Dragon's Egg (29 page)

“We are too far away from the focus spot,” Swift-Killer said. “We will have to move down the cliff.”

North-Wind had never been able to figure out exactly what Swift-Killer and Cliff-Watcher were talking about when they mentioned things like focus spots, but he decided to let Swift-Killer do the thinking. After all, she was the commander. He silently followed her along the edge of the cliff until they came to another convenient portion of the ledge where they could both get a good tread grip. Swift-Killer again stuck her little glancer over the edge and watched as Cliff-Watcher pouched the expander, hauled it to the new position underneath Swift-Killer’s waving manipulator, then repositioned it carefully on the crust and moved back.

This time, when the light blazed from the top of
the cliff, the beam that came out from the expander did not refocus. Swift-Killer thought that it was still slightly converging as she lost sight of it high in the sky, but it was good enough.

“We will continue our message,” she said as she pulled the tally strings from a pouch. North-Wind shuffled the crust in resignation, retracted the short flare they had been using for testing purposes and replaced it with a longer one.

“At least I won’t have to climb for a while,” he said tiredly to himself, and settled down to hold the heavy manipulator as still as he possibly could.

Soon a disciplined pulsation of light was beaming its way up to the Eyes, continuing the message that had been interrupted a dozen turns ago when the glancer had fallen from the face of the cliff. Swift-Killer did not pause long when she came to the end. Since they were on their body reserves, it didn’t help much to rest anymore; except for an occasional change of flare or pod juice vial, the two troopers doggedly kept at their task.

Their job finally finished, Swift-Killer and North-Wind started their way back down the path to the base of the cliff. By mutual consent, they left everything but their clan totems in a pile at the top of the cliff.

A dozen turns later, a weary Cliff-Watcher saw two very thin cheela slowly making their way around the end of the cliff. Swift-Killer was in front, breaking a path for the exhausted trooper.

“Another tread length,” she would urge, and gently nudge the sides of his treads with her trailing edge to keep him rippling. Slowly the two came up to Cliff-Watcher.

“I cannot go any further,” North-Wind said. “Leave me here.”

“No,” said Swift-Killer. “We are all going together.”
She turned her attention to Cliff-Watcher. “I know you are tired too, but we must get to the base camp where there is a cache of food waiting. You get behind North-Wind and keep him moving while I break path.” Cliff-Watcher was too tired to argue and moved in behind his friend North-Wind. Together the three began to move off and down the sloping valley.

Cliff-Watcher, who had been checking the dark detector periodically, had just repouched it after looking to see if there had been any reply to their hard sent messages. There was nothing. He turned some of his eyes up to the specks of light above him and wondered at their silence. As he looked, a rapidly falling streak of bright light appeared to the side of the Eyes, high in the sky. The falling object became elongated and grew brighter and brighter. Cliff-Watcher stirred, and the other two raised their eyes, then tried to draw them under their protective flaps. There was no time. In an instant the whole sky was aflame with an explosion of light and heat that seared their top-sides and left three skinny blobs of scorched, blinded flesh that wriggled away from each other in their attempts to escape the pain.

Swift-Killer had never hurt so. Her last thought was that Bright had decided to punish her for having the temerity to attempt to talk to God. The automatic protective mechanisms in her body, activated by the lack of body reserves and the shock from the topside burns, suddenly took over. The animal reflexes were turned off, and for the first time in untold generations, a cheela went to sleep.

Abdul came flying over to Seiko’s console. He halted his headlong dive with a practiced swing around one
of the support stanchions and hung motionless just over Seiko’s head.

“What reply?” he said.

“There is someone down there who is sending back pictures with the same format that you used,” Seiko replied, “but they are coming from the east pole, they use thermal ultraviolet radiation instead of laser light, and they are coming very fast. Look—here is the first picture.”

“It is a picture of Dragon Slayer and the six Tidal Compensators above Dragon’s Egg,” Abdul said. “But the star seems to be badly distorted into the shape of a pancake. It must be their star, however, because they have drawn in the mound formation. But what is that long narrow wedge with its base near us and its point over the formation?”

“It is a pointer,” Seiko said. “If you look at the second and third pictures, you will see that they are almost identical, except that the position of our ship slowly shifts toward the west, while the wedge symbol gets shorter.”

Seiko’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and soon the first picture was joined by a second and a portion of a third.

“You are right,” Abdul said. “It looks as if they want us to move to a position over their formation. I know why, too. The visibility through the atmosphere is poor in that direction. It would be much better if we were directly overhead.”

Abdul suddenly realized something else that Seiko had said. “How fast was the message being sent?” he asked.

“The computer had to slow it down,” Seiko said. “I estimate a pulse every four microseconds.”

Abdul went back to his console and soon had a trace of the pulses from the first picture lined up on
the screen. He leaned forward and looked more closely at the interval between the pulses.

“They are very irregular in spacing and amplitude,” he said. “Almost as if they were handmade. You would think that a being that could make an ultraviolet laser could make a decent modulator.”

“The radiation is from a thermal source,” Seiko retorted.

Abdul paused as her reply sank in. “They are signaling to us with the neutron star equivalent of American Indian smoke signals!” he said. “And each one of those crude pulses is made in four microseconds—Great Allah! That means that those beings must live something like a million times faster than we do! And I have been sending the laser pulses at a rate of about once per second. To them that is like a million seconds between pulses.”

Seiko quickly did the calculation for him. “As if it were about a week between pulses.”

Abdul had another horrible thought. “How long has it been since they started to reply?” he asked.

Seiko’s hands flicked on the keyboard, and the first picture reappeared with the time of reception in the upper corner. “The first picture arrived almost a minute ago,” she replied, “and if the ratio is a million to one, that is like two years ago.”

“They have probably gotten tired of waiting for an answer and have gone home,” Abdul said. “We had better get busy—and fast!” He hesitated a second, then lifted the cover on a panel on the side of the console and flicked the emergency alarm switch.

“You explain the situation to Pierre and the others,” he said over the whoop of the alarm signal, “and get Pierre to start moving the Dragon Slayer over the mound formation. I will try to get some sort of reply back as fast as I can.”

Seiko fixed up her screen with all the pictures displayed so she would be ready when the rest of the crew came boiling into the main deck to see what the emergency was. Within a few seconds Abdul had swiveled the laser radar to illuminate the east pole directly below them, while its operational frequency had been pushed up to the short ultraviolet. Because he had nothing better immediately at hand, Abdul had the computer play back the pictures that had been sent up from the surface. While they were pulsing down at a megahertz rate, he quickly pulled in the first picture that he had beamed down, showing the Dragon Slayer and the six tidal compensators above Dragon’s Egg. He added an arrow that curved over to a position above the mound formations, and had the computer send that down to the east pole. He then swiveled the laser back toward the strange starlike formation, and had it repeat the message twice, alternating between ultraviolet and light output. Since they had seen his first messages they should be able to detect it one way or the other. This time Abdul hoped that nobody would die of boredom waiting for the next pulse.

The nearly empty seared sacks lay on the crust, quietly sleeping. Ancient plant genes, activated by the almost complete lack of food reserves, began their strange work. The animal enzymes were neutralized, and new enzymes were generated that attacked the very muscles that supported the skin, turning the striated flesh into a floating cloud of long fibers. The skin itself was thinned until it was almost transparent. Other plant enzymes took over and used the liquid material
and long fibers to fashion large super-strength crystals. This was not the brittle crystallium that the animal body had previously used for manipulators—this was dragon crystal. At the center of the now flaccid tread, a tendril forced its way into the crust. In its core was a sharp cone of crystal. Exuding acids that ate their way into the crust, the spike slowly penetrated deeper and deeper into the hot, neutron-rich crust. Hairlike threads spread out between the crustal fibers and nutrients began to flow in from the threads and up the tap root. Meanwhile, smaller spikes of crystal, thick at the base and finely rounded at the tip, began to form in a starlike pattern at the head of the tap root. The strong dragon crystal structure overcame the frightful pull of Egg, and jutted out at a low angle to the surface. The dozen spikes spread out like a thorny crown. They grew longer and longer, and the flaccid skin, long since cured of its burns, was lifted up into the air. As the spikes grew longer, even their great crystalline strength was no longer adequate to resist Egg’s pull, so strong tension fibers formed that went from attachment knobs just below the growing tip of each spike to a stubby post that stuck up from the base of the spikes. Slowly the twelve-spiked cantilever canopy raised itself off the crust until the skin was drawn tightly to it.

The topside portion of the skin, hanging in a smooth dark red concave arc between the ends of the spikes, found that its shape shielded it from the glowing yellow surface crust, and it stared straight up into the cold sky. With its spike buried deep in the hot, neutron-rich crust, and its thinned upper surface area well coupled to a cold heat-sink, the heat-engine-plant that used to be Swift-Killer began to make food. It was oblivious to the fact that nearby were two other dragon plants, the first crop since before recorded cheela history. For many, many turns the dragon plants grew and prospered.
They were massive, and slow-growing, and had to replace a lot of food reserves, so they took their time.

After waiting in vain for the three climbers to return, the troop was finally taken over by the senior squad leader, who mustered out those who wanted to stay in this Bright-forsaken region, and moved the remainder of the troop back to the borders of Bright’s Empire, where he then had the unpleasant duty of reporting the deaths of Swift-Killer, North-Wind, and Cliff-Watcher to their clans.

Time went on and Bright’s Empire grew and expanded its borders. Since the fort of Swift’s Climb existed, it was easy for the border to expand all the way to the foothills of the east pole mountains. However, no one really liked to climb unless they had to, especially in the hard direction, so there were no visitors in the mountain paths, and the dragon plants grew undisturbed.

One turn there was a sharp quake as the massive overburden that the east pole mountains put upon Egg readjusted itself. A poorly formed joint in one of the three dragon plants failed. The spike fell instantly in the strong pull of Egg, tearing the skin and dumping the vital fluids onto the surface. For a while the dragon plant struggled to survive, but finally it gave up. After a dozen, dozen turns, there was nothing left but shiny spikes of dragon crystal, a few shreds of dried skin, a clan totem, and the double button of a squad leader.

For a long while nothing happened. Then the dragon crystal spikes sparkled as a slowly pulsating beam of pure blue light shone down from the tiny center speck of the seven points of light in the sky. The pulsations went on for some time, bathing the mountains in a blue glow, but there were no eyes to see them. They finally stopped.

Time continued on. The barbarians were driven further and further from Bright’s Empire, and grew smaller in number. The large volcano in the north became more active, and billows of smoke crowded against the east pole. The unbalance in the heat radiated from the star into the dark skies became so great that huge wind storms grew, and were strong enough occasionally to push smoke into the east pole region. The sky grew cloudy, the bottoms of the smoky clouds turned yellow with the heat reflected from the glowing surface. The heat engine that ran between the taproot in the crust and the skyward facing concave dish of skin in the dragon plants began to fail. With food reserves high, and growing efficiencies low, the plant forming genes began to lose their potency, and other enzyme mechanisms were triggered. Slowly the dragon crystal was dissolved, to reappear as firm muscle under a thick skin. The little photosensitive bud cups at the tips of the crystal spikes reformed their flaps, and new little eyes, still dormant, grew under those flaps.

Swift-Killer woke up.

She felt very strange, as if she had not moved a muscle in a long time. Fortunately, she was feeling no pain from her burned topside and eyes.

“My eyes! I cannot see! How will I ever get down out of these mountains without eyes?”

She then realized that she had all of her eyes tucked tightly underneath their flaps. She cautiously pushed out one after the other.

“I can see light,” she said, “but everything is all blurry.”

She tried to form a pseudopod to wipe off her eyes, and found that she was as weak and clumsy as a hatchling. She soon had the fluid wiped off her eyes, but it was a full turn before she could really see clearly.