Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  At last, after rechecking everyone and listening to the fetuses growing inside the other females, Soikenn declared she was satisfied. “And look at it this way. Now we know that our visitor is probably edible, should the need arise. Let’s go out and see what he thinks of the idea of teaching the gods how to talk.”

  We had worried about that point. Gods ought to be all-knowing. But there was no cure for it—you have to interact to learn to speak a language well, and we thought gods who spoke ungrammatically with a terrible accent would be even less credible. Furthermore, we wanted to keep as much of our language as possible for ourselves, to give us one more edge in dealing with the slaves.

  When the door opened he went from kneeling to prostrate in one thud. We advanced on him in a group, but he remained facedown. After a long pause, Mejox said, “It’s very respectful but it’s not the easiest position to communicate to or from.”

  He bent, grasped the Seteposian by the long hair of his head, and yanked him to his knees. The Seteposian looked around, gasped, and fell over sideways.

  “You don’t suppose that killed him?” Mejox asked anxiously.

  “Well, at least his weird heart and lungs are still working,” Soikenn said, pointing to where his throat was moving. “So I’d say he’s probably okay. Maybe they’re just knocked unconscious by strong emotions. It doesn’t have to make any more sense than anything else evolution does. Possibly with just one heart his blood pressure can fall very fast.”

  “Assuming you’re right,” Osepok asked, “how do we wake him up?”

  “Well, if it’s caused by a blood pressure drop, then probably his brain was getting either too much or too little blood. So we move his blood around.”

  “All right,” Mejox said. He rolled the Seteposian over, lifted him by his armpits so that his head hung down, and shook him hard. “Let’s see if—”

  The Seteposian gasped and made a horrid ululating cry which started Mejox so much that he dropped him onto his face. The Seteposian pulled himself back into his starting position, prostrate with respect.

  “Well, we’ve gotten back to where we started from,” Osepok said. “Now what?”

  “Well, we could try being a bit politer,” I said. I crouched by the Seteposian, slid my hands under his shoulders, and gently lifted. He sat up. This was the closest I had seen one, and familiarity was not improving his looks any.

  I pointed to myself and said, “Zahmekoses. Zahmekoses. Zahmekoses. Zah. Meh. Koh. Seez.”

  Then I pointed to the Seteposian’s mouth. He continued to stare.

  “Zah,” I said, pointing at his mouth.

  He drew a breath and said, “Shah.”

  “Zahmekoses.”

  “Shahmekotheesh.”

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “Not bad,” he replied.

  Everyone laughed, and he threw himself back into the prostrate position. It took some time to get him to sit up again. Much later I learned that our laughter sounded like a mixture of growling and screaming to them. (Their laughter is a strange barking or bleating sound.) When we all made that noise he thought he must have spoken a word reserved for the gods themselves, and that he was about to pay the penalty such a blasphemy warranted.

  Right then, of course, I didn’t know any such thing. But I could see we had lost some ground, so I got him through “Zahmekoses” a few more times. Then we proceeded through “Mejokth” and “Otush” and so forth, until he could name us all. Finally I pointed to him and learned he was “Rar.”

  By now it was time for midday meal, so we decided to break for that. “Do we feed him?” Priekahm asked.

  “Better reserve god-food for us, till we find out how powerful a magic it seems to be to them,” Osepok said. “They’re very much like the Leeward Islanders in some ways, and of course drastically different in others, but the food of powerful beings was supposed to have a lot of power in all our primitive cultures. Might as well play it safe and not give him any till we know how he’ll interpret it.”

  I picked up a stick and thrust it into the ground. The Seteposian stared at me. I put a smaller stick into the ground at the tip of the shadow of the bigger stick. Then I put in another a small angle away from the first, carefully making sure it was eastward so that the shadow would move in that direction. (I certainly wanted to see him before tomorrow morning.) Then I said “Rar” and pointed at the ground, then at the stick the shadow would reach in about a twentieth of a day. I indicated, I hoped, “Rar here” for each short stick, and then indicated the angle between them and pointed out at the open spaces around.

  He gestured agreement and prostrated himself, chanted our names, and crawled backward away from us. When he had reached the ashes of the palisade, he turned, rose, and ran for the hills. “Do you suppose he actually got that?” Otuz asked.

  “I don’t know, but he acted like he did. I guess we go eat, then wait till the shadow hits the second stick and see if he turns up again. I kind of think he will, though. He seemed to be getting it,” I said, playing at being more confident than I really was.

  “Well,” Osepok said, “at the very least, Rar has some ability to understand from context. He used the assent gesture, and we didn’t teach him that one. He must have figured it out by watching us.”

  Rar was back right on time, prostrating himself by the crude sundial. We went out and raised him up. The long afternoon, and the next eight-day, were spent learning a few hundred of his words and a rudimentary grammar of his language.

  The grammar was extremely complex and difficult, which according to Osepok, as we talked it over at one evening meal, was “pretty much what we’d expect. Primitive people’s languages tend to be more complex and specific because they don’t have the diversity of things to talk about that technically advanced people do. So they build the specificity they need right into the words, instead of constructing it at the sentence level. So it will take a while to learn, and we’ll probably always feel it’s a very stiff and formal way of saying a very limited variety of things.

  “Chances are that once we get an empire going, their language will rapidly become simpler in grammar and more general in vocabulary—but I’m afraid that will take a few generations.”

  She returned her attention to her food. After a pause, Kekox said, “Er, Captain, I’m curious. You’ve been remarkably good at all these, uh, matters of relating to primitive peoples, and we’ve been very glad that one of us is—but we were wondering … where did you learn it?”

  She looked sad. “Well,” she said, “after Poiparesis … died, I missed him terribly. I think you know that he and I … well, we spent a lot of our time in each other’s chambers.”

  None of us had even had a suspicion.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “all of a sudden I had a lot of time to spend by myself, and as the proverb says, you can’t mourn forever. At first I listened to favorite music or watched old performances, but you know, that doesn’t give much stimulus to the mind after a while. So naturally, since—please forgive my saying this—I really didn’t want to see or talk to any of you for a while, I started to look for some study or interest to keep myself amused and sane with, something I could work on all by myself that might be useful. Well, the one thing nobody had thought of sending on the trip was an expert in cross-cultural study, and even if they had … well, after all, it’s been a long time since we had the chance to do it, really, and there’s no one with any meaningful experiences. After all, the last primitives were found in Wahkopem’s time, and then Palath took over and most of the primitives were carried off as slaves. So no one had done what they used to call ‘field work’ in centuries.

  “Now since I was sure they were people, I thought techniques for studying primitive people would be a good thing to know. So I learned what I could from books, which turned out to be quite a bit. On the way I had to master Early Modern Shulathian and learn a little bit about twenty or so extinct languages. But it was worth it, both as a distraction and now that we h
ave some use for it all. More useful than astrogation and subnucleonics, anyway.”

  In the days that followed we found out just how much her new skills were worth to us, as we made rapid progress in understanding the situation. We had indeed wiped out both the hereditary governing family and the hereditary priesthood. Without quite meaning to, we had created a new priest-king, for as the only one who spoke to us, Rar had ascended to the height of his society. Before our coming he had been nobody special, an ordinary hunter and farmer among the bachelor males, but now, in just the two eightdays we had been there, he had acquired four wives (“three widows and a fresh one,” he told us proudly), and a picked band of loyal retainers from among his group, which called themselves the Real People.

  “Well, I don’t think we meant to create him as our all-powerful representative,” Otuz commented, “but he’s certainly working out well.” We were watching the Real People till, weed, and irrigate their fields. When we had noticed the crops dying, we had told Rar we were no longer angry with his people for worshipping the false Mother God, and that they could save their crops and—if they continued to please and obey us, and stayed away from false gods—we would show them how to rebuild their town and make them the greatest people in the world. But if they fell away or disobeyed, we would strike them all down.

  Not surprisingly they had taken the deal. They were working hard, now, and only occasionally glancing our way. We had promised them a bumper harvest, and we were making good on that; Soikenn had studied the metabolism of “wheat,” the stuff they grew in their fields, and found that the local soil was a bit too acid and a little deficient in nitrogen, and we had prepared appropriate supplements and ordered them to spread them on the fields.

  I hadn’t had much of a chance to be alone with Otuz lately, and of course with a hundred pairs of eyes on us, including Rar’s, we weren’t quite alone anyway. It didn’t matter as much as it might have, for she was now quite swollen with her pregnancy, and I doubted very much that she would be in the mood. Still, we could stand on the hill and speak Nisuan and talk about all that had happened. “I think Kekox is right,” she said. “We should wait till next spring before beginning the conquest. All things in due time, and so forth.”

  “That seems to be Kekox’s principle,” I said.

  She swatted my arm. “Now, if Osepok and Soikenn are both happy about it, who’s to condemn them? And at least Osepok got pregnant by him first.” She turned to look over the field and said, “I could almost admire the old rascal.”

  There was a distant thunder high above us, and we turned to watch the Gurix coming in. With Mejox at the controls, it was moving swiftly and smoothly down to the landing pad by the big, comfortable log house we had built for ourselves with power tools from the ship. “Want to hear whatever the news is?”

  “Sure.” We walked down the hill hand in hand. I looked around, felt the warm amber sun Kousapex on my back, saw our slaves tending the grain with Rar standing over them, and then looked down to our house. “Gurix and Rumaz only have one more trip each to make for supplies,” I said. “Then no more trips to space … or if we go, it’ll be just for fun.”

  “Nothing wrong with fun,” she pointed out. “There’s enough antimatter in their tanks to make a trip every eightday for as long as we live. But yes, an era is coming to an end, I guess. We’ll have to content ourselves with being all-powerful gods.”

  “And parents,” I pointed out. “Which I’m told is quite a bit different.”

  When we got there, Mejox, Osepok, and Kekox had all come down, leaving Priekahm and Soikenn up on the ship. Usually everyone came down with the supply ferry, but, Mejox explained, “There’s some kind of problem with Priekahm’s pregnancy and Soikenn wanted to use the better gear on Wahkopem to diagnose it.”

  We had just gotten the supplies unloaded, and were about to settle onto our porch to watch the sun set over the wooded hills, when the radio called for our attention. We keyed up the visual in the Gurix and crowded in to hear what Soikenn had to say. “Well, it’s messy, but we can deal with it,” she said. “It turns out that protein incompatibility is a mixed blessing. There are several things that we’re not excreting—I’ve tested my blood and Priekahm’s, and we’re crawling with a number of foreign proteins. We had thought that they were functionally inert, but it turns out that they’re putting a terrible strain on Priekahm’s child’s kidney.”

  “Is there a way of getting them out of the bloodstream?” Mejox asked.

  “Well, yes, two ways. I can set up dialysis in the short run, and clean us and our unborn children up in a matter of an eightday. It’s already working in a lab version, and it’s really not a complicated job because what we’re screening for is so different. But that’s not a permanent solution. I can’t make a dialysis rig that we can take down to the surface, and if I could, we’d all be dependent on it forever. So that brings up solution two …”

  “Which is?” Kekox asked.

  “A tailored virus to do a genetic modification. It could work while we were doing dialysis every four eightdays or so. After a year, it will have regenerated enough kidney tissue so that we’ll be able to process the alien proteins ourselves. And we’ll also pass the trait on to our children.”

  “What’s the catch?” Osepok asked. “You don’t sound happy.”

  “It’s a vector, potentially, isn’t it?” Otuz asked.

  Soikenn gestured assent. Her expression was grim. “While it’s in our bloodstreams, it’s a kind of code translator. Just possibly it will hook up with some local virus or bacterium; organisms like that trade DNA very easily. In effect it might tell some local bug how to dial into our receptor sites, or how to look less weird to our immune systems. We run a big risk of throwing away that perfect immunity we’ve had since we got here.”

  “But if we don’t,” Kekox said, “then everyone dies a few years after the last dialysis machine breaks?”

  “Well, they could stave it off by only eating Nisuan food—I’m going to suggest that we do that till we’re all gene-treated—but yes. Without the modification, as soon as we lose the ability to do dialysis or to live entirely on Nisuan food, our whole species dies, after a few years, probably from kidney failure. If something else doesn’t turn out to fail faster than the kidney. And I really see no way that we can count on keeping the ship’s farm, the Gurix, or a dialysis rig running for three hundred years. We’re going to have to do the genetic modification.”

  “Well, you’ve persuaded me we have to,” Osepok said. “And I think you’ve persuaded all of us, actually.”

  “I was hoping one of you would have a brilliant idea for a way to avoid this,” she said, a little sadly. “We thought Setepos might be paradise. It’s still pretty good, but I’m afraid there’s one way in which it will be less perfect than I had hoped—we’ll be able to get sick.”

  That fall we discovered that the gods were going to have to do some taking care of their faithful people. We had showed them how to raise a good mud-and-stone wall, but they had to harvest crops as well. We had demonstrated to them why they would want a stone tower to serve both as granary and observation deck, but there was too much for them to build before the rains came again, and with the crop losses we had inflicted upon them, there was a real risk of famine. If we wanted a healthy army for the spring conquest, we would need to lend them a hand.

  We used the Rumaz to bring down a small treaded tractor; with that, we excavated a foundation in a day, when it would have taken them several eightdays. The tractor plus a log sledge let us move twenty times as much stone per day as all of them working together could have done, and we needed only Rar and a few helpers. And with the aid of a few blasting charges, we made a local cliff supply us with more stone than an army of them could have found or cut.

  The stone walls enclosed a large area, most especially including our log house and the field for the landers. With the machine tools and Rar’s now quite skillful interpretation of our directions, our little
community was safely behind its walls, with all the grain into the tower, well before the first rain fell. Kekox and Mejox went out with Rar and a party of bearers for several days and shot a large number of wild goats, deer, pigs, and aurochs—animals which had become almost as familiar to us as to the Seteposians—and we introduced them to the basic techniques of smoking and salting meat.

  When the first rains fell, the Seteposians threw a “thanksgiving,” in which they presented us with quite a lot of food (which we put into the cooler we had installed in our house). In return, we presented them with a few thousand fired mud bricks and a lot of planks we had made with power tools; it seemed like a small gift, but two days hard work put them all into more or less dry houses with much less flammable roofs.

  After the houses were all up, they “danced” (that strange rhythmic motion we had seen around the animal sacrifice) and later all got intoxicated on a fermented mash of the local fruit. There were some not-serious fights that Rar put down with his loyal assistants, and after that people settled into making their houses more snug and comfortable.

  Soikenn had finished tailoring and testing the virus, so with considerable nervousness, she gave it to Kekox. When he seemed to be fine after two eightdays, and his kidneys began to regenerate with the capability of handling the foreign proteins, she gave the rest of us doses of it as well.

  And still the rain fell, turning the fields to mud and bringing the river to flood. We were well above it, and we and our Seteposians were snug indoors, but there was something intolerably dreary about it. We had not gotten around to making window glass yet, so we spent most of our time behind wooden shutters, in glaring artificial light. We ate, we studied, and we met regularly with Rar. It took a great deal of effort to explain to him what kind of war we would have in the spring, that the Real People, who were now our slaves, would have all the neighbors as slaves. At first he could not see why they had to burn villages, or attack at night, or destroy the idols in their temples. But with time he came to understand, and he was invaluable as Kekox began to drill the fighting-age males in the new way of fighting.