Starquake Page 4

  of pedestrian traffic north and south. Most of the compounds now had their window slides back so Cliff-Web could look into the outer courtyards.

  He stopped to admire the plant arrangement in one fence-port. Someone had taken a normal, triangular window opening and had inserted cleft-brackets between alternate courses of bricks, making an ascending staircase of cleft-brackets. A single heavy stem came up from the crust, divided into two branches that went up from the sides of the triangular notch, then spread its web over one cleft support after another. Being staggered, each web of the multi-webbed plant was able to see the dark sky and thrive. The top two clefts in the arrangement were not yet webbed, but he could see the little tendrils being trained to make the next step. Surrounding the growing tips were little boxes. He couldn't figure out what they were. He was impressed with the display. As he moved over the nameplate embedded in the walkway in front of the door, he took note of the name. D. M. Zero-Gauss, 2412 North-West 7th Street. Must be a professor at the Institute. He would have to arrange a visit to discuss gardening some turn.

  Cliff-Web didn't miss the proper intersection now that he was back again in familiar territory. He tacked north-west past his compound, still a number of diamonds to the north, made the sharp turn to the north-east onto his own street, and headed for home. His compound was one of the largest in the neighborhood. It took up a whole diamond to itself. After he had earned the huge incentive bonus for coming in way under the target cost for the design of the Space Fountain, he had enough stars to his credit that he bought out his neighbors, tore down the walls between the four plots, and expanded his old personal compound. One of his neighbor's compounds had been turned into a workroom, another into a potting yard and heatbed for new sprouts, and the third into quarters for his pets. He whispered a happy electronic whistle into the crust as he approached his compound. Happy noises echoed back.

  He was first greeted by Chilly, the genetically miniaturized hybrid Swift. Chilly had slithered up to the top of the compound fence, its tail wrapped around the street-sign post built into the corner, and greeted him with up and down bows of its head. The five sharp-pointed teeth would spring

  out to show a glowing white maw, then draw back in again as it swallowed. Chilly took a swipe at the cleft-wort plant Cliff-Web was carrying on his back, but Cliff-Web diverted the animal by sticking a manipulator down its gullet. Chilly's razor-sharp teeth, which could have amputated the end of his manipulator in one bite, just scraped the skin slightly and continued to mouth the manipulator as he pulled it free. Cliff-Web paused to let Chilly slide onto his topside and reached through the fence window to pat a few friendly bodies on the other side. He reached his doorway, pulled out his magnekey, unlocked the fence-door, and slid it into the wall. He was immediately surrounded by three Slinks, a half-dozen Slinklings, and Cold, Chilly's mate.

  After he said hello to all the Slinks, they took off on their various Slinkish activities, and he had time to look around for Rollo. The ball-like animal was cowering in a corner behind its large, slow-moving cousin, Slurge, a miniaturized Flow Slow. Slurge had gotten into the parasol bed. He would have to speak with his caretaker, Moving-Sand, about that.

  "Come here, Rollo," he called, holding out a waving tendril. "Come, Rollo. Come here."

  Slowly the ball rolled out from behind the Flow Slow, its multitude of eyes drawn by the waving tendril. Finally it moved close enough for the tendril to stroke it. It rumbled in pleasure, ducking its eyes out of the way of the moving tendril.

  "There, there, Rollo," he said. "No need to be afraid. The noisy Slinks are all gone now." The pet, now more relaxed, rolled around his periphery, enjoying caresses from one tendril after another. Just then Moving-Sand flowed into view around the corner.

  "I knew it must be you when I heard the commotion. Those Slinks must have vibrated the whole neighborhood by now." Suddenly he noticed the Flow Slow in the parasol bed.

  "Hey!" said Moving-Sand. "What do you mean letting Slurge get into the plants! How am I going to keep things in shape here if you don't help?"

  Forming a heavy, clublike manipulator, Moving-Sand flowed over to the heavy creature that was soaking up plant juices through its lower tread, and banged it hard on one side.

  "Move, you big hunk of flabby rock," Moving-Sand hollered through the crust.

  Shrinking as much from the shrill cry on its underside as

  from the heavy blows on its armored topside, the miniaturized Flow Slow moved off the patch of parasol flowers and back onto the lawn it had been trained to keep in check.

  Moving-Sand gave it a few more blows to keep it moving. "Your mail is in your study and your meal is in the oven," Moving-Sand said. "Get it yourself. I've still got a dozen more fountain-shoots to transplant."

  "How are the fountain plants doing?" asked Cliff-Web.

  "The ones that survived are doing fine," Moving-Sand reported. "They would do better if you had left them back at the East Pole where you found them, where the magnetic field goes straight up and down. I found if I started from seed, picked those with a tilted firing tube and lopsided catcher, and planted them pointing in the proper direction, I could get them to grow. Don't ever expect them to get too large, though. Nope. The catcher would get so lopsided they'd topple over. Got one planted right over there." Moving-Sand's eye-stubs twitched to a circular patch of parasol flowers, in the center of which was a tiny fountain of blue-white sparks.

  The fountain plant was a highly energetic form of plant life that worked at intense rates just to stay alive. Biologists at the Inner Eye Institute still argued over whether it should be classified as a plant or an animal, since it could only live in highly rich, neutron-poor soil like that found in the East and West Pole mountains.

  The central core of the fountain plant was a long thin tube. Its extensive root system pulled in the nutrients and burned them at a terrific rate. The blue-hot temperatures inside were transferred to seedlike particles that were shot up the tube into the sky in a shower of tiny blue-white specks. The specks cooled by radiation and were only dull red by the time they were gathered in by the cup-shaped collector at the base of the plant to be recycled again. Each gamma-ray photon emitted during the short-lived trajectory moved the nuclear equivalent of the photosynthesis cycle one more notch along on the way to make an energized molecule that could be used by the plant to grow.

  The fountain plants Cliff-Web had seen in the East Pole mountains often lived less than a turn. They would start from seed in a promising mound of dust, would sparkle for a few dothturns, getting visibly bigger as time went on, then as the nutrient wore out, the firing stalk would start to shoot out

  larger seed particles. In the last few methturns, the dying stalk would start to wobble while the ejection velocity increased, and the seeds would be shot over a region many centimeters on a side. If they landed on a promising mound of neutron-poor material, the process would start again. Otherwise the seeds would wait until ground tremors or animal motion moved them to the right place.

  Cliff-Web had hoped that by supplying adequate amounts of nutrients he could keep them running for many turns at a time. These plants were not designed for a long life, however, and seemed to give up after a half-dozen turns. They were a real delight when sparking, so he just enjoyed the sight for a few methturns, then went across the outer courtyard to his study room in the inner compound.

  As he entered the study, Lassie moved off its pad near the wall that backed up to the oven in the next room. The aging Slink moved erratically as it came to greet its master. The Slink was so old it had lost most of its long hair. Cliff-Web was bemused at how much the hairless Slink looked like a wrinkled cheela hatchling. The close resemblance of the two species was probably why the slinks were the favorite pets of the cheela. Practically every cheela kept one, and the latest trend was to name the animals after hairy, four-legged human pets such as Lassie, Trigger, Peter, Bossy, and Tabby.

  Cliff-Web went to his work station, and the silver
touch-and-taste screen activated as soon as his tread moved onto it. As a major engineering contractor, Cliff-Web had the latest in intelligent terminals. He read his computer net messages, dictated some replies to his roborespondor program, arranged for the final billing for the Time-Comm machine, then turned to his scroll delivery. He had been gone for a long time, and even though computer messages had replaced most personal message delivery services, there still were a large number of message scrolls in his scroll wall.

  Made of strong, crisscrossing plates built into the wall of his study, the scroll wall held those documents that were either too important or too bureaucratic to trust to the computer net message service. Suspecting what it was, Cliff-Web reached for the largest scroll and pulled it from its diamond-shaped hole in the wall. A glance at the outside showed he had guessed right. It was the formal request for plans for the design of the inertia drive engine to replace the failing rocket in the asteroid protecting the humans. Strengthening his manipulator bone to

  compensate for the weight of the multi-folded document, he lowered it carefully to the floor where the springy metal foils distorted into an ellipsoidal shape, just waiting for the flick of a tendril to flatten out at the desired sheet. Although there was a copy for him to look at in his message files, Cliff-Web still liked to stare at the crust when he was thinking, so he formed a tendril and, poking it in the central hole of the scroll, pushed down.

  The slight bit of pressure added to the strong gravitational field of Egg caused the metal foil to flatten out, revealing the top page. It was the Request For Plan for the giant inertia drive. Cliff-Web scanned the first page and didn't like what he saw.

  "May Bright set!" he swore. "It's been over two greats of turns since we promised the humans we would rescue them. I thought the Slow One Interaction Laboratory would have done more by now! This Request For Plan is only for a preliminary design effort. They should have done that study in-compound a great of turns ago."

  Having stared down at many such documents in his career, he inserted another tendril about two-thirds of the way through the stack. The "flow-plate" foils that the bureaucracy had inserted between the cover sheet and the meat of the document rolled up again into a tight ellipse. He let a few more pages roll up, back-rolled one page, then cursed again.

  "Suck a Flow Slow! They only budgeted 144 great-stars for this contract! They must be expecting us to add eggs to their pen."

  He let a few more pages roll up until he got to the listing of the work items required. He didn't curse this time, because he had seen the same thing happen too many times before.

  "... and the only difference between this 'preliminary' design effort and a 'full' design effort is that we don't have to submit firm price quotes as part of the final report." He moved his tendril and let the pages roll up quickly one after another as he scanned them. His eye-wave motion slowed and his tread 'trummed nervously as his brain-knot thought of an alternate approach to the problem.

  "That might work," he said to himself. He let the scroll roll up and put it back into the scroll wall as he moved onto his touch-and-taste communicator. He was about to set up a con-

  ference call to some of his chief engineers out in the field when a slow gonging sound penetrated the crust. His pendulum clock was marking the end of the turn with the slow tolling of the twelfth dothturn. He checked his nuclear chronometer—the ancient pendulum clock was still keeping perfect time despite the large crustquake a few turns ago. No use calling anyone now. Everyone on Egg was settling down to their main meal of the turn. He would get something to eat himself and make the call at dothturn one.

  Lassie followed him to the meal room as he left the study. Lassie may have been old, but she wasn't dumb; it would be her mealtime too. Moving-Sand had prepared a good turnfeast. A small pan with a loaf of ground eye-anchor and spices surrounded by a dozen small parasol root-nodes was warming in the oven. He lifted the lid of the cooler built into the meal-room floor and found a fresh salad of petal-leaves with hot sauce made from crushed North Pole stinger-fronds. He also extracted a cooled bag of singleberry wine. It was from the north slopes of the Exodus Volcano and was supposedly one of the best.

  He was busy thinking about the new project and normally would have just dumped the contents of the food plates into an eating pouch and gone back to his study, but this turn he decided to stay in the meal room and enjoy the excellent turnfeast. He put the plates on the temperature-controlled segments in the floor next to his eating pad and settled his large body down. He moved two of his eating pouches around until they were next to each other and in front of the two dishes. A manipulator held the bag of singleberry wine above both pouches and squirted streams into one or the other as the taste called for.

  The eye-anchor loaf was superb. There were still a few excellent flank slabs in the freezer that were even better, but he was glad that Moving-Sand had settled for the cheaper cut, since he would rather have the slabs when he had company. After all, it wasn't often that one had prime cheela meat for turnfeast.

  He was fortunate that he still had most of his bonus left when the carcass went on sale, otherwise Fountain-Petal would have been eaten by non-clanners. She had been killed in a terrible glide-car accident caused during a crustquake. All dead cheela carcasses belonged to their clan and were sold at auction to augment the clan tributes that were used to

  cover the expenses of raising the clan hatchlings. Since, on the average, there was only one cheela carcass per lifetime for every cheela, even the tough, stringy meat of an Ancient One was more expensive than the best animal meat. Only a rich person could afford to buy more than one eye-segment of the typical carcass. The meat of an accident victim in her prime was nearly priceless to the indolent wealthy who seemed to spring up in modern affluent societies. Cliff-Web brought honor back to his clan when he outbid a combine of feast pad operators for all twelve eye segments of Fountain-Petal. The clan tribute was lowered by a dozeth for a great after the sale.

  The bag of wine was dry, the platter of ground eye-anchor muscle was empty, and Cliff-Web was poking at the remains of his hot-cold salad when the crust vibrated with the complex melody of the half-dothturn chime. It was still too early to set up a conference call to his engineering team, so he let Lassie suck at his dishes, then moved slowly into the entertainment room. He didn't want entertainment, however; he wanted news—news about the humans and their predicament. He wanted to see what the average cheela on Egg knew (or cared) about the precarious predicament of the Slow Ones above them.

  He turned on the holovid and focused his eyes on the empty space between him and the silver screen covering the floor and two walls of the corner of the room. A scene appeared, floating in space. It was a new prophet, treading the ancient phrases of Pink-Eyes, the First Prophet, promising sexual ecstasy to all. Cliff-Web vibrated his eye-stubs in annoyance at this additional example of a degenerating modern society. Already there were some modern males who were renouncing their clans to avoid the tribute needed to raise the hatchlings. After all, they didn't generate eggs that needed hatching and raising. The next thing you knew, female cheela would be aborting their eggs because they got "tired of carrying them." They should be thankful they weren't human females who had to take care of their offspring after they were hatched.

  Cliff-Web had a modern holovid set with full computer accessories. The computer was not quite as intelligent as a robot, but nearly as good. It kept copies in its molecmem of all the programming that had passed through its 144 channels in the previous six turns and could retrieve older programs from its permanent memory.

  "What news programs have mentioned the humans?" he asked.

  "None in the past six turns," replied the computer. "There was a science news program on an educational channel 36 turns ago that mentioned that Sky-Teacher, the special purpose robot used for talking to the humans, had been deactivated for modernization and repairs since the human communicator Pierre Niven had left the communications console. Its place had
been taken by an automaton, but Sky-Teacher would be back before the humans missed it. The broadcast was sponsored by the Slow One Patrons."

  "The whole public and bureaucracy are Slow One Patrons," said Cliff-Web. "They treat the humans as if they were just another animal to protect. They say, 'The humans are so slow and so stupid, we have to take care of them.' Yet they aren't taking care of them! The humans are in danger, and we cheela are trying to save a few stars by delaying work and underestimating costs." He gave a muttered curse and moved off to his study. It was still two grethturns until dothturn one, but if he knew his chief engineers, they were akeady through with their turnfeasts and back at their consoles.

  He activated a conference link and gathered his engineers together to prepare a response to the Request For Plan. Web Engineering would probably lose money on the contract, but that didn't bother Cliff-Web. The combined clans of Egg might not care much about the humans, but Web Engineering did.

  06:51:19 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050

  Dr. Cesar Wong lifted his eyes from the porthole looking into Jean's protection tank and peered at the control board in the wall. The tell-tales indicated that three tanks were now occupied and that Jean, Abdul, and Seiko were temporarily safe from the rapidly varying tidal forces. Pierre was still in the library on the lower crew deck, but should be back soon to get into his tank. Cesar slowly made his way around the central column to his own tank, being careful not to lose control of his limbs to the tearing gravity forces. Amalita's tank was next to his, but she was not there and not in her tank. He looked around with concern. The main deck was empty.

  "Amalita!" he called. There was no reply, but he heard sounds of heavy breathing coming down the passageway from the Science Deck. He started up the passageway rungs to see what was going on.