Keokolo seemed to be doing the same thing, except that the objects he gathered were clear and glassy in appearance, and the container in which he placed them, unlike the girl’s, seemed to need no floats. Periodically one of the harvesters would return to Malolo and hand the collecting basket up to the captain, who transferred its contents quickly to something Mike couldn’t see, since the salt-stained gunwale was more than a meter above him. Wanaka would then return the bucket to the harvester.
It was a long, rather boring, and tiring process. The noise armor was heavy and much less flexible than Mike would have liked, and the harvesters seemed to be taking a completely random course over the i’a’uri’s surface; the visitor could not even guess how nearly finished they might be. They stopped and ate for three-quarters of an hour while Kaihapa eclipsed the suns, then resumed work until the latter set. Mike had tried to calculate how many of the items being collected there might be on the vast surface of the pseudoorganism, and suspected Malolo might be there for several days; but when he suggested this aloud, the captain shook her now-exposed head negatively.
“No,” she said through her breathing mask, rather regretfully he thought. “If we’d come across it sooner we might have been able to get a full load, but as ’Ao said when she spotted it, this one is quite a bit past ripe. Its batteries are nearly full, and there’s no way to keep it from sinking out of reach after the leaves are gone. It’s a rather old design, though a very efficient collector. Its iron is very pure and its water drinkable. It’s too bad to see so much of it get away, though of course having only one cargo item to trade isn’t good policy anyway.”