Leaving

06:00:00 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Pierre Niven opened his tired eyes and awkwardly turned off the alarm on his wrist chronometer. Six hours of sleep. He rubbed his hand over his bearded chin. The beard needed a trim and there were probably a few grey hairs peeking through the brown, but there was work to do. A quick bite in the galley, then he would relieve Amalita at the communications console. Both she and Seiko were long overdue for a sleep break. He heard muffled curses from the next sleep rack as Jean Kelly Thomas struggled to put her bed up.

The long day started.

06:05:06 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Multi-scientist Seiko Kauffmann Takahashi was on the Science Deck working with the star image telescope. The telescope looked at the neutron star with one-meter diameter mirror in the top of the cylindrical tower of star-oriented instruments that stuck out of the “north pole” of Dragon Slayer’s spherical body. The telescope brought a large, bright image down through the hollow center of the tower and focused it on the froste surface of the star image table in the middle through the array of light detectors built under the surface of the table. When the crew first arrived a little over a day ago, the star image had only a few features in it. There had been the large volcano in the northern hemisphere, and the rough, mountainous regions at the East and West Poles where infalling meteoric material collected. Now, just a day later, the star was covered with a network of super-highways connecting great cities that grew in size even as Seiko watched. Noticing something happening in the outskirts of the capital city, Bright’s Heaven, she efficiently took her compact body swiftly through a set of coordinated free-fall twists that put her on the other side of the table, then took a closer look.

“Abdul,” Seiko said. “I would like you to observe this. There is a strange phenomenon occurring at the old Holy Temple.”

“Just a sec while I reset the neutrino detector,” electronic engineer Abdul Nkomi Farouk replied as he pushed himself over to hover above the star image table. Seiko reached up to the ceiling and made some adjustments to the telescope controls. The disk of light on the table expanded to show an elongated twelve-pointed star formation in the southern hemisphere of the neutron star.

Still the largest structure on the star, the Holy Temple had been raised by the cheela nearly 24 hours ago as they emerged from barbarism. Led by the ancient prophet Pink-Eyes (one of the few cheela who could see the visible light from the human’s laser mapping beam), the cheela had raised the great mound-temple to serve as a place for worship of their pantheon of gods: the God-Star Bright (our nearby Sun hovering over the South Pole axis of the neutron star), Bright’s Messenger (the large asteroid, Otis, in its highly elliptical orbit), the six Eyes of Bright (the six small asteroids in a circle hovering over the East Pole), and the Inner Eye of Bright (the tiny human spacecraft at the center of the ring of asteroids).

After the humans had established contact and convinced the cheela that the were not gods, the Holy Temple had been neglected and was slowly fading away into the landscape. The shape of the temple was that of a cheela at full alert, and twelve round eyes perched on short, exponentially tapered eye-stubs. After a hundred generations of neglect, the ancient ruins had degenerated to twelve blobs that used to be eyes and portions of wall mounds that had formed the rest of the body. Now, however, one of the eyes was once again dark and round, while its eye-stub was easily visible in the telescope image.

Abdul thoughtfully twisted one black whisker tip with his fingers as he pondered the scene. “Looks like they’re fixing up the Holy Temple. Are they reverting to human worship?”

“Absolutely not,” Seiko pronounced her verdict in the authoritative Teutonic tone she had learned from her father. “They are too intelligent for that. Since they now have space travel, they must have looked down and realized that the most visible structure on Egg looks rundown. Unless your neutrino and X-ray detectors have responded to a crustquake recently, it must be some sort of historical renovation project.”

“No big quakes lately,” said Abdul. “So they must be doing this on purpose.

“It’s about time,” Seiko humphed in disapproval. “That is the trouble with egg-layers, especially those that let the clan Old Ones raise the young. With no direct family ties through parents, they have no personal links to history.”

Seiko had had no sleep for the past 36 hours. She looked up to adjust the solar image telescope controls to expand the view. The sudden motion made her head swim. She hit the wrong switch, and the filter that blocked most of the light from the neutron star flicked open for an instant. Her eyes shut against the glare.

“Seiko…Seiko…”

Seiko opened her heavy eyelids to see Dr. Cesar Wong holding her by the shoulders and peering through the wisps of straight black hair that had fallen forward over her face. Floating next to him was Abdul.

“I told her and I told her she shouldn’t have skipped her last sleep break,” Abdul said. “Maybe she’ll listen to you and take one this time.”

“Seiko, my dear.” Cesar’s deep brown eyes showed concern. “You have driven yourself much too hard. Please take a rest.”

“Doctor Wong, I appreciate your concern. But I am not about to abandon my professional responsibility at this critical juncture.”

“Well—at least take a break and join with me in a cup of hot coffee in the galley.” Dr. Wong took the petite scientist gently by the arm. She allowed herself to be steered down the passageway to the bottom deck. On the way through the middle deck, they passed Amalita and Pierre working the communications console that talked directly to the cheela through the laser communication link.

Pierre was stretched out in free fall, his head and arms inside the communications console, while Amalita was talking to the cheela on the star. The speaker was not a computer-slowed image of a real cheela, but the real-time image of Sky-Teacher, a special purpose intelligent robot that the cheela had built for the job of communicating with the slow-thinking humans.

Pierre was replacing the HoloMem crystal in the side of the communications console. He reached in and removed the small three-sided cover shaped like the corner of a box. The outside was jet black, but the inner surface was a corner reflector of brilliantly reflecting mirrors. He pushed a button and a clear crystal cube about five centimeters across popped out into the room, rotating slowly from the force of its ejection. Pierre left it in midair as he placed another cube into the memory cavity and replaced the mirrored cover. Then he floated over to catch the cube. The corners and edges of the HoloMem cube were jet black, but through the transparent faces could be seen flashes of rainbow light from the information fringes stored in the interior.

06:13:54 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Leaving Amalita talking to Sky-Teacher, Pierre grasped the HoloMem cube at opposite corners and followed Doc and Seiko through the passageway 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 all the wisdom that the cheela had accumulated during the past thirty minutes. He placed the crystal in its scanner cavity in the library console, fitted the brilliantly polished corner segement into place, and closed the lid.

Sky-Teacher had said that this latest HoloMem crystal held 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, nickel, and other metallic nuclei in a crystalline lattice, through which flowed a liquid sea of electrons. Next came the mantle—two kilometers of neutrons and metallic nuclei in layers that became more neutron-rich and dense with depth. The inner three-fourths of the star was a liquid ball of superfluid neutron and superfluid protons.

Pierre scanned the next page, 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 tiny 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 humans.

“But the Crab Nebula neutron star 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 followed a long section of encrypted gibberish.

In near shock, Pierre set the library console for automatic transfer of the data to St. George and slowly floated over to the nearby lounge at the center bottom of Dragon Slayer. Everyone but Amalita was there. Doc was trying to talk Seiko out of taking some W.A.K.E. pills with her coffee, and Abdul was telling Jean Kelly Thomas about the recent restoration of the Holy Temple as she gulped down a quick breakfast after her shortened sleep period while trying to comb out the snarls in her short cap of red hair at the same time. While Jean and Pierre had been asleep, the cheela had advanced from their first orbital flights around their home world to intergalactic travel.

Everyone was sitting on the soft, circular lounge seat, held there by the low outward-going residual gravity forces. Occasionally one of them would look out the viewport below his feet. Pierre jumped up to the top of the lounge and held onto the handle in the hatch door leading to one of the six high-gravity protection tanks built into the center of the ship. He too looked down and out of the one-meter diameter window set in the “south pole” of the spherical spacecraft. The electronically controlled optical shutter had been set to blacken the port thirty times a second as each of the six glowing compensator masses passed in front of the port. The only light that entered the window came from a single intense spot that was Bright—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 freckled nose wrinkled in puzzlement. “I thought the plan was for us to stay down here for at least another week.”

“With the cheela doing all the mapping and measurements for us, there is really no need for us to stay any longer,” Pierre 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 swung down an stopped himself at 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 crouched, then flashed a smile at them through his neat, dark brown beard.

“Come on,” he said, “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 as the others swam through the lounge door and spread out through the ship.

Pierre swung over to the communications 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 make a slow-response, long-living robot that could take over the demanding task of talking to the slow-thinking humans. What amazed Pierre was that the robotic creature was so realistic that it had a personality. Sky-Teacher was not robot-like 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 some cheela’s lifetime if they made a mistake or paused for a moment.

“We shortly will have filled up all your available HoloMem crystals,” Sky-Teacher’s image said, in its halo of twelve robotic eyes doing a perfect imitation of the traveling wave pattern of 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 were the electron is paramount, and we in worlds where the neutron dominates.”

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

HOLOMEM CRYSTAL FULL

“You are on your own now,” Sky-Teacher said. “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!”

06:40:10 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Amalita closed down her console and floated over to a hatch in the wall next to the console. She looked through the thick glass of the tiny port into the interior of the high-gravity protection tank. The insides of the small, one-meter diameter sphere was empty except for a tiny split-screen video console set in the inner wall. In the walls of the tanks were banks of sound generators that produced pressure waves to counteract the gravitational tidal forces they would experience once they had left the haven of the size dense masses that danced in a ring around their spacecraft. Amalita pushed buttons that emptied the air from the tank and filled it with incompressible water. A touch on the controls and the sound generators sang their protective cloak into the chamber. In the exact center of the tank was a tiny check sphere pinioned by the sound forces. She increased the intensity of the sound pulses and waited until the tiny ball glowed a brilliant green. Satisfied that the tank was operational, Amalita punched for a purge and restart, then went around the central column to check out the next tank.

As Amalita left, Seiko came to a halt in front of the tank and started taking off her clothes. She stripped to a bra and briefs, pulled a wetsuit from the locker below the hatch door, and slid her pale body smoothly into the suit, the underwater breathing mask floating quietly above her head in the low gravity. Amalita paused in he check-out of the adjacent tank, looked down at her blouse, blushed, and dove down the passageway to her private locker. Shortly she was back again, and this time the motions of her upper body seems to be a little more constrained.

By the time Amalita had come around to the hatch that opened downward from the ceiling of the lounge, Abdul was already there. He was down to his underpants. They were the skimpy European “bikini” style. The white satin contrasted nicely with the muscular ebony-black skin. Amalita floated up under Abdul and grabbed him firmly by his naked waist.

“Here, let me give you a hand with your suit,” she said, her long, ballet-trained legs and feet locked firmly in the handholds at the lounge door.

“Hey! Cut it out!” Abdul yelled.

“I’m just trying to help,” Amalita replied sweetly.

“I’ll bet. I know you oversexed Harvard boards. Always trying to find some excuse to paw an MIT engineer. Leggo. I’m big enough to get dressed by myself.”

Despite Abdul’s protests, Amalita held onto his muscular waist until he got the legs of his wet suit on. Then pushing his arms into his sleeves as if she were dressing a little child, she helped him dress the rest of the way. Her attention bruised Abdul’s ego a little, but Amalita didn’t care; they were going home, and it was time for a little fun. Grinning from ear to ear, she shot up the passageway to check out the top tank. The hatch for this tank was under the star image table.

Amalita floated over to the table and glanced down for a moment at the image of Dragon’s Egg on the white frosted surface. There was now more to see on the star as the cheela technology became capable of constructing structures large enough to be seen from space. The Bright’s Heaven jump loop was now visible below. It was already slinging payloads into space. Within ten minutes or so, a space fountain should be pointing straight up into space from the top of the East Pole mountains off on the horizon. Just before she flicked off the image, Amalita saw the Polar Orbiting Space Station of the cheela flash by below like a white-hot tracer bullet.

06:45:10 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

Captain Star-Glider looked up with three of his eyes as the six glowing masses that formed the Eyes of Bright moved slowly by above him. The polar orbit of his space station carried him close enough to the huge formation that he could see the cylindrical instrument tower sticking out from one end of the spherical main hull of Dragon Slayer. The human spacecraft was as black-cold as a prostitute’s eyeball and could only be seen by the red reflections from the Six Eyes and the yellow-white glare from Egg below. He shivered at the thought of living in such a cold place and thankfully spread out his tread on the glowing warmth of the yellow-white deck. It took almost a grethturn before the huge circle of glowing planetoids was far enough off from the vertical that it was no longer “above” him. His three anxious upturned eyes stopped their relentless watch and returned to join the remainder of his twelve eyes in the familiar cheela traveling wave pattern.

The wave pattern quickened as Captain Star-Glider tasted a message scrolling across the communications taste screen built into the deck. They would be launching an exploration ark within a few turns, and the exploration crew had been called for a final briefing. The briefing would take place in two dothturns at the meeting area around on the other side of the space station. The jump loop at Bright’s Heaven had been busy the last turn sending up one jumpcraft after another with the crew, while the gravity catapults at the East and West Poles had been busy tossing cargo and equipment into the sky. The catapults were ancient, over eight human hours old. Extremely inefficient, even when aided by the inertia drives on the cargo shuttlecraft, they were slowly being replaced. Most personnel transfers now used the jump loops, and soon nearly everything would come up by way of a space fountain.

Although it really wasn’t any of his business, Star-Glider decided to attend the briefing. It wasn’t often that an exploration ark was sent off to visit some distant star. In fact, this was going to be the last one for quite a while. The Deep Space Exploration Council had decided for budgetary reasons to limit the number of exploration arks to six. The arks would spend a number of greats of turns at an interesting star, then move on to another one. The rest of the Deep Space Exploration fleet consisted of a small squadron of scout ships and a dozen cargo haulers that resupplied the exploration arks and rotated the crews.

The initial exploration was done by the high-speed scout ships that visited candidate neutron stars looking for interesting stellar dynamics or signs of life. one had recently returned to report that they had found life on a neutron star some 12,000 light-years distant. This was the sixth report of possible life, and the first one where the life forms seems to be intelligent.

Star-Glider had seen the pictures of the aliens when they first appeared on holovid. They were the ugliest things the cheela had seen since humans. The novelty had worn off quickly, however. Star-Glider hadn’t heard much about the aliens since and hoped he could learn more at the briefing. He turned the command of the space station over to his first officer, Horizon-Sensor, and made his way along the many centimeters of corridor to the meeting room on the opposite side of his spherically shaped command ship.

When he entered the large, bowl-shaped meeting room, he found it already crowded. Using his undertread to hold onto the slide-stops built into the sloping ramp, he moved down to the high-gravity region near the center of the room. He was nearly a centimeter closer to the miniature black hole at the center of the space station and it felt good to get under a little gravity again, even though it was nowhere near that of the 67 billion gravities of Egg.

Three dozen taste screens were built into the central portion of the meeting room deck. He made his way toward them, his six-pointed captain’s badges parting the crowds before him. Normally, his status would have reserved one of the taste screens for him, but since there were 24 scientists and crew members assigned to the exploration ark to be briefed, the four members of the scout ships that had discovered the aliens, and the Deep Space Exploration scientists and managers, he had to content himself with watching one of the intensity-only visual screens built into the low walls of the meeting room. As he settled himself down to wait for the briefing to start, he found he was next to another Space Force captain. Though she was very young-looking to be a captain, she was huge in size, full of vitality, good-looking, and proved to be quick-witted when she switched an eye from the cheela with whom she had been talking. Instantly realizing who he was, she moved her eyes around to his side and lifted her near tread edge to talk.

“Captain Star-Glider?” she said. “I’m Captain Far-Ranger of the interstellar scout ship Triton.” She flicked half her eyes toward her companion. “And this is Lieutenant Star-Finder, our navigator. We both have enjoyed your hospitality these past few turns.”

“If I had known you were aboard, Captain, I would have invited you to dinner,” he replied. “Unfortunately, this station is so large that often I don’t even know how many spaceshipe we have docked, much less how many visitors are on board. I find your aliens very interesting and would like to learn more about them.”

“They are just ugly savages,” Far-Ranger said, “as you will see from the briefing. But they have some real potential if we can set up communication with them. If you are really interested, perhaps we can get together over a meal after the exploration ark leaves. I took a well deserved leave of a half-great of turns when I returned and I still have a few dozen turns to go.”

“You are my guest, then,” said Star-Glider quickly. “Let’s make it at turnfest on Turn 104.” Remembering his manners, he nodded three of his eyes toward Star-Finder. “You are welcome, too, Lieutenant.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she said. “But I am navigating the exploration ark back to the star. Besides, I am sure you and Captain Far-Ranger will have plenty to talk about.”

Star-Glidder ’trummed a polite regret. The briefing had started, and all eyes were focused toward the bottom of the bowl as the strong waves from the tread amplifier at the central speaker’s pad rippled through the deck. Star-Glider had to look over the topside of Far-Ranger to see the speaker. A few of his eyes glanced down at her deep red topside, then his gaze wandered to take in her full fleshy eyelids.

One of her near eyes caught him looking at her anatomy. Instead of glaring him down as he expected, the eyes slowly and deliberately dipped down between its eyelids and back out in a long sexy wink. Star-Glider felt his eye-stalks stiffen as he returned his attention to the speaker.

“We will now have a briefing on the alien life forms found on the star by Captain Far-Ranger, Doctor of alienology,” the speaker announced. Star-Glider was impressed when he heard her second title. “You are welcome to use my taste screen,” she said as she started to move through the crowd to the center. He whispered an electronic “Thanks,” then moved onto the glowing patch in the deck where her undertread had been. The taste screen came to life under his tread as her amplified voice boomed out through the deck.

“When we first arrived at NS 1566 + 84, we did a mapping of the entire surface. We found no obvious artifacts, but an artificial intelligence search routine programmed with an alien artifact interest operator drew our attention to one of the magnetic poles.” A picture flashed on the viewscreen showing an enlarged picture of a low chain of mountains with a small cluster of hexagonal markings at the base.

“This is a small village, with individual compounds shaped like clusters of crude hexagons. We were able to get some close-ups with our high resolution scanning array infrared antenna.” An artificial-looking picture showed up on the screen.

“The picture is presented in false colors, since we are looking in the infrared portion of the spectrum instead of the soft X-ray visible portion. The moving objects are blurred by the scanning process, but it is obvious that each compound is inhabited by one or two larger aliens, while the central hexagon in each ‘family’ grouping contains smaller aliens with an occasional larger one. Outside the compounds are low pens that contain large numbers of very small creatures.

“Once we knew where we could get pictures, we sent in a skimmer orbiter with an X-ray camera and a motion compensator. Despite the mountains nearby, we were able to set the periapsis of the skimmer within less than a meter of the surface ang got some excellent pictures of the aliens.”

A disgusting-looking blob filled the screen. It looked like a Flow Slow in the process of being butchered. The basic body shape was a treadless, eyeless, flattened blob like a Flow Slow, but stripped of its protective plates. Where the plates would have been were ragged sheets of reddish flesh. Into opposite sides of the body, about halfway up, there were stuck long sticklike objects with knobs on the ends. The sticks had a joint at the middle and were slightly bent like the skinny sticklike arms and legs of the humans. From around the place where th stick emerged from the blob, there came a large number of long, wiggly tendrils. The screen flickered, and the image changed slightly.

“We were able to get five successive pictures as the skimmer orbited over this individual, so we can recreate a crude display of motion.” the five pictures were played rapidly on the screen, and the sequence repeated a number of times. The being was rolling along the crust with the knobbed armlike things sticking out to the sides and the tendrils pushing and pulling at the crust to move it along. The ragged flaps of flesh changed colors as they rotated up, over, around, and under the rolling body of the alien.

“You will notice that the sticks become darker the further they are from the body, leaving the knob at the end quite dark red. The knobs are moved backward and forward to cover the regions in front and behind the alien, but they are never used to touch the ground, so they don’t seem to be for propulsion. here is a close-up of one of the knobs. It seems to be a sphere with many tiny hexagonal facets. We believe the knobs are their eyes. They seem to be similar in structure to the eyes of bees or flies on the human planet Earth. The stick must be a special bonelike material with high strength but low heat conduction to keep the eyes cool.”

There were a number of other pictures, including a unique one showing two of the aliens side-by-side, grasping each other with their tendrils, their eye-sticks seemingly buried in each other’s body.

“We are not positive what is going on here,” said Far-Ranger. “However, if you are thinking what I think you are thinking, you are probably right.”

There was a rumble in the deck, and someone remarked through the laughter, “I guess if you do it with only one eye at a time, you get more deeply involved…”

“The most amazing feature of this alien culture is that there is no plant life. All the creatures seem to be animals.”

“Then what is the base of the food chain?” someone asked.

“It took a long time for us to find out, but one of the clues is that there are only two regions where life is found. They are the two magnetic poles. I can’t call them the East and West Poles as we do here on Egg, because they are quite close to the spin poles. The star has a lot of material left around it from the original supernova explosion, and there is a constant infall of expanded, neutron-poor, planetary-type material at each pole. In fact, there is so much that I didn’t dare risk our scout-ship in flights over those polar regions. The mountain passes are fully of tiny eyeless ball-like animals that probably absorb this neutron-poor dust from the surface of the crust and extract energy to live and grow from the process of converting it into normal crustal material. The larger balls are selected out by the intelligent aliens and herded into pens until they are eaten for food. The aliens are evidently still in the hunting-gathering stage of savagery, except that with no plant life, huting and gathering are synonymous.”

Another picture flashed on the screen. It was the carcass of one of the aliens, surrounded by hundreds of tiny carcasses. All had obviously been seared by a super-hot flash of hard gamma rays from the infall of a large chunk of matter onto the star. “It seemed that being the one chosen to herd in the food supply can be dangerous. I think that one of the ways we can help these aliens is to keep a watch on the larger incoming chunks and warn them away from the mountains during the time they are falling. That should cut their gathering losses. Also, we might be able to stabilize the amount of infall so they have a constant supply of food. Once we have secured their food supply, then maybe they will have the leisure time to talk to us and develop their culture.”

Three turns later, it was time for the expedition to leave. Star-Glider and Far-Ranger said goodbye to Lieutenant Star-Finder, then watched as the interstellar exploration ark, Amalita Shakhashiri Drake, pulled a few meters away for safety. they couldn’t feel the humming as the spinor warp as the space between Dragon’s Egg and a point some 100 light-years away was nullified. A large red marker star zoomed in from the distance, so close they could see the cloudy patches on it. Then the spinor drive reinserted the nullified space, but this time on the other side of the ark. The Amalita and the red star zoomed back into the heavens together.

“A hundred light-years in the time it takes to move a single tread length,” said Star-Glider.

“All you need to do is shrink the hundred light-years until it is but a tread-length long,” Far-Ranger said. “Bright’s Oath, my pouch is dry. How about some juice before turnfeast?”

“Good idea,” Star-Glider said. “I have a few bags of West Pole Double-Distilled in my locker at my quarters.”

“Great!” she said, her nearest eye giving him a long, slow, wink. “You spread the field lines and I’ll follow along behind”

He lead the way to his cabin, the moving bulk of his conducting body spreading the weak magnetic field lines stringing through the space-station plates. They were nowhere near as strong as the trillion-gauss fields on Egg so there was no need for him to act as pathbreaker, but he didn’t mind having her snuggled up to his trailing edge. As they moved down the roofless corridor, a few of his eyes looked up into the sky to watch the formation of six asteroids pass over once again. Around each glowing mass were tiny specks that glared periodically. They were the herder rockets that kept the condensed asteroids in their proper position around Dragon Slayer. If these ever failed, the humans would be torn apart by the ferocious tides of Egg. He suddenly stopped and all his eyes turned upward.

“What is the matter?” Far-Ranger asked.

“The pattern is wrong,” Star-Glider replied. “The pulses are coming at the wrong times. Something has happened to the Eyes of Bright!” For a blink he panicked at the thought of those large objects falling down on him. Then reason reminded him they were in orbit. They wouldn’t fall, but something was definitely wrong. He flowed around Far-Ranger and headed back up the corridor to the command deck at full tread-ripple.

“The humans are in trouble!” he said. “Follow me!”