Trek

07:54:43 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Commander Swift-Killer fixed her attention out toward the horizon. Each of her eight watch eyes reported back that the shallow arc of a needlelike dragon tooth could still be seen, held at guard position by one of the perimeter guards. She left the watch eyes at their automatic duty and scanned her other eyes around the camp where the rest of her troopers were relaxing. Most were still eating, but a few had paired off and were now enjoying each other over in one corner of the camp. She looked at them enviously and was tempted to pass over the watch to her second-in-command, go get her favorite fun-partner and join them, but the last contact with the barbarians had only been a turn ago, and they must stay at full alert.

Frustrated in her bodily pleasures, Swift-Killer turned to her other personal form of recreation—trying to figure out why things work. She paused, concentrated for a moment, and her body pushed out some pseudopods. She then grew some articulated crystallium bones under the protrusions of tough, muscular skin to form manipulators. The bones in the manipulators were small, not like the ones that she grew to hold her shield and sword in battle. Still keeping her watch eyes on the horizon, Swift-Killer glanced with the remaining eyes at the four extremities, made a minor change to one of them, then reached through the sphincter of a carrying pouch in her body and pulled out her “experiments.”

One experiment was an old one that she had come upon in the last campaign. Their pursuit of the barbarians had taken them into strange territory where the crust was not smooth, but had suffered a recent shaking. In that region, the crust did not have its usual fibrous plasticity, but was almost as hard as dragon crystal. The quake had shattered the crust into many flat plates, their cleaved surfaces glinting with the reflected image of the God Bright that hung motionless over the south pole. Her mind always active, Swift-Killer had collected several plates and had played with them, turning them first one way, then the other, to bring the image of Bright to each of her eyes in turn. She had even held one well up above normal eye level (it had taken most of her bone-forming crystallium to support the plate against Egg’s tremendous gravity pull) and had actually looked at her own topside. It looked weird to her, what with the deep red color, the reddish-yellow lump of her brain nodule near the middle, and the smaller lump of a forming egg next to it. She had hastily withdrawn the plate and had glanced around quickly to reassure herself that no one had seen her examining her own topside. Unless it was your lover trying to get you in the mood, no one ever talked about one’s topside, much less looked at it.

As a troop commander, she had found an excellent use for the mirror plates. A “glancer” was now standard battle equipment on the eastern front. With careful aim of the mirror to reflect the image of Bright in the right direction, messages and commands could be sent over great distances to other squads without alerting the barbarians. They still used the old code patterns for the commands, since the limitations of the glancer communication system were similar to the old technique that used synchronized thumps of the treads of a trooper squad on the crust. With this new communication technique, the element of surprise that they had gained over the barbarians had decreased their losses by significant factors.

Swift-Killer placed her collection of equipment on the crust. Along with the glancers, there was another of her discoveries, the flares. The fact that certain types of crust would glow when pod juice dropped on them had been known since ancient history. Swift-Killer had been intrigued by this effect, and everywhere she went in her service to the Leader of the Combined Clans, she had always sacrificed a few drops of her daily ration of pods to the crust to see how brightly it would glow. She had recently come across a very reactive portion of crust. A drop of pod juice would make a blue-white flare of light almost too bright to look at. She had carefully used a slicer to extract some long, fibrous rods out of the crust; these were her flares. She had visited a chemist at the base hospital, and soon her enthusiasm persuaded him to use his ancient arts to separate the various components of a large batch of pod juice, until she had a small vial of cast dragon crystal with the concentrated essence of the factor in the pod juice that made the flares glow.

Swift-Killer tested out the flare by holding the vial above the end of the stick and letting a few drops of fluid fall on the end. The eyes on that side of her body popped reflexively into their skin pouches as the brilliant blue-white glare of light burst forth. Swift-Killer noticed with pleasure the murmur of startled treads vibrating through the crust to her.

“The Commander is at it again… now what is she up to?”

Remembering her prime duty, she turned her attention to her watch eyes, and again assured herself that each one still had a distant dragon tooth firmly fixed in its vision. She noticed that one or two of them also had a fuzzy spot off to one side, where they had picked up the momentary glare of the flashing flare. However, true to their assigned duties, they had not ducked into their skin pouch at the bright glare.

With the flare ready, she then turned her attention to her latest discovery, the “expander.” She had come upon it not long ago when she had been out visiting the perimeter guards. Normally that task was the duty of one of the squad leaders, but since her favorite at that time had been one of the guards, she took the opportunity of an inspection tour to get a few moments alone with him. Of course, being on guard, he had to remain at alert with his eyes on the horizon, while giving stiffly formal responses to her queries. Although her questions followed the usual routine of an inspection of the guard, her actions took advantage of the fact that he was not allowed to break his at-alert condition.

“Who approaches?” boomed the crust as his tread rippled at her approach.

“Troop Commander Swift-Killer,” she replied.

“You may approach,” he said. So she did… and got closer and closer and closer until her body was pressed up right next to his and had flowed around in a crescent that nearly enveloped his periphery. Her cool dark-red eyes stared right into his, while he dutifully kept his gaze fixed on the horizon.

“Report!” she commanded, but instead of using solid talk, she whispered it with an electronic tingle that sent thrills through his frustrated body.

“Guard to the east under observation and secure. Guard to the west under observation and secure. No unknown objects on the horizon. All secure, Commander Swift-Killer,” boomed his muffled report in formal solid talk. She then felt a soft electronic whisper as he added, “But I seem to be under attack from Bright-side.”

“At Alert!” she barked, and felt his body stiffen.

“What is this I see,” she said, as her eyes went up on stubs to look at his topside.

“Dirt!” she said severely; and reaching out a soft muscular pseudopod, she proceeded to brush imaginary specks of dirt off his topside, making sure that she had touched all of his sensitive spots in the process.

“Just for that, Squad-Leader North-Wind, after you have been relieved of your post, you shall report to me for extra duty,” she said, with a mixture of solid talk and electronic whisper that trailed off into a pure whisper at the words “extra duty” that left no doubt in his mind what that duty would consist of.

Commander Swift-Killer slowly slid her body along North-Wind, who kept his outer perimeter in the prescribed circle and his eyes on the horizon. Then drawing herself back into proper traveling form, she went off to visit the next guard on the perimeter, leaving an emotionally frustrated North-Wind at his post, his eyes and body at attention, but his mind full of things other than non-existent barbarians.

“He does not have too much longer before the change of the guard,” she thought as she moved off to inspect the next guard. “But by that time, will he be ready!”

The next guard had always been one of her problem troopers. She had never really learned discipline. Although Easy-Mover had never given any trouble when under direct supervision, she did not have the proper spirit of a real needle trooper, and would not discipline herself to act always in the manner of a trooper even when there was no superior officer nearby. Unfortunately, the lonely duty of perimeter guard gave her plenty of opportunity to become lax, and she had been caught so many times that she had never been able to keep any of her promotions for very long.

“She is at it again,” Swift-Killer said to herself as she approached the guard and felt a telltale grinding noise in the crust beneath her tread. Her eyes carefully surveyed the guard, but there was not one sign of motion in the body of the guard or the arc of dragon tooth that jutted out towards the horizon. A challenge replaced the grinding noise as the guard noticed her approach.

“Who approaches?” boomed the guard.

“Troop Commander Swift-Killer,” she replied.

“You may approach,” came the formal reply.

Swift-Killer flowed to one side of the rigid trooper and barked, “Move here in front of me!”

There was a moment’s hesitation, bad enough in itself, and then the trooper swiftly flowed over and resumed the formal guard position. Swift-Killer went to the spot that the guard had vacated, formed a manipulator and picked up the two plates of broken crust that lay there. The plates were placed one on top of the other; as Swift-Killer took them apart, a dusty powder of ground-up crust fell to the surface. Bored with guard duty, Easy-Mover had been holding her outside surface at alert, but had been absent-mindedly rubbing one plate against another under her tread. This was not the first time she had been caught doing something like that, so it didn’t surprise Swift-Killer.

“You are already down to trooper, so I can’t demote you any further,” Swift-Killer barked at the now rigid form of Easy-Mover. “But until you learn that troopers on guard duty are to remain at full alert at all times, you will have to make do without recreation periods. Since this is not your first offense, it will be a dozen turns this time!”

Swift-Killer thought she detected a quiver of protest, but fortunately for Easy-Mover, she recovered rapidly with her reply.

“Yes, Commander,” she said.

Swift-Killer then took the guard through the remainder of her formal report and left to inspect the rest of the perimeter, taking the two plates with her to remove temptation from the scene.

“A dozen turns with no recreation is not only going to be hard on her, but also on about three males that I know of,” Swift-Killer thought as she flowed off. “I don’t know how she keeps them all happy. One lover at a time is enough for me.”

The offending plates had been tucked away in one of Swift-Killer’s carrying pouches and she had forgotten about them until their shape got in the way during her fun and games with the eager North-Wind. She had put them to one side and had attended to more important business, such as thinning herself down and slithering under the hot kneading tread of North-Wind as their eye-stubs entwined softly about one another. They took turns kneading each other’s topside with their treads, concentrating on their favorite spots. Then with their eye-stubs firmly intertwined to pull their very edges together, their mutual vibrations raised in pitch with an electronic tingle adding an overtone of spice to the massage. Finally, in a multiple spasm of their bodies, a dozen tiny perimeter orifices just under North-Wind’s eye-stubs opened—to emit a small portion of his inner juices into the waiting folds around Swift-Killer’s eye-stubs.

Swift-Killer felt the tiny globules of North-Wind as they were carried by her automatic reflexes to the egg case. She slowly gathered herself into her more normal shape and slid from beneath the still thinned and exhausted North-Wind. She left him lying there and began to pick up the various things she had laid aside from her carrying pouches. As each item was tucked away, she became less and less Swift-Killer the lover. Finally, as she placed the four-button symbol of her rank into a holding sphincter on her side, she turned back into Troop Commander Swift-Killer.

As she came to the last few items, she picked up the crustal plates that she had taken from Easy-Mover. The plates no longer had flat surfaces; instead one was slightly hollow and the other was slightly rounded. Some of the shiny aspect of a freshly cleaved surface was gone, but it was still possible to see a reflection in them. Always inquisitive, Swift-Killer looked at the two curved plates and was amazed to see that in one of them her eye looked smaller than normal, while in the other, it was larger.

She reached out a soft pseudopod and wiped the dust off the surfaces. This improved the image some. Now completely absorbed in trying to understand the strange behavior of the curved plates, Swift-Killer the inventor forgot her lover and her command duties while her mind wandered off into thought.

For many turns Swift-Killer spent her spare time with the curved plates. She talked to Easy-Mover and found that she had been carrying those plates for many turns and had used them to relieve her boredom on many tours of perimeter guard duty. Swift-Killer duplicated her grinding process and soon had several expander and shrinker mirrors. She found that if she did not apply much pressure in the later parts of the rubbing, the mirrors could be made very shiny, almost as good as the cleaved surfaces of the original plates.

She spent a long time on one set of plates to see how curved she could make them, for she had found that the more the mirrors were curved, the more they would expand or shrink the image. Finally she obtained one pair where something amazing happened; not only was the image of her eye expanded, it was also turned upside down! She found that if she put her eye very close to the mirror it would appear right side up and expanded, but as she moved back it would get bigger and bigger, finally filling the whole mirror with a distorted image, then would finally appear again upside down.

Swift-Killer now held one of those expander mirrors. She knew that a flat mirror would reflect the light from her flare, and she wanted to see what the expander would do. Perhaps it would expand the light and make it brighter.

Swift-Killer formed her body around in a crescent, with her four free eyes moved around so that they were concentrated on the inner part of the crescent where they could observe the experiment. Aware that the light would be quite bright, she had them tucked under their protective folds of skin and had closed the fold until each was only watching through a narrow slit. Carefully she held the vial of pod juice extract above the flare and adjusted the little crystal valve until a thin stream of liquid fell down on the end of the flare. Soon she had a continuous bright arc going. Light flared over her body and up into the sky. Using her manipulators she brought the expander mirror up near the arc. Instead of reflecting the light off in all directions like a flat mirror, it seemed to collect it and make it smaller. She moved the mirror back and forth. She first found a point where the light seemed to go off in a straight beam from the expander. She then found that there was a position in which the light was focused into a spot on the crust. She reached out with a pseudopod to touch the bright spot.

“OW!!!”

The whole camp came to alert as they heard the agonized t’trum of their Troop Commander on the crust. Swift-Killer, her burned spot sucked into the interior of her body where it was quickly enveloped in soothing liquid, stopped the flow of pod-juice from the vial, waited until the flare stopped glowing, and then put her experiments back into her carrying pouches as her eyes glared around the camp. In short order, all the troopers were very busy.

After many turns of experimentation, Swift-Killer understood how the expander worked. Halfway between the mirror and the point where her eye flipped from right side up to upside down was the point where the flare would give off a straight beam. If it were in front or in back of that point, the light would be focused to a point, later to spread out again. For a while, Swift-Killer thought that she had a new weapon, a thing that would burn at a distance, but a little experimentation showed her that it was far easier and faster to poke a hole in a barbarian with a dragon tooth than to burn one with an expander (assuming that the barbarian would hold still long enough).

However, the more she thought about the long-reaching beam of light that she could make, and the old stories about the narrow beams of invisible light that the ancient prophet Pink-Eyes had seen, the more she thought that she ought to talk to some of the scientists back in Bright’s Heaven who were trying to make sense of the still pulsating beams.

It took some discussion with the Commander of the Eastern Front, but after seeing her experiment, he decided to relieve her temporarily of her command and let her make a journey back to Bright’s Heaven.

07:54:50 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

The road to Bright’s Heaven was long but fast. It stretched out in a straight line along the easy direction from the eastern outpost trooper camp. The way had been smoothed by generations of treads and baggage sleds. Swift-Killer moved along the road at her rapid trooper’s glide, her four button troop commander’s insignia automatically clearing the path ahead of her and giving her preferential treatment at the food stations along the way.

One of the food station keepers was well known for his interesting and nearly inexhaustible repertoire of love kneadings, and she had enjoyed a couple of dalliances in previous trips, but her mind was elsewhere when she passed through this time, so she didn’t wait for him to return from one of his periodic trips to restock his pod bins. She just took the pods that she needed and continued on her way, crushing the pod with the powerful muscles in her food intake pouch and sucking the tingly juices in through the thin skin at one end of the pouch.

Swift-Killer finally arrived at Bright’s Heaven, and after a short formal meeting with the Commander of the Central Defense Command, she took off to visit the Inner Eye Institute, part of the large Holy Temple complex.

“Troop Commander Swift-Killer!” the Institute astrologer greeted her. “We are honored by your visit. The fact that you are here gives us reassurance that the eastern border is safe.”

Swift-Killer’s eye-stubs twisted with embarrassment as the Institute astrologer continued. “That invention of the glancer has given you a reputation among the astrologers here at the Institute. Have you ever thought about leaving the Troopers and becoming one of us?”

Swift-Killer knew what she was best at. Her extraordinary size, strong muscles, and quick intelligence had led her to her natural position as a front line troop commander. They had also given her a new name, when as a youngster just barely out of the hatchling pens, she had killed a Swift unaided, with only a slicer for a weapon. She enjoyed her hobby of trying to figure out how things worked, but she had no intention of making it her life’s work, not as long as there were barbarians trying to destroy Bright’s Heaven. She brushed off the Institute astrologer’s question with one of her own.

“What is the latest news on the strange pulsating beams from Bright’s Inner Eye?” Swift-Killer asked.

The Institute astrologer hesitated. He and the others in the Inner Eye Institute had been undergoing a difficult conversion. Fortunately it had happened so slowly that they had had time to overcome the shock. However, they were not sure yet, so neither the populace nor the rest of the temple priests had been informed of their suspicions. The eyes of the Institute astrologer swayed back and forth rhythmically as he evaluated Swift-Killer. He equivocated.

“The beams from Bright’s Inner Eye continue to bring down a message from the mind of Bright,” he replied. “The beams are invisible except to certain ones who have what is known as Bright’s Blessing, although Bright’s Affliction would probably be a better term for it, as the unfortunate individuals rarely live to breeding age. Fortunately, the alchemists have found a liquid that is sensitive to the invisible beams, and turns color temporarily if a vial of it is exposed to the beam, so now we do not have to search the Empire for those unfortunate ones and drag them away from their clans to interpret Bright’s message to us.”

“The pulsations continue?” Swift-Killer asked.

“Yes,” the Institute astrologer replied. “And there seems to be some pattern to them. We are still trying to analyze what they mean. They come so slowly, one pulse every few turns.”

The fact that the pulsations seemed to have a pattern intrigued Swift-Killer’s inquisitive mind.

“May I see what you have collected?” she asked eagerly.

The Institute astrologer formed a manipulator, extracted a tally string from a storage pouch and gave it to Swift-Killer, who quickly ran a tendril down its length.

“It is a string of numbers!” she exclaimed. “Only it stops at ten and then repeats twice more.” She continued her examination of the tally string.

“This seems to be a number system that only goes to ten, then goes into two symbols to represent things larger than ten,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, “and if you go on, you will find that after counting to ten times ten, new symbols appear, interspersed with the number symbols.”

Swift-Killer moved quickly over the repetitious section and found the new symbols. First a one, then a strange symbol, then another one, then a different strange symbol, then a two. The Institute astrologer kept his tread still, while his eye-stubs watched the tense body of Swift-Killer. Finally her eye-stubs resumed their normal wavelike motion and she started murmuring.

“One plus one equals two, one plus two equals three, two plus two equals four…” she said. She then turned her attention to the Institute astrologer and her eyes stared at him, twitching nervously. The Institute astrologer clenched his tread muscles and waited for Swift-Killer’s brain to realize what he and the others in the Institute had finally had to face.

“This is nothing but a primer in arithmetic, but in a number system that goes only to ten. Surely Bright would not waste time to send such a trivial message, and take so long to do it. This is more like an interpreter trying to learn one of the barbarian tongues.”

Swift-Killer hesitated, for what she was about to say next went against all her early religious training. “It is almost as if there were a strange clan of barbarians living on the Inner Eye, and trying to set up communication with us,” she said. “But that cannot be!”

The Institute astrologer kept his tread quiet and passed over another tally string. This one was a fringe string, with many strings knotted to a main string, and with each side string containing many knots. At first Swift-Killer could make no sense of it, for there were no symbol groups, only large and small knots. She felt through the fringes, puzzled by the large blank sections.

“It took us a long time to figure that one out,” the Institute astrologer admitted. “In fact it was a novice who literally stumbled onto it, when he happened to glide across the tally fringe as it lay on the crust. Here, let me arrange it.”

The Institute astrologer took the tally fringe and laid it out as a rectangle on the crust.

“Now glide onto it carefully and see what your tread tells you,” he said.

Following his instructions, Swift-Killer moved her body onto the large rectangle, and suddenly it all became clear. Whereas her eyes could only see the tally string at such a low angle that everything was distorted beyond recognition, her touch sensitive bottom tread could absorb the picture all at once.

“It is like a map,” said Swift-Killer, who utilized devices when planning large scale campaigns. “But it is not any place that I know…”

She hesitated, and then said, “Wait… In this large circle, this tiny feature here must be the Holy Temple, and this must be Bright’s Heaven—but everything is so distorted. The circle must be Egg itself, and these seven small dots must be Bright’s Eyes.” She looked again at the Institute astrologer and said, “This is a picture of Egg and the Eyes of Bright. But why is everything on Egg so distorted? It looks like it has been stretched in the east-west direction.”

“We don’t know,” said the Institute astrologer. “We are still trying to figure that out. We have since received another picture map, and the present signals are in the process of beaming down a third one.”

“May I feel them?” Swift-Killer asked.

The Institute astrologer pulled out two more tally strings from carrying pouches and laid them out on the crust without comment. They were close enough together so that Swift-Killer could spread herself out to cover both of them at the same time.

“This shows the Eyes of Bright,” Swift-Killer said. “But the smaller Inner Eye is not just a featureless circle like the others. It has strange markings and circles on it and there is a cylinder sticking out of one side. And this other is an enlargement of the Inner Eye, and you can see forms inside the circle, as if you were peering though holes in the Inner Eye.”

Swift-Killer paused. “What does all this mean?” she asked.

“We are not positive,” said the Institute astrologer, “but we think that those things we can see inside the orifices are strange beings.”

“But they are so sticklike and angular, they would be broken in a moment,” she exclaimed.

“They are floating in the sky above the east pole, so they seem to be immune to the gravity pull of Egg, although why they want such long manipulator bones is unknown.” While the Institute astrologer had been talking, Swift-Killer had been reexamining the pictures.

“The Inner Eye looks like a giant machine,” she said. “This thing at the top of the cylinder looks like a glancer in a holder, and these other things look like my expander.”

“What is an expander?” asked the astrologer.

Swift-Killer finally remembered that she had not yet told him of her discovery. She had come to give him some new knowledge, but instead had been bedazzled with one new concept after another.

Swift-Killer formed a manipulator, reached into a carrying pouch and pulled out the expander and the shrinker. Then she explained their odd behavior to the Institute astrologer as he moved them back and forth in front of one of his eyes.

“This curved shape for a glancer means that it can send a beam of light a long way,” she told him. “And that is probably why they exist on the Inner Eye thing, to send the beams down to us on Egg.”

The Institute astrologer moved onto the tally pictures on the crust, and compared the shapes of the things protruding from the Inner Eye with the object that he held.

“The shapes are very similar,” he said. “You are probably right. But what is this about sending beams?”

“I came to give you a demonstration,” Swift-Killer said.

“Wait,” the Institute Astrologer suggested. “I will gather the rest of the members of the Institute.”

Soon Swift-Killer was the center of attention as she demonstrated her bright light source and the way the expander could bring the light into a hot spot, or send it off in a straight beam.

After several demonstrations, Swift-Killer let some of the more eager novices play with the new toy. As she flowed back to talk to the Institute astrologer, she could hear others starting to grind away at two plates to make their own expanders.

It was soon obvious to all in the Institute that Swift-Killer’s new invention provided a means to signal back to whatever it was in the Inner Eye that was beaming down messages to them. After several turns, they set up a bright light source and started sending off a coded message aimed at the Eyes of Bright. They kept it up for many turns, but nothing happened; the pulsed beam from the Inner Eye continued its methodical blinking, slowly finishing off the last picture. After many, many turns, Swift-Killer had a thought. Far to the east of Bright’s Heaven was a fracture ridge that stuck up just over the horizon. Its side was the quarry for the blocks that were used to build the housing and storage compounds for Bright’s Heaven. Swift-Killer decided to go out to the quarry, and make the arduous climb up the slope to the top; then she would look for the beam of light that the astrologers would send periodically in that direction.

After a dozen turns, a dejected Swift-Killer returned to the Institute.

“It is no wonder that Inner Eye is not responding to our signals,” she said. “I can just barely see them from the top of the quarry.”

“I was afraid of that,” the Institute Astrologer said. “The Eyes are so low on the horizon that our light beam has to travel a long way through the absorbing atmosphere. It is too bad that the Eyes of Bright are hovering over the east pole, if it were hovering above us, we could not only detect their beam easier, but they could see our pitifully weak attempt at a response.”

Swift-Killer shivered at the thought of something hanging over her in the sky, but agreed that Bright had certainly sent his seven Eyes to the poorest spot in the sky for seeing.

Then suddenly, Swift-Killer had an idea.

“If we went to the east pole, we could send our light beam straight up to the Inner Eye. The distance through the atmosphere would be a lot shorter, and the beam would be going in the easy direction and would not fade so much.”

“But nobody goes to the east pole,” the Institute astrologer protested. “The land is full of barbarians, every direction that you move is in the hard direction, the sky is hot and full of volcano smoke, the crust is too bristly to move on… No cheela could survive there.”

“I know it is not as nice as Bright’s Heaven,” Swift-Killer said. “But cheela can survive there. After all, as you said, the place is infested with barbarians.”

“Actually,” Swift-Killer went on, “the troopers on the eastern border have penetrated a good way toward the east pole in punitive raids on barbarian settlements. We have them cowed enough that they would not bother a good-sized expedition.”

A discussion of the pros and cons of Swift-Killer’s suggestion continued for many turns. The cost would be high, especially in terms of the number of troopers that would be needed to guard an expedition deep into barbarian territory. It was beyond the resources and authority of the Inner Eye Institute, and the idea might have been dropped if the last section of the third picture had not been so dramatic. The picture of the machine with the strange beings was remarkable enough (for there was no doubt that the sticklike things seen vaguely through the holes in the Inner Eye were beings). But up in one corner of the picture was a similar figure placed next to the familiar (although stretched) outlines of the Holy Temple. It seemed incredulous, but the markings left no doubt that the being was about one-twelfth as big as the Temple. When the new picture was completed, the Institute astrologer decided that he had better inform the rest of the ruling authorities of their discoveries.

Initially, the High Priest and the Chief Astrologer were perturbed about the Institute astrologer’s interpretation of the pictures, but finally accepted his version as no threat to their religion by assuming that Bright worked in a mysterious way, and that some time in the distant future, it would all become clear to them.

The Leader of the Combined Clans, although nominally a devout worshiper of the God Bright, was willing to compartmentalize her mind and look at the pictures without being bothered by the religious overtones.

“Weird looking creatures,” the Leader said. “And giants at that. Yet if they have learned to hover in the sky without falling down, we could learn much from them, and they seem to be willing to talk to us. It can’t hurt to learn more. Proceed with the expedition.”

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who would be the leader of the expedition. As a combined astrologer-thinker and battle commander, Swift-Killer was the obvious choice. With the authority of the Leader of the Combined Clans behind her, Swift-Killer organized the expedition. They would be gone for many, many turns, and meanwhile the work of the Institute had to go on, so she only took a few of the younger astrologers and novices. A good supply of flares and concentrated pod juice were obtained under her direction, and during that time a few excellent large-diameter expanders had been manufactured by the careful grinding of newly trained artisans. One of the expanders was so large in diameter that only a few of the novices could get a carrying pouch around it; once it was pouched, they could carry little else.

For the trip out to the eastern border, no troopers were needed for protection, and the food stops sufficed for supplies. However, messengers were sent ahead to gather the supplies that the expedition would need in the turns ahead. Soon, Swift-Killer returned to take over command of her troop of needle troopers, for naturally she had requested that they supply the guard for the expedition. Soon the entire party was assembled. Rations were distributed, and civilians were taught the elementary thrusts of the short sword in case a barbarian ever penetrated to the center of the circle formation. Finally they left, gliding easily over the crust toward the east magnetic pole.

07:56:29 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

Dead-Troopers pulled her eye down from its crystallium-cored stub and pushed her way off in the hard direction, keeping her body as thin as sex until she was well over the horizon. She could not figure out why this circle of troopers were penetrating so far into her territory. The scouts had reported that they were on the move, and she had acted to defend the nearest village that would have been an obvious target for a punitive attack, but the circle of troopers had carefully worked its way around it. Such behavior of Empire troopers was new, and Dead-Troopers hated anything new. They were up to something, and she would stop it—but what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07:56:30 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…North! Bright!—East! West! North!…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Trooper-Killer!” she said, and fury sent her short sword again and again through the already damaged brain-knot. Her exhaustion forgotten in the discovery, she moved the dead hunks of meat off the sworn enemy of every troop commander of the east border, and proceeded to strip the tiniest pouch of that dead hulking body.

To her dismay, she found four more trooper buttons—well tarnished—in an almost sealed-off pouch, but nothing else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The troop was still on full circle march alert, when she finally finished and resumed command.

“Rest!” rolled the command through the crust, and the gleaming needles of the dragon teeth stopped in space, paused, then relaxed into a disarrayed, but still outward-facing circle.

“Make camp!”

“Post Guards!”

“Squad Leaders Report!”

The commands rippled out through the crust and the troop camp took on its normal life style as the subordinates interpreted the Commander’s orders, added a few of their own for local order and discipline, and then gathered near the mound of cooling bodies for a conference with their Troop Commander.

“We are in no real hurry,” Swift-Killer announced to them. “And we have a long way to go in hostile territory without food storage depots. We will stop here long enough to dry the meat, then we will move on to the east.”

The squad leaders were pleased with the Commander’s decision. The troopers had been on constant march for a dozen turns, and this break would not only give the more restless ones a few moments to relieve the pressure of their juices, but would also give the whole command a chance to revert to a seminormal life style, not to mention a welcome change in diet from the ever-present food pods.

The squad leaders had no trouble in getting volunteers for butcher duty, and soon the whole pile of eight bodies was neatly drained, the muscular meat carefully sliced from the skin and the leathery skin stretched out as far as it would go in the easy direction. The ends were held down with the ample weight of a couple of otherwise useless novice astrologers, and left to dry for a turn on the glowing crust, until they were ready to rewrap the meat hunks that they had so recently enveloped.

When the butchering crew came to the eggs, there was a lengthy pause. One of the troopers and the Trooper-Killer barbarian were found to have eggs in their egg cases. Unfortunately for the sensibilities of the butchering crew, the precious egglings were still alive in their leathery sacs.

The news of the living egglings brought Swift-Killer to the scene at once. As much as she hated it, it was her duty to pass judgment. She looked carefully at the leathery egg-sacs, sliding each one in turn under the protection of a hatching mantle to feel the pulsating life form within.

Unfortunately, the pulsations from the wee ones only confirmed what they all knew. Egg-sacs with that color had no chance of surviving without many more turns of protection and nourishment within their mother.

Swift-Killer felt the terrible urge to lift the little eggling into her egg case—to give it the protection and nourishment that it needed. But she knew full well that within one turn, her normally protective egg case would have swollen into a bloated anger, and the vile juices that it would have exuded would have literally dissolved the egg sac and its precious cargo. As much as they all would have liked to have saved them, the egglings were doomed.

Swift-Killer softly took the two quivering egg-sacs into a holding pouch and moved off. The butchering crew continued their work, while the rest of the expedition followed Swift-Killer to the other side of the camp.

“Another nasty duty,” Swift-Killer complained. She drew out the flashing sword that she had so recently acquired.

“If it has to be done, let it be done quickly,” she said. With two swift slices, she sacrificed the juices of the egglings to the all-absorbing crust of Egg, which glowed momentarily in response.

The others returned to the camp, but Swift-Killer, who had had the duty, stayed on to punish herself. As she looked at the dead egglings, she was horrified at her inner thoughts.

“That is a tender looking slice of meat,” her appetite said.

“Not even a barbarian would eat an eggling!” she remonstrated. Shifting her attention from the immature egglings baking on the glowing crust, she flowed back into the camp to supervise the wrapping of the meat, for that would be the troop’s main source of food for many turns to come.

07:56:36 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

After two dozen turns, the expedition began to approach the east pole. Every direction was now a hard direction for travel, and if it weren’t for the disciplined nature of the troopers, who were used to marching in close formation, the going would have been difficult. Fortunately, since there was no easy direction of travel, there was also no danger of rapid attack, and their guard could be relaxed. Swift-Killer changed the usual loose marching circle into a modified wedge. The troopers were placed in a sharp pointed chevron formation, with the front of the chevron thrusting steadily through the resistant atmosphere to force an opening. The remainder of the troopers kept the gap open, and the small group of scientist astrologers moved swiftly along at the trailing edge, moving easily into the gap created by the troopers.

To break the monotony, the squads in the troop had been having a contest. Each squad would take a turn as path breaker and see how many treads they could keep up the pace before having to fall back and let the following squad have their turn. Each squad, of course, had to break the previous squad’s record, and when Swift-Killer began to notice that several troopers on the front line were beginning to surreptitiously drop equipment and food parcels from their pouches in order to keep up the pace, she decided to call a break before things got beyond control.

“Cease March!” Swift-Killer’s voice rolled through the crust.

An exhausted group of troopers halted their steady push and felt the hardness close in around them. Since all directions were hard going, no one wanted to move from his position, but Swift-Killer was pleased to see that the squad leaders kept after their troopers until they were dispersed in a rough circle, with a few individuals designated to keep one or two eyes on the horizon while they were eating.

“They really must be tired,” Swift-Killer thought as she looked around. “No one has the energy to pair off for a little fun.”

Having stayed at her normal position near the center of the troop, Swift-Killer had not had to participate in the exhausting procedure of breaking path, and so had not even begun to tax her great strength. So she was feeling fine and would have liked to have a little relaxation after eating; but a quick survey of her many lovers among the troop convinced her that she should let them rest.

Swift-Killer wandered over to the clump of astrologers and approached Cliff-Watcher, who was busy tying knots in a tally string. On the crust beside him were three tread sticks.

“Amazing, simply amazing,” Cliff-Watcher was murmuring to himself as he added knot after knot to the tally string.

“What’s amazing?” Swift-Killer asked, curious as always, and confident enough in her position to ask questions of someone many turns her junior.

“Egg is really shaped like an egg!” exclaimed Cliff-Watcher as a few of his eyes glanced away from the tally string and noticed her approach. He then saw the bewilderment in the jerky overtones of Swift-Killer’s normal eye-wave pattern and continued, “I have been keeping a count of the number of standard treads on our march with the tread sticks. The east pole is on a very flat place on Egg. It takes many, many treads of travel before there is a noticeable change in the horizon,” he said.

Swift-Killer looked ahead along their direction of travel. She could see the east pole mountains just raising their tops over the horizon. It was true, the horizon had hardly changed for the last three turns.

“Like an Egg?” she asked.

“Yes,” the young astrologer said. “An egg-sac is flattened on the top and bottom because of the pull of gravity, and spreads out in the other directions. Our home, Egg, seems to be constructed the same way. Near the east and west poles it is very flat and you have to go a long way to see a change in the horizon. Halfway between the east and west pole, where Bright’s Heaven is, the horizon is very close in the east and west direction but many treads away in the hard direction.”

Swift-Killer knew this elementary fact of the topography near Bright’s Heaven, but she had never connected it with the shape of Egg. However, neither she nor Cliff-Watcher realized that Cliff-Watcher’s calculations had misled him. The star was spherical, not egg-shaped. It was his tread sticks that were distorted, giving him a false impression. Everything on the star—the tread sticks, the dragon crystal weapons and even the nuclei in their bodies—was distorted by the trillion-gauss magnetic field of the star so that they were many times longer along the magnetic field lines than across them. Since even their eyes participated in the general stretching, they couldn’t see the distortion; everything looked normal to them.

Swift-Killer turned professional. “How many treads until we reach the east pole mountains?” she asked.

Cliff-Watcher, who was proud of his advanced education in conceptual geometry, immediately went into a calculation trance, his practiced counting tendrils shooting forth from his body. The tendrils began to wave and interlace with each other at blinding speed. Finally he broke from the trance.

“Two dozen standard marches,” he announced.

Swift-Killer looked at the east pole mountains that loomed over the deceptively near horizon and announced, “Then I guess we had better get the troop moving.”

Without shifting, she roared, “At Alert!” The troop smoothly reformed and continued their push to the east, the disruptive contest between squads forgotten.

Cliff-Watcher had been right, it really was about two dozen standard marches to the east pole mountains, but since a standard march between breaks was impossible in this terrain, it really took much longer.

“It is like constantly climbing a hill in the hard direction,” Swift-Killer complained to herself as she took a turn at the point of the chevron forcing its way into the hard direction.

“I know,” said the trooper at her right. “Except you never end up on top.”

Swift-Killer breasted another furry hillock in front of her. Each tiny little thread of crust was sticking up toward the sky in the easy direction. It looked impossible—the threads seemed to be laughing at the powerful gravity pull of Egg. But when Swift-Killer had to push over that tiny little thread, along with the myriad others that made up the fuzzy surface, she found they were powerfully strong. It took a great deal of strength just to move through the fuzz, knocking it down and pushing on over it. Then on top of it all, if the fuzz slowed her down too much, the hard direction closed in on her and made the going even worse.

The troop finally reached the foothills of the east pole mountains without further incident. Swift-Killer looked with awe at the height of the mountains, then upwards at the Eyes of Bright, still hanging in the sky far above the mountains, defying the mighty pull of Egg.

Swift-Killer put the camp on bivouac status. First, long-range sentries were put out at a good distance from the camp; then she allowed the troopers to put down their weapons. A file of troopers went into a virgin stand of crust-fuzz and stamped out a circular depressed region where the dragon teeth and the short swords were stacked to block out the constant winds. In the center, the remainder of the pods and dried meat was stored, while those who had been burdened with their weight during the long march became free again to frolic without care. Hunting parties were formed, with old and new couples taking off in small carefree groups to see what was off on the horizon. Now was an important time for Swift-Killer. She gathered the astrologers and began to set up her experiment. She first took the flat glancer mirror and set it on a mound of rubble at an angle until she could go off at a distance and see the Eyes of Bright reflected off the center of the mirror.

“The Eyes of Bright are larger and closer, and they look a little brighter,” Cliff-Watcher remarked, as a few of his eyes scanned the cluster of seven lights in the sky.

“I should hope so, after all the work we did to get here,” Swift-Killer said crankily as she struggled to scrape a notch for the curved expander in the fuzzy crust some distance away from the glancer.

“I could never figure out why Bright chose to send his Eyes to the east pole, when we were in Bright’s Heaven,” Cliff-Watcher mused.

“Perhaps Bright did not want to see us too well, because we are so wicked,” Swift-Killer said in annoyance. “Here, hold this while I sight through the pointing hole.”

Swift-Killer had the large, curved expander standing vertically on the crust. It came up almost to the top of Cliff-Watcher as he moved over to surround it and hold it vertical. He was glad it had not been his job to keep that thing pouched during their travels.

Cliff-Watcher flowed his body away from the center of the expander as Swift-Killer backed off and stared through the small hole in the plate. Swift-Killer moved her eye until she could see the center of the glancer through the hole. There, shining in the center of the flat mirror were the Eyes of Bright. Now she had to tilt the expander until the image of her eye off the flat backside of the expander was swallowed up in the hole that she was looking through; in that way she knew that the expander was pointing at the glancer, which in turn was pointing up at the Eyes of Bright.

“Up a little,” she said. “Hold it!” She moved quickly and soon Cliff-Watcher’s place was taken by a cluster of pieces of crust.

The message to the strange sticklike beings in the Inner Eye had been decided long ago. Since they had used a rectangular format with a prime number of rows and columns to send crude pictures, they would certainly recognize that format if it were beamed back to them—only the picture inside the rectangle would be new. First it would show a picture of the Eyes of Bright over the east pole with a dragon tooth pointing the way to Bright’s Heaven. Then later pictures would show the Eyes of Bright hovering over Bright’s Heaven, with the distinctive profile of the east pole mountains poking up over the horizon of Egg. Each picture had been converted into a complex tally string, ready to read off. Swift-Killer gathered her crew of astrologers and they proceeded to retransmit the message that they had sent in vain from the compound back at the Inner Eye Institute.

“Long burn, flick, flick, flick, dash, flick…” Swift-Killer intoned as she ran the tally string through a set of tendrils. The crew of flare holders and pod-juice controllers kept up their steady work, and flash after flash of light glared from the end of the flare, reflected from the curved surface of the expander into a straight beam that flashed across the crust to the glancer, then went beaming upwards toward the cluster of lights in the sky. After several lines, Swift-Killer would take another look through the sighting holes to make sure that the beam was being sent off in the right direction, while the flare crew replaced their flares with fresh ones.

After the first picture had been sent, Swift-Killer went over to the astrologer whom she had put in charge of the dark detector. She was slightly disappointed that there had been no darkening of the detector, but she resolved to keep on with the rest of the series.

A dozen turns and more than twice as many messages later, Swift-Killer finally had to admit that perhaps the messages were still not getting through.

“The Eyes still look dim to us, so you can imagine that our weak little light is going to be very dim by the time it gets up through the murky atmosphere,” Cliff-Watcher said as his thinned out body tried to knead the worries out of the flattened Swift-Killer.

Swift-Killer lay relaxed under the tender ministrations of Cliff-Watcher and felt the small globules that used to be a piece of Cliff-Watcher moving slowly through her body on their way to her egg case. Her body was at rest, but her mind was a turmoil of emotion.

“If they cannot see us yet, then we must get closer,” she said, “I am going to climb the mountains to where the atmosphere is clearer.”

Cliff-Watcher’s kneading stopped. “But that will take forever!” he remonstrated.

“So it may,” said Swift-Killer, who had slipped out from under Cliff-Watcher and had rapidly resumed her more normal shape. She was now putting on her office of command as she gathered and pouched the tools, weapons and trinkets that she had cast aside earlier. “But we are going anyway.”

07:56:48 GMT MONDAY 20 JUNE 2050

The climbing of the east pole mountains was like a siege. The mountains were many times higher than any that had ever been attempted. Swift-Killer took her time to organize her support, for once she had started up the mountain the organization would have to run itself. The formal command structure of the troop was dismantled, and a new arrangement organized more along the lines of a permanent border fort replaced it. A quarry crew was sent out and soon a fortified compound replaced the campground. Regular hunting parties were organized, and the short swords and dragon teeth soon were sinking their sharp fangs into wandering animals instead of their natural prey. With much grumbling, long rows of petal plants were placed in the crust, and the business of tending them rotated among the troopers—who in many cases had only joined up to get away from the clan farm.

With her supply lines secure, Swift-Killer organized the assault on the east pole mountains. Swift-Killer, Cliff-Watcher and North-Wind would lead the climb, but backing them would be over half the troop. Swift-Killer worked carefully, orchestrating the climb like a major battle. Twice she backed down from a hard-won valley because the climb—although not difficult for an unburdened cheela—would have been impossible for one loaded with food parcels. Slowly the expedition worked its way into the foothills. Chunks of crust were stationed on the steeper slopes for rest stations, and soon two lanes of porters were moving back and forth from the fort on the lowlands to the point of the climb that slowly thrust its way inward and upward.

“That was a terrible stretch,” Cliff-Watch er complained as he lay exhausted on the crust in one of the rare flat spots in the mountain pass. “The glancer almost wouldn’t fit through that narrow crevasse.”

Swift-Killer, her body bulging with the curved shape of the expander, ignored the complaint and announced, “This will be an ideal place for our next base camp. I will go ahead and reconnoiter, while you two work your way down to the lead parcel crew. Take your time and make sure that you secure the path for them.”

Swift-Killer carefully emptied her pouch of the expander, and moved swiftly off as North-Wind and Cliff-Watcher wearily dropped their loads and moved back down the mountain.

Swift-Killer was pleased. The way ahead was steep, but broad. They would make good progress with their loads over this stretch. In her hurry to explore well ahead, she thinned her body down and pushed only a narrow path through the prickly crust. She would broaden it on her way back down, when the tremendous pull of Egg would help instead of hinder her motion. She came around a low ledge and then stared at the barrier ahead.

“Bright’s Curse!” she exploded. Her eyes scanned the area, but there was no escape from the fact that the canyon they had been traveling had come to an abrupt end. There was a tall cliff blocking the way. She moved closer to it and began to examine the vertical cracks that rent the face in the easy direction.

There were a lot of the cracks, for the crust had very little strength in the easy direction, and the pull of Egg was constantly attempting to draw the soaring cliffs to its bosom. This particular cliff must have been formed recently, for it had not been worn much by the ever-present winds. Swift-Killer searched along the base and then found a fairly large rent that went back a good way into the cliff. Conquering her fear of the cliff face towering over her, she moved up to the rent. Without looking up at the terrifying sight of that mass of rock ready to fall on her topside, she narrowed down and pushed her body into the crack. She soon filled the bottom of it completely. Then, still pushing with her tread and muscles on the outside, she forced her body fluids into the narrow crack; slowly her body became tall and narrow instead of its usual flattened ellipsoidal shape. Although the pull of Egg tried to drag her down, the narrow crevasse kept her from being flattened, and since the easy direction was upwards, it was not hard to move in that direction, while the hardness in the horizontal direction actually helped her to maintain her body in the crevasse. She pushed and pushed and felt the pressure build up in her lower body. When she felt she could stand the pressure no longer, she took a quick, terrified glance up the remainder of the crack and was disappointed to find that she had climbed only a small portion of the way to the top.

Dismay and terror weakened her hold, and she felt herself falling down and out the bottom of the crevasse. The force of her fall caused her internal juices to form a small wave that actually rolled her outside sack of skin over and over. For the first time since she was a tiny hatchling blown about by the wind, she found herself tread upwards.

Swift-Killer slowly righted her bruised body and moved away from the front of the cliff while she thought. She went over to a mound of rubble and thoughtfully picked her way through the chunks of crust that lay tumbled there. She picked up several good-sized slabs that were thick plates. She went back to the crevasse with her burden and, turning one of the chunks endways, pushed it ahead of her into the crevasse. She again pushed her body into the crack, and lifted the plate up as high as she could. She then turned the slab sideways and slowly let it come down, where the flat edges jammed against the narrowing sides of the crack as the pull of Egg sat it firmly into place. Swift-Killer slowly relinquished her hold, and she watched in pleasure as the heavy chunk of crust stayed suspended between the walls of the crevasse, just over her normal eye height. She took another slab, a longer one this time, and soon it too was suspended against the pull of Egg at the same height, but further out from the back of the notch. Swift-Killer looked her creation over with care and then flowed back out of the crevasse and shortly returned from the rubble pile with another thick slab of crust, longer than the others. With a great effort she lifted the slab and soon it was in place, resting on top of the other two. Swift-Killer hesitated, then slowly induced herself to glide under the improvised platform to the back of the crevasse. She again forced her body into the narrow crack, and stretching out a narrow pseudopod that snaked up to rest on top of the wedged slabs, she slowly pumped her juices up against the pull of Egg so that they inflated that portion of her skin on the platform. She halted after she had several eyes transferred to the upper level, then formed some strong manipulators that grasped the top slab tightly. Then, firmly anchored, she finally pushed and pulled the rest of her body up onto the platform.

All during this long procedure, Swift-Killer had been careful to keep all of her dozen eyes carefully concerned with watching the wall, the manipulators, the slabs, anything but the outside environment. Only when she was safely on top of the slab, her manipulators keeping her from flowing off the front or the back, and the firm walls of the crevasse holding her in from the sides, did she finally allow herself to observe the predicament she had put herself into. She looked out of the crevasse at the horizon, then at the pile of rubble in the distance, then at the crust just at the entrance to the crevasse, then just inside the entrance, and then her eyes refused to look any further. Try as she might, she just couldn’t seem to make them look down from the platform where she hunched, perched at a height above the crust that would have burst her skin like a ripe pod if she had fallen.

“It needs to be wider,” Swift-Killer said to herself, “if we are going to use this as a platform to make another one further up. And perhaps they should be closer together so it isn’t as hard to flow up onto them. But it will work. We will just make floating platforms up the crevasse to the top of the cliff.”

Swift-Killer slowly let herself down, forming a few more massive manipulators to hold onto small ledges in the cliff walls to slow her descent. She quickly flowed out from beneath the platform and returned to the base camp, happily breasting her way down through the fuzzy crust.

Conquering the cliff took many turns. Although some of the troopers soon became expert scalers, and even found a technique to get the awkward expander and glancer up the notch, almost one-third of the troopers were incapable of forcing themselves to climb up on the overhanging platforms. Despite the thinning out of her supply line, Swift-Killer pressed on, and as the double line of the expedition wound its way through the east pole mountains, it slowly became obvious to all that the atmosphere was getting thinner and the visibility was getting better. Far to the north, they could see a swirling cloud of smoke that came southward from the large volcano in the northern hemisphere and, turning at the east pole, made its way out to the west along the equator. However, the dense clouds didn’t penetrate into the mountains.

During a rest period, Cliff-Watcher gazed up at the seven bright points of light. “Perhaps we could try sending a message again,” he said.

Swift-Killer had made up her own mind about that long ago.

“It is clearer,” she said. “But we could still have a better chance of being seen if we were to go higher still, for the atmosphere is getting thinner rapidly as we go higher. We could attempt a message now, but we have only a limited supply of flares and pod juice, and I would rather wait to use them when we are as high as we can get.”

The climb had taken over two greats of turns. Even Swift-Killer was surprised when she realized that she would soon have a second egg mature inside her to be sent back down with one of the plodding porters that moved back and forth between base camps, shuttling food up the living chain. Finally, the supply line had been stretched to its limit. There was no limit to the food supply at the base of the mountains, for the fort had turned into a prosperous town, complete with egg-pens, hatchling schools, farms and small businesses set up on the side by enterprising troopers. The hunting parties and harvesters kept a steady stream of food pouring into the base of the pyramid, but most of it went into supplying the daily needs of the porters who used the energy to haul supplies up the mountain against the great pull of Egg. Swift-Killer finally called a halt at a flat place in the mountains.

“We will stop here,” she said to Cliff-Watcher and North-Wind. “I want you both to rest and eat well to build up your reserves while the porter crews build up our supplies. I will scout ahead and see if there is another place equally as good ahead of us. If there is, we will move on to it to send our message, otherwise, we will attempt it from here.”

Swift-Killer emptied out her pouches, especially the bulky glancer she had been carrying, and moved steadily on up the canyon. She was gone for so many turns that Cliff-Watcher and North-Wind began to get worried, but finally she returned with good news.

“There is another wide, level place further up the mountain,” she said. “It will be a long climb carrying the equipment, but there are no tricky traverses or steep cliffs, just a long, upward trip.”

She glanced at the nervously twitching eye-stubs of her two compatriots. She could tell that they were thinking about objecting to a continuation of the climb, since the messages could be sent almost as well from their present spot. She decided to reassert her authority.

“At Alert!” boomed the tread of Troop Commander Swift-Killer, only slightly muffled by the fuzzy crust.

Although Cliff-Watcher was not a trooper, he had been living with the troop for so long that he found his body imitating the instant response of North-Wind as the Commander’s rigid eyes glared at them.

“The sole purpose of this entire expedition is to send a message to the beings in the Inner Eye,” Swift-Killer began. “And I intend to do that to the best of my ability—and yours! This camp is not the best place to send that message, so we will go on—do you understand?”

“Yes, Commander,” boomed North-Wind’s formal reply, echoed by Cliff-Watcher’s awed response.

“Good!” she said. “From now on, I want you two to obey my orders.” Her body relaxed slightly and she continued. “We three will push on in a dozen turns, after we all have had time to rest, build up our internal food reserves, and have a good supply of food parcels. Now for my orders. My first order is to rest. My second order is to eat well, and my third order is to thin out, because I have just returned from a long lonely journey, and I am going to take you both on at once.” With that she moved in between them and shortly was enjoying being the middle layer of a triple layer orgy.

After twelve turns of rest and recreation, Swift-Killer was anxious to be on her way. Since they had to have other things to occupy their time besides eating and sex, she had Cliff-Watcher learn the finer points of short-sword infighting from North-Wind while she refereed. Then both she and North-Wind learned to make counter tendrils and soon both could compute almost as fast as Cliff-Watcher.

They were now ready to go. She had convinced North-Wind that there was very little likelihood of meeting barbarians in the mountains at these heights, so they left their weapons. They loaded up with the all-important message equipment and as much food as they could carry, and the three set off up the mountain. The rest of the troop was left with orders to set up food caches at the various base camps down the mountain and to withdraw to the fort.

The climb was difficult, but as Swift-Killer had assured them, there was nothing particularly tricky about it. Because of their bulky burdens, however, it took them much longer to make the climb than it had taken Swift-Killer in her exploration climb. They ate their food rapidly as their bodies labored under the pull of Egg.

“I always felt that I would rather carry the food in my juices than in my pouches,” North-Wind said as he ate a pod. “It may all weigh the same, but somehow when it is inside me, I feel it is at least carrying its share of the load.”

“I will be glad to relieve you of any food you don’t want to carry any longer,” Cliff-Watcher said.

“Sorry,” North-Wind said, carefully sucking the last drop of juice from a pod skin as he pulled it from his eating pouch. “Last one.”

“Oh well,” Cliff-Watcher said as North-Wind cracked open each pod seed with a tiny, hard manipulator and carefully ate the little kernel inside. “Guess we might as well be on our way.” He turned his attention to Swift-Killer, who was busy calculating something.

“That will work out just about right,” she said. “We are about two turns from our destination. We will be out of food by then, but our body reserves will last long enough for us to send up the messages and get back to the base camp with plenty to spare, although we will be hungry most of the way back down.”

“I’m hungry right now,” Cliff-Watcher said, “and I finished all my food last turn.”

“That is what the troopers call fat hunger,” North-Wind said. “When you think you are hungry just because you are used to eating every turn. You can’t eat every turn when you are a trooper pursuing barbarians. Wait a dozen turns, then you will know what being hungry really means.”

“I’m not looking forward to it,” Cliff-Watcher said as he led the way up the canyon.

At last they came over a rise and entered the wide, level region that Swift-Killer had found. With a sigh of relief, they unloaded the message equipment and spread out on the fuzzy crust for a rest.

“I sure could use some food right now,” Cliff-Watcher said. “Even an unripe pod would taste good.”

“You would never make a trooper,” North-Wind retorted. “I haven’t been hungry since we left the last base camp. It is all just a matter of proper attitude. Look at me, I am not even hungry for a pod, much less an unripe one.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Swift-Killer remarked. “I just happened to have saved out three ripe pods, but since North-Wind isn’t hungry and Cliff-Watcher seems to pine for unripe pods, I guess I will just have to eat them myself.”

At these words the two males swarmed over her, prodding her all over until they found the pouch that held the three pods. Despite her protests that this was no way to treat a troop commander, North-Wind held her down while Cliff-Watcher carefully kneaded the pouch open and extracted three slightly bruised pods. They all then relaxed, eating their last meal for some time, as they stared up at the tiny light hanging in the sky, with its ring of six bright lights slowly circling about it.

Soon the three were busy setting up the beaming apparatus. The flat glancer mirror was propped up at an angle against a nearby cliff, and the curved expander was placed a slight distance away. Swift-Killer organized them into a smoothly working team. North-Wind held up the flares, and kept them placed as close as possible to the point in space that Swift-Killer and Cliff-Watcher had decided upon. Cliff-Watcher used his finest tendrils to manipulate the flow valve on the holder for the pod juice, while Swift-Killer constantly checked the alignments of the various portions of the apparatus and at the same time rhythmically read off the calls from the tally string that she held at her side.

“Long burn, flick, flick, flick, dash, flick…” Swift-Killer droned slowly as Cliff-Watcher concentrated on turning the valve of the vial of pod juice and North-Wind held the flare carefully at the correct position.

The message was very boring, since it was just a picture with a lot of blank space, but both North-Wind and Cliff-Watcher had participated in previous attempts to beam a message up to Inner Eye and knew what they were getting into. The many short flashes representing spaces were just as important as the dashes representing points or the long burns that signified the beginning of a line. A few omitted flashes could badly distort the picture and the message they were trying to send.

Swift-Killer had decided long ago that accuracy was more important than speed, even constant speed. After all, the strange beings in the Inner Eye certainly took their time in sending down their pictures—almost as if they were too slow-witted to cope with anything faster.

They slowly ground through the first picture message. Swift-Killer called a halt to see if there was any darkening of the dark detector, indicating that there was a message coming back to them in return.

“Nothing,” Swift-Killer said, as she lifted the small vial of fluid and peered through it.