"Who is Qui-Qui?" Dented-Shield asked.

"Someone I knew long ago," he said.

21:04:17 GMT TUESDAY 21 JUNE 2050.

"Excellent choice of frequency, Jean," said Seiko. "Short ultraviolet. Too long for normal cheela vision and too short to cause s.e.xual side effects. It definitely affected the battle."

"What is happening?" Abdul asked.

"Happened. It was all over in a tenth of a second."

"But whowon?" Abdul shouted.

"The s.p.a.ce cheela did, of course." Seiko was monitoring the snippets of condensed news from the crust below.

"With a little help from their friends," said Abdul.

"They need a little more help," Seiko said. "Then: libraries were wiped out by the starquake, and they want us to send back some of the information on our library HoloMem crystals. They don't want all of it, but they will let our computer know which sections."

"I'll bring up the first crystal." Pierre, seated at the library console, reached up to the HoloMem rack and pulled out the first crystal. It was still labeledA toAME, but that human dictionary content had been replaced long ago with knowledge from the cheela. The crystal would transmit faster if it were in the communications console on the Main Deck, so Pierre pushed himself up the metal ladder as fast as he could go, knowing that no matter how fast a human moved, it was too slow for a cheela.

Escape

01:01:10 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE2050.

"That's the last of the HoloMem storage crystals, Pierre," Jean said as she turned away from the communications console. "Most of the material on that one was encrypted. I hope they have the crypto-keys." She swiveled back as the image of Sky-Speaker flashed on the screen.

"Keys obvious," said Sky-Speaker. "Goodbye."

"I liked the old Sky-Teacher better," said Pierre. "He talked so verbosely that it gave you time to think."

"We have plenty of time to think now," Jean said quietly as she shut down the communications console.

She reached under the counter and extracted the HoloMem crystal that had come from the library and replaced it with the regular console crystal that kept a log of everything that went through the console.

"Too much time," said Pierre. He followed Jean as she ottered her way down the pa.s.sageway to the crew deck. Jean went to the library console and restored the HoloMem to its place in the storage rack.

Pierre, driven by his command responsibility, returned to the galley and stared at the listing of the food supplies on the food storage lockers. There was food for eight more days at normal rations, sixteen days at half-rations, thirty-two days at quarter-rations ... only one month. It would take five more months after that before Oscar returned from its long elliptical orbit around Egg. His eyes didn't look at the bank of lockers with the blank label. Bouncing lightly in the low gravity, he pa.s.sed Jean at the library console and turned into the lounge. Doc was talking with Seiko and Abdul was looking pensively out of the viewport in the floor.

"HoloMems done?" asked Abdul, looking up.

"Yep," said Pierre, floating lightly to the cushion beside him.

"Anything left for us mere humans to do?" Abdul asked.

"The cheela don't need us anymore. They should be well on their way to recovery by now." A tiny white-hot speck appeared outside the viewport window and stopped.

"Smile," said Abdul. "You're about to have your picture taken by some tourists."

The speck released a shower of sparks. There was a flickering of light, then the sparks rejoined the glowing speck and it sped away.

"What are your plans for the rest of the mission, Pierre?" Seiko asked.

"I have no plans."

"You must!" Seiko sounded disturbed. "We must not waste our lives doing nothing until we die!"

Pierre raised his gaze from the viewport. The anguish in his face showed through the ragged, unkempt beard.

"I can't find a way to save us," he said, tears starting to well up in his eyes.

"Of course you can't," said Seiko. "Thereis no way to save us. It is simple mathematics. There are five people to feed and only eight days of food rations. We might be able to stretch that out using our body reserves, but we will be out of food in a month. We could even consider eating Amalita's body. At best, we could only get about 50 kilos of meat from it." She turned to Doc Wong.

"How many calories in meat, Doctor Wong?" she asked him.

"I can't believe this conversation!" said Abdul. "There is no way I'm going to be a cannibal! I'm leaving!"

He started to dive out the door to his private quarters, but Pierre held him back with a hand on one shoulder. He kept it there as he nodded at Doc to answer.

"Use the values for pork, Doc," Abdul blurted. "I hear from my cannibal friends that you can't tell the difference."

"Most meats have about 4000 calories per kilogram," said Dr. Cesar Wong. "The average person could live on a half-kilo of meat per day if the diet were supplemented with vitamins."

"So 50 kilos would only last us 20 days at full rations or 80 days at quarter rations," said Seiko. "We are still short by two months." She paused for a second. "As I said, there is no way to save us."

"I thought for sure that the next thing you were going to suggest was that we draw straws," said Abdul to Pierre.

"Abdul!" Pierre said severely.

"I have calculated that option," said Seiko. "There is a problem. If we wait for a person to die of hunger, then there is very little nourishment left on the body."

"There'll be none left on mine!" said Abdul.

"If, however, a person dies at the beginning of the period, then not only does his body become a source of significant nourishment, but he is not consuming food as time goes on. Using Doctor Wong's calorie estimate, while two carca.s.ses would allow quarter rations for four people over the same period, three could supply adequate nourishment for the remaining three for six months."

"Great!" cried Abdul. "Why stop at cannibalism when we can have ritualistic murder?"

"Although such an option is technically feasible," continued Seiko, "I personally have no intention of suggesting or partic.i.p.ating in any such option."

"What's the matter?" Abdul asked. "Afraid of drawing the short straw?"

"No. The long one," answered Seiko. "Neither you, nor I, nor any of the others, could return to our respective cultures if we had to survive using that solution. I, for one, am going to spend my last days completing my scientific studies, preparing my work for publication, and transmitting it back to St.

George. It will be the culmination of my career. When I am done, I am ready to go." She turned to Dr.

Wong again.

"We do have termination capsules on board, Doctor Wong?" she asked.

"Of course," Cesar replied.

Seiko then turned back to Pierre. "It will be difficult to stay rational as time goes on," she said matter-of-factly. "I would recommend that you consider consigning Amalita's body to s.p.a.ce now. That way we can avoid temptation later." She dove out the door and pulled herself up through the pa.s.sageway to the Science Deck.

Pierre looked around at the others.

"She's right," Jean said.

"I'll help take her out," said Cesar.

"If you don't mind, I'd rather be somewhere else," said Abdul. "I don't think I could take it."

"Sure," said Pierre. "Doc and I can handle it, and Jean can run the EVA controls for us."

Amalita had been placed in the storage locker in a fetal position, so she was relatively easy to move around on the deck, but it was a close fit through the pa.s.sageway holes. She was still in her s.p.a.cesuit, since Doctor Wong had not bothered to examine her further after he had removed her helmet and found the broken neck. Seiko closed down the star physics console and dimmed the star image table as they brought Amalita to the Science Deck.

"I'll hold Amalita while you get your suits on," she said softly, taking the frosty burden from them.

"The EVA lock is ready," said Jean. She got up from the EVA console, helped Pierre and Cesar with their suits, and took them through the checkout sheet, trying to be as careful and thorough as Amalita had always been.

"Magni-stiction boots . . ." said Jean. Pierre flicked a switch in his chest console that rearranged the pseudorandom pattern of the magnetic monopoles in the soles of his boots so they matched up with the hexagonal pattern of monopoles built into the inner plates and hull of Dragon Slayer. His boots clanged onto the deck, twisted outward at a 30-degree angle.

"Check," he said, then clumped into the EVA lock. He turned around and helped Cesar maneuver Amalita's body in through the door.

"Don't forget your safety lines," said Jean. "There are some weird gravity fields out there." Pierre attached a line to himself and another to the ring in Amalita's suit. Just then a dark head appeared in the pa.s.sageway hole in the deck.

"I had to say goodbye," said Abdul. He forced himself to look at Amalita's badly burned face. His left hand reached into the singed hair and held it lightly, while his right hand took two kisses from his lips and placed them softly on the frosted blisters of Amalita's closed eyelids. He turned and dove down the pa.s.sageway, leaving behind cl.u.s.ters of teardrops moving upward in the swirling air.

Jean cycled them through.

"The best place to release her is near the viewport window," Pierre said as he climbed out the outer lock. He care- fully attached his magni-stiction boots to the hull, then shifted his safety line to a tiedown. "She'll be pulled outward to the ring of compensator ma.s.ses and be gone in a flash of plasma. The last thing we want is to have her, or 'pieces' of her, in orbit."

They moved carefully over the hull to a point near the viewport. They were standing at the south pole of their little moon that circled around the neutron star five times a second. The hull of Dragon Slayer did not spin while it orbited, however, but stayed oriented with respect to the distant stars. To the two humans standing on the hull, the white-hot neutron star seemed to be rotating around the equator of the ship five times a second, while above and below them whirled a ring of six red ma.s.ses that pa.s.sed over the two poles of the spherical ship while it rotated to always be tangent to the direction to the star. In this configuration, the gravity tides from the ring of ma.s.ses cancelled the dangerous gravity tides from the star and allowed the humans to survive.

"I'll give her a slight push while you pay out the safety line," Pierre said.

He let go of Amalita's body, and the uncompensated tides started to pull her outwards. The further she got away from the ship and the closer she got to the ma.s.sive bodies in the ring, the stronger the forces became. A sprinkling of white-hot sparks gathered off in the distance to observe.

"She is getting heavy," said Cesar.

"It looks stable," said Pierre. "Let her go."

The last of the safety rope whipped through the tiedown and followed Amalita as she accelerated rapidly toward the ring 200 meters away. Just before she reached the ring her body was momentarily surrounded by a swirling cloud of white-hot specks. There was a flash, and she was gone.

When Pierre and Cesar came inside, Jean and Seiko helped them out of their suits.

"Unless somebody is going to use the console library, I think I'll get back to working on my book," said Pierre.

"Which one?" Jean asked.

"The popular version that covers everything that happened on the trip. I was going to call itDragon's Egg, but the editors at Ballantine Interplanetary said that they already had a t.i.tle of that name in their inventory. Besides, they wanted something more personal, so they chose,My Visit With Our Nucleonic Friends.I think it's a dumb t.i.tle, but they are the ones buying the book."

"I don't think money is a consideration anymore," Seiko reminded him.

"Hmm." Pierre glanced down at the star image table and noticed that there were a number of new features on the surface of the neutron star.

"There have been some changes in the last hour," he said to Seiko.

"Yes," she replied. "While you and Doctor Wong were outside, the cheela have reestablished a highly technological civilization on the ground and have resumed extensive s.p.a.ce travel activities. They have rapidly caught up to where they were at the time of the starquake and are continuing on at a rapid pace."

"I'd better get busy writing if I am going to stay up with them." Pierre reached down and pulled himself through the pa.s.sageway hole in the deck. He stopped when he came to the main deck. Abdul was there.

He had opened the metal shield on one of the equatorial viewports and was looking out through the tinted gla.s.s.

"Hey! Look at the sightseers," Abdul hollered across the deck. "It's like being one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. Why don't you come over and pretend to be Teddy Roosevelt? You've got the beard for it." As Pierre approached the window, the number of specks outside increased dramatically.

01:30:04 GMT WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE2050.

Busy-Thoughts moved around the creche-cla.s.sroom critiquing the work of the students. Although most of the youngling's education was done through holovid connections to the "Master Teacher" program in the central computer, there were still some topics that were best handled by live teachers in central cla.s.srooms. Plasma art was one of them, especially since the generators were ma.s.sive and expensive.

"Excellent structure, Lovely-Eyes," said Busy-Thoughts. "But the colors are a little weak for such a bold form. Perhaps you should try more current in the ion generators."

The student adjusted the controls under his tread and increased the intensity of the ion beams shooting into the shaped magnetic fields. The ions spiraled along the magnetic field lines, giving off a glow of synchrotron radiation. With the increased current, the interior of the magnetic sculpture glowed brighter. Lovely-Eyes then increased the strength of one of the magnetic field generators in the base and adjusted some transparent superconductor guides attached to the top. The sculpture was now a floating form of brightly glowing colors. The shape was bi-symmetric. There was an intense inner violet structure that was basically spherical, but had large rough holes penetrating it. Two circles were set side-by-side in the violet sphere, with a triangle and a rectangle below them. Covering the violet structure was a lumpy blanket of softer plasma in blue-white with patches of yellow-white.

"It looks strangely familiar," said Busy-Thoughts.

"It is a portrait of one of the humans," said Lovely-Eyes. "This one is Pierre Carnot Niven, the Commander of the Expedition."

"If you say so. The Slow Ones all look the same to me."

"Not once you know them better," said Lovely-Eyes. "Pierre has hairs on the bottom side of his head-lump as well as the top side." Lovely-Eyes went on eagerly, "I've been learning all about the humans in my holovid courses. The Master Teacher program says I do well in that subject and has allowed me to take a special advanced program in humanology."

"That's very nice, Lovely-Eyes, but this is an abstract art cla.s.s. As strange as humans look, they don't qualify as abstract art. In the next cla.s.s I want you to concentrate on doing your a.s.signment."