Dragon's Egg

by Robert L. Forward

  The troop was still on full circle march alert, when she finally finished and resumed command.

  “Rest!” rolled the command through the crust, and the gleaming needles of the dragon teeth stopped in space, paused, then relaxed into a disarrayed, but still outward-facing circle.

  “Make camp!

  “Post Guards!

  “Squad Leaders Report!”

  The commands rippled out through the crust and the troop camp took on its normal life style as the subordinates interpreted the Commander’s orders, added a few of their own for local order and discipline, and then gathered near the mound of cooling bodies for a conference with their Troop Commander.

  “We are in no real hurry,” Swift-Killer announced to them. “And we have a long way to go in hostile territory without food storage depots. We will stop here long enough to dry the meat, then we will move on to the east.”

  The squad leaders were pleased with the Commander’s decision. The troopers had been on constant march for a dozen turns, and this break would not only give the more restless ones a few moments to relieve the pressure of their juices, but would also give the whole command a chance to revert to a seminormal life style, not to mention a welcome change in diet from the ever-present food pods.

  The squad leaders had no trouble in getting volunteers for butcher duty, and soon the whole pile of eight bodies was neatly drained, the muscular meat carefully sliced from the skin and the leathery skin stretched out as far as it would go in the easy direction. The ends were held down with the ample weight of a couple of otherwise useless novice astrologers, and left to dry for a turn on the glowing crust, until they were ready to rewrap the meat hunks that they had so recently enveloped.

  When the butchering crew came to the eggs, there was a lengthy pause. One of the troopers and the Trooper-Killer barbarian were found to have eggs in their egg cases. Unfortunately for the sensibilities of the butchering crew, the precious egglings were still alive in their leathery sacs.

  The news of the living egglings brought Swift-Killer to the scene at once. As much as she hated it, it was her duty to pass judgment. She looked carefully at the leathery egg-sacs, sliding each one in turn under the protection of a hatching mantle to feel the pulsating life form within.

  Unfortunately, the pulsations from the wee ones only confirmed what they all knew. Egg-sacs with that color had no chance of surviving without many more turns of protection and nourishment within their mother.

  Swift-Killer felt the terrible urge to lift the little eggling into her egg case—to give it the protection and nourishment that it needed. But she knew full well that within one turn, her normally protective egg case would have swollen into a bloated anger, and the vile juices that it would have exuded would have literally dissolved the egg sac and its precious cargo. As much as they all would have liked to have saved them, the egglings were doomed.

  Swift-Killer softly took the two quivering egg-sacs into a holding pouch and moved off. The butchering crew continued their work, while the rest of the expedition followed Swift-Killer to the other side of the camp.

  “Another nasty duty,” Swift-Killer complained. She drew out the flashing sword that she had so recently acquired.

  “If it has to be done, let it be done quickly,” she said. With two swift slices, she sacrificed the juices of the egglings to the all-absorbing crust of Egg, which glowed momentarily in response.

  The others returned to the camp, but Swift-Killer, who had had the duty, stayed on to punish herself. As she looked at the dead egglings, she was horrified at her inner thoughts.

  “That is a tender looking slice of meat,” her appetite said.

  “Not even a barbarian would eat an eggling!” she remonstrated. Shifting her attention from the immature egglings baking on the glowing crust, she flowed back into the camp to supervise the wrapping of the meat, for that would be the troop’s main source of food for many turns to come.

  TIME: 07:56:36 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

  After two dozen turns, the expedition began to approach the east pole. Every direction was now a hard direction for travel, and if it weren’t for the disciplined nature of the troopers, who were used to marching in close formation, the going would have been difficult. Fortunately, since there was no easy direction of travel, there was also no danger of rapid attack, and their guard could be relaxed. Swift-Killer changed the usual loose marching circle into a modified wedge. The troopers were placed in a sharp pointed chevron formation, with the front of the chevron thrusting steadily through the resistant atmosphere to force an opening. The remainder of the troopers kept the gap open, and the small group of scientist astrologers moved swiftly along at the trailing edge, moving easily into the gap created by the troopers.

  To break the monotony, the squads in the troop had been having a contest. Each squad would take a turn as path breaker and see how many treads they could keep up the pace before having to fall back and let the following squad have their turn. Each squad, of course, had to break the previous squad’s record, and when Swift-Killer began to notice that several troopers on the front line were beginning to surreptitiously drop equipment and food parcels from their pouches in order to keep up the pace, she decided to call a break before things got beyond control.

  “Cease March!” Swift-Killer’s voice rolled through the crust.

  An exhausted group of troopers halted their steady push and felt the hardness close in around them. Since all directions were hard going, no one wanted to move from his position, but Swift-Killer was pleased to see that the squad leaders kept after their troopers until they were dispersed in a rough circle, with a few individuals designated to keep one or two eyes on the horizon while they were eating.

  “They really must be tired,” Swift-Killer thought as she looked around. “No one has the energy to pair off for a little fun.”

  Having stayed at her normal position near the center of the troop, Swift-Killer had not had to participate in the exhausting procedure of breaking path, and so had not even begun to tax her great strength. So she was feeling fine and would have liked to have a little relaxation after eating; but a quick survey of her many lovers among the troop convinced her that she should let them rest.

  Swift-Killer wandered over to the clump of astrologers and approached Cliff-Watcher, who was busy tying knots in a tally string. On the crust beside him were three tread sticks.

  “Amazing, simply amazing,” Cliff-Watcher was murmuring to himself as he added knot after knot to the tally string.

  “What’s amazing?” Swift-Killer asked, curious as always, and confident enough in her position to ask questions of someone many turns her junior.

  “Egg is really shaped like an egg!” exclaimed Cliff-Watcher as a few of his eyes glanced away from the tally string and noticed her approach. He then saw the bewilderment in the jerky overtones of Swift-Killer’s normal eye-wave pattern and continued, “I have been keeping a count of the number of standard treads on our march with the tread sticks. The east pole is on a very flat place on Egg. It takes many, many treads of travel before there is a noticeable change in the horizon,” he said.

  Swift-Killer looked ahead along their direction of travel. She could see the east pole mountains just raising their tops over the horizon. It was true, the horizon had hardly changed for the last three turns.

  “Like an Egg?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the young astrologer said. “An egg-sac is flattened on the top and bottom because of the pull of gravity, and spreads out in the other directions. Our home, Egg, seems to be constructed the same way. Near the east and west poles it is very flat and you have to go a long way to see a change in the horizon. Halfway between the east and west pole, where Bright’s Heaven is, the horizon is very close in the east and west direction but many treads away in the hard direction.”

  Swift-Killer knew this elementary fact of the topography near Bright’s Heaven, but she had never connected it with the shape of Egg. However, neither she no
r Cliff-Watcher realized that Cliff-Watcher’s calculations had misled him. The star was spherical, not egg-shaped. It was his tread sticks that were distorted, giving him a false impression. Everything on the star—the tread sticks, the dragon crystal weapons and even the nuclei in their bodies—was distorted by the trillion-gauss magnetic field of the star so that they were many times longer along the magnetic field lines than across them. Since even their eyes participated in the general stretching, they couldn’t see the distortion; everything looked normal to them.

  Swift-Killer turned professional. “How many treads until we reach the east pole mountains?” she asked.

  Cliff-Watcher, who was proud of his advanced education in conceptual geometry, immediately went into a calculation trance, his practiced counting tendrils shooting forth from his body. The tendrils began to wave and interlace with each other at blinding speed. Finally he broke from the trance.

  “Two dozen standard marches,” he announced.

  Swift-Killer looked at the east pole mountains that loomed over the deceptively near horizon and announced, “Then I guess we had better get the troop moving.”

  Without shifting, she roared, “At Alert!” The troop smoothly reformed and continued their push to the east, the disruptive contest between squads forgotten.

  Cliff-Watcher had been right, it really was about two dozen standard marches to the east pole mountains, but since a standard march between breaks was impossible in this terrain, it really took much longer.

  “It is like constantly climbing a hill in the hard direction,” Swift-Killer complained to herself as she took a turn at the point of the chevron forcing its way into the hard direction.

  “I know,” said the trooper at her right. “Except you never end up on top.”

  Swift-Killer breasted another furry hillock in front of her. Each tiny little thread of crust was sticking up toward the sky in the easy direction. It looked impossible—the threads seemed to be laughing at the powerful gravity pull of Egg. But when Swift-Killer had to push over that tiny little thread, along with the myriad others that made up the fuzzy surface, she found they were powerfully strong. It took a great deal of strength just to move through the fuzz, knocking it down and pushing on over it. Then on top of it all, if the fuzz slowed her down too much, the hard direction closed in on her and made the going even worse.

  The troop finally reached the foothills of the east pole mountains without further incident. Swift-Killer looked with awe at the height of the mountains, then upwards at the Eyes of Bright, still hanging in the sky far above the mountains, defying the mighty pull of Egg.

  Swift-Killer put the camp on bivouac status. First, long-range sentries were put out at a good distance from the camp; then she allowed the troopers to put down their weapons. A file of troopers went into a virgin stand of crust-fuzz and stamped out a circular depressed region where the dragon teeth and the short swords were stacked to block out the constant winds. In the center, the remainder of the pods and dried meat was stored, while those who had been burdened with their weight during the long march became free again to frolic without care. Hunting parties were formed, with old and new couples taking off in small carefree groups to see what was off on the horizon. Now was an important time for Swift-Killer. She gathered the astrologers and began to set up her experiment. She first took the flat glancer mirror and set it on a mound of rubble at an angle until she could go off at a distance and see the Eyes of Bright reflected off the center of the mirror.

  “The Eyes of Bright are larger and closer, and they look a little brighter,” Cliff-Watcher remarked, as a few of his eyes scanned the cluster of seven lights in the sky.

  “I should hope so, after all the work we did to get here,” Swift-Killer said crankily as she struggled to scrape a notch for the curved expander in the fuzzy crust some distance away from the glancer.

  “I could never figure out why Bright chose to send his Eyes to the east pole, when we were in Bright’s Heaven,” Cliff-Watcher mused.

  “Perhaps Bright did not want to see us too well, because we are so wicked,” Swift-Killer said in annoyance. “Here, hold this while I sight through the pointing hole.”

  Swift-Killer had the large, curved expander standing vertically on the crust. It came up almost to the top of Cliff-Watcher as he moved over to surround it and hold it vertical. He was glad it had not been his job to keep that thing pouched during their travels.

  Cliff-Watcher flowed his body away from the center of the expander as Swift-Killer backed off and stared through the small hole in the plate. Swift-Killer moved her eye until she could see the center of the glancer through the hole. There, shining in the center of the flat mirror were the Eyes of Bright. Now she had to tilt the expander until the image of her eye off the flat backside of the expander was swallowed up in the hole that she was looking through; in that way she knew that the expander was pointing at the glancer, which in turn was pointing up at the Eyes of Bright.

  “Up a little,” she said. “Hold it!” She moved quickly and soon Cliff-Watcher’s place was taken by a cluster of pieces of crust.

  The message to the strange sticklike beings in the Inner Eye had been decided long ago. Since they had used a rectangular format with a prime number of rows and columns to send crude pictures, they would certainly recognize that format if it were beamed back to them—only the picture inside the rectangle would be new. First it would show a picture of the Eyes of Bright over the east pole with a dragon tooth pointing the way to Bright’s Heaven. Then later pictures would show the Eyes of Bright hovering over Bright’s Heaven, with the distinctive profile of the east pole mountains poking up over the horizon of Egg. Each picture had been converted into a complex tally string, ready to read off. Swift-Killer gathered her crew of astrologers and they proceeded to retransmit the message that they had sent in vain from the compound back at the Inner Eye Institute.

  “Long burn, flick, flick, flick, dash, flick …” Swift-Killer intoned as she ran the tally string through a set of tendrils. The crew of flare holders and pod-juice controllers kept up their steady work, and flash after flash of light glared from the end of the flare, reflected from the curved surface of the expander into a straight beam that flashed across the crust to the glancer, then went beaming upwards toward the cluster of lights in the sky. After several lines, Swift-Killer would take another look through the sighting holes to make sure that the beam was being sent off in the right direction, while the flare crew replaced their flares with fresh ones.

  After the first picture had been sent, Swift-Killer went over to the astrologer whom she had put in charge of the dark detector. She was slightly disappointed that there had been no darkening of the detector, but she resolved to keep on with the rest of the series.

  A dozen turns and more than twice as many messages later, Swift-Killer finally had to admit that perhaps the messages were still not getting through.

  “The Eyes still look dim to us, so you can imagine that our weak little light is going to be very dim by the time it gets up through the murky atmosphere,” Cliff-Watcher said as his thinned out body tried to knead the worries out of the flattened Swift-Killer.

  Swift-Killer lay relaxed under the tender ministrations of Cliff-Watcher and felt the small globules that used to be a piece of Cliff-Watcher moving slowly through her body on their way to her egg case. Her body was at rest, but her mind was a turmoil of emotion.

  “If they cannot see us yet, then we must get closer,” she said, “I am going to climb the mountains to where the atmosphere is clearer.”

  Cliff-Watcher’s kneading stopped. “But that will take forever!” he remonstrated.

  “So it may,” said Swift-Killer, who had slipped out from under Cliff-Watcher and had rapidly resumed her more normal shape. She was now putting on her office of command as she gathered and pouched the tools, weapons and trinkets that she had cast aside earlier. “But we are going anyway.”

  TIME: 07:56:48 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050


  The climbing of the east pole mountains was like a siege. The mountains were many times higher than any that had ever been attempted. Swift-Killer took her time to organize her support, for once she had started up the mountain the organization would have to run itself. The formal command structure of the troop was dismantled, and a new arrangement organized more along the lines of a permanent border fort replaced it. A quarry crew was sent out and soon a fortified compound replaced the campground. Regular hunting parties were organized, and the short swords and dragon teeth soon were sinking their sharp fangs into wandering animals instead of their natural prey. With much grumbling, long rows of petal plants were placed in the crust, and the business of tending them rotated among the troopers—who in many cases had only joined up to get away from the clan farm.

  With her supply lines secure, Swift-Killer organized the assault on the east pole mountains. Swift-Killer, Cliff-Watcher and North-Wind would lead the climb, but backing them would be over half the troop. Swift-Killer worked carefully, orchestrating the climb like a major battle. Twice she backed down from a hard-won valley because the climb—although not difficult for an unburdened cheela—would have been impossible for one loaded with food parcels. Slowly the expedition worked its way into the foothills. Chunks of crust were stationed on the steeper slopes for rest stations, and soon two lanes of porters were moving back and forth from the fort on the lowlands to the point of the climb that slowly thrust its way inward and upward.