Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  Clio shrugged and, using her chopsticks, pulled out a small piece of fish tempura, dipped it in the sauce, and plopped it into her bowl of rice. That evening, as they did once a week, they were having a private meal in Sanetomo’s quarters. He wasn’t a great cook, but it was hard to ruin tempura, and Clio didn’t come here for the food. “Well,” she said, “it’s ambiguous to anyone who reads Tiberian, but I have to make it one or the other for those idiot American undergrads who can’t be bothered to learn one of the foundational languages of our civilization. Now I know what one crusty old Latinist I knew years ago was complaining about; he always used to say if you want to understand what Seneca says, you should learn to read him, not find someone to make him say something you already understand.”

  “Were you the type that always got along with teachers?”

  “Not with that one. He wasn’t even a real historian or a real classicist. He’d come from some other department years before. Looked like a fat, bald monkey.”

  “Well,” Sanetomo said mildly, “from the Tiberian point of view, didn’t we all look like bald monkeys?”

  “Unkempt ones, anyway,” Clio said. “So to shorten the story some more, I’m having to translate The Account of Zahmekoses on the assumption that he’s being humble and wants to be sneered at a little. Pretty silly assumption when you think about it—he was awfully proud and overbearing in some parts of his own account, and he sure didn’t have much respect for the Tiberians back home.”

  Sanetomo nodded politely. There was a funny surge to the side. “Laser cutout,” he said. “Glad it wasn’t my shift for maintenance—somebody’s going to spend an hour swapping out one of the ZPEs. I’ll be glad when we learn to build them as well as the Tiberians did.”

  “Not me,” Clio said. “I like this set-up. I wouldn’t want to spend all that time in an acceleration tank, and having all these years of unlimited thinking time—and no committee work!—is about as close to heaven as a historian can get.”

  “Or an astronomer,” Sanetomo added. “Or any other kind of intellectual. This might just be the major effect star travel will have on human life. But then we all repeat that to each other six times a day, don’t we? More fish or should I freeze it?”

  “I’m stuffed,” she confessed. “And maybe it’s a cultural failing but I’d just as soon not tuck away much more fish.”

  “What are you planning to eat for the next seven years, then?”

  “Fish,” Clio admitted, “but I’d rather not.”

  The fish on board was tilapia, carp, and bass—freshwater species suited for life in the forward tank, right at the nose of the ship, where the enormous load of water served as an important protection against radiation for the ship’s farm and the living quarters beneath that. Moving at just over one third of lightspeed, they were transforming the interstellar atoms they collided with into bursts of radiation, up at the front; but down here they were effectively under thirty feet of water and, if you added up all the little soil banks in the farm, sixteen feet of dirt.

  That night, after they had made love, Sanetomo went straight to sleep, and Clio lay awake beside him, happy, drifting, thinking idly about her translation. There was a difference between that first Tiberian voyage to cross this vast lonely gulf of vacuum, and this first human one … something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Both had knowingly taken along vast numbers of projects to do … both had sent along people smart enough to amuse themselves … but there was a difference.

  As she drifted off to sleep, she seemed to hear Zahmekoses whispering to her, “When you know what that difference is, you’ll really know something.”

  Weeks rolled together into months, and Clio and Sanetomo spent more time with each other. It was odd, she realized, that here on Tenacity, in a way, what they were doing was duplicating that silliest experiment of twentieth-century America: high school. People here had lots of time to do what they needed to do, and no real need to earn a living per se—no paychecks, no rent, no bills—and thus they had lots of time for esoteric interests and for relationships. Why weren’t they driving each other crazy, and then using up all that excess time dealing with the craziness, the way high school students always had?

  She was having that thought as she set up her artificial Christmas tree; she paused a moment to deliberate whether she would put the star or the angel at the top, the only decision there was to make every year, since the tree really only fit into one spot in her quarters, and she always put every one of her home-made ornaments onto it. Christmas of 2075 was not going to be much different from that of 2069, 2070, or any other year since departure.

  She knew Sanetomo’s knock at her door so well that without looking around she simply said, “Come in.” The door opened with a soft thud behind her.

  “That’s gotta be the ugliest piece of bonsai I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Hey, I’m a Martian. This was the only kind there was where I grew up. And at least I didn’t have to torture it to keep it from growing taller. C’mon in and shut the door; there’s soup on the stove, which somebody who isn’t me ought to re-season.”

  She had just settled on the star and put it into place when she heard him slurp a couple of times and say, “Slightly short on salt. Nothing else wrong. You’re getting better. Well, today we confirmed another one—there’s free oxygen in the atmosphere of the fifth planet of Zeta Tucanae. It looks like they succeeded in terraforming all but two of the nine planets they tried it on.”

  “All but three of the ten,” Clio reminded him. “Their effort on Mars was a legitimate try at terraforming, even if it didn’t go very well, and even if they didn’t have any equipment intended for the purpose. Let’s just look your new one up, though,” she said, and clicked on her display screen, checking through the list of colonies. “Well, the folks going to Zeta Tucanae thought they would name that planet Preka Retahrka, which means something like ‘New Hope’ or ‘Another Chance’ or ‘Better Try.’ Sounds like they at least made a good try.”

  “They certainly generated some hope for us, if not for themselves,” Sanetomo said. “And that expands the list a little further, anyway. I wonder what could have gone wrong at the two that didn’t work out?”

  Clio shrugged. “Maybe nothing their fault. Maybe their collision avoidance system failed and they hit a rock and blew all over the sky. Maybe their ZPE locked up for good and their descendants are still out there somewhere, thousands of light years away, unable to slow down. Bad luck happens, you know.”

  “Spoken like someone who’s been translating ancient Tiberian. How far along are you?”

  “Oh, I’ve almost got them to Setepos. Earth I mean. I kind of decided to at least give the kids a flavor by using Tiberian place names.” She took the wine and glasses from him and set them on the table, next to the warm bread and soup. “Dinner’s on. Say, let me put a question to you—how come we haven’t all gotten involved in complex cliques about who’s sleeping with who and who’s best friends and who’s not and all that stuff? We have a classic setup for it here: lots of time off and no worries about material conditions that we can do anything about. How come we’re not all enacting high school for grownups?”

  He shrugged. “The psychological screening, maybe?”

  “Those silly little tests? I can’t believe that they would have—”

  “No, I mean the self-screening. Remember that you couldn’t get considered for the crew unless you had a big project you wanted to put years into, and they really did judge the quality of the projects. So everyone here has something they’d rather be doing than mooning over each other. Usually, that is. I intend to moon over you for at least ten minutes after dinner. You are sublimely moonworthy. You are the maximally moon-over-able person I know. You—”

  She groaned. “All right, let’s stop before we get to anti-non-moon-over-able-ous-ness. Did anyone ever tell you your sense of humor is predictable?”

  “And you like it.”

  �
�In moderate doses,” she said. “Which is how you like my cooking. Dinner’s on the table, let’s eat.”

  As they sat over the soup, he said, “You know, more seriously, I think we’ll get better discoveries out of this than we did out of some of the early explorations.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Out of sending smart people with time on their hands. Idleness is only the devil’s plaything if you aren’t smart or creative enough to fill it. But the best minds have always flourished on idleness. Here we take all kinds of bright people, send them out to explore another star system and to look at the ruins of an ancient culture far greater than ours—and thanks to the light speed limit, and the huge distances, it’s going to be more than a decade till we get there. I mean, at our present speed we could travel from the Earth to the Moon in about four seconds, and the speed is increasing all the time, and yet we’ve been traveling for years and we still have years to go. And everything we know of physics says that light speed is absolute; we’ll never go faster, which means it will always take years to reach the stars.

  “Well, those years are the time we need to develop ourselves, get to know ourselves, really grow into something. Which means by the time we arrive we’ll be really ready to do the job—which is a lot more than you could say for Columbus’s crew, or Magellan’s, or Captain Cook’s, or even for a lot of the astronauts. It used to be that getting there was such a small fraction of a human lifetime that you could send just about any old kind of human, as long as they were physically and mentally up to the rigors of the voyage. Now you have to send someone to grow.”

  She smiled. “Of course, sure, none of us is the person who left. And mostly we’re getting better at living with each other, and certainly more learned and better at the intellectual skills.”

  “Wiser,” he said, “is the word. In fact the one thing I wish they’d let us do on this trip is raise kids. Being a parent seems to deepen people back home, and certainly a kid who grew up here would get a big head start on the world, wouldn’t he?”

  Clio might have had an answer, but she thought Sanetomo was leading up to a proposal, so she waited for it; clearly he was just waiting for an answer to his idle speculation, and the moment slipped by.

  That night, drifting off, it occurred to her that if she had really had the high school mindset, there was no doubt at all that she would have been frustrated by Sanetomo’s failure to propose when she thought he would. As it stood, she was almost as frustrated by the failure of their conversation to go on—and that wasn’t much. After the holidays, maybe, or after she finished a couple more sections of The Account of Zahmekoses, if he still hadn’t, she would. “Unless I think of something better,” she mumbled, stretching into final position to sleep.

  “Think of better what?” he said, his speech slurred.

  “Doesn’t need to concern you,” she said, snuggling in closer. “Yet.”

  On Halloween 2076, Sanetomo knocked on her door, and when she opened it, he said, “Trick or Treat. Marry me.”

  “Is that a treat or a trick?” she asked him, her face carefully deadpan. By that time, she had not only gotten used to his sense of humor; she could duplicate it. And by that time, he knew that answer was “yes,” without her saying it. The only disappointment for either of them was that when they shared the news at common dinner, everyone on the ship looked up, a bit baffled, and said “But I thought they were engaged.”

  “Are you ready to go through with this?” Sanetomo asked her.

  “Well, we’re supposed to be bringing terrible luck on ourselves by letting you see me on the wedding day, but otherwise, sure.” Clio adjusted her headgear one more time.

  “That only applies for Western grooms,” Sanetomo said, firmly. “You’re marrying a Japanese, you only have to worry about Japanese superstitions. Those are the official rules. And what kind of a wedding is it, anyway, when the bride stays up late the night before to finish her book instead of her dress?”

  “The dress was done and the book wasn’t. And what kind of wedding is it where the groom knows a thing like that?”

  “Five minutes to showtime,” Captain Olshavsky said, sticking his head in the door. “Which one of you is going to cry and say it’s all off?”

  “Must’ve been some other wedding you heard about,” Sanetomo said, smiling broadly. “Clio, you look terrific. Did I mention that?”

  “Not often enough. And you do nice things for a dress uniform yourself.”

  “In that case,” the captain said, “I guess we’re going through with it. Come on down to the dining hall when you’re ready.”

  “Did you really finish your translation of The Account of Zahmekoses last night?” Sanetomo asked.

  “Yep. You don’t think I’d have stayed up for fun? Anyway, now the honeymoon, then on to The Account of Diehrenn. And one of these days, back to the straight history. But I guess before we start the honeymoon, we’d better get the marrying part out of the way.”

  The ceremony was brief, and of course since no one was going anywhere outside the ship, every guest turned up as expected and the newlywed couple found their way to the “honeymoon suite”—Sanetomo’s room as decorated by his best man—without difficulty. The party went on for a while—it had been a long time since they’d had one—but naturally Sanetomo and Clio slipped away a little early.

  Afterwards, they lay snuggled together in the now double-sized chamber. One of Sanetomo’s neighbors had already moved into Clio’s old one, and they had spent the better part of the previous day taking down the partition. Sanetomo said, “Well, here we are. As of this morning, Olshavsky said we’d covered 142,160 astronomical units. Hard to believe it took us more than a year to reach the first hundred and now we’re doing close to a hundred per day; it would only take us about five hours to get from one side of Saturn’s orbit to the other, and yet we’re still five years from our destination. …” His voice was already fading, and as he slipped an arm around Clio he muttered, “I wonder if other couples talk about how much we’re all alone in the middle of an unimaginable void on their wedding nights.”

  “Traditionally,” Clio said, “I think that comes later.”

  “Well, anyway, at least now we’re a tiny bit past half way. Only 132,000 AU to go, the captain says. Wake me up when we get there,” he murmured, and fell asleep.

  Clio lay back and thought about things; it had been a long courtship and a short engagement because in such a tiny community with so little space, moving in with each other was a decision with so many implications that they had to be very sure of themselves before they did it, but once the decision was made it was extremely easy to implement.

  During most of that time she’d put off working on From the Moon to the Stars, ostensibly to finish her translation of The Account of Zahmekoses.

  She thought about where she was. Tenacity was moving through space at fifty-five percent of the speed of light, fast enough to go around the Earth at the equator four times per second; yet even though they were moving at such a tremendous speed and were now over halfway to Alpha Centauri, the distance was so huge that they would not begin to brake for another two years and one month, by which time they would be moving at almost seventy-five percent of lightspeed. Then they would find out just how good their copy of the Tiberian magnetic loop brake was, for though more than fifty of them had been tested on unmanned probes before this, still one never knew until one tried it whether the particular magnetic loop was working.

  In just ten and a half months they would cross the sort-of boundary of the Alpha Centauri System: the orbit of Proxima Centauri, the distant, dim companion that orbited far out in space from where A and B eternally circled each other. (Though of course Proxima itself was nowhere near their trajectory.)

  And once they were braking, long after they had flown deep into the Alpha Centauri System, it would still take two years to get the rest of the way into the system and rendezvous with Tiber. So only about five years left till arrival, and
since she and Sanetomo had radioed their request for permission to have a child back to Earth from here, that would mean they would be on Tiber for at least a year before they got permission, or were denied it.

  I’m not sure, but I kind of think the custom of calling home to get everything approved isn’t going to last much longer, Clio thought as she lay drifting, waiting for sleep to come.

  She closed her eyes and let herself picture Tenacity as a tiny dot of metal hurtling through the black vacuum at hard-to-imagine velocities, no other living thing within light-years … and yet, here in one small room in that dot of metal, she and Sanetomo had chosen to begin a life together. It was a pretty big leap of faith.

  Not as big as the one Diehrenn had made, she reminded herself. And certainly in terms of plans turning out differently … and the impossibility of calling home for directions … yes, she was eager to get into the new project.

  In some ways she had saved translating The Account of Diehrenn because it was the more interesting … to be born a slave in the Stone Age and be buried as the president of Mars … and because she had seen the frozen, preserved body of Diehrenn, exhibited in the museum on Mars, and thus could picture her. Just as Clio fell asleep, it seemed to her for a moment that the Hybrid female stood before her, asking her something—though whether to tell her story, or to listen to it, Clio didn’t figure out before drifting into deeper sleep.

  PART III

  THE LIGHT THAT FAILED

  7254–7208 B.C.E.

  1

  I WAS FORTY-THREE YEARS old, as time was reckoned on Setepos, and I was now raising my third generation of the Nim’s descendants—as close to an elder among the Nisuan slaves as you could be without having arrived on the ship from Nisu.

  But seniority cannot override a warm spring day. I could shout all I wanted at the children, but I wasn’t going to have their attention for any longer than I could have a butterfly’s. Even the younger slaves weren’t paying much attention to me today. I was just their mother, big sister, or aunt, and the Seteposian children, whose pets they were, were princes and princesses. I had heard them, often enough, arguing about precedence, based on who owned them and who they cared for. Probably if they had a chance to be free, or to go back to Nisu, tomorrow, they’d turn it down.