Starquake

by Robert L. Forward

  with Seiko and Abdul was looking pensively out of the viewport in the floor.

  "HoloMems done?" asked Abdul, looking up.

  "Yep," said Pierre, floating lightly to the cushion beside him.

  "Anything left for us mere humans to do?" Abdul asked.

  "The cheela don't need us anymore. They should be well on their way to recovery by now." A tiny white-hot speck appeared outside the viewport window and stopped.

  "Smile," said Abdul. "You're about to have your picture taken by some tourists."

  The speck released a shower of sparks. There was a flickering of light, then the sparks rejoined the glowing speck and it sped away.

  "What are your plans for the rest of the mission, Pierre?" Seiko asked.

  "I have no plans."

  "You must!" Seiko sounded disturbed. "We must not waste our lives doing nothing until we die!"

  Pierre raised his gaze from the viewport. The anguish in his face showed through the ragged, unkempt beard.

  "I can't find a way to save us," he said, tears starting to well up in his eyes.

  "Of course you can't," said Seiko. "There is no way to save us. It is simple mathematics. There are five people to feed and only eight days of food rations. We might be able to stretch that out using our body reserves, but we will be out of food in a month. We could even consider eating Amalita's body. At best, we could only get about 50 kilos of meat from it." She turned to Doc Wong.

  "How many calories in meat, Doctor Wong?" she asked him.

  "I can't believe this conversation!" said Abdul. "There is no way I'm going to be a cannibal! I'm leaving!" He started to dive out the door to his private quarters, but Pierre held him back with a hand on one shoulder. He kept it there as he nodded at Doc to answer.

  "Use the values for pork, Doc," Abdul blurted. "I hear from my cannibal friends that you can't tell the difference."

  "Most meats have about 4000 calories per kilogram," said Dr. Cesar Wong. "The average person could live on a half-kilo of meat per day if the diet were supplemented with vitamins."

  "So 50 kilos would only last us 20 days at full rations or 80 days at quarter rations," said Seiko. "We are still short by two months." She paused for a second. "As I said, there is no way to save us."

  "I thought for sure that the next thing you were going to suggest was that we draw straws," said Abdul to Pierre.

  "Abdul!" Pierre said severely.

  "I have calculated that option," said Seiko. "There is a problem. If we wait for a person to die of hunger, then there is very little nourishment left on the body."

  "There'll be none left on mine!" said Abdul.

  "If, however, a person dies at the beginning of the period, then not only does his body become a source of significant nourishment, but he is not consuming food as time goes on. Using Doctor Wong's calorie estimate, while two carcasses would allow quarter rations for four people over the same period, three could supply adequate nourishment for the remaining three for six months."

  "Great!" cried Abdul. "Why stop at cannibalism when we can have ritualistic murder?"

  "Although such an option is technically feasible," continued Seiko, "I personally have no intention of suggesting or participating in any such option."

  "What's the matter?" Abdul asked. "Afraid of drawing the short straw?"

  "No. The long one," answered Seiko. "Neither you, nor I, nor any of the others, could return to our respective cultures if we had to survive using that solution. I, for one, am going to spend my last days completing my scientific studies, preparing my work for publication, and transmitting it back to St. George. It will be the culmination of my career. When I am done, I am ready to go." She turned to Dr. Wong again.

  "We do have termination capsules on board, Doctor Wong?" she asked.

  "Of course," Cesar replied.

  Seiko then turned back to Pierre. "It will be difficult to stay rational as time goes on," she said matter-of-factly. "I would recommend that you consider consigning Amalita's body to space now. That way we can avoid temptation later." She dove out the door and pulled herself up through the passageway to the Science Deck.

  Pierre looked around at the others.

  "She's right," Jean said.

  "I'll help take her out," said Cesar.

  "If you don't mind, I'd rather be somewhere else," said Abdul. "I don't think I could take it."

  "Sure," said Pierre. "Doc and I can handle it, and Jean can run the EVA controls for us."

  Amalita had been placed in the storage locker in a fetal position, so she was relatively easy to move around on the deck, but it was a close fit through the passageway holes. She was still in her spacesuit, since Doctor Wong had not bothered to examine her further after he had removed her helmet and found the broken neck. Seiko closed down the star physics console and dimmed the star image table as they brought Amalita to the Science Deck.

  "I'll hold Amalita while you get your suits on," she said softly, taking the frosty burden from them.

  "The EVA lock is ready," said Jean. She got up from the EVA console, helped Pierre and Cesar with their suits, and took them through the checkout sheet, trying to be as careful and thorough as Amalita had always been.

  "Magni-stiction boots . . ." said Jean. Pierre flicked a switch in his chest console that rearranged the pseudorandom pattern of the magnetic monopoles in the soles of his boots so they matched up with the hexagonal pattern of monopoles built into the inner plates and hull of Dragon Slayer. His boots clanged onto the deck, twisted outward at a 30-degree angle.

  "Check," he said, then clumped into the EVA lock. He turned around and helped Cesar maneuver Amalita's body in through the door.

  "Don't forget your safety lines," said Jean. "There are some weird gravity fields out there." Pierre attached a line to himself and another to the ring in Amalita's suit. Just then a dark head appeared in the passageway hole in the deck.

  "I had to say goodbye," said Abdul. He forced himself to look at Amalita's badly burned face. His left hand reached into the singed hair and held it lightly, while his right hand took two kisses from his lips and placed them softly on the frosted blisters of Amalita's closed eyelids. He turned and dove down the passageway, leaving behind clusters of teardrops moving upward in the swirling air.

  Jean cycled them through.

  "The best place to release her is near the viewport window," Pierre said as he climbed out the outer lock. He care-

  fully attached his magni-stiction boots to the hull, then shifted his safety line to a tiedown. "She'll be pulled outward to the ring of compensator masses and be gone in a flash of plasma. The last thing we want is to have her, or 'pieces' of her, in orbit."

  They moved carefully over the hull to a point near the viewport. They were standing at the south pole of their little moon that circled around the neutron star five times a second. The hull of Dragon Slayer did not spin while it orbited, however, but stayed oriented with respect to the distant stars. To the two humans standing on the hull, the white-hot neutron star seemed to be rotating around the equator of the ship five times a second, while above and below them whirled a ring of six red masses that passed over the two poles of the spherical ship while it rotated to always be tangent to the direction to the star. In this configuration, the gravity tides from the ring of masses cancelled the dangerous gravity tides from the star and allowed the humans to survive.

  "I'll give her a slight push while you pay out the safety line," Pierre said.

  He let go of Amalita's body, and the uncompensated tides started to pull her outwards. The further she got away from the ship and the closer she got to the massive bodies in the ring, the stronger the forces became. A sprinkling of white-hot sparks gathered off in the distance to observe.

  "She is getting heavy," said Cesar.

  "It looks stable," said Pierre. "Let her go."

  The last of the safety rope whipped through the tiedown and followed Amalita as she accelerated rapidly toward the ring 200 meters away. J
ust before she reached the ring her body was momentarily surrounded by a swirling cloud of white-hot specks. There was a flash, and she was gone.

  When Pierre and Cesar came inside, Jean and Seiko helped them out of their suits.

  "Unless somebody is going to use the console library, I think I'll get back to working on my book," said Pierre.

  "Which one?" Jean asked.

  "The popular version that covers everything that happened on the trip. I was going to call it Dragon's Egg, but the editors at Ballantine Interplanetary said that they already had a title of that name in their inventory. Besides, they wanted something more personal, so they chose, My Visit With Our

  Nucleonic Friends. I think it's a dumb title, but they are the ones buying the book."

  "I don't think money is a consideration anymore," Seiko reminded him.

  "Hmm." Pierre glanced down at the star image table and noticed that there were a number of new features on the surface of the neutron star.

  "There have been some changes in the last hour," he said to Seiko.

  "Yes," she replied. "While you and Doctor Wong were outside, the cheela have reestablished a highly technological civilization on the ground and have resumed extensive space travel activities. They have rapidly caught up to where they were at the time of the starquake and are continuing on at a rapid pace."

  "I'd better get busy writing if I am going to stay up with them." Pierre reached down and pulled himself through the passageway hole in the deck. He stopped when he came to the main deck. Abdul was there. He had opened the metal shield on one of the equatorial viewports and was looking out through the tinted glass.

  "Hey! Look at the sightseers," Abdul hollered across the deck. "It's like being one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. Why don't you come over and pretend to be Teddy Roosevelt? You've got the beard for it." As Pierre approached the window, the number of specks outside increased dramatically.

  01:30:04 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

  Busy-Thoughts moved around the creche-classroom critiquing the work of the students. Although most of the youngling's education was done through holovid connections to the "Master Teacher" program in the central computer, there were still some topics that were best handled by live teachers in central classrooms. Plasma art was one of them, especially since the generators were massive and expensive.

  "Excellent structure, Lovely-Eyes," said Busy-Thoughts. "But the colors are a little weak for such a bold form. Perhaps you should try more current in the ion generators."

  The student adjusted the controls under his tread and increased the intensity of the ion beams shooting into the

  shaped magnetic fields. The ions spiraled along the magnetic field lines, giving off a glow of synchrotron radiation. With the increased current, the interior of the magnetic sculpture glowed brighter. Lovely-Eyes then increased the strength of one of the magnetic field generators in the base and adjusted some transparent superconductor guides attached to the top. The sculpture was now a floating form of brightly glowing colors. The shape was bi-symmetric. There was an intense inner violet structure that was basically spherical, but had large rough holes penetrating it. Two circles were set side-by-side in the violet sphere, with a triangle and a rectangle below them. Covering the violet structure was a lumpy blanket of softer plasma in blue-white with patches of yellow-white.

  "It looks strangely familiar," said Busy-Thoughts.

  "It is a portrait of one of the humans," said Lovely-Eyes. "This one is Pierre Carnot Niven, the Commander of the Expedition."

  "If you say so. The Slow Ones all look the same to me."

  "Not once you know them better," said Lovely-Eyes. "Pierre has hairs on the bottom side of his head-lump as well as the top side." Lovely-Eyes went on eagerly, "I've been learning all about the humans in my holovid courses. The Master Teacher program says I do well in that subject and has allowed me to take a special advanced program in humanology."

  "That's very nice, Lovely-Eyes, but this is an abstract art class. As strange as humans look, they don't qualify as abstract art. In the next class I want you to concentrate on doing your assignment."

  Busy-Thoughts moved to the center of the classroom and 'trummed the class to attention.

  "Everyone finish his sculpture and set the control pattern in memory. When you finish I have an announcement."

  There were whispered exchanges between the students as they made last minute adjustments to their pieces and closed down their generators. As they gathered around the teacher, Busy-Thoughts momentarily felt the instinct to reach out and cover them all with his hatching mantle. He shook off the feeling, then made a resolve to apply for rejuvenation again. He had been putting it off too long.

  "The White Rock Clan has prospered this year," said Busy-Thoughts. "With the decrease in our egg quota from

  the Combined Clans Population Control Board, we have had fewer creche expenses. The elders of the clan have decided to send the entire creche-school on a trip to see the humans. After all, we are in a unique period in history, when all five humans can be seen, up close, at the same time."

  Lovely-Eyes was ecstatic at the announcement. For the first time he would be able to see the humans he had been studying.

  The class took a glide-carrier to the West Pole and rode up the West Pole Space Fountain to the top. Busy-Thoughts had arranged a special hookup to the Master Teacher. On the way up the class was given a lecture on the geographical features of the West Pole hemisphere they could see below them. At Topside Platform they switched to a tourist ship especially made for viewing the humans. It had artificial gravity generators and tiers of platforms so that everyone had a good view, yet the human spacecraft wasn't uncomfortably "overhead."

  "Oh my! They are huge," Lovely-Eyes said as the tourist ship floated to a stop a meter away from the porthole that held the motionless visages of Pierre and Abdul. He formed a tendril and pointed it at one of the humans. "That's Pierre. You can tell because of the yellow patch all over the bottom of his head. The other one is Abdul. He only has a thin yellow patch under his nose."

  "What is the yellow stuff?" one of his classmates asked.

  "Hairs. Humans are mostly hairless like us, but they have hairy patches like Slink hide on their heads."

  "Ugly!!!" she replied.

  The tourist ship moved on to the next porthole where Jean Kelly was looking out.

  "They all look the same," someone said. "I thought they had hides of different color."

  "They do, in the long wavelength portion of the spectrum where the humans eyes work," said Lovely-Eyes. "But they all look the same to X-ray vision."

  The tourist ship set up a holovid projector with a time-lapse sequence. First they saw Abdul at the porthole calling Pierre, the appearance of Pierre at the window, then Abdul and Pierre talking and looking at the visiting spacecraft. The jerky time-lapse photography had everyone rumbling their tread.

  "Stop laughing!!!" Lovely-Eyes shouted into the deck.

  Those brave humans have given up their lives to save Egg, and you laugh at them like Slinks in a zoo!"

  "Lovely-Eyes!" Busy-Thoughts' tread rapped in the distance. "Behave yourself!"

  Lovely-Eyes' tread fell silent, but his brain-knot was still seething. "There must be a way to save them," he thought. "And I will not change my accursed egg-name until I find it. When I do, the name I shall choose will be a better name, a noble name."

  01:30:05 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

  "Look at those spaceships!" said Abdul. "They are almost 10 centimeters long and have multiple decks. They must be the equivalent of cruise ships, coming up to see the sights."

  "They are no longer spherical." Seiko was peering out an adjacent porthole. "They have found an efficient method of producing gravity, so they no longer need to carry along miniature black holes. Their technological capability is increasing at an astounding rate."

  "I wonder if they'll ever be able to move asteroids," Jean said wistfully.

  "They have plent
y of energy to do the job," said Pierre. "It's just that Oscar is so fragile, and they and their machines are so dense."

  "Superman may be able to lift icebergs in the holovids," said Abdul. "But if he tried lifting a real iceberg he would end up with nothing but a pile of ice cubes."

  "There is no way they could bring Oscar back any sooner than six months," said Seiko in her authoritative Teutonic tone. "We might as well stop wishful thinking; it's counterproductive. We're going to die, and there is not much we can do about it. I'm going down to the galley for something to eat. Anyone care to join me?"

  "I'm not hungry just now," said Cesar. The others kept looking out the windows at the blizzard of visiting spacecraft.

  03:54:50 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050

  The turn eventually came when Lovely-Eyes at last gave up on his quest and returned to White Rock City, the homeland of his clan. He found the creche-master and asked for a position tending the young ones.

  "Few positions left," said Creche-Master/71. "PopCon Board decreasing cheela, more robots instead."

  Lovely-Eyes didn't like the abrupt language style that had developed in the last 60 greats of turns. Now that nearly every cheela had a horde of robots at its beck and call, and seldom interacted with other cheela, politeness had nearly dropped out of the language. After all, robots didn't have feelings and didn't have to be persuaded to do anything, just told to do it. Since he was talking to a cheela, however, he thought that perhaps he would do better if he used the old style.

  "I would really appreciate it if you could find a position for me," said Lovely-Eyes. "I have worked hard for 300 greats of turns and am looking forward to tending the hatc-lings."

  "Experience?" asked Creche-Master/71.

  "I have advanced degrees in Humanology, Human Medicine, Expanded Matter Science, Inertial and Gravitational Engineering, and Science Administration. I was also Leader of the Fourth Segment in the Legislature of the Combined Clans."