Dragon's Egg

by Robert L. Forward

  As she slithered into the compound, she noticed with glum satisfaction that the scrape of her tread on the crust had warned the camp. Those who were presently in her good graces were merely very busy taking care of important matters, while those who weren’t had rapidly absented themselves when they felt the first murmurs of her approach.

  Her second-in-command, and one of her lovers, was busy rubbing his unusually brilliant short sword against a chunk of crust. Although the cast dragon crystal would usually stay sharp until the edge was notched by a hard blow, it did help a little to keep the edge in fine hone by monotonous rubbing against the crustal material. Dead-Troopers knew that Pink-Sky had never let the short sword get dull since the time he had wrested it from the dead body of a trooper whom they had killed jointly. She glided up next to Pink-Sky until their edges were touching along almost half their length. Pink-Sky continued to hone his sword as Dead-Troopers watched.

  “They are in full force,” she said. “But they do not attack! I don’t like it!”

  “There are very few things about troopers that you do like,” he replied calmly.

  Dead-Troopers paused for a moment, then said, “Well, I like this even less.”

  “Where are they going?” Pink-Sky asked.

  Dead-Troopers shifted, several eyes staring at Pink-Sky while the rest wriggled in irritation. “It looks as if they are headed for the east pole,” she said. “But that makes no sense at all. No one goes to the east pole. It is too hot and bristly.”

  Pink-Eye remarked sagely, “They seem to be getting very far from their home base, and the mountainous territory near the east pole makes the horizons undependable.”

  Dead-Troopers paused a moment, and then realized what her second-in-command was referring to. It was a good thing he was a lot smaller than she was, or he would have been leader of the clan.

  “You are right, as usual,” she said. “Let us gather the warriors and go east to the first range of ridges, to the one that has a cliff different than the rest, the one that looks as if it is a horizon until you are almost on it.”

  Pink-Sky shortly had a signaling crew together and was sending out phased messages to the nearby barbarian clan settlements. The message took a long time to send, since the signaling crew had to adjust their treading to emphasize the natural resonant frequencies of the crust.

  “What is that strange rumbling sound in the crust?” one of the novices inside the circle of marching troopers asked. “Is it a crust-quake?”

  “No,” another said. “This is the wrong part of Egg for quakes.”

  Swift-Killer had felt the rumble long before the novices. Despite what one of them had said, the east pole was crustquake country, but this was not a quake.

  What they felt was only a long distance signal from one barbarian clan to another. From its similarities to others she had heard, it was probably the call to assemble. No doubt her expedition this deep in barbarian territory had caused some concern. Since it was a long distance message, and not a localized call for attack, she had no need to put the troopers on alert, but she noticed with pride that most of them had felt the presence of the barbarians, and that the dragon teeth, which had been in typical marching disarray, now gleamed as a single, coordinated, double row of interleaved needles.

  At the next rest break, Swift-Killer ordered out the feeding-time perimeter guard, and gathered the civilians to the center.

  “The barbarians have called for an assembly to decide what to do about us,” she said. “Hopefully, they will realize that we are not bothering their settlements, and are too large to attack, and will leave us alone. However, this is the territory of Trooper-Killer, one of the few barbarian chieftains to have killed more than one trooper and survived to tell about it. For the next few turns we will keep in a tight circle formation, and you civilians will have to stay in the center.”

  Moving in one direction while looking and fighting in another direction came easily to the multieyed, non-oriented cheela. Although each had a preferred set of eyes, all dozen worked well and gave the cheela a complete, if two-dimensional, view of the region around them.

  Each cheela also had one or two preferred eating pouches and elimination orifices, but with a little concentration to break many turns of habit, the two could actually be reversed in function if necessary. The same went for carrying pouches, which were just immature feeding pouches. However, it was only the very young or very old who slobbered on their collection of trinkets.

  On the body of a typical cheela there were certain sections of skin that had developed good muscle tone and a high level of tactile sensory endings that made the best pseudopods, and there were other chunky muscular sections that were the best to drape about a crystallium manipulator skeleton for maximum leverage. All troopers learned in basic training camp to form deep pockets in their skin, backed up with crystallium sockets imbedded in their tread muscles to handle the long, heavy dragon teeth. A well-trained trooper could perform that function at any point around the circle while maintaining the measured tread of the advance ripple, and simultaneously eating, eliminating, and switching trinkets from one pouch to the next. It was the brag of Swift-Killer’s troopers that they could engage in sex on top of all of that. But as had been proved during a few after-battle orgies, that was more talk than performance.

  The commander of a circle of troopers had two choices. One was to put all the troopers of one sex in one ring, with the next ring of the opposite sex constantly riding partially on the topside of the first rank. This kept the troopers happy, with a constant reminder of fun either under tread or topside. However, there was always the problem of the one or two who didn’t quite fit into the geometry of the circle. A second choice was to alternate male and female side-by-side in each rank, with purely (nearly) platonic interaction between ranks, although they were overlapping on topsides. Swift-Killer preferred the second ordering since it made for tighter rank spacing, despite the other problems it caused.

  At one time, early in her career as an officer, she had considered the possibility of a trooper circle made up of only one sex. She could see herself, leading the Ferocious Females to triumph in battle. But her trooper background vetoed that bleak, joyless scene quickly. In their battles against the barbarians, the real enemy was boredom, and a single-sex battle circle would not survive long.

  Dead-Troopers led her clan, and the out-family warriors who had joined them, off to the east, then back again to the west.

  “A long crawl for no progress,” Sinking-Cliff, one of the out-family fighters, complained. But even he had to admit that their route had taken them safely around the trooper scouts who would slither quickly over the horizon and back again.

  Sinking-Cliff had been the leader of his small clan before he had decided to join forces with Dead-Troopers’ larger clan that contained many of his out-family. The penetration of the large force of well-armed troopers into his clan territory was of great concern, and he readily joined himself and his three best warriors to the cause. However, he did not really like taking commands from someone else.

  Dead-Troopers knew that she was treading on prickly crust when she heard the complaint and made her move, but she could tolerate no insubordination if she were going to keep control of this half-wild band.

  “Silence!” came Dead-Troopers’ harsh whisper, and Sinking-Cliff half raised his club as a dozen eyes on a huge form blazed down at him.

  Dead-Troopers dropped into lingua inter-familia, and applied her most diplomatic accent—Pink-Sky would have been proud of her. “Even hatchlings are quiet when the Swift is around,” she admonished in a soft whisper. “This dark-side cliff we have come to is along the path of the marauding troopers,” Dead-Troopers continued. “There is none other like it, since all other cliffs in this region show their faces to the bright light.”

  The tension relaxed, and Dead-Troopers slid a pseudopod on the topside of Sinking-Cliff as she continued, “The path of the troopers takes them to the bright-light side
of this cliff. They will never see us behind it, and we can rush out and take them unaware.” She removed her pseudopod with a promising pat and glided off to arrange the attack.

  TIME 07:56:30 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

  The expedition to the east pole moved slowly on in its quiet but determined way. Scouts moved ahead to look over the horizon, but the crust was getting prickly, especially on the way back, so they did not range out as far as they had done in the past. None of them realized that the horizon off to one side was not the real horizon, but instead was the top of a precipitous cliff that sheltered a horde of barbarians behind its sharp edge.

  It was to Dead-Troopers’ credit that she held her mixed pseudo-clan of warriors until the circle glided past. She released them with a terrible thump that shook the very crust under Swift-Killer’s tread and they attacked with a fury born of turn upon turn of punitive raids on their loved ones and hatchlings.

  “At Alert!” t’trumed Swift-Killer, and narrowed herself down to pass through the dazed civilians to the rear of the circle.

  Her automatic judgment of the tactical situation was verified when she saw the stream of barbarians seem to pour endlessly out of a notch in the horizon. Her dozen eyes lifted slightly on stubs as they once again evaluated the near perfect boundary between dark sky and glowing crust, and she saw her mistake. A slight rise of the glowing crust indicated a low cliff. Too low to see, but high enough to hide a war party of barbarians.

  “East! West! North! Bright!—East! West! North! Bright!—East! …” chanted Swift-Killer as her eyes took in the battle situation. Her troopers moved obediently in a rigid march that took them nowhere, as their bodies became attuned to the cooperative movement and the deadly needles of the dragon teeth formed their impenetrable barrier about the circle of close-coupled troopers.

  The civilians peered over the flattened ranks of troopers and some of them were beginning to panic Swift-Killer lowered the intensity of her rhythmic thump on the crust as her squad leaders took up the chant to make up for the loss of her volume.

  Swift-Killer circled around the inner rank of her troopers, sliding encouraging pseudopods on male and female alike, as her whisper sped through the crust, its electronic tingle emphasizing the solid thump of the squad leaders.

  “… North! Bright!—East! West! North! …”

  At the same time, she thinned out the inner third of her body and spread a thin hatching mantle over the bewildered noncombatants at the center. In almost automatic reflex action, their bodies reverted to minimum area, and they huddled together under the protective cloak. As the pressure in the center was released, the ranks of troopers compacted, and the needle points at the outer ring grew imperceptibly closer together.

  Swift-Killer watched the charge of the barbarians with cool detachment. Although they came in a group, they were still individuals, and the first of those individuals actually to make contact with the deadly circle of dragon teeth would die, and both she and the barbarians knew that horrible fact.

  “… West! North! Bright!—East! West! North!…” Swift-Killer added the thump of her tread to the clamor as the barbarians approached. With a roar that shook the very crust, they came straight along the easy direction from the west, then broke into two peeling waves that plowed their way off into the hard directions toward the north and Bright sides.

  Swift-Killer had expected the attack to break off in the face of a well-tended circle. What she had not expected was the rattle of pod seeds and smooth rocks rolling and sliding across the crust toward her circle of troopers. That was all that they were, rocks and garbage from an ordinary pod meal, but the unexpected did to her troopers what anything unexpected would do to any group—it confused them. In their effort to avoid what was harmless, the troopers slid to one side or the other. Their careful cadence was lost and the impenetrable barrier of needlelike dragon teeth wavered.

  From the middle of the still flowing barbarian horde burst Dead-Troopers and five of her warriors. They were nearly hidden by their load of undried cheela skin. Swift-Killer’s eyes shrank at the sight, but she had to admire the tactical effectiveness of the result. As the raw cheela skin contacted the pricks of the dragon teeth, the natural death reflexes in the muscular skin pouched up and grasped the points of the dragon teeth in viselike sphincters.

  Backing off for a moment, the barbarians let the skins drag the ends of the deadly needles to the crust, and then flowed over their grisly weapon and pinned the circle defenses under their treads as they encountered the outer perimeter, their clubs and stolen short swords shattering crystal and slashing skin.

  “West! West! West! West! …” t’trumed Swift-Killer as she changed the cadence and moved the circle into the direction of the attack. The small knot of fighting troopers and barbarians stayed fixed, each slashing where they could at the small amount of skin exposed behind their shields of dried skin or Flow Slow plates. Meanwhile, the steady cadence moved the circle of troopers around the point of attack, like a cell enveloping its struggling prey. The surprise was gone, and the next rapid attack of the barbarians from the east did not produce the desired confusion when a rattle of crustal pebbles and pod seeds came sliding across the crust. The needle points of the dragon teeth did not waver, and the holders of the remainder of the poor unfortunate cheela who had unwillingly donated his very skin to the cause of the barbarian attack left their glowing white juices dripping off the ends of the dragon teeth.

  “Out! Out! Out! Out!” Swift-Killer commanded. She expanded the circle in all directions, but most importantly in the direction towards the clump of barbarian warriors. The pincher closed and the needle points of the dragon teeth began to have their effect.

  With the trap shut, Swift-Killer pulled back her mantle from over the civilians. Making herself into an avenging needle, she slipped her huge bulk between two of her troopers in the rear ranks. Three knives held in front of her and her short sword trailing behind, she screeched a high pitched whisper that threw the knot of combatants into confusion, and dove in under their bodies, knives slashing.

  Swift-Killer climbed out of the hole she had carved out of the middle of Dead-Troopers’ body, glowing juices running down her eye-stubs. She then attacked the rest of the beleaguered barbarians from behind. Their initiative was lost, and it took little time for the troopers to finish them all with thrusts of their short swords.

  Swift-Killer looked across the topsides of the still quivering bags of juice and surveyed her command. True to the tradition of trooper discipline, even if the commander seemed to ignore it, the squad leaders had disengaged the little knot of dead and wounded to the inside, and a nearly perfect circle of regrouped troopers were now arrayed in rank after rank, their needle points in perfect array as the cadence continued. “East! West! North! Bright!—East! West! North! …” The remainder of the barbarian horde sent taunts and curses through the crust, made weaker and weaker feinting attacks, and finally faded off over the horizon.

  Swift-Killer shivered her skin, sending yellow-white globs of cooling juice showering down on the bare topsides of the motionless layers of skin beneath her tread. She slowly flowed down off the sagging mound of flesh, checking each one of her short slashing blades before inserting them back into her lined weapons pouch. As she descended, her tread automatically kneaded the flaccid skin beneath her and worked out the lumps that were hidden away in the enemy skin pouches.

  One cache yielded buttons. Swift-Killer paused in shock. There were three single buttons that signaled that each had come from trooper; a doublet button that used to grace the skin of a squad leader; and another with four buttons that matched the one that now glistened wetly on her supple skin.

  “The Trooper-Killer!” she said, and fury sent her short sword again and again through the already damaged brain-knot. Her exhaustion forgotten in the discovery, she moved the dead hunks of meat off the sworn enemy of every troop commander of the east border, and proceeded to strip the tiniest pouch of that dead hulking body. />
  To her dismay, she found four more trooper buttons—well tarnished—in an almost sealed-off pouch, but nothing else.

  “Kill! Kill! Kill!” she murmured. “Nothing to live for but to kill troopers.”

  She went on to the other bodies, glancing around as she did so to notice that the battle was over and the circle was back in its proper form. One body yielded a trooper button, but this one came from the holding sphincter of a trooper, who had died defending its honor. She searched the periphery until she found the trooper’s heritage pouch, and she slowly kneaded it until she extracted the mementos given to the trooper as he left his clan to join the eastern border guard. She separated the personal ones from the clan ones, tossing most of the personal ones to the crust but taking those that might be of value to her some turn. She put the clan totem into a special pouch that she sealed until she might, at some future time, deliver it to the clan chief, while giving thanks for the assistance of that segment of the clan in the protection of the far-flung borders of Bright’s Empire.

  “It is a good thing that we lose so few troopers in these skirmishes with the barbarians,” she thought to herself, “or else the troop commanders would be so laden down with clan totems that they would not be able to move.”

  At the thought, she self-consciously twitched the little pouch in a forgotten segment of her body that had not been opened for over three dozen greats of turns, and would not—until death relaxed the sphincter that kept her little piece of homeland and kin within her.

  Swift-Killer continued her search. Two of her troopers and six barbarians. A poor trade. And it was her fault for not having trained her troopers against the “rolling garbage” attack. It was an old and seldom used tactic, but in this time and in this environment it had come close to equaling the odds for the barbarians.

  Kneading a recalcitrant pouch on one of the last barbarian skin sacks, she almost cut her tread. Moving off and sliding a pseudopod under the edge of the folded skin, she extracted a short sword. The fact that a barbarian had succeeded in wresting a short sword from a trooper was not unusual, but the condition of the short sword was. She examined its shining sides and keenly honed edge with wonder. If only her troopers could be encouraged to keep their weapons in such good condition! She pouched the shining sword in her weapons pouch and finished the inspection, then finally turned to cleaning herself.