Chapter 2: The Spirit Quest Begins
The official Spirit quest ceremony was brief and inspiring, and Mark Dawn Owl and Waking Stone were soon on their way. Mark had attended such ceremonies before and knew what to expect, but those were ceremonies for other Tribe boys. It was different to yourself be the focus of attention for hundreds of people, and to be cheered on by them and thought well of by dozens of telepaths. By the time it was over his head was spinning with well-wishes from well-wishers.
He liked that everyone in the Tribe knew everyone else, especially those in the same clan. His father had told him of his own childhood in Brooklyn while his father helped build skyscrapers and earn much needed white-man cash for the Tribe, living among millions of strangers, and Dawn Owl couldn't imagine such a thing, though perhaps even that was better than being alone.
They duo were slowly skirting around the periphery of Giants Rest Mountain, making slow but steady progress over the sun softened ice, with Walking Stone in the lead. Even with his big-toed feet, the heavy Stone-Coat was sinking more than a foot into the sun-softened ice/snow, but he used his Stone-Coat strength to plow open a hard but icy path with his diamond-hard feet. Mark wore hiking boots with attached crampons that firmly griped the icy trail left by Walking-Stone. They had been out on the ice many times in trial runs and when hiking and camping with his father, grandfather, and grandmother, and Dawn Owl's confidence was high.
Early on, Walking Stone had noted that since he would need to plow his way through the melting snow layer anyway, it was logical for him to lead the way, and for Mark to take advantage of the resulting path by following in his footsteps. Mark readily agreed. Carrying a fifty-pound backpack was tough enough without having to also break-trail. Everything was going well until Walking Stone abruptly dropped completely out of sight through the ice.
Mark had seen Stone-Coats fall into snow-hidden cracks in the ice sheet before, but those were fifty-foot tall behemoths that easily climbed back out. He anxiously crawled to the edge of the hole made by Walking Stone's heavy body and peered down. Over twenty feet below him the Stone-Coat was buried up to his neck in dislodged ice and snow and was looking up at him alertly. "Are you alright?" Mark asked.
"There is no physical damage to this unit," Walking Stone replied. "I have discovered what may geologically be classified as a sinkhole in the ice sheet, probably formed by melting surface snow waters running down and beneath the ice sheet."
Mark had to laugh.
"Your reaction is not understood," said the Stone-Coat. "In keeping with our new protocol we should discuss it."
Mark had to laugh some more. "Let's discuss it after you are out of that hole, science geek. Can you climb out?"
Deep within the Stone-Coat, water to ice transformations were induced, producing huge hydraulic pressures that drove arms and legs into motion. Diamond-clawed fingers and toes bit into ice. The ice unfortunately crumbled and fell down into the water where it was washed away. He tried again and more ice again gave-way. Walking Stone ended up standing in a slightly wider hole, up to his knees in swiftly running melt-water.
"My Dad told me that Stone-Coat Ice-Giants have lived for millions of years in frozen places. These things have happened before to you guys. What do you usually do in these situations?"
"Three relevant tactics are recalled," replied Walking Stone. "I could wait for the ice to melt, which could take a thousand years or more. That is not a long time for Stone-Coats, but clearly too long for you and this quest. Second, I could follow the stream through the ice until it flows into the open, which could take an estimated several weeks or longer, perhaps also thousands of years if along the way I become mired down. Finally, other Stone-Coat units could help this unit climb out, which is forbidden by our agreement. None of those approaches are satisfactory in the current situation."
"But we can still help each other," said Mark. "I could simply use my rope to try to help you out but you are too heavy."
"Yes, that analysis is correct. Using your common force units of measure the rope would break at approximately five-hundred pounds. Approaches involving many more ropes could work but we are limited to only the equipment that you now carry."
"I have another idea but it will take me a little while to carry it out," said Mark. "Stay where you are and I'll return as soon as I can."
"Leaving my presence will break the Treaty; we are to stay in close proximity with each other," complained Walking Stone as Mark backed away from the hole and out of sight from his Stone-Coat monitor.
"Tough; I'm not coming down there to join you," replied Mark, as he slushed away towards a nearby stand of pine-tree remains that poked above the ice-sheet. The ice sheet along the sunny edge of the Mountain was too unstable and problematic for these tree-tops to be harvested by Ice Giants in summertime. Mark soon found what he was looking for: a twenty-five-foot length of relatively thin pine-trunk. It was already lying on the softened snow, so he didn't even need to use his hatchet to cut it down; he only had to trim off a few already battered limbs. However it was almost too heavy and awkward for him to move it, even using prying sticks as leavers. Struggling mightily in the July sun, he had to shed most of his clothing layers as he moved it a few feet at a time. After half an hour he was able to at last wrestle the trunk to the sinkhole.
"You have returned, Mark Dawn Owl," noted the Stone-Coat dispassionately. "However, through your action our Treaty has been broken. You have willfully eluded my observation for thirty two minutes. In that time I have also failed three additional attempts to climb out."
"My Dad once explained to me something that he called a trade-off. Solutions to problems aren't always perfect and may involve negative factors. You can only do the best that you can do. I had to leave you for a short time so that your ability to monitor me can be restored for the rest of my lifetime. Get it?"
"I understand your explanation and judge that your action was logical and potentially positive. Have you found what you were looking for?"
"I did. I have a log for you to climb. I'll drop it down to you and you climb up it gently and carefully or it will break."
With some difficulty Mark was able to tip and slide the log down into the sinkhole where the thicker end of it came to rest heavily beside the Stone-Coat. The bottom of the log was anchored solidly in the rocky stream-bed. The top of the log reached nearly to the top of the hole.
"I estimate that it will bear perhaps half of my weight," said Walking Stone. "It is uncertain that the ice will bear my remaining weight."
"There will also be my doubled-up rope," said Mark. "Altogether that should be just about enough to support you." He soon anchored the rope with tent stakes driven into ice by hatchet and shouted to Walking Stone to begin climbing out.
In the Stone-Coat's water-filled hydraulic body cavities ice formed and with its expansion pushed diamond-strong cylinders attached to graphene-carbon tendons a hundred times stronger than steel. Movement came to graphite lubricated joints of rock crystal formed legs, arms, fingers and toes. Walking Stone used his jaws and one hand on the ropes, his other hand to dig into the ice, while both feet gripped the log firmly, taking care not to crush the wood. The tree trunk sank a few inches to rest firmly on rock, then supported most of the Stone-Coat's great weight. Walking-Stone slowly moved himself upwards, inch by inch, foot by foot.
Mark worried about the great strain being put on the rope; rope designed to support human climbers, not Stone-Coat Ice Giants. Rather than bringing a man-made rope, he should have brought a Stone-Coat manufactured rope made from carbon nanotubes, but he had equipped this quest for himself, not for a Stone-Coat. His quest was originally going to be an escape from everything having to do with Stone-Coats. "Don't put too much weight on the rope!" he shouted in warning.
"I monitor the tension continuously," Walking Stone reassured him. "The ice is becoming stronger as I climb away from the running water, and I can decrease tension on the rope and the forces on the wood tree trunk."
; Indeed the Stone-Coat now supported most of its weight by pressing its great hands against opposite sides of the hole, and pulling on the rope with its jaws, while continuing to climb the gradually thinning tree trunk using its prehensile feet. Mark's confidence grew as Walking Stone gradually moved ever higher.
The Stone-Coat's head had almost reached surface-level when with a loud crack the log snapped near the middle. Walking Stone fell only two feet before catching himself with wide-spread arms and the jaw-held rope. He had released the log when it broke, and his legs and feet, after failing to grasp anything but air, hung uselessly. "I can only hold myself up this way for a few minutes," Walking Stone said calmly. "It may be necessary for me to fall to the bottom again and for you to seek more logs."
"Maybe not," said Mark. "The tree trunk hasn't fully broken in two, and it still nearly reaches to the top of the hole. It might still support much of your weight if you can reach it. There isn't time to get a new log."
"My legs are too short; I can't reach it," explained Walking Stone. "It has shifted just beyond my reach."
"Maybe I can move it closer to you," said Mark. "Can you support my added weight if I climb down the rope and on top of you?"
"Perhaps for a short time, but you would risk your life," replied the Stone-Coat. "Warm life forms such as yours are very delicate and ephemeral. The action that you propose is not advised."
"And what if you break a limb when you fall a second time and you can't climb out? Stone coat limbs can take days to heal; weeks if you lose the severed limb and you have to grow it from scratch from raw materials. You could also get mired down and have to lay there for over a thousand years before the ice melts. Our quest would then surely fail."
"Your death would also break the Treaty and cause quest failure," the Stone-Coat pointed out.
"Shut up, I'm saving you," said Mark, as he grasped the taut rope and swung himself off his ice perch and into the hole. Soon he was climbing down the Stone-Coat's body by grasping the folds of the poncho that covered it, and wrapping his legs around the massive Stone-Coat leg closest to the log. He was also soon shivering so hard that he could barely function. He realized that he should have put back on at least his sweatshirt before climbing down into a hole in an ice cavern where the temperature was below freezing. The leg of the Stone-Coat that he grasped was also freezing cold; Stone-Coats when physically active kept their body temperatures near the freezing temperature of water so that liquid/solid transitions could be easily managed and used for hydraulics.
"Your action is ill-advised, human," Walking Stone again protested.
"I'll reach out and grab the log and pull it towards your foot," Mark said. "Get ready to grab it with your toes when I tell you to."
With his legs still wrapped around the Stone-Coat's ankle Mark dove out and grasped the log to pull it back towards the waiting grasping toes. "Flint!" he exclaimed using the English name for the evil hearted Mohawk god, when the log stubbornly refused to move. He needed more leverage. He released his leg-grip on the Stone-Coat and swung himself out to fully support his weight using only the log. If the damaged log gave way he would likely fall to his death, but it held.
"Have you fallen?" the Stone-Coat asked. Walking Stonet couldn't see what Mark had done. Mark may have been imagining it, but he thought that he sensed a hint of anxiety in the usually monotonic voice of the Stone-Coat.
"No, I'm on the log," Mark explained. "Let me catch my breath for a moment and then I'll push it towards your foot. Get ready to grab it."
"I strongly advise that you to climb up my body now and escape your death," Walking Stone said. "Perhaps a replacement Stone-Coat unit could be assigned to monitor you."
"I'll happily climb out of this hole after you have grabbed the log," said Mark. "Get ready."
Mark had to use all the strength in his legs to push the log towards Walking Stone's waiting, grasping toes. It moved but not enough. Then with a crack of snapping wood it gave way and it moved towards Waking Stone. "Now!" he shouted, and the Stone-Coat's diamond-tipped toes soon successfully closed over the trunk.
"Climb over me and out of this hole now!" said Walking Stone. "You should climb out of this crevice before I test my weight on the log again. The strength of the weakened log is unknown."
"Will do!" agreed Mark, as he transferred from log to Stone-Coat and climbed up and out of the hole, thankful that previous to this experience he had spent hours climbing trees, rock, and ice while Walking Stone passively watched.
The Stone-Coat cautiously resumed his own climb out of the hole and was soon standing beside his grinning human companion. "Your plan worked," he noted.
"Let's try to not do that again," Mark said.
"Agreed. Will you now explain your laughter earlier?"
Mark shrugged as he gathered up rope and other equipment to pack it carefully into his backpack. "I was worried when you fell and relieved when you were OK and gave me your dorky geology report from the bottom of a deep ice-pit."
"You were worried about me?" the Stone-Coat asked.
"Yes, I guess I was. I never had to worry about you before; you've always been a big indestructible monster creature with ever staring eyes, but for a moment I thought that you were gone forever. I've gotten used to you being with me, I guess. I was relieved that you were OK; and sometimes I laugh when I'm happy. That's about all I can say about it."
"I still don't understand."
"Maybe you never will. People don't really understand emotions either, they just have them. They have to experience them for themselves to even begin to think that they understand them. You can't experience my personal emotions, only I can do that. The best that different folks can do is maybe experience similar emotions in similar situations. Then they feel that they understand each other and maybe become friends."
I follow the logic of your words but suspect that I still do not fully understand what you describe," said Walking Stone. "You seem to be implying that understanding is more than having the pertinent information."
"Yes, for sure," Mark agreed.
"I don't understand."
"My Mom says that you Stone-Coats seem to be alive but you don't have feelings like people and other animals do. You have a lot of information but it isn't tied together with ideas about the information and feelings like we humans have."
"To the contrary, our information is prioritized and assigned probabilities that reflect accuracy and utility, and linked together relationally."
"I'm not sure what you're saying. You really need to talk with older wiser people like my Dad to understand things better."
"Agreed, but the mission of this unit is to monitor you, not your father."
"Swell, but those kinds of questions are things that people have been arguing about for hundreds of years, so you may get more than one opinion, and you may get better answers out of select adult humans."
"The notion of 'opinions' is another thing we have difficulty understanding," noted Walking Stone. "Even when near identical information is provided to different humans, radically different conclusions sometimes result."
"Different people think in different ways, I guess. We're all wired a little different and our wiring is reshaped by our unique experiences. But here is a question for you. Do different Stone-Coats have different ideas about things? Different opinions?"
"Mostly not. For what we judge to be weighty matters a mountain of Stone-Coats can support the required thought process and adjudicate the so-called best answer, if it is required that there be only one answer. There is a very basic dichotomy involved involving multiple possible futures that emerge as but a single reality. However the most probable predictions can still be sought and usefully applied to influence actions taken. When the resources of multiple Stone-Coats are employed more complex algorithms and multiple simulations can be brought to bear to better predict the most probable of outcomes. The human disciplines of decision and game theory though rudimentary are applicable.
"My Dad tried to explain it all to me. You aren't really individuals, you are all part of one big super computer brain. Sort of like a jant hive-mind."
"Essentially correct, under normal circumstances. Right now to satisfy human spirit quest rules I operate without connection to other units. When only individual Stone-Coats are seeking an answer to the same problem, the computations of multiple individual units have been found to result in similar but not totally equivalent answers. Individual units share a common basic architecture and therefore all have nearly the same thoughts, but not exactly, for several reasons.
"To correspond with inaccuracies in sensed information we have long employed such things as probabilistic driven calculations that introduce some randomness into our findings. Further, quantum influences introduce uncertainty to logic and memory components of our thought processes, and there are also chaos driven phenomena that can become significant. In addition, results can be influenced by the number of processing subcomponents available, which varies significantly from unit to unit."
"So some Stone-Coat units have more brainpower than others," concluded Mark, who was pleased with himself to salvage some understanding from what he had just been told.
"Yes, that is what I just said," said Walking Stone. "It is useful that your brain development has reached a stage where such concepts are possible for you. But you may be over emphasizing the hive-mind aspect of Stone-Coat thought. Even when linked together we do compartmentalize much of our thoughts flexibly, much as the jants do with their multiple individuals and colonies. We are not simplistic dedicated computer systems with static architectures as typically designed by humans. Computers are a relatively simple human invention, though we have found it useful to emulate some clever human computer design properties. Humans have thereby helped Stone-Coats to become significantly more intelligent."
"That's nice," said Mark, as he finished packing his backpack. "I am also impressed that you can think and operate without being connected to your Mountain companions. This is all very interesting, but we need to get moving again. I'll lead this time, and poke my trekking poles through the snow to look for sinkholes."
"Why is Stone-Coats using human computer designs nice?" Walking Stone asked.
"Because everyone helping each other is a good thing," Mark explained. "If we are collectively smarter we can live better and be happier. If understanding human computers makes you Stone-Coats smarter that's a good thing that makes me happy."
"What does 'happy' mean?" asked the Stone-Coat.
Mark marveled at how much his formerly quiet companion had become so annoyingly inquisitive and talkative. His effort to formulate a suitable response to Walking Stone was interrupted by the distant but approaching roar of a helicopter that soon passed overhead, moving in the direction of the Tribe Caves. "Look! That must be Jerry Green coming to Giants' Rest!"
"Yes, I detect radio communications. Jerry Green is aboard the flying device we currently observe visually."
"I would like to see him in person," said Mark, as the helicopter dropped out of sight behind intervening Mountain foothills.
"If you wish I will soon be able to access Stone-Coat perceptions of him for you to see when he comes within visual sensing range," said Walking Stone.
"You can do that?"
"Anything any Stone-Coat senses can be sensed by any other Stone-Coat units, if communication is available and requests are made. The sight and sound of Jerry can be presented to you using one of my eyes as a small viewing screen. It is highly unlikely that seeing his image would provide any advantage to our quest, so it should in principle be permissible."
"That would be great! But you know what? You're right. It wouldn't help with our quest. It would be a distraction that could waste our time or put us in danger. So thanks but no thanks, Walking Stone. We'll find out what has happened when we get back. Now let's get going." With great effort Mark swung his heavy backpack onto his back; it was almost half as heavy as he was.
"I could carry your backpack," said Walking-Stone. "I have computed the extra energy expenditure on my part to be within allowable tolerances. I would need to stop to cool off only three percent more frequently."
"Great!" replied Mark, as he swung the heavy backpack off. "I was hoping that you'd offer to carry this."
"Then why wait for my offer? Why did you not yourself request several hours ago that I determine the feasibility of carrying it?" asked the Stone-Coat, as he hung the pack on one of his great shoulders.
"I compute that the explanation would be too long and complex and out of allowable quest tolerances for me to provide it at this time," said Mark. "Let's get going."
****