“What you’re saying is that we have a ready-made seabed,” said Fredda, “and it is already partly filled with water-frozen water, but water all the same. Which means that all we have to do is dig the channel.”
“Not a simple matter, or a small one,” Kresh said. “And there would either have to be two channels dug, or one channel large enough to encompass both a northward and southward flow.”
“We’d need both, actually,” Lentrall said. “One channel that could accommodate two-way flow, and one that would simply serve as a sort of huge pressure-relief valve. The second outlet would not generally carry huge amounts of water, but it would make it possible to regulate the amount of water in the Polar Sea.”
“How do manage to get water to flow in two directions at once through one channel?” Fredda asked.
“Actually, that is one of the more straightforward parts of the business,” said Lentrall. “It happens all the time in natural oceans. The warm water moves on top, while the counterflow of cold water moves on the bottom. A sort of natural temperature barrier, or thermocline, develops. The two currents are quite distinct from each other. They can even have different concentrations of trace elements. For all intents and purposes, they do not intermix. In the present case, the cold counterflow to the south should also serve to scour out the initial channel through the process of water erosion.”
“You make it all seem so simple,” said Fredda, not making any great effort to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Why it is it no one has ever thought of it before?”
But Lentrall was clearly immune to sarcasm, no doubt because he was virtually unable to detect it. “Oh, many people have thought of it before,” he said. “The problem is that no one has been able to find a way to go about digging the necessary channels until now. The job was too big and too expensive to do with any conceivable sort of conventional digging equipment. If we started right now, with an all-out effort to dig the channel, we wouldn’t get halfway done before the climate collapsed.”
“But you, and you alone, have found the way,” said Fredda.
That jibe almost seemed to strike home. “Well, yes,” Lentrall said, suddenly just a trifle cautious. “Yes, I have.”
“How?” asked Fredda. “How in the devil are you going to do it?”
Lentrall was now plainly startled. He looked from Fredda to Alvar and then back again. “You mean he didn’t even tell you that much? He didn’t explain?”
“No,” Fredda said. She glanced at her husband, but it was plain he was not going to say anything. “The governor wanted me to hear it from you.”
“I see,” Lentrall said, clearly taken aback. “I thought you knew that part.”
“But I don’t,” said Fredda, more than a little annoyed. “So I ask you again to tell me now. How are you going to do it?”
Davlo Lentrall fiddled with the map for a moment. He cleared his throat. He sat up straight in his chair, and looked straight at Fredda. “It’s quite simple,” he said. “I intend to drop a comet onto the planet.”
6
GUBBER ANSHAW SMILED to himself as he strolled along the wide boulevards of Valhalla. He had only been to the hidden city a time or two before, and he was genuinely pleased to return.
Valhalla was a utilitarian place, designed down to the last detail to be efficient, sensible, orderly. The overall design was, ironically enough, reminiscent of underground Spacer cities, but perhaps that was to be expected. Building underground did force certain requirements on the design.
The city was built in four levels. The lower three were a fairly conventional series of storage areas, living quarters, and so on, each connected to the others by broad ramps and high-speed lifts. But Gubber was on the top level of Valhalla, and the top level was something quite unconventional, indeed. It did not remind him of anything at all.
It was an open gallery, a half-cylinder on its side, precisely two kilometers long and one kilometer wide. The side walls of the main level merged smoothly into the wide, curved, ceiling. The entire interior surface of the semicylindrical gallery was coated with a highly reflective white material. The overall effect was overbright to human eyes, but no doubt the New Laws regarded it as a more efficient style of illumination.
The floor of the huge gallery was still in large part empty, though it seemed to Gubber that there were a few new structures in place since his last visit. “Structures” seemed a better word than “buildings,” as many of them did not seem to be buildings, exactly.
There were, of course, a number of normal-seeming installations on the main level, given over to one conventional purpose or another. He could identify repair centers, warehouses, transshipment centers, and so on. But Gubber did not spend much time considering them. Instead, his eye was drawn to the less identifiable structures clustered toward the center of the main level.
All of them were the size of two- or three-story buildings. Nearly all of them were geometric solids of one sort or another: cubes, cones, dodecahedrons, oblate spheroids, three-, four-, and five-sided pyramids, each painted or coated in a bright primary color. A few were positioned in strange attitudes. One cone was upside-down, and two of the pyramids rested on base-edges, so that their apexes were pointed exactly ninety degrees away from the zenith. Gubber had no idea how the New Law robots had kept them from falling over.
He was reminded of a child’s carelessly scattered building blocks. On his last visit, Lancon-03 had described the structures as an experiment in abstract aesthetics, and had launched into an intricate explanation of the theories of beauty and utility currently under discussion in the New Law community.
Some of the structures were occupied or used in some way, while others did not seem to have any access way into their interiors. They were, in essence, abstract sculpture. Gubber did not care for them very much as art, but that was almost incidental. He found it fascinating that the New Laws would construct sculptures in the first place. But did they do so for pleasure, or were they simply compelled to attempt art by the murky demands of the Fourth Law? Did these huge geometric solids appeal to the New Law robots in their own right? Or did these strange beings construct them because they felt they ought to build them, because they wanted to convince themselves they were capable of creating? In short, did they build them because they wanted to, because Fourth Law made them do it, or because they felt it was expected of them, because human cities have public art?
Gubber had been pondering such questions for months now, and was quite pleased to realize he was no nearer an answer. Lancon-03 had never succeeded in explaining things to Gubber’s satisfaction, and Gubber himself had not been able to come up with a good explanation. But that suited him fine. Puzzles lost much of their savor once they were solved. “This place always surprises me,” he said to his host.
“And why is that, sir?” asked Lancon-03.
Gubber chuckled quietly as he made an expansive sweeping gesture with one arm, taking in all of Valhalla. “I suppose because none of this seems the least bit like me,” he said.
Lancon-03 regarded her guest thoughtfully. “I take it, then, that because you invented the gravitonic brain, you expected to see some expression of your own personality in the thing created by beings who possess gravitonic brains?”