Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  No one could remember ever having heard of this speaker before. His name was Fereg Yorock, and he was one of ten Palathian members in the General Court—back during the Emancipation, ten representative seats for Palathians had been created on the General Court, and ten posts in the imperial bureaucracy had been reserved for Shulathians. Nowadays, theoretically, all the posts except emperor were open to either race; in reality it didn’t happen.

  “I don’t remember any Yorock family,” Osepok muttered.

  “They couldn’t be that important or he wouldn’t be in a ceremonial slot like that,” Kekox added. “Normally it’s bad form for one of us even to talk in General Court. What’s he up to?”

  Soikenn shushed them again; the introductory speaker had finally gotten done with reading all the credentials for Fereg, most of them minor posts in provincial bureaucracies.

  “My friends and equals,” he began. Kekox muttered; that was the way Egalitarians began speeches. Soikenn shushed him, and meanwhile Fereg went on, “—no one can doubt that the efforts of the Reconstruction agencies and of the Migration Project have been heroic and have been carried out with the utmost spirit of intelligence and cooperation. Nisu is a better world because of their efforts, and indeed our whole civilization is not only richer, but far more equal and free than it was a scant hundred and fifty years ago.

  “I argue only that the time has come to consider not only our duty to our honored ancestors, and what must be done for future generations, but also what can be done for we, the living. The unprecedented advances of science and technology which we have made—moving from crude aircraft and steamships to our first starflight in only a century—is itself a rich inheritance, and I believe that without jeopardizing any of our accomplishments, we can still draw upon it for everyone’s benefit.”

  “Words, words, words,” Poiparesis said. “Come on, tell us what you want to do.”

  The image of Fereg on the screen smiled and said, “I have examined budgets and plans exhaustively for the last half-year, and what I have found is that we have considerable room for the improvement of life here on Nisu, for this generation. I call this the Planetary Improvement Program, and what I propose is …”

  It was a long list. Public parks, beaches free to everyone, two extra eightdays of paid vacation each year, retirement two years early for most people, a complete reequipping of the Imperial Guard with more modern aircraft and ships, two new legions of Imperial Guard to be raised in Shulath …

  “Something for everybody,” Osepok muttered. “Right. Now just what do you suppose he plans to use to pay for it?”

  It took some time, because the number of things he was promising was so large, but after a while he got around to talking about paying for it. His plan had just three parts: step one, stretch out planning and design studies for an extra eleven years on Imperial Hope, “to take advantage of technical advances and so that the large capital expenditures of the early years of the Planetary Improvement Program will not come at the same time as the start-up costs of construction.”

  “Right, stretch it out, make it cost more, and get more snouts into the trough,” Kekox said.

  Step two, put the missions to the five other systems known to have habitable planets on hold, since Setepos was so clearly promising, and if it should prove unsuitable, there would be time to refit Wahkopem Zomos again and send it to the next most promising system.

  Soikenn groaned. “Right. Bet the whole future on this ship.”

  Step three: Delay by twelve years the power-up of the next-generation boost laser, so that the solar power satellites intended for it could be diverted to lowering energy cost on Nisu and thus “enhancing the climate for our neglected private enterprise sector.”

  “What!?” Captain Osepok stood up in shock.

  None of the rest of us could speak at all. Our entire plan for returning home depended on that laser, and even though it was twice as powerful as the one pushing us now, it would still take us forty-one years to get back.

  The reasons for that were simple and unavoidable. At Setepos, we would have no antimatter-liquid hydrogen booster to start us falling toward Kousapex, the sun of that world. We would take well over a year to maneuver ourselves into an elongated elliptical orbit that would bring us in close enough to Kousapex, in the proper position, to get a solar boost to start us on our journey.

  But that boost, too, would be smaller; Kousapex was only three-quarters as bright as our Sun, and it had no companion star to give us another boost. We would leave moving at less than one-thirty-second of light-speed—as opposed to the more than one-twentieth at which we had left our home system.

  So we would be delayed in starting, and we would leave more slowly. But the last of all the problems was the biggest: we would have to “swim upstream” in the laser beam. We could do this because once we had received enough of the beam to carry us to Setepos, an enormous lightweight mirror, five times the diameter of our sail and made of the same material, was being sent out on the beam after us. By the time we finished our mission on Setepos and were on our way home, the mirror would pass us and continue on into space, reflecting almost all of the light back toward our home system.

  Our sail was beryllium on the side that faced us, and boron on the side that faced out into space. The bright beryllium reflected light; the dark boron absorbed it. Reflected light gives twice as much push as absorbed light; thus the light reflected from the mirror would push twice as hard on the beryllium surface as the light coming directly from the laser would on the boron, and we would move toward the laser at half the acceleration with which we could move away from it—if the mirrors and sail had been perfect. However, the mirror, like our sail, reflected only about nine-tenths of what fell onto it, and further, the dark boron “outside” surface of the sail did reflect about one-twentieth of the light falling on it. Thus the effective push on us for our return trip, when all the countervailing forces were added up, would be only nine-twentieths what it had been on the way out.

  The only advantage in speed that the return trip would have over the outbound was that instead of electrostatic braking using interstellar protons, we would be able to simply turn the ship around and use the laser itself to brake. Because of this, we could accelerate (though slowly) almost the whole way home. Even so, with the new laser power station, twice as powerful as the one now driving us to Setepos, the return journey would still take forty-one years. Now they were talking about not bringing the new station in on schedule—which meant we would be forced to make the first part of the return trip at much lower acceleration.

  “How long?” Kekox asked.

  “Figuring it,” Soikenn said, tapping at a wall terminal. Poiparesis had pulled out his portable terminal, and for a long moment we all watched the two Shulathian scientists as they worked, hoping to hear a different answer from the one we knew we would hear.

  “I get sixty-nine years,” Soikenn said.

  “Same here. Mother Sea’s blood, you kids will just get home in time to die of old age,” Poiparesis said.

  “Shh,” Osepok said, “I think somebody else figured that out and now Fereg is explaining.”

  Fereg was answering a shouted question from a news-teller; he said, “No, not at all. The point is that by canceling the other missions, we can eventually add the power stations planned for them to the Wahkopem Zomos mission, which will give them much more acceleration toward the end of the trip. My experts can show you that they’ll be back in just about twenty percent more time than planned. Which will cost nothing extra—”

  “Twenty percent?” Osepok said. “So even with his plan that’s still about forty-eight years. Assuming they don’t find reasons to cancel or divert that power production later. Which I certainly wouldn’t assume.”

  “You know what I’m afraid of?” Otuz said. “That they’ll give up entirely, and the way we’ll find out is that all of a sudden the sail will just stop glowing, because a few years ago they turned off the laser boost
, and the last of it will bounce off our sails and we’ll be on our own, somewhere in the void.”

  Soikenn shuddered. “You’re going to scare yourselves to death,” she said. “Look, we’re all worried, and we’re angry, but it’s not necessarily anything to be afraid of. Politicians usually don’t mean anything, when you come right down to it. Pretty soon someone will make a fuss about how Imperial Hope isn’t getting built fast enough, and accuse these people of destroying the Migration Project, and the same people who voted for ‘striking a balance’ will throw Fereg and his crowd out on their ears to ‘save the future’ or some slogan like that.”

  But the newscast went on and on, showing more and more public protests in Shulath and even big rallies in Palath itself. It looked like the Planetary Improvement Program was very popular.

  And though the politicians were always careful to talk about “balance” and “of course we don’t want to lose a century of progress,” many of the ordinary people interviewed said bluntly that they didn’t see any reason to save their great-grandchildren.

  One old Palathian appeared on the screen and said, “I don’t call it no century of progress. We got all this new stuff but nobody can use it, and you just know where all the jobs and money are going, don’t you? Right over to Shulath, for those tall skinny long-ears to play with. Shulath is getting rich off all this go-to-Setepos nonsense, and once they get money, all those long-ears go around acting just like they’re equal, just like they’re something special, and they forget their place—”

  “Turn it off,” Kekox said. “We can always play that recording some other time if anyone really needs to see it.”

  During the next few eightweeks, the news was bad every night. The Planetary Improvement Program carried easily in the General Court and the empress adopted it virtually as her own.

  “The trouble is, all our constituency is either dead or not born yet,” Otuz said, as we children shared a late meal after a day of studying. We often met together as a group in the evening, to talk about our research and ongoing projects.

  “That never stopped anyone from voting in Shulath, if the history books are telling the truth,” Mejox said.

  Priekahm looked around wide-eyed at us, and said, “Well, you know … I mean, I don’t agree with them, but I can understand them. Of course hanging out here in the middle of light-years of vacuum, we see that we need the support, and we understand that the thing has to go forward. But if you look at it from their viewpoint—”

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “I mean, I understand wanting to just toss away the future and have fun now. But I also understand that we can’t do that. Nobody asked us, either, and we’re all giving up a lot more than any taxpayer back home. All of us have given up most of our lives to this. The adults are going to die on Setepos. We’re going to be old before we ever see Nisu again, and after just a few years of going outside again and exploring big, beautiful Setepos, we’ll have to get back inside this metal box and put in a fifty-two-year return trip—assuming Fereg Yorock and the empress keep even that much faith.”

  Priekahm shuddered and touched Mejox’s arm. “Let’s not talk about that.”

  “Sure, of course you’re right,” Mejox said. “Zahmekoses, I have an idea I’d like to talk with you about, later.”

  One of the odder things about Mejox in the last year had been his protectiveness of Priekahm; he acted as if he couldn’t bear for her to hear anything that might upset her. Odder still was that she not only accepted it, but seemed to like it. So it was no surprise that he dropped in on Otuz and me the next day, while we were working in the lab—and while Priekahm was doing remedial math with Osepok.

  “I guess what I wanted to talk about,” Mejox said, “is this whole stupid business of leaving Setepos once we’re there.”

  Otuz sighed. “It will be hard on all of us, but I’m sure it will be hardest on you. You’re practically living there already.”

  Mejox, who had never seemed to care much for study, though he was certainly bright enough, had flung himself into the study of the probe data with surprising enthusiasm. We had been getting a steady stream of information as successive generations of probes from Tiber, launched with better and better technology (so that they were lighter) and more power available for boost, had been getting to Setepos more and more quickly and reliably. Moreover, as we got closer to Setepos, radio lag grew shorter; we were now receiving signal from the probes years before scientists back home got them. Some of the gossamer probes had descended to Setepos’s surface and relayed back some pictures, and Mejox’s private chamber was literally lined with copies of those pictures, particularly the three that showed largish animals.

  “I wish that were true,” he said. “It’s so beautiful. I don’t see how I’ll even have time to look at the hundred or so places I most want to see: those strange boglands at the mouths of rivers, those wide plains, all those wet hot forests—so many strange places. And I’d like to float down one of those rivers in a boat, and take a year to do it … but after we’ve only been there five years, we’ve got to start back. And get old before we breathe open air again!”

  He seemed to be gasping for breath, and I think we were all about to ask what was wrong, when he suddenly jumped up and ran into the passageway. A moment later we heard his door slam.

  “What was that about? Did I hurt his feelings?” Otuz asked.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted.

  “Me either,” Otuz said.

  The next day he apologized, saying he was sorry if he had offended us, and then in the middle of apologizing he started to cry. When we tried to comfort him he ran down the corridor and slammed his door again. We went to find somebody to tell us what was going on, and we found Poiparesis in the observatory.

  “This is either a habit or a disease,” Otuz said.

  “Close but not quite right,” Poiparesis said. “He’s going into puberty. He’s a little ahead of the rest of you, but you’ll all be acting like that soon.”

  “Did you act like that?” I demanded.

  “Er, yes.”

  “And I was worse,” Kekox added, coming in. “You’ll all have to try to be nice to Mejox, and that won’t be at all easy because he’s going to be rude and unpleasant, and once puberty hits you, you’ll be just as bad.”

  Otuz was next oldest, but Priekahm was the next to go into puberty. If anything, she was worse about it, and she and Mejox seemed to rotate between rudely ignoring each other, sobbing in each other’s arms, screaming at each other, and cuddling up and talking baby-talk.

  Otuz and I couldn’t stand them, in any of their phases, and we started spending even more of our time together. Our friendship had grown so deep that it often seemed that when one of us spoke, it was to finish the other’s thought.

  We knew the adults were unhappy about Priekahm and Mejox, but, being still children ourselves, just why the adults were upset didn’t occur to us for a while. But as it happened the day that Soikenn decided to take Priekahm aside for a talk in the computer lab, we were in the rear study room, right next to it. We crept over to the door to hear what Soikenn was saying so softly and urgently to Priekahm.

  “You’re not an adult yet,” she hissed, “and you don’t have my experience. And I can tell you’ve forgotten who you are and who he is. You’re a Shulathian, Priekahm. You can’t marry him, and if he takes you as consort it will destroy his future. And the way Palathian males treat females—”

  “Mejox is not—”

  “I’m not a bigot, and I’ve worked with Palathians all my life and I like many of them, but there’s a certain amount of truth in the old saying about them being half animals. He’ll get what he wants and after that he’ll think you’re his whore, that he can have you for sex whenever he wants it. We’ve got to protect ourselves against—”

  “Like you did?” I had never heard such anger or aggression in Priekahm’s voice; she had always been the gentle, timid one among us. Now I cringed just to hear her tone
.

  Soikenn gasped slightly, and then, choking with fury, she said, “Who told you?”

  “Mejox said he saw you once, and he heard the captain saying—”

  “That’s enough.” Soikenn’s voice was tight and cold with anger, but she kept her tone even. “But I’m the case that proves it, Priekahm. Poiparesis and I had been no more than colleagues to each other for a long time. Kekox gave me the impression the same was true for him and Osepok. It didn’t seem wrong, and it was certainly a relief. But in the first place, Kekox was lying to me—and even though he’d deceived me, it was me that Osepok was angry with. And ever since then—well, it’s hard to explain. Let’s say Kekox will probably never take anything I think, do, or say seriously again. And he’s about as decent as Palathians get. Most of them would have been much worse about it; at least he’s careful of everyone’s feelings. Or everyone’s except mine, anyway. And he’s never said a word in front of you children. But that’s the best you can hope for from Mejox—when he’s done he’ll treat you like a toy that used to be interesting. Is that all you want?”

  There was a crack and a soft moan; it took me an instant to realize that Priekahm had hit Soikenn. Then I heard Priekahm running down the inner deck to her room, and the door slamming.

  After a long time Soikenn sighed. The door opened, then closed very softly behind her. Finally we could stir from our hiding place.

  “Never,” Otuz said, “absolutely never.”

  “Never what?”

  “I’m never going to let them marry me to Mejox. He was always greedy and pushy, and I’m not as dumb and docile as Priekahm. They aren’t going to turn him loose on me.”

  “But then,” I stammered, “I mean, we’re going to hit puberty, too—”

  “Zahmekoses, you’re my best friend. That’s usually who people end up with, back on Nisu. If they didn’t want us to feel that way, they shouldn’t have let us spend so much time together—”

  “There isn’t much choice in a spaceship,” I pointed out. “And look, the whole idea scares me a lot. I’ve seen how crazy Mejox is and I’m not looking forward to it. And even if he is headstrong and willful, he’s my friend.”