Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  That was a gloomy thought; for some reason the fine spring day seemed to be bringing on despair. But since Grandmother Soikenn and Uncle Mejox had died last summer, and Mother had fallen ill with the same strange sickness, there was really no one to talk to and I felt very alone.

  “Diehrenn!” Messlah shouted. The Seteposian boy was my favorite in that he was usually polite and a bit quieter than the rest. “Over here! What’s this?”

  I ran to see what he was shouting about, and was so surprised when I saw it that for a long moment I just gaped at it as it fluttered there in the thornbush. Finally I said, “I had thought that all such things were found long ago, and yet here’s one not four long stone-throws from Real People Town. Well, they’ll certainly be proud of you, Messlah, for finding such a thing.”

  “But what is it?” he asked.

  “You haven’t seen anything like it?” I prompted him. “Not in the temple?” One way in which Seteposians were strange was that they were often sexually mature before they even began to think like adults, and so they could be quite sizable and still think like children, all wild guesses and enthusiasm.

  Menomoum, the young full-blooded Palathian slave who was appointed as Messlah’s companion, spoke up. “It’s a … it’s a … the thing from the thing, Diehrenn! A piece of the … whatever it is that lets the … whatchamacallit come down to the ground slowly.” He was nearly as excited as Messlah, and with less excuse—he was well past the age for full consciousness even if he was still years short of puberty.

  I let it pass. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s a piece of parachute. See where two of the—” I had to struggle for the word myself—“shroud lines are still attached? It’s what the probes used to descend from Wahkopem Zomos. It’s very important—they haven’t found any of that since I was little. We should take it back to the palace right away.”

  “But we just came out to play!” Messlah protested.

  I looked around the circle of children in the bright sunlight. The Seteposians, all smaller than Messlah, were making that strange face they did when they were frustrated or about to demand something—their lower lips bulged out and their eyes squinted slightly.

  We Nisuans were holding perfectly still and keeping our facial expressions neutral. If the Seteposian children complained to our masters afterwards, we were the ones who would be in trouble.

  Still, I was in charge, and this sort of thing did have to be taken to the Nim at once. It would only interrupt playtime for a little while.

  This was frustrating, too, because even a few moons ago, I would still have been out here as Set’s companion, and he would have made the other Seteposians mind me. But he had gotten old enough not to need a nurse or companion anymore—he was off with his grandfather’s army—and now I was the nurse for Esser, his five-year-old niece, by far the most spoiled of Nim Rar’s descendants.

  For an instant I hesitated, wishing that I had Set here, wishing that his son—born this year—was in my charge, as his father and grandfather had been. Wishing, however, could not make it so and didn’t solve the problem.

  The trouble was that there were no good outcomes. They all wanted to play right now. So if I took them all trooping back, with the precious piece of parachute, they would be angry and surely get even later. The older Seteposian children would make up some story or other to get me whipped.

  If I took the parachute material back myself, Menomoum might or might not manage the children successfully until I could get back—and if he didn’t, which was likely since he tended to let Messlah do whatever he wanted, then I would be whipped.

  Or I could take the children, go play, and pick up the parachute material on the way back. The trouble was that Nim Rar, sooner or later, would find out that I hadn’t come straight back with it as soon as we’d found it. And he was very protective of any Nisuan artifacts that turned up—so if I had neglected one, I would be whipped.

  It wasn’t much of a choice.

  “Diehrenn!” a voice shouted behind me. I turned around, and there was Set, striding down the hill, mane of brown hair bobbing in the sunlight, soft robe billowing around him. I had never been happier to see him.

  “I just got back from the war,” he said. “We took thousands of fresh prisoners. It’s another great victory, Nim Rar’s one-hundred-twelfth, and he named me one of his great warriors for it.” As he drew nearer, I could see his teeth; his lips were drawn back in that expression that meant a Seteposian was pleased. “I hope you’re very proud of me.”

  “I am, master,” I said, only partly lying. If I had a favorite of all the Nim’s descendants, Set was it. He was generous and friendly, and he had never ordered a beating for me, let alone beaten me himself.

  But the older generation had raised me to remember that it was sheer bad luck that we were the Nim’s slaves, and not vice versa. Set’s courtesy and friendliness only made it more clear to me that I was a slave and an alien.

  Still he would be useful now. “That’s wonderful, Master Set,” I said, “and it’s a very good omen that we just heard the news at this moment—look what Messlah just found!” I pointed to it.

  Set took two steps toward it and then said, “But … but that’s impossible!”

  I was a little disconcerted. “It certainly is possible, master, it’s right there.”

  Set turned back to me with a strange expression in his eyes. “Oh, I know you’re not lying, Diehrenn. That’s a piece of parachute and I know it’s not any of the pieces from the temple, either. But it’s still impossible. This thornbush was always the Snail Eaters’ Base when the other boys and I would play ‘Real People Against Snail Eaters.’ See? You can still see where there are spots worn in the ground by the goal keepers when we played. There’ve been dozens of boys around this thornbush for years and years. It couldn’t have avoided detection for so long.”

  “Master, maybe it was stuck in a high tree somewhere, and then tore loose and blew here, master?” Menomoum suggested. My nephew was very afraid of Set, perhaps because he was directly in line for the throne.

  “That might be,” Set said, “though it doesn’t show any signs of weathering, or dirt … or does this material weather at all, Diehrenn?”

  “Not so far as I know,” I said, “but I have to admit I’ve never even touched that material; all the pieces I ever saw were in the temple.” On the wall by Kekox’s skin, I wanted to add. That would hardly be fair to Set; he himself had burst into tears the first time he had seen the skin and head of Kekox on the temple wall, and cried until the Nim himself had promised that no such thing would ever happen to me. “I don’t suppose it weathered much in there. But some Nisuan materials are very tough and don’t wear out at all as far as we can tell.”

  Set nodded assent, and moved closer to the thornbush. He reached up to take the fabric in his hands. “It’s soft,” he said, “and very slick. You can see it was woven out of something or other, but the fibers are finer than spiderweb. And—”

  “Diehrenn! Set! Look in the trees over there!” Messlah shouted.

  Our heads jerked up at Messlah’s excited scream. In one of the old, gnarled cedars, a great swath of fabric hung down farther than the temple was tall. I felt a strange tingling on my spine, and my small crest stood up until it felt as big as Uncle Mejox’s.

  “Menomoum, Messlah,” I said, as casually as I could manage, “I think we need to have you two guard the children. Set and I should get a closer look at this before we let the little ones get too close to it.” Sometimes suggesting to older boys that I needed them to act as protectors or seconds-in-command would make them behave for a little while.

  Set asked, “Do you think they can handle that?” his tone indicating that he didn’t think so.

  “I’m sure they can,” I said. Set and I headed down the hill, toward the brook, the old cedar, and the parachute. Thanks to Set’s comment, they now desperately wanted to prove that I was right, and they would do their best—whatever that might be—to make t
he other children behave.

  “Thanks,” I said, as soon as I was sure that we were out of earshot.

  “Welcome to it,” Set said. “I don’t know how many times, on patrol or in battle, I was glad that you were strict with me. Those kids need discipline; it’s a shame the old Nim is getting soft.”

  Maybe toward his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I thought. I hadn’t noticed that he was being any nicer to his slaves. “How do you suppose we could have suddenly gotten a whole parachute, Master Set? Maybe a probe hung up on a tree somewhere upwind of here and couldn’t make it down, then got shaken loose and blew here?”

  “Except all of the area upwind has been part of the Nim’s empire for a decade or more, patrolled by his army—and every soldier knows there are big rewards for bringing in any Nisuan stuff. It would have to have been well-hidden—but in that case, how did the wind get to it?”

  By now we were almost in the shade of the cedar, its earth-spicy scent and the cool air under it about to brush over my thin fur. Something else occurred to me. “There hasn’t been a storm in several days. Nothing to shake this loose, either. And people are in this area all the time.”

  “And,” he added, glancing sideways at me and lowering his voice to a whisper, “it wasn’t possible for probes to get permanently hung up in trees, was it? I mean, they could move themselves around—”

  “Grandmother Osepok says there were many kinds of probes, and they launched hundreds of them, master. Some of them were little more than a camera on a parachute.”

  I could see him struggling with his memory, so I explained the Nisuan word. “A camera is one of those devices that lets you see a thing from far away. It sends the picture to a receiver on Wahkopem Zomos.”

  “I remember now,” he said. We stood before the big cedar, its shade just falling at our feet, and looked up at the great swath of hanging fabric. The glare of the sun was behind the shroud, so that its white iridescence made a play of strange rainbows, and as we looked at it our faces seemed to grow hotter and hotter; the space under the tree seemed dark and cold, and we hesitated a moment before stepping into the cedar-smelling cavern.

  Then the two of us stepped forward into the dim, dark green light. I blinked once as my eyes adjusted.

  Set gasped. There, under the tree, was a probe, sitting on its twelve metal feet—with a little scorch mark leading to it, presumably from flying the short distance, after cutting off its parachute, to this place under the tree.

  I just had time to realize that the smell of burnt mulch must mean it was still active. Then it swiveled the round bulb that sat on its top like a head, and we saw ourselves reflected in the big, clear, dark circle, as wide as my hand, on the top of the bulb. With a slight hum and clicking noise, it lifted three of its six “front” legs up, extended them, and took a slow, graceful step toward us. The round thing on top—its eye, I thought, but that was the wrong word for it—tilted up to look at our faces, and swung back and forth between us, as if making sure it could memorize what we both looked like.

  “Camera,” I said finally. “The round thing on the top that looks like an eye is a camera, Set. It’s sending pictures of us to someone, or something. But I don’t think it’s to Wahkopem Zomos.”

  From the Report of Thetakisus, Captain’s Assistant, Egalitarian Republic

  The first time we ran the engines of our starship, Egalitarian Republic, at full, and went up close to lightspeed, was as we departed from Nisu, so we had no real idea what we were getting into. We had made short trips in the ship at high acceleration, but never more than half a day at ten gravities.

  For our initial boost out of the solar system we were going to be taking off at more than ten gravities for forty days. There were volunteers who had spent that long, at gravity that high, in centrifuges, and the People’s Space Exploration Foundation assured us they had all survived and suffered little pain or difficulty. Indeed we were given to understand that after a few days acclimating, the five eightdays’ acceleration would be like a long, comfortable vacation. It wasn’t until we actually experienced it that we noticed that none of us had ever actually met or talked to any of the volunteers from the centrifuges.

  The Nisuan body was just not made to withstand ten gravities of acceleration for five eightdays. And they could preach all they wanted about how much stronger so many of us were, being Hybrids, but even if that were true it only meant we were stronger than purebred Palathians or Shulathians. Yarn is stronger than thread, but neither will hold up a bridge. We Hybrids were still just flesh and blood, and our bodies weren’t up to it. Besides, the Palathian and Shulathian members of the crew didn’t seem to me to be any more or less miserable under high acceleration than we were.

  We spent forty days immersed in the tanks, much of our ten-times-normal weight buoyed up by the special fluid, the pressure equalized by filling our body cavities with the same fluid. We breathed through masks for the entire time, switching them with the backups for cleaning every day.

  Hand-operated voice synthesizers and speaker plugs in our ears let us talk; the same goggles that protected our eyes from the terrible pressure also allowed us to read text or watch motion pictures projected on them. Catheters carried off waste, and we “ate,” “breathed,” and “drank” intravenously.

  We survived, but by the sixth day in the tanks we knew that things were not really going according to plan; unfortunately, with the Political Officer right there in Tank One with us, the rest of us in that tank could hardly discuss it or decide to change a mission plan that had been laid out at the highest levels of the state. So we endured it, and we wondered—or I did, anyway, since I didn’t dare to find out if anyone else felt the same way—whether they had planned for us to be this uncomfortable, and not cared, or whether they had even done the centrifuge experiments at all as they said they had.

  A forty-day stay in the tank was a mixture of ways of being uncomfortable. First of all there is a limit to how much you can talk about, how much you can watch, how much you can read, as anyone who has been bedridden for a while can tell you. The tanks were small, too, so that even if we had been able to get off our couches, there would have been nowhere to go.

  Rather than bet on our ability to operate the ship while in the tank, they had automated everything, which meant that nothing we did during those five eightdays really mattered. I remember Captain Baegess complaining that he might as well not have come along, since every important maneuver was being done by the machines. So not only were we bored, but for the moment, we were unnecessary.

  And everything ached, not so badly that it was agony, but just enough so that we never felt physically well. The engineers and biotechs had kept us from being permanently injured or killed by cushioning and buoying our bodies and the major organs within them. But they could not possibly protect every little corner of the body from every vagary of pressure and acceleration, and they had not tried. Joints tired and became sore from pushing against unaccustomed loads. Little places—our gums, our ears, the pads of fat in our buttocks—seemed to be constantly injured and bruised. Muscles most people hardly know exist—the ones that moved food through our digestive tracts, for example—ached with overwork. The large muscles in our bodies, forced both to be inactive and to carry heavy loads, cramped or felt worn out. Nothing was hurt badly enough to require medical attention, and yet everything hurt. The day we emerged from high acceleration had been planned as a day of celebration and rest; it ended up being a day of rest, followed by another day of rest. We took our acceleration down to a tenth of a gravity, just enough to keep us comfortably in our bunks, and stayed in bed. It was the first of many times we disobeyed the original flight plan, but if Captain Baegess got any complaints from Streeyeptin, our Political Officer, he didn’t mention them around me.

  Besides, we were now twenty-two light-days away from them and moving so near the speed of light that any radio message about our getting off the plan would only overtake us after we arrived at Sete
pos.

  Streeyeptin seemed to accept that things would be politically looser on the ship than at home with good grace and kept mostly to himself, making it clear that he was not concerned with any subversive remarks we might make, nor with watching us for deviant or prerevolutionary behavior.

  Not that they had much to worry about from the crew of a starship. All of us under thirty—more than half the crew of twenty—were Hybrids. In the old days before the Revolution, we would have been killed at birth. The older ship’s officers were mostly veterans of the Revolution. We probably had the best political reliability profiles of anyone Streeyeptin had ever been around.

  Besides, anyone who wanted to go into space had to be pro-Revolutionary. Not least among the crimes of the last empress had been the way that, with the Intruder already on its way around for its final, world-wrecking pass, she had squandered precious time and money trying to bribe the people into continuing to support her tyrannical regime. The Revolution had come about in part when we learned that our single remaining hope, Wahkopem Zomos, had failed, and that the Imperial Academy had been sitting on the revolutionary discovery of the zero-point energy laser, the engine that could take us to the stars.

  So if you supported space, you supported the Revolution—for without the Revolution there would have been no starships. Every member of our crew had spent at least ten years trying to get a berth on the starships, particularly on Egalitarian Republic, since it would fly the first real interstellar mission, and I think that if there were anyone on board with any counterrevolutionary tendencies, all the rest of us would turn such a person over to the Political Officer at the first opportunity.