Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  Soikenn all but spat on him. “Is that what we are to you? Slaves? Breeding animals?” She turned to face the rest of the crew. “Well, you’ve all guessed it I’m sure. Kekox just tried to force Priekahm. He seems to think that Shulathian females should all be at his service all the time.”

  Kekox seemed about to reply, but Poiparesis grabbed him by the elbow and said, “You’d do better not to say anything right now.” There was something about his tone—not angry, not challenging, but completely firm—that seemed to take all the fight out of Kekox, and he left with Poiparesis. They were in Poiparesis’s chamber for a tenth of a day; occasionally we could hear Kekox’s raised, angry voice coming from there, but mostly we heard the endless reasonable drone of Poiparesis, sounding the way he always did when he was trying to find a way to peace.

  But that was later. While the rest of us were still trying to figure out what was happening, Soikenn dragged Priekahm off to her chamber, and the captain took Mejox up to the cockpit.

  Priekahm said afterwards that Soikenn gave her an endless lecture of the familiar—about how she had brought this attack on herself by her carrying on with Mejox, that if she couldn’t see that Palathian males were just animals from Mejox’s behavior, surely this would convince her. She used a lot of old Shulathian standard phrases like “living up to our freedom” and “working through an unjust world to a better one” and the old “maybe in a hundred years” phrase.

  After a while she seemed to run out of energy, and Priekahm said, “I’m ready to live free now. And I can. There are just four of you in my way. That’s all. Why don’t you get out of it and let me live the way you say you believe in?”

  Soikenn’s voice was flat and bitter. “You got to where you are today because you stood on the shoulders of generations past—Shulathians who were conquered, robbed, enslaved, and fought their way to equality. You owe it to your race—”

  “And do you suppose Kekox owes it to his race to keep me in my place?”

  Soikenn didn’t speak for a long time, then finally said, “Look. Don’t take this wrong. We know people are equal. But like and equal are not the same thing. Palathians aren’t like us. And one way they aren’t is that when it comes to sex they are animals, and mean animals at that. What you just saw is typical Palathian male behavior—”

  “Is that how Kekox took you?” Priekahm asked. Soikenn swung a hard slap at her, but Priekahm caught the blow before it landed and forced the older female’s arm back to her side. “No more of that, either. You’d better get used to the idea that I’m grown up now. If you had so little respect for him, if you always thought he was a dangerous animal, why did you have sex with Kekox for so many years?”

  Soikenn was silent; Priekahm said later that it was at that moment that she knew that she had won, but not what she had won. Nevertheless she pressed her advantage. “Now understand me. By the time we return to Nisu—if we ever do—everything may have changed anyway. You won’t be there to see it. And we’ll be old. And we are not going to live our whole lives to fit the judgment of people who will see us when our lives are almost over. And especially we are not going to drag your old stupid ideas about how the races should relate into our lives!”

  “I’m sorry I tried to slap you,” Soikenn said.

  Priekahm said that even though she knew Soikenn hadn’t really listened to a word, she choked down her rage and said, “I don’t like the way this makes me feel, Soikenn, but I can’t let you or the other adults treat us this way anymore. You wanted to make new, better people. Well, that’s what I am. That’s what my friends are. Kekox’s response is more honest—at least he just hates us and tries to hurt us, which means he sees us. But we don’t exist to be what you want us to be. We just exist. We are what we are. You worked hard to make us without prejudices—now you’ll just have to live with people who won’t put up with your prejudices. Is that clear?”

  Soikenn gestured assent. It looked like she might cry, so Priekahm left then. When she was telling us about it later, Otuz asked what Soikenn was crying about, and Priekahm just made a noncommittal gesture and said, “Probably everything. People do cry, you know, when the whole world turns upside down. Even when it needs to be turned upside down.”

  I have no idea what Poiparesis said to Kekox in his chamber while all this was going on. Otuz and I just did our work in the lab and avoided conversation of any kind. Mejox spent the time doing piloting drills with Captain Osepok in the cockpit; he said, “She kept running me through all the standard drills the ship’s computer had, trying to get my deviation from perfect down to zero, but when I would miss, she’d just say ‘better next time’ or ‘that’s all right, it’s the stumble before the big leap’ or things like that.”

  Toward the end of the practice, with the last meal of the day drawing near, Mejox said, Osepok had said, “A lot of times when you just don’t want to think about something, when there is nothing you can do and the waiting is just unbearable, it helps to demand a lot from yourself, to do or learn more than you thought you could, and just let your concentration get you through the bad time. It’s how I’ve lived for years.” Then—and his voice had a tone of awe in it—she had ripped off a perfect simulated landing, right down to a touchdown with zero force.

  “And she said,” Mejox added, “‘See what enough unhappiness can do for you—I hope you never have to develop this much skill.’ You know, I think she has probably been practicing toward perfection ever since Kekox started with Soikenn, all those years ago. Captain Osepok is probably the only person in the universe who can do perfect landings. …”

  We had been sitting in Mejox’s chamber—a tiny space, but at least we could close the door—and comparing notes, trying to figure out what we would do now. But now the bell sounded for the last meal of the day, and we all looked at each other uneasily.

  Someone tapped on the door. Otuz opened it—it was Poiparesis. Without being asked, he stepped inside and closed the door. “I think we’ve had the last incident of that kind,” he said without preliminaries. “Of course things are still very tense. And I know that you were entirely in the right and Kekox was entirely in the wrong, Priekahm, but I don’t think you’ll get an apology from him immediately. I thought you should all know that all the adults are planning to behave themselves at dinner.”

  “We’re not going to cause an uproar,” I said. “As long as it’s understood that Kekox was the cause of all the trouble.”

  “Understood by me, and I think by the captain, anyway,” Poiparesis said. “Maybe even by Kekox, and I’m working on that.” We noticed he didn’t mention Soikenn, but no one brought it up. “And everyone has agreed that we’ll keep a lid on it. I was hoping you would be willing to do the same.”

  “Zahmekoses already said so,” Mejox said.

  Poiparesis gestured agreement. “So he did. All right, then. Thank you.”

  At evening meal all the adults were very subdued, and all of us were very nervous, but speaking.

  That evening, I was studying some distant-star gravimetrics in the smaller computer lab when Kekox came in. He sat down, looked at me, and said, “Well.”

  “Hello,” I said. I kept working. If he had anything to say, I should probably let him say it, but I wasn’t expecting anything worth hearing.

  He sat a long moment, then said, “I just want to ask you something. Poiparesis has assured me that it’s something I have no business asking and that you will take offense, but it is something I badly want to know.” His voice was too quiet and reasonable—he must have been extremely upset. The computer lab was dead still. The only motion was the pale blue curves on the screen, marking the rise and fall of distant star gravity as the ship traversed the space between the stars.

  Every curve was as smooth as theory predicted it should be. All the animations showed smooth rise and fall. I let the moments click away, watched the distant stars roll over and over through the pale blue curtain of braking photons, and listened to Kekox shifting in his seat. Pr
obably I had some hope he wouldn’t talk at all.

  It was so long before he spoke that I almost jumped when he did. “I just want to know … This, uh, involvement between you and Otuz. Is it a serious one? I mean, since Priekahm and Mejox are so protective about her … being exclusive … Poiparesis insists on calling it her ‘chastity’ … well, is your reason for all this you have been doing with Otuz, perhaps, that you don’t have a normal sexual outlet with your own kind? Or are you perhaps being deliberately offensive, either to me or to Mejox? Or is it some kind of … well, some kind of perverse attraction for … well, I just wanted to know why.”

  I recorded a graph I thought they would want to see back on Nisu. “Actually I’d say it’s more that we just like each other. We always have. We’re interested in the same things, we do the same work, we were close for more than a decade before puberty … you could hardly expect it to be otherwise, could you? Of course, all of us younger generation are friends, but it’s not the same. Otuz and I are more like each other than either of them. So … well, it just seems very natural to me. I’m much more attracted to Otuz than I ever could be to Priekahm, and—”

  “She feels the same way about you,” Kekox said, his voice flat and dull. “I already talked to her.” He groaned and rubbed his crisp, bushy top crest, now beginning to go gray. “I understand everything I guess except why sex has to get into it.”

  “Well, you’ve had sex, or tried to, with every female on board except Otuz. You tell me why it has to get into it.”

  From the way his back hair bristled I thought I was about to get a beating, but then he said, softly, “I wish I knew. My father used to say I must have Shulathian blood from somewhere. Seems like it’s been all my life that it was the most important thing there was, that it’s what I thought about whenever I wasn’t on a mission. Especially what I thought about tended to be the next one, who I was going to copulate with next … it’s hard to explain. We’ve been on this voyage for so long now, twenty years, and … I’d literally kill for a chance at a new female. I never thought that could be an issue, but it is. I guess I can’t fault you or Mejox for being interested in sex, either … but still. When I was growing up, what you kids do in front of everyone was the kind of dirty joke that could get you into a fight. It’s just hard for me to …” He let the sentence trail off and sat, squirming uncomfortably, for a long time before he said, “Well, I guess I look like an idiot?”

  “Well, not an idiot, maybe, but you know, none of what you’re saying is our problem. We’re on the ship. On the ship everyone is equal. So why shouldn’t we love who we love?”

  Kekox sighed. “The strange thing is that there was a time when I would have agreed completely. I used to use my opinions to start brawls with guys I wanted to fight. But now I find … I’m not as big as my principles. Funny.” He looked over my shoulder at the screen. “Is that anything interesting?”

  I took his invitation. “Oh, it looks like a few more stars may have dark companions than we thought,” I said. “And most stars have a lot more planets than we’d thought. If anyone back home was the least bit concerned with finding habitable worlds anymore, we would have a list of at least three hundred possibles for them—all the places with enough mass in their habitable zones. A few fast probes could settle the question and then we could scatter our people to a thousand worlds, instead of betting everything on the poor old Imperial Hope. If they ever finish her, that is.” I pointed to the comparison graphs. “See? We measure the microgravity at every fourth eightday—we’ve been doing that since we started—and then we do a mathematical decomposition to pinpoint the sources. Way down in the fine grain of the noise, we find things that have moved and resolve those into masses and positions.

  “Gravity is a lot weaker signal than light is, but they don’t attenuate or block nearly as easily, so we can find the right places farther away. The biggest thing we needed to do this kind of astronomy is to be able to take measurements at points far enough apart—and we’ve certainly had the chance to do that across these past twenty years.”

  Kekox asked me to show him how to do the basic solutions, and he and I worked together silently for the sixteenth of a day until bed. After that we were almost friends again, speaking to each other anyway, but now and then I would see him staring at me and Otuz and I would know it could never be entirely over. And though he didn’t try anything again, Priekahm was afraid of him till the day he died.

  And so for three more years we decelerated into the Kousapex System. Kekox was civil but distant, Soikenn alternated between sullen silence and false heartiness, and except for her turns in the cockpit, the captain tended to stay in her chamber, listening to music, watching performances, and reading old books. The only adult that all of the younger generation were able to talk to was Poiparesis, and that was strange because he was the only one who spoke to us openly about the way we had paired off. He accepted that Mejox was being reasonably decent to Priekahm and did not seem likely to drop her abruptly, as Soikenn feared. He even conceded that the way we had arranged things was a better fit to our personalities.

  But, he would add, always, love and marriage were two different things, both difficult enough, and he didn’t see why we had to make things so much harder by rebelling against the old ways. And now and then when Mejox and Priekahm would sit with arms draped around each other near him, or when Otuz and I might brush hands or whisper to each other, we would catch a glimpse of Poiparesis wincing.

  Yet despite all that, we liked and trusted him, and we were all around Poiparesis a great deal for another reason: he was doing the most interesting work on the ship. We had many probes down on Setepos now, and a sizable number of orbiters, and Poiparesis was trying to process all the pictures and data into a single decision: where we would land and build our base.

  It mattered a great deal: we children would live there for five years (or five and a half years of Setepos—we would have to get used to a new calendar). And the adults would live out their lives and finally die there, while doing the long-term research needed for Imperial Hope’s millions of settlers.

  “Always assuming they ever build Imperial Hope,” Poiparesis said. Two days before we had gotten a news update: the design phase was not only to be stretched out, but to be stretched out seventeen rather than eleven additional years. “Sometimes I think that all the evolutionary advantages of being able to think about the future are canceled out by the ability to figure out how far away the future is. We don’t seem to be able to balance things out between understanding that we still have time to act, and that the future is always going to get here.”

  “You’re being philosophic today,” Priekahm teased. “It’s what you get for watching the news.”

  “It would make a philosopher out of you,” Otuz said, “or a suicide, depending on how seriously you took it. Didn’t you check it, Priekahm? Seventeen-year stretch-out now. At least they’re still letting us have the new power station on schedule, and the mirror is on its way. Hey, look at these pictures! Look at the size of those animals!”

  We all bent around what Otuz had pulled up on the screen; she worked image enhancement on it and added a measuring stick.

  “They’re at least twice a body-length high at the shoulder,” Mejox breathed. “And look at those snouts—that is their nose, isn’t it?”

  “I’d say so, but for all I know their spine folds around and that’s their tail,” Poiparesis said. “Can’t tell till we get there and cut one up. Or unless we move one of the moving-picture probes over to the eastern Hook, which is where we found this one—and we’ve pretty well ruled it out. Big predators, not enough water, no good river transport …”

  “Oh, of course, I know,” Otuz said, “but aren’t they wonderful?”

  “It’s an amazing planet, based on a sample of two,” Poiparesis agreed.

  “You’re so lucky, Poiparesis,” Mejox said. “There will be time for you to explore a lot more—”

  “If it were up t
o me,” he said quietly, “we’d all stay. I think there’s something crazy about sending you back.”

  The room was perfectly still. We had never heard any adult voice a thought like that, not even privately to each other when they thought we weren’t listening.

  He sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t have said that. Everyone seems to have strong opinions about what opinions I should have. But the only reason for you all to go back is to be living examples, symbols, people they can trot out to make the case for the Migration Project. We all know Mejox and Otuz are pretty much out of the running for Emperor now; the empress has had four children we know about, and I would bet that somewhere out there in space behind us there’re radio messages announcing two more. As celebrities you’d have a great deal of influence, but I’m sure that if you stayed here, there would be decades more of exploration and setup completed, and the colonists are going to need that data so much … it seems so insane to spend all the time, money, so much of your lives to get you here, and then to send you back so you can shake hands and lead parades.” He looked around. “Am I depressing all of you?”

  “I’m depressed enough as it is,” Mejox said. “It’s hard for me to remember that when I was little, I used to think the parades and ceremonies and so forth were the greatest things in life. I guess because I thought they were all for me, and I thought that they had something to do with being powerful and getting my way. Nowadays … well, even before I left I guess I had figured out that the one they hold the parade for might as well be a prisoner. All he can do is walk where he’s supposed to.”

  I always liked to tease Mejox when he went into self-pity, so I said, “Of course, scientifically speaking, we’ll want to test that by holding parades for some prisoners, and then maybe imprisoning some celebrities—”

  Mejox made a sour face. “All right, I’m exaggerating. I’m still not happy about—”

  Priekahm cried out as if something had bitten her.