Dragon's Egg (23 page)

For many turns Swift-Killer spent her spare time with the curved plates. She talked to Easy-Mover and found that she had been carrying those plates for many turns and had used them to relieve her boredom on many tours of perimeter guard duty. Swift-Killer duplicated her grinding process and soon had several expander and shrinker mirrors. She found that if she did not apply much pressure in the later parts of the rubbing, the mirrors could be made very shiny, almost as good as the cleaved surfaces of the original plates.

She spent a long time on one set of plates to see how curved she could make them, for she had found that the more the mirrors were curved, the more they would expand or shrink the image. Finally she obtained one pair where something amazing happened; not only was the image of her eye expanded, it was also turned upside down! She found that if she put her eye very close to
the mirror it would appear right side up and expanded, but as she moved back it would get bigger and bigger, finally filling the whole mirror with a distorted image, then would finally appear again upside down.

Swift-Killer now held one of those expander mirrors. She knew that a flat mirror would reflect the light from her flare, and she wanted to see what the expander would do. Perhaps it would expand the light and make it brighter.

Swift-Killer formed her body around in a crescent, with her four free eyes moved around so that they were concentrated on the inner part of the crescent where they could observe the experiment. Aware that the light would be quite bright, she had them tucked under their protective folds of skin and had closed the fold until each was only watching through a narrow slit. Carefully she held the vial of pod juice extract above the flare and adjusted the little crystal valve until a thin stream of liquid fell down on the end of the flare. Soon she had a continuous bright arc going. Light flared over her body and up into the sky. Using her manipulators she brought the expander mirror up near the arc. Instead of reflecting the light off in all directions like a flat mirror, it seemed to collect it and make it smaller. She moved the mirror back and forth. She first found a point where the light seemed to go off in a straight beam from the expander. She then found that there was a position in which the light was focused into a spot on the crust. She reached out with a pseudopod to touch the bright spot.

“OW!!!”

The whole camp came to alert as they heard the agonized t’trum of their Troop Commander on the crust. Swift-Killer, her burned spot sucked into the interior of her body where it was quickly enveloped in soothing liquid, stopped the flow of pod-juice from the
vial, waited until the flare stopped glowing, and then put her experiments back into her carrying pouches as her eyes glared around the camp. In short order, all the troopers were very busy.

After many turns of experimentation, Swift-Killer understood how the expander worked. Halfway between the mirror and the point where her eye flipped from right side up to upside down was the point where the flare would give off a straight beam. If it were in front or in back of that point, the light would be focused to a point, later to spread out again. For a while, Swift-Killer thought that she had a new weapon, a thing that would burn at a distance, but a little experimentation showed her that it was far easier and faster to poke a hole in a barbarian with a dragon tooth than to burn one with an expander (assuming that the barbarian would hold still long enough).

However, the more she thought about the long-reaching beam of light that she could make, and the old stories about the narrow beams of invisible light that the ancient prophet Pink-Eyes had seen, the more she thought that she ought to talk to some of the scientists back in Bright’s Heaven who were trying to make sense of the still pulsating beams.

It took some discussion with the Commander of the Eastern Front, but after seeing her experiment, he decided to relieve her temporarily of her command and let her make a journey back to Bright’s Heaven.

The road to Bright’s Heaven was long but fast. It stretched out in a straight line along the easy direction from the eastern outpost trooper camp. The way had been smoothed by generations of treads and baggage sleds. Swift-Killer moved along the road at her rapid trooper’s glide, her four button troop commander’s
insignia automatically clearing the path ahead of her and giving her preferential treatment at the food stations along the way.

One of the food station keepers was well known for his interesting and nearly inexhaustible repertoire of love kneadings, and she had enjoyed a couple of dalliances in previous trips, but her mind was elsewhere when she passed through this time, so she didn’t wait for him to return from one of his periodic trips to restock his pod bins. She just took the pods that she needed and continued on her way, crushing the pod with the powerful muscles in her food intake pouch and sucking the tingly juices in through the thin skin at one end of the pouch.

Swift-Killer finally arrived at Bright’s Heaven, and after a short formal meeting with the Commander of the Central Defense Command, she took off to visit the Inner Eye Institute, part of the large Holy Temple complex.

“Troop Commander Swift-Killer!” the Institute astrologer greeted her. “We are honored by your visit. The fact that you are here gives us reassurance that the eastern border is safe.”

Swift-Killer’s eye-stubs twisted with embarrassment as the Institute astrologer continued. “That invention of the glancer has given you a reputation among the astrologers here at the Institute. Have you ever thought about leaving the Troopers and becoming one of us?”

Swift-Killer knew what she was best at. Her extraordinary size, strong muscles, and quick intelligence had led her to her natural position as a front line troop commander. They had also given her a new name, when as a youngster just barely out of the hatchling pens, she had killed a Swift unaided, with only a slicer for a weapon. She enjoyed her hobby of trying to figure out how things worked, but she had no intention of making it her life’s work, not as long as there were
barbarians trying to destroy Bright’s Heaven. She brushed off the Institute astrologer’s question with one of her own.

“What is the latest news on the strange pulsating beams from Bright’s Inner Eye?” Swift-Killer asked.

The Institute astrologer hesitated. He and the others in the Inner Eye Institute had been undergoing a difficult conversion. Fortunately it had happened so slowly that they had had time to overcome the shock. However, they were not sure yet, so neither the populace nor the rest of the temple priests had been informed of their suspicions. The eyes of the Institute astrologer swayed back and forth rhythmically as he evaluated Swift-Killer. He equivocated.

“The beams from Bright’s Inner Eye continue to bring down a message from the mind of Bright,” he replied. “The beams are invisible except to certain ones who have what is known as Bright’s Blessing, although Bright’s Affliction would probably be a better term for it, as the unfortunate individuals rarely live to breeding age. Fortunately, the alchemists have found a liquid that is sensitive to the invisible beams, and turns color temporarily if a vial of it is exposed to the beam, so now we do not have to search the Empire for those unfortunate ones and drag them away from their clans to interpret Bright’s message to us.”

“The pulsations continue?” Swift-Killer asked.

“Yes,” the Institute astrologer replied. “And there seems to be some pattern to them. We are still trying to analyze what they mean. They come so slowly, one pulse every few turns.”

The fact that the pulsations seemed to have a pattern intrigued Swift-Killer’s inquisitive mind.

“May I see what you have collected?” she asked eagerly.

The Institute astrologer formed a manipulator, extracted a tally string from a storage pouch and gave it
to Swift-Killer, who quickly ran a tendril down its length.

“It is a string of numbers!” she exclaimed. “Only it stops at ten and then repeats twice more.” She continued her examination of the tally string.

“This seems to be a number system that only goes to ten, then goes into two symbols to represent things larger than ten,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, “and if you go on, you will find that after counting to ten times ten, new symbols appear, interspersed with the number symbols.”

Swift-Killer moved quickly over the repetitious section and found the new symbols. First a one, then a strange symbol, then another one, then a different strange symbol, then a two. The Institute astrologer kept his tread still, while his eye-stubs watched the tense body of Swift-Killer. Finally her eye-stubs resumed their normal wavelike motion and she started murmuring.

“One plus one equals two, one plus two equals three, two plus two equals four …” she said. She then turned her attention to the Institute astrologer and her eyes stared at him, twitching nervously. The Institute astrologer clenched his tread muscles and waited for Swift-Killer’s brain to realize what he and the others in the Institute had finally had to face.

“This is nothing but a primer in arithmetic, but in a number system that goes only to ten. Surely Bright would not waste time to send such a trivial message, and take so long to do it. This is more like an interpreter trying to learn one of the barbarian tongues.”

Swift-Killer hesitated, for what she was about to say next went against all her early religious training. “It is almost as if there were a strange clan of barbarians living on the Inner Eye, and trying to set up communication with us,” she said. “But that cannot be!”

The Institute astrologer kept his tread quiet and
passed over another tally string. This one was a fringe string, with many strings knotted to a main string, and with each side string containing many knots. At first Swift-Killer could make no sense of it, for there were no symbol groups, only large and small knots. She felt through the fringes, puzzled by the large blank sections.

“It took us a long time to figure that one out,” the Institute astrologer admitted. “In fact it was a novice who literally stumbled onto it, when he happened to glide across the tally fringe as it lay on the crust. Here, let me arrange it.”

The Institute astrologer took the tally fringe and laid it out as a rectangle on the crust.

“Now glide onto it carefully and see what your tread tells you,” he said.

Following his instructions, Swift-Killer moved her body onto the large rectangle, and suddenly it all became clear. Whereas her eyes could only see the tally string at such a low angle that everything was distorted beyond recognition, her touch sensitive bottom tread could absorb the picture all at once.

“It is like a map,” said Swift-Killer, who utilized devices when planning large scale campaigns. “But it is not any place that I know …”

She hesitated, and then said, “Wait … In this large circle, this tiny feature here must be the Holy Temple, and this must be Bright’s Heaven—but everything is so distorted. The circle must be Egg itself, and these seven small dots must be Bright’s Eyes.” She looked again at the Institute astrologer and said, “This is a picture of Egg and the Eyes of Bright. But why is everything on Egg so distorted? It looks like it has been stretched in the east-west direction.”

“We don’t know,” said the Institute astrologer. “We are still trying to figure that out. We have since
received another picture map, and the present signals are in the process of beaming down a third one.”

“May I feel them?” Swift-Killer asked.

The Institute astrologer pulled out two more tally strings from carrying pouches and laid them out on the crust without comment. They were close enough together so that Swift-Killer could spread herself out to cover both of them at the same time.

“This shows the Eyes of Bright,” Swift-Killer said. “But the smaller Inner Eye is not just a featureless circle like the others. It has strange markings and circles on it and there is a cylinder sticking out of one side. And this other is an enlargement of the Inner Eye, and you can see forms inside the circle, as if you were peering though holes in the Inner Eye.”

Swift-Killer paused. “What does all this mean?” she asked.

“We are not positive,” said the Institute astrologer, “but we think that those things we can see inside the orifices are strange beings.”

“But they are so sticklike and angular, they would be broken in a moment,” she exclaimed.

“They are floating in the sky above the east pole, so they seem to be immune to the gravity pull of Egg, although why they want such long manipulator bones is unknown.” While the Institute astrologer had been talking, Swift-Killer had been reexamining the pictures.

“The Inner Eye looks like a giant machine,” she said. “This thing at the top of the cylinder looks like a glancer in a holder, and these other things look like my expander.”

“What is an expander?” asked the astrologer.

Swift-Killer finally remembered that she had not yet told him of her discovery. She had come to give him some new knowledge, but instead had been bedazzled with one new concept after another.

Swift-Killer formed a manipulator, reached into a carrying pouch and pulled out the expander and the shrinker. Then she explained their odd behavior to the Institute astrologer as he moved them back and forth in front of one of his eyes.

“This curved shape for a glancer means that it can send a beam of light a long way,” she told him. “And that is probably why they exist on the Inner Eye thing, to send the beams down to us on Egg.”

The Institute astrologer moved onto the tally pictures on the crust, and compared the shapes of the things protruding from the Inner Eye with the object that he held.

“The shapes are very similar,” he said. “You are probably right. But what is this about sending beams?”

“I came to give you a demonstration,” Swift-Killer said.

“Wait,” the Institute Astrologer suggested. “I will gather the rest of the members of the Institute.”

Soon Swift-Killer was the center of attention as she demonstrated her bright light source and the way the expander could bring the light into a hot spot, or send it off in a straight beam.