Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  “The thing is, the Seteposians have helped me see that the difference between people and animals is that animals always live up to their potentials and people never do. The Seteposians had a lot of science and math to learn and technology to invent, but still … well, why wasn’t Sixth Dynasty Kratareni waiting here already? Surely it’s not too much to expect intelligent beings to build a space that’s pleasant to live in and to at least move their own shit and garbage away from themselves?”

  I thought about that and gestured agreement. “So you think—?”

  “I think we may be doing them a favor after all, in the long run. In two years the survivors of this village will be cleaner and healthier than any of their species ever has been before. And they’ll be the nobility of the biggest and richest empire their planet has ever seen. In twenty years Setepos will have a dozen real cities, with decent roads connecting them, and by the time Imperial Hope gets here, this world will be rich, peaceful, and civilized. Every Nisuan who arrives here will step onto a beautiful estate, ready and running for him or her.

  “And I’ll admit it, in a few thousand years, probably, Seteposians and Nisuans will sit at the same table, share the same language, and rule a hundred more species that need civilizing. Because when I look at this squalid little town and its smelly people, and think about what they could be like with some thought and work on their part … well, I see that Poiparesis was right. We can’t just keep civilization to ourselves. We need to lift these people up. And it only takes a look—or a sniff!—to tell us they aren’t going to ask to improve, or do it willingly. So for the next few generations, we supply brains, discipline, and know-how; they supply blood and sweat; and we all advance together.”

  Otuz sighed. “Everything you say makes perfect sense. It’s just very hard not to feel sorry for them.”

  “Of course it is, but be rational about it.” Kekox looked around at all of us and seemed to find agreement. “A little pain for a few generations, in exchange for a glorious future later. I’m sure they won’t like being slaves—but could we really have left them the way we found them?”

  Priekahm’s gesture was noncommittal. “Well, we can’t now. They’re going to be very different thanks to the experience we’ve just handed them, anyway. And even if we took off right now, we couldn’t put them back the way they were. So I guess it’s just a matter of deciding what’s best for them in the long run. And we might as well get on with it. Zahmekoses, is breakfast ready?”

  “Whenever people want it,” I said, checking the pan.

  “Then we might as well see if everyone else is ready to get up, and—”

  “I am,” Soikenn said, staggering in, “and Mejox is just dressing. To judge from the noises Osepok is making, she’ll be along soon, too.”

  Over breakfast we set the two large screens for a full surround view. The village had finished burning during the night, and now it lay in ashes around us. A few charred logs poking up from the low ridge of dirt were all that remained of the palisade. Rims of black timber showed where houses had been attached to the surrounding wall.

  “Stupid,” Kekox said.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Stupid of them to put their huts right against their defensive wall. And even stupider to roof it all with cut grass and tree branches. At the least they should have laid flat stones or split logs on top of the thatch. Even an army of their own kind, with just spears, could easily drive them out of here—just set the roofs on fire with thrown torches, or break a part of the palisade down and come in through one of those huts.”

  “Maybe they don’t fight that way,” I suggested.

  “They’re people, aren’t they?”

  “Well,” Osepok said, “if you go by Wahkopem’s accounts of the Leeward Islanders—which is the last time before this a civilized person met real savages—then warfare might be ritual for them. They come out to the battlefield—the same one every summer—wave magic sticks at each other, run down the hill and slash at each other a little, then run back home and brag about it. Probably almost no deaths, and no loss of valuable buildings or crops.”

  Kekox chewed a large bite for a long moment, and then said, “That makes sense. They can’t be fighting seriously. If they were, a surprise night attack and a massacre would take care of any of these towns—and we know that the rivers and lakesides in this part of Big are crawling with these little towns. If they were fighting real wars, either they’d have real fortifications, or this would already be part of an empire—and then it would still be fortified, it’s too logical a strategic strong point.” He cut another bite of food and added, “This is even easier. We teach these people how to conquer and enslave their neighbors for us … that creates an inner ring of vassal villages … and then the inner ring conquers the outer ring for us … and so forth. We might have this whole part of Setepos under our domination with only a few people ever having seen us. Like a pyramid sales scheme.”

  I laughed at that. “And of course, like any pyramid scheme, the best time to get in is at the beginning. The people who do the best are the ones who start them.”

  Kekox laughed in response. “So we came all this way to set up a franchise-distributor system like an illegal sales promoter. Well, let’s get going. Have any Seteposians come back yet?”

  “Not yet,” Otuz said. She sat down to operate one of the remote cameras. “But—yes, I saw them before we started eating and they’re more than halfway here now. Eight of them, adults to judge by their size, and something else warm-blooded with them, maybe a child or a domestic animal. I would guess they’ll be here in a thirty-second of a day or so. Everyone might as well just relax for a while.”

  Relaxing wasn’t easy. We had no reason to fear them, but we did have to hope they were coming here to beg mercy from the new gods, rather than to exorcise demons—because if that were the case, the demons would have to prove again that the old magic wouldn’t work on us. That would mean more killing and suffering, needlessly this time since all the Seteposians had to do was settle down and behave. I hoped they would have the sense to see that.

  The time crawled by. We watched each other, the wall, the viewports, or whatever, not having much to say.

  Finally, Otuz checked the amplified viewport for what seemed like the hundredth time and said, “All right, at least they’re in view now.” She clicked the image over to one of the main screens.

  As she had said, there were eight Seteposians, and they were leading or dragging, mostly dragging, a small animal by a rope tied around its neck. The animal was covered by black and white hair in irregular splotches and walked on four hard little feet. Short horns sprouted from the top of its head, and they had draped its neck with several garlands of flowers. As we watched the little animal bent forward, clearly trying to eat the flowers. They pulled its head back up, but the animal balked and braced its feet; it took four of them to kick and drag it into moving again, and in the process several flowers were knocked off and gobbled up.

  “I hope sacrificing it to the new gods involves killing it,” Kekox said, “because as a live sample it would be too valuable to kill, and I don’t think I want to cope with having it in here.”

  Another sixty-fourth of a day brought them down into the burned-out village. The animal must have sensed something—the smell of ashes and death, or perhaps the fear of the Seteposians—for he began to struggle and kick until finally he had to be dragged by the rope and half-strangled to get him into the clear space in front of the Gurix’s main hatch.

  “One more way to see how smart they are,” Soikenn said. “They remembered where the door is. It’s not obvious from the outside, especially if you’ve never seen anything like it before. But I guess most of the evidence is irrelevant now, anyway.”

  “Not irrelevant,” Otuz said. “We have to use Seteposians as slaves for the time being, but we probably should remember they’re people, and that the things we have to do are as much for their good as ours. If we remember how s
mart they are, maybe our great-grandchildren will be more willing to let them be our full partners once the time comes.”

  “It if comes that soon,” Kekox said. “Meanwhile, if we remember how smart they are it could keep us from underestimating them, which is probably more important.”

  Otuz had turned back to the view port, and now she said, “Well, it looks to me like they’re going to kill it.” The Seteposians bound the animal’s feet together and turned it over. It was obviously completely terrified, arching its back, turning its head, and crying out. Otuz brought up the external audio and we heard the cry, a weird flat bleat alternating with a horrible bawl.

  Over that sound we could hear the Seteposians chanting and singing. Slowly they drew together into a tight circle around the bucking, screaming animal and began to whirl, feet moving in a distinct rhythm, bodies swaying. “What in the Creator’s name are they doing?” Mejox asked.

  Priekahm scratched behind one ear. “I doubt they could explain it either. I mean, try to explain any religious ritual. And these people are ten thousand years or more behind us; they probably believe a lot of strange stuff, really believe it, I mean.”

  “At least it works that way on Nisu,” Osepok said. “The farther back you go in time, and the lower the technical level, the more complex the religion gets and the fewer explanations people give for it.”

  The circle of Seteposians whirled faster, slapping their hands together and stamping. It rose to a crescendo, then stopped abruptly. The ring of Seteposians closed around the animal; all of them knelt, pressing their faces into the ground so that they formed a huddle of bodies around the animal. Then the one facing the hatch, a squat, heavily muscled male with thick facial hair, rose to his feet and pointed a knife at our hatch.

  “Polished stone,” Osepok said. “The very oldest tools on Nisu, or at least the very oldest ones anyone is willing to agree are tools, are almost exactly like that. The ones in the museums in Palath look just like it except for the shorter handles—I guess because they’ve got one more finger than we do.”

  The Seteposian was holding the knife over his head and chanting so loudly that, aside from the external audio, we could hear it faintly, directly, through the Gurix’s walls. After a while he stopped chanting, and the rest began to chant, a few notes over and over, rising into a scream. Then the muscular Seteposian struck savagely downward, with the full force of his body, nearly severing the neck of the small animal. He struck again, disemboweling it with a single neat stroke, and as blood and viscera poured onto the ground, they spread the gory mess out onto the ground, arranging the guts in a rough pattern.

  “What are they doing now?” Otuz asked.

  Osepok gestured noncommittally. “Maybe that’s how you make flesh acceptable to the gods. Or it’s how you foretell the future. Or how you find out if the spirits are angry. Or maybe it’s the sacred signal for ‘please don’t kill us,’ or ‘demons go away.’ We’ll have to learn their language before we even know what question would be appropriate.”

  The little sacrifice party was backing up. “What do you think? Should we go out and accept the sacrifice?”

  “Might as well,” Kekox said. He tossed me a disposable environment suit, then put one on himself as I wriggled into mine. “Let’s go see just how acceptable to the gods this one is going to be.”

  The dead animal was a lot heavier than it had appeared. Moreover, because its neck was nearly severed, it was very awkward to lift up, and since the ground was covered with blood and guts, the footing was slippery as well. Helpfully, Soikenn reminded us that she needed the guts, too.

  We ended up stuffing the entrails back into the gaping empty belly, getting blood and unspeakable other things all over our environment suits, and dragging it over to the biosample hatch by its legs. At least the biosample capsule was big enough for it, so we dumped it in, sealed it, and pushed the button to send it into the Gurix. Then we moved around to the decontaminator and let it spray the suits with superheated steam for a couple of minutes. That made a lot of the blood clot in a very unpleasant way, making the suits stiff and hard to move in, and the heating load made the respirators hard to breathe through, too.

  When we got into the airlock, the sampler said there was nothing alive floating in the air, so we gingerly detached the arms of the suits, slipped on the gloves that hung in waiting for us, and peeled off the rest of the suits, throwing them into the hopper to be melted down and reformed. By the time we got inside, Soikenn was already down in the utility compartment, dissecting the thing with Otuz.

  As Kekox and I scrubbed the dank sweat off ourselves, he muttered, “As new god around here, my first commandment is going to be that all sacrifices will be by non-messy techniques.”

  “Completely agreed,” I said. “At least I don’t think I’ll have any trouble waiting for lunch.”

  There were a lot of exclamations from down in the utility compartment, but not nearly enough room for anyone to stand in there and watch what Soikenn and Otuz were doing, so we waited and amused ourselves with long-range scans. The villagers seemed to be gathering up in the hills, in one large clearing.

  “Could be massing for an attack,” Kekox said.

  “Yes, or they could just be getting the story from the animal chopper himself,” Priekahm pointed out. “If they head this way with weapons, we’ll know in plenty of time. But most likely what they’re getting is the short report: the new gods found the gift acceptable. Which is even true as far as it goes.”

  By time for the midday meal, Soikenn had her report ready to go, and our appetites were back. Partly it was that the day here was one fifth longer than Nisuan standard, and thus meals were farther apart and the waking time tended to be longer; partly it was that we were realizing how dull it was to sit in this little metal box waiting to find out whether we could do anything else.

  “Well,” Soikenn said, “I’ll refrain from showing photographs and give you the highlights. First of all, it’s built on the same basic plan as we are: muscles and bones surrounding a digestive system, so the digestive system can get near food and the muscles can get fed. It has a brain inside a protective skull, with all the specialized sense organs located close to the brain.

  “The biggest difference is the heart and circulatory system. They have two big lungs, instead of our hundreds of small ones, and one huge heart instead of our eleven small ones. No blood mixer; the heart just has four chambers, in and out to the lungs, in and out to the body. The body-side receiving chamber does more or less what our blood mixer does, but it’s part of the heart, and it only contains a small quantity of blood at a time.”

  “So if we assume the Seteposians are built on a similar plan, then up close they’d be a lot harder to kill in a fight than we are,” Kekox said.

  Soikenn gestured noncommittally. “Don’t be so sure. Whatever they gain by not having a soft target like the blood mixer, they lose by lack of redundancy. Remember we can live with three hearts gone, or as many as twenty lungs punctured; I think even one lung—and certainly that big heart—would be enough to kill them. And the chest is a pretty big target for a steam rifle.”

  “That’s good to know,” Kekox grunted.

  “Here’s something even better to know,” Otuz said. “This animal, anyway, has a ninety-six percent match to our amino acid mix. He’d be nutritious if we ate him. And in about two hours the toxicology simulator should be done, and the cell exposure tests; if both of those say he’s okay, we can have him grilled tonight.”

  Actually, it was stew—it seemed like a good idea to make sure the animal was thoroughly cooked—and it was astonishingly tasty. We all gorged on it and agreed the gods were pleased. “And it’s harmless?” I asked Soikenn, as everyone had, repeatedly.

  “Three of us are pregnant,” Osepok pointed out, “and we all read the full report. As nearly as we can know anything, it’s harmless.”

  “There are a lot of long-chain proteins that don’t interact with our proteins at all,
” Otuz amplified, taking seconds. “Almost all of them break down into something we can digest when they’re heated. The rest will probably just pass through. That’s also why it would be hard to get a local infection—most of the germs aren’t going to find much in us they can eat—our body proteins are just different enough to frustrate them, and they’re so different from us that they’ll really be obvious to our immune systems. It should be generations before any of us really has to worry about getting sick.”

  The next morning, the same male who had sacrificed the animal to us was waiting outside the hatch, patiently kneeling with his face on the ground.

  13

  OSEPOK WANTED TO GO out, communicate with the Seteposian, and get the process going right away, but she had to wait a while, along with the rest of us and the Seteposian himself. Like it or not, we were all part of an experiment.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to do an autopsy to find out why I’m still alive?” Kekox grumbled. “I’ve given you my blood, my mucus, and my urine. What more do you want?”

  “Everyone else’s,” Soikenn said, impassively. “Behave yourself and cooperate. I need to get the samples right now because we don’t know how long we’ll be talking to that Seteposian. Now, is everyone feeling well?”

  “Never better,” Osepok said. “Can we go outside now?”

  “Not till Mommy has your blood,” Soikenn said. “For what it’s worth, so far the analyzer is turning you all up as perfectly normal.”

  “Then it’s defective,” Mejox said.

  We were probably all just a little silly at the prospect of actually getting outside and beginning to really live on our new world. All the tests were showing that our protein compatibility was ideal—just compatible enough so that we could eat the local fauna (if we cooked it long enough), but not so compatible that the local germs were apt to get us. Of course we’d have to test each new food, and there were bound to be some local things poisonous to us, but it looked like this place could be our home, and we were all eager to get the process underway.