Dragon's Egg (21 page)

“Are you God’s-Chosen?” the High Priest asked.

“If you believe it, then I am,” was the reply.

“Well, I don’t believe it,” the High Priest said angrily. “Admit you are a fraud!”

Pink-Eyes made no reply.

Bright’s-First turned his eyes to Hungry-Swift and said firmly, “I say we should turn him into meat!”

Hungry-Swift hesitated. “He did bring us the Blessing,” he said.

“Maybe,” countered the High Priest. “But where is it now? He has caused us to lose it.”

As the two leaders talked, Pink-Eyes had been gazing alternately at Bright and the Eyes for guidance. Suddenly he saw a beam from the Inner Eye!

“I can see it again!” he called out.

“What?” the startled Hungry-Swift asked. The High Priest was worried. Could it be that this creature had arranged all this in order to bring down Bright’s curse upon him, to destroy him, and take over as High Priest?

“I can see the Blessing of Bright,” Pink-Eyes said, but then in despair he saw that the beam was no longer coming toward them, but instead was pointing toward the north.

Hungry-Swift looked up at the Inner Eye, searching in vain for the faint flicker that he had longed to see these many turns. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

“I am afraid that you cannot,” Pink-Eyes said. “The beam is now going off to the north.”

“The north!” the High Priest exclaimed in relief. “That is the territory of the barbarians! By your own
admission you have caused Bright to avert his Blessing from us and give it to the barbarians.”

There were angry murmurs from the crowd at the base of the mound.

“Away with him!” the High Priest shouted, and Hungry-Swift and his troopers stood by helplessly while an angry crowd flowed up the mound and pushed and rolled the helpless pale body down the slope.

Sharp prickers were pulled from weapons pouches; they prodded at Pink-Eyes’ edges, forcing him out the eastern orifice of the Temple. A storage bin at a nearby needle trooper compound was raided and two dozen long dragon tooth spears were brought and laid out on the ground. Pink-Eyes was then forced onto the row of spear shafts. The ends of the shafts were raised by burly warriors. As Pink-Eyes felt his tread leave the crust, he went into a hysterical panic. The small pale body was easily carried to a nearby field.

The crust in the field had recently been plowed and seeded, but it would be a long time before the petal plants would grow. Now, however, a more vicious crop was springing up, as warrior after warrior planted a slicer or pricker in the crumbled crust, point upwards.

Pink-Eyes’ tread trembled in pain as his body was lowered down over the points. He tried to support his body on the narrow shafts of the spears, while lifting the rest of his tread away from the tormenting pricks. Then the spear shafts were pulled out from underneath his trembling tread. His tortured body fell helplessly onto the crust, the slicers and prickers glinting up through his topside, wet points glowing white with his juices.

In agony, Pink-Eyes attempted to lift his pale body off the agonizing shards of dragon crystal, but with each heave he only sliced his body further. He gave up trying, and slowly spread out as his juices flowed into the crust.

“O Bright,” his tortured tread cried in muffled agony, “Bring down your Blessing—even on these—for they want you too much.”

It was half a turn before the butchering crew was called. There was not much meat on that tiny carcass, and the meat had the same sickly paleness that the skin had. One of the butcher crew sucked at a hunk of meat. “It does not even taste right,” she said. “I wouldn’t eat this stuff.”

“You are right,” another said after taking a small taste. So by common consent, the body was left in the field to dry on the glowing crust, the shrinking skin pricked through with sharp shards of dragon crystal abandoned by their former owners.

Seiko Kauffmann Takahashi looked up as her shift relief drifted in from his breakfast—early as usual. Abdul, still sipping a squeezer full of sweet mint tea, pulled himself to the vacant communications console. With a few practiced flips of his left hand, he soon had a copy of Seiko’s screen on his console.

“Anything exciting?” he said as his unbuckled body floated slowly up out of the console seat. He was surprised at the reply—for nothing ever excited Seiko.

“Yes,” she replied firmly, reaching out to finger a panel. A picture from the star image telescope flashed on both their screens. She did not say another word-she did not have to.

Pierre Carnot Niven, having finished his ten-hour shift and a leisurely dinner, was relaxing. He sat buckled into a seat in front of a console down in the library, his finger flicking over the screen.

“Fatter!”

“More!”

“Fine!”

His finger traced another line. “Now—the other arm-same as the first!

“Good!”

He stretched back and surveyed his handiwork on the screen with pride. The image of the child on the screen now looked the way it should, although the baby-fat pudginess made it an unlikely candidate for what he would make it do next. However, that image was just what he had been striving for. The audience for his scan-book needed to identify—even if they couldn’t copy. He leaned over to the screen and touched the right hand of the image.

“Put a ball in this hand!” A ball was instantly there, with the fingers of the hand opened to grasp it.

“Now comes the difficult part,” he thought. “We’ll see how good the body action subroutine is.”

He spoke again. “Throw ball from here—along hereto here. Use Earth gravity!” While he spoke, his finger scribed a curve leading from the hand along a high arc down into the background area of the picture.

He watched as the body in the image leaned back in a slightly jerky movement and launched the ball into the air. The ball rose and then fell back to the ground-stopping abruptly without a bounce. The computer handled the perspective very nicely; the ball grew smaller and smaller as it sailed into the distance.

“Good—repeat with Lunar gravity!”

The scene was repeated with the words
LUNAR GRAVITY
in the upper corner of the screen. The ball now rose much more slowly, with a significantly flatter trajectory.

Pierre spoke again, “Repeat both!”

The two scenes repeated their actions. First
EARTH GRAVITY
, then
LUNAR GRAVITY
. Pierre watched, checking
them carefully. They would look much better after they were fleshed out with the publisher’s curved surface software routine. He then generated another one using Mars gravity. There weren’t many of his readers on Mars yet, but he suspected there would be by the time he returned to earth.

Pierre leaned toward the screen. “Earth gravity picture—rotate 45 degrees to right!

“Display action!”

He watched as the action repeated, this time as seen from the side. The ball rose in a nice parabolic trajectory. He smiled and thought, “The kids have had their fun imagining that their bodies are strong enough to throw a ball fifty meters. Now they will have to get to work and learn some science, which—after all—is why they are scanning the book.” He spoke aloud:

“Shrink ball by two!

“Shrink child by five!

“Put in graph axes—vertical here!” His hand reached out and scribed a line from the top of the screen down to the miniature figure now tossing a baseball as big as its head.

Pierre was halfway through getting the coordinate axes numbered and the parabolic equation placed in the picture where it would be out of the way of the trajectory, when he was interrupted by a message that flashed on the upper part of the screen.

Pierre looked up. “Accept link!” he said.

“Sure Doc,” Pierre said. “Be right there.

“Break link!”

“Store under Trajectory Graph!

“Detach job!”

He unbuckled from the console chair and pushed himself quickly up the passageway leading to the main deck as the computer obediently flashed confirmation after confirmation toward his disappearing feet.

Pierre swung onto the bridge and over to the group looking at some fresh printouts. As he floated over he could see that they were pictures from the high resolution star image telescope.

Cesar spoke up as he approached. “Sorry to drag you up on your break, Pierre, but these printouts are really bewildering. Since you are our resident expert on neutron star crustal activity, we figured you could make a better evaluation than we could.”

Seiko handed him a sheet. “I took these off the star image telescope this shift. This one was taken at 0645 hours. Notice the pattern here near the west limb.”

Pierre looked briefly at the printout. The chaotic hash of the west limb region was almost familiar by now. But there was something new there, a short arc-like pattern. Seiko was right. As of yesterday there had been no such structure at that place on Dragon’s Egg. “It looks like wrinkle ridges that you could get on any crusted object with a liquid core. In fact, there are many similarities between those patterns and the ones near the Caloric pole of Mercury. But wait … the directions in the pattern are all wrong. From what I know about the behavior of neutron star crustal material under the
influence of high magnetic fields, the ridges should all be aligned along the magnetic field lines.”

“So far, we have all come to the same conclusion,” Seiko said. “This pattern is not a wrinkle ridge from a collapse of the surface. Besides, we have been monitoring the spin speed of the star, and if there had been a slump of that magnitude in the past day, it would have shown up as a glitch in the rotation period, and there has been none.”

“Now,” Abdul said, “show him the kicker.”

Seiko pulled out another sheet from beneath the first.

“This was taken at 0648 hours, just before Dr. Wong finished a laser scan of that region.”

She passed it over without further comment.

Pierre saw an elongated oval shape, with ten oval dots around it and one in the middle. The dots on the outside were connected to the large oval with short exponentially tapered horns. There were slight traces of two more dots that would complete the symmetric pattern.

“The direction of the oval looks generally east-west,” he said.

“It is,” Seiko stated, with the calm assurance of someone who had taken the trouble to check. “The semimajor axis is within less than a milliradian of magnetic east, so the pattern is dominated by magnetic effects and not rotational effects. But the lines that make up the oval are not straight magnetic east-west as are all the other cliffs and wrinkle ridges in that area.”

“It looks like something that is stretched,” Pierre said, holding the printout up to his eye. “In fact, from this angle it looks exactly like a Sheriff’s star in an old western movie, complete with a bullet hole in the center. However, it isn’t complete, there are only ten points.”

He looked up and the others watched his expression change from initial surprise to suspicion.

“You’re kidding me,” he said.

“No,” Cesar said. “We are deadly serious. I knew you would have a tough time accepting this without better proof, so I had Seiko fix up the star image telescope with the filters for direct viewing.”

Pierre knew from the tone that Cesar was serious and that the image print was real—but he still found himself diving up the passageway toward the star image telescope control post. He floated in, quickly checked the filter settings, then flicked the switch that opened the direct view port. The light beamed in from overhead and down onto the white frosted table top in the center of the room. He drifted over and hung above the glaring image and adjusted the strobe controls until the spinning image in the center of the table slowed down and finally stopped rotating. He found the symmetric flowerlike diagram.

Pierre looked up as the others came up the passageway. “The diagram is now complete,” he said.

They gathered around the table and looked down at the image as Pierre whispered softly, “It is not only complete, there are no extra lines. There can be no other logical explanation. Whatever that is, it was made by intelligent beings!”

“Intelligent beings!” Seiko exclaimed. “That is impossible! The surface gravity of that star is 67-billion gees and the temperature is 8200 degrees! Any being that existed on that star would be a flat glowing pancake of solid neutrons.”

“They wouldn’t be made of neutrons,” Pierre replied. “My measurements show that although the interior of the star is made of neutrons, the outer crust has a density more like that of a white dwarf star, and its composition is quite complex, with most of the same atomic nuclei that we have in the Earth’s crust, only
much more neutron-rich and without the electron clouds around them.”

Pierre was perplexed. They had a mission here at Dragon’s Egg. The mission was to get as much scientific data as possible from their vantage point only 400 km from the neutron star. His problem was that the magic gravitational elevator that had put them down into this orbit a few days ago would soon finish its complicated interlaced orbital pattern and would be returning to take them away again. They had only a limited amount of time—what should they do?

Abdul spoke. “I don’t really come onto shift for over an hour. Why don’t I try to generate some kind of signal to send down in case there really is some form of intelligent life there, while the rest of you keep up with the science time line.”

“Fine,” Pierre said. “We have finished with the laser radar mapper on this hemisphere, so you can use that. If you need anything else, let me know. I am sure we can reschedule an experiment for later on in the program.”