Dragon's Egg (17 page)

“It must have been wonderful to have been so important, Old One Loud-Talker,” Pink-Eyes said. “Why did you stop being Leader?”

“Well,” Loud-Talker rumbled in wry humor, “I didn’t really stop. It was just that someone bigger and stronger wanted to be Leader, and after discussing it with him for a while, I decided that I didn’t want to be Leader of the Combined Clans any longer.” He unconsciously formed a tendril and brushed it over a scar on his hide as he went on. “Besides, I was getting tired of being Leader. More and more I wanted to come and tend eggs and play with you hatchlings and tell you stories and do nothing else until I flow.” Loud-Talker flared his protective mantle and brushed it over the feverish body of the eager little pale one while Pink-Eyes reflexively shrank to minimum area and reveled in the cool caress.

Abdul Nkomi Farouk’s nimble brain woke up softly, ready for anything. He slowly opened his eyes and grinned inwardly at the sight of his brown arms floating aimlessly in front of him. He was awake, but they were still asleep.

“Get busy arms!” he thought to them. “You have a lot of button pushing to do today if we are ever going to get that neutron star mapped.”

However, the first thing that the arms did was their now automatic twist and curl of the tips of Abdul’s fierce black moustache. Abdul’s eyes watched the arms in amusement. He then gave them his first direct command. Instantly his body dropped from its dreamlike trance and became one with his mind. He unsealed the sleeping cocoon and pushed off to the head.

It was nearly time for Pink-Eyes to leave the hatchling pen when Loud-Talker died. Loud-Talker was in the
midst of his favorite activity; telling stories to the hatchlings. He was recounting the tale of the time he had led the forces of the Combined Clans in a punitive raid to drive back the barbarians in the north. He was just getting to the good part, where he personally hacked up a dozen barbarians at one time (the number of barbarians seemed to increase with each telling), when a fluid pump to his brain-knot failed. The constant muscular tension in his skin relaxed, and his body spread into a large, limp circle that flowed out and in between the hatchlings.

Pink-Eyes was shocked. This was not the first Old One that he had seen die, but the loss of his special friend and mentor was a great blow. He stayed rooted to the spot, not even moving when the butchering crew came to get the body. He was still there when the hatchlings returned from watching Loud-Talker converted into meat for the food bins.

While the others were busy eating, Pink-Eyes wandered out the opening of the hatchling pen and went slowly off to climb a small mound just outside the clan camp.

As a leader of a clan that inhabited the eastern border of Bright’s Empire, Sharp-Slicer always kept half her tread listening to the constant murmurs in the crust. Her clan was subject to many attacks by the barbarians, and although she had good warriors out on watch duty, she never relaxed. She paused now as something unusual rippled through the crust under her tread. It was very faint, and very high-pitched. It was not a sentry alarm, but it definitely didn’t sound like the usual busy noises of the clan camp.

The strange ripple sounded like a voice from a hatchling pen, but her trained directional senses placed it well outside the camp boundaries. She moved to the edge of the camp where the high-pitched ripple now
came more clearly. She then saw the source, a faint pale spot on top of a nearby rise. Sharp-Slicer moved toward it; as she got closer, she realized that the pale spot was the Bright’s Afflicted hatchling, Pink-Something-or-Other.

She was annoyed that the hatchling had been allowed to wander off this far from the camp, but then again, there had been some confusion at the hatchling pen when Loud-Talker had flowed. Besides, the hatchling was probably old enough by now to be given some work, although Sharp-Slicer had a hard time thinking of what such a small, poorly-sighted one could do.

As Sharp-Slicer approached the base of the rise, she could hear the high-pitched voice through the crust. She was surprised at how well the tiny ripples seemed to travel. She stopped to listen.

“O Bright One in the sky. Why do you punish me so, for I have done nothing wrong. I have always worshiped you as I should,” Pink-Eyes said. “You have inflicted this miserable pale body upon me—and now you have taken my only friend. Why? Oh why?”

Sharp-Slicer was a little bewildered that the youngster seemed so attached to the Old One. She had respected Loud-Talker herself. After all, anyone would respect an ex-Leader of the Combined Clans. But he was meat now—there was nothing left to respect. She supposed that this unseemly sorrow over a hunk of meat was just one of the many strange things that was wrong with the poor youngster. She rumbled a call in his direction.

“You—come down at once, and return to the compound!” she said. “You know there are barbarians not far away.”

Pink-Eyes was startled at the voice booming through the crust, for his eyes had been busy trying to make out the blur that was all he could see of Bright, and he had not noticed the Clan Leader’s approach. He was
awed at being addressed personally by the Leader of the Clan, and quickly flowed down the hill and started back to the camp, but a command from Sharp-Slicer brought him to a stop.

“Wait!” Sharp-Slicer said. “Since you now feel that you can just wander out of the hatchling pen whenever you want to, perhaps you are too big for the hatchery. What is your name and age, youngster?”

“My name is Pink-Eyes and I have aged a dozen greats of turns, O Leader of the Clan,” Pink-Eyes responded respectfully.

Sharp-Slicer flowed over and looked at him closely. He was small, much too small for training as a warrior or hunter, and even too small for tending crops. She was going to have a hard time finding something useful for this one to do. She finally had an idea.

“You are to go to the clan astrologer and tell him that the Leader of the Clan said that you are to train to be an apprentice astrologer,” she ordered.

Pink-Eyes was delighted that he had finally been given something useful to do, and immediately flowed off toward the astrologers’ compound.

Sharp-Slicer watched the eager youngster flow off, and then returned to more important business, having never connected the pale youngster with the pale egg that she had left at the egg-pen so long ago.

Cesar was busy at the science experiments console. Now that they had settled in over the east magnetic pole, it was time to start the survey instruments. The IR and UV scanners were busy, and the high resolution visible camera was taking shot after shot of small regions in the mountainous territory in the east pole region. Even the neutrino and gravitational radiation detectors were operational on the possibility that a crustquake might
occur, although the chances of that happening were not high.

Cesar now readied the laser radar mapper. He first set it in the short pulse mode to get the best resolution on the mountains directly below Dragon Slayer. He checked over the laser parameters as they appeared on the screen.

Satisfied with the setup, Cesar leaned forward. “Proceed with laser radar mapper scan!” he said. “Circular scan from sub-surface point out to five kilometers radius!”

Cesar watched as the screen blanked and the image of Dragon’s Egg appeared on the screen. He then saw a track of tiny little circles, each one representing a spot where the laser radar had reflected its beam off the crust of the neutron star, slowly winding its way outward in an ever expanding spiral.

“The spiral scan will take about eight minutes,” he murmured to himself. He watched for a few seconds and then his fingers flickered over the keyboard as he moved on to set up the next experiment.

“I don’t want to complain, but I don’t want him around,” the clan astrologer complained to Sharp-Slicer. “When you first sent Pink-Eyes to apprentice with me, I was willing to give him a try, even if he does look strange. He was eager, and tried very hard, but when we found out that his eyes are so poor that Bright and
the Eyes are only blurs, and that he cannot even see most of the other stars in the sky, it was obvious that he could never be an astrologer. If you cannot see the stars, then how can you make astrological predictions?

“Despite that,” the clan astrologer went on, “I did find him useful in helping me with the worship services. His voice is high, but the ripples carry well. I use him for all the chants, and have him take care of the worship symbols. But now, I am afraid that I will have to get rid of him. He’s blasphemous.”

“What!” exclaimed Sharp-Slicer.

“Yes,” the clan astrologer said. “For a long time, as an apprentice, he kept saying that the Inner Eye of Bright was flashing on and off. We finally convinced him that it was just his poor eyesight tricking him, but recently he has been saying that every dozen turns or so, the flashes get brighter and brighter, and then fade away again. The last time occurred a few turns ago. He even dragged me up to the top of his silly hill and kept saying to me, ‘Look at them! Look at those brilliant flashes! Are you blind, Old One!’

“I don’t mind being called an Old One, for it is not long before I will get to play with the hatchlings,” the clan astrologer went on. “But to be called blind by that nearly sightless freak is more than I can stand. Besides, he is going around telling everyone that Bright’s Inner Eye is signaling to him—him alone!”

Sharp-Slicer looked at the seven points of light hanging nearly motionless over the east pole. She did not often look at the sky, as she was too preoccupied with running the clan here on the crust. However, if there had been bright flashes from the Inner Eye, she certainly would have noticed them. She normally did not pay much attention to religion, but, as Leader of the Clan, she was automatically Chief Worshiper of Bright at holy times, and it wouldn’t do to let things be disrupted by an obviously deranged individual.

“I guess the Bright’s Afflicted has other problems besides paleness and poor eye sight,” she said. “However, times are good, so we will just let him get by without having to do any work.”

Pink-Eyes was not happy with his new status. He felt worthless, and spent most of his time off away from the clan camp, gazing at the blurry shapes of Bright and the Eyes, talking to the spots of light and himself, and dreaming that he was Leader of the Combined Clans, speaking to the multitudes that gathered around him to hear his words of wisdom.

The console screen flashed, and Cesar looked up. Across the top of the screen appeared the words:

Cesar struck a few keys and the IR image that he had been examining disappeared and was replaced with the command setup for the laser radar mapping experiment.

For the next segment of the scan, the laser beam would be shooting obliquely across the curved surface of Dragon’s Egg, and the equipment could now obtain both high resolution height and surface position information if it were set up to use a chirped pulse. Soon the laser was chirping in frequency from the visible up to the ultraviolet region, while the pulse repetition rate was lowered to 100,000 pulses per second.

Cesar set up the laser mapper to scan a one radian sector, starting from the edge of the five-kilometer circle that he had already mapped and extending out for another five kilometers—well over the curve of Dragon’s Egg. He then watched as the sector scan
started, the narrow fan beam taking about one second per sweep as it slowly crept outward toward the west.

Pink-Eyes made his way up the slight rise just outside the clan camp. He had been so sure that Bright had been talking to him through Bright’s Inner Eye, but no one would believe him.

“Yet—it was so bright!” Pink-Eyes said to himself. “Such dazzling, brilliant flashes of pure light. It was Bright incarnate! Yet Bright would not let them see! Why? Why?? Why???”

Pink-Eyes rested once again on the low rise. Using the prayers and chants that he had so faithfully rippled into the crust every worship time, he again sought comfort from one who seemed to have inflicted nearly every indignity upon him—except death.

Pink-Eyes felt his small sharp knife in his personal weapons pouch, and drew it out. He looked at it for a long while, considering … He dropped the knife to the crust, where it lay, its tiny point shattered by the fall.

Pink-Eyes knew that his clan would not allow him to starve, even though they refused to let him share in the work, but he resolved never to return. Without looking back, he set forth toward the east, directly into the wilderness—the territory of the barbarians. The sentry guards, used to the wanderings of this strange pale one of the clan, let him pass outward without challenge.

Pink-Eyes had no plan. Having been rejected by the clan, his only thought was to leave. He knew he was in danger from the barbarians, but the thought of meeting death at the points of their spears held no terror for him. He traveled onward, drawn toward the pattern of lights over the east pole that slowly rotated, once a turn.

Pink-Eyes found some partially ripe pods on an isolated wild plant, and was slowly savoring the first food he had had in many turns when he stopped, struck with awe. The Inner Eye had sent out a brilliant, long-lasting, multicolored beam of light down ahead of him. The beam was unlike the others that he had seen previously. Those had been short flashes of light, so fast and so intense that there was no color to them. These were like silent words of rolling crustquakes. They started in the deep red and slowly—taking their time—swept through strange colors into a radiating brilliance. Pink-Eyes waited, and shortly was rewarded by another dazzling display. As if in a trance, he put the pods into a storage pouch and moved off toward the beam of light. It came again and again, and soon he began to depend upon its regularity.