Dragon's Egg (14 page)

Carole looked at a display across the room. The field of view of the monitor camera contained the glowing sphere of one of the larger condensed asteroids in the lower corner, and a small white speck representing the other large asteroid in the upper corner. As she watched, the smaller speck moved slowly across the screen, getting brighter as it came. Carole looked at another console, the picture there was almost the same, but reversed. The geometry of the elastic collision of the two large ultra-dense asteroids was almost exactly symmetric.

Pierre stared at his console. There were no pictures on his screen, just a computer-generated plot of two curved lines that were slowly approaching each other in a collision course. Numbers in boxes along the side of his screen changed rapidly. “Thirty seconds to last abort point,” he announced. “Any problems?”

Jean spoke from another console. “Video monitors operating.”

“Computer control well within margins,” another voice said.

“Herder probe propulsion units all operational,” said another.

“I’ll let it go, then,” Pierre said, lifting his finger from the abort toggle and snapping shut the safety cover.

Carole watched one of the screens as the smaller blob grew larger and larger. Angry tongues of fire burst
rapidly in seemingly random directions from positions near the two spheres as the computer directed the herder probes to keep the asteroids on their correct paths. Then suddenly, in a sequence that was too fast to follow, an ultra-dense asteroid flashed around between its twin and the camera probe, and the screen was empty.

Pierre flicked on another camera that was off at a different angle, but that view was only good for a few seconds before the rapidly shrinking spot faded from the screen.

They all turned to Pierre’s screen, which showed the orbits of the two asteroids. The trajectories had approached so close to each other that the tight curlicues in their respective paths due to their mutual gravitational attraction seemed to be placed one on top of the other. They now watched as one line headed outward toward the asteroid belt again, while the other seemed to be dropping straight into the neutron star. Actually, the falling massive asteroid would miss the star by a slight margin and was now in a highly elliptical orbit, with its aphelion near the 100,000 km circular orbit of St. George and its perihelion at just over 400 km from Dragon’s Egg.

Their elevator was in place.

God

God came to the cheela slowly. For many, many, many generations, the cheela had no God. The sky was empty except for a few tiny pinpricks of light scattered across the cold, black dome. Then God had become lonely and made the great volcano grow, driving the cheela from their home in the north to a new home in the south. There the god Bright had welcomed his chosen people into the Heaven he had prepared for them.

Bright had been good to the cheela. Bright never rose or set like the other spots of light, but stayed up in the sky, keeping watch over all the cheela. Life was good, and the cheela let Bright know that they were happy by their prayers that they faithfully gave every turn of Bright’s throne.

Then one turn, when the eyes of the cheela were lifted to the skies in prayer, one of the supplicants saw a new speck rise over the horizon. As soon as the prayers were finished, he brought it to the attention of the Holy Ones that interpreted Bright’s wishes.

The Holy Ones were puzzled, but did not let it show. As masters of their profession, they had learned to say little and do even less until they were sure of themselves.

“Yes—we expected something like that, but let us
wait and we will study it further,” they reassured the excited discoverer.

They did study it. It was still a speck in the sky, not much different from all the other specks, but it soon became brighter than any of the others. Fortunately, it was not nearly as brilliant as the god Bright, as it would have been difficult to explain two gods to a people that had been brought up to believe in the omnipotence and uniqueness of the One God—Bright.

The new speck grew and grew in brilliance with each passing turn, and although the common cheela noticed the increase in brightness, it was only the Holy Ones who noticed that the speck was also slowly moving with respect to the other stars in the sky. A moving star! This was unheard of in cheela astrology, where the pattern of lights, dominated by the glaring red-yellow presence of Bright, had always remained fixed in relative position while rotating slowly about Bright’s throne in the sky.

“If the stars are not fixed, but move around, how can one make any kind of predictions from them? The future would be constantly changing,” complained Bright’s-Second, the Chief Astrologer and next in line for the position of High Priest.

“I am sure Bright has a reason for this change in the sky,” Bright’s-First said. “It is up to us to use our intelligence in the service of Bright and interpret its meaning.”

The High Priest turned her eyes toward the young novice.

“Are you sure of the motion?” she asked.

“Yes, O Bright’s-First,” said Sky-Seeker. “In my training in astrology I have been learning how to estimate the angles between the star specks with the astrologer sticks and have memorized almost all my number tables. I had tried to add the new star to my memory but, still being a novice, I had failed to get all the numbers correctly. I realized my mistake many
turns later when I was trying to cast a fortune. I then went back to the astrologer sticks to get the numbers correctly and I found that some of the old numbers that I had memorized did not agree with the new ones for that star.”

“Unfortunately, he is correct,” the Chief Astrologer said. “At first I thought his memory was faulty or that someone had disturbed the astrologer sticks. However, when I checked the numbers against the ones that I had committed to memory on the fateful turn when that star blossomed in the sky, I found out that my old numbers were even further off than the novice’s, yet none of the other stars in the sky have changed their numbers at all.”

“A moving star …” the High Priest murmured. “One that moves. It must be that Bright has sent us a messenger! Perhaps Bright will speak directly to us now.”

Soon the religion of the cheela was broadened to include the new phenomenon, a star that not only grew brighter and brighter until it rivaled Bright in its brilliance, but which swept majestically across the skies. There was some consternation when Bright’s Messenger reached perihelion and its brilliance started to fade, but all the cheela were relieved when after a few greats of turns, it retraced its path in the sky.

The new star set the small cadre of novices talking among themselves. Having been picked primarily because of their interest in numbers and their eidetic memory, so necessary for the position of an astrologer in a civilization without writing, they soon began to puzzle over the strange behavior of the motion of Bright’s Messenger.

“If it were a circle, then it would make more sense,” said one of the novices. “We could say that Bright and the other stars are perched on a large crystal egg that rotates once a turn, and Bright’s Messenger would then
be on a smaller crystal egg, turning at a slightly faster rate.”

“But not only is it not a circle,” another said, “it does not even move evenly along its path.”

“Another way of looking at it is that Bright and the stars do not move in the sky,” said a third, “but that Egg turns once on its axis every turn, and that Bright’s Messenger rotates about Egg in an elongated path.”

The others looked at her as if she had spoken heresy (which she had come close to doing), and one quickly put her down with one of the first lessons in Holy School.

“All stars rotate about the unique brilliance of Bright, worshiping the God of the Universe as all cheela do,” one of them said. “Your picture would have the stars standing still, when we all know that only Bright, the center of the universe, stands still, while all else must revolve.”

Knowing she was treading on unstable crust, Sky-Seeker did not bother to reply, although she knew as well as the others, that Bright did not really stand still but moved in a tiny circle about an invisible point in the sky. This lack of perfection of Bright had been a nagging splinter in the tread of the philosophers of theology since it was first discovered by the use of the astrologer sticks. The High Priest had assured them that they would understand this in time, but it had been a long time and a dozen High Priests had come and gone and Bright still carried out the tiny motion, without bothering to explain.

The Chief Astrologer had been wrong. The variable motion of Bright’s Messenger across the sky did not
doom the science of astrology. Indeed, by adding some complexity to the sky it gave the astrologers much more to work with than a single set of memorized numbers that gave the relative position of the stars in the sky. Soon, the old technique of casting horoscopes by the star that was appearing over the horizon at the propitious time became obsolete. The position of Bright’s Messenger among the fixed positions of the rest of the stars became the dominant factor in predicting the future.

It soon became evident that the technique of memorizing the numbers taken with the astrologer sticks was not going to work. Even the best memories of the novices could not cope with the flood of numbers that Bright’s Messenger produced every turn. The ancient accounting technique of the business merchants, who monitored their inventory with pod seeds in bins, was adapted by the astrologers. After an awkward time of trying to work directly with seeds, one of the novices discovered the device of scratching pictures of seeds on flat plates of rock, then shortly after that, because of the hardness of the rock and the laziness of the novices, a shorthand written number system was invented. Not only astrology, but business and science were soon revolutionized by the discovery of written numbers. Then, shortly after having gotten used to writing numbers on a tablet, the merchant scribes (as lazy as the astrologer scribes) found that they didn’t have to draw a complete picture of the object that was being counted for an inventory or delivery record, but only enough so that another scribe (presumably equally loath to make complete drawings) would be able to recognize what it was.

Thus, although none of the High Priests ever realized it, the cheela were soon using the gift that Bright had sent by its Messenger—the gift of writing.

For greats of greats of turns, the life of the cheela was smooth. Bright kept watch over Heaven and blessed the cheela in their growth and in their conquests of the north and east. Small, savage bands of leathery-skinned barbarians would often leave their smoky lands to the north and attempt raids on the croplands in the northern part of Heaven, but the cheela farmers in the north were well protected by roving squads of needle troopers.

The needle troopers carried the dreaded weapon, the dragon tooth. A very long needle of melted dragon crystal, it was made by the forgers, who used fires of dried pod seeds blown to a blue white heat with bellows from Flow Slow skin to melt otherwise useless pieces of dragon crystal until they had a liquid melt. The glowing melt was poured into a groove cut into the crust along the easy direction. The long fibrous strings in the liquid became aligned by the strong magnetic field of the star. The liquid then recrystallized about the fibers, forming a two-component matrix material that was as strong as the original dragon crystal, except that now it was longer than any dragon crystal had ever been. A cheela trooper could envelop the blunt end of the needle and get enough leverage so he or she could extend the light, strong needle of crystal out a full body diameter without letting the point either touch the crust or rise too high in the air.

The barbarians, not having the secrets of the forge, were limited to broken shards of dragon crystal for their weapons and were no match for a well-trained squad of needle troopers, who moved in disciplined circles, their dragon tooth needles bristling across the tops of their interlocked Flow Slow plate shields.

Commander Carole Swenson was floating above the console, watching over Pierre’s shoulder as the outward-going asteroid met the first of the compensator masses still waiting far out in the asteroid belt. In the same manner as it had dropped the deorbiter mass toward the neutron star, the large asteroid overtook the first of the smaller masses and dropped it inward toward the star. It then went on to the next one. After watching the first two, Carole went back to the bridge. Nothing was more boring than the inevitability of the Newtonian law of gravitational attraction.

One after another, the six glowing compensator masses were dropped from their far-flung orbits to a spot near St. George, where they were met by the deorbiter mass, which stopped them in their tracks and left them dancing randomly about each other in a 100,000-kilometer circular orbit not too far from St. George. Their huge bulk dwarfed the long, thin mother ship, and the heat generated during their formation made them glow like new stars in the black sky.