Interaction

08:42:05 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Swift-Killer moved slowly through the compound of the Inner Eye Institute in Bright’s Heaven. She was getting old and did not bluster her way directly into the hard direction as she had used to. Instead, she slid obliquely along, letting the bulk of her still huge body do the work against the “lines of magnetic force” that one of Pierre’s early science books had taught them about. She made her way to the Sky-Talk Library. It was still under construction, with workers busily assembling low walls with storage bins for the knowledge that had been beaming down from the sky for almost two generations now. There were smaller bins for the tally fringe strings that were the method of recording the pictures early in her job as Keeper of the Sender, and larger ones for the new tasting plates that could accurately record the high resolution, multihued “television” images that the humans were now using.

The taste-plates had also been one of Swift-Killer’s many inventions. She had begun to despair over accurately recording all the subtle nuances of the human television signal in the form of knots of various shapes and sizes. She had happened upon the new technique when she had been on inspection after they had broken camp and were moving on to a new station under the westward-drifting human spacecraft. She had flowed through the remains of the kitchen for the camp and her tread moved across an abandoned mixing plate, stained with meat juices and spices. Her ancient hunting senses had sprung into action, attempting to extract every item of information from the complex chemical spoor that it found under her tread. Swift-Killer had experimented and found that her tread could “taste” with higher resolution and comprehension using her ancient spoor-tracking senses than it could feel with her high-sensitivity tactile senses. After a little experimentation to find the most pungent and long-lasting spices, the knowledge of the humans was soon being stored on long-lasting, apparently featureless plates, that burst into a detailed, “full-colored” image as a trained tread flowed onto it.

Swift-Killer approached Sky-Beams, one of her apprentices, who was busily staring upwards at the rapidly blinking Inner Eye, a set of trained tendrils in front of him, shooting drop after drop of spice onto a fresh plate.

Leaving half of his eyes devoted to the recording task, Sky-Beams turned the others toward his mentor. “What are you doing here, O Keeper of the Sender?” Sky-Beams said, his correctly formal address scarcely concealing his annoyance that the Old One was interrupting him.

Swift-Killer knew exactly what was wrong with the youngster. He was ready to become the new Keeper of the Sender, and she was still around. However, it didn’t bother her any longer. As she grew older, she grew more mellow and now was actually looking forward to tending eggs and hatchlings. What stories she would tell them!

“I came to bring you good news, Sky-Beams,” she said. “The advisory council of the Inner Eye Institute has agreed with my recommendation, and you are now the new Keeper of the Sender.”

Swift-Killer flowed over toward him as the tendrils on the younger one hesitated. She started to form a pseudopod to stroke his topside as she had done many times in the past. He seemed perfectly willing, but she found that she was just not interested in sex anymore. She wanted to get to the eggs that were waiting for her. She gave him a friendly brush anyway, then said, “Stay vigilant, Sky-Beams. The work may be tedious at times, but one never knows but what the next page will bring a new truth to our people.”

“I will, my teacher,” Sky-Beams said, and turned all his eyes back to the sky as Swift-Killer flowed away in the easy direction, heading for the egg-pens on the east side of Bright’s Heaven.

Pierre looked up at the flash in the corner of his screen.

LINK FROM JEAN—LIBRARY

“Accept link!” he said.

PULLED SECTION ON MATH AND PHYSICS.
IT IS NOW CUED IN COMPUTER AFTER YOUR BOOKS.
CONCENTRATED ON PHYSICS OF NEUTRON STARS.
SLOW GOING, HOWEVER.
WHAT NEXT?
# # # # JEAN

Pierre thought for a moment. Jean was right. If they spent time searching through the extensive ship’s encyclopedia for useful knowledge on the HoloMem crystals, then dumping those sections into the communication computer and out the laser communications console, it would take them forever and a day. A day for the humans and what would seem like forever to the neutron star beings.

“Amalita!” he bellowed, and soon a bloody handkerchief with two eager eyes above it was peering down through the passageway. “Can we hook up the library HoloMem reader directly into the communications console?”

There was a slight pause as Amalita flicked circuit diagrams through her nearly eidetic memory.

“Sorry, Pierre,” she said. “The HoloMem crystal reader is hardwired into the library computer. However, the communications console does have the capability of reading or recording a single HoloMem crystal at a time.”

“It does?” Pierre said, surprised.

Amalita floated over to the communications console where Abdul was monitoring the latest transmission and flipped open a small door in one side. She reached in and carefully removed a three-sided object. When she pulled it out, Pierre could see the bottom was missing and the interior was a corner cube of brilliantly polished mirrors.

“This is one-half the scanner cavity,” Amalita said, “and here is the HoloMem crystal itself.” She pushed a button and a clear crystal cube about five centimeters across sprang out of the door, twirling slowly as it floated into the room. The corners and edges of the cube were jet black, but through the clear faces Pierre could see the rainbowlike reflections from the information fringes stored in the interior. Amalita deftly plucked the cube out of the air, her thumb and forefinger grasping it at opposite corners.

“This has been storing everything that has gone through the console since we started,” she said. “It is exactly the same size as one of the encyclopedia HoloMems and we can put one of them in place of this one and read the encyclopedia down one crystal at a time. It will take about a minute to switch crystals and check the scanner adjustments, and about half an hour to read out each one of the 25 encyclopedia crystals, but that should still be faster than shoving all those bits from the library computer through the communications computer to the console.”

“Good!” Pierre said. “Go get the first encyclopedia crystal and start with that.”

“A to AME, AME to AUS, AUS to BLO, BLO to…” muttered Amalita as she twirled down through the passageway to the library, her trained legs and feet propelling her as efficiently as her hands, which were still busy holding the HoloMem crystal and the corner of the laser scanner cavity.

“A complete education, from Astronomy to Zoology,” Pierre mused. “Alphabetical order may not be the best way to teach someone, but in this case it is the fastest.”

11:16:03 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Suck-the-Crystal pressed the pores of his tread to the page—absorbing again the revelation that had come dripping across from the neutron-depleted plates. His thrums of joy and surprise pounded the page. From the page they were transmitted to the floor and thence to the entire courtyard of the Sky-Talk Library—raising admonishing taps from the librarians and scholars. The taps were soon followed by slower waves emanating from the methodical approach of his friend, mentor and (unfortunately at this time) Chief Librarian—Seek-the-Sky, who arrived saying, “Have you lost your senses or is it only that you’ve drained your nuclei dry trying to read those depleted plates of crystal and have gone into convulsions?”

“I am sorry, Seek-the-Sky. It is just that I absorbed a piece of knowledge that made my previous studies come together into one coherent piece. Here—try it.”

Seek-the-Sky flowed onto the dusty, well-tasted crystal plate as Suck-the-Crystal flowed off. From the heading on the plate the librarian noted that it was an early plate from the human encyclopedia, HoloMem 2—AME to AUS. It was a table in the section on Astronomy.

“So?” Seek-the-Sky said. “This plate has been tasted so often that there is hardly a neutron left on it, much less any information that has not been correlated and cross-correlated and cross-cross-correlated by the Old Ones many turns ago. What do you find here that I don’t? This seems to be a brittle, tasteless table of stellar nebula.”

As he flowed off the plate he stamped, “What is so important about this that you should disturb the scholarly researches of the entire library staff?”

“But, please,” Suck-the-Crystal said quickly, “it was an entry in the table that suddenly cross-correlated with some new plates that I helped prepare and catalog just this turn. A few milliseconds ago, over at the Comm Input, I had prepared the crystal plates from the turn’s batch of data transmitted by the humans, and had proof-tasted them carefully with the vibrations from the acoustic delay line as any apprentice should. Now-most of the apprentices don’t really care what is on the plates, just as long as they agree with the delay line vibrations—but I like to taste them and do preliminary correlations and pretend that I am the Keeper of the Comm.”

“You?” Seek-the-Sky shuffled. “Keeper of the Comm?”

“Well…” said Suck-the-Crystal. “Yes!” He hastened to explain himself. “Heaven’s-Bounty has been Keeper of the Comm for more than fifteen human minutes. There may be other apprentices who are older than I, but I’m the only one who really cares about the information we are collecting. I bet when the Council meets to replace Heaven’s-Bounty, they will choose me. Am I right?—You’re on the Council.”

“Hmm,” Seek-the-Sky said. “Maybe you are right-but don’t let it make you spread. Now—what is this correlation that has your edges flapping?”

“The large veil-like nebula that is fifth on the list can be extrapolated back to a point of origin at a certain time about 500,000 human years ago. That point is very close to here, about 50 light-years away. That point in space and time is also almost exactly on the path that Egg is on, if you extrapolate back along its track.”

“Very interesting,” the Chief-Librarian said. “You have probably identified the time and place of the supernova explosion that formed Egg.”

“But what is more interesting,” continued Suck-the-Crystal, “is that the climatological records that are coming down right now indicate a very drastic change of climate on the human’s Earth at about that time. Also, that time corresponds with the human anthropologist’s estimate for the genesis of the homo sapiens species. I believe that the laying of Egg by a supernova explosion so very near the Solar System was the direct cause of the emergence of intelligence in the creatures that now float above us, teaching us all they know.”

“I am sure the humans will be amused when they hear that,” Seek-the-Sky said. “Let us go see Heaven’s-Bounty and have her put that in her next message.”

14:20:05 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Jean was busy setting up an alternate communication link with the infrared scanner when she heard a loud snorting bark. It sounded like an angry seal. She quickly turned, looking for the source of the noise.

“I fell asleep and snored,” said an abashed Pierre, who had been handing her tools while she was head downwards inside the infrared scanner bay.

“No wonder,” she replied, pulling herself out of the bay and taking the tool kit from him. “You missed your sleep shift when this ruckus started. You head off to your rack and get some sleep. You are no good to us in this condition.”

“But if I go to sleep for eight hours, there will be a thousand years of cheela development before I wake up. That is like sleeping through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire!”

“Set your alarm for six hours,” she replied, pushing him down the passageway, “That will give you enough sleep to keep you going and maybe you will be awake again before they develop spaceflight.”

14:28:11 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Soother’s-Worry paused in the middle of his message to the human. He formed a manipulator, grew a crystalline bone to strengthen it, and pressed the panels that turned off the image that was beaming 400 kilometers down from the human spaceship in its synchronous orbit about Egg. The face that lay under him on the tasting screen flickered off, and was replaced with his own image.

“I simply must see how gorgeous I look,” Soother’s-Worry thought. “Those humans can just wait a while. Besides, with the computer slowing everything down by a million to one so the Slow Ones can follow things, I bet they never even notice that I stopped talking.”

Soother’s-Worry absorbed his image through his tread and glowed inwardly at the sight. His dozen eyes glistened in a deep red halo about the baroque pattern that he had recently had painted on the topside of his flattened ellipsoidal body. He turned slowly, watching the pattern shift on the screen. The dozen shiny reflective circles near the base of each eye-stub mirrored the black sky and stars, so that it looked as if he had holes through his body looking out on another universe. Winding between the circles was a stripe of highly emissive paint that glowed a hot yellow against his deep red topside surface.

“Beautiful, simply beautiful. Mother will simply love it,” he gloated.

He wanted his mother to like him. She almost never visited him anymore, and seemed to spend all her time with Soother’s-First and Soother’s-Pride.

“You must remember,” Soother’s-Worry said to himself in an imitation of the Old One who had had the job of raising him, “your mother is Soother-of-All-Clans and has more important things to do than to take care of her children.

“If only,” thought Soother’s-Worry, “she had not commanded that her eggs be kept separate from all the others. Then I would be just another cheela from the central nursery and not have to worry whether my mother was neglecting me or not.

“But,” he reminded himself, “if it had not been for mother, I certainly would not have the enviable position of Keeper of the Comm. As boring as the job is, it is certainly one of the most prestigious in Soother’s-Empire.”

Soother-of-All-Clans paused at the entrance to the egg pen. The Old One in charge of the pen, having no eggs to keep him busy, had felt her tread and was waiting for her. He watched with a combination of anxiety and eagerness as the egg-sac was extruded onto the crust from Soother’s laying orifice. As soon as the sac was safely on the crust, flattened into a nice ellipsoidal shape, the Old One spread out one of his edges into a hatching mantle and covered the egg gently with the thin membrane. He then slowly rolled the egg toward him and placed it under the protection of his body.

“This one shall be named Soother’s-Rock,” Soother said. “Its father is Yellow-Rock. Leader of the Clan in the northwest. As soon as the eggling is ready to leave the hatchling pen, it is to be sent to Yellow-Rock for rearing as a youth of its father’s clan, for it will become Leader when its father flows.”

“It will be done, Soother-of-All-Clans,” the Old One said.

Soother turned and rejoined her chief advisors, Soother’s-First and Soother’s-Pride, her first two children. She was getting a little tired of the constant egg laying, but it was one of her most important duties as Soother-of-All-Clans.

“Who is the next one?” she asked Soother’s-First.

“There are many choices, Mother,” he said. “However, our merchant informers in the clans to the north have told us that the clan leader Deadly-Sting has been talking about a formal challenge to your leadership, despite the fact that you have forbidden leadership duels. Perhaps a command to him to visit here for a formal mating with you would awe him enough that we could get him to hold off.”

“Then again,” Soother’s-Pride said, “if he gets too difficult while he is here, we could arrange for him to flow.”

“No,” Soother remonstrated, “I don’t think that will be necessary. After all, the whole object of my reign is to soothe away these barbaric instincts in my people, so that in future generations they will act in a civilized manner—as the humans do.”

“Shall it be Deadly-Sting then?” Soother’s-First asked.

“Yes,” Soother said, “we will give that near-barbarian from the north a royal welcome that will make him feel much more important than he really is. Then after the formal mating, we will send him home with so many gifts that he will forget all about trying to challenge my rule.”

“I will arrange it immediately, Mother,” Soother’s-First said, moving off toward the Royal compound.

“I am going to Sky Talk library,” Soother told Soother’s-Pride. “I understand that a new book about one of the early human rulers has been sent down by the humans on one of the alternate communication channels. I want to study it carefully for new ideas. I hope that the ideas on government by the human Napoleon will prove to be as interesting as those of Machiavelli were.”

Soother’s-Pride watched his mother flow off toward the Sky-Talk compound, a squad of troopers automatically shaping a chevron formation about her, their burly bodies acting as pathbreakers for her in both the hard and the soft directions. As she moved off, Soother’s-Pride heard her tread muttering as she moved.

“What shall I name it? Soother’s-Sting? Who ever heard of a soothing sting? Soother’s-Deadly? No—that’s worse…”

As Soother approached the Sky-Talk compound, she headed directly for the library and was careful to avoid the Comm complex. The last thing she wanted to be bothered with was the fawning presence of Soother’s-Worry.

She was very sorry that she had studied only the GOVERNMENT sections of the human encyclopedia in her youth. She had applied her new knowledge of government to the naive ruling system of the semibarbaric cheela of her time, and had shortly taken over the Leadership of the Combined Clans. She had forged a mighty state that had conquered the remainder of the barbarian tribes on Egg and had finally brought peace to the entire star. As Soother-of-All-Clans she was now powerful enough to subjugate any unruly band or clan, but her job now was to consolidate her rule by less violent means, and form a hereditary dynasty that would eliminate forever the problem of deciding who the next ruler would be, for that would be foreordained from birth.

Her first (and she hoped her only) mistake, was trying to form the line of descendants completely from her own flesh. Soother’s-First was a beautiful example of a cheela, and she would be proud to have him carry on her name after she flowed. She had thought that, since he was such a handsome specimen, she could combine her excellent qualities with his by mating with him as soon as he left the hatching pens. Unfortunately, the result was not what she had expected. The Old Ones at the hatchery tried to give the little one extra attention, but it was soon obvious to all that the hatchling was barely smart enough to feed itself. Soother had found the sinecure of Keeper of the Comm for Soother’s-Worry, but the last thing she wanted was to be reminded of her own weaknesses. For according to the human encyclopedia section on GENETICS, the weaknesses that were so obvious in Soother’s-Worry were lying dormant in her, only they were masked by other, better genes from her mates.

“If only I had at least scanned the other sections, instead of concentrating solely on the GOVERNMENT section,” she said to herself for what seemed to be the dozenth time, knowing full well that if she had done that, she would still be in the library, and would not now be Soother-of-All-Clans.

Actually, Soother had almost gotten away with her scheme. The cheela biophysicists would not determine the genetic coding mechanism for the cheela for dozens of generations, but when they did, both they and the humans would be surprised at how different it was. Because of the high temperatures on the neutron star that attempted to disrupt everything into random chaos, and the all-pervasive magnetic field that lined everything up along the magnetic field lines, the cheela genetic structure was a triply-redundant linear strand of complex nuclear molecules. As the duplicating enzymes would copy the genetic molecule, the check at each triply redundant site provided an automatically correcting copying mechanism; if one of the three linear strands had mutated, the copying enzyme would be governed by majority rule, and the new triple strand would have the mutation corrected. If two mutations had occurred and all three sites were different, the enzyme would self-destruct, taking the faulty gene with it. It was only when the two mutations were the same that an error was able to creep through. Unfortunately, there had been too many repeated errors in those genes that had formed the nervous system in her son, Soother’s-Worry. He was mentally retarded.

Many, many eggs later, Soother was getting tired, yet her ambition drove her on. Her aging body was now pouring nucleonic hormones into her juices that were designed to make her slow down her aggressive drive and retire to the essential job of being an Old One.

The Old Ones were designed by the cheela genes to carefully tend the clan eggs that the younger females would lay and forget, while they returned to their jobs as warriors protecting the clan from enemies. There were no real enemies anymore, and Soother did not want to be an Old One tending eggs, so she transferred her developing parental instincts to the cheela as a whole and drove herself on, consolidating her rule by using the governmental techniques developed by generations of humans.

Finally Soother began to realize that she could not go on forever. Eventually she would have to flow, and the Soother-of-All-Clans would not be there to keep the quarrelsome clans soothed. Of course, Soother’s-First was quite capable and willing to take her place and assume his duties as Soother-of-All-Clans, however, her personal ambition kept her from relinquishing her control over her people.

Soother then remembered an old story about the ancient one named Swift-Killer who had first made contact with the humans. The Leonardo da Vinci of the cheela, Swift-Killer had invented the first communication system and was the first Keeper of the Comm. That was long ago when the Keeper of the Comm had to know how to keep the communication and data storage systems operating, and didn’t have a team of communication engineers and library assistants to run things.

Soother went to visit the scientists at Sky-Talk compound. “I understand that Swift-Killer, the first Keeper of the Comm, experienced a strange transformation that rejuvenated her,” she said.

“Yes,” the scientist replied. “Under extreme trauma, her body reverted to that of a dragon plant. She stayed that way for some dozens of greats of turns, and then for some reason the dragon plant reverted back to that of a cheela. However, the new body, having been almost completely rebuilt, was that of a youth, while the scarred outer skin and brain was that of an older one.”

“I want to go through that transformation,” Soother said, “so that I may continue to lead my people.”

“That would be very dangerous, O Soother-of-All-Clans,” the scientist said in alarm. “Shortly after Swift-Killer’s experience, the experiment was tried by many cheela. With most of them, nothing happened, and they finally gave up and went off to tend eggs. With others, they had starved themselves so much that they just stopped living and flowed. There was not enough meat left on them even to bother calling the butchers. A few tried both starvation and a severe heating of the topside. Most of these died from the serious burns, and only one started the transformation. However, even that one died before he was well started. You may not have learned it in the stories that you read about Swift-Killer, but she was not alone; there were two others with her, and one of those died.”

“Then if it is done properly, the odds are two out of three,” Soother said firmly.

“But Soother,” protested the scientist, “we don’t really know how to do it properly. No one was there to witness the transformation.”

“Still,” Soother continued, “if I do not go through the transformation, I am surely going to flow soon. I want to be transformed, and within the next great of turns. You and the others are to read all that you can and make preparations. I will return when you are ready.”

“It shall be done,” the scientist said with resignation. Soother flowed away from him without further word, her squad of troopers forming automatically around her as she moved off.

There was really little more to learn about the ancient transformation of Swift-Killer. What records the scientists had were mostly old storyteller tales that had been distorted by many tellings before they had been written down. It was well less than a great of turns before the scientists let Soother know that they were as ready as they could be.

Soother came at once. She left Soother’s-Pride in charge of the routine business of running the Empire, while Soother’s-First and a full troop of needle troopers came to Sky-Talk compound to make sure that the experiment was carried out safely. When Soother’s-First and the troop commander heard what Soother would be subjected to, they protested strongly.

“They are going to kill you with that treatment!” Soother’s-First warned.

“First they are going to starve you until you are an empty sac, and then they are going to sear your topside with a bank of X-ray arcs!” the troop commander shouted.

“Yet, that is what Swift-Killer went through, and so can I,” Soother said bravely. “I want you two to see that they do it properly.”

“I can’t see how we can protect you from them,” the Troop Commander said. “What they propose to do to you does not sound like a treatment, but a fiendish torture for a particularly nasty barbarian!”

“But you can protect me,” she replied. “For if I die, you can see that they do also!”

The troop commander hesitated, for to kill unarmed thinkers who had only done their best, and under protest, did not seem like the kind of thing a decent warrior should do, but his sense of duty overcame his principles; after all, the one giving the order was the Soother-of-All-Clans.

“It will be as you say, Soother-of-All-Clans,” said the troop commander obediently.

“And if I do flow,” Soother said to Soother’s-First, “you shall be the next Soother-of-All-Clans. Rule well, my son.” She formed a small tendril and stroked him lightly on the topside.

“I will, Mother,” he said.

“But don’t count on it,” she cut in abruptly. “For I intend to come back—younger than you.” Her tendril whipped off his topside and shrank back into her surface. She moved off toward the waiting scientists.

“You may proceed,” she said.

Although Soother had not eaten for three dozen turns in preparation for the ordeal, it took two dozen more turns before the scientists and doctors felt that she had been weakened enough that her body functions were disrupted to the point where the plant transformation enzymes could begin to dominate the animal enzymes. They could now start the next phase of the transformation.

According to the legends of the storytellers, Swift-Killer had a blotchy topside after her transformation. Some painful experiments with volunteers who had suffered a small section of their topsides to be seared with lengthening sessions under an X-ray arc had shown that the blotches were caused by blisters that formed on the skin after a certain amount of exposure to X-rays. The timing was critical, however, for too long an exposure caused the blistered surface to char, and then the burn was too severe. The volunteer who had suffered that much radiation still had a nasty scar in the small test spot. He would not have survived if the burn had been over a much larger area.

Soother was barely conscious when the banks of X-ray arcs were struck. The violet-white radiation beamed unmercifully down upon her weakened body. The pain and shock knocked her out and she flowed. The doctors were watching closely, and the arcs were extinguished just as the blisters started.

The troop commander and Soother’s-First stood by, looking with distaste and horror on the flattened sac of blistered skin that lay in front of them. The scientists and doctors hovered around, their tendrils constantly touching the now sleeping body.

“She still lives,” one of the doctors said. “But her body functions are very unusual. Her fluid pumps are not beating as they do when a cheela is struck in the brain-knot and knocked unconscious; instead they are moving very slowly. It is a state that the humans call sleep.”

Soother’s-First moved toward the body and confirmed their diagnosis. “It is indeed fortunate for you that she is still alive,” he said. “Continue your work.”

“There is nothing left for us to do,” one of the scientists said. “It is now up to her body. All we can do is make sure that she is not disturbed. We can only wait and watch.”

For two dozen turns, nothing much happened, except that the blistered topside started slowly to heal itself. As the healing progressed, Soother’s-First noticed that the muscle tone of the skin, which had been poor at the end of the starvation period, now became almost nonexistent. The skin under the healing blisters seemed to be almost transparent. Then after another dozen turns, a small, twelve-pointed crown started to lift up under the center of the sac of skin.

“It looks as if the transformation is working,” one of the scientists reported. “The root spike must now be complete, and that is the start of the cantilever structure that will hold the skin up to the sky.”

Inside Soother, the hormones and enzymes were busy. The animal muscle was attacked and dissolved, but the enzymes were careful to take their dissolution process just so far. The stringlike molecules in the muscle tissue were carefully teased apart into separate strands, but the strands were carefully maintained as long fibers. The longer they were, the stronger would be the resulting dragon crystal. The fibers floated through the juices where they were picked up by the enzymes building the engineering marvel that would lift the huge body up off the surface of Egg against the fierce gravity, the stiff structures of the plant body being capable of doing something that the more flexible tissues of the animal body could never do. Carefully the enzymes worked the long fibers into the crystal, embedding them firmly into the clear crystal-Hum, to make a composite material that was many times stronger than the crystallium itself. Things went well for a while, and the cantilever structure grew, slowly lifting the thinned sack of skin off the ground. However, long before the twelve-pointed structure was really finished, the muscle tissue ran low. The growth slowed, and every strand that floated nearby was eagerly salvaged by the enzymes that struggled to make do with inadequate building materials. Finally the last portions of the spikes were being made almost entirely of inadequate clear crystallium.

Soother had waited too long for her transformation. The ancient Swift-Killer had been a well-exercised troop commander, and even in her starved state she had had plenty of muscle tissue; but Soother had been an administrator too long, and had not gone into her ordeal with sufficient reserves.

Soother’s-First was awed by the huge plant that began to tower over him. Even the scientists were greatly pleased with the result. As the turns passed, the skin folds lifted off the crust, and the doctors could already tell from the wastes emitted from the still partially functioning animal orifices that new nourishment was being generated by the plant portion of the body. Everything looked good. Soother’s-First even began to think about leaving the Sky-Talk compound to visit with Soother’s-Pride to work out the details of their temporary joint rule for the next dozen greats of turns until his mother was rejuvenated.

Then it happened. The tip of one of the weakened spikes broke as it attempted to tighten the skin. Soother’s-First was horrified to see a jagged point of dragon crystal sticking up out of the torn fold of skin. The skin held for a while, and the scientists attempted to build a mound up against the side of the body to support the damaged section. But before the support could be arranged, an adjoining spike gave way under the unequal tension, and in a rapid series of sharp cracks and loud crashes, the remainder of the twelve-pointed skeleton broke and fell to the crust.

For a few moments, they all stood in horror as the thin skin oozed the last of its juices out of jagged holes onto the crust. Then Soother’s-First turned to the troop commander.

“I am Soother-of-All-Clans,” he said. His eyes took in the horrified group of scientists and doctors.

“They failed,” he said. “Do as my mother commanded!”

The troop commander hesitated. “But they did their best!” he protested. “There must have been something wrong with Soother’s body for the failure to have occurred like that. It is not proper for you to punish them.”

“Do not lecture to me about what is proper, for I am Soother-of-All-Clans,” he replied angrily. “Obey me at once, or you will no longer be troop commander.”

The troop commander felt an angry muttering among his warriors. Although they were well-trained troopers and obedient to duty, it would take all of his prestige to get them to carry out the order. Then suddenly the troop commander realized the strength of his position. His troopers were more loyal to him personally than to Soother’s-First. They would not have backed him against the legendary Soother herself, but he had no question as to their choice now.

“Who is Leader of All Clans, Old One?” he said quietly, and not a tread moved in the complex as the ancient challenge rang out through the crust.

“What is this nonsense!” Soother’s-First demanded angrily. “The leadership challenge was outlawed by Soother long ago.” His eyes swept over the large body of troopers and found a burly squad leader.

“You,” he ordered. “You are now commander of this troop. Take command and take this traitor into custody!”

The squad leader hesitated. Then with the repressed violence of someone who has seen her whole clan-oriented life disrupted by Soother, who kept track of her eggs like a perverted Old One, she vibrated a harsh reply back through the crust, “I take orders from my commander, not from you—you clanless mother-lover!”

The vehemence of the reply startled Soother’s-First. He looked through the mass of trooper eyes, looking for support, but found none.

The troop commander, now confident of his backing, repeated the challenge. “Who is Leader of All Clans, Old One?”

Soother’s-First did not reply, knowing that he had no chance against this battle-hardened warrior. He attempted to flow off to the west. The troop commander watched for a moment, then accepted a dragon tooth from the nearest trooper. After a very short chase, a well-aimed thrust to the brain-knot ended the short rule of Soother’s-First.

The troop commander found a very strong popular support for his actions, and soon the much larger group of “Clannists” had overcome the numerically smaller group of “Mothers” and by popular acclaim, the troop commander became the new Leader of All Clans.

14:28:53 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Seiko was watching the image of the decorated cheela on the screen. Soother’s-Worry was in the midst of one of his confused sentences when suddenly there was a large crowd of cheela surrounding him. She caught a glimpse of glittering knives of dragon crystal as the computer-fed display stopped. Almost instantly the screen flashed on again. There was no trace of Soother’s-Worry, and the very plain topside of a cheela again was centered on her screen, the dozen eye-stubs waving smoothly as the intelligent-looking eyes stared intently at the optical pickup.

“I am Leonardo, the Chief Scientist of the Sky Talk science complex,” the image said. “I have been appointed the new Keeper of the Comm by the Leader of All Clans.”

Not a flicker of surprise crossed Seiko’s stolid face. One minute ago, the ruler of this world had been called Soother-of-All-Clans. Now they were back to the old title of Leader. Well, they were probably going through their equivalent of the consolidation of China by Ch’in or of Europe by Napoleon, and one would have to expect rapid changes for a while until they had left their semibarbaric state and had settled down to a method for transition of rule by peaceful means.

“Welcome, Leonardo,” Seiko said, slightly amused. The name was probably inherited with the job as Chief Scientist. Right now the cheela were in awe of the accomplishments of the humans and often took names from the encyclopedia the humans were sending down. Within half a day, they would have surpassed the humans in knowledge and technology. She doubted that she would meet any Leonardos or Einsteins on her next shift.

“We are about through with the HoloMem crystal GAM to GRE and we will have to take a short break while we load in the next one,” Seiko said.

“Good,” said the computer-slowed image of Leonardo. “That will give us a chance to install the new radiation to taste converters.”

20:29:59 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Super-Fluid was dejected. This turn was to have been one of the greatest moments of his career, and it had been blasted by his meeting with the Council for the Programmed Education of the Slow Ones. The Council had decided that the humans would not be told about Super-Fluid’s new theory of gravity. Instead, the humans would have to rediscover it for themselves.

Super-Fluid had wanted to have his new theory appreciated and used by the humans. After all, they had given so much to the cheela. Yet he recognized that the only reason that the cheela were still developing on their own was that the extensive knowledge of the humans had been transmitted down to them so slowly that the faster-thinking cheela had usually figured out things by themselves, long before the detailed human explanation had finally trickled in.

The Council had decreed that his new discoveries on antigravity would have to be sent up to the humans in a coded form. The detailed information on his theory would be in the hands of the humans, but they would not be able to read it until they knew the crypto-keyword that would decipher the gibberish that they had received. The crypto-keyword for the antigravity section was the complete nonlinear formula that Super-Fluid had laboriously developed only after many turns of deep thought.

“It isn’t fair,” Super-Fluid thought. “Before they can find out what I did, one of the humans will have had to think the same thoughts that I did, and that person will get the credit!”

Yet he knew that, although the human might receive some limited notoriety for breaking the cryptocode to the antigravity section, it would give no real consolation to the person who, after all, had come in second best.

“They are so brave—so noble—those Slow Ones,” thought Super-Fluid, as he approached the construction site for the antigravity machine.

Helium-Two, Project Manager of the Negative Gravity Test Project, watched the wrinkled figure of the elderly scientist approach. According to reports, the Aged One still had enough juice left in him to take an interest in his earlier scientific exploits, even though he had served a full stint at the hatching pens. He had been expecting a wrinkled, but still perky Aged One; but what was coming toward him was the sorriest, most dejected cheela he had ever seen since he had been hatched. There must be something wrong.

Then, as Helium-Two watched, the cheela in the distance noticed his presence. Shivering himself all over, Super-Fluid suddenly changed character and moved surely toward him, even though he was partially off in the hard direction.

“I presume you are Helium-Two,” the Aged One said with a firm tread. “Thank you for arranging to have me present during the demonstration.”

“I knew that you would want to see it,” Helium-Two said. “Please follow me.”

The two cheela moved in single file across the dense crystal crust of the neutron star. Helium-Two pushed hard, as if he were leaning into a heavy wind. His opalescent, ellipsoidal body flattened out to force an opening between the trillion gauss magnetic field lines. He deferentially held the gap open with a trailing cluster of reinforced manipulator arms that allowed the elder scientist to flow after him with minimum effort. They paused to look around; as they did so, they felt the magnetic field close in on them again, their bodies pinned onto the field lines like beads on a wire.

“How do you like it, Super-Fluid?” Helium-Two asked. “Big, isn’t it?”

“I don’t see much of anything except those large pumps over there and some ridges in the crust.”

“We had to put most of the antigravity machine underground because of the high pressures. Underneath those ridges are the largest high pressure vessels ever made by cheela. They are formed of strong pipes wrapped around and around in the shape of a ring wrapped with wire. You can see one ring under that ridge and the top of the other ring over there. They are set up at an angle to each other so that the place of maximum interaction is just above the surface in the middle.”

“I didn’t visualize anything like this when I was working on the theory,” Super-Fluid said, as his dozen eyes took in the vista.

“You are lucky. Very few theoretical scientists ever see their mathematical equations turned into working hardware in their lifetime, especially when the theoretical work involves such a fundamental change in our understanding of nature such as does the Super-Fluid-Einstein theory of gravitation. Einstein himself was one of the few. He lived to see his E=mc² prediction bring about control of nuclear energy. Einstein was lucky because it turned out to be easy for the humans to get a nuclear chain reaction going—they just have to bring two pieces of uranium or plutonium near each other. You are fortunate in that it is easy for us to get the very high mass-densities and velocities that are needed to make the Super-Fluid effect work.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that term,” Super-Fluid said. “The correct term is the gravimotive effect. People keep referring to the effect by my name—and I appreciate the honor, but I am thinking of the poor students in the future. They are going to have a hard time remembering that the Super-Fluid effect is the gravimotive effect and does not have anything to do with superconductivity.”

The two started back toward the bunker as Super-Fluid went on, “I have always been proud of the unusual name that the Old Ones chose for me when I was a hatchling. Like you, I was hatched during the generation when the humans were beaming down the SUPERCONDUCTIVITY section of their encyclopedia. The theories of superconductivity revolutionized our understanding of the interior of our home star. It made quite an impression on everyone to learn that we are floating on a crystalline crust over a liquid core of superfluid neutrons.”

“All right—the gravimotive effect,” Helium-Two said. “Anyway, the gravitational engineers did a good job on the design. The antigravity machine is a lot more efficient and compact than I thought it would be when I took on the job of managing the design and construction contract.”

Helium-Two went around the bunker to the entrance in the rear. “Come inside, then we will give the machine its first try. We will only take it to half-power in this first trial. We won’t try to make the gravity force go negative, but there should be plenty of interesting effects when we get to zero gravity.”

The project manager and the scientist went into the low bunker. They raised some of their eyes up on short conical stubs and looked out over the top. Helium-Two spent the next few moments going over the checklist with the gravitational engineers.

“It is a big moment for them, too,” Helium-Two thought. “They have been studying and training for many turns, and this is the first time they will be able to see the theories they studied work.”

Everything was soon ready and Helium-Two signaled for the power to be applied. Super-Fluid could feel the vibrations from the great pumps as they started to move their massive loads of ultra-dense liquid. The fluid moved around in the pipes at a constantly increasing velocity. The acceleration supplied by the pumps was so great that the velocity of the dense fluid would begin to approach the speed of light in a millisecond. However, that would be more than time enough for the fast-living cheela to carry out a leisurely experiment.

Super-Fluid could almost visualize the Einstein gravity fields generated by the motion of the liquid and was not surprised to see the crust in the center of the machine lift up and flow out from the center. Soon there was a great cavity almost a centimeter deep, as the Einstein fields took hold and started to nullify the neutron star’s 67-billion-gee gravitational field.

“So far it has all been Einstein antigravity fields,” Helium-Two whispered to him. “Very shortly the hyper-nonlinear portion of your theory should take over and we should get the contraction of the Einstein fields into a region at the center.”

They watched tensely as the crust started to flow back to fill in the depression—more slowly this time—while the whine of the pumps moved to higher and higher pitch. Soon the crust was nearly what it had been before, but now above the crust at the center of the machine was a distortion in the atmosphere.

“Why can we see the region?” Helium-Two asked. “It can’t be a distortion in space-time caused by strong gravity fields. The gravity is less there than it is here.”

“No,” Super-Fluid said, awed in spite of himself. “The explanation is much more pragmatic than that. The low-gravity region is visible because it doesn’t have any atmosphere. The atmosphere has all flowed to the outside edges. That is an oval-shaped chunk of outer space hanging in front of you, and what you are seeing is the difference in the index of refraction of vacuum and the atmosphere.”

“Now for the fun part,” Helium-Two said. “We are going to inject a small chunk of pure carbon into the zero gravity region and see what happens.”

Helium-Two turned to the crew and initiated the sequence of events. Super-Fluid watched as a short stubby cylinder started to rise up out of the crust right under the distortion. He could feel powerful hydraulic pumps complaining as the top of the cylinder started to approach the edge of the oval-shaped region.

“That last little bit of distance is going to take some time,” Helium-Two said, as the hydraulic pumps labored under the strain. “Moving those few microns from our normal gravity to the zero gravity in the gravimotive-effect region is equivalent to going straight up off our neutron star into outer space. Not much distance to travel, but it takes a lot of energy. We are going to stop the cylinder just as it gets to the inner edge, and fire the carbon pellet from a gun built into the piston.”

The vibration of the hydraulic pumps finally stabilized and began to beat with the rising whine of the antigravity generator pumps that kept the distortion activated. Helium-Two turned a few of his eyes toward his engineers and his undertread rumbled an order through the crust: “Inject!”

Super-Fluid watched as a tiny speck rose from the center of the piston and floated to the center of the distortion, brightly illuminated by lights that flooded the central region with X-rays. As he watched, the speck grew, and by the time it had reached the center and hung there, it had grown to be almost as round as he was wide.

“Why doesn’t it fall out of the zero gravity region as the atmosphere did?” Super-Fluid asked.

Helium-Two replied, “Those X-ray lights are not just for illumination, they are also coupled to a servo control system. We use X-ray pressure to keep the carbon speck centered in the zero gravity region.”

“As it gets bigger, it gets harder to see,” Super-Fluid said, watching in awe and amazement as the tiny speck of degenerate crystalline carbon slowly came apart. Once the material had been released from the tremendous gravitational pressures exerted by the neutron star, the nuclear repulsive forces took over and the nuclei moved further and further apart. Now that there was space between the nuclei, the electrons, which had been packed into a superconductive fluid coursing through the close-packed array of carbon nuclei, began to evaporate from the fluid to take up orbits around the nuclei, further isolating the nuclei from each other. Soon the tiny speck had grown a hundred times larger in each direction while its density dropped by a million.

“I can’t see it anymore,” Super-Fluid said.

“I can, and it’s beautiful,” Helium-Two said, waving one of his eyes after another. “At least with some of my eyes. I think I can fix things so we can both see it without having to move around.” He went to the servo control console and talked to the engineer there.

He returned. “I had the engineer set the servo control so that the crystal would rotate while staying in place.”

They both watched as the seemingly empty space suddenly sparkled into a brilliant flash of light—then winked off again.

“You wouldn’t think that something with a density of only a few grams per cubic centimeter would be visible at all—much less be so brilliant,” Helium-Two said.

“It is because the crystal structure reflects the X-rays when the atomic planes of the crystal are at just the right angle between one of the lights and one of our eyes,” Super-Fluid explained. “I have been watching the pattern carefully as it rotates. If I am not mistaken, that is a crystal with a cubic lattice structure. What did you say the seed material was?”

“Carbon,” Helium-Two said.

“I think that is what the humans call a diamond,” Super-Fluid said. “They were right—it is pretty.”

20:30:00 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

The chimes rang again and again, insistently. Pierre woke up grudgingly, his red-lined eyes peering at the numbers on the clock.

2030, the numbers indicated.

“I missed my shift!” Pierre exclaimed, slapping the release and running an index finger down the sealing seam of the sleeping sack. As his brain became more active, he realized that shifts no longer counted, but he still should be awake and helping.

“Six hours,” he groaned as he rubbed his face. “Six hours—and three-fourths of a millennium. I wonder what is going on?” He quickly bathed, and, still holding a food-stick, swung up the passageway to the back of the communications console.

Abdul looked up as he came in. “Glad to see you, Pierre,” he said in a concerned voice. “Did you get some sleep?”

“Yes,” Pierre replied. “Enough to keep me awake for the rest of my shift. Thanks for standing in for me.”

“No problem,” Abdul said. “It has been interesting watching the cheela civilization develop almost right in front of my eyes.”

“At what stage are the cheela now?” Pierre asked.

“They are beginning to pass us in all areas except molecular chemistry. But since they don’t even have molecules to experiment on, you can’t blame them for that. They tell us that they can almost predict the contents of the rest of the encyclopedia, but they insist that we send the entire text down for the sake of their historians and humanologists. We should be changing to the last encyclopedia crystal WAT to ZYZ shortly. Then you should erase the encyclopedia crystals and the cheela will start filling them up with information that they have learned on their own in the past day.”

“Good,” Pierre said. “Amalita and I can take it from here. You had better get some rest yourself.”

“I won’t take long,” Abdul said as he floated out the door. “This is too interesting to miss.”

22:26:03 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Floating-Crystal returned from her vacation with mixed emotions. It had been a delightful vacation, eight long turns in the foothills at Swift’s Climb mountain resort. She had enjoyed every millisecond of it, even though she would never get used to the idea of looking down on things. She was reluctant to return to what everyone would admit was often the most boring job on the star, yet at the same time she felt eager to be back at work; while the job of Keeper of the Comm was boring at times, it was the most important position a cheela could aspire to (with the possible exception of the President of the United Clans).

Floating-Crystal was feeling good as she entered Sky Talk complex. She decided to take a shortcut. Rather than moving along the paths in the easy direction, and then crossing over at the superconducting tunnels, she flattened herself out and pushed her way in the hard direction across the park that separated the compounds in the complex. She could almost feel the magnetic field lines rippling across her top side as she pushed herself along, her tread gripping the textured surface. She flowed by the crumbling ruins of the gigabit receiving antenna that had been the pride and joy of her predecessors many generations ago, and went into the compound surrounding the huge transmitter array.

Her first thought was to check on the Comm display. As she flowed onto its large flat surface she could tell that the human—Amalita Shakhashiri Drake—was still in the middle of her sentence. At the bottom of the screen the computer had superimposed the words of the sentence. Those that Amalita had already spoken were in one taste and the computer prediction for the words in the rest of the sentence were in another taste. It was a long sentence, and full of the many redundancies that humans found necessary to insert into their speech. It was the very predictability of the redundancies that made the job of Keeper of the Comm so boring.

Before Floating-Crystal had left on her vacation Amalita had spoken the words:

“Pierre has informed me that the Ho…”

Floating-Crystal did not need a computer to figure out that the next few phonemes were “…loMem crystal…” and that the rest of the sentence was probably something about the holographic memory data storage crystal being full and that they should stop transmitting data up for a minute while Pierre put in a blank crystal.

When Amalita had gotten to “Holo…”, Floating-Crystal had decided it would be a good time for a long vacation and had taken off. On her return to the display, she was surprised to find that both she and the computer had misjudged the human. Amalita had progressed much further in her sentence than she had expected, although the general content was the same. The computer display of the spoken part now read:

“Pierre has informed me that the HoloMem’s full. Stop one min…”

“Good,” Floating-Crystal thought to herself. “The old array has been transmitting data up to the humans for generations. That minute will give us time to tear down the obsolete hunk of junk and build a decent one with computer-controlled phased-array beam steering.”

Floating-Crystal flowed off the display and went to the translation compound. Her three apprentices were busily scanning the human-language output of a computer generated translation of a text on cheela physiology. Although the computer did an excellent job of translation, there were many times that a straight human translation of a cheela sentence ended up distorted (or even bawdy) and it required an experienced student of human culture to figure out how to restructure the human sentence to retain the original cheela intent. Clear-Thinker, the eldest apprentice, felt the vibrations from Floating-Crystal’s tread as she approached. He turned a few of his eyes toward her.

“Remind me in three or four dozen turns to find a good stopping point in the data stream,” Floating-Crystal instructed him. “It is time for the humans to change crystals.”

“This book on physiology that we are translating now is scheduled for transmission in about three dozen turns,” the apprentice replied. “It has a lot of pictures, so the number of bits is quite high, but it shouldn’t take too many turns to transmit—even at the slow bit rates that the human receivers can handle.”

“Good,” Floating-Crystal said. “Make the break at the end of the text.”

She then returned to the Comm display room and prepared her reply in front of the cameras. The computer stored her performance and then played it back for her review—first on the long, thin visual display that just showed her front edge and eyes, and then on the human-oriented rectangular taste display. The camera for that display looked down at her from an angle and showed her whole flat body with the ring of eyes around its periphery. She could see the bulge that was an egg near her middle and wondered idly whether it had been Clear-Thinker or Bit-Cruncher who had put it there. “Not that it really matters,” she thought to herself. “It looks as if it will be ready to leave with the Old Ones at the hatching pens pretty soon.”

“I still think the whole thing is slightly obscene,” she murmured as she examined her image in the human display. “Nobody but lovers, computers, and humans ever see the top side of me.”

She didn’t like her first performance and redid it a couple of times until the message was short, yet clear. She then keyed the computer to transmit the message at human rates as soon as Amalita finished her sentence.

With a long break coming up, there was a lot to do. She contacted Comm Engineering and told them that they would soon be able to replace the aging antenna. They were delighted to be able to switch from maintenance to design and building. She could almost taste the eagerness in the Chief Engineer’s image as he flowed away to tell his crew.

She then called a meeting of the Comm Advisory Board. There had been some talk of a possible expedition to visit the humans, but because it would involve a good deal of direct communication, it had been put off until the next break in the data stream.

A dozen turns later the Advisory Board gathered. They listened to the gravitational engineers as they explained the latest test results on their gravity-control and inertia-drive experiments. The inertia drive was the propulsion mechanism that would allow them to leave their neutron star home, where the escape velocity was one-fourth the speed of light. However, the most dangerous part of travel off the surface of a neutron star was the explosive decompression of neutronic matter (including the neutronic matter of the space traveler!) when it was no longer kept compressed by the gravitational pressure supplied by the star. Now the engineers were sure that both problems had been solved.

Most of the Advisory Board had a difficult time accepting the fact that solid substances like the hard crystalline crust of their neutron star home or their equally tough yet supple bodies were not stable. Yet, without gravity to hold them together, they would decompose and reform into a tenuous molecular structure with the nuclei spaced a hundred times further apart than normally. However, these facts were well known to Floating-Crystal. One of the Old Ones tending her hatchling pen had worked on the original antigravity machine. He, himself, had seen a small speck of neutronic material expand when placed in the zero gravity region formed by the machine, and he had watched it turn into a transparent, twinkling molecular crystal floating in space. He had given her name to her when she hatched, and later told her about the beautiful floating crystal that had been her namesake.

After many meetings of the Comm Advisory Board and the engineers, it was finally decided that a visit to the humans was technically feasible. However, the effort required was substantial, so a commitment by the President and the Council of the United Clans was needed.

After much public debate, the program outlined by the engineers was approved, the finances were allocated, and the generation long project was started. Although the focus of the effort—“A Visit to the Humans”—was quixotic in nature, since there was almost nothing that could be communicated during the visit, they all knew that the real reason for the project was to crack the invisible egg-sac of gravity that had kept the cheela bound in the hatchery of their laying. For they all knew the cheela species could not stay on their home star forever.

The decision for the Visit came soon after the data stream was turned off. During the period while the cheela engineers were rebuilding the data transmitter and Pierre was replacing the full HoloMem crystal with an empty one, Floating-Crystal took over the Comm link to Amalita and with the help of the Visit program engineers, told her what to expect and what to do.

“We are coming out to visit,” was her first message. As the turns passed and she saw in the display the look of astonishment and concern build on Amalita’s face, she quickly brushed aside the protest that was forming on Amalita’s lips. “We will not explode. We will provide our own gravity.”

For the next minute Amalita listened attentively while Floating-Crystal explained the general outline of the planned visit. Amalita was a little concerned when she heard about the X-ray generator they were going to use to illuminate the inside of the spacecraft, then blushed a little when she began to realize how much someone could see who used soft X-rays for part of his vision range. However, the cheela already knew a great deal about human physiology. They had had plenty of time to study the human encyclopedia and the textbooks that had been beamed down by the humans many generations ago, so they knew that the total X-ray dose they would be using on their human friends during their short visit would be minimal.

At the end of the first minute, Pierre returned from the computer room to hear the musical voice of Floating-Crystal.

“We have started the data again. First is a schedule for you to follow during the visit. The expedition will start in about fifteen minutes. Read the instructions carefully, for the whole visit will only last ten seconds.”

Foating-Crystal saw Pierre come slowly around the corner and was overjoyed to see him. She had been hoping he would come back into view before she had to retire her job and take her place as an Old One teaching the hatchlings how to talk.

“I’m glad to see you again, Pierre,” she said. “I must say goodbye now. You have much reading to do and preparations to make. When you return to the monitor, there will be a new Keeper of the Comm.”

“These fifteen-minute lifetime friendships are hard on the emotions,” Amalita said to herself as she brushed her eyes, then flicked the communications screen to the computer and started reading the words that appeared there.

The cheela plan was very detailed and concise, for the cheela had long since had a complete description of the ship Dragon Slayer.

Amalita punched for a hardcopy of the screen full of words for Pierre to read, then went on to the diagram. The diagram was animated and showed herself seated at the console and Pierre near one window. Then the cheela ship arrived outside the ship. Her cartoon image rose from the chair at the console, raised its arms and, twirling around once like a clumsy ballerina, fell toward the right viewing port. Meanwhile, the cartoon of Pierre clung to another port, its nose pressed to the glass. A closeup view showed that less than a meter from his nose was a tiny speck a few millimeters across, and on that speck sat a cheela—no spacesuit—no pressure container—nothing to keep it from exploding.

Pierre quickly read the instructions, then they both watched the animation again. They were bewildered by their motions in the animation. They both looked clumsy and constrained—as if they were acting out their motions in earth-bound simulators instead of the graceful ballet of free-fall motion they were used to.

They read further and then began to realize why they had been so clumsy in the animation. To survive in space, the cheela explorers had to bring gravity with them. Their main spacecraft was a hard crystalline spherical shell about four centimeters across with a rather “large” miniature black hole at the center. At 11-billion tons mass, the black hole provided 180 thousand gees at the surface of the crystal sphere. Although far from the 67-billion gees that the cheela lived in at the surface of the neutron star, it was enough to keep their electron structure in its degenerate form. Individual cheela and equipment modules had their own smaller version of the main spacecraft. The radii of the individual flitters and equipment tugs were much smaller, so that only a tiny black hole was needed for each one. The smaller spacecraft had separate power and inertia propulsion subsystems, and the whole swarm fitted neatly into hemispherical depressions that pocked the surface of the main spacecraft.

“Inertia propulsion!” Pierre exclaimed. “On our last shift we were teaching them Newton’s law of gravity. Today they have inertia drives! Where will they be tomorrow?”

“They probably will be able to control space and time and won’t have to bother with such clumsy things as black hole gravity generators and inertia drives,” Amalita replied. “But now I see why we were so awkward. Their main spacecraft will stay fifteen meters away from our spacecraft, but it is so massive that we will experience about one-third of a gee from it, pulling me out of the console chair and over to the viewing port. I guess I could manage to twirl once as I fall so they can see the human joints in action, but I bet I am going to be clumsier in one-third gee than that animation.” She turned from the screen and looked at him, “I wish you were doing my part, so I could get to see the cheela.”

“I don’t know whether you would like it,” Pierre said. “According to this contour plot of the gravity field from the individual craft, although the size and mass of the flitters are much smaller than the main spacecraft, this one is going to come up to less than one meter from my viewing port and my nose is going to be pulling three gees!” He looked down at her body and grinned, “I guess the reason they didn’t choose you is they must know you don’t wear a bra in free-fall and they didn’t want to give you reverse Cooper’s droop.”

Amalita turned back to the display, jabbing him with her elbow as she did so, and brought up the next screen full of instructions. “You know perfectly well that since this is the one time that our two civilizations will be close enough culturally to make a physical visit meaningful, they chose the earth’s best known science writer and interpreter for the interview,” she said. “How long do you get?”

Pierre scanned down the time schedule that the cheela had sent up. “He will stay there for about one second, and will try to remain as motionless as possible for as long as he can, so that my eyes will have time to focus on him. At that, he will probably come close to starving to death unless they can figure out a way for him to eat without moving too much.”

“It seems ridiculous for them to go through this visit,” said Amalita. “We both have complete descriptions of each other’s physiology and plenty of pictures, both still and motion.”

“However,” she went on, “if I were offered the opportunity to visit the surface of a neutron star and spend fifteen seconds watching a half year of cheela civilization whirling about me, I would jump at the chance.”

The console beeped and the computer switched off the information display. A cheela’s visage appeared on the screen.

“I am Bit-Cruncher, the new Keeper of the Comm.”

Bit-Cruncher waited out the polite response from the humans by interviewing some new apprentices. One of them would take his place one of these turns, but all of them would meanwhile become so thoroughly soaked in human culture that they would almost think like humans. He was kind to the youngsters, remembering his terror when old Floating-Crystal had interviewed him. Still, they had a rough time ahead, for only one of them could become Keeper of the Comm.

As one of Floating-Crystal’s apprentices, he had worked hard and had not only kept up with his apprentice work, but had developed a complex new computer program to cross-correlate the immense amount of human knowledge that was still stored in the Sky-Talk Library. His new program was now finding out more about humans than the humans knew about themselves. For this prodigious feat he was awarded the rare opportunity to choose a new name for himself, and it eventually had led to his being made the new Keeper of the Comm when Floating-Crystal became an Old One and went off to tend eggs.

“It was the opportunity for a new name that really drove me,” he rippled to himself. “I’ll never forgive that romantic-minded Old One that named me Moby-Dick, after reading one of those old human adventure novels.”

Bit-Cruncher continued to think about prior times as he flowed back to the Comm compound. After he had been awarded the job as the new Keeper of the Comm, his comrades and competitors in apprenticeship had had to seek other occupations. Crystal-Blossom was now a Professor of Humanology at Sky-Talk University and Clear-Thinker was leader of the Visit expedition.

“Even though he lost out to me for Keeper of the Comm, I think maybe Clear-Thinker might be better off,” he mused. “There will be many Keepers of the Comm, but only one Visit. In addition, although I see humans on the display every turn, I do it through their cameras, which are made for their eyes. He will get to see a human in the flesh, bones and all!” Bit-Cruncher returned to the display just as Amalita was finishing.

“…meet you, Bit-Cruncher. When will the visit b…”

Bit-Cruncher contacted Clear-Thinker through the links and got the latest schedule. Things were going well. The main spacecraft had made it out to space and back on automatic control. Everything, even the unwilling Slinks that had been sent along in cages to test the life support system, had survived without damage. Another few hundred turns and they would be ready.

“Set a definite time,” said Bit-Cruncher, “so the humans can get everything ready.”

“All right,” Clear-Thinker said. “Two greats of turns from now.”

“That long? Everyone is going to be tired of waiting for the liftoff,” Bit-Cruncher said. “But I guess it is better to be on the safe side.” Bit-Cruncher returned to the communications display as Amalita finished and informed her that the visit would take place in exactly 57 seconds.

Amalita and Pierre turned away from the console and got busy. Amalita opened the shields over the viewing ports, set the automatic cameras for the focal distances and exposures the cheela had recommended, and turned them on. She then returned to her chair at the console, found her acceleration belt and adjusted it so she would stay in her seat until the time came for her to twirl across to the port.

Pierre bustled about the cabin, plucking loose items from loops, off sticky pads and out of corners where they had drifted, and stuffed them into a cabinet. He then went around making sure that all the cabinets were latched.

“The last thing we want is a pile of loose junk cluttering up the ports,” he said.

The seconds ticked away. Pierre took up his position near one port, his hands firmly gripping the handholds set in the frame. They both looked out the other port toward the place where the visitors would arrive.

As they waited, the light in the room flickered eerily as the white radiance from the neutron star flashed into the ports five times a second, alternating with the red glow of the ultra-dense asteroids that circled around their spacecraft, their strong gravitational fields blocking the crushing, tearing tides of the neutron star.

Suddenly there was a flash of multihued light and they both glimpsed a small brilliant white object the size of a golf ball holding a steady position fifteen meters away. There was a moment’s pause and then the golf ball seemed to explode into a cloud of colored snowflakes that swarmed across the intervening distance. The larger snowflakes stayed well away from the ports while the smaller ones came in closer.

22:30:10.0 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

“Holy Egg!” murmured one of the cheela crew as they slowly drifted in between the large glowing condensed asteroids and settled down in a synchronous orbit fifteen meters out from one of the viewing ports. “I expected the thing to be big, but I never imagined it would be this big!”

Clear-Thinker mentally agreed with the crew member. He couldn’t see who said it, since she was out of sight around the horizon on their little home away from home. What really bothered him was not that the human spacecraft was big, but that it was “overhead.” Although all the crew had been in space and had learned to conquer the fear that the home star they were orbiting was going to fall on them, this object was much too close for comfort. He quickly called an unscheduled hold in their carefully timed schedule. The humans would hardly notice a one-fifth of a second pause and he felt a full turn of rest and recreation while the crew got used to the sight of the human spacecraft overhead would be worth the delay.

He ordered everyone to stay in his assigned station on the spacecraft while he rotated the shell slowly around. The gigantic human spacecraft passed above every crew member several times while they all gazed at the metal skin and stared into the viewing ports, where they could vaguely glimpse some huge shadowy shapes behind the heavily tinted fuzzy glass. After a short while Clear-Thinker stopped the rotation, ordered a minimum crew to stay at the controls and let the rest of the two dozen crew members have a vacation break for a full turn. A few paired off and wandered around to the back side to find a quiet place behind some piece of equipment, but most gathered at the front and continued to stare at the unbelievable sight as the slow turning of the human spacecraft around their home star changed the lighting. At last the neutron star set behind the spacecraft and the show was over. The darkness was also strange, but the cheela psychologists had anticipated that problem and had made sure that the crystal shell underneath them had all the old familiar heat and radiation characteristics that they were used to on Egg, even though the gravitational pull was nowhere near that of home.

With half a turn gone, Egg rose from behind the opposite side of the spacecraft, and the spectator crowd grew once again. It was obvious to Clear-Thinker that the initial problem of having the spacecraft overhead had now dissipated, but he decided to wait for one full turn before putting the crew back onto the schedule so that their timing for the photographs and spectral analyses would be correctly oriented with respect to the illumination from Egg.

Precisely one turn later the crew members were back at their posts and the Visit began. A cloud of individual fliers and many small instrument packages took off. Each one was a tiny sphere with a sub-miniature black hole at the center to keep it under enough gravity so that it would not explode. The first instrument packages to get to the human spacecraft were several X-ray generators. Some larger ones were positioned at a distance to illuminate the general scene, their radiation varying in opposition to the illumination from the neutron star that rose and set as the work proceeded. Others were placed in a ring around the viewing ports and sent their violet-white beams through the heavily tinted glass into the interior of the spacecraft. Soon the shadows in the room became clearer. Using the pictures and a map of the console room, the crew could identify the communications console and the chair in front of it. In the chair was a collection of strangely-shaped violet objects surrounded by a multicolored cloud. They increased the illumination and then could finally make out the outlines of the yellow-white clothing and blue-white human flesh covering Amalita’s violet bones. Cameras were set up and adjusted, and data started pouring back to the mother spacecraft where other crew members monitored displays and tended the computers and the communication links back down to Egg.

22:30:11.2 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

“One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two…” counted Amalita as she felt the gravitational tug from the insignificant golf ball fifteen meters away.

“…one-thousand-three and twirl,” she chanted as she pressed the belt release, did one pirouette through the air and landed on all fours on the thick glass of the viewing port.

“Rather prettily done, if I do say so myself,” she thought.

22:30:12.9 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

“She is right on the time line,” Clear-Thinker mused to himself as he observed the computer-generated image of Amalita taken the previous turn and compared it with those taken a few turns previously. The enlarged image of the seat belt showed it was coming apart. Now if she could turn around once while she fell to the window, they could get some high resolution, three-dimensional X-ray images that made so much more sense to their computers than the book-oriented, flat diagrams they had obtained from the human physiology textbooks.

In the following turns the crew members watched as Amalita’s body ponderously fell through the air toward the viewing port, turning slowly as it came. Clear-Thinker kept the X-ray illuminators off most of the time, to keep the radiation dose on his human friend down to a minimum. At times calculated by the computer, the X-ray illuminators would flash on, and another snapshot of the human body in motion was taken. By the time Amalita’s body was approaching the port, the computer had built up a detailed three-dimensional model of her body. Now the illuminators were brought in to focus on certain portions of her body as the scientists called for more detailed data on the glands and the corrugation patterns in the brain. The data they were collecting would keep generations of students busy.

As Amalita’s hands and feet were contacting the viewing port glass and her body started to bounce back, one of the human-medicine specialists on the crew came up to Clear-Thinker and put down a computer-generated picture for him to scan. As Clear-Thinker flowed onto the pad and tasted the picture, the specialist said, “That is a closeup of Amalita’s left breast. Fortunately she was not wearing a brassiere so that when she landed on the window, her breasts came forward and we were able to get a highly detailed image of the entire mammary gland complex. The thing that concerns us is the anomalous region right at the center of that diagram. We are sure that it is a small group of cancer cells. They are still too small to be seen by human X-ray machines, but it is our professional judgment that they are definitely malignant.”

“Well, it looks as if we will be able to repay Amalita for her performance,” Clear-Thinker said. “Prepare a picture that the human doctors can understand and we will send it to Amalita along with a warning of what we found.”

The specialist replied, “We had already planned to do that, but we are all concerned about the time it will take. It will be a week before the Dragon Slayer leaves this orbit and takes Amalita and the rest of the crew back up to the mother ship, St. George. In that week, the cancer could grow and start sending out seeds to contaminate the rest of her body. We had another idea that we wanted to talk to you about.”

Clear-Thinker flowed off the pad, “What is your proposal?”

“Now—you must realize that what we are about to suggest is against all normal human and cheela standards of ethics. All the human-physiology specialists here, along with many experts on human psychology, medicine and law back on Egg have argued back and forth for the last two turns. There has been a general consensus, although not unanimous by any means, and it was decided to bring it to you for your approval.”

Clear-Thinker waited patiently while the specialist worked her way through the circumlocutious argument.

“The consensus is that because of the high malignancy potential of this growth, and the time it will take Amalita to get to a human doctor, we should treat the cancer now, even though we do not have time to get her permission first.”

Finally it was out, and Clear-Thinker could understand why it had taken the specialist so much time to come to the point. She was right. By the time the slow-thinking Amalita had been informed of her problem, and had made the decision whether or not to let them try to treat her, the expedition would have had to return to Egg. He also realized that the specialists would not have made their recommendation unless they were sure that Amalita had a serious problem that needed immediate treatment.

“Go ahead,” Clear-Thinker quickly replied. “What do you need?”

“We will want to modify one of the X-ray illuminators to increase its frequency and power output,” she said. “Running it at a high power level will burn it out quickly, so it will no longer be available for general illumination, but if we do a careful scan, the focused beam of X-rays should kill the cancer cells with only minimal damage to the rest of the breast.”

“We have plenty of illuminators,” Clear-Thinker said. “Check with the camera crew to find out which one they can spare, and proceed whenever you are ready.”

The specialist gathered a crew and soon a modified X-ray illuminator with a large focusing mirror and a high-intensity power source moved up to the window of the viewing port. The computer first aligned the coordinates of the focal point of the illuminator with the calculated position of the cancer deep within the slowly moving breast. Then burst after burst of high intensity X-rays shot out from the illuminator as it was slowly moved back and forth in wide arcs about the focal point buried deep within Amalita. The cancer shriveled and died, while the skin at the surface of the breast started to turn pink—as if it had gotten too much sun at the beach.

22:30:16.3 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

“Ouch!” Amalita cried as she rebounded from the window. Her hand went to her breast, but the sharp hurt was gone. “Reverse Cooper’s droop?” she thought to herself. She then turned to watch Pierre, her mouth still forming the automatic count, “…One-thousand-seven…”

22:30:17.1 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

“It is time for the Visit,” announced Clear-Thinker at one of the planning sessions. “Get out the skimmer and check the mush tube and waste disposal systems.”

The skimmer was a small vehicle especially designed for the Visit. It was not much larger than an instrument shell and had only rudimentary propulsion and control subsystems. A standard individual shell was much larger, and needed a larger mini-black hole to keep it from exploding. Such shells had to stay over a meter away from the viewing ports since their gravity fields were so high. The skimmer was much less massive, so it could approach much closer to the ports. The skimmer had two things that an individual shell did not normally carry, however: a half-dozen turns worth of food, most of it in the form of a liquid mush, and a disposal grate connected to a holding tank.

Most of the crew had the decency to busy themselves elsewhere as the commander of the Visit expedition settled himself onto the skimmer. The spherical shell of the skimmer was only slightly larger than his body, so there was only one way that he could fit on it. With the controls at his front, his food intake orifice was situated near the tube from the mush tanks, while his elimination orifice was over the disposal grid.

Clear-Thinker formed some crystalline bones within his body, conformed them into manipulators, took hold of the controls and raised power.

“Never has a nickname for a spacecraft fit so well,” thought Clear-Thinker, as the “Flying Toilet” rose from the main expedition spacecraft and moved over to the left viewing port where it stopped—just a bit less than a meter from the tip of Pierre’s nose.

22:30:17.2 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Pierre watched Amalita drop and tightened his grip on the hand-holds to keep himself from following her down to that end of the cabin. He turned his head toward the window as a small glowing speck pushed through the main cloud that stayed a number of meters away, came up to the window, and stopped outside the glass—about an arm’s length away. Pierre looked out at the tiny incandescent sphere. It was slightly larger than a mustard seed.

Clear-Thinker stared up at the ghostly human face hanging in the air above him. The face was a half-dozen times larger than the highest mountain on Egg. The only thing he could see easily was the huge skull illuminated by the deep violet color of the soft X-rays emitted from the X-ray arc. There were the gaping holes for the eyes, each as large as the caldera of the Mount Exodus volcano. Between the eyes was a cavernous slash for the nose cavity, and below that were the two rows of dense teeth, like two mountain ranges, one stacked up on top of another. As a very faint blue-white outline surrounding and covering the skull, Clear-Thinker could see the flesh and hair reflecting the UV radiation from the arc, and thought he could see Pierre’s eyes staring down at him.

“Well—there is no time for a long speech,” Clear-Thinker said to himself. He activated the communication link control and spoke to the human.

“Hello, Pierre,” he said, his undertread rippling a carefully modulated acoustic wave into the pickup. It was not much of a greeting, but he had hoped he had made it a personal one with a carefully practiced French accent on the “Pierre.” With the greeting off on its way through the Comm computer, where it would be parceled out to Pierre in slow phonemes over many turns, he shivered himself, took the mush tube into his intake orifice, and got himself ready for the long, self-imposed ordeal.

He first formed a crystallium stiffener inside each eye-stub to keep his eyes steady. “No need to make it thick under this reduced gravity,” he reminded himself. “I will need the crystallium for the rest of the structure.”

He concentrated and soon the eye-stubs were braced with an interlocking network of crystalline bones that would keep him from moving too much. This last technique was a new one to him, since like most cheela he had always limited his internal bone-growing repertoire to manipulators, eye-stubs and pulling bars. However, the medical scientists, having learned much about the capability of the cheela organism from a religious sect that had developed extraordinary control over their body functions, had taught him the interlocking technique.

With his preparations ready, he set the skimmer on automatic control, sipped a little mush, and settled down for the Visit with his gargantuan friend.

“Well—so you are Pierre Carnot Niven—are you?” he murmured up at the motionless skull. “All right, Pierre, let’s see who blinks first.”

22:30:18.2 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Pierre focused his eyes on the tiny white-hot speck floating in front of him on the other side of the deeply tinted glass. The skimmer itself was an iridescent sphere about five millimeters in diameter. Almost covering the hemisphere on the side toward him was the opalescent body of Clear-Thinker. The various portions of his body changed color like an incandescent drop of liquid crystal, as the hot internal fluid currents and cooler radiative surfaces varied their temperature. Spaced around the periphery of the flattened ellipsoidal body were a dozen red pinpoint eyes glowing like tiny coals around a tiny campfire.

“Like a flattened miniature scallop on the half-shell,” Pierre thought. “Although scallops don’t have manipulators and their eyes are blue.”

As his eyes and the humming automatic cameras took in the sight of Clear-Thinker patiently enduring his vigil outside the viewport, the speaker on the communication console spoke Clear-Thinker’s greeting.

“Hello, Pierre.”

As the echo of the last syllable floated across the console room, there was a flash of light and the incandescent speck was gone, leaving only a yellow-green afterimage on Pierre’s retina. It was only after the gravity pull had lifted that Pierre finally realized that his nose ached from being squashed up to the window at three gees.

22:30:19.3 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

The mush was gone, the holding tank stank, and it was time to say goodbye.

“You win—my friend,” Clear-Thinker spoke up to the ghostly apparition that had not moved during his long vigil. At that, Clear-Thinker had done better than he had thought he would—six whole turns without moving more than a ripple. Isomorphic exercises had helped to keep his innards from clogging up, but his skin felt as if it would crack if he moved it. He moved—and it didn’t crack—so he moved some more; then, with a delighted dance that almost lifted him off the skimmer with its nearly negligible gravity field, he dissolved the crystalline bones that had kept him stationary, grabbed the controls, and flew the “Flying Toilet” back to the main spacecraft.

After a decent meal and some clean-up, Clear-Thinker was back in command of the expedition. It was time to pack up and go. The specialists were still busy taking long-distance pictures of Pierre and were reluctant to leave. However, the supplies were getting low, and at last they too wound down their activities and started to bring their equipment back.

Actually, of course, it was the shipboard computer that handled the motion of the instrument spheres while it monitored the flight paths of the individual fliers. The gravitational self-attraction of the spheres made navigation quite tricky, even when the pilots had reflex velocities that approached the speed of light.

Unfortunately, no one had bothered to inform the computer that the modified X-ray illuminator that had been used to treat Amalita’s cancer had been firmly connected to the very large power source that had been used to drive it. Therefore the computer saw nothing wrong with choosing a return path for the illuminator that took it close to the viewport window. As the illuminator, dragging the power supply, passed by the window, the intense gravitational tidal forces from the massive power supply ripped a large jagged canyon out of the three centimeter thick laminated window. Huge chunks of glass as large as mountains fell toward the power supply. They were crushed into powder as they fell, and then disappeared in a flash of light as they impacted the surface of the shell.

22:30:20.0 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

The acoustic micrometeoroid detectors in the frame of the viewing ports sensed something wrong and slammed the outside metallic shields across the windows. Amalita blinked, then stared at a tiny scratch in the glass.

“…One-thousand-ten,” she said.

The Visit was over.

06:13:54 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Leaving Amalita talking to Sky-Teacher at the communications console on the main deck, Pierre dived smoothly through the hole in the floor to the lower deck and pulled himself over to the library console. He moved carefully, for between two fingers he was carrying a precious HoloMem crystal containing all the wisdom of the cheela that had accumulated during the past thirty minutes. He carefully placed the crystal in its scanner cavity in the library console, fitted the brilliantly polished corner segment into place, and closed the cover.

According to their conversations with the robot cheela communicator, this latest HoloMem crystal had a large section on the internal structure of neutron stars. Pierre had the computer jump rapidly through the millions of pages until he found a detailed cross section of the interior of Dragon’s Egg. The diagram showed that the star had an outer surface that was a solid crust of nuclei; neutron-rich isotopes of iron, zinc, nickle, and other elements in a crystalline lattice, through which flowed a liquid sea of electrons. Next came the mantle—two kilometers of neutrons and iron nuclei that became more neutron-rich with depth. The inner three-fourths of the star was a liquid ball of superfluid neutrons and superfluid protons. At the very center was a small core of esoteric elementary particles whose normally short lifetimes were lengthened by the extreme pressures and densities inside the star.

Pierre looked carefully at the symbols for the elementary particles. Most were known to him, but there was one that he had never seen before. He looked at the legend to one side and saw that the symbol referred to an “Elysium” particle. The cheela had found an elementary particle inside their star that the humans had not yet seen in their atom smashers! Pierre quickly keyed the library console to search through the HoloMem crystal for more information on the Elysium particle. In a fraction of a second, his screen flashed:

PROPERTIES AND USES OF ELYSIUM PARTICLE—FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS PARTICLE IS ENCRYPTED. THE KEY IS THE MASS AND LIFETIME OF THE FIRST EIGHT ELEMENTARY PARTICLES (INCLUDING THE ELYSIUM PARTICLE) TO FIVE SIGNIFICANT FIGURES.

The rest of the section was gibberish.

Pierre mused. The cheela could have told the humans about the particle, but had decided not to. The human race was going to have to find that particle by itself and learn enough about its mass and lifetime so that they could decrypt the section and read what the cheela had learned about it.

Of course, if the humans did their research correctly, they would know practically everything that was now hidden behind the gibberish, but if they had gotten off on the wrong track, then the knowledge the cheela had left would correct them before they went on to learn more about the universe that they lived in.

“Just like a good teacher,” Pierre thought. “You give the students a start by letting them know there is something interesting to learn in a certain area, let them learn about it on their own, then finally check over their results and give them any correction necessary.”

As he flipped back to the section on neutron star interiors, he mused that a cryptogram with only sixteen five-digit numbers could probably be broken by a large computer in an exhaustive search, but he figured that the human race would be too proud to peek.

His console screen returned to the original diagram of the interior of Dragon’s Egg. Pierre scanned the next page. It was a photograph of a neutron star, but it wasn’t Dragon’s Egg. He could tell it was a real photograph, since he could see a portion of a cheela on a space flitter in the foreground. His eyes widened and he rapidly scanned page after page. There were many photographs, each followed by detailed diagrams of the internal structure of the various neutron stars. They ranged the gamut from very dense stars that were almost black holes to large bloated neutron stars that had a neutron core and a white-dwarf-star exterior. Some of the names were unfamiliar, but others, like the Vela pulsar and the Crab Nebula pulsar, were neutron stars known to the humans.

“But the Crab Nebula pulsar is over 3000 light-years away!” Pierre exclaimed to himself. “They would have had to travel faster than the speed of light to have gone there to take those photographs in the past eight hours!”

A quick search through the index found the answer.

FASTER-THAN-LIGHT PROPULSION—THE CRYPTO-KEY TO THIS SECTION IS ENGRAVED ON A PYRAMID ON THE THIRD MOON OF THE SECOND PLANET OF EPSILON ERIDANI.

There then followed a long section of gibberish.

In near shock, Pierre turned off the console and slowly floated over to the nearby lounge. He was not surprised to find everyone except Amalita there. They were all sitting in the low gravity on the soft circular seat and looking down past their feet out the view port below them. Pierre jumped up to the top of the lounge and held onto the handle in the hatch door leading to one of the high-gravity protection tanks. He too looked down and out the one-meter diameter port set in the bottom of the spacecraft. The electronically controlled density filter had been set to blacken the port thirty times a second as each of the six glowing compensator masses passed in front of the window five times a second. The only light that entered the port was the single point of intense brightness that was the sun—their home—2120 AU away.

Pierre broke the silence. “It’s nearly time for us to leave,” he said.

Jean looked up, her perky nose wrinkled in puzzlement. “I thought the plan was for us to stay down here for at least another week,” she said.

“With the cheela doing all the mapping and measurements for us, there is really no need for us to stay any longer,” he 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 straightened out and swung down to hold himself in 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 flexed his knees preparatory to leaping up the passageway to the main deck. He flashed his smile through his beard at them and said, “Come on, 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 and the others swam out the lounge door and spread out through the ship.

Pierre swung over to the communication 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 develop a long-living intelligent robot that could take over the demanding task of talking to the slow-thinking humans. What amazed him was that the robotic creature was so highly developed that it had a personality. It was not robotlike 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 someone’s life if they made a mistake or hesitated for a moment.

“We shortly will have filled up all your available HoloMem crystals,” Sky-Teacher’s image said, its halo of robotic eyes doing a perfect imitation of the traveling wave pattern in 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.

“But please don’t despair. We may live much faster than you, but there are only a finite number of fundamental truths to learn about the Universe, so eventually you will catch up to us.”

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

HOLOMEM CRYSTAL FULL.

“You are on your own now,” Sky-Teacher said, hearing the tone. “But we have one last present for you. You will need tens of thousands of years to develop fully, and minor nuisances like ice ages on your planet would slow you down. While we were exploring the interior of your Sun, we found five small black holes. There were the four that you already know about and a much smaller one. Since they were disturbing the fusion reactions in your Sun, we removed them for you. Now the Sun will stay stable while you are learning from the HoloMem crystals.”

“We thank you,” Pierre stammered, awed by the power implied by the simple statement.

“And we thank you,” Sky-Teacher said. “But 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!”