Robert L. Forward - Starquake

STARQUAKE

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 Blass, 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

Contents

Prelude

Leaving

Danger

Rescue

Quiet

Quake!

Marooned

Sacrifice

Barbarian

Landing

Emperor

Escape

Technical Appendix

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 space 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 spacecraft 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 orbit 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 spacecraft, 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 space. 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 orbit 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 worship the new Gods.

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 Gods 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 ship'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 Shakhashiri 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

passed. 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 surpassed 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 ship'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 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 JUNE2050

Multi-scientist Seiko Kauffmann Takahashi 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 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 they 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, 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 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," 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.

"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 segment 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 neutrons 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 the 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 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 and 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, 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 where 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 inside 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 six 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 her 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 seemed 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'mjust trying to help," Amalita replied sweetly.

"I'll bet. I know you oversexed Harvard broads. 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.

Robert L. Forward - Starquake

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