Much later Swift-Killer called a halt. The second message had been beamed up to the Inner Eye, and still there was no response.
“If only we could be sure that our weak light could be seen at that distance,” Swift-Killer complained bitterly.
“You could climb to the top of that peak over there,” North-Wind said with mild sarcasm. “Cliff-Watcher and I will be glad to beam a message up to you and you could check on the reception.”
For once, Swift-Killer was silent. She could think of nothing else to do but to try again.
They were nearing the end of the third message when a loud crash came vibrating through the crust. Swift-Killer didn’t move. The highly developed sonic direction-finding apparatus in her tread had told her exactly what had happened.
“The glancer has fallen,” she said. Her eyes, which had been concentrating on the work of monitoring the fall of the drops of pod juice onto the end of the flare, continued their gaze while Swift-Killer slowly turned the valve off, closing it tightly to prevent leaks. She pouched the vial, and then finally turned her attention to the base of the nearby cliff where the glittering shards of the broken glancer lay in a shattered heap.
Swift-Killer flowed over to the base of the cliff, forming a manipulator as she went. She felt through the sparkling pieces, but found none that were anywhere near the size of the original mirror.
“At least we got some of the messages off,” Cliff-Watcher said consolingly.
“Yes, but there are still more, and we ought to repeat them as often as we can to make sure they are received,” Swift-Killer said. “We must find a way to keep sending without using the glancer.”
“Perhaps we can find a suitable chunk of crust around here,” North-Wind suggested.
“I’m afraid not,” Swift-Killer said. “I have been looking at the various types of crust as we passed by different formations, and all the material in these mountains seems to consist of fuzzy crust. I have not seen anything around here that had anywhere near as shiny a cleavage surface as a glancer. We will have to think of something else.”
Swift-Killer tried many things. However, there was no way that she could get a beam formed and directed upwards to the Inner Eye. She had even tried leaning the expander up against the cliff at an angle (being careful this time to back it up with chunks of crust), but the light from the flare came in at such an angle that the light reflected from the expander was sprayed out in a distorted beam that rapidly dissipated into the sky. She knew where the focus spot of the expander was, but it was an unreachable point way up in the sky, at least a dozen times higher than she could reach, and almost as high as the cliff itself. Then she had an idea.
“If we put the expander flat on the crust, pointing up at the Eyes,” she said, “then the focus spot will be up around the top of this cliff. If we climbed up there with the flares we could make the light near the focus and the beam from the expander would go straight up to the Eyes.”
Being a trooper, North-Wind said nothing, but Cliff-Watcher exploded. “You can’t be serious. That cliff must be twice as high as you are wide. It will take you a dozen turns to climb that high, even if you can find a route, and we are out of food! We will be nothing but bags of skin if we ever make it!”
“You are not going,” Swift-Killer said. “You will stay here. I will need to have you move the expander to different positions along the face of the cliff until we get the focus spot so it is just above the edge of the cliff where we can reach it.”
Swift-Killer went to the broken glancer, picked up one of the larger shards and pouched it.
“Let’s go, North-Wind,” she said, and took off toward the far end of the cliff, with the obedient trooper close on the tread of his Commander.
TIME: 07:58:24.4 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
A fraction of a second later, the pulsed emission started again, and this time the narrow-angle scanner caught it early in its emission period. The semiautomatic search-and-identify circuits kept the scanner focused on the pulsations, while the feature extractor in the frequency analysis circuits activated a correlation program. A strong match was then found between the pulsation pattern of the emissions and the rectangular picture pattern that Abdul had chosen in his attempts at communication with Dragon’s Egg. If the computer had been a human, its eyebrows would have raised.
The new correlation was enough to trigger an action circuit. As a result—a millisecond later—humans were called into the loop.
PERIODIC X-UV EMISSION—EAST POLE
Seiko glanced up at the computer message across the top of her screen. She was floating too far away from the console to reach any of the keys, so she used audibles, even if they were slower.
“Display!” she commanded, and instantly a replay of the narrow-angle X-ray/ultraviolet scanner was on her screen. She watched the regular blinking of the spot in the middle of the east pole mountains, then glanced up to see that the computer had slowed it down considerably for her.
1/100,000 REAL TIME
Seiko watched it for a few seconds. The pulsations stopped abruptly. There seemed to be no sense to them.
“Analysis!” she commanded.
The picture on the screen stayed, while the computer overprinted result after result of its analysis.
POSITION 0.1 DEG W LONG, 2.0 DEG N LAT
SPECTRUM MODIFIED THERMAL, 15,000 K
MODULATION SIMILAR TO DRAGON’S EGG COMM PICTURE
NO IDENTIFIABLE NATURAL SOURCE
Seiko scanned down the list and stiffened in shock. She expertly twisted her body in a midair position-reversal maneuver, caught hold of the edge of the console and pulled herself up to it. Her fingers flew over the keys. Within a few seconds, Swift-Killer’s second message was building up on her screen.
“Abdul!” she called to the next console, where Abdul Nkomi Farouk was laboriously working out a new message. “They are answering!”
TIME: 07:58:28 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
Cliff-Watcher had been right. The path that finally took them to the top of the cliff was tortuous and hard. Both Swift-Killer and North-Wind were hungry long before they reached the top, and this time it was the real hunger of someone who had been working at hard labor for a dozen turns. Swift-Killer still had plenty of reserves, but she was beginning to worry about North-Wind, for he was not as robust as she was. However, being a trooper, he never complained.
As Swift-Killer approached the edge of the cliff, she pulled the glancer shard from a pouch. “I’m sure I could never get one of my eyes to look down over the edge to see where Cliff-Watcher is, but as long as it thinks it is looking out at the horizon, I shouldn’t have any trouble,” she explained to North-Wind. Forming a strong manipulator with a deep root embedded in her tread muscles, she extended the shard out over the edge of the cliff.
She clustered her eyes in a line; with a little adjustment, she could see the deep red top of Cliff-Watcher waiting patiently next to the expander.
“I must really be getting hungry,” Swift-Killer thought. “Here I am gazing full on the topside of a handsome young male and I am not even interested.”
Swift-Killer turned to North-Wind and said, “We will have to move down this way.” She led the way down the cliff until they were at the point above the waiting Cliff-Watcher. Cliff-Watcher had never thought that his hatchling name had amounted to much, and now here he was spending what seemed to be his last dozen turns on Egg, doing nothing but watching a cliff.
Swift-Killer tried both long-talk and short-talk, and soon found that there was no trouble in communicating with Cliff-Watcher if he just kept a portion of his tread leaning up against the face of the cliff.
Cliff-Watcher had already arranged the expander; it was as close to the base of the cliff as he could get it. North-Wind formed a heavy manipulator like that of Swift-Killer and slowly stretched it out over the edge, a small flare held at the end.
Swift-Killer removed one of the vials of pod juice from a pouch, and gripping it carefully, exte
nded that, too. She constantly reminded herself to hold tightly to the vial; if it fell, the expander would be shattered in as many shreds as the glancer. Slowly she formed a muscular pseudopod that slithered out on top of the hefty manipulator. The fine tip of the pseudopod curled its way around the valve. The valve slowly turned and a tiny stream of liquid hit the end of the flare. They both flinched from the unaccustomed blue-white light, but soon a steady beam shot forth into the sky. Swift-Killer evaluated it carefully. Fortunately the winds were high that turn, and there were many dust particles in the air. Swift-Killer could see the strong beam as it went upwards, only to come to a bright point at some unimaginable distance overhead. Swift-Killer turned off the valve and they both slowly withdrew their manipulators back over the edge and relaxed.
“We are too far away from the focus spot,” Swift-Killer said. “We will have to move down the cliff.”
North-Wind had never been able to figure out exactly what Swift-Killer and Cliff-Watcher were talking about when they mentioned things like focus spots, but he decided to let Swift-Killer do the thinking. After all, she was the commander. He silently followed her along the edge of the cliff until they came to another convenient portion of the ledge where they could both get a good tread grip. Swift-Killer again stuck her little glancer over the edge and watched as Cliff-Watcher pouched the expander, hauled it to the new position underneath Swift-Killer’s waving manipulator, then repositioned it carefully on the crust and moved back.
This time, when the light blazed from the top of the cliff, the beam that came out from the expander did not refocus. Swift-Killer thought that it was still slightly converging as she lost sight of it high in the sky, but it was good enough.
“We will continue our message,” she said as she pulled the tally strings from a pouch. North-Wind shuffled the crust in resignation, retracted the short flare they had been using for testing purposes and replaced it with a longer one.
“At least I won’t have to climb for a while,” he said tiredly to himself, and settled down to hold the heavy manipulator as still as he possibly could.
Soon a disciplined pulsation of light was beaming its way up to the Eyes, continuing the message that had been interrupted a dozen turns ago when the glancer had fallen from the face of the cliff. Swift-Killer did not pause long when she came to the end. Since they were on their body reserves, it didn’t help much to rest anymore; except for an occasional change of flare or pod juice vial, the two troopers doggedly kept at their task.
Their job finally finished, Swift-Killer and North-Wind started their way back down the path to the base of the cliff. By mutual consent, they left everything but their clan totems in a pile at the top of the cliff.
A dozen turns later, a weary Cliff-Watcher saw two very thin cheela slowly making their way around the end of the cliff. Swift-Killer was in front, breaking a path for the exhausted trooper.
“Another tread length,” she would urge, and gently nudge the sides of his treads with her trailing edge to keep him rippling. Slowly the two came up to Cliff-Watcher.
“I cannot go any further,” North-Wind said. “Leave me here.”
“No,” said Swift-Killer. “We are all going together.” She turned her attention to Cliff-Watcher. “I know you are tired too, but we must get to the base camp where there is a cache of food waiting. You get behind North-Wind and keep him moving while I break path.” Cliff-Watcher was too tired to argue and moved in behind his friend North-Wind. Together the three began to move off and down the sloping valley.
Cliff-Watcher, who had been checking the dark detector periodically, had just repouched it after looking to see if there had been any reply to their hard sent messages. There was nothing. He turned some of his eyes up to the specks of light above him and wondered at their silence. As he looked, a rapidly falling streak of bright light appeared to the side of the Eyes, high in the sky. The falling object became elongated and grew brighter and brighter. Cliff-Watcher stirred, and the other two raised their eyes, then tried to draw them under their protective flaps. There was no time. In an instant the whole sky was aflame with an explosion of light and heat that seared their top-sides and left three skinny blobs of scorched, blinded flesh that wriggled away from each other in their attempts to escape the pain.
Swift-Killer had never hurt so. Her last thought was that Bright had decided to punish her for having the temerity to attempt to talk to God. The automatic protective mechanisms in her body, activated by the lack of body reserves and the shock from the topside burns, suddenly took over. The animal reflexes were turned off, and for the first time in untold generations, a cheela went to sleep.
TIME: 07:58:37 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
Abdul came flying over to Seiko’s console. He halted his headlong dive with a practiced swing around one of the support stanchions and hung motionless just over Seiko’s head.
“What reply?” he said.
“There is someone down there who is sending back pictures with the same format that you used,” Seiko replied, “but they are coming from the east pole, they use thermal ultraviolet radiation instead of laser light, and they are coming very fast. Look—here is the first picture.”
“It is a picture of Dragon Slayer and the six Tidal Compensators above Dragon’s Egg,” Abdul said. “But the star seems to be badly distorted into the shape of a pancake. It must be their star, however, because they have drawn in the mound formation. But what is that long narrow wedge with its base near us and its point over the formation?”
“It is a pointer,” Seiko said. “If you look at the second and third pictures, you will see that they are almost identical, except that the position of our ship slowly shifts toward the west, while the wedge symbol gets shorter.”
Seiko’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and soon the first picture was joined by a second and a portion of a third.
“You are right,” Abdul said. “It looks as if they want us to move to a position over their formation. I know why, too. The visibility through the atmosphere is poor in that direction. It would be much better if we were directly overhead.”
Abdul suddenly realized something else that Seiko had said. “How fast was the message being sent?” he asked.
“The computer had to slow it down,” Seiko said. “I estimate a pulse every four microseconds.”
Abdul went back to his console and soon had a trace of the pulses from the first picture lined up on the screen. He leaned forward and looked more closely at the interval between the pulses.
“They are very irregular in spacing and amplitude,” he said. “Almost as if they were handmade. You would think that a being that could make an ultraviolet laser could make a decent modulator.”
“The radiation is from a thermal source,” Seiko retorted.
Abdul paused as her reply sank in. “They are signaling to us with the neutron star equivalent of American Indian smoke signals!” he said. “And each one of those crude pulses is made in four microseconds—Great Allah! That means that those beings must live something like a million times faster than we do! And I have been sending the laser pulses at a rate of about once per second. To them that is like a million seconds between pulses.”
Seiko quickly did the calculation for him. “As if it were about a week between pulses.”
Abdul had another horrible thought. “How long has it been since they started to reply?” he asked.
Seiko’s hands flicked on the keyboard, and the first picture reappeared with the time of reception in the upper corner. “The first picture arrived almost a minute ago,” she replied, “and if the ratio is a million to one, that is like two years ago.”
“They have probably gotten tired of waiting for an answer and have gone home,” Abdul said. “We had better get busy—and fast!” He hesitated a second, then lifted the cover on a panel on the side of the console and flicked the emergency alarm switch.
“You explain the situation to Pierre and the others,” he said over the whoop of the alarm s
ignal, “and get Pierre to start moving the Dragon Slayer over the mound formation. I will try to get some sort of reply back as fast as I can.”
Seiko fixed up her screen with all the pictures displayed so she would be ready when the rest of the crew came boiling into the main deck to see what the emergency was. Within a few seconds Abdul had swiveled the laser radar to illuminate the east pole directly below them, while its operational frequency had been pushed up to the short ultraviolet. Because he had nothing better immediately at hand, Abdul had the computer play back the pictures that had been sent up from the surface. While they were pulsing down at a megahertz rate, he quickly pulled in the first picture that he had beamed down, showing the Dragon Slayer and the six tidal compensators above Dragon’s Egg. He added an arrow that curved over to a position above the mound formations, and had the computer send that down to the east pole. He then swiveled the laser back toward the strange starlike formation, and had it repeat the message twice, alternating between ultraviolet and light output. Since they had seen his first messages they should be able to detect it one way or the other. This time Abdul hoped that nobody would die of boredom waiting for the next pulse.
TIME: 07:58:40 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050
The nearly empty seared sacks lay on the crust, quietly sleeping. Ancient plant genes, activated by the almost complete lack of food reserves, began their strange work. The animal enzymes were neutralized, and new enzymes were generated that attacked the very muscles that supported the skin, turning the striated flesh into a floating cloud of long fibers. The skin itself was thinned until it was almost transparent. Other plant enzymes took over and used the liquid material and long fibers to fashion large super-strength crystals. This was not the brittle crystallium that the animal body had previously used for manipulators—this was dragon crystal. At the center of the now flaccid tread, a tendril forced its way into the crust. In its core was a sharp cone of crystal. Exuding acids that ate their way into the crust, the spike slowly penetrated deeper and deeper into the hot, neutron-rich crust. Hairlike threads spread out between the crustal fibers and nutrients began to flow in from the threads and up the tap root. Meanwhile, smaller spikes of crystal, thick at the base and finely rounded at the tip, began to form in a starlike pattern at the head of the tap root. The strong dragon crystal structure overcame the frightful pull of Egg, and jutted out at a low angle to the surface. The dozen spikes spread out like a thorny crown. They grew longer and longer, and the flaccid skin, long since cured of its burns, was lifted up into the air. As the spikes grew longer, even their great crystalline strength was no longer adequate to resist Egg’s pull, so strong tension fibers formed that went from attachment knobs just below the growing tip of each spike to a stubby post that stuck up from the base of the spikes. Slowly the twelve-spiked cantilever canopy raised itself off the crust until the skin was drawn tightly to it.
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