Starquake

by Robert L. Forward

  "With the cheela doing all the mapping and measurements for us, there is really no need for us to stay any longer," Pierre explained. "You should have read the detailed description of both the exterior and interior of Dragon's Egg in that last HoloMem crystal I brought down." He swung down and stopped himself at the doorway to the lounge.

  "I had the computer reprogram the herder probes to move us into the path of the deorbiter mass. In about half a day we will be in proper position to be kicked out of this close orbit back up to St. George. Then we can be heading for home instead of looking at it." He looked up at the clock readout on the lounge wall.

  “Time to change HoloMem crystals again," he said. He crouched, then flashed a smile at them through his neat, dark brown beard.

  "Come on," he said. "There is a lot of work to do to get this ship ready. Amalita and I will finish off the last of the HoloMem crystals, but the rest of you had better start buttoning up the ship; the gravity fields from that deorbiter will turn anything loose into a deadly missile." He jumped upward to the central deck as the others swam through the lounge door and spread out through the ship.

  Pierre swung over to the communications console and looked at Sky-Teacher over Amalita's shoulder. The robot cheela was patiently explaining something. Pierre stared in fascination at the image. With the million-to-one time differential, it had not surprised Pierre that the cheela would make a slow-response, long-living robot that could take over the demanding task of talking to the slow-thinking humans. What amazed Pierre was that the robotic creature was so realistic that it had a personality. Sky-Teacher was not robot-like in its mannerisms

  at all. In fact, it acted very much like a patient, old-time schoolmaster. One could almost hear the friendly smile and the greying hair in the voice. It was a relief to the humans to have Sky-Teacher to talk to. They no longer felt as if they were wasting a good portion of some cheela's lifetime if they made a mistake or paused for a moment.

  "We shortly will have filled up all your available HoloMem crystals," Sky-Teacher's image said, its halo of twelve robotic eyes doing a perfect imitation of the traveling wave pattern of a real cheela. "I am afraid that you will find most of this material is encrypted, since we are now the equivalent of many thousands of years ahead of you in development.

  "Yet, if it had not been for you, we would still be savages, stagnating in an illiterate haze for thousands or even millions of greats of turns. We owe you much, but we must be careful how we pay you back, for you too have a right to grow and develop on your own. For your own good, it is best that we cut off communication after this last HoloMem crystal is full. We have given you enough material to keep you busy learning for thousands of your years. Then we will both be off on our separate ways, seeking truth and knowledge through space and time. You in worlds where the electron is paramount, and we in worlds where the neutron dominates."

  A tone sounded and a small message appeared on the upper part of the screen.

  HOLOMEM CRYSTAL FULL

  "You are on your own now," Sky-Teacher said. "It is drawing near the time for you to leave. Goodbye, my friends."

  "Goodbye," Pierre said as the screen blanked.

  He turned to Amalita. "I'll put away the HoloMem crystal, and you start checking out the acceleration tanks," he said. "It's time to go home!"

  06:40:10 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

  Amalita closed down her console and floated over to a hatch in the wall next to the console. She looked through the thick glass of the tiny port into the interior of the high-gravity protection tank. The inside of the small, one-meter diameter sphere was empty except for a tiny split-screen video console

  set in the inner wall. In the walls of the tanks were banks of sound generators that produced pressure waves to counteract the gravitational tidal forces they would experience once they had left the haven of the six dense masses that danced in a ring around their spacecraft. Amalita pushed buttons that emptied the air from the tank and filled it with incompressible water. A touch on the controls and the sound generators sang their protective cloak into the chamber. In the exact center of the tank was a tiny check sphere pinioned by the sound forces. She increased the intensity of the sound pulses and waited until the tiny ball glowed a brilliant green. Satisfied that the tank was operational, Amalita punched for a purge and restart, then went around the central column to check out the next tank.

  As Amalita left, Seiko came to a halt in front of the tank and started taking off her clothes. She stripped to a bra and briefs, pulled a wetsuit from the locker below the hatch door, and slid her pale body smoothly into the suit, the underwater breathing mask floating quietly above her head in the low gravity. Amalita paused in her check-out of the adjacent tank, looked down at her blouse, blushed, and dove down the passageway to her private locker. Shortly she was back again, and this time the motions of her upper body seemed to be a little more constrained.

  By the time Amalita had come around to the hatch that opened downward from the ceiling of the lounge, Abdul was already there. He was down to his underpants. They were the skimpy European "bikini" style. The white satin contrasted nicely with the muscular ebony-black skin. Amalita floated up under Abdul and grabbed him firmly by his naked waist.

  "Here, let me give you a hand with your suit," she said, her long, ballet-trained legs and feet locked firmly in the handholds at the lounge door.

  "Hey! Cut it out!" Abdul yelled.

  "I'm just trying to help," Amalita replied sweetly.

  "I'll bet. I know you oversexed Harvard broads. Always trying to find some excuse to paw an MIT engineer. Leggo. I'm big enough to get dressed by myself."

  Despite Abdul's protests, Amalita held onto his muscular waist until he got the legs of his wet suit on. Then pushing his arms into his sleeves as if she were dressing a little child, she helped him dress the rest of the way. Her attention bruised Abdul's ego a little, but Amalita didn't care; they were going home, and it was time for a little fun. Grinning from ear to ear,

  she shot up the passageway to check out the top tank. The hatch for this tank was under the star image table.

  Amalita floated over to the table and glanced down for a moment at the image of Dragon's Egg on the white frosted surface. There was now more to see on the star as the cheela technology became capable of constructing structures large enough to be seen from space. The Bright's Heaven jump loop was now visible below. It was already slinging payloads into space. Within ten minutes or so, a space fountain should be pointing straight up into space from the top of the East Pole mountains off on the horizon. Just before she flicked off the image, Amalita saw the Polar Orbiting Space Station of the cheela flash by below like a white-hot tracer bullet.

  06:45:10 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

  Captain Star-Glider looked up with three of his eyes as the six glowing masses that formed the Eyes of Bright moved slowly by above him. The polar orbit of his space station carried him close enough to the huge formation that he could see the cylindrical instrument tower sticking out from one end of the spherical main hull of Dragon Slayer. The human spacecraft was as black-cold as a prostitute's eyeball and could only be seen by the red reflections from the Six Eyes and the yellow-white glare from Egg below. He shivered at the thought of living in such a cold place and thankfully spread out his tread on the glowing warmth of the yellow-white deck. It took almost a grethturn before the huge circle of glowing planetoids was far enough off from the vertical that it was no longer "above" him. His three anxious upturned eyes stopped their relentless watch and returned to join the remainder of his twelve eyes in the familiar cheela traveling wave pattern.

  The wave pattern quickened as Captain Star-Glider tasted a message scrolling across the communications taste screen built into the deck. They would be launching an exploration ark within a few turns, and the exploration crew had been called for a final briefing. The briefing would take place in two dothturns at the meeting area around on the other side of the space station. The jump loop
at Bright's Heaven had been busy the last turn sending up one jumpcraft after another with the crew, while the gravity catapults at the East and West Poles had been busy tossing cargo and equipment into the sky. The

  catapults were ancient, over eight human hours old. Extremely inefficient, even when aided by the inertia drives on the cargo shuttlecraft, they were slowly being replaced. Most personnel transfers now used the jump loops, and soon nearly everything would come up by way of a space fountain.

  Although it really wasn't any of his business, Star-Glider decided to attend the briefing. It wasn't often that an exploration ark was sent off to visit some distant star. In fact, this was going to be the last one for quite a while. The Deep Space Exploration Council had decided for budgetary reasons to limit the number of exploration arks to six. The arks would spend a number of greats of turns at an interesting star, then move on to another one. The rest of the Deep Space Exploration fleet consisted of a small squadron of scout ships and a dozen cargo haulers that resupplied the exploration arks and rotated the crews.

  The initial exploration was done by the high-speed scout ships that visited candidate neutron stars looking for interesting stellar dynamics or signs of life. One had recently returned to report that they had found life on a neutron star some 12,000 light-years distant. This was the sixth report of possible life, and the first one where the life forms seemed to be intelligent.

  Star-Glider had seen the pictures of the aliens when they first appeared on holovid. They were the ugliest things the cheela had seen since humans. The novelty had worn off quickly, however. Star-Glider hadn't heard much about the aliens since and hoped he could learn more at the briefing. He turned the command of the space station over to his first officer, Horizon-Sensor, and made his way along the many centimeters of corridor to the meeting room on the opposite side of his spherically shaped command ship.

  When he entered the large, bowl-shaped meeting room, he found it already crowded. Using his undertread to hold onto the slide-stops built into the sloping ramp, he moved down to the high-gravity region near the center of the room. He was nearly a centimeter closer to the miniature black hole at the center of the space station and it felt good to get under a little gravity again, even though it was nowhere near that of the 67 billion gravities of Egg.

  Three dozen taste screens were built into the central portion of the meeting room deck. He made his way toward them, his six-pointed captain's badges parting the crowds before him. Normally, his status would have reserved one of the taste

  screens for him, but since there were 24 scientists and crew members assigned to the exploration ark to be briefed, the four members of the scout ship that had discovered the aliens, and the Deep Space Exploration scientists and managers, he had to content himself with watching one of the intensity-only visual screens built into the low walls of the meeting room. As he settled himself down to wait for the briefing to start, he found he was next to another Space Force captain. Though she was very young-looking to be a captain, she was huge in size, full of vitality, good-looking, and proved to be quick-witted when she switched an eye from the cheela with whom she had been talking. Instantly realizing who he was, she moved her eyes around to his side and lifted her near tread edge to talk.

  "Captain Star-Glider?" she said. "I'm Captain Far-Ranger of the interstellar scout ship Triton." She flicked half her eyes toward her companion. "And this is Lieutenant Star-Finder, our navigator. We both have enjoyed your hospitality these past few turns."

  "If I had known you were aboard, Captain, I would have invited you to dinner," he replied. "Unfortunately, this station is so large that often I don't even know how many spaceships we have docked, much less how many visitors are on board. I find your aliens very interesting and would like to learn more about them."

  "They are just ugly savages," Far-Ranger said, "as you will see from the briefing. But they have some real potential if we can set up communication with them. If you are really interested, perhaps we can get together over a meal after the exploration ark leaves. I took a well deserved leave of a half-great of turns when I returned and I still have a few dozen turns to go."

  "You are my guest, then," said Star-Glider quickly. "Let's make it at turnfeast on Turn 104." Remembering his manners, he nodded three of his eyes toward Star-Finder. "You are welcome, too, Lieutenant."

  "Thank you, Captain," she said. "But I am navigating the exploration ark back to the star. Besides, I am sure you and Captain Far-Ranger will have plenty to talk about."

  Star-Glider 'trummed a polite regret. The briefing had started, and all eyes were focused toward the bottom of the bowl as the strong waves from the tread amplifier at the central speaker's pad rippled through the deck. Star-Glider had to look over the topside of Far-Ranger to see the speaker. A few

  of his eyes glanced down at her deep red topside, then his gaze wandered to take in her full fleshy eyelids.

  One of her near eyes caught him looking at her anatomy. Instead of glaring him down as he expected, the eye slowly and deliberately dipped down between its eyelids and back out again in a long sexy wink. Star-Glider felt his eye-stalks stiffen as he returned his attention to the speaker.

  "We will now have a briefing on the alien life forms found on the star by Captain Far-Ranger, Doctor of Alienology," the speaker announced. Star-Glider was impressed when he heard her second title. "You are welcome to use my taste screen," she said as she started to move through the crowd to the center. He whispered an electronic 'Thanks," then moved onto the glowing patch in the deck where her undertread had been. The taste screen came to life under his tread as her amplified voice boomed out through the deck.

  "When we first arrived at NS 1566 + 74, we did a mapping of the entire surface. We found no obvious artifacts, but an artificial intelligence search routine programmed with an alien artifact interest operator drew our attention to one of the magnetic poles." A picture flashed on the viewscreen showing an enlarged picture of a low chain of mountains with a small cluster of hexagonal markings at the base.

  'This is a small village, with individual compounds shaped like clusters of crude hexagons. We were able to get some close-ups with our high resolution scanning array infrared antenna." An artificial-looking picture showed up on the screen.

  "The picture is presented in false colors, since we are looking in the infrared portion of the spectrum instead of the soft X-ray visible portion. The moving objects are blurred by the scanning process, but it is obvious that each compound is inhabited by one or two larger aliens, while the central hexagon in each 'family' grouping contains smaller aliens with an occasional larger one. Outside the compounds are low pens that contain large numbers of very small creatures.

  "Once we knew where we could get pictures, we sent in a skimmer orbiter with an X-ray camera and a motion compensator. Despite the mountains nearby, we were able to set the periapsis of the skimmer within less than a meter of the surface and got some excellent pictures of the aliens."

  A disgusting-looking blob filled the screen. It looked like a Flow Slow in the process of being butchered. The basic body shape was a treadless, eyeless, flattened blob like a Flow Slow,

  but stripped of its protective plates. Where the plates would have been were ragged sheets of reddish flesh. Into opposite sides of the body, about halfway up, there were stuck long sticklike objects with knobs on the ends. The sticks had a joint at the middle and were slightly bent like the skinny sticklike arms and legs of the humans. From around the place where the stick emerged from the blob, there came a large number of long, wiggly tendrils. The screen flickered, and the image changed slightly.

  "We were able to get five successive pictures as the skimmer orbited over this individual, so we can recreate a crude display of motion." The five pictures were played rapidly on the screen, and the sequence repeated a number of times. The being was rolling along the crust with the knobbed armlike things sticking out to the sides and the tendrils pushing and pulling at the crust to move it al
ong. The ragged flaps of flesh changed color as they rotated up, over, around, and under the rolling body of the alien.

  "You will notice that the sticks become darker the further they are from the body, leaving the knob at the end quite dark red. The knobs are moved backward and forward to cover the regions in front and behind the alien, but they are never used to touch the ground, so they don't seem to be for propulsion. Here is a close-up of one of the knobs. It seems to be a sphere with many tiny hexagonal facets. We believe the knobs are their eyes. They seem to be similar in structure to the eyes of bees or flies on the human planet Earth. The stick must be a special bonelike material with high strength but low heat conduction to keep the eyes cool."

  There were a number of other pictures, including a unique one showing two of the aliens side-by-side, grasping each other with their tendrils, their eye-sticks seemingly buried in each other's body.

  "We are not positive what is going on here," said Far-Ranger. "However, if you are thinking what I think you are thinking, you are probably right."

  There was a rumble in the deck, and someone remarked through the laughter, "I guess if you do it with only one eye at a time, you get more deeply involved...."

  "The most amazing feature of this alien culture is that there is no plant life. All the creatures seem to be animals."

  "Then what is the base of the food chain?" someone asked.

  "It took a long time for us to find out, but one of the clues

  is that there are only two regions where life is found. They are the two magnetic poles. I can't call them the East and West Poles as we do here on Egg, because they are quite close to the spin poles. The star has a lot of material left around it from the original supernova explosion, and there is a constant infall of expanded, neutron-poor, planetary-type material at each pole. In fact, there is so much that I didn't dare risk our scout-ship in flights over those polar regions. The mountain passes are full of tiny eyeless ball-like animals that probably absorb this neutron-poor dust from the surface of the crust and extract energy to live and grow from the process of converting it into normal crustal material. The larger balls are selected out by the intelligent aliens and herded into pens until they are eaten for food. The aliens are evidently still in the hunting-gathering stage of savagery, except that with no plant life, hunting and gathering are synonymous."