EFFECTS OF OPENNESS / CH. 3:THE WET AMBASSADOR
SWIMMING POOL DOME, MARS. TUESOL, 18TH JULY. 9AM.
“Fellow Ambassadors, thank you for all coming.” Alice said, “I'm sure you're all wondering why you're here, and why I asked yesterday that the pool be closed to the general public. Let me explain. I don't know how many of you are aware of the meeting of the security council last week, which set up a naval exclusion zone in the general area that the SpaceGuard interceptor is due to hit. Yesterday, I got information from my government on Earth related to the reason for that exclusion zone. I see from some nods that I'm not the only one. I also got asked to introduce someone to you. Since I'm pretty sure that unless or perhaps even if you've been very well briefed, you're not going to believe me if I say more. I'd like you just come this way, and watch a little demonstration. Oh, some of you will know Ruth, who's been at the council offices for the past few months. This is a side of her, of her background, that I certainly didn't know about.”
“Cut the theatrics, Alice.” Mack said, “we're busy people.”
“Hi, Mack.” Ruth said, stepping out of the changing area, wearing a swimming costume and her scale, “Do you like my swimming costume? I brought it from where I grew up, before I left there and went to Alice's homeland. What I'd like you all to do, since this pool is rather small, is stay away from the ends of the pool, because I might make a splash. And I'd also like you to time how long I'm underwater for. Have patience, and you'll see why Alice asked you to come here.” With that, she dived into the pool, and started to swim lengths underwater.
Thirty seconds later someone asked “OK, so she can swim fast in that mermaid outfit, but I don't get the point, Alice. What's this all about?”
“Please wait,” Alice said, “and I hope you're timing. This is mostly about how long she can swim for underwater.”
“You mean she's got some kind of miniature breather in that thing?”
“No. She hasn't,” Alice said, “Upon my word of honour. This is just something she can do. She could do it without the tail. To prove to me she wasn't going to totally embarrass me she stuck her head in a glass mixing bowl full of water last night, and read a book.”
“What, a whole one?” the ambassador from Israel, who'd heard something from home about ancient treaties, asked.
“No, don't be silly. She can't breath water. She said she'd much prefer to do it this way because the bowl thing gave her a stiff neck. Anyone got the time?”
“One minute and thirty seconds.”
A while later Alice said “Oh, about the city she comes from... you've probably all heard of the name, but that's apparently just because they borrowed the name from fiction.”
“Oh come on Alice, you're not saying she dresses like a mermaid because she comes from Atlantis?”
“Just as there have been rather a lot of spaceships called the Enterprise,” James said, “the city-submarine that Ruth and I grew up on — we're third cousins by the way — is indeed called Atlantis. The press will be getting an information pack today, and the chance to visit in about a week's time.”
“And they have preserved records and books from before the Roman era,” the Greek ambassador said, “many of which were thought lost to mankind.”
That sparked a discussion.
“Time check?” Alice asked.
“Three and a half minutes.” Mack said, “She's doing really well but she's got to come up soon.”
“I'll be very surprised if she does,” James said.
“Me too,” Alice agreed.
“So far,” the ambassador from China said, “we've seen a young woman get wet in a strange swimming device, and heard talk of a city-submarine. I would like some kind of proof.”
“You are getting it,” Alice said, “I expect she will not come up for another eight minutes or so.”
“That's impossible,” she snapped. “What's the trick?”
“We have oxygen carrying muscles, and a modified gasp reflex,” James said.
“Oh come on,” she replied, “You're saying you're not human?”
“They consider themselves a different sub-species, not a different species.” Alice said, “They did not bring their different technology with them to Mars, your governments on Earth will have heard or will hear about that, I'm sure. I've received instructions to introduce Ruth to you as the ambassador from Atlantis, and while I could show you that instruction from my government, the only real proof to you is this little demonstration. I'm not sure, in your position, I would feel I wanted to write home about it until the press have had their say.”
“Four minutes,” Mack said, “How long was she reading for last night, Alice?”
“I couldn't believe what I was seeing, to start with, and forgot to start my stopwatch. More than ten minutes, but she wasn't swimming at all, let alone this fast.”
“She'll tell you that this wasn't swimming fast,” James corrected, “the simple fact is that the tail is a very effective swimming aid, and we've been perfecting them for a long long time.”
“Your history really goes back to Roman times?”
“The earliest written records we have are treaties, going back to around the time of the pyramid-building pharaohs. We have stories going back before then, of course. Modern-day Atlantis was built around the year one thousand in the Christian calendar.”
“And you say it's a submarine?”
“Yes. It's been expanded a bit over the years, but the central portion and the engines are that old.”
“Five minutes,” Mack said, “I'm getting impressed, but I'll be more impressed when I look in her mouth to check there's no breathing tube or something.”
“I suggest if you do, you don't breath in,” James said, “she'll be breathing out a lot of carbon dioxide. That's another difference — we can tolerate a bit more of it in our blood than you can.”
A bit later Mack shook his head and said “six minutes.”
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POOLSIDE, 9.15AM
Breathing deeply, Ruth hauled herself out of the pool. “How long did I go for?”
“Just over eleven minutes,” Mack said.
“Mack wants to examine your mouth for tubes,” Alice said.
“He's welcome, as long as I can just lie here for a bit. I've decided I'm unfit.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Small pools are harder to swim in,” James said.
“Yeah, yeah.” Ruth said, between breaths, “Say aaaah Ruth, Aaaaaaaaah.”
Mack reported, “I see no tubes. Anyone see anything fake, or can we believe that Ruth is from Atlantis?”
“I can believe that,” the ambassador from Greece said, “but her status as ambassador is more questionable.”
“Since we have Alice's word on that, and she's not going to want to embarrass her king, I think the Mars Council is going to accept that status.”
“Thanks, Mack,” Ruth said, standing up. “I bring greetings in the name of Karella Farspeaker Homebringer, Queen of all Mer-folk by the will of the high council of Atlantis, ruler of the navies of the Mer people, undisputed sovereign of the deeps and shallows of Earth. For the first time in a century, the engines of Atlantis will be started today. My queen thinks there is some danger, James tells me she should have listened better at school, but in any case, the plan is that city will break free from the silt it's been in for the last hundred years and the heat trace will show up on satellites. If the engines fail to start properly, say because of a leak, then our submarines will be used to move the city, which will be very noisy. Either way, Atlantis will not be where the interceptor is due to hit the sea when it does. Mack, would you and the rest of the council be willing to engage in a little-treaty negotiating sometime? I'm thinking that our building technology that enabled us to keep the water out of Atlantis for the past millennia might be interesting to the council.”
“Clever forcefields? No thanks. I don't want anyone's life depending on not having a power-cut.”
“A transparent, insulating crystal material,” Ruth corrected.
“More interesting. How brittle?”
“James, any idea?”
“If you hit Atlantis' dome with a hammer, I'm pretty sure the hammer would break first. A shaped-charge might make a crack, I don't know.”
“Likewise a meteor.” Mack added.
“Probably,” Ruth agreed “Personally, I'd go for crystal dome plus forcefield, or maybe a double-skinned dome. It's not like you're keeping out the weight of the Atlantic, after all. And I don't know you'd want to build to the same size, either. I always thought it was silly having all our people in one dome.”
“How big is Atlantis?” Mack asked.
“Two kilometres across.”
“A single dome?” Mack asked, “Under the Atlantic?”
“Yes. About five hundred meters down.”
“That's a lot of trust in your engineers.”
“It's lasted a thousand years,” Alice pointed out. “So I guess they got their maths right.”
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EMBASSY COMPOUND, FRISOL 21ST JULY
“I really don't know what I'm supposed to do, right now,” Ruth complained.
“Represent our people.”
“How, swim around the pool like I'm in a freak show?”
“No, absolutely not.”
“You see, it's all very well for me to be called ambassador, but all its really done so far is allowed me to wear scale, which isn't exactly useful on almost the whole planet, and made me unemployed.”
“You ought to be thinking what Mars could offer the Mer, and what the Mer could offer Mars.”
“They can offer us... rock, dry bits of Mars, urm... anything else?”
“What about manufacturing?” Alice asked.
“What?” Ruth asked, shocked.
“Think about it. We're an isolated population here, there's a far lower chance of espionage than anywhere else.”
“I don't think it's going to work,” James said. “Not for most things.”
“Showcase for your engineering skills?”
“You mean get people more work to do? I don't think that's going to be popular back home.”
“We're not lazy, Alice. But... if you really want a Mer to work, you give them a real challenge, not ask them to do something they've done loads of times before.”
“Oh, like setting up a magnetic field for this planet to keep the radiation out, or creating that sea down in Hellas everyone keeps talking about?”
“Yeah,” Ruth agreed, “That'd certainly get someone's juices going.”
“Is it really possible?” James asked.
“A sea in Hellas? There's some plants growing down there at the moment. That's to say, liquid water doesn't boil at ambient temperature. And there's not really anywhere for water there to go when it rains unless it evaporates. But... to get anything like that in our lifetimes they'd need a lot more comets than they've delivered so far, plus release a lot more nitrogen from the rocks, too, assuming you want to be able to swim there.”
“Hmm... Do you know any geologists, or whatever they're called on Mars?” Ruth asked.
“Areologists? Probably some at the university. Why?”
“I want to know what Mars rock is made of. Or at least regolith.”
“Talk to Jimmy Durrel, then. He ought to know regolith.”
“Thanks. I will.” Ruth made a note on her wrist unit, “any more impossible dreams?”
“Well, there's that comet swatting forcefield that one of my journalists thought of.”
“What?”
“Dear Simon, since you've discovered impossible forcefields, please could you make a nice long one? That way we can swat away any comet that starts coming our way, like the one that wiped out Restoration.”
“It'd make more sense to suck it dry, surely?” James said.
“Pardon?” Alice asked.
“Why waste the water?” Ruth asked.
“Sorry, you've lost me.” Alice replied.
“Water's precious on Mars, why go to the trouble of setting up a nice long forcefield just to throw the water away, when you can whack the thing with a laser, and get it down to the planet. I'm not talking rubbish, am I James?”
“You'd need a big field generator of course. And careful tuning and the rest, but sure, it ought to work. You just need to trap it in a forcefield, blast it with a laser, and get the water back down the force field pipe as you collapse it.”
“Could a construction sub do it?” Ruth asked.
“Not big enough, I expect. And the design's wrong too, you'd want to be able to start with a cone and then head towards a rod, but not all the way. It'd need some tricky design.”
“And then you could just point the thing at an incoming comet and collect it and shred it in one go?” Alice asked.
“I'm sure, yes.” James said, “Please put that down on your list, Ruth.”
“I have. Sounds like a lovely way to fill up my swimming pool.”
“What swimming pool?”
“If we're going to fill up Hellas, then I want swimming rights for the Mer.”
“And beach-front properties,” James said, “comfortable caves,”
“Oooh yes, certainly. How big is Hellas, in something the average Mermaid can cope with please.”
“Urm, it's bigger than Mediterranean sea. Not twice, though. Maybe one and a half?” Alice guessed.
“That'll do, yes. A girl can get a proper swim in that.”
“It'll get full of hypochlorates.”
“Hmm, we can't have that,” Ruth said, “I'm going to want to put a proper ecosystem in there. Margaret, you're good at maths. How many comets will we need to grab to fill my little swimming pool to say five hundred meters deep on average, assuming we don't bother waiting for it to rain and just pipe the water straight in?”
“Off the top of my head? Lots.”
“A tiny bit more accurate?”
“Lots is accurate. You want precise.”
“Yes, OK.”
“Let's assume you grab comets that are much too big for MarsCorp.”
“Sounds sensible,”
“Say, you're going to pick on things two kilometre across?”
“OK.”
“Then you're looking for something like half a million of them.”
“What! Mars Corp don't send anything like that many comets, do they?”
“No, but every little helps, you know? It's mostly about freeing the water that's already here. If you'll put up with a meter of water then you only need a thousand, of those two kilometre comets of course.”
“Yeah. So... say we grabbed a thousand a year, it'd only take a few years to get it swimable, wouldn't it? That'd be OK.”
“Ruth,” Margaret said, “I like you, but you're crazy. Totally and utterly crazy if you think you can send out a forcefield to the Kuiper belt, catch three two kilometre meteors a day, vaporise them and get them back here. I'm pretty sure there's no way you can do that, even with Mer technology. You'd pull the planet off its orbit or something equally dangerous.”
“But there's got to be a way!” Ruth complained.
“It'd probably be easier to play alchemist,” James said.
“I like you, James. Yeah. That's going to take longer to set up though, isn't it?”
“Yes, Ruth. But you could start with a smaller crater, rather than the biggest one on Mars.”
“Hmm. Delusions of grandeur? Humble little me?” Ruth hugged her self and hopped up and down. “Do you think Karella could send us a little alchemy kit? Nothing massive, just you know, enough to fill some crater somewhere big enough for squid to live in within about 3 years?”
“What's wrong with a great big swimming pool?”
“They're migratory, James.” Ruth said.
“Do they have to be?”
“I think it's programmed. I'm sure you can grow some from eggs, but I'm not sure they'll breed very well.”
“You'd better convince Karella you need a few comet catchers then, and a really big chemical processor. I don't know if you really need to go to the full alchemy set, just to get water.”
“Margaret, do you know what they're talking about?” Alice asked plaintively.
“My guess is that Ruth's got a grand crazy scheme to rip apart chemicals or even atoms by the sound of it, in the interests of making Mars a second home for Mer. Squid, if I remember right are pretty sensitive, so if squid can live then most other things can too.”
“On the basis that all the Earth's oceans aren't big enough?” Alice asked, bemused.
“Naturally we're a coastal sub-species, Alice,” James said. “That doesn't give us much ideal habitat at all, and you've built on most of it. And eventually we're going to need large bodies of water on Mars, just in terms of atmospheric stability.”