Dragon's Egg (11 page)

With her bulk reduced to fighting trim, Great-Crack flowed off the pile. Paying no attention to the jokes, she went off with the others as they moved through the petal plants, carefully picking off the best of the pods and storing them inside their body pouches until the whole hunting party was loaded to capacity.

“Are you sure that bulk is all pods, Great-Crack?” chided Shaking-Crust. “You didn’t go back for a few trinkets, did you?”

Great-Crack was in the midst of rippling out a vicious whisper about being a better fighter when loaded with pods than Shaking-Crust was in fighting trim, and would she like to have her prove it … when Blue-Flow interrupted with a loud t’trum on the crust.

“You two stop that!” he said. Then his eyes looked around to all of them and he called, “It’s time to go back!” Blue-Flow pushed his bulk in the hard direction, while the rest of them rapidly formed a single file and pushed off behind him.

Suddenly Blue-Flow stopped. “Wait!” he said in amazement. “We’re going in the wrong direction!”

They all looked up from their crouched, streamlined positions in back of him and looked ahead. There was the benevolent beam of Bright, directly ahead. They stopped, confused. They had come into Bright’s Heaven far enough that they had stopped having the lost feeling that they had experienced earlier under the smoke. Being good hunters, they knew instinctively where they were and in which direction to go. But their instincts were leading them directly toward Bright, while they knew from logic that the way back to the clan was in the opposite direction.

“I guess we will have to forget our where-sense when it comes to traveling in this land,” Blue-Flow said. He flowed to the back of the column and pushed off again, this time directly away from Bright.

The group soon reached the edge of Bright’s Heaven. They all cast longing looks behind with a few of their eyes as Bright dipped below the horizon and their sense of being lost returned. Blue-Flow kept the break periods short since they were all in good shape and well fed, and they made it quickly back across the “feeling lost” territory with its intense smoky sky flowing to the west.

Their sense of direction slowly returned, and Blue-Flow felt much better now that his instincts finally agreed with his logic. They were following their previous track very closely, and Blue-Flow was disturbed that he could read their spoor. They must have been extremely discouraged to have been so careless. Well—they were on their way back now, and that spoor of many turns ago would just lead any trackers astray if they kept their present track clean. When it came his turn at the rear of the column, he looked back and was pleased with the fact, that except for a quickly fading whitish track from the heat of their bodies warming the crust, he could see almost no evidence of their passage.

At the next break, most of them had another pod to eat. As was her usual custom, Great-Crack kept all the seeds from the pod in case the clan needed more. Blue-Flow noticed that she had only added a pod skin to the burial pit and came over to talk to her.

“You are a good hunter and a hard fighter, Great-Crack, so I have never complained about your bulk. But we are now on a very serious mission and everything that slows us down hurts the chances for the survival of the whole clan. I want you to put all the seeds and
anything else you have picked up into the burial pit and stop collecting things until we have the whole clan back to Bright’s Heaven.”

“But the seeds are valuable!” she protested.

“The clan will have no need for seeds to plant when they are on the move to Bright’s Heaven, and there will be plenty of pods and seeds when we bring them there,” he replied.

She could only agree with him, and he stood by watching, first with amusement, then with amazement, as a steady flow of seeds, pebbles, worthless dragon crystal shards, and Flow Slow nodes filled the burial pit. He did not know that Great-Crack held back something. In each one of the food pods from Bright’s Heaven, the bottom seed in the clump had an unusual twelve-pointed cluster shape, instead of the normal oval shape. Great-Crack’s curiosity had been aroused by the unusual shape and she had looked carefully at each pod she had opened. Every pod had a cluster-shaped seed, and she was especially careful to keep each one. She wanted to plant them to see if the petal plant that grew from them would be different in shape than the ones that grew from the oval seeds. When she dumped her store of treasures, she withheld the cluster seeds.

“They are so small, they won’t slow me down,” she said smugly to herself. “Besides he will never notice, now that I have an egg growing.” Covering up the burial pit carefully to leave no trace of its presence, she returned to join the others.

After many, many turns the hunting party began to enter familiar territory. They took no breaks now, but pushed steadily onward. As they approached the home of the clan, they felt disturbing tremors under their treads. There were loud voices booming through the crust and much rapid movement of treads. Some of the voices were in a strange accent.

The clan was under attack! Blue-Flow moved ahead
more rapidly. Thinning way down, he stopped just over the horizon from the camp. He quickly reinforced an eye-stub and raised one eye up to evaluate the situation.

A large war party from another clan was attacking the petal plant field. He could see movement between the rows as the war party drove the guards down the rows, so that others could strip the pods from the plants at the ends of the rows. There was another group that kept up feinting attacks on the pod bins and stockades on the other side of the camp, spreading the clan guard warriors thin. There seemed to be too few guards, and Blue-Flow could not see Smoky-Sky anywhere. There were no enemy warriors on their side of the field, so the plan of attack was obvious. Blue-Flow dropped his eye and whispered the situation to his group.

“The petal plant fields are under attack by a large war party that has control over the eastern half. We will go east from here, staying below the horizon, cross over in the hard direction until we are in back of them, then come down at them from the east and trap them in between.” As he spoke, pods and digging tools dropped out of pouches into a disorganized pile on the crust. Rugged fighting manipulators sprang from their bodies and pulled sharp shards of dragon crystal from their weapons pouches. Although Great-Crack tried to hide them, Blue-Flow saw with disgust the small pile of funny pod seeds. He resolved to give her a drubbing once the battle was over.

With their killing spears of shattered dragon crystal at the ready, the hunting party moved east, going many times faster than their previous rate of movement in the hard direction. Once they had moved far enough east to be over the horizon in that direction, Blue-Flow led them across in the hard direction until they were in back of the attacking party.

Putting his warriors in a line, each with one or more
sharp spikes sticking out from strong manipulators firmly imbedded in their thickened front ends, he whispered to them all. “They do not know we are attacking, so move as quietly as you can. If we can surprise them, we will catch them with their brain-knots in our direction.”

They moved ahead smoothly, keeping a low profile as they came over the horizon. They flowed around a pile of pods that had been stacked for pickup.

Blue-Flow whispered, “We’re in luck. The pickers have gone down to fight and push the guards further back.”

They each chose a row and with their quarry busily engaged in a battle midway down the row, they were able to attack almost without warning.

It was hard to kill a cheela. If hit with something hard, the fluid body just retreated from the blow with the flexible skin absorbing the impact. If the something hard was very sharp, like the shattered end of a dragon crystal, it could poke a hole through the skin, and if that was big enough a hole, some of the glowing fluid inside would leak out before the automatic protection systems could close the wound. If an eye that was so rash as to be out on a stub could be caught, a sharp-edged shard might slice off the eye-stub with an accompanying shock of pain but only a partial loss of sight. After all, if one or two of the normal complement of twelve eyes were lost, the cheela could easily adjust the position of the remainder to have nearly complete vision.

The only really vulnerable part of a cheela was the brain-knot. It could be anywhere inside the skin, but it was a good bet that, if the cheela was fighting someone on one side, the brain-knot would be well over on the other side, far away from any sharp spears of dragon crystal. Blue-Flow was counting on this instinctive behavior
as he rushed his enemy target from behind and flowed up onto her topside. He felt the telltale knot under his tread and shocked it into unconsciousness with a focused ripple from his underside, then neatly speared it three times as his momentum carried him up and over his now-dead foe.

“Blue-Flow!” shouted Weary-Tread, lowering the point of her spear. “Where did you come from?”

Blue-Flow surveyed the oozing hide of his old friend and replied, “We just got back and we have found a new home for the clan. But come, follow me, we have fighting to do.”

Blue-Flow moved down the row of plants until he could see a sparring trio of warriors between the plants. Warm-Wind and Great-Crack had an enemy warrior between them. The warrior had parried Great-Crack’s initial rush and was now fending them both off as he attempted to escape between the rows. In a rumble of despair he saw the long shard in Blue-Flow’s grasp as Blue-Flow blocked the way, sending his spear directly into the center of the enemy.

“Another brain kill!” Blue-Flow gloated as the foe collapsed into a spreading disk that filled the space between the plants.

He quickly whispered to Great-Crack and Warm-Wind, pointing with a ripple of his eye-stubs, “You two go that way and we will go this way.” Blue-Flow turned and, with Weary-Tread covering his trail, went down the row to find more of the foe.

With the return of the hunting party, the tide of battle turned, and soon the enemy war party had retreated, without their stolen pods, and with many of their number gone.

The clean-up work began. The stolen pods were stored in the pod bin along with the ripe pods that the hunting party had brought back with them. The many
dead, among them Fuzzy-Crust and Star-Rise of the clan, were sliced open to let the fluid seep into the crust, and then the meat was dried and stored.

The news that the clan had for the hunting party was not good. They had been under almost constant attack by hungry war parties ever since the group had left. Smoky-Sky had died long ago in a battle to protect the fields and Weary-Tread was now Leader of the Clan. When Blue-Flow heard this news, he turned and looked at Weary-Tread, whose scarred hide was still oozing glowing, yellow-white fluid from some serious spear wounds.

“Now is the best time to do this,” Blue-Flow thought. “The clan needs a strong Leader for the journey to Bright’s Heaven.” He turned, raised his spear and issued the formal challenge to Weary-Tread.

“Who is Leader of the Clan, Old One?”

There was a long pause as Weary-Tread evaluated her chances. She could still be a good Leader and did not want to be relegated to the status of an Old One, but never had she felt so like the dreary name she had been stuck with as a hatchling.

“You are, Blue-Flow,” she replied, and winced as the ceremonial slash from Blue-Flow’s spear added another small wound to her punctured hide.

Blue-Flow turned and said to them all, “I am Leader of the Clan. Does anyone challenge me?” There was no reply, and, with the formal ceremony over, his tone changed as he took command.

“I have good news. I have found a new land for us. A clean land with no smoke. A good land with no enemies, with much game and with many, many petal plants that have never been picked. It is a long distance away in the hard direction and the trail will be harsh and difficult. But we will go, for a new God Star and His Heaven—Bright’s Heaven—waits for us!”

For the next few turns, Blue-Flow had everyone who
was not out hunting meat busy in the fields picking the edible pods and storing them in the pod bin. He was outside the bin with Great-Crack, looking with satisfaction at the pods spilling out of the opening.

“It is enough,” he said. “We will leave when the hunters return.”

“But
is
it enough?” Great-Crack wondered. “We needed to eat many, many pods to get from Bright’s Heaven back to the clan. There are many in the clan and they will travel much more slowly than a hunting party.”

“There are many, many pods, Great-Crack. There must be enough there to feed all the clan, for I have never seen so many pods before.” Blue-Flow went off to greet a returning hunting party.

Great-Crack stared at the flowing pile of pods. “There are many pods,” she thought. “But are there enough?”

She played internally with her pouch full of cluster-shaped seeds, which she had retrieved after the battle, and thought back over the many pods she herself had eaten while crossing the barren land between here and Bright’s Heaven. Many pods would be needed, for she had taken the cluster-shaped seed from each one as she had eaten it, and there were many, many of those seeds in her storage pouch.

Then, in a flash of inspiration, one of the greatest mathematical minds ever hatched in the past or future history of the cheela made a great leap of abstract thought.

“I took one seed from every pod that I ate,” Great-Crack said to herself. “So I have as many seeds as pods.”

Her mind faltered for a moment. “But seeds are not pods!”

It recovered, “But there are as many seeds as there were pods, so the number is the same.”

She laid the seeds out in a row that stretched all along
the wall of the pod bin. There were many of them. She then took out pods and put one next to each seed until she had a row of pods.

“There,” she said. “I will need that many pods to get to Bright’s Heaven.” She put the pods to one side in a pile. She took out more pods and laid them next to the seeds until she had another row of pods.