Dragon's Egg (27 page)

With her supply lines secure, Swift-Killer organized the assault on the east pole mountains. Swift-Killer, Cliff-Watcher and North-Wind would lead the climb, but backing them would be over half the troop. Swift-Killer worked carefully, orchestrating the climb like a major battle. Twice she backed down from a hard-won valley because the climb—although not difficult for an unburdened cheela—would have been impossible for one loaded with food parcels. Slowly the expedition worked its way into the foothills. Chunks of crust were stationed on the steeper slopes for rest stations, and soon two lanes of porters were moving back and forth from the fort on the lowlands to the point of the climb that slowly thrust its way inward and upward.

“That was a terrible stretch,” Cliff-Watch er complained as he lay exhausted on the crust in one of the rare flat spots in the mountain pass. “The glancer almost wouldn’t fit through that narrow crevasse.”

Swift-Killer, her body bulging with the curved shape of the expander, ignored the complaint and announced, “This will be an ideal place for our next base camp. I will go ahead and reconnoiter, while you two work your way down to the lead parcel crew. Take your time and make sure that you secure the path for them.”

Swift-Killer carefully emptied her pouch of the expander, and moved swiftly off as North-Wind and Cliff-Watcher wearily dropped their loads and moved back down the mountain.

Swift-Killer was pleased. The way ahead was steep, but broad. They would make good progress with their loads over this stretch. In her hurry to explore well ahead, she thinned her body down and pushed only a narrow path through the prickly crust. She would broaden it on her way back down, when the tremendous pull of Egg would help instead of hinder her motion.
She came around a low ledge and then stared at the barrier ahead.

“Bright’s Curse!” she exploded. Her eyes scanned the area, but there was no escape from the fact that the canyon they had been traveling had come to an abrupt end. There was a tall cliff blocking the way. She moved closer to it and began to examine the vertical cracks that rent the face in the easy direction.

There were a lot of the cracks, for the crust had very little strength in the easy direction, and the pull of Egg was constantly attempting to draw the soaring cliffs to its bosom. This particular cliff must have been formed recently, for it had not been worn much by the ever-present winds. Swift-Killer searched along the base and then found a fairly large rent that went back a good way into the cliff. Conquering her fear of the cliff face towering over her, she moved up to the rent. Without looking up at the terrifying sight of that mass of rock ready to fall on her topside, she narrowed down and pushed her body into the crack. She soon filled the bottom of it completely. Then, still pushing with her tread and muscles on the outside, she forced her body fluids into the narrow crack; slowly her body became tall and narrow instead of its usual flattened ellipsoidal shape. Although the pull of Egg tried to drag her down, the narrow crevasse kept her from being flattened, and since the easy direction was upwards, it was not hard to move in that direction, while the hardness in the horizontal direction actually helped her to maintain her body in the crevasse. She pushed and pushed and felt the pressure build up in her lower body. When she felt she could stand the pressure no longer, she took a quick, terrified glance up the remainder of the crack and was disappointed to find that she had climbed only a small portion of the way to the top.

Dismay and terror weakened her hold, and she felt herself falling down and out the bottom of the crevasse.
The force of her fall caused her internal juices to form a small wave that actually rolled her outside sack of skin over and over. For the first time since she was a tiny hatchling blown about by the wind, she found herself tread upwards.

Swift-Killer slowly righted her bruised body and moved away from the front of the cliff while she thought. She went over to a mound of rubble and thoughtfully picked her way through the chunks of crust that lay tumbled there. She picked up several good-sized slabs that were thick plates. She went back to the crevasse with her burden and, turning one of the chunks endways, pushed it ahead of her into the crevasse. She again pushed her body into the crack, and lifted the plate up as high as she could. She then turned the slab sideways and slowly let it come down, where the flat edges jammed against the narrowing sides of the crack as the pull of Egg sat it firmly into place. Swift-Killer slowly relinquished her hold, and she watched in pleasure as the heavy chunk of crust stayed suspended between the walls of the crevasse, just over her normal eye height. She took another slab, a longer one this time, and soon it too was suspended against the pull of Egg at the same height, but further out from the back of the notch. Swift-Killer looked her creation over with care and then flowed back out of the crevasse and shortly returned from the rubble pile with another thick slab of crust, longer than the others. With a great effort she lifted the slab and soon it was in place, resting on top of the other two. Swift-Killer hesitated, then slowly induced herself to glide under the improvised platform to the back of the crevasse. She again forced her body into the narrow crack, and stretching out a narrow pseudopod that snaked up to rest on top of the wedged slabs, she slowly pumped her juices up against the pull of Egg so that they inflated that portion of her skin on the platform. She halted after
she had several eyes transferred to the upper level, then formed some strong manipulators that grasped the top slab tightly. Then, firmly anchored, she finally pushed and pulled the rest of her body up onto the platform.

All during this long procedure, Swift-Killer had been careful to keep all of her dozen eyes carefully concerned with watching the wall, the manipulators, the slabs, anything but the outside environment. Only when she was safely on top of the slab, her manipulators keeping her from flowing off the front or the back, and the firm walls of the crevasse holding her in from the sides, did she finally allow herself to observe the predicament she had put herself into. She looked out of the crevasse at the horizon, then at the pile of rubble in the distance, then at the crust just at the entrance to the crevasse, then just inside the entrance, and then her eyes refused to look any further. Try as she might, she just couldn’t seem to make them look down from the platform where she hunched, perched at a height above the crust that would have burst her skin like a ripe pod if she had fallen.

“It needs to be wider,” Swift-Killer said to herself, “if we are going to use this as a platform to make another one further up. And perhaps they should be closer together so it isn’t as hard to flow up onto them. But it will work. We will just make floating platforms up the crevasse to the top of the cliff.”

Swift-Killer slowly let herself down, forming a few more massive manipulators to hold onto small ledges in the cliff walls to slow her descent. She quickly flowed out from beneath the platform and returned to the base camp, happily breasting her way down through the fuzzy crust.

Conquering the cliff took many turns. Although some of the troopers soon became expert scalers, and even found a technique to get the awkward expander and glancer up the notch, almost one-third of the troopers
were incapable of forcing themselves to climb up on the overhanging platforms. Despite the thinning out of her supply line, Swift-Killer pressed on, and as the double line of the expedition wound its way through the east pole mountains, it slowly became obvious to all that the atmosphere was getting thinner and the visibility was getting better. Far to the north, they could see a swirling cloud of smoke that came southward from the large volcano in the northern hemisphere and, turning at the east pole, made its way out to the west along the equator. However, the dense clouds didn’t penetrate into the mountains.

During a rest period, Cliff-Watcher gazed up at the seven bright points of light. “Perhaps we could try sending a message again,” he said.

Swift-Killer had made up her own mind about that long ago.

“It is clearer,” she said. “But we could still have a better chance of being seen if we were to go higher still, for the atmosphere is getting thinner rapidly as we go higher. We could attempt a message now, but we have only a limited supply of flares and pod juice, and I would rather wait to use them when we are as high as we can get.”

The climb had taken over two greats of turns. Even Swift-Killer was surprised when she realized that she would soon have a second egg mature inside her to be sent back down with one of the plodding porters that moved back and forth between base camps, shuttling food up the living chain. Finally, the supply line had been stretched to its limit. There was no limit to the food supply at the base of the mountains, for the fort had turned into a prosperous town, complete with egg-pens, hatchling schools, farms and small businesses set up on the side by enterprising troopers. The hunting parties and harvesters kept a steady stream of food pouring into the base of the pyramid, but most of it
went into supplying the daily needs of the porters who used the energy to haul supplies up the mountain against the great pull of Egg. Swift-Killer finally called a halt at a flat place in the mountains.

“We will stop here,” she said to Cliff-Watcher and North-Wind. “I want you both to rest and eat well to build up your reserves while the porter crews build up our supplies. I will scout ahead and see if there is another place equally as good ahead of us. If there is, we will move on to it to send our message, otherwise, we will attempt it from here.”

Swift-Killer emptied out her pouches, especially the bulky glancer she had been carrying, and moved steadily on up the canyon. She was gone for so many turns that Cliff-Watcher and North-Wind began to get worried, but finally she returned with good news.

“There is another wide, level place further up the mountain,” she said. “It will be a long climb carrying the equipment, but there are no tricky traverses or steep cliffs, just a long, upward trip.”

She glanced at the nervously twitching eye-stubs of her two compatriots. She could tell that they were thinking about objecting to a continuation of the climb, since the messages could be sent almost as well from their present spot. She decided to reassert her authority.

“At Alert!” boomed the tread of Troop Commander Swift-Killer, only slightly muffled by the fuzzy crust.

Although Cliff-Watcher was not a trooper, he had been living with the troop for so long that he found his body imitating the instant response of North-Wind as the Commander’s rigid eyes glared at them.

“The sole purpose of this entire expedition is to send a message to the beings in the Inner Eye,” Swift-Killer began. “And I intend to do that to the best of my ability—and yours! This camp is not the best place to
send that message, so we will go on—do you understand?”

“Yes, Commander,” boomed North-Wind’s formal reply, echoed by Cliff-Watcher’s awed response.

“Good!” she said. “From now on, I want you two to obey my orders.” Her body relaxed slightly and she continued. “We three will push on in a dozen turns, after we all have had time to rest, build up our internal food reserves, and have a good supply of food parcels. Now for my orders. My first order is to rest. My second order is to eat well, and my third order is to thin out, because I have just returned from a long lonely journey, and I am going to take you both on at once.” With that she moved in between them and shortly was enjoying being the middle layer of a triple layer orgy.

After twelve turns of rest and recreation, Swift-Killer was anxious to be on her way. Since they had to have other things to occupy their time besides eating and sex, she had Cliff-Watcher learn the finer points of short-sword infighting from North-Wind while she refereed. Then both she and North-Wind learned to make counter tendrils and soon both could compute almost as fast as Cliff-Watcher.

They were now ready to go. She had convinced North-Wind that there was very little likelihood of meeting barbarians in the mountains at these heights, so they left their weapons. They loaded up with the all-important message equipment and as much food as they could carry, and the three set off up the mountain. The rest of the troop was left with orders to set up food caches at the various base camps down the mountain and to withdraw to the fort.

The climb was difficult, but as Swift-Killer had assured them, there was nothing particularly tricky about it. Because of their bulky burdens, however, it took them much longer to make the climb than it had
taken Swift-Killer in her exploration climb. They ate their food rapidly as their bodies labored under the pull of Egg.

“I always felt that I would rather carry the food in my juices than in my pouches,” North-Wind said as he ate a pod. “It may all weigh the same, but somehow when it is inside me, I feel it is at least carrying its share of the load.”

“I will be glad to relieve you of any food you don’t want to carry any longer,” Cliff-Watcher said.

“Sorry,” North-Wind said, carefully sucking the last drop of juice from a pod skin as he pulled it from his eating pouch. “Last one.”

“Oh well,” Cliff-Watcher said as North-Wind cracked open each pod seed with a tiny, hard manipulator and carefully ate the little kernel inside. “Guess we might as well be on our way.” He turned his attention to Swift-Killer, who was busy calculating something.

“That will work out just about right,” she said. “We are about two turns from our destination. We will be out of food by then, but our body reserves will last long enough for us to send up the messages and get back to the base camp with plenty to spare, although we will be hungry most of the way back down.”

“I’m hungry right now,” Cliff-Watcher said, “and I finished all my food last turn.”

“That is what the troopers call fat hunger,” North-Wind said. “When you think you are hungry just because you are used to eating every turn. You can’t eat every turn when you are a trooper pursuing barbarians. Wait a dozen turns, then you will know what being hungry really means.”