Canticle Blue

9. Canticle Blue

After a day of relatively light work and unpacking, the team actually felt refreshed. They finished their evening meal early and cleared the center of the sanctuary for discussion, with everyone sitting at the doors of their tents, as if around a campfire. The meeting would be informal, and there was much to be shared.

Syl began with: "Havi will be keeping the meeting log from now on. The paper he's using is just like the ones we use in our personal logs, loose-leaf with wide margins. So, if anyone wants to add notes, questions or anything else to the log, just let him know. If you have something longer you want to add, just write it down in your own log and give him the page to insert. By the way, if anyone gets low on pages, we have plenty.

"We're going to let Annibet speak first so she can help Tor and Elyse in the shelter before it gets too dark down there."

Annibet stood up. "This morning Elyse and I found one of the microscopes in the supplies and used it to get a look at the glowing powder. What we saw, believe it or not, was phytoplankton, or more specifically, the silica shells, of one kind of single-celled algae. They appear to be emitting light from a radiant substance that is adhering to them. The light wouldn't be from bio-luminescence, as we know it, because these organisms are no longer living. Chemical reactions of that type of are relatively short-lived anyway. And it's not from radioactivity, of course, because that's one of the first things we checked for. Elyse tells me that this species is known—one of a great many brought by colonists from the original home world—but the glowing effect is not. This type can live in salt water or fresh, but she guesses the latter would be more likely here on the island. We don't think the glowing substance is applied with some coating technique. It adheres too well and seems too uniform in its distribution. It follows the contours and patterns of the shells exactly, as if it were a single layer of material. The powder is stunningly beautiful under the scope. We're going to be preparing slides and can't wait to show them to you guys. Os says we have an imager attachment for the microscope too; we just have to find it. For my part, even the chemist part of me can't guess what the glowing substance might be at this point.

"Also, it might be too early to suggest this, but we wanted to make a request. We seem to finding several types of exotic matter here. If we decide to name them, if only for discussion, we wanted to suggest a name for the powder. Elyse and I were watching the changing brightness in the samples we had, and they reminded us—don't laugh—of festive singing. So we thought of the name 'Canticle Blue.' You wouldn't have to decide right away, but we liked it. Syl likes it and promises that Geddes will too."

Syl applauded quietly.

She continued. "I wanted to mention one more thing, and then I'll be finished. Elyse doesn't think one species of phytoplankton could be cultured in a cave system like this. So, we were wondering if there could be facilities for that elsewhere on the island.

"Thank you, Cian and Os, for letting me go first."

Os was next. "I wanted to summarize what we found the upper tunnel. As you all know, there's a doorway into a crater at the top of it, and it's blocked by rocks and ice. The rock-fill is certainly not naturally caused. The variety in type and size of the rocks is too great, and, from what we saw on the way in, there's no debris-source area above the crater. The rubble, as a whole, is not that deep, probably less than seven feet. You can actually hear ocean waves up there when the wind is light. The crater itself is not altogether natural either. There are cut and polished surfaces, and indications of improbable symmetry—that is, it's apparently elliptical rather than circular. I think we saw that from the air and aerial images too.

"Tor is trying to determine if we could excavate the crater—or at least part of it—by hand. We didn't see anything boulder size near the doorway. If we do decide to excavate, there would be a few things to consider. One is that there is ice mixed in with the rubble, and probably some snow on top. If we start digging from the bottom, it could collapse further. Also, our digging would probably be visible from the air. Tor thinks we might be able to dig a crawl space which follows the wall, if we just wanted to look at the crater perimeter. But it would have to be braced. He's sure we could find things on the beach to do that. A third thing to consider is, if we open a path from the upper doorway to the surface of the mountain, cold air will be drawn through this room and both tunnels from the beach."

Before her talk, Cian opened a container and passed around the two textured objects from the upper tunnel. She smiled and said, "Please don't ask me to explain these. But they feel quite strange in your hands, don't they? Like trying to turn some kind of free-spinning gyro."

Geddes handled one and said, "It's like a force is always trying to push them in one direction."

"I know," Cian continued. "Isn't that weird? I can tell you that when you put them on a scale and then change their orientation, their weight will change. I'm not prepared to call it magic yet," she laughed. "But, it certainly makes for good entertainment.

"If I could speculate about these pieces and the... Canticle-Blue powder," she smiled at Syl as she said it, "I do see something they might have in common. To me, they appear to be interacting with something, maybe even the same thing. In fact, if you leave one of these pieces on the scale long enough, it will show slight weight changes, similar to the way the powder changes in brightness. It's as if energy is being converted into light and repulsion. If so—and I know I'm just going farther out on a limb—it seems unlikely that such a force is being produced locally. There would be some kind of interference with our own equipment. It wouldn't be a magnetic or electromagnetic force for the same reason. There are other possibilities. Cosmology at least leaves the door open for these kinds of things in the areas of dark energy and dark matter. But better answers are just going to take time. Another thing to think about would be that, while the powder might have accreted  naturally, the pieces we're looking at here were made with a process. So, assuming we're talking about the Per'sa, they must have learned how to collect this kind of exotic matter.

"I think that's everything I wanted to say. If any of you find these ideas pretty wild, you would certainly be justified. But we're actually seeing these things and have to look for explanations." Feel free to work with us on this. That way, your brains could work overtime," she kidded, "and ours could rest." She held up one of the objects again. "If we are deciding to name these strange materials, maybe we could just call this kind, "R- type," for "repulsion."

Syl stood up. "Well done guys. Lots and lots of mysteries. I'm not going to say "meeting adjourned" because that just sounds too stiff to me. Free-time for the night now. If anyone wants to play games, I'd love to join in."

Before he closed the team logbook for the night, Havilan jotted down a poem that he and Elyse had composed about the glowing powder:

Where the wind
leaves them:
Diatoms