Chapter 51 The Summons South

The recordings left the Kairyu within the hour, and the world answered faster than it had ever answered anything. Tanabe had braced for the old machinery to grind awake — the requests for verification, the committees, the long gray delay of men who had been given a miracle and wanted to know its paperwork number. The replies did come in that language, but underneath them ran something else, something she had not heard in thirty years of service: urgency without fear. The song had done that. You could not spend your mornings humming four notes into a hydrophone and then spend your afternoons treating the source of those notes as a problem to be filed. The radio conference was held on the fourth day, in the chart room, on a circuit patched through relays that spanned three oceans. Tanabe sat at the table with Sano, Ellison, and Callahan, and the loudspeaker gave them the flags one at a time. Rear Admiral Hollis spoke for the Americans, his voice dry and careful, a man choosing each word the way a man chooses footing on scree. A commodore of the Royal Navy listened more than he talked. A civilian voice from the treaty secretariat read, at length, from the instrument that held the southern continent in trust for peace and science, and then said, quietly, that no clause of it had ever imagined a door. "The position you transmitted lies under four thousand meters of ice on a landmass that belongs to no nation and to all of them," Hollis said. "Half the fleets on earth want to send ships. The other half want to send fewer. We need to know what you intend to do when you get there, Captain, because the world intends to do something, and it would prefer to do it behind you." "We intend to listen," Tanabe said. "As we have always listened. The deep gave us a name and a place. It asked nothing else." "It asked us to go," Ellison said, and there was the difference in a sentence, the reason the room's static seemed to lean toward her. "Fifty years we kept the vigil so that the world would be ready. The world is ready. If we do not go, we will have kept the vigil for nothing, because readiness expires." There was a silence on the circuit, the particular silence of many staffs conferring in many rooms, and then Hollis said, "Then we go. Survey assets only at first. No weapons forward unless weapons come to meet them. The treaty holds. God help whoever tests it." A pause. "One more thing, Captain. The man who sealed the first fissure. Is he aboard?" Callahan leaned toward the microphone, and his voice, when it came, was the flat voice of an old pilot reading back a clearance. "He is." "Then he sails as the carrier," Hollis said. "That is not a courtesy title. Half the men humming at their stations on my ships learned it from your journals, son. They'll want to know the song is in familiar hands." He signed off before Callahan could argue, which Tanabe suspected was deliberate; admirals learned early which arguments were worth having and which were better ended first. The liaison arrived two days later, dropped by helicopter through a low overcast: Lieutenant Commander Ruth Halloway of the United States Navy, hydrographer, carrying a sealed case and a manner that suggested she had read her own orders and disagreed with several of them. She came to the chart room within the hour, laid the case on the table, and did not sit. "I have two sets of instructions," she said. "The public ones say I am to assist with acoustics and survey coordination. The sealed ones say the phrase 'secure or deny' about the site, and I am instructed to interpret that phrase myself." She looked at Tanabe steadily. "I would rather interpret it your way. But you should know what the other way looks like, because it is already moving. An application was filed in a registry in Panama eight days ago — an exploration claim on polymetallic deposits beneath the ice at your coordinates. Filed by the Aldrich Group. They have an icebreaker fitting out at Punta Arenas. The Meridian. Eighteen days, perhaps less, and she will not be alone." "A mining ship," Sano said, and his voice was very even. "Coming to the place where the song was born." "A company does not know what is there," Halloway said. "A company knows what a claim is worth. The distinction stopped mattering somewhere around the time their lawyers found the registry." She unlocked the sealed case and slid the papers across the table. "I am telling you everything in my brief because I have spent nine weeks reading the journals, Captain, and the journals do not contain a single page about hiding things from allies. If I am to be your liaison, I will liaise." Tanabe read the claim twice, then set it under the chart weight where everyone could see it, which was its own kind of order. "Then we work," she said. "Sano — the refit lists. The bell goes south, which means cold systems, which means she dives differently under a roof of ice than she does under open sky, and I want every failure she can have to happen here first, in warm water, where we can laugh at it. Ellison — the listening stations. Every navy that owns a hydrophone is going to point it at that continent whether we ask or no. I want their tapes flowing to us, and ours flowing to them, before anyone's government remembers to object. Halloway — you are the channel to Admiral Hollis. Tell him what is sailing out of Punta Arenas." "And Callahan?" Ellison asked. "Callahan," Tanabe said, "rests. He is seventy years old, he is the last of the squadron, and the moment that ship clears the harbor he will carry more of this than any of us. That is an order with no log entry." But Callahan was not resting. He was in the sonar room, in the second chair, where he had quietly installed himself every evening since the duet, watching the traces with the petty officers and saying almost nothing. He was there now, and it was the youngest of them, Petty Officer Ishikawa, on the midwatch, who saw it first. At 0312 ship's time, every hydrophone in the Pacific recorded a single sustained tone rising from the far south — seven seconds, clean, beneath the range of storms and shipping, arriving at every station in the same instant, which was impossible, and arriving gently, which was worse. The trace did not decay the way sound decays. It withdrew, the way a hand withdraws from a shoulder. Ishikawa brought the strip to the chart room with both hands, as if it might go out in rain. "Captain," he said. "It knew." Tanabe looked at the line on the paper for a long moment. Fifty years of vigil, six volumes, a world newly humming, and beneath it all a door turning under the ice, patient as time — and now this, a touch laid on the whole ocean at once, light as a knock. "Signal our position to the fleet," she said. "Course south by the great circle. Helm, make revolutions for twelve knots." She looked at the bulkhead, and past it, at the dark water beginning to slide beneath the keel. "We are expected. Let us not be late."