Dragon's Egg

by Robert L. Forward

  For many, many turns the hunting party moved along, the sky overhead still smoky. Finally, Shaking-Crust remarked during a pod break, “I think that the smoke is even worse here than back at home.”

  They could not all agree then, but after a few more turns of travel it was very obvious to all of them that conditions were worse here. The smoke filled the sky, and the crust was covered with sickly red-yellow ash that chilled their treads as they flowed over it. There was some talk of going back, but Blue-Flow would have none of that. This was his first trial as a leader of a hunting party and he would not come back with pods still pouched in his body.

  Blue-Flow drove them on, always moving in the hard direction. The difficult grind of pushing ahead, with the poor grip that the ashes gave to their treads, took all the fun out of the expedition. But something else was happening that added to their discomfort—they were becoming lost!

  It was not for many turns that one of them mentioned what they had all been feeling. “This land bothers me,” said Final-Pod. “I feel that I am lost all the time. Yet I know right where I am. I can see the cliff over there that we passed a few turns ago, so logically I know that I could make my way right back to the clan with no problem, just by going in the hard direction in the opposite way we have been going—but I still feel lost.”

  They all agreed. Logically they knew they were not lost—but they definitely felt as if they were.

  “Let us move on,” Blue-Flow said, pushing off again. But the further they went, the worse they felt and the darker the sky became. Then the pods began to run low.

  At the next break Shaking-Crust spoke up for all of them, “I think we should turn back, Blue-Flow. The land and the sky just get worse and worse the further we go. Perhaps the instructions of the ancient Aged Ones are no longer correct.”

  Blue-Flow countered, “If we tell the clan to go back in the direction that we came from, they will just get closer to the volcano. If we have them go east or west, we know they will run into the other clans that are fleeing the volcano. If they stay where they are, the smoke will kill the petal plants and we will all starve. Our only hope is in this direction. We must keep going as long as we can.”

  Shaking-Crust said, “You may go on if you like. I’m going back.”

  Blue-Flow had been expecting something like this for a long time and was ready for it, but he had never expected rebellion from his favorite playmate. Without warning, he was on top of her, drubbing her brain-knot soundly with his tread and knocking her out before she had a chance to move. Still on top of the unconscious body, he whispered, “Does anyone else want to challenge me?”

  No one moved as he flowed off Shaking-Crust, who was starting to recover from her sonically induced shock. As her senses cleared, she heard Blue-Flow talking.

  “I don’t think you realize how serious things are. The volcano is poisoning all the Crust that it can reach. The only hope for the clan is for us to find a place where we can survive. If we do not, the clan will die, the hatchlings first.” This last was a telling blow. For although the cheela were not attached to a specific hatchling, and no female could even remember which egg she had put into the hatchery unless it had some distinctive marking, they were all very attached to the little hatchlings, who lived a spoiled life until they were old enough to go to work. The thought of hatchlings dying was enough to eliminate any thought of quitting.

  Many turns later Blue-Flow was really worried. They were way past their food supply limit. It would be a weak and thin party of cheela that came back to the clan—if they made it back. The feeling of being lost had become worse. At the next break he was almost ready to quit. But first he decided to have a better look ahead. He took the longest dragon crystal spear that they had and poked its sharp end down into the crust. It stood far up into the sky, many times higher than he could ever lift an eye on one of his own flimsy eye-stubs. When the others saw what he was doing, they gathered in a circle around him and applied pressure on his edges. He formed a thick pseudopod with one of his eye-stubs at the end and flowed it up along the shaft of the dragon crystal spear until his eye was perched on top of the spear. The sky looked smoky right to the horizon …

  “I see a star!” he shouted, and his pseudopod flowed back down so quickly that they were all rippled by the energy regained from its fall. “The sky is still smoky, but it must be thinner because I can see a star through it. The star was right on the horizon.”

  Shaking-Crust insisted on seeing it, too; after much effort, she soon had one eye perched on top of the spear. The star was almost exactly in the hard direction, and right on the horizon. Shaking-Crust was almost positive that it was brighter than any star she had ever seen, but without any other stars visible to compare it with, she was not sure.

  Great-Crack and some of the others wanted a look too, but Blue-Flow stopped the sight-seeing. “It takes as much energy to put an eye on top of the spear as it does to travel a few turns where we can all see it from eye level. Let’s get moving!”

  With something to aim for, spirit returned to the column; for the first time in many turns, they made good time over the ashen land. Soon the star appeared above the horizon, and as it did, the feeling of being lost began to decrease. By silent agreement, the rest breaks were short and they pushed on.

  Soon Blue-Flow noticed that there were short breaks in the intense cover of smoke. After a few more turns of travel, the ashes on the crust stopped being a hindrance to travel. Soon other stars were visible, strange ones that they had never seen before. But the strangest one of all was the intensely bright reddish yellow one that hung motionless in the southern sky from turn to turn, while all the others whirled about it like a cloud of minor deities paying homage to a god.

  It was an awe-inspiring experience for them all as they moved forward out of the smoky hell in back of them into a new land, free from smoke and ash, and with untouched petal plants growing in delicious profusion all about them. There were plenty of game signs, and soon they were all enjoying the meat of a Slink, interspersed with delicious, perfectly ripe pods.

  “There are plenty of game signs, but no sign of a single other cheela,” said Shaking-Crust. “The game was not particularly afraid of us. It is as if they had never been hunted before.”

  “This place sounds like an Old One’s stories of heaven,” Great-Crack said.

  “I guess we should call it Heaven,” Blue-Flow agreed. “Bright’s Heaven. For Bright, the God Star, rules over it all, and its bright glare keeps the smoke from coming over the horizon. Let us load up with food and head back over the ‘lost’ region to tell the clan the good news. We have been gone so long, they probably think we are dead.”

  TIME: 16:45:34 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

  Pierre turned from the display on his console and called over to Jean, who was operating the Lyman-alpha telescope at another console. “I was trying to think if the weather would be any different on Earth if the magnetic field of the Earth were east-west instead of nearly north-south.”

  “No,” Jean said. “The Earth’s magnetic field is too weak to affect the atmosphere on Earth as it does here.”

  Pierre laughed, and Jean looked at him quizzically. “I just realized that the only real effect of an east-west magnetic field on Earth would be on homing pigeons. Homing pigeons use a combination of the earth’s north-south magnetic field and the east-west Coriolis spin forces for homing. They would feel completely lost if the magnetic field lines and the Coriolis force lines were in the same direction—as they are along the spin equator here. That would be even worse than the fact that the directional sense of a homing pigeon gets turned around when the pigeon is released in the southern hemisphere after being trained in the northern hemisphere.”

  Pierre turned back and spoke at the console:

  “Store that sequence!

  “Continue monitoring volcanic lava flow pattern on Priority Two basis!”

  He turned to Jean, “Well, the main console is all yours. I’m going t
o get some food, write a little, then head for bed. See you next shift.”

  Jean pulled herself into the main console seat, quickly checked all the settings, and carefully buckled herself in. “What are you writing now?”

  Pierre stopped himself at the hole in the deck and replied, “It’s a physics text for the ten-to-fourteen age bracket. According to the communication flashes from the publisher, I made such a hit writing scan-books about science and space for the eight-to-twelve age group on the way out to Dragon’s Egg that I actually have fan clubs. Do you realize that when I get back from this trip two years from now I am going to be getting more in royalties from children’s books than I will in salary for being a space scientist?”

  “Well, none of us are jealous—much!” Jean said. “We all realize that every kid you make enthusiastic about space science is going to be a voting taxpayer after we return, and we should come back to Dragon’s Egg with a follow-up expedition before it leaves the Solar System.”

  “I’m sure the World Space Administration agrees with you. They even gave my publisher a special rate on the cost of transmitting my manuscripts back.” He turned and pushed himself down the passageway.

  TIME: 16:45:35 GMT SUNDAY 22 MAY 2050

  Great-Crack was a pack rat. Although one of the better hunters in the clan, with two Flow Slow kills to her credit, she was the constant butt of jokes from her hunting mates because of her habit of picking up and carrying anything she found that looked interesting—and because of her highly developed sense of curiosity, practically everything looked interesting to her.

  When it came time for the hunting party to load up with ripe pods for the long journey back to the clan, Great-Crack had to unpouch her trinkets so she could load up her pouches with pods. She went over to a shallow depression in the crust; amid ribald calls of “What are you doing? Laying three eggs at once?”, followed by “No, just one, but it’s the size of a Flow Slow!”, she dumped her precious pile of odds and ends, with the heavier ones around the pile in a low wall that she hoped would protect them from the constant winds. With luck, she would be able to pick them up again when they returned with the clan.

  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 ha
lf. 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.