Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  His had been the last speech on the subject; we managed to overcome some premonitions and foreboding, and the next day we pointed the ship so that the sail would jettison behind us in orbit, and triggered jettison.

  Though the sail and its cables weighed many tons, because they were virtually single-molecule materials they had folded into tiny spaces. Now, as we watched it go, the great black-and-silver fabric began to unfurl in orbit as the sunlight caught it, and the diamond cables, one eightieth of the circumference of this planet, started to stretch out from it. Then, far below, we saw a spray of bright red lines as the spun-diamond cables began to drop into the atmosphere; the added drag yanked the sail open, so that for one instant it was immense in the sky, and then as the drag grew more intense, it billowed, folded, and fell at its awesome velocity into the upper atmosphere of Setepos. Only about three hundred atoms thick, it vaporized and burned in a sudden great flash, like a piece of tissue paper tossed into a hot chimney flue. It must have been quite a show, down below.

  Soikenn and the captain spent the next day frantically getting a set of up-close pictures of Setepos and its moon. That left Kekox plus the younger generation to ready the Gurix, the lander that would take us down to the surface. We had chosen it partly because of its name—General Gurix, after all, had conquered a world, whereas Rumaz, the empress after whom the other lander was named, had merely been on the throne when he had done it for her.

  We spent one long, nervous, frustrating day getting decades-old power and data systems up and running, and there were times when we all struggled not to voice the thought to each other: What if, after coming all this way, we can’t get one of our landers working, and we’re never able to touch the world that fills our viewports?

  At the end of that day of struggle, we finally seemed to have electric power everywhere we were supposed to, the containment on the antimatter mixing had held for a full tenth of a day, and all sensors were at last responding intelligibly. We set it to run a self-diagnostic while we slept, and then all but staggered through the narrow tunnels to the main body of Wahkopem Zomos and fell into our bunks. Tomorrow we would do the final checkout, then move on to outfitting the Rumaz.

  After we arose, and ate a long, relaxed meal, we went back into the central core to do the checkout. The lander had leaked most of the air in its cabin, and the computer had eventually shut off the air supply to avoid losing all of it into space.

  The Gurix’s seals and gaskets had deteriorated, whether from cryonic temperatures, vacuum, interstellar radiation flux, or aging, we had no way of knowing. There was nothing for it but to make a fresh batch of the plastics, cut new parts, and install them. The ship’s computer had all the specifications, but more days went by while we did that, and as we replaced parts, we often had to redo things we had done on the first day. Then, of course, we repeated the process on the Rumaz, and finally we had two working landers.

  “It’s a good thing we brought along tools and materials to make every part for the lander,” Mejox commented at dinner that night. “Someone back on Nisu knew what they were doing, amazing as that seems.”

  “What it makes me wonder about is whether everything would have held together on Wahkopem Zomos if we had tried to voyage back to Nisu,” Priekahm said. “After all, we’re only about a third of the way into the voyage they planned for us. A fifth of the way with Fereg Yorock’s revised schedule. If there’s that much deterioration on the Gurix, who knows what parts of Wahkopem Zomos might be about to go?”

  I shuddered, but I pointed out, “Well, we have been working with and monitoring everything on the main ship, replacing parts from time to time. I suppose if we had the raw materials we could build just about everything with the material fabricators and machine tools on board, except the sail, the shrouds, and the brakeloop. It’s not quite the same thing as leaving the landers in storage for all that time.”

  “Storage,” Kekox said. “We still haven’t even started to work out the logistics. Which stuff should go down on which lander flight?”

  That sent everyone scrambling for all the reports we had on the site, and then put us all to arguing about what we might need first—other than the steam rifles and the incendiary throwers needed to establish ourselves as the species in charge on Setepos. Everything had to change now that we were no longer planning a slow exploration followed by departure.

  It took several days, even after we had our lists in order. Much of the gear had been stowed with an eye to its convenience during the voyage, some things had been moved without the information being recorded, and of course among the things that had been stored for twenty years there was some deterioration and breakage that had to be dealt with, and things that had to be remanufactured. Furthermore, though no one talked about it, our feet dragged a little as we went about our tasks, because we were planning to begin moving out of home forever.

  11

  WE WENT THROUGH THE final checkout three times, and even then our stomachs turned over a little as the Gurix lurched away from Wahkopem Zomos. We had discussed this many times—going down in one versus going down in two landers—but Kekox’s military sense had won out over pleas from Soikenn and me for engineering, and we would not be dividing our forces (though it meant running the risk of a single equipment failure for this first mission). Later, of course, we would be flying both landers routinely.

  Otuz was still our best pilot by far, and she had never crashed on a simulation run, so she was at the helm. I called off numbers for her from the navigation computer, and everyone else, I suppose, just sat there and worried.

  Antimatter is a compact fuel—it has such a high specific impulse that you don’t have to use much of it to get where you’re going. We fired the main rocket to slow the Gurix down and start it on its drop into the atmosphere, and the fuel indicator barely showed a fraction of a percent consumed. The glowing stream of plasma whipped out ahead of us, distorting in the planet’s bizarre magnetic field, and we sank toward our destination, weight pushing against our feet.

  It was very different from the space flights I remembered from my childhood. There was enough surplus power so that rather than using the air to slow us, for the most part we simply rode down on the engine. As we hit the outermost tenuous atmosphere there was a brief, dull red glow from some of the Gurix’s exposed parts, because our speed was still very high relative to the air, but it cooled and darkened. By the time the sky above us had turned to deep blue and the stars had vanished, the outside of the ship was cool. We watched the air over the lands below grow from a thin film to a thick smear, and then merge into the world around us. The lands around our landing site went from blotches on a globe to smears on a map, and then to sharply detailed relief, until finally we found ourselves hanging above land, descending past a few white, fluffy clouds. The great inland sea to our west vanished from our viewports, and then the salt lake north of us likewise disappeared; the thick forests below began to take on traces of individual detail.

  We hovered as Otuz corrected our position slightly, moving us some distance south and a little east. We had decided we would land within sight of the largest village. If they turned out to be more intelligent than we thought they were, then our descent from the sky on a pillar of flame would surely help to produce the awe we would need to subjugate them.

  The village became individual buildings, and then we could see the animals running and scrambling around inside its palisade. We sank slowly onto one of their grain fields, the Gurix now just balancing on its exhaust. We could see individuals clearly, as they raced about, gesturing frantically at each other, flinging themselves on the ground or leaping up to see us.

  Our engine exhaust lashed into the field of rain-damp grain, setting a wide ring of it smoldering, scorching a spot below us into a great black circle. Otuz slowed us still further, and as gently as the flying insects of Setepos settle onto its flowers, the Gurix put its feet down onto the freshly charred field of grain.

  “Well,” she sai
d, turning to us, “was that satisfactory?”

  “It was brilliant,” Kekox said. “As you know. All right, everyone, get ready. It’s time to put on our little show.”

  We had spent some effort on planning just what we would do when we stepped out of the ship. The problem, of course, was that we were dealing with animals (or just possibly thinking beings) of a type we had never met. Would they recognize a weapon if we threatened them with it? How would they respond if we killed a few of them? And since we didn’t want to feed them or have to tend them—the idea was to have them do those things for us—how could we avoid having them all sit down and wait for us to tell them what to do?

  The three steam rifles we had been supplied with were hunting weapons, intended for killing fresh game and repelling large predators, not for any sort of military use. They held thirty-two shots per magazine, each delivering enough momentum to knock a quadruped four times our mass off its feet. Magazines could be reloaded using a little gadget that drew electricity from the Gurix’s power plant; plain sand was all the raw material needed. They were nice weapons, but there were only three of them, and we had no way to make them more potent than they were. We had already figured out, from the wildlife observations, that the steam rifles wouldn’t be adequate for large areas of Setepos; Soikenn’s theory was that the lower gravity here had allowed animals as a whole to be bigger, and this included predators much larger than the steam rifle had been designed to deal with. We just hoped that we were right in thinking that if the smart animals could live in this area, and they were about our size, then there wasn’t much around here that would kill or eat them routinely.

  Otuz, Kekox, and Mejox had practiced a lot with the steam rifles in simulation, enough so that we were fairly confident that they could make them work when we needed them to. The plans we had settled on—one for if the Seteposians turned out to be smart animals and one for if they were stupid people—weren’t so much plans as first steps, to be followed by a lot of contingencies and improvisations.

  The first step went perfectly. We looked out the viewports to see that the animals from the village were approaching the Gurix in a great, incoherent mass. “One right guess,” Mejox said with satisfaction. “They’re not in any kind of order or under any kind of leadership.”

  “That’s not much to evaluate them on,” Kekox said. “I’d imagine they were taken by surprise, even if every one of them is a genius.”

  We formed up, facing the door. Kekox took the point position, his steam rifle at ready. Behind Kekox, I stepped into place, with the improvised incendiary launcher that we had come up with: a simple tube with a hydrogen-oxygen capsule at its closed end, and a thin plastic can full of methanol blocking its open end. With luck, anyway, when I pressed the button on its side, the capsule would explode and throw the can out the end of the open tube. The explosion should also set fire to a wick in the can, and when it hit, if we were right, the lightweight can would break, the wick would ignite the methanol, and we’d set whatever building we pointed it at on fire.

  At my side was Priekahm, with another incendiary launcher. Then behind us, with recording gear, were Osepok and Soikenn, with cameras to record our first encounter with these animals—if they had some sort of rudimentary language, we needed to start learning it. Finally, behind us, came Mejox and Otuz, steam rifles ready.

  Even if worse came to worst, and they attacked us straight off, we knew that between what was already loaded into the steam rifles and what was in the magazines we were carrying, we had three slugs for every inhabitant of the village. Against that, they had a collection of pointed sticks—big thick ones to stab with and little thin ones they propelled with a bent stick, in some way we had not yet figured out from watching moving pictures of them. And of course they could throw rocks or hit us with sticks.

  So when we had planned all this, we had been about as sure as we could possibly be that this next part would go well. We had been more worried about seals holding and navigation gear working on the Gurix than we had about this first contact. The difference now was that we knew the Gurix had landed and we didn’t know how this was going to come out.

  “Our public awaits,” Mejox said. “Let’s go.” Kekox pressed the button and the door slid open; beyond it, the stairway extended down to the wet ground.

  They were close to us, now, but they seemed to freeze in fear when the stairs came down. Kekox walked slowly down the steps, his head moving quickly from side to side as he scanned for any threat. We came down the steps after him, as quickly as we all could without falling, since if trouble started we didn’t want to be bunched together. As soon as we were off the stairs we fanned out into a rough triangle, with Osepok and Soikenn at the center, and Mejox and Otuz forming the back corners. At Kekox’s command we moved slowly forward.

  One of them approached Kekox. They were an ugly species, flatter in the face than Palathians, with less fur than even a Shulathian, and head fur that grew in great messy profusion, not in a neat crest like a Palathian’s but on top of the head (and all over the face as well, in the males), so that the whole effect was of a blank wall with eyes behind a curtain of hair.

  They were shorter than Shulathians and taller than Palathians, narrower in the shoulder than Palathians and broader than Shulathians. They had small rounded ears like a Palathian but the tops of their heads were crestless like a Shulathian’s.

  Yet though they were in some ways intermediate between our races, they did not look like the crossbred Nisuans I had seen in biology textbooks, or exhibited stuffed in museums. Those had been curiously attractive; these creatures were simply hideous.

  The tall one approaching us was only half a head shorter than I, and I was the tallest of our crew. He was dressed in a long tunic—really not more than a shirt that extended to his knees—into which had been stuck hundreds of soft, rustling objects. Later I was to learn that these were the “feathers”—flexible scales—of “birds”—those flying creatures we had seen in such great numbers in the probe pictures.

  He drew close to us. His eyes were strange—only a small area around the lens was colored, so that instead of a smooth swath of red, yellow, or green like ours, their eyes were white with a small colored circle. I did not know at the time that one reason why the white part was so large was because he was terrified.

  At last he spoke. There was no question that he was using words.

  “Anyone have any idea what he’s saying?” Priekahm asked.

  “Forgot to bring my dictionary,” I said.

  This started all of them gabbling at each other, so that the tall one turned around and spoke very loudly. Their voices were very odd; Otuz and I figured out later that it was because in normal speech they emitted a large number of tones all together, rather than the single pure tone that we usually spoke in. We had no idea of it then, but they had just named us the “Singing Ones.”

  “People or animals?” Kekox asked us. “Anyone got an opinion?”

  “People,” I said. “Not necessarily smart ones.”

  “People,” Otuz and Priekahm concurred.

  “I agree,” Kekox said. “Anyone think differently?”

  There was a long pause. I was slowly beginning to notice things around me: the burnt smell from the charred grain, the warmth of the air, the more distant faint odor of the forest. So many different colors, so many different smells, the sounds of what must be hundreds of kinds of living things; I had just a moment to think I might like it here.

  “Then we’re gods,” Kekox said. “We go with Plan Two. Remember to stay bunched up. If any of them moves between us, shoot it; we’ve got to stay compact.”

  As we neared the village, the crowd began to pack in closer. There must have been a hundred fifty or more inhabitants, counting only those old enough to walk by themselves. And to judge by the number of infants being carried by mothers, the population was growing rapidly.

  The press of people gave me a chance to sneak a look at their tools. “Shaped s
tone, as we thought,” I said. “Looks like they grind or polish it. Heavy, but it probably does what they want it to. Copper ornaments, maybe some tin and silver. And of course the stuff they tore off the probe.”

  “They do some kind of weaving,” Priekahm observed on my other side. “Very coarse. They probably hand-plait the thread and then just lay it crisscross to make the cloth. Probably keeps the worst of the rain off them, and assuming the adult males have genitals that protrude as much as the juveniles near us do, I’d guess that it’s for comfort as well.”

  Osepok noted, “I can’t make any kind of sense of it yet, but it feels like all the ornamentation falls into some kind of pattern. Probably a very complicated system of ranking and relations.”

  We walked on toward the village; it was a short distance away, but the crowd around us was thick, so it took a long time. So far none of them had tried to get between us, and I was certainly glad about that because the ones that seemed most apt to get into the middle were the young ones, and Kekox’s orders or not, I didn’t think any of us could shoot a little one.

  As we entered the open gate in the palisade, I noticed a plate of lashed-together logs sitting beside the opening, and two upright logs set behind the main walls. “Probably they slide that across the opening at night,” Priekahm said. “Which means either they’ve got big predators or they’ve got warfare.”

  “Bad news either way,” Soikenn said. “Have you noticed how much they talk and argue with each other? I’m afraid they’ll never make well-behaved slaves.”

  “It’s a little late to change plans now,” Kekox said, curtly. “Unless you all want to take a vote in the middle of this mob?”