Starquake.pdf

circling the torus at high speed and all of it shot out of the hole. If it had not been operating, we would
have only lost one loop's worth. We could have patched the leak and operated the catapult on the rest."
"Well, there are three more catapults here at the West Pole," said Qui-Qui. "Let's go look at them."
"I hope their power plants are working," Coulomb-Force said. "I don't think we could count on the
interconnect power conduits to be unbroken over those long distances."
They didn't even bother to stop at the next gravity catapult. A major break in the crust had torn the large
torus into two half-circles. Two turns later Newton-Einstein reported up to the West Pole Space Station.
"None of the gravity catapults are operational at the West Pole. We will have to try the East Pole."
It was Qui-Qui who reported in from the East Pole. Coulomb-Force and Newton-Einstein were too
discouraged.
"As we suspected, the machines here were even more damaged. Not even one power well remained
pressurized. We will just have to learn to make monopole stabilized black-hole dust and recharge the
gravity catapult at the West Pole after we fix the leak. It will take us a few greats, since you are going to
have to dictate to us in detail how to go about it; but we'll keep working at it."
The three waited patiently for the reply. It was from Cliff-Web, now back at East Pole Space Station.
"I'm afraid that it is going to take a little longer than a few greats. No one uses monopole stabilized
black-hole dust anymore. It hasn't been made for over two dozen generations. We have no information
on it up here, since it is an obsolete material. With the library records erased down there, we are going
to have to get what information we can from the humans and that will take many minutes, perhaps as
much as an hour. Even that information will only be general knowledge. I and the other engineers up here
will have to expand that into detailed instructions of how to build the machines to produce and stabilize
the black-hole dust, try them out up here on prototypes, then dictate the information down to you. All
that will take considerable time."
Ignoring the dejected looks of Coulomb-Force and Newton-Einstein, Qui-Qui tried to put a cheerful trill
in her tread as she replied. "You had better get busy talking to the humans, then. It always takes them
forever to doanything. And while you are at it, ask them to send you a capsule history of that they called
the 'Dark Ages.' By knowing how their learned people maintained islands of knowledge while
surrounded by ignorance and barbarians, I may learn things that will help me cope with the situation here.
Also, does anyone up there know any magic tricks?"
They returned to the maze at Bright's Heaven. Slowly the information trickled from the HoloMem
crystals in the human console to the East Pole Space Station, where it was studied, checked out, and
sent on down to the surface below. By the time Coulomb-Force died, he had managed to construct a
few more free-space communication sets. Young scribes, chosen for the honor because of their neat
script, copied the information from space, and the manuals and textbooks were passed on to others who
attempted to build and operate the machines described with their inadequate tools and resources. There
were long periods when no information was being dictated, so many of the scrolls were decorated by the
bored scribes with elaborate fluorescent illustrations in the spaces along the edges and within the technical
diagrams.
Qui-Qui spent most of her time in the flyer, gathering food and recruits. She was known to the clans
around as the glowing God of Youth and Knowledge, the Mother of Egg. She could fly through the sky
and talk to the stars. She was forever beautiful and never died.