Dragon's Egg (36 page)

“It is a big moment for them, too,” Helium-Two thought. “They have been studying and training for many turns, and this is the first time they will be able to see the theories they studied work.”

Everything was soon ready and Helium-Two signaled for the power to be applied. Super-Fluid could feel the vibrations from the great pumps as they started to move their massive loads of ultra-dense liquid. The fluid moved around in the pipes at a constantly increasing velocity. The acceleration supplied by the pumps was so great that the velocity of the dense fluid would begin to approach the speed of light in a millisecond. However, that would be more than time enough for the fast-living cheela to carry out a leisurely experiment.

Super-Fluid could almost visualize the Einstein gravity fields generated by the motion of the liquid and was not surprised to see the crust in the center of
the machine lift up and flow out from the center. Soon there was a great cavity almost a centimeter deep, as the Einstein fields took hold and started to nullify the neutron star’s 67-billion-gee gravitational field.

“So far it has all been Einstein antigravity fields,” Helium-Two whispered to him. “Very shortly the hyper-nonlinear portion of your theory should take over and we should get the contraction of the Einstein fields into a region at the center.”

They watched tensely as the crust started to flow back to fill in the depression—more slowly this time—while the whine of the pumps moved to higher and higher pitch. Soon the crust was nearly what it had been before, but now above the crust at the center of the machine was a distortion in the atmosphere.

“Why can we see the region?” Helium-Two asked. “It can’t be a distortion in space-time caused by strong gravity fields. The gravity is less there than it is here.”

“No,” Super-Fluid said, awed in spite of himself. “The explanation is much more pragmatic than that. The low-gravity region is visible because it doesn’t have any atmosphere. The atmosphere has all flowed to the outside edges. That is an oval-shaped chunk of outer space hanging in front of you, and what you are seeing is the difference in the index of refraction of vacuum and the atmosphere.”

“Now for the fun part,” Helium-Two said. “We are going to inject a small chunk of pure carbon into the zero gravity region and see what happens.”

Helium-Two turned to the crew and initiated the sequence of events. Super-Fluid watched as a short stubby cylinder started to rise up out of the crust right under the distortion. He could feel powerful hydraulic pumps complaining as the top of the cylinder started to approach the edge of the oval-shaped region.

“That last little bit of distance is going to take some
time,” Helium-Two said, as the hydraulic pumps labored under the strain. “Moving those few microns from our normal gravity to the zero gravity in the gravimotive-effect region is equivalent to going straight up off our neutron star into outer space. Not much distance to travel, but it takes a lot of energy. We are going to stop the cylinder just as it gets to the inner edge, and fire the carbon pellet from a gun built into the piston.”

The vibration of the hydraulic pumps finally stabilized and began to beat with the rising whine of the antigravity generator pumps that kept the distortion activated. Helium-Two turned a few of his eyes toward his engineers and his undertread rumbled an order through the crust: “Inject!”

Super-Fluid watched as a tiny speck rose from the center of the piston and floated to the center of the distortion, brightly illuminated by lights that flooded the central region with X-rays. As he watched, the speck grew, and by the time it had reached the center and hung there, it had grown to be almost as round as he was wide.

“Why doesn’t it fall out of the zero gravity region as the atmosphere did?” Super-Fluid asked.

Helium-Two replied, “Those X-ray lights are not just for illumination, they are also coupled to a servo control system. We use X-ray pressure to keep the carbon speck centered in the zero gravity region.”

“As it gets bigger, it gets harder to see,” Super-Fluid said, watching in awe and amazement as the tiny speck of degenerate crystalline carbon slowly came apart. Once the material had been released from the tremendous gravitational pressures exerted by the neutron star, the nuclear repulsive forces took over and the nuclei moved further and further apart. Now that there was space between the nuclei, the electrons, which had been packed into a superconductive fluid coursing
through the close-packed array of carbon nuclei, began to evaporate from the fluid to take up orbits around the nuclei, further isolating the nuclei from each other. Soon the tiny speck had grown a hundred times larger in each direction while its density dropped by a million.

“I can’t see it anymore,” Super-Fluid said.

“I can, and it’s beautiful,” Helium-Two said, waving one of his eyes after another. “At least with some of my eyes. I think I can fix things so we can both see it without having to move around.” He went to the servo control console and talked to the engineer there.

He returned. “I had the engineer set the servo control so that the crystal would rotate while staying in place.”

They both watched as the seemingly empty space suddenly sparkled into a brilliant flash of light—then winked off again.

“You wouldn’t think that something with a density of only a few grams per cubic centimeter would be visible at all—much less be so brilliant,” Helium-Two said.

“It is because the crystal structure reflects the X-rays when the atomic planes of the crystal are at just the right angle between one of the lights and one of our eyes,” Super-Fluid explained. “I have been watching the pattern carefully as it rotates. If I am not mistaken, that is a crystal with a cubic lattice structure. What did you say the seed material was?”

“Carbon,” Helium-Two said.

“I think that is what the humans call a diamond,” Super-Fluid said. “They were right—it is pretty.”

The chimes rang again and again, insistently. Pierre woke up grudgingly, his red-lined eyes peering at the numbers on the clock.

2030, the numbers indicated.

“I missed my shift!” Pierre exclaimed, slapping the release and running an index finger down the sealing seam of the sleeping sack. As his brain became more active, he realized that shifts no longer counted, but he still should be awake and helping.

“Six hours,” he groaned as he rubbed his face. “Six hours—and three-fourths of a millennium. I wonder what is going on?” He quickly bathed, and, still holding a food-stick, swung up the passageway to the back of the communications console.

Abdul looked up as he came in. “Glad to see you, Pierre,” he said in a concerned voice. “Did you get some sleep?”

“Yes,” Pierre replied. “Enough to keep me awake for the rest of my shift. Thanks for standing in for me.”

“No problem,” Abdul said. “It has been interesting watching the cheela civilization develop almost right in front of my eyes.”

“At what stage are the cheela now?” Pierre asked.

“They are beginning to pass us in all areas except molecular chemistry. But since they don’t even have molecules to experiment on, you can’t blame them for that. They tell us that they can almost predict the contents of the rest of the encyclopedia, but they insist that we send the entire text down for the sake of their historians and humanologists. We should be changing to the last encyclopedia crystal WAT to ZYZ shortly. Then you should erase the encyclopedia crystals and the cheela will start filling them up with information that they have learned on their own in the past day.”

“Good,” Pierre said. “Amalita and I can take it from here. You had better get some rest yourself.”

“I won’t take long,” Abdul said as he floated out the door. “This is too interesting to miss.”

Floating-Crystal returned from her vacation with mixed emotions. It had been a delightful vacation, eight long turns in the foothills at Swift’s Climb mountain resort. She had enjoyed every millisecond of it, even though she would never get used to the idea of looking down on things. She was reluctant to return to what everyone would admit was often the most boring job on the star, yet at the same time she felt eager to be back at work; while the job of Keeper of the Comm was boring at times, it was the most important position a cheela could aspire to (with the possible exception of the President of the United Clans).

Floating-Crystal was feeling good as she entered Sky Talk complex. She decided to take a shortcut. Rather than moving along the paths in the easy direction, and then crossing over at the superconducting tunnels, she flattened herself out and pushed her way in the hard direction across the park that separated the compounds in the complex. She could almost feel the magnetic field lines rippling across her top side as she pushed herself along, her tread gripping the textured surface. She flowed by the crumbling ruins of the gigabit receiving antenna that had been the pride and joy of her predecessors many generations ago, and went into the compound surrounding the huge transmitter array.

Her first thought was to check on the Comm display. As she flowed onto its large flat surface she could tell that the human—Amalita Shakhashiri Drake—was still in the middle of her sentence. At the bottom of the screen the computer had superimposed the words of the sentence. Those that Amalita had already spoken were in one taste and the computer prediction for the words in the rest of the sentence were in another taste. It was a long sentence, and full of the many redundancies
that humans found necessary to insert into their speech. It was the very predictability of the redundancies that made the job of Keeper of the Comm so boring.

Before Floating-Crystal had left on her vacation Amalita had spoken the words:

“Pierre has informed me that the Ho …”

Floating-Crystal did not need a computer to figure out that the next few phonemes were “…  loMem crystal …” and that the rest of the sentence was probably something about the holographic memory data storage crystal being full and that they should stop transmitting data up for a minute while Pierre put in a blank crystal.

When Amalita had gotten to “Holo …”, Floating-Crystal had decided it would be a good time for a long vacation and had taken off. On her return to the display, she was surprised to find that both she and the computer had misjudged the human. Amalita had progressed much further in her sentence than she had expected, although the general content was the same. The computer display of the spoken part now read:

“Pierre has informed me that the HoloMem’s full. Stop one min …”

“Good,” Floating-Crystal thought to herself. “The old array has been transmitting data up to the humans for generations. That minute will give us time to tear down the obsolete hunk of junk and build a decent one with computer-controlled phased-array beam steering.”

Floating-Crystal flowed off the display and went to the translation compound. Her three apprentices were busily scanning the human-language output of a computer generated translation of a text on cheela physiology. Although the computer did an excellent job of translation, there were many times that a straight human translation of a cheela sentence ended up distorted (or even bawdy) and it required an experienced
student of human culture to figure out how to restructure the human sentence to retain the original cheela intent. Clear-Thinker, the eldest apprentice, felt the vibrations from Floating-Crystal’s tread as she approached. He turned a few of his eyes toward her.

“Remind me in three or four dozen turns to find a good stopping point in the data stream,” Floating-Crystal instructed him. “It is time for the humans to change crystals.”

“This book on physiology that we are translating now is scheduled for transmission in about three dozen turns,” the apprentice replied. “It has a lot of pictures, so the number of bits is quite high, but it shouldn’t take too many turns to transmit—even at the slow bit rates that the human receivers can handle.”

“Good,” Floating-Crystal said. “Make the break at the end of the text.”

She then returned to the Comm display room and prepared her reply in front of the cameras. The computer stored her performance and then played it back for her review—first on the long, thin visual display that just showed her front edge and eyes, and then on the human-oriented rectangular taste display. The camera for that display looked down at her from an angle and showed her whole flat body with the ring of eyes around its periphery. She could see the bulge that was an egg near her middle and wondered idly whether it had been Clear-Thinker or Bit-Cruncher who had put it there. “Not that it really matters,” she thought to herself. “It looks as if it will be ready to leave with the Old Ones at the hatching pens pretty soon.”

“I still think the whole thing is slightly obscene,” she murmured as she examined her image in the human display. “Nobody but lovers, computers, and humans ever see the top side of me.”

She didn’t like her first performance and redid it a couple of times until the message was short, yet clear.
She then keyed the computer to transmit the message at human rates as soon as Amalita finished her sentence.

With a long break coming up, there was a lot to do. She contacted Comm Engineering and told them that they would soon be able to replace the aging antenna. They were delighted to be able to switch from maintenance to design and building. She could almost taste the eagerness in the Chief Engineer’s image as he flowed away to tell his crew.

She then called a meeting of the Comm Advisory Board. There had been some talk of a possible expedition to visit the humans, but because it would involve a good deal of direct communication, it had been put off until the next break in the data stream.

A dozen turns later the Advisory Board gathered. They listened to the gravitational engineers as they explained the latest test results on their gravity-control and inertia-drive experiments. The inertia drive was the propulsion mechanism that would allow them to leave their neutron star home, where the escape velocity was one-fourth the speed of light. However, the most dangerous part of travel off the surface of a neutron star was the explosive decompression of neutronic matter (including the neutronic matter of the space traveler!) when it was no longer kept compressed by the gravitational pressure supplied by the star. Now the engineers were sure that both problems had been solved.