Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  Strange intense feelings were surging through me and my breath seemed to catch in my throat. I wanted to punch Otuz. I wanted to gather her into my arms. I wanted her to shut up and I wanted her to say—I didn’t know what.

  “He’s my friend!” I screamed. “He’s not going to act that way! And I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I know this—back home they kill Shulathian males for things like what you’re thinking about!” My breath was jammed in my throat, big as someone’s foot rammed down there, and then my feet seemed to throw me out the door and down the corridor.

  I heard Otuz calling “Zahmekoses!” after me, but I didn’t care and kept running. My room seemed like such a welcoming, friendly place, and when I flung myself into it and slammed the door, I was suddenly limp with relief. I stretched out on the bed and cried for a long time.

  After a while, Poiparesis knocked and called “Zahmekoses,” very gently and softly. I didn’t answer. He came in anyway, closed the door, and sat down on the bed beside me.

  “I didn’t ask you to come in,” I said.

  “I didn’t ask you to go into puberty,” he said. “You do know that’s what’s happening?”

  “Yes.” I lay there, trying to feel calmer, sinking facedown into my bed. “Two years of this?”

  “Around two years. Maybe you’ll come out sooner.”

  I groaned. “Well, I read all the stuff you told us to, and I think I understand it all.” I hoped he would go away.

  He didn’t. “Ah. Hard thing to bring up, you know. All of us—the adults, I mean—have been talking about, well, things. Uh …”

  “Otuz told you,” I said.

  “She’s sort of jealous, you know, because she’s second oldest, but she’s getting puberty late.”

  “She can have mine if she wants it.”

  Poiparesis chuckled. “The worst thing is, it doesn’t kill your sense of humor. You’re still acutely aware when you’re being ridiculous.”

  “Do you think—”

  “Not right now. And I hope to the Creator that I don’t laugh at you myself; I remember what it was like to be laughed at when I was going through it. Anyway, let me tell you what I came to tell you. Otuz told me your whole conversation, as much as she remembered, and I thought maybe a few things ought to be explained. All right?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Good. To begin at the beginning, we aren’t under Nisuan law here. The Creator alone knows what it’s going to be like when you get back—maybe there will be more tolerance, maybe less. It would really have been better for everyone if you kids had paired off the way it was planned, but there’s nothing we can do about it now, I suppose. Except hope you all outgrow it.”

  “Sure, but when I get back—”

  “You know there’s not a death penalty anymore?” he asked, as if he hadn’t been listening to me.

  “Yes, I do, but—”

  “Let me tell you something every biologist learns but nobody will say in public. Shulathians were slaves for hundreds of years. Supposedly all mixed-parent offspring were aborted or killed right after birth, right?”

  I nodded. I was suddenly realizing that Poiparesis seemed to be almost as upset as I was, and I didn’t know how to feel about that, or what was going on.

  “Well,” he said, “in all those centuries, do you suppose every baby born came out with a tag that said ‘one hundred percent pure’? Of course the two races are different in appearance, but we blend into each other—I’m sure you’ve heard Kekox mention that his older brother was called ‘Long-ears’ by everyone in the family, and that there were jokes about his mother and the family tutor? Well, chances are that he wasn’t a crossbreed—and I certainly would never suggest that he was around Kekox—but there’s a good chance that there was some crossbreeding in the family. In most families, in fact. Especially the older Palathian aristocracy, which had so many slaves for so long. It’s pretty well established that one emperor was a substitute baby.”

  “I’d heard of substitute babies, but I don’t know what they are,” I said.

  He grunted. “Simple. In the old days sometimes a Palathian line couldn’t produce an heir for one reason or another, so the male would impregnate a female slave, preferably one they thought was crossbred anyway. Then the female would go into confinement and pretend to be too ill to see people. When the baby was born they’d present it in public as their own.”

  “What happened to the female slave?”

  Poiparesis stared at me, his face hard and flat. “What do you think?”

  I shuddered. “That’s what scares me so much.”

  “It should. Never forget that even though Kekox and Osepok are just about the most kind, decent, loyal people you’ll ever meet, not every Palathian is like them. And even they—well, that doesn’t matter at the moment. The point is that yes, you have to watch out for yourself, and you have to keep your position in mind. But it’s a long time till you get back. Anything could happen in that time. And you won’t be getting sterility reversals until you’re en route back. So after a lot of extremely candid discussion among the adults—at the strong suggestion of Captain Osepok—we’ve decided to try to put our feelings aside and let you do what you think best. We won’t conceal from you that we would like to see everything settle out as it should have, and if that happens there won’t be a word of any of this back to Nisu—it will be just as if it had never happened. But if not … well, I think you should all do what seems best to you. It will be better, though, if we’re all allowed to pretend that we don’t know.” He got up from my bed, and I rolled over to look at him. From the way his shoulders sagged, he looked really old. He glanced back. “You’re all right?”

  “Except for being insane for the next two years, and having to worry about getting hanged when I get home, sure.” I rolled over and lay facedown on my bed. After a little while the door closed and I knew he was gone.

  8

  OTUZ ENTERED PUBERTY AN eighth of a year later. By that time it was a great relief to me; there was someone else I could stand to be around some of the time, and she seemed to feel for me a lot of what I felt for her.

  Within days of the first time Otuz and I touched each other sexually, I could tell that Kekox hated me, but since I was mad at the world that year, it didn’t make much difference. I kind of enjoyed it. I did remember Poiparesis’s warning, though, and I tried not to do anything very physical with Otuz in front of the old Imperial Guard, especially since it seemed to me very likely that if anyone on board was going to hurt anyone else, it would be Kekox attacking a Shulathian. He had the training and it was clear he wasn’t as open-minded as he was trying to act.

  Otuz, on the other hand, seemed to want to do everything in front of Kekox all the time. After a while Osepok took her aside and pointed out that she could get me killed. We both resented Osepok for it.

  Meanwhile, although we each spent more time with the girls, Mejox and I became good friends again, because we finally had a common interest: Setepos. We spent most of our working hours in the computer lab, extracting images from the data now pouring in from all the probes ahead of us.

  Picking a landing site was getting to be more and more difficult; if you didn’t count the one at the south pole that was under ice, this new world had five continents to Nisu’s two. All of the continents had a larger area than Shulath, and the biggest—the one we called simply “Big”—dwarfed Palath. The Hook was somewhat bigger, and Bug wasn’t much smaller. There was also an enormous number of islands, and they varied much more than those of Nisu did—we guessed that there must be at least a dozen island formation processes at work, where on Nisu only two were known.

  Furthermore, because there were so many land masses separated by water, and so many wide deserts and steep mountain ranges (though none of them high by our standards), Setepos had a much larger number of semiisolated local ecologies, and thus a far greater variety of animal life than we were used to.

  This made it all the mo
re complicated, for our soft-landing robot probes had actually touched down at only eight sites, and unfortunately none of them were anywhere that animals passed by frequently. The two in the hot, wet, equatorial forests were hanging from the shroud lines of their parachutes, high up in the dim gloom, and saw little of the life around them except when something climbed or slithered over branches near them, or when the flying animals tried to perch on them. The probes in the deserts and mountains had simply set down too far from anything an animal would be interested in. The only exception was one that had landed on a broad plain near a riverbank in the center of the Bug; it was fine as far as it went, except that the only species of any significance around it seemed to be the immense brown-and-black horned animals who came down to the river to drink twice a day.

  “There are five more four-probe packages on their way,” Soikenn said. “We’ll get twenty more looks before we land. And we still have more than a year of deceleration and maneuvering. Plenty of time.”

  “Oh, sure, yes,” Mejox said. “But for right now if I see one more big furry coat—”

  “It ought to make you feel at home, fossil-boy,” I said. As our friendship had renewed, so had the teasing.

  “Somewhere out there on that planet,” Mejox said, “there is an animal with long ears. Preferably a smelly animal with unpleasant habits and long ears. And I think it’s a priority to find one, so that I won’t be at a conversational disadvantage.”

  I laughed; Soikenn sighed. “When you two are on your way back to Nisu, promise me you’ll both spend the last ten years practicing not talking that way. I know it’s all a game to you, you’ve grown up equal and comfortable with each other all your lives, but—”

  “‘It could get us killed back home,’” we said in unison.

  She laughed and put an arm around both of us, “I have said that pretty often, haven’t I? I’m sorry. Anyway, we have a hundred more images to process, if you aren’t tired.”

  “Never,” Mejox said. “Insane but not tired, that’s us.” We worked over the pictures silently for a long time; again there was nothing but desert, rock, ice, and the limb of one tall tree. In one picture from a tree, we did find one small animal being swallowed by a long, thin, legless one. At first we thought the thin, legless one was just another tree limb. “I’ve never seen anything like that no-legger before, but it’s creepy,” Mejox said. “I hope there’s nothing big enough to do that to us.”

  “Oh, if there is, you have four expendable old people to try it out on,” Soikenn said.

  Mejox snorted. “Osepok is too tough to swallow, Poiparesis isn’t enough meat, Kekox is bitter, and I like you. Let’s get the last images done—”

  I was about to leave them to finish the set out together—I usually did, since Soikenn and Mejox had a lot more patience for the fiddling process of imaging than I did—when I saw something forming in one image and stuck around.

  The picture came from a probe that had landed in the desert in the north part of the Hook. Where we had collected days and days of pictures of sand, rock, and sky, suddenly here was a big animal—almost a bodylength and a half long, probably more than a bodylength tall at the shoulder, and the ugliest, most graceless beast that had ever gone on four legs. It had an apparent huge upward crook in its spine, a strange swaying neck, a long head with thick lips, and ridiculously big feet on silly long thin legs. It seemed to be covered with long matted brown hair. It was staring at the probe with an expression of such vacant stupidity that all of us burst out laughing.

  “You’re in luck, Zahmekoses,” Mejox said, “this one has short ears, too.”

  More probes landed on Setepos. It was still more than half a year until we got there, but now we were entering the inner part of Kousapex’s surrounding cloud of cometoids; we even took a look at one through our telescopes and radars once, but it looked exactly like every other cometoid, a soft ball of snow with rocks and chunks of iron in it.

  Shortly after that, one of our probes came down in an open meadow in the middle of a forest, near a stream, in the eastern part of the Bug. We cataloged dozens more animals in a short time. To Mejox’s delight, one smallish animal that hopped on its hind legs turned out to have long ears; he promptly named it a “zahmekoses” in my honor. A few days later a probe in the equatorial part of the Triangle, hanging from the tree where its parachute had caught, sent us a picture of a hair-covered, flat-faced creature which looked for all the world like a freeze-dried half-scale Palathian except that it hung by its long tail from the branch; I named it the “mejox,” returning the favor. The girls told us that if we ever named anything after them, we’d be sorry.

  We were now mostly past the worst of puberty; it was no worse than being occasionally irritable and depressed. Mejox and Otuz’s dark adult fur had come in, and Mejox had a really rather splendid top crest. My adult muscles (such as they were—even for a Shulathian I was always going to be thin) were coming in, and Priekahm’s hips had widened. By the time we landed, if we hadn’t been given reversible sterilizations, we’d have been ready to have children; as it was Priekahm and Mejox did a lot of “practicing,” making a lot of noise about it, and Otuz and I very quietly were doing the same.

  Both the Palathian adults were outraged by Otuz and me, but only annoyed by Priekahm and Mejox, however much they believed in equality in principle. If Priekahm was willing to be a concubine (or less than one, since there would be no ceremony), it was after all just “part of the nature of Shulathian females, they’ve got to have all the sex they can and their own males can’t keep up” as we heard Osepok say—timing it so that Soikenn would hear it. So although they wished Mejox would “get serious” and form a couple with Otuz, they generally just regarded the situation as a typical young Palathian male having fun before settling down. What it might mean to Priekahm, I think, never occurred to them.

  Poiparesis and Soikenn were humiliated by it all, of course, since from their view Priekahm was behaving like the stereotype. And Mejox and Priekahm seemed to go out of their way to be noisy and public about their affection.

  The situation was very different for Otuz and me. I don’t know what arguments were used or who was on what side, but it was clear that all of the adults were very uncomfortable about a Shulathian male paired off with a Palathian female. Kekox barely spoke to me at all. Osepok remained close to Otuz and was always very carefully polite to me, but I could feel her anger.

  Soikenn tried so hard to be friendly and accepting that she made all four of us children uncomfortable, but at least we could get along with her whenever we weren’t in couples; one on one, or with just the girls or just the boys, she was usually fine, but when we were in couples—which was almost always—in some ways she was worse than any of the other adults because she tried, which let us find out what she was actually thinking.

  She never tried to speak to either Otuz or to Mejox about the cross-racial connections, which told us more plainly than words that she didn’t think our Palathian friends could be trusted. That alone would have been enough to alienate me and Priekahm, but worse yet was that whenever Soikenn spoke to us it was in two voices. She would keep telling us that the idea of mating across racial lines didn’t bother her (when obviously it did) and that she was only concerned with what people on Nisu would say or might do after we got back—as if fifty-seven years into the future was even really worth thinking about. And when she said “People on Nisu will say that …” she might as well have said “I think …” because that’s how it seemed to us—with her constant talk of Priekahm being regarded as a slut and as having disappointed all of Shulath by becoming a concubine, and her equally frequent reminding me that I was apt to be killed by a mob of angry Palathians on my return.

  In many ways it was easier to endure Captain Osepok’s reaction to it all—which was to pretend that she heard and saw nothing, even when she would sometimes catch Otuz and me fooling around in the lab. Still, even the barest acknowledgment would have helped us feel like we we
re still accepted, and we never saw any acknowledgment from Osepok.

  Kekox stayed silent, glaring, and angry, for many eightdays, speaking to none of the younger generation. After a time we almost forgot he had ever talked to us, for if at all possible he left any chamber we entered and seemed to be spending as much time as he could in his own chamber.

  Then during one second work shift, he went into the gym when Priekahm was in there, working out by herself. Later she said she was surprised to see him at all, but even more surprised when he spoke to her; her first thought was that perhaps he wanted to make amends and be friends.

  Then he pushed her against the wall, said, “Let’s see what Mejox sees in you,” and reached between her legs.

  “Stop it!”

  “I know you like it. I hear the noises you make with Mejox every day. I’m just getting a share for myself—”

  “I like it with Mejox! Not with you! Stop it!”

  “You just have romantic notions because he’s your first, so you think it’s him, and not what you’re doing.” Kekox’s voice was calm, warm, and friendly, Priekahm said later, even as he pinned her hands over her head and began to stroke her copulatory organ. “You and I both know you like it. You just relax now and—”

  Priekahm screamed, bit him on the shoulder, and got a hand free to smash into his face. He fell backward, clutching his bitten shoulder. “Creator burn out your womb, I only wanted some fun—”

  Soikenn burst in, saw everything at once, and ran to get between them. “Leave her alone!” Her shout was even louder than Priekahm’s scream, and that brought the rest of us.

  Kekox was panting and angry, so much so that my first thought was that he was going to spring on Soikenn. “I just want some of what Mejox has been getting all the time. And if it was such a big deal to you, Soikenn, you’d still be taking care of my needs—”