked like he’d been kicked
in the stomach. “You most certainly are not - “

“I’m not under your direction,”
Nicole pointed out. “And I want to know what’s going on down there, and I’m
more capable than any robot. I’ll just throw my deepwater bag together, and
dive.”

Lars looked up at the ceiling,
thinking. “The publicity situation is already a mess. If we wait for a robot,
that will look bad, but if we lose one of the best-loved humaniforms, it will
look worse. We have no idea what’s going on down there, and if we let you go -”

“You won’t be
letting
me anything,” Nicole said. “I’m a citizen, my contract
is with the Oceanographic Institute and they have a separate one with the
company that operates
Clarke
. Nothing stops me from
just going over the side. Do you want to have been consulted or not?”

“I do,” Stephanie said. “Time for
an interview before you dive in?”

“Sure,” Nicole said. “Well, Lars,
do you want your wife to write that you were dithering?”

Lars shrugged. “It’s something to
do while everything spins out of control.” He stared down into the holo image
of the huge structures on the bottom of the ocean, squeezing his lower lip
between his thumb and forefinger. “A surprise with big stakes and a good chance
of guessing wrong. I hate those.”

Nicole looked away. “Stephanie, I
know it’s miserable for you up top, and once I’m up there I’m just going to
dive over the side, so if you don’t mind sitting in a corner of my cabin while
I pack -”

“If I can stick my autorec to the
wall -”

“Sure. Then just run up with me
to shoot vid of me going over the side. You’ll only have to be out in the
freezing weather for a few seconds.”

Nicole’s cabin completely
overthrew Stephanie’s expectation of Spartan pragmatism. Space she saved by
having no clothes and needing no bed enabled a wild chaos of piles of books,
tools, instruments, and papers. Every wall was covered by paste-on screens,
displaying a rotating profusion of scenery from all over the solar system,
pictures of ex-husbands and families, major awards, and the other five
humaniforms. The physical chaos of the floor was exceeded only by the
informational chaos of the walls. Stephanie had to smile.

Nicole said, “What?”

“Oh, just noticing that this is a
place where somebody works with a passion,” Stephanie said.
That I didn’t expect from a robot.

Nicole nodded. “I wish I’d been
designed to sleep; night watches in here are lonely. I think that spot by the
bathroom door will work for your autorec. Fire away.”

Tip her off
guard.
“Do the oceans ever bore you?”

“I’ve been down in every ocean
the solar system’s still got,” Nicole said, “and walked the dry bottoms of the
ones that’re gone, and a thousand years would not suffice to see just the cool
parts of one.”

Great answer,
they’ll quote that everywhere. Now the bread and butter.
“For the
record, what’s going into that bag and what are you going to do?”

“Sampling tools, suction gadgets
to capture fluids, blades and drills for solids, containers for everything.
Acoustic, gamma, meson, and positron scanners. I’m going to strap lights on my
forehead and forearms, fill my lungs with diving fluid, turn my temperature up,
and dive down through the canopy. Then I’ll cut pieces off these upside-down
trees, drill holes, bring back stuff to analyse, and look around in general.”

“Any idea what you’re going to
look for?”

“I’d like to know where all the
sea life that was here went,” Nicole said. “Because of the iron fertilization,
there were immense populations of everything from microbes up to whales around
here, and there haven’t been any migrations or any population increases in the
adjacent uncontaminated areas. Maybe two million marine mammals and six billion
fish and sharks are gone, and god knows how many invertebrates, along with four
hundred billion tons of plant life. I’m pretty sure they’re dead, but where are
all the bodies?”

“No idea?”

“Biomass is energy and whatever
that is down there required a lot of energy to make. Beyond that, I try to keep
an open mind and just tell the world to surprise me.”

Another great
answer. Now something for the personal interest.
“Here’s what people are
going to ask me - what’s she really like?”

Nicole slipped the last tool into
the bag and started strapping a utility light and tool holster to her left arm.
“Hunh. I really like surprises, the deep wild turn over the world kind. I do
know what you mean, but honestly, how would I know what I’m like? That happens
out there with everyone else, and in here, there isn’t anyone to compare to.”
Nicole hesitated, looked at her directly, and said, “You’re not very
comfortable talking to a humaniform, are you?” She pulled the lighted helmet
onto her head and fastened the chin strap.

“Have my questions been too
blunt?”

“Well, many times, people talk to
me bluntly for the same reason they talk to any machine bluntly, because it’s
not a person,” she said. “People swear at a screwdriver because they don’t care
what the screwdriver thinks of them.”

Whoa, that
one made me squirm. Turn it around.
“And you do care what I think of
you.”

Nicole nodded, as if reaching
inside herself for the answer. “I do; I usually care what people think of me.”

“That’s a pretty good argument
that you’re a person. Welcome to the club.”

Nicole surprised her by laughing.
“Wow, I’m oversensitive today, and not in a way I can adjust.” She stepped
carefully over a couple of construction-block-sized instruments and surprised
Stephanie with a warm, tight hug.

I’d’ve
thought she’d feel like a heated couch,
but this is
nice.
She stroked the bare skin of Nicole’s shoulder: like nubbly
fabric, softer than raw silk but not as slick as satin. Stephanie felt at once
that Nicole’s skin was as sensitive, as responsive, as easy to feel as her own.
When Nicole kissed her cheek, the lips felt warm, and slightly rough. “We’ll be
friends. You’ll see. Right now I have to run.”

“Of course. Don’t let me use up
your daylight.”

Nicole smiled, shaking her head. “Now,
as a reporter -”

“Duh, of course, it’s
always
dark down there.”

Out on the deck, Stephanie
recorded Nicole putting the tube into her mouth and inhaling diving fluid; it
looked like watery brown pudding. Then Nicole calmly stuck the needle into her
abdominal cavity, then her sinuses, filling all with the same goo. She had body
cavities to give her a normal speaking voice, to process repair materials in
the field, and be normally proportioned without having to haul excess weight;
for ocean-bottom work, being fluid-filled prevented her from collapsing.

Filled with fluid, Nicole couldn’t
speak, so she waved with a merry smile, and flipped over the side in a dive.
The big splash flung up green and black gunk, which slid down
Clarke’
s side. Alone and cold, Stephanie went back below.

“How’d it go?” Lars asked, after
they had both been quietly working in their cabin for more than an hour.

“I think it’s going to be easier
than I imagined,” Stephanie said. “You’re right, she’s hard not to like.” The
memory of Nicole’s warm, different texture, and the strength of those arms
holding her, was distracting, but very pleasant.

They had eaten dinner, and
darkness had long since fallen, when texts popped up on their screens. Nicole
had returned, and they would meet her in the conference room with the other
scientists in twenty minutes. “I bet she doesn’t want anyone recording how she
removes diving fluid,” Stephanie said.

“Nicole always said she felt
about it like human women feel about changing a tampon - no big deal but too
messy for public. She can collapse each cavity completely in one stroke, so in
three quick motions, she clears her lungs through her mouth, her sinuses
through her nose, and her abdominal -”

“Gosh, I’m looking forward to her
presentation.”

At the meeting, Nicole looked
like the kid who just had a perfect Christmas. “All right, I’m scared and
worried, and I’ll explain why in a second, but what I just found is so awesome
- like in the really old sense, the way Nix Olympica is awesome - that I hope
you’ll forgive me for babbling. First of all, those vertical structures are
mostly made out of calcium hydroxylapatite, with a highly complex internal
structure.”

Someone said, “Bone.”

“Exactly. The towers are gigantic
bones. The root-canopy above is a huge digestive organ, which did its damnedest
to digest me. Luckily nothing it excreted was a me-solvent. So we have tree
trunks, which are bones; and roots, which are stomachs, intestines, and livers,
floating in a cloud above them. Two kilometres high and growing on an
exceptionally cold and deep abyssal plain, across an area the size of
Pennsylvania, and I think it might all be one big organism; definitely a lot of
the tubes in the canopy hook to more than one trunk. Everyone will now please
experience some real awe and surprise, okay?”

Lars’s expression was flat,
drawn, almost angry. “You said you are worried and scared.”

“Two kilometre high bones with a
curtain of guts floating above them sounds like plenty to worry about to me,”
Stephanie said.

Lars turned his
Shut up, you’re just a reporter
glare on her - actually it
wasn’t easy to tell it from
shut up, you’re just my wife,
Stephanie thought spitefully.

Nicole winked at her, startling
her into silence more effectively than Lars’s glare. “Well,” Nicole said, “When
I drilled cores, I found the outer walls are riddled with little tubes and
pockets, and what’s in them is chopped Earth life. Seafood salad, you might
call it, bugs and fish and seaweed and whales, all pretty much blenderized and
packed in. That’s where some of the marine life went - ground up and stuffed
into those pockets in the bone. Incidentally, Stephanie, at a guess, the three
vanished people from that capsized yacht very likely ended up in there, too, so
you may want to watch how you break this news until someone talks to their
families. Anyway, there’s roughly a twenty meter thick wall, according to the
positron activation scan, that’s all that pocketed bone. Inside that, which I
couldn’t drill to, and the positrons couldn’t penetrate to, the acoustic probes
showed drastic changes of density, and NMR plus meson tomography eventually
teased out what’s in the middle layer and the core.

“The middle layer is larger and
smaller alternating chambers, all about seventy meters from the outer wall to
the inner wall, laced with reinforcing struts of more bone. The larger
chambers, which extend about 80 meters in the direction of the trunk, contain
very high purity hydrogen peroxide, which is so unstable around biological
material that there must be a special coating or something on the inner
surfaces of those chambers to keep it from dissociating violently. Between
hydrogen peroxide chambers, there are smaller forty-five-meter-long chambers
filled with a mix of twenty percent toluene, seventy percent octane, and ten
percent heptane - whoever said
gasoline
, that’s it.
And the core is a two meter thick bone wall surrounding an empty -”

The intercom hooted the signal
for an emergency announcement. “This is the captain. Bathygraphy room wants you
all to know that the imaging is showing all those big structures are now
floating upwards, pushing right up through that canopy. They all let loose at
once, and they’re rising at about a meter and a half per second, so they’ll be
breaking the surface here in about twenty minutes. We can’t run two hundred
kilometres in the thirty minutes before they surface - all we can do is try to
dodge the big towers as they float up and keep our intakes clear of all that
canopy gunk. I know you’ll want to observe whatever’s happening; please be
careful in moving around the ship and remember that we could have a sudden
collision with one of those huge things. They seem to be staying upright as
they rise, and if that continues there should be space between them.”