Part 1 (1/2)
STARQUAKE.
Robert L Forward.
Acknowledgments.
My thanks to my many friends who contributed ideas and helped me in several technical areas. In addition to those who helped in making the neutron star world ofDragon's Egg more believable, I want to thank Paul Bla.s.s, Rod Hyde, Keith Lofstrom, David Lynch, Lester del Rey, and Mark Zimmer-mann for additional help on this sequel.
My special thanks to Eve for generating new names for the many generations of cheela that lived, fought, and died on the following pages and to Martha for putting up with a husband constantly off in a brown study
Prelude
Burrowing through the dark void between the Sun and its stellar neighbors, a tiny visitor came to the Solar System-a rapidly spinning, white-hot, ultra-dense neutron star. A super-strong magnetic field impaled the star from east to west. Reaching out from the rotating star, the two whirling arms of magnetic force whipped at the random atoms floating in s.p.a.ce until they were moving at nearly the speed of light.
The shocked atoms gave off a pulsating beam of powerful radio waves. Thus, even though the tiny neutron star was too small to be seen in the sky by the naked eye, it had been detected by radio telescopes on Earth long before it arrived at the Solar System.
The neutron star was given the name ”Dragon's Egg.” When it was first detected, its position in the sky was at the end of the constellation Draco, as if the dragon had left an egg behind in its nest.
The discovery of magnetic monopoles had revolutionized fusion-rocket technology, so it wasn't long before the first ”interstellar” expedition reached the star, only some 2120 AU from Earth. Riding in the interstellar s.p.a.cecraft St. George, the exploration crew approached the visitor carefully, for a neutron star can be dangerous if approached too closely without taking proper precautions.
Although Dragon's Egg was only 20 kilometers in diameter, the surface gravity was 67 billion times Earth gravity, the 8200 K temperature was hotter than the Sun, and the trillion-gauss magnetic field threading through the star at the ”East” and ”West” magnetic ”Poles” was so strong it could elongate a normally round atomic nucleus into a cigar shape. Since Dragon's Egg was spinning at slightly more than five revolutions per second, the rapidly moving magnetic fields emanating from the East and West Poles would cook any humans who approached the star too closely without protection.
To counteract the gravity and the rotating magnetic fields, the scientists on St. George placed Dragon Slayer, their small science capsule, in a 406 kilometer synchronous...o...b..t about the star, where the extreme gravity was canceled by the centrifugal force. Here also, Dragon Slayer would be moving along with the magnetic field and at 406 kilometers distance the magnetic field was no longer dangerous, just a nuisance.
Although the orbital motion of Dragon Slayer canceled the gravity at the center of the s.p.a.cecraft, the match was not perfect everywhere. The residual gravity tides of 200 gravities per meter were still dangerous, but the exploration scientists devised a solution for that problem. They looped a superconducting cable a million kilometers long around the neutron star. The cable was used to extract electrical energy from the star's rotating magnetic field. The electrical currents in the cable powered a robotic factory that produced magnetic monopoles. The monopoles were injected into eight of the many asteroids that had been collected by the neutron star during its journey through s.p.a.ce. There were two large asteroids and six small ones.
The monopoles from the factory condensed the asteroids until they were almost the density of the neutron star itself. Using the gravity interactions between the two larger asteroids, Otis and Oscar, the humans and their computers played a game of celestial billiards that placed the six smaller asteroids in a circular formation in synchronous...o...b..t over the East Pole of the star. Then, using Otis as a gravitational elevator, Dragon Slayer and its crew was hauled down to join them.
Once in orbit, the crew began to map Dragon's Egg. They expected to learn many interesting scientific facts about this dense visitor to their Solar System, but they also found something they had never expected.
Life!
Life on the surface of a neutron star!
The alien creatures, the ”cheela,” were dense-as dense as the crust that covered the white-hot star. The tiny bodies of the cheela, a little larger than sesame seeds, weighed as much as a human, since they were made of degenerate nucleonic material. The life processes of the cheela used interactions between the nuclear particles in the bare nuclei that make up the cheela, while life on Earth uses electronic interactions between the electron clouds of the atoms that make up humans. Because nuclear reactions take place a million times faster than electronic reactions, the cheela thought, talked, lived, and died a million times faster than the humans in orbit above them.
When Dragon Slayer first took up its position over the East Pole, the cheela were little more than savages and were awed by the laser mapping beams sent down from the middle of the strange star formation floating motionless in their sky. They raised a huge mound temple to wors.h.i.+p the new G.o.ds.
The humans saw the temple and started sending simple picture messages, one pulse per second. Within less than a day the cheela had developed their technology to the point that they were able to send their first crude, handmade signals to the G.o.ds above them, at 250,000 pulses per second. The humans, finally realizing the immense time difference, worked as rapidly as they could, but nearly a generation went by on the surface of the neutron star before the human laser pulses answered the crude flare signals sent by the cheela below. The human crew used the slower science instruments such as the laser radar mapper for human-to-cheela communication, while the computer dumped the contents of the s.h.i.+p's library directly from the Holographic Memory storage cubes through a high-speed laser communicator to the surface below.
Chief Scientist Pierre Carnot Niven watched as Chief Engineer Amalita Shakhas.h.i.+ri Drake inserted the first of the 25 library HoloMem cubes,A to AME, into the communications console.
”A complete education, from Astronomy to Zoology,” Pierre mused. ”Alphabetical order may not be the best way to teach someone, but in this case it's the fastest.”
For half a day the humans were the teachers for the cheela. In that 12 hours, 60 cheela generations pa.s.sed. These were prosperous generations for the cheela, with the manna of knowledge pouring from the heavens keeping the previously warring clans on the star busy and at peace. After the first half day, the cheela had surpa.s.sed the human race in technological development and it was now time for the humans to become the students. Despite their tired bodies and their bewilderment over the rapidity of events in the past day, the humans continued to work diligently at their various science instruments and consoles, while one after another, the HoloMem crystals in their s.h.i.+p's library were rewritten with new knowledge from the cheela.
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 m.u.f.fled 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 JUNE2050.
Multi-scientist Seiko Kauffmann Takahas.h.i.+ was on the Science Deck working with the star image telescope. The telescope looked at the neutron star with a 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 frosted surface of the star image table in the middle of the top deck. Seiko looked down at the image while the computer looked up at the same image 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 wors.h.i.+p of their pantheon of G.o.ds: the G.o.d-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 s.p.a.cecraft at the center of the ring of asteroids).
After the humans had established contact and convinced the cheela that they were not G.o.ds, 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, a long ellipsoidal body, with the long direction aligned along the local direction of the magnetic field, 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 wors.h.i.+p?”
”Absolutely not.” Seiko p.r.o.nounced her verdict in the authoritative Teutonic tone she had learned from her father. ”They are too intelligent for that. Since they now have s.p.a.ce 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,” Seikohumphed 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.