Spinneret

Chapter 24

Carmen had done a fair amount of scuba diving back on Earth, and during the long trip to Astra she'd had several chances to experience weightlessness. The combination of the two, though, was something that took getting used to.

Floating in the center of the Pom ship, flapping her hands slowly against the gentle stemward currents, she focused her attention away from her rebellious stomach and onto the circle of huge windows set into the hull around her. Through one of them Astra's sun was visible, its light filling the chamber and turning the water into a brilliant green fog. "Impressive," she said carefully, keeping her facial movements to a minimum. The full-face mask wasn't supposed to leak unless mishandled, but she had only Lieutenant Andrews's word for that, and she had no wish to have any of this gunk inside with her.

"Thank you," said a deep voice in her ear. The Pom had been drifting toward the windows; with a powerful flip of his tail he rolled over and returned to Carmen's side. She caught just a glimpse of a small black cube in his tentacle as it was slipped back into a pocket on the alien's harness. "Light intensities seem to be within a few percent of optimal," the translator voice continued. "It's still too early to get a good growth curve for the algae, but that should only take another few hours."

"Good." A second Pom swooped in out of the murk, his wake catching Carmen and starting her spinning. She flailed a bit, managed to stop herself. Like being in the porpoise tank at the aquarium, the thought struck her. At feeding time, she added as a third Pom brushed casually between her legs to join the party. For a moment the three aliens drifted together like spokes of a wheel, their noses almost touching as they conferred. Then they broke formation and her earphone came alive again.

"The flow speed is now properly adjusted," the Pom leader informed her. "The algae will have the proper light and dark periods for maximum growth."

"Good. Will your extractors be able to handle the output?"

"Certainly. The usual crop for this design of ship grows nearly twice as quickly as yours will."

"Interesting. We might like to purchase a sample for study. If it proves compatible with our chemistry we might try switching products."

"You would do better, in all honesty, to rent a second ship. The expense and difficulty of cleaning a ship this size is prohibitive."

"Oh. Still, you've done it at least once."

"With this ship? Not true. It was a new craft, water-filled but not yet seeded. We were all fortunate the timing worked out so well."

"Indeed," Carmen nodded. Textured algae foods wouldn't be the ultimate solution to Astra's supply problems, but for the time being they would enable the colony to stretch out its stockpile well into the next growing season. As soon as the output and delivery system stabilize, she decided, we can switch the Rooshrike's ground tanks to normal vegetable production. I wonder if we could support any livestock yet … or how we'd get hold of them, for that matter.

"If you're finished with your inspection," the Pom said, "I believe Waywisher would like to speak with you in private in the control area."

"All right." Probably wants to discuss rental fees, she decided, kicking herself toward the hull where the currents would make noseward motion easier. Two of the three Poms fell into formation beside her, the third disappearing somewhere hack toward the stern. A half-dozen openings led forward from the central room; picking one at random, she swam through it, flicking on her light as the sunlight faded behind her. The "darkroom," as she'd privately dubbed it, was nearly as big as the area they'd just left and just as full of algae. Fortunately, the exit hatch was rimmed with red-orange lights, and she was able to find it without assistance. The lock was big enough for all three of them, a definite plus for visitors who didn't have the sort of manipulative equipment the mechanism had been designed for.

After the warmth of the algae tank the clean water flooding in felt like the North Atlantic, and she was glad when the inner door finally opened and she could get her arms and legs moving again.

If the algae tanks had reminded her of an aquarium, the forward part of the ship was nothing less than a 3-D mouse maze lined with Christmas lights and sunk in water. She assumed that the sudden twists and turns in the corridors made some kind of sense, but on the basis of a single visit she couldn't figure out exactly how.

Must have an interesting room layout, she thought as they negotiated two rightangle turns in less than four meters. I'd hate to be on a landing party assigned to take this ship. The thought reminded her of the question Meredith had wanted her to ask while she was here, and she spent the rest of the swim trying to come up with a polite way to phrase it.

They emerged from the maze into a control room whose impressiveness lay less in lights and gadgetry than in the quiet competence she could sense in the Poms on duty there. Off to one side, floating next to a porthole, was the alien she recognized as Waywisher. As she turned in his direction he flipped his tail, timing his movement to meet her exactly halfway.

"Good day, Miss Olivero," the translator said as Waywisher swam around her in a brief pattern she took for a Pom welcome dance. Possibly a sign of responsibility as well, she decided, noting that her escort withdrew to the other side of the room as it ended. "I trust the ship has been set up to your satisfaction?"

"It seems to be, so far," she said. "We'll know in a few days or weeks, after the whole system reaches equilibrium. You wished to talk privately with me?"

"Yes." There was a brief hum on the circuit, and when the translator voice began again it had changed subtly in tone. "We are now cut off from communication with either of our species. I would like to offer you a barter: information for credit against Spinneret cable."

"Indeed?" Carmen asked, trying to dislodge the tight knot that had abruptly formed in her stomach. "What sort of information?"

"We have formulated self-consistent hypotheses concerning both the cable material itself and the 'glue,' as you call it, with which it is coated. We will trade this information for a credit of one trillion dollars."

"That's a lot of money," Carmen said. "What makes you think the information is that valuable?"

"It is unlikely your science will be able to provide you with these insights in the foreseeable future. However, once you have been put on the right track, your progress toward understanding and control of the Spinneret will undoubtedly be greatly enhanced."

"What makes you think we don't have control and understanding now?"

"Two of your fellows died during or shortly after the first Rooshrike cable operation. The conclusion is obvious."

Carmen pursed her lips tightly. "All right. Then as long as we're on the subject anyway, some of us would like to know why you want so much cable. It seems to us that, living under water, the possible uses for something this strong would be extremely limited."

If Way wisher was annoyed by the question, neither his manner nor his words showed it. "It's precisely because of our habitat that we need the cable so desperately. Tell me, how do you think we launch our ships into space?"

"Why—" She fumbled at the sudden change of subject. "I assume you do like everyone else: build the ships in orbit with material brought up in shuttles."

"No. For us it turns out to be more economical to build them on the planet surface"—under water, Carmen's mind edited in—"and then launch them essentially empty, with only the control areas flooded and most of the crew packed into small boxes under artificial hibernation. A skeleton crew then guides the ship to the nearest ringed gas giant planet—or asteroid belt, if the system is fortunate enough to have one—and spends up to a year mining enough ice to fill the ship. Only then can the crew be revived and the ship made fully functional."

"Complicated," Carmen murmured.

"And very costly," the Pom said. "One of every twenty-eight who undergo hibernation does not survive the revival procedure."

Carmen swallowed. "You must want very badly to go into space."

"The oceans of our home are wide and unbounded; we have always been a people who swam freely wherever we chose. Should we now be bound to the surface of a single world?" The Pom's fins rippled restlessly for a moment, and Carmen had the sudden feeling she'd been granted a brief glimpse into the innermost workings of the Pom psyche. Odd, she thought, how the translators tend to mask how really alien we are to each other. I wonder whether that's a strength or a weakness of the whole technique? An interesting thought; but before she had time to follow it any further, Way wisher had composed himself. "It's for this reason we desire your cable," he said. "With it we will build a device with which we may bring our ships directly to space."

And suddenly Carmen understood. "You're going to build a skyhook, aren't you?

Run a Spinneret cable from orbit to the surface and use it like an elevator."

The Pom's tentacles rippled. "You're familiar with such devices? Astonishing!"

"Only the theory," Carmen admitted, dredging her memory for any details she may have squirreled away. "We worked that out—oh, at least half a century ago, I think. I don't know if we never came up with anything strong enough to build it or if someone found a flaw in the theory or what."

"There are no theoretical flaws, but we've found no material strong enough for our needs. Until now."

"Yes, the cable would be ideal, wouldn't it?" Was that what the Spinners had used it for? "A trillion dollars is still a lot of money, though. For good, hard data we might be willing. But I want an overview first, some idea of what exactly we'd be paying for."

"I suppose that's not unreasonable," Waywisher said after a short pause. "Very well. Our first clues came from the Rooshrike heat tests on their first cable. As you know, it becomes superconducting at relatively low temperatures, distributing the applied heat evenly through its mass. What you may not know is that at higher temperatures it begins to show an almost black-body radiation spectrum, but with gaps that resemble absorption lines for various metals. At higher temperatures still the lines disappear."

"Yes, the Rooshrike report mentioned all that. There were some lines like those of simple molecules, too—titanium oxide, I think, and one or two others. I didn't know they'd given the data to anyone but us."

"They didn't. But they did their tests in space, and we had a probe nearby."

"Ah." It was becoming increasingly hard for Carmen to maintain her old image of the Poms as gentle, guileless creatures. "They seemed to think it indicated the presence of nontransmuted metals in the cable skin."

"Not true. The strength of the cable indicates it to be a perfectly homogeneous material."

"Why? A lot of alloys are stronger than their constituent metals."

"True. But alloys cannot be internally bonded by enhanced nuclear force."

Carmen's skin prickled. The Poms' mastery of nuclear forces was supposed to be what had allowed them to develop an underwater technology in the first place, and it was a secret they'd guarded jealously from other races. If that was what they were offering … "You've done that kind of bonding yourselves?" she asked, as casually as possible.

"Yes." Waywisher's fins and tentacles ripped restlessly, a mute indication of how much this revelation was costing him. "The theory is quite straightforward, though application can be difficult, and under it the 'glue' can also be partially explained as a stepwise-enhanced edge effect. The absorptionlike spectrum lines would then be due to weak force-electromagnetic coupling between nuclear fluctuations and the electron shell response. Is all of this translating properly?"

"I think so," Carmen said, the taste of irony in her mouth. All the talk on Astra of protecting the Spinneret's secrets—and here the Poms had been using those same secrets for centuries. "I'm not a scientist, but all the words sound familiar. So why are you bothering to buy our cable when you can make your own?"

Waywisher barked, an almost seal-like sound the translator didn't touch. "We've mastered the technique only for the lightest metals; the difficulty, as well as the material's final strength, increases rapidly with atomic weight. If our theory is correct, the Spinneret cable is composed of an entirely new element with weight approximately three hundred seventy times that of hydrogen … and its actual tensile strength around ten to the twelfth pounds per square inch."

Which was, Carmen realized with a shiver, a thousand times as strong as the lower limit the Rooshrike had established for it. "I don't believe it," she murmured.

"The numbers are accurate to within ten percent."

"No, I didn't mean that—I was just talking to myself." She took a moment to get her brain back on its rails. "You've got the whole thing—theory, numbers, speculations—all written out for us?"

"I have it with me now. It's on a disk compatible with the reader we delivered to Colonel Meredith four days ago."

"All right, then," Carmen nodded. "A trillion dollars in cable for the disk. You still have to supply however many tons of metal that'll come to, I'm afraid."

"That will be acceptable." Waywisher's left tentacle probed into his harness, emerged with a flat package. "I don't suppose I have to warn you that this information is a great secret of the Pom people, and that its contents are not to be given to any other people."

"Of course," Carmen nodded, taking the package gingerly. "The very fact we've got it at all will only be known by a few select people. We, uh, are honored by your trust."

"We have little choice." Waywisher's fins were undulating gently, and Carmen suddenly realized the two of them had begun drifting toward the outer lock and her waiting shuttle. "You have something we need; it isn't trust to offer something of equal value in exchange for it. Besides, your military weakness prevents you from the casual betrayal an empire might consider. Should you do so, your destruction would follow quickly."

Carmen swallowed. "And we value your friendship, too," she murmured.

With a flip of his tail Way wisher drove them the last meter to lock, steadying Carmen with one tentacle as he worked the mechanism with the other. "Good-bye, Miss Olivero. We look forward to a long and harmonious relationship between our peoples."

"As do we," Carmen nodded, kicking backward into the lock. "Good-bye, Waywisher."

Especially, she added to herself as the lock door slid shut, a long one.

Lieutenant Andrews was looking more than a little worried when she finally emerged from the lock's air dryer into the shuttle passenger bay. "You all right?" he asked, helping her maneuver the weightless but massive oxygen tanks into their jury-rigged latches.

"Sure," she said, exchanging her fins and mask for a pair of soft boots. "Why do you ask? Just because you lose your monitor for a few—"

"So you knew about that, did you?" His eyes probed her face, flicked to the package Waywisher had given her. "It wasn't equipment failure, then, I take it.

Waywisher really meant it when he asked for a private chat?"

"Something like that. I'm not at liberty to discuss it with anyone but Colonel Meredith. I'm sorry."

Andrews shrugged. "It's okay by me—secrets I can't tell anyone else just add frustration to my life, anyway. You might as well go back and change, though," he added as she headed for one of the crash chairs. "We're going to be up here for another orbit."

She frowned. "Why?"

He grinned. "Because there's a Ctencri shuttle making its approach now and Major Brown wants it to have lots of room. As befits incoming VIPs."

"VIPs? You mean … ?"

"Yep. Perez's little gamble paid off. The scientific cavalry has arrived."