Starquake.pdf

and behaves much like a young cheela hatchling. On Earth, it would be as if the most popular pets were
monkeys rather than cats or dogs.
Cheela bodies are very wide compared to their height so they take up a lot of area. To accommodate
these wide bodies without the aid of basements or multiple stories, the home and workplace compounds
also take up a lot of area, so the walls go right out to the street as they do in old towns on Earth.
An architect's version of a typical cheela street in the town of Swift's Climb is shown in Figure 2. The
East Pole mountains can be seen in the distance, while to the right rise the South Side cliffs marking the
South Side fault line. The main street is east-west, with compounds in each side abutting the slidewalks.
Near the East Pole, the magnetic field comes up out of the ground so all directions are hard-going, and
the cross streets are at right angles to each other. In cities far from the poles, such as the capital, Bright's
Heaven, the "cross" streets are at an angle of thirty to sixty degrees to the easygoing east-west streets.
When moving along these cross streets the cheela brace their bodies against the slippery slidewalls and
push their way at an angle to the prevailing magnetic field to get to the next east-west street where the
rippling is easier.
The cheela learned about traffic problems from the humans long before they had cities big enough to
have traffic problems. The street, with its double yellow line down the middle, is ready for the turnfeast
glide-car rush.
Each compound usually takes up a separate block to itself. (In Bright's Heaven, the "blocks" are
diamond- or triangle-shaped.) The street name markers are built up from the corners of the compound
walls, while the entrances to the compounds are identified with street numbers in the wall and the name of
the owner in the slidewalk plate. The home compound on the left is a modern version with half-circle
window cutouts and an inner walled patio area with a tri-poster tree. The home compound on the right is
an older version with simple square windows and no inner patio.
PLANT LIFEON EGG
The plants on Egg make food by extracting energy from the hot crust of Egg with their root system and
rejecting their waste heat to the cold temperature of the sky. One major form