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SETI Library: Black Smoker

Written by Gregory Benford

Ruth held firmly onto the rail and watched the research vessel buck against curling white waves. Spume burst over the prow and sprayed her with salty wet. Wind whipped by her and shredded the whitecaps in the gray sea light. She looked around at the white faces of the other Library staff and was glad she had experienced sailing with her father in rough seas.

Akralan wasn’t doing so well, either. The big alien lumbered by her, rolling with the pitch of the deck. The rigid face and dancing gray eyes managed to convey both alarm and wooziness.

The research ship ploughed through thick waves, prow headed west. She looked back but the California coast was long gone behind tossing surf and dirty, sun-streaked clouds.

Akralan’s translator came lurching along the deck, green and rolling-eyed. But the sea was calming already as the storm headed inland to dump rain on a thirsty California. The crew was already swinging the descent cylinder up from the hold, setting it down on the prep deck with clanks and groans of metal. Time to get suited up.

She got into her suit, mostly just a rubbery garment to keep her warm during the descent. Akralan’s translator was worrying around the alien, who had his own specially made suit to fit his odd physique.

Ruth hoped they could pull off this deception. Akralan had slowly revealed more of his own biology, including his intense interest in deep ocean thermal vents—though without giving a clue about why.

So the SETI Library had arranged this stunt. Akralan had insisted on seeing the absolutely lowest depth in the ocean, but there were few thermal vents in the really deep ones. So the Library’s Prefect had hit upon a simple ruse—tell Akralan that he was going to the deepest vent, and then just take him down to a convenient one. How could he plausibly judge the depth, anyway?

Ingenious, Ruth had to admit. So of course Akralan had also insisted that she accompany him in this deep ocean descent off Monterey. Even though his last stunt had killed a librarian on the slopes of Everest, he wanted her along. The Library felt that since she had started all this, taking the orbital plunge with Akralan, she was in for the full ride, no matter how dangerous it seemed.

Ruth felt edgy about this. They still didn’t really grasp Akralan, and now they were playing deceptive games with him. She paced the deck as Akralan got outfitted.

Their craft was self-propelled with a large personnel sphere below

a ballast and trim system. Steel weights clung to it, to allow faster deep dives. These would be jettisoned at the end of the dive and left at the bottom.

The three of them entered the cylinder and strapped in. It was pretty bare-bones, a research vessel. The passenger sphere was next to the ballast tank and they could not even see the crew. She had always been a bit nervous in close quarters, and when the hatch boomed shut she felt a surge of anxiety. An acrid taste came into her mouth and she wondered if she was going to throw up.

The A-frame crane lifted the cylinder and cabling. They splashed into the still-tossing sea and then a world of quiet and dark descended. The viewing window soon went black. The near-freezing sea cold began to seep in.

Being crowded into a gunmetal gray passenger zone was bad enough. But with the alien, it was immeasurably worse. Akralan become more agitated as they descended.

#

They sighted the black smoker after two hours. The crew said the smoky water was superheated to over 400°C. The stony field hundreds of meters wide rippled with superheated water coming through the ocean floor. The dingy currents were rich in dissolved minerals from the crust. They descended through clouds of sulfides that loomed above the site. Brooding above this landscape were fogs that formed when the super hot water came in contact with the cold ocean above, making minerals precipitate. Below towered a black chimney-like structure around each turbulent vent. Sprays of mud came from ripe orange gouts at the smoker peak.

The translator spoke for him. “He wants to know if this is truly the lowest spot in our oceans.”

“Yes, that’s what he wanted,” Ruth lied, though without technically lying.

The translator eyed her. Getting to the truly deep sites, where the continental plates pulled apart and lava erupted, was very difficult, and dangerous. The SETI Library would never take such a risk with a visiting alien, even if the alien wanted it.

Akralan’s eyes danced, his chest heaved. Plainly he could barely breathe. Rasps of air escaped him and his nostrils flared. He rose from his specially molded chair and stared through the viewing ports, mouth open. Ruth watched him, sensing that this sight carried some hidden meaning for him.

Suddenly Akralan burst into a high, wracking burst of sound. The staccato bursts rang in the passenger chamber. Ruth blinked and wondered if the alien would become violent.

The translator leaned over and smiled. “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”

“That’s laughter?”

The woman shrugged, though Ruth could see she was also wary of the harsh, barking sound. What must it have been like for her, months of night and day contact with the alien, but never quite knowing what Akralan was up to? Not that anyone else had a clear idea, either. “Apparently it serves the same function that laughing does for us,” she said. “Releases unspoken tensions.”

Akralan began speaking in rapid-fire volleys. The sounds echoed and built, the translator frowned, and Ruth found it hard to breathe, to think. The cylinder hovered above the black smokers and fizzing sounds came through the walls. Akralan gestured with his odd arms, fired off phrases, pointed out the view port. Whirring currents rushed by and their hull resounded with whirring, clicking jolts as debris dinged into them.

The captain came on the speakers, his flat voice surrealistically bland. He pointed out bacteria growing in thick mats. These attracted crawling organisms that grazed slowly upon the dark brown bacteria. Larger organisms appeared in the rich nutrient bath as they descended--snails, shrimp, crabs, tube worms, fish. A pink octopus leisurely groped in some prey from a rock fortress.

The captain continued in a routine tone, “You’ll see this system forms a food chain of predator and prey relationships, going well beyond the primary consumers. We once harvested some of the eyeless shrimp and found them quite good in a New Orleans sauce.”

The ballast tank rattled and they moved directly over a smoker.

Tubeworms with no mouth were everywhere. She knew they absorbed nutrients directly into their tissues, so