"The Ocean of the Blind" is a long story about a group of scientists in a station on the bottom of the ice-covered sea of a moon called Ilmatar, in a distant star system. They mean well but get into trouble.
The main character is Rob Freeman, a young technician who gets recruited by the boorish celebrity scientist Henri Kerlerec to help with a secret project. Henri has a Russian Navy stealth diving suit, and wants to use it to get a close look at the lobster-like intelligent inhabitants of Ilmatar. Contact with the natives is forbidden, but since they sense the world by sonar, Henri thinks he can get close in the stealth suit and record videos without being detected.
Meanwhile, an Ilmataran scientist named Broadtail is nervously presenting his discoveries about ancient stone carvings to a learned society run by the wealthy aristocrat Longpincer. His work is well received, and Broadtail is accepted into the group. Longpincer invites all of them to investigate a nearby vent, where they may find some interesting specimens.
They do: they find Henri. His stealth suit makes him sonar-absorbent, but the Ilmatarans can perceive him because there's a big blank silent spot in the middle of their echo-filled world. Feeling invulnerable, he boldly swims right into the middle of the group and they capture him. Rob tries to distract them with noisemakers but it doesn't work. The Ilmatarans are more curious than frightened.
The Ilmatarans haul their new specimen back to Longpincer's home and are amazed at how odd it is when they dissect it. Rob returns to the station alone, horrified and tormented by guilt at leaving Henri behind.
The story had an odd genesis. Back when I was living in Ithaca during the late 1990s I got an idea for a novel which I called A Darkling Sea. It was about a three-way conflict among humans, Ilmatarans, and another spacefaring species called the Sholen. The Sholen follow a kind of Star Trek style "Prime Directive" which forbids contact with non-starfaring species, but the humans argue that since the Ilmatarans live at the bottom of an ocean under a couple of miles of ice they're never going to venture into space on their own. Eventually the Sholen invade Ilmatar to shut down the human research station, and some of the humans take refuge with the Ilmatarans and wage a guerilla campaign against the Sholen.
(Anyone who has ever spent a year in Ithaca may understand where I got the idea of people deep in an icy abyss, dealing with strange alien creatures motivated by fanatical ideology.)
When I took my synopsis and sample chapters of A Darkling Sea to the acerbic and perceptive Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop, I got a lot of comments and suggestions. One idea for improvement was to add a chapter at the beginning, showing more of the life of the scientists on the station and depicting a "triggering incident" to set the plot in motion.
I did, and because I wanted to get some money for my work, I wrote the chapter as a stand-alone story . . . called "The Ocean of the Blind." So this story is also the first chapter of a novel.
So far I haven't been able to sell Darkling Sea, but the completed manuscript is sitting on my hard drive in case any publishers are reading this.
In "Ocean" I killed off Henri in a fairly horrible way (the Ilmatarans vivisect him), so I did as much as possible to make him a thoroughly unlikeable character before that. At his first introduction he barges into a conversation the other researchers are having, in which they're trading methods of murdering Henri. He doesn't know who they're talking about and butts in, suggesting a murder method lifted whole and entire from Roald Dahl's story "Lamb to the Slaughter."
That was actually based on a real incident at college. Some people I knew in another dormitory had a much-disliked fellow resident who absolutely would not shut up and insisted on forcing his way into every conversation he encountered. Their dislike of him reached the point that they were happily discussing ways to murder him, when of course the jerk happened by and insisted on joining in.
Because I intended for the humans and Ilmatarans to wind up allied against the invading Sholen meant that this story could have no villains. Everyone -- even that ass Henri -- is well-intentioned. Indeed, their goals are exactly the same, since they're all motivated by a desire to learn. It's the off-stage Sholen and their draconian rules against contact who are ultimately responsible for what happens.
Did I mention I think the Star Trek "Prime Directive" is a stupid idea? I do. I know Gene Roddenberry wanted to get away from the raygun-toting empire-builders of the pulp science fiction era, but the idea of a rigid ban on any contact with "less advanced" civilizations is still foolish. It assumes that cultures without advanced technology are somehow naive or innocent, and that the process of leaving that low-tech life is a step down somehow -- a Fall from Eden. That's simply not true. When Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay, he brought change to Japan; incredible, neck-snappingly rapid change. But Japan remained Japan. Its people were no better or worse morally than before.
"The Ocean of the Blind" ran in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the April 2004 issue. People must have liked it because it was collected in Year's Best Science Fiction in 2005, and the story made it as far as the preliminary Nebula award ballot. I still like it a lot, and if I don't manage to sell A Darkling Sea I may see if I can carve any more short stories out of the carcass.
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