Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  Everywhere, Real People Town was falling into confusion and chaos. The only thing that seemed to be certain was that Nisuans were supposed to go to the Palace Square, so there were a number of Nisuan children and house slaves winding through the streets, with everyone giving them a wide berth. Now and then a Seteposian would hurry by, carrying a Nisuan baby that the family had been given by Rar to bring up in slavery; once one of them shouted to me, “Please, Diehrenn, if you will, can you tell them I am taking this child to the square as quickly as I can, and we have been good to him?”

  I repeated what they had said in Nisuan, and Bepemm said, “Tell her that if that is true, no harm will come to her or her family.” I repeated that to the woman. The Seteposian woman seemed to be almost fainting with fear, but she headed toward the brightly lit lander that towered above Real People Town.

  “You looked startled,” Thetakisus observed, “when she spoke to you. What surprised you?”

  I looked down at the ground. “Well,” I said, “I’m really not used to anyone asking me rather than telling me, and she said ‘please,’ the same thing as the Nisuan request for courtesy—it’s only used between equals. No Seteposian ever spoke to me that way before. So even though she used my name, it took me a moment to realize she was speaking to me.”

  I didn’t know quite what the glances the Nisuans exchanged meant. They didn’t seem to be disapproval of me, yet I could tell they were not pleased.

  “Well,” Thetakisus said, “I guess we still have some ground to cover, and we should get that done. Streeyeptin wanted to get the word out before anyone got any stupid ideas about harming Nisuans or taking them hostage.”

  We had already circled the square, first in the inner ring of streets and then in the outer, and thus covered the territory within the stone wall; as I explained to Thetakisus, this meant that we had reached almost all the Nisuans and their masters within Real People Town, because the people beyond the stone wall gate, in the larger outer part of town, were usually too poor to merit Nisuan slaves. “But there are a few outside,” I said, “all close to the stone wall. It will be faster if we just go to their huts.”

  The Nim was not completely heartless or impractical; some Nisuan slaves were invalids from one injury or another; a few, like Captain Osepok and my father, were really too old to work; and then there were a number of “breeders,” very fertile females who were kept constantly pregnant or nursing. There were no more than ten Nisuans in the outer town, counting two not-yet-weaned babies, and most were on the gate side of the stone wall. It was a matter of only a few moments to go to each hut.

  Still it took us a long while, because we quickly realized that many of the people we were talking to could not move themselves. Soon our party was burdened: two Nisuans lamed by their cruel masters were leaning on Krurix, as a sort of shared crutch; my younger sister Geremm, disabled with pneumonia, was leaning on me; Itenn was carrying two babies, and we were accompanied by mothers carrying two more, plus several Nisuans who could shuffle along but not carry anything themselves. When we reached my father’s hut, our last stop, I was relieved to discover that my mother was not there, and there was a note lettered by my father hanging from the lintel that said he and Priekahm had already gotten her to the Palace Square.

  As we moved our little party of invalids through the streets back toward the shining tower of the lander, I used the amplifier to repeat the announcement a few times, just in case there were any stragglers or anyone still holding out or hiding. We were getting near Palace Square when something hissed by my face, so close I felt the cool wind of the arrow before I fully knew what it was.

  Thetakisus and Sereterses were thinking faster than I was; I later learned that those huge masks they wore permitted them to see in the dark. At the time all wonders seemed possible; if they had both turned into wolves or walked straight up the wall of a house I would have been no more and no less surprised. From their utility harnesses they pulled cylinders small enough to fit in the palms of their hands, touched their own faces once, and then turned and clicked the cylinders with their thumbs, all in one swift movement. At once, from the surrounding darkness, I heard screams. The two Nisuans dashed into the dark together. There were more screams, and I heard a couple of Seteposian voices begging for their lives, then “not my children,” and then more screams. A moment later flames leaped up from a house, and by their light I could see Thetakisus and Sereterses dragging still bodies out of the house to line up in the street in front of it.

  They returned to us, and Thetakisus said, “I’m afraid I’ll need you as translator. This is going to be unpleasant, but it’s highly necessary.” He turned to Bepemm and said, “Get everyone back to the square. If you’re assaulted, same drill I followed—kill the attackers, everyone near them, and everyone in any building they came out of or fled to. Burn all the buildings connected with them. Display the bodies.”

  Under his mask Krurix looked a little ill; Thetakisus asked him sharply if there was a problem. “No, sir, I’ll follow orders, of course,” he said.

  I got Geremm set up to be supported by three of the mothers who could walk. They headed out to Palace Square, and I returned with the two males to the burning building. A crowd had gathered around, looking at the bodies. Thetakisus and Sereterses kept the cylinders out where people could see them. “It’s a hand maser,” Thetakisus said as we approached the crowd. “Shoots an invisible beam that cooks flesh in an instant and will set wood or fabric on fire.” He pointed at a part of the roof of the house that was not yet on fire and squeezed his hand maser, making another click. With a soft whoosh, flames shot up from where he had pointed. The crowd of Seteposians moaned with fear.

  “Okay, now use your amp and tell them what I say to you,” he said.

  I held it to my mouth and translated as Thetakisus explained that he had killed “this bag of garbage” (pointing to the corpse that still wore a quiver of arrows) for taking a shot at us, four others for being with him, and the rest for allowing them to hide behind their house. “This is what will happen to everyone who raises a hand against us and to everyone who assists them in the smallest way, whether deliberately or not,” he said, and I repeated it to the Seteposians. “Furthermore, there is to be no gathering or mourning for these bags of garbage; they are to receive no burial or funeral honors and no one is to gather for any purpose connected with their deaths. This crowd is in violation of that order, but because we are merciful we will only punish a few of you this time, so that the rest of you can explain our rules to the other animals.”

  They stood stunned, not understanding what was about to happen. Sereterses walked into the crowd and grabbed three of them, dragging them forward into the light of the burning house.

  I saw something and darted into the crowd for a moment. I heard Thetakisus cry out in surprise, but I didn’t stop to explain—I just grabbed and got her by the hair—Esser, the five-year-old who I had been attending. The little beast had had me whipped many times, for no reason other than that I had frustrated some whim or other. I wrapped my fingers in her hair and dragged her over to join the three others, screaming and crying. To make sure she stayed put, I pushed her down onto the pavement, hard, and treated myself to kicking her in the head. She wailed in fear and pain. It was wonderful. “Her too,” I said to the startled Thetakisus.

  He gestured agreement, his expression under the mask a little baffled. He had me announce that these would suffer the penalty for having formed a crowd around the site of an execution, as an example to the others, and then he and Sereterses clicked the cylinders at them, pointing at their heads. They died instantly in an odor of roasting meat.

  Thetakisus held up the maser and announced, through me and the amplifier, that he would use it on anyone who was still in sight after he counted five. The crowd broke and ran in terror. He turned to me and gestured at Esser’s body, asking “Why?”

  “Because she was my most recent master,” I said, “and because she’s of the Nim’s
family. It helped make it clear that they can expect nothing and that they are to obey.” I kicked the little corpse once. “Why did you say this was going to be unpleasant?”

  It was our first time back on Republic after seven days, local time, on the ground, and Bepemm and I had just finished showering and dressing and were considering what to have for dinner. We decided to have everything.

  “What a job,” I said, after we had both spent a while stuffing our faces. “I don’t think I slept an eighth of a day uninterrupted after we got down there.”

  She yawned. “That’s my big plan for after this. A long nap. Who’d have thought … well, any of it?”

  During those seven days, we had discovered two things: every Nisuan in Real People Town was hell-bent on taking revenge for the decades of slavery, and the inhabitants of Real People Town both expected to be slaughtered and expected to be fed. When the gods arrive, apparently, there’s no need to be responsible anymore. At the direction of Prirox, who had managed a great deal of the agriculture for years, we had had to force them to clear canals, carry water, weed and hoe, and do all the other necessary tasks. Then we had discovered that we also had to manage the granaries and put out fires—in short, do almost everything that they had been doing for themselves before we got there. Just before the lander had shuttled us up here for rest and normal food, a group of Seteposians had come to us wanting us to settle a dispute over land, and another group had come to complain that various surrounding villages were not paying taxes they “owed” to the Real People.

  The most popular thing we had done—at least among the Nisuans we had rescued—was killing off Nim Rar and all his heirs. Just to make things extra-clear, we also blew up the stone tower and breached the walls. Real People Town, as an imperial capital, was finished. At times I felt sorry for various terrified Seteposians; but when I did, I thought of what I had learned from talking to Diehrenn and her father.

  “So are you going to take your native princess back with you?” Bepemm asked, a strange glint in her eye.

  “What?” I said, through a mouthful of food.

  “Exactly what do you have in mind for Diehrenn?”

  I was startled. “Well, I don’t think that’s my decision—”

  Bepemm snorted. “Right. She follows you around like a pet, you spend hours talking to her, you’re even learning Real-People from her, and she happens to have a wonderful body and a beautiful face. And all this is coincidence.”

  It occurred to me that Bepemm might be jealous, but since she and I had never actually been involved, I could see no graceful way to discuss that, so instead I said, “Well, don’t be silly. She is one of our best interpreters. She does like working with me, and yes, she’s beautiful, but neither she nor I have talked about anything like that.”

  “And she just happened to come up on this very lander for her dialysis,” Bepemm said.

  “Well, her mother had regained consciousness—it was about time she got to see her. She’s been worried.”

  Using Soikenn’s work from decades before as a starting point, it had only taken Dr. Lerimarsix a couple of days to track down the slowly accumulating toxins produced by the Nisuan immune system trying to deal with ubiquitous unassimilable Seteposian proteins, and to show that those were what was slowly causing kidney and lung failure, as well as early sterility and half a dozen other complications that the Nisuans in Real People Town had not even known they had. Once the problem was solved, he had constructed dialysis rigs to clean out the toxins, and induced-regeneration drugs could then fix up most Nisuans as good as new. He had started on the Nisuans who had arrived on Wahkopem Zomos, because they had accumulated more toxins due to eating adult portions of Seteposian food almost from the day they arrived. Now he was starting on the first generation born on Setepos.

  “You know, if we’d been a couple of years later,” I said, “there might have been no one who spoke Nisuan at all. A lot of the older ‘native’ generation were very close to the line, or so Dr. Lerimarsix says.”

  “Do you suppose if they’d had no memory of a time before slavery, and no memory of adults telling them about it, they’d have been less vengeful?” Bepemm asked.

  “Being a slave is being a slave, wherever you came from, I think,” I said. “I don’t think any of us will ever understand how deeply they all hate Seteposians. I don’t think I would want to be able to understand.”

  Bepemm took a large mouthful and chewed vigorously. “Me either,” she said. “But seriously, Thetakisus, even if you don’t feel anything for Diehrenn, she’s clearly fascinated with you.”

  That made me even more uncomfortable, because the truth was she’d been haunting my dreams—when I’d had time to sleep, which wasn’t often or much. Her ferocity shocked me, her experiences appalled me (from puberty on, she had copulated with whomever she was ordered to copulate with—and seemed to regard it as the least unpleasant part of her job), and yet … there was something about her I found really magnificent. Possibly I was just impressed with what she had survived, or with her fierce curiosity and longing to learn everything new right away. Perhaps Bepemm was right and it was only that Diehrenn was beautiful.

  From the way Bepemm was glaring at me, I realized I had probably gotten a faraway look in my eyes, right when the subject of Diehrenn had come up—a bad idea. I was trying to think how to correct the situation when Krurix came in, carrying a pastry that was probably part of finishing off his big meal. “Do the two of you have a minute to talk?”

  Bepemm looked visibly relieved; maybe she hadn’t wanted to have a fight, either. “If we can stuff our faces while you talk, that’s even better.”

  He sat down, took a bite of the pastry he had carried in, swallowed, and said, “Well, to start with the embarrassing part, it’s about the zero-point energy laser again, and the way the plates are working. When I got back and looked at the recorded graphs, from every time we modulate the laser—which we have to do because every time either of the landers docks or launches, and every time we launch a probe, we have to retune it just a little to maintain station—well, the plate responses have been getting weirder. The periods of chaos are taking longer, less and less of the curves are smooth. I’m really afraid it’s deteriorating.”

  “Uh, isn’t this something for you to talk to Azir about?” I asked. What he was saying was alarming, but we weren’t the people who could do anything about it.

  “Yeah. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Azir is so scared of going back to Streeyeptin that she won’t even try. It would throw the schedule off by quite a bit, you know. The overhaul in ballistic orbit would be about ten days, and with having to fly rendezvous maneuvers instead of just coming up like an elevator, each lander would only be able to make a trip every other day or so, I think, instead of the two per day they’re making now. So it would really throw Streeyeptin’s plans off. But I think if Streeyeptin understands the risk, he’s not going to be completely unreasonable. He wants to get the mission accomplished and get home, too. So I think he needs to know that it looks bad, and what’s bad about it, and what I wanted to ask you is if you have any brilliant ideas about how to approach him.” He took a large bite, chewed hard, and added, “The thing is, I don’t care if he’s mad at me as long as the ship is safe, but I know I’m a pretty irritating person, and I don’t want to blow the chance to explain the situation. And I’m afraid that’s just what would happen. I think that—”

  “Pardon me,” Streeyeptin said, coming in. We all froze. He looked around and sighed. “No, don’t think you’re in any trouble. Krurix, I wasn’t deliberately listening, but I was passing by when you started your conversation. So it is your judgment that we have less time than you had thought before the main drive fails? And do I remember that, if it fails, the ship could be destroyed?”

  “Only if it fails during hover, sir,” Krurix said. “If we’re in orbit or en route, we’d have all the time in the world to fix it, and it’s not hard to fix. It’s only if we sho
uld drop into the atmosphere while the plates are jammed at the bottom that we could get blown up, once the emergency restart kicks in. But if that happened … well, then, yes, the ship would be pretty much gone. That’s why I’d rather take us to orbit; that would mean we’d have all the time we needed to do the overhaul.”

  Streeyeptin seemed to consider, and finally said, “Well, there’s a sort of compromise that we can make, but I’m afraid it’s bad news for the four of us.” He saw that he had our attention and went on. “Here’s the situation. No doubt it’s occurred to you that the Nim’s breeding program has put us in a terrible spot? We had planned to have room to take along ten Nisuans, in case a couple of children had been born to the original expedition. Twelve, with a great deal of squeezing and discomfort, is the limit. We can’t take even one-third of the Nisuans off of Setepos and back to Nisu in Egalitarian Republic.

  “Now, that’s bad enough. I’ve already sent a radio message back to Nisu about all this, and when they get it, four years from now, assuming ships aren’t desperately needed for dozens of things they probably will be needed for … then I would guess it would only take them two years to get a rescue expedition together, which would take about four and a half years to get here—so we’re looking at any help being at least a decade away.

  “But there’s another problem, one that none of you would have had much reason to think about just yet. The Nisuans here are former slaves and they hate Seteposians violently. Ergo, if we arm them and tell them to wait for us here, all we’re going to do is recreate the Nim’s empire with a Nisuan royal family. Equality, if it means anything, has to extend to everyone—even to Seteposians living in the Stone Age—and we need people here on the spot to make sure that what develops is a fair and free society, to teach these people, both the former slaves and the former masters, how to live together, at least as well as we’ve managed on Nisu. The most obvious person for such a job is a political officer, and hence I’m volunteering.”