Read Online Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward - Free Book Online

may be old, but I still see well and remember well. The last time the young ones came back from a hunt, they had traveled so far away they had found some petal plants that had never been picked. They brought home as many pods as they could carry. There were many delicious ripe ones and some that looked all right, but, when opened, were runny and the seeds inside were hard. Naturally, being an Aged One, I got the overripe pods. I ate all that I could—the taste is not bad once you get used to it—but the seeds inside were too hard to crack, so I rolled them outside.”
    “I remember that hunt,” Broken-Petal said. “We never did find a sign of a Flow Slow or even a Slink, but that patch of untouched petal plants made up for it all.”
    Dragon-Flower continued, “One turn I noticed that one of the seeds had rolled into a crack in my wall. Ithad a little petal growing from it. I watched it turn after turn as it became larger and larger. It grew into a petal plant! I was happy, I would have my own petal plant right near my door. I would dream of picking the pods whenever I wanted, without having to go far distances. Maybe I could even wait and have a ripe pod to eat all by myself, as I did in the old times when I was a young warrior and went on hunting expeditions.”
    Her t’trums became sadder as she went on, “But the stones in the wall kept the petal plant tilted to one side—and it fell over and died.”
    She added, “I watched the other seeds, but none of them grew into petal plants. They just sat there under the sky and did nothing. Then many turns ago, having nothing better to do, I cleaned out my stockade and pushed a pile of dirt, old pod skins and Flow Slow nodes out the door. The pile covered one of the seeds. Later I noticed it too had started to grow into a petal plant!
    “That’s it over there,” she said, rippling her eye-stubs.
    Broken-Petal’s eyes followed the ripples and saw a small plant growing up from the corner of a decomposing heap of trash. The plant was still small enough that he could look down on its concave topside, cooled to a dark red by the black sky above, while the lumpy underside of the many-pointed leaf structure reflected the healthy yellow glow of the crust.
    “It should be big soon,” Dragon-Flower said. “I can already see some pod swellings on the underside.”
    Several thoughts ran through Broken-Petal’s mind as he looked at the plant, with its promise of food. But there was one thought that made him feel in a funny way that he had never felt before. He felt the spark of inspiration.
    “Aged One! I have thought of a new thing! Let us take all the hard seeds we can find and put them under piles of trash that we take out of our stockades. Theseeds will grow into petal plants and we will have all the pods that we want!”
    Dragon-Flower paused a moment, reformed her manipulator, and grasped her broken shard of dragon crystal. “You are wrong, Broken-Petal. The seeds do not need trash. My first petal plant was not under trash, it was in a hole in my wall,” she said. “It is obvious that the petal plants just want to see the sky. As long as the seeds stay out on the crust where they can see the sky they are happy and do not grow. But if you take away the sky, they get unhappy and break out of their hard coats and grow until they can see the sky. That is what I am doing with this broken crystal. I use the sharp point to make a little hole in the crust. I put the seed in the hole and cover it up so that it cannot see the sky. The seed will get unhappy and start to push up until it can see the sky once more, only by then it will be a petal plant, instead of a seed.”
    Broken-Petal knew better than to get into an argument with an Aged One, even if he was Leader of the Clan. He watched as Dragon-Flower continued with the arduous task of poking the sharp end of the broken crystal into the hard crust. She soon tired and quit, but not before there were many holes around the