Dragon's Egg

by Robert L. Forward

  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.

  “Blue-Flow will need these pods to travel to Bright’s Heaven,” she said as she gathered the pods up again and put them in another pile.

  Great-Crack soon had pile after pile of pods stacked inside and outside the pod bin as she set aside rations for each of the clan members. She was only halfway through the names of the clan members when she ran out of pods. There was not enough food!

  Great-Crack hurried off and brought Blue-Flow back to the pod bin to explain what she had done. She got nowhere.

  “Yes, I see the piles of pods, but how do you know that each person will need that many?

  “Yes, I see that when you line up the pods next to the seeds that the line of pods is as long as the line of seeds, but what do seeds have to do with pods?

  “Yes, I understand that you saved one seed from each pod as you ate it on the way back from Bright’s Heaven, but what does that have to do with feeding the clan? You ate all those pods and there is nothing left but these deformed seeds.

  “No, I don’t understand what you mean when you say that the seeds tell you how many pods each one of us will need. Seeds are not pods.”

  Great-Crack tried in many ways to get Blue-Flow to make the jump in abstract thought that now came so naturally to her, but he could not do it. Finally, in frustration, he lost his temper and stamped, “There are plenty of pods. Look at them all. We will go now, for Bright’s Heaven is waiting.”

  Great-Crack flowed to block his way. “We cannot go!” she said, “We will starve before we get there! The seeds tell the truth!”

  “Seeds are not pods,” he retorted, “and I have been meaning to tromp you for keeping those seeds after I told you to leave them on the trail.”

  Her reply brought him up short. “Who is Leader of the Clan, Old One?”

  She moved toward him while he backed out of the pod bin. “No use endangering the pods,” he thought. “We are both in good shape and this is going to be a long fight. I wonder why she is challenging me now?”

  The clan gathered around them as they moved together into a clear place between the stockades. Blue-Flow watched with a combination of fear and amusement as his opponent emptied her pouches of tools and trinkets, formed a dueling manipulator, and raised her spear.

  �
��Blue-Flow is in good shape,” Great-Crack thought as she made a neat pile of her precious “unusual things.” “I will need every advantage I can get to beat him. However, he must not be allowed to win—for he will lead the clan into sure starvation!”

  She finally turned, raised her spear and repeated her challenge, “Who is Leader of the Clan, Old One?” She paused—then punctuated the challenge by ejecting her half-formed egg sac from the protection of her body onto the crust between them. The clan looked in shock at the precious, tiny eggling wriggling out the last of its life among the glowing remains of its ruptured egg-sac.

  Blue-Flow alternated his horrified eyes between the cooling eggling and the stern visage of Great-Crack. “She is really determined to win. Could it be that she is right, and there are not enough pods?” He shifted his spear. “No matter—things have gone too far to stop now.”

  Blue-Flow returned the formal reply, “I am—Hatchling!” He lunged at her.

  It was not a pretty fight. Both were encumbered by the rule that they had to maintain control of their spears to keep from automatically losing, but were not allowed to use the points for cutting until the final ceremonial slash of the loser by the winner. They wallowed, struck at each other’s eye-stubs with the sides of their spears, trod one another’s edges, tried to wrest the spear from the other’s grasp, and slapped each other with muscular pseudopods in an attempt to deliver a knockout shock to the brain-knot.

  The usually fluidless battle for Leadership ended in a shocking way when Great-Crack found Blue-Flow’s spear pointing in an opportune direction and deliberately impaled herself on it, taking it into her body. No longer in control of his spear, Blue-Flow had lost. He shook the glowing gout of Great-Crack’s fluid off his dueling manipulator onto the crust as she repeated her challenge. “Who is Leader of the Clan, Old One?”

  “You are, Great-Crack,” Blue-Flow replied.

  Great-Crack maneuvered her body and Blue-Flow watched, horrified, as his sharp spear broke out of the rapidly healing wound in Great-Crack’s side. The spear reached over to his surface and gave him the ceremonial cut, the fluids from the two bodies mixing together as they dripped off the spear point onto the crust.

  Although she had suffered a significant wound, the injury would only slow an excellent fighter like Great-Crack, and when she repeated the challenge, no one had the courage to reply.

  Great-Crack then told the gathered clan, “We will go to Bright’s Heaven, but not now. We do not have enough food to survive the trek across the bad lands between here and Bright’s Heaven. We must grow more pods. Go back to the fields and plant many more seeds. We will go after the next harvest.”

  The clan turned to their work, their disappointment at the delay in reaching Bright’s Heaven countered by their natural reluctance to leave their home. Within a few turns, Great-Crack had mended, and she spent the time making sure not only that the clan planted enough seeds, but that she wouldn’t lose the services of Blue-Flow, one of the best warriors of the clan. At every opportunity she patted and teased him. In a few turns, he got over his sulk at losing, gave in to the teasing, and they enjoyed a romp together. Soon she felt a new egg growing inside her to replace the one she had sacrificed.

  Great-Crack planted a few of the funny cluster seeds in one spot and watched the plants with interest, but to her great disappointment the plants, pods, and seeds inside were just like the plants grown from the oval seeds from Bright’s Heaven. She could never figure out why.

  While the crops grew, Great-Crack played with mathematics. In the same manner as she had learned to identify pods with seeds, she now had a collection of pebbles, one for each member of the clan.

  With the new crop coming in, a new pod bin had to be constructed. Great-Crack decided that it was about time to check to see if there were enough pods for the clan. She did not look forward to hauling all those pods out of the bins, lining them up against the collection of seeds that she had accumulated on her trek back from Bright’s Heaven, then putting them in stacks, and back into the bins again.

  Then she made another conceptual breakthrough.

  “Why do I have to move pods around?” she thought. “I can make a collection of seeds, one for each pod in the bin. Once that is done, then it is much easier to move seeds than pods.”

  Soon the pod bin had a smaller bin outside the opening containing a pile of seeds, one for each pod in the bin. Monitoring the bin was the cheek’s first accountant, an Old One assigned to the task of adding a seed to the seed bin for each pod put into the pod bin, and taking one seed out for every pod eaten.

  As the harvest proceeded, even the number of seeds grew to overflow their bin. Great-Crack looked at the seed bin and was both pleased and appalled at the number. Now that she had learned to use her mathematics to make her job easy, she kept trying to think of other ways to make it even easier. She mused as she pushed the seeds around in stacks. She then noticed that since the seeds were long ovals, they had a tendency to form into clumps. She found that if she arranged them so that their sides just touched, they formed a pretty cluster. Although there were too many to count, there was always the same number if they were all pushed together so that all the sides just touched. It was a pretty pattern, just like the cluster pattern of the bottom seed of the pods from Bright’s Heaven. She put one of the cluster seeds next to the collection of seeds. They looked identical. Then the now familiar habit of isomorphic identification struck again.

  “If a cluster seed looks like this small clump of seeds,” she wondered, “why don’t I just save a stack of cluster seeds, each one representing a whole clump of oval seeds?”

  Soon she had the seed bin replaced with a smaller one containing a large number of cluster seeds and a few odd oval seeds left over. That bothered her a little, having some pods represented by cluster seeds and some by oval seeds, but it helped that the cluster seeds were a little bigger than the oval ones. Her real problem came with her accountant, who didn’t understand at all.

  “The old way was very simple, Great-Crack,” the Old One said. “One seed in the seed bin for one pod in the pod bin. But this does not make sense. How can one seed, even a cluster seed, mean many pods?”

  Great-Crack tried hard to explain, and ran into the phenomenon that is often encountered by one trying to teach someone something—the teacher often learns something new herself. Great-Crack learned to count past three.

  “Now look, Old One, I will go through it carefully. Here is one pod, and one oval seed. Here is another pod next to the first pod, and another oval seed next to the first seed. That’s two—and now three.” Great-Crack moved the third pod and seed into place, then reached for another set.

  “Now this many is …” Great-Crack fumbled for the nonexistent word. “… the same number of ways that you can travel: east, west, and the two hard directions.” She continued adding sets. “And this many is the same as the number of fangs on a Swift. And this many is the number of petals in a petal plant …”

  She went on. “And this …” she said as she completed the pattern, “is the number of bumps on the cluster seed. It is as many as your eyes.”

  The accountant dipped each of his dozen eyes, one after the other, as he carefully touched each of the seeds in turn with a delicate tendril. “So it is,” he said, “That will make it easy to count them.”

  The lesson really didn’t sink in the first time, but after many repetitions even the accountant was using one, two, three, travel, swift, petal … all the way up to a dozen, as if he had learned it as a hatchling. But soon even that did not suffice, for there were so many pods from the harvest that Great-Crack had to invent the name “great” for a dozen dozen of pods. The accountant was very satisfied with her choice of word, for it obviously represented a “great” number of objects.

  With the accountant’s help, Great-Crack checked the results of the harvest. First the pebbles, one for each member of the clan, were placed in a column, then across the bottom were placed cluster
seeds, only now the unique collection of cluster seeds that Great-Crack had accumulated during her trip back (and which measured the distance to Bright’s Heaven in terms of pods) had been replaced by a concept—a number—a petal worth of cluster seeds plus a swift of oval ones.

  The forecast was not good. As the cluster seeds grew out from each pebble, Great-Crack came to the end of the seeds before she came to the last of the pebbles. Great-Crack felt once again the frustration of being Leader of the Clan. The volcano had become more active and the sky grew steadily worse. With their vision of the sky clouded, the crops grew poorly and the harvests were meager. Their neighbors to the east and west were hungry and restless and there had been many more attacks on the fields of the clan. They must go. But there were not enough pods.

  Great-Crack stared at the diagram in front of her. Although the pebbles and seeds were far removed from hungry bodies and nourishing pods, they still foretold of great anguish for all.

  “I can strip the unripe pods from the plants before we leave, and they will get ripe enough to eat after a few turns,” she thought. “There are usually about two nearly ripe pods per plant.” She flowed over to her stockade, where she kept a pile of seeds that represented the number of plants in the fields. She soon returned with a collection of seeds that represented the unripe pods in the fields, but even when these were added to the diagram, there were not enough.

  “Dragon’s Fire!” she swore to herself. She shrank from making the obvious decision, arguing with herself, “But there are so many pods, surely there are enough for all to go.” But the diagram, empty at the top and end, stared at her with its cold logic.