The decapods were marooned. Stuck in their box—now a prison. A dark insulated prison which made visualizing the outside world difficult.

While Study-Up busied herself writing her observations, a tide of boredom flowed into Thermal-Rock and Sand-Stirrer. The two passed the time playing simple sonic games.

“Give me a moment.” Thermal-Rock distorted his body in a circular pattern with all arms out and distorted his arms forward and back in such a way to create crude waves of his arms. “Okay, what am I?”

Sand-Stirrer sent a light at Thermal-Rock.

“A haulfin.” Sand-Stirrer said.

“Nope, but close!”

“Ah a quickfin.”

“Yes!”

Decapod language was sono-pictorial. The sound waves reflecting off an object generate a mental image and most creatures in their universe (ordinarily referred to as ‘everything’) used echolocation. Predation by larger species created survival pressures on the decapods, and over the long eons of darkness, they gained the ability to hold a mental image, then convert that back to sound to send warnings. This enabled decapods to see predators around-the-corner.

Whilst the others were busy, Ice-Driller spent the time thinking about the future. Would the otherworld stone make any current in the thoughts of those below? Would proof of materials—metals even—bring peace?

“Now it is my turn. This might be before your time, youngin’. Okay, I’m ready.” Sand-Stirrer said.

“Krill—no! a Crab.” Thermal-Rock replied.

“Good guess, few of them around anymore.” Sand-Stirrer said.

The sono-pictures were circular and had subtle differences over the dimension of time, a three-dimensional element. A decapod could crudely duplicate the quasi-spherical image by putting its tentacles in a specific three-dimensional shape, (if one ignoring the central mass of a decapod of course). Thus the sound-picture of a ‘rock,’ the word for ‘rock,’ and the sound of a rock hitting something had three separate acoustic patterns and were mental synonyms.

“Now what am I?”

“Random silt.” Ice-Driller added sarcastically. He swam as far away as he could and went to the pictures his father had taken. He planned on making his own noise, pinging the metal sheets.

“Sorry Ice-Driller. We can stop.”

“It’s okay, you can go back to your game.” He sank to the bottom with his pictures and attempted to read the images physically with his sense of touch. Echoes from their game were enough for him to visualize what he wanted, anyway. But after a few minutes, the two tired of their game and became listless.

Sand-Stirrer sang a photopoetic poem:

The tides roll under, the ice which c̃reak̃s,

Warmth flows up, from [ʀᴏᴄᴋ] it se̾eps̾̾.

To nourish all life in this S͜͡phere.

Intimate red, and danger blue,

Our coppered blood distorts all hue.

A soul's a b̥ubble̊ which ris̊̊e̊̊̊s to (N͝ull).

The dead drift ûp̂̂, the living hold͇,

The shark it : the swimmer b͇old.

A well hidden body lives another T͜id͡e.

The poem had certain accents that evoked the visual image of words, along with tapped words and other complexities of a sonopictorial language.

Sensing a way to make them productive, the Ice-Driller called out an order. “Can you two check the flow-rate again?”

They chirped in agreement and got the materials. The two measured the current’s strength and compared it to their previous recordings. They used a knotted rope, which let out soft sounds as one end thumped against the outside of the room.

“The flow has declined, but the current still strong.” Thermal-Rock said.

Food was the issue at hand. They needed a flow rate much lower than their swim speed to escape. If the rate was too high, it could suck them against a hole too small for their bodies (though possibly one body would plug the hole allowing the others to escape, but none thought long on that idea). The accompanied noise and pain would be a death worse than flash freezing in the Nullworld. At the current rate, a slow starvation was a far preferable fate. Extended torpor could let them survive many tides, though they needed strength to descend.

“Don’t worry. It will drop off,” said Ice-Driller. He was the only member of the team to have seen the original blow-out (which was perhaps a hundred tides ago.) “We will swim soon. Hold fast.”

stopped hereIce-Driller continued to study his father’s sono-pictures and noticed something. Slight variations in the pictures of The Great Attractor showed striations and even a large swirl. Faint, of course, but still unmistakable. “Study-Up. Does that look like a small eddy to you?”

Study-Up swam over and let out a ping of her own directed at the unrolled sheet metal.

“Your father, Ice-Gazer, may have stirred the chemicals when it was being exposed,” she said.

“Maybe, but I think I notice it here, too.” He showed her another.

“How are these ordered and dated?”

“These three pictures came over different sleeps, but sequenced over a single full tide, as best as he could manage.”

There were four images, two with noticeable crescent shapes: ◐ ☽ and ☾ ◑, but recorded on different dates. Another one was almost a full circle with almost no crescent ◎ , while the fourth had a faint crescent with odd swirls around one section of exposure ◉ showing a different exposure.

Study-Up looked. Yes, the swirl had migrated around and came back in another image, but held at the same vertical location. “Interesting.” In other pictures, the half-crescent of darkness covered half of the swirl. “It doesn’t seem to be made by the application of the silver.”

“I noticed something else. Do you see how the exposures seem to have a fine pitted nature that’s oriented, depending on which tide he estimated it was at? And then at this one tide there is none.”

Study-Up hit each of the pictures again with her own ping and saw a fuzziness perpendicular to TGA and then another during a second great tide, also perpendicular, but now exactly opposite in relation to the great attractor. Other pictures between tides seemed to have the same fuzziness at an angle. The minor tides appeared to have little effect on the pictures. Only the major tide affected it.

“I’ve read that exposures to chemicals close to the ice-shell react in different ways depending on the tides. I’ve assumed that the same energies feeding non-chemosynthetic life might also cause the chemicals to behave abnormally.” Study-Up said.

Thermal-Rock and Sand-Stirrer came over. The room was too small not to notice both Ice-Driller and Study-Up getting excited. Their free tentacles were inadvertently wiggling with energy as they talked, disturbing the water.

“Sure, but many chemicals and materials react weirdly to this water. It could be the cold or the increased oxygen.” Sand-Stirrer said.

“Yeah, but the fuzziness isn’t everywhere?” Asked Ice-Driller. He then unrolled and stacked another picture on top of another “Look, this picture has the same tide-phase recorded.” He pinged the stack of two pictures and visualized the overlap in fuzziness from his sonar images.”

Ice-Driller laid out four unrolled sonic pictures out on the floor and arranged them left, right, forward, and back. ☽ ͝𓇹 ☾ in accordance with the cyclic tide. The four floated above. He placed the image edge of The Great Attractor on the outside, with their universe in the center.

The other decapods chirped an agreement.

“But another arrangement exists.” Ice-Driller rearranged the plates. He aligned the fuzziness toward one direction, and oriented it so their universe was on the outside, and TGA was on the inside. “We can be outside and consistently point towards.”

He rotated every image around a half revolution: ☾ ͜͡ ☽

The others looked at the idea with suspicion. “That’s an even bigger current for most minds to swim against.” Thermal-Rock said.

“Ignore what others will or will not believe. Some have the flexibility of a rock with new thoughts.”

“A hardness of mind does not soften the evidence.” Sand-Stirrer recited a proverb.

“Maybe the even greater attractors are on a very slow tide…” Ice-Driller muttered.

“Something attracts The Great Attractor? A Greater Attractor?” Ice-Driller asked. His mind started racing at the thought. His free tentacles wiggled with energy.

“Something that is outside the outside?” Thermal-Rock said.

Sure, that could make sense, they each thought. They had already pierced the sacred teachings of magma-rock-water-ice. It took little effort to tack on -nothing-something onto -nothing-TGA of their developing cosmology.

“The water is a shell over the rock, and ice a shell over the water. By extrapolation, then there’s some sort of sphere containing TGA is itself an outer shell of something greater,” Sand-Stirrer said, evoking the many spheres argument from ancient civilizations. It was an argument that had fallen out of fashion in their ‘modern’ age; accelerating material progress was given as a reason to discard old wisdoms.

“The research was supposed to solve the question, not land us with bigger uncertainties to explain.” Study-Up said. “But when has research ever done that?” She asked rhetorically. Her own research had spawned only more questions that were unanswered. Those of a hardened mind used such questions to attack an uncertain answer.

“Arguing against the spheroid theory of cosmology might have to wait. Everypod believes there is heat in the center, hot rock is covered by cool rock which is covered by a sphere of water. Ice, which is covered by nothing, covers that water. Then, outside of the nether, other loose materials have swirled around, like silt waiting to settle. It is self-evident from a single person’s point-of-view that it would be difficult to unseat it. And right now we need the general populace to support us.” Sand-Stirrer said. He was older, and more attached to the theory himself, but was also wiser and knew the enormous boulders of thought that sat heavy in everyone’s mind.

“Could we calculate the angles and the distances from this?” Sand-Stirrer asked. “Using Trigonometry and Parallax?”

They all talked about the possibility, but estimated they’d need more digits on their calculating ropes. Their decapod standard length was originally based on the median length of decapods, which varied over the ages and location with food supply. Eventually, scientific society standardized one ‘length.’ But the decapods had evolutionary pressure to remain small to evade predators, and though the concept of kilo-lengths was well used for travel, mega-lengths were ignored except for areas of mathematical speculation. And pure math was a subject these experimentalists were impatient with.

Since they were effectively trapped, the parallax calculations were still attempted.

“If we had another set of images, like one from the other pole above Hotsmoke, and we took them at the exact time, then yes, we could calculate a parallax. That would give us a distance since we know the radius of our planet and the depth of the waters.” Sand-Stirrer said, rubbing his sound melon with a free arm.

“—We’d need more digits,”

“What about the fluidic computers at the Hydraulic Calc Institute?” Ice-Driller asked.

They chattered more about the new devices that used flows of water to give answers to mathematics. With amplification gates, the numbers of digits could be expanded indefinitely. Three of them decided it wasn’t much used to speculation, but Ice-Driller persisted.

“What about an estimate now? We know the length of a full tide, that we have an accurate number of moments. 10,000 moments or five sleeps. We can work backwards or get a range? Ice-Gazer wouldn’t have taken them during a sleep, he would have kept his sleep cycle tuned to the tides. Then use the parallax method.” Ice-Driller asked. He wanted any estimate. Providing an inaccurate answer would swarm the institution decapods to fixate on proving him wrong by providing a better estimate, which was what he wanted.

“Too inaccurate, plus we’d need a fixed point. We’re not sure any point on The Great Attractor is fixed. It appears to be full of vortices of fluid.”

They went on more discussing, with Sand-Stirrer trying to convince Ice-Driller that an estimate was not useful, but a second picture from another spot on the ice at a known distance away is all they needed.

“Everyone Quiet!—I can’t hear the flow.” Thermal-Rock said.

Silence. Each wanted to be free of the small confines and out into open water, but no one dared hope, because of the insulated walls.

They went into the second chamber and then opened up the small door and were greeted with the silence of still water.

Ice-Driller was the first to squeeze through the opening, which only needed to be as large as the decapod’s sound melon for one to exit. Outside, he detected the faint blues that were common with the ice here, but it didn’t help with navigation.

He almost forgot how chill the icy depths were and had left without his insulating wraps. Then he sent out a ping.

The landscape was altered, but not drastically. The ice had been worn down, and every landmark he remembered that had a sharp edge was curved. All the hard edges seemed rounded, and every hole was enlarged. Despite their attempt to mitigate a blowout with a seal and netting, those items were gone—sucked into Nullworld.

He swam into what he thought was the newly enlarged room where they left the stone.

Echoes returned. The Overworld Stone!

He swam back and announced the find. Elation lit the building’s darkness. “Prep for descent!”Carefully, the stone was wrapped in their strongest net and tied it to the building, which was securely held by the ice.

Right before they were ready to leave, Thermal-Rock swam away to a crevasse in the ice. “I almost forgot the fishing net!—It’s full! The blowout must have sucked them in,” he said and lit up with happy colors. “We’ve invented a new fishing method. Blowout trawling.” He came back with a full net of food.

All was good; they had held fast. Now they had a net full of krill and proofs of the Nullworld in their possession. Downward was their future of success—until the ice made another sound.“Get back!” Ice-Driller commanded.

A loud alien rumble erupted from above.

“What is that?” Study-Up asked.