Dragon's Egg (33 page)

The taste-plates had also been one of Swift-Killer’s many inventions. She had begun to despair over accurately recording all the subtle nuances of the human television signal in the form of knots of various shapes and sizes. She had happened upon the new technique when she had been on inspection after they had broken
camp and were moving on to a new station under the westward-drifting human spacecraft. She had flowed through the remains of the kitchen for the camp and her tread moved across an abandoned mixing plate, stained with meat juices and spices. Her ancient hunting senses had sprung into action, attempting to extract every item of information from the complex chemical spoor that it found under her tread. Swift-Killer had experimented and found that her tread could “taste” with higher resolution and comprehension using her ancient spoor-tracking senses than it could feel with her high-sensitivity tactile senses. After a little experimentation to find the most pungent and long-lasting spices, the knowledge of the humans was soon being stored on long-lasting, apparently featureless plates, that burst into a detailed, “full-colored” image as a trained tread flowed onto it.

Swift-Killer approached Sky-Beams, one of her apprentices, who was busily staring upwards at the rapidly blinking Inner Eye, a set of trained tendrils in front of him, shooting drop after drop of spice onto a fresh plate.

Leaving half of his eyes devoted to the recording task, Sky-Beams turned the others toward his mentor. “What are you doing here, O Keeper of the Sender?” Sky-Beams said, his correctly formal address scarcely concealing his annoyance that the Old One was interrupting him.

Swift-Killer knew exactly what was wrong with the youngster. He was ready to become the new Keeper of the Sender, and she was still around. However, it didn’t bother her any longer. As she grew older, she grew more mellow and now was actually looking forward to tending eggs and hatchlings. What stories she would tell them!

“I came to bring you good news, Sky-Beams,” she said. “The advisory council of the Inner Eye Institute
has agreed with my recommendation, and you are now the new Keeper of the Sender.”

Swift-Killer flowed over toward him as the tendrils on the younger one hesitated. She started to form a pseudopod to stroke his topside as she had done many times in the past. He seemed perfectly willing, but she found that she was just not interested in sex anymore. She wanted to get to the eggs that were waiting for her. She gave him a friendly brush anyway, then said, “Stay vigilant, Sky-Beams. The work may be tedious at times, but one never knows but what the next page will bring a new truth to our people.”

“I will, my teacher,” Sky-Beams said, and turned all his eyes back to the sky as Swift-Killer flowed away in the easy direction, heading for the egg-pens on the east side of Bright’s Heaven.

Pierre looked up at the flash in the corner of his screen.

“Accept link!” he said.

Pierre thought for a moment. Jean was right. If they spent time searching through the extensive ship’s encyclopedia for useful knowledge on the HoloMem crystals, then dumping those sections into the communication computer and out the laser communications console, it would take them forever and a day. A day
for the humans and what would seem like forever to the neutron star beings.

“Amalita!” he bellowed, and soon a bloody handkerchief with two eager eyes above it was peering down through the passageway. “Can we hook up the library HoloMem reader directly into the communications console?”

There was a slight pause as Amalita flicked circuit diagrams through her nearly eidetic memory.

“Sorry, Pierre,” she said. “The HoloMem crystal reader is hardwired into the library computer. However, the communications console does have the capability of reading or recording a single HoloMem crystal at a time.”

“It does?” Pierre said, surprised.

Amalita floated over to the communications console where Abdul was monitoring the latest transmission and flipped open a small door in one side. She reached in and carefully removed a three-sided object. When she pulled it out, Pierre could see the bottom was missing and the interior was a corner cube of brilliantly polished mirrors.

“This is one-half the scanner cavity,” Amalita said, “and here is the HoloMem crystal itself.” She pushed a button and a clear crystal cube about five centimeters across sprang out of the door, twirling slowly as it floated into the room. The corners and edges of the cube were jet black, but through the clear faces Pierre could see the rainbowlike reflections from the information fringes stored in the interior. Amalita deftly plucked the cube out of the air, her thumb and forefinger grasping it at opposite corners.

“This has been storing everything that has gone through the console since we started,” she said. “It is exactly the same size as one of the encyclopedia HoloMems and we can put one of them in place of this one and read the encyclopedia down one crystal
at a time. It will take about a minute to switch crystals and check the scanner adjustments, and about half an hour to read out each one of the 25 encyclopedia crystals, but that should still be faster than shoving all those bits from the library computer through the communications computer to the console.”

“Good!” Pierre said. “Go get the first encyclopedia crystal and start with that.”

“A to AME, AME to AUS, AUS to BLO, BLO to …” muttered Amalita as she twirled down through the passageway to the library, her trained legs and feet propelling her as efficiently as her hands, which were still busy holding the HoloMem crystal and the corner of the laser scanner cavity.

“A complete education, from Astronomy to Zoology,” Pierre mused. “Alphabetical order may not be the best way to teach someone, but in this case it is the fastest.”

Suck-the-Crystal pressed the pores of his tread to the page—absorbing again the revelation that had come dripping across from the neutron-depleted plates. His thrums of joy and surprise pounded the page. From the page they were transmitted to the floor and thence to the entire courtyard of the Sky-Talk Library—raising admonishing taps from the librarians and scholars. The taps were soon followed by slower waves emanating from the methodical approach of his friend, mentor and (unfortunately at this time) Chief Librarian—Seek-the-Sky, who arrived saying, “Have you lost your senses or is it only that you’ve drained your nuclei dry trying to read those depleted plates of crystal and have gone into convulsions?”

“I am sorry, Seek-the-Sky. It is just that I absorbed a piece of knowledge that made my previous studies come together into one coherent piece. Here—try it.”

Seek-the-Sky flowed onto the dusty, well-tasted crystal plate as Suck-the-Crystal flowed off. From the heading on the plate the librarian noted that it was an early plate from the human encyclopedia, HoloMem 2—AME to AUS. It was a table in the section on Astronomy.

“So?” Seek-the-Sky said. “This plate has been tasted so often that there is hardly a neutron left on it, much less any information that has not been correlated and cross-correlated and cross-cross-correlated by the Old Ones many turns ago. What do you find here that I don’t? This seems to be a brittle, tasteless table of stellar nebula.”

As he flowed off the plate he stamped, “What is so important about this that you should disturb the scholarly researches of the entire library staff?”

“But, please,” Suck-the-Crystal said quickly, “it was an entry in the table that suddenly cross-correlated with some new plates that I helped prepare and catalog just this turn. A few milliseconds ago, over at the Comm Input, I had prepared the crystal plates from the turn’s batch of data transmitted by the humans, and had proof-tasted them carefully with the vibrations from the acoustic delay line as any apprentice should. Now-most of the apprentices don’t really care what is on the plates, just as long as they agree with the delay line vibrations—but I like to taste them and do preliminary correlations and pretend that I am the Keeper of the Comm.”

“You?” Seek-the-Sky shuffled. “Keeper of the Comm?”

“Well …” said Suck-the-Crystal. “Yes!” He hastened to explain himself. “Heaven’s-Bounty has been Keeper of the Comm for more than fifteen human minutes. There may be other apprentices who are older than I, but I’m the only one who really cares about the information we are collecting. I bet when the Council meets to
replace Heaven’s-Bounty, they will choose me. Am I right?—You’re on the Council.”

“Hmm,” Seek-the-Sky said. “Maybe you are right-but don’t let it make you spread. Now—what is this correlation that has your edges flapping?”

“The large veil-like nebula that is fifth on the list can be extrapolated back to a point of origin at a certain time about 500,000 human years ago. That point is very close to here, about 50 light-years away. That point in space and time is also almost exactly on the path that Egg is on, if you extrapolate back along its track.”

“Very interesting,” the Chief-Librarian said. “You have probably identified the time and place of the supernova explosion that formed Egg.”

“But what is more interesting,” continued Suck-the-Crystal, “is that the climatological records that are coming down right now indicate a very drastic change of climate on the human’s Earth at about that time. Also, that time corresponds with the human anthropologist’s estimate for the genesis of the homo sapiens species. I believe that the laying of Egg by a supernova explosion so very near the Solar System was the direct cause of the emergence of intelligence in the creatures that now float above us, teaching us all they know.”

“I am sure the humans will be amused when they hear that,” Seek-the-Sky said. “Let us go see Heaven’s-Bounty and have her put that in her next message.”

Jean was busy setting up an alternate communication link with the infrared scanner when she heard a loud snorting bark. It sounded like an angry seal. She quickly turned, looking for the source of the noise.

“I fell asleep and snored,” said an abashed Pierre, who had been handing her tools while she was head downwards inside the infrared scanner bay.

“No wonder,” she replied, pulling herself out of the bay and taking the tool kit from him. “You missed your sleep shift when this ruckus started. You head off to your rack and get some sleep. You are no good to us in this condition.”

“But if I go to sleep for eight hours, there will be a thousand years of cheela development before I wake up. That is like sleeping through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire!”

“Set your alarm for six hours,” she replied, pushing him down the passageway, “That will give you enough sleep to keep you going and maybe you will be awake again before they develop spaceflight.”

Soother’s-Worry paused in the middle of his message to the human. He formed a manipulator, grew a crystalline bone to strengthen it, and pressed the panels that turned off the image that was beaming 400 kilometers down from the human spaceship in its synchronous orbit about Egg. The face that lay under him on the tasting screen flickered off, and was replaced with his own image.

“I simply must see how gorgeous I look,” Soother’s-Worry thought. “Those humans can just wait a while. Besides, with the computer slowing everything down by a million to one so the Slow Ones can follow things, I bet they never even notice that I stopped talking.”

Soother’s-Worry absorbed his image through his tread and glowed inwardly at the sight. His dozen eyes glistened in a deep red halo about the baroque pattern that he had recently had painted on the topside of his flattened ellipsoidal body. He turned slowly, watching the pattern shift on the screen. The dozen shiny reflective circles near the base of each eye-stub mirrored the black sky and stars, so that it looked as if he had
holes through his body looking out on another universe. Winding between the circles was a stripe of highly emissive paint that glowed a hot yellow against his deep red topside surface.

“Beautiful, simply beautiful. Mother will simply love it,” he gloated.

He wanted his mother to like him. She almost never visited him anymore, and seemed to spend all her time with Soother’s-First and Soother’s-Pride.

“You must remember,” Soother’s-Worry said to himself in an imitation of the Old One who had had the job of raising him, “your mother is Soother-of-All-Clans and has more important things to do than to take care of her children.

“If only,” thought Soother’s-Worry, “she had not commanded that her eggs be kept separate from all the others. Then I would be just another cheela from the central nursery and not have to worry whether my mother was neglecting me or not.

“But,” he reminded himself, “if it had not been for mother, I certainly would not have the enviable position of Keeper of the Comm. As boring as the job is, it is certainly one of the most prestigious in Soother’s-Empire.”

Soother-of-All-Clans paused at the entrance to the egg pen. The Old One in charge of the pen, having no eggs to keep him busy, had felt her tread and was waiting for her. He watched with a combination of anxiety and eagerness as the egg-sac was extruded onto the crust from Soother’s laying orifice. As soon as the sac was safely on the crust, flattened into a nice ellipsoidal shape, the Old One spread out one of his edges into a hatching mantle and covered the egg gently with the thin membrane. He then slowly rolled the egg toward him and placed it under the protection of his body.

“This one shall be named Soother’s-Rock,” Soother
said. “Its father is Yellow-Rock. Leader of the Clan in the northwest. As soon as the eggling is ready to leave the hatchling pen, it is to be sent to Yellow-Rock for rearing as a youth of its father’s clan, for it will become Leader when its father flows.”

“It will be done, Soother-of-All-Clans,” the Old One said.