Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  Very gently, I pressed my hand against the break, through the guide membrane. Then I pushed upward firmly on his foot, ready to snatch my hand back if the bone broke under the pressure. It held; I pushed harder, and it barely bowed. “He’s forming the temporary matrix, and pretty quickly. It’ll be hard in another couple of days, and after that if he wakes up he might be able to walk on it, though it won’t be very strong. And Soikenn did as good a job as anyone could of setting it. There’s a splinter underneath that will probably make him limp a little for some years until it’s reabsorbed, and he might never run very well again, but for field conditions this was brilliant.”

  I peeled back one of his outer eyelids and whistled sharply in his ear; the inner lid flipped down and up, in the Teravorsis Reflex. Otuz asked, “Was that good?”

  “As far as it goes. He’s got some higher brain function. Let’s check the other side.” He had the Teravorsis Reflex on that side as well. I probed gently at his crest; it was bound to be sore. The thick, heavy tufts of hair that make up the crest in a mature Palathian are supported by a dense network of blood vessels, and those in turn run in and out of the skull through a thick piece of bone networked with thousands of tiny holes, the Urdebok Structure, that helps in temperature regulation. If the Urdebok Structure is crushed hard enough, even though the skull is not fractured, bleeding within the structure can cause blood clots to form and circulate into the brain, with all kinds of disastrous consequences.

  I didn’t want to dislodge anything that might have already formed and be rattling around loose in there, but at the same time I badly wanted to know whether his Urdebok Structure had been crushed, or whether it was only the stiff short hair at the base of the crest that had taken the damage. So at first I probed very gingerly, and then I searched around systematically. “I don’t find any soft spots,” I said. “So he’s hard-headed, I guess.”

  “Just as we always knew.”

  “Unh hunh. Probably just a bad concussion, compounded by blood loss and shock. If he and I got hit about equally hard, he’d be in worse shape—that’s a major difference between Shulathian and Palathian. He probably didn’t form any clots, but he almost certainly took a pressure wave in the brain from the Urdebok being compressed. And given what his leg and head would feel like right now, in a way he’s lucky to be unconscious. Have you been able to get any water into him?”

  “It takes some effort, but yes. We sort of brush it onto his mouth until that gets wet, then he reflexively licks it off. We get a couple hand-volumes into him that way, over the course of maybe an eighth of a day.”

  “That’s good. It’s keeping him alive. If we can keep him alive long enough, and if they don’t run out of patience or hurt him further, then he’ll probably recover.”

  “Will it be a full recovery?”

  “Well, he’ll be a lot better off than this. After that, the Creator only knows.”

  Soikenn woke up then, and we reviewed Mejox together. She was upset at having failed to notice the concussion, but since the news was at least sort of good—Mejox might be all right and I probably would be—it was at least not a miserable conversation. As I finished giving the news, I noted that for the first time in a long time my head wasn’t actually hurting. About that time the guards brought us more boiled grain, this time a thick paste of it with bits of cooked animal flesh. We weren’t sure if the taste of the animal or the way it was seasoned was what was so peculiar, but we were hungry and the flavor wasn’t enough to keep us from eating.

  “Well, the food’s improving,” Otuz said, when we were done. “Or maybe that’s the standard evening meal. Either way, we apparently won’t starve or die of thirst.”

  Priekahm sighed. “I suppose comparatively speaking things are looking up.”

  There was a distant booming thud, in a regular rhythm, which rapidly grew louder. We all rose and moved toward the door.

  Our little prison faced one side of the new temple; they had rebuilt it almost overnight, but then it was a fairly simple construction in any case, and they had learned a lot about building from us. The mud statue of Mother Goddess was uglier than the one before, which was going some. The altar, where the probe had been in the old temple, was bare, and there was a long row of people kneeling on the “front porch” with their backs to the new wall.

  In front of the row of Seteposians, between the temple wall and the new, bare altar, was a tall chair, and in that chair sat Nim Rar. He was wearing a tall feathered hat and all sorts of jewelry, much of it obviously from the probe or from our personal gear. The hat, I realized, was in the shape of a lander, echoing the shadowy burned-out bulk of the Rumaz behind him.

  In his right hand he clutched an ax. Soikenn stared for a long moment, then shuddered and whispered to us, “I bet that’s the ax that killed Kekox.”

  The deep thudding noise grew louder, and the crowd parted. I caught a glimpse of a huge pile of wood down in front of the porch; then I saw that the rhythmic thudding was coming from a group of Seteposian drummers, who marched in and gathered around the porch. They were followed by a group of torchbearers, who planted their long-handled torches around the group; then the last of the torch bearers dipped his torch to set the piled wood on fire. It blazed up quickly—a dense odor came to our nostrils.

  As the fire blazed up brightly, the drumming became more rapid. Nim Rar stood up. Something draped around his shoulders, and he spread it wide behind him—

  Otuz began to vomit beside me before I had quite realized what Nim Rar was wearing.

  Kekox’s skin, with his head still attached.

  Soikenn was crying and groaning beside me; Priekahm simply kept whispering, “No.” I hoped Osepok was too far gone, still, to look.

  Then they carried in his body, dressed the way they dress game. I was numb with shock and rage, wanting to look away, unable to do so.

  The pounding grew faster still, and then Nim Rar, still wearing Kekox’s skin, cut up the corpse. His assistants roasted it, and all of the assembled Real People ate it. It must have taken an eighth of a day in all.

  It was not until I smelled my lifelong friend cooking that finally I vomited, wept, crawled back into the hut, and let myself faint. I don’t know what they did with the bones when they were done, but Kekox’s skin hung in that hideous temple for many long years.

  “Get up, Zahmekoses, I think they’re moving us,” Otuz whispered in my ear. I was awake instantly, every horrible memory of the night before still vivid. There were Seteposian voices outside, a great confusing gabble of them, and our guards seemed to be talking with everyone at once.

  Soikenn was groaning as she got to her feet. “Let’s try to wake Mejox if we can,” she said. “We can always carry him between Priekahm and Otuz. Osepok, me, and Zahmekoses can at least carry the babies.”

  But as Soikenn and Priekahm lifted Mejox up by his shoulders, he coughed, loudly, several times, and looked up at me. “Zahmekoses?”

  “I’m here, Mejox. Can you move any part of your body?”

  Ever so slowly, he stood erect, or as close to it as he could manage just then. “I seem to be all here,” he said. “My shin feels like it’s on fire.”

  “You had a compound fracture. It’s healing. The Seteposians have captured us,” I said. “We’re prisoners.”

  “Weruz?”

  “She’s all right, Mejox,” Priekahm said. “And now that you’re awake, so am I. Do you remember what happened to Kekox?”

  “They killed him,” Mejox said. “I don’t really remember, but that’s the only way we could have ended up like this. Did we lose anyone else?”

  “Osekahm,” Soikenn said. It was the first time she had pronounced her daughter’s name since the child had died.

  No one quite knew what to say, but then Nim Rar strode in, surrounded by half a dozen guards. He looked around the room with apparent satisfaction. “Well,” he said, “I should thank you.” It took me a moment to realize he was speaking quite clear Nisuan; he had undoubtedly
listened to us long enough to pick it up. How many ways had we given it away that we were not gods? How many ways had he found out we were vulnerable? Perhaps it was better not to know.

  “If you want to know what will happen,” the Nim said, now in Seteposian, “I very much like this empire idea of yours. And your wonderful devices. The only thing wrong with it all was that you were in charge of it. Now that has been corrected. I am assuming that, as I was a pleasant and cooperative slave, so will you be.

  “Now, you’ve never met my entire family; I had a son by a woman whom you burned alive with your Gurix the first day. It happens that he survives. Let me introduce him now that I know you have no power to harm him.” He clapped his hands. “Inok!”

  The Seteposian who entered was young, though well-muscled for his age, and just reaching reproductive age. Rar must have started young, I thought to myself, and then realized that as briefly as they lived—the oldest man in the village had lived no more than forty of their years, or thirty-six of ours—they probably all started as young as they could. “You will teach him Nisuan. You will teach him everything,” his proud father said. “He will be Nim after me, and will rule a great empire with many slaves. It is fitting that he know everything you do.” With a slight nod of his head, Nim Rar left us alone with the boy.

  He did not have his father’s gift for languages, but his accent got better and more understandable as we worked. As the eightdays slid by, it seemed to me I had always been one of Inok’s tutors, living in my cell near the great palace of Nim Rar—our old house, which had not burned after all, though the inner walls were now black with soot. The house was the Nim’s now, along with the Gurix he had captured from the sky gods. It was with polite interest, later that spring, that I heard of the conquest and enslavement of the nearest neighbors to the Real People: the Rat People, the Snake Eaters, and the Ugly Woman People. “I don’t suppose we have to worry about introducing any unpleasant tendency toward bigotry into this culture,” Otuz muttered to me, after Inok finished telling us the tale.

  The first word Diehrenn said, that summer, was “Mama.” Not a Nisuan word, but a word in the language of the Real People. We were thrilled anyway.

  15

  THERE WASN’T MUCH ELSE to do, so we worked hard at teaching Inok. He seemed to be bright enough, and we got along fairly well, except that he didn’t believe a thing we told him, since manifestly the world was not round, it wasn’t moving, the sun circled Setepos, you could not see any other worlds beyond the sky, and anyway the stars were tiny and therefore the Gurix couldn’t have come from them. He had accepted his father’s insight that we were flesh and blood, along with Rar’s realization that we were more use to him if most of the Real People thought we were gods or demons whom he had subdued.

  Inok had already had something of an education from the storytellers. He knew that there were legends of people along a big river south and west of here, tales passed on by the Snake Eaters, who heard it from their neighbors, the Dog People, who presumably heard it from their neighbors. There were even more shadowy stories of “people across the water” that trickled in from the west and the north, along with accounts of “traveling people” who had no place of their own and lived by moving from place to place.

  This education—possibly the best in Real People Town—had given Inok the ability to see through our silly story. As far as Inok was concerned, the world had so many kinds of people in it that we were plainly just another kind. Sooner or later we would stop lying and tell him where we were from, and then he and his father would take the Gurix and go conquer Nisu, since we were a weak and silly people, but we did have wonderful things. Till then, where we came from was just not terribly important.

  Yet though he believed none of the things we told him, he loved stories of our history, and apparently so did the rest of the Real People, because he would repeat whatever we told him to them in the evenings, and it was very popular entertainment. We taught him Nisuan, but we kept back the three major ancient Shulathian languages that all of us had learned in school, speaking them only at night when we could breathe them in each other’s ear.

  A year went by; Mejox grew stronger, the three surviving children flourished, and Priekahm and Otuz were pregnant again. The Nim made it clear that Soikenn and Osepok should also get pregnant soon, but neither Mejox nor I could quite bring ourselves to take that step yet. We told Inok that they were our mothers, but this only meant that (based on resemblance) I was told to impregnate Osepok, and Mejox was told to impregnate Soikenn. We continued to stall.

  Maybe it was just the need for nursing him for so many days, or perhaps there was some kind of a real bond of friendship there, but Inok and Mejox seemed to take to each other. As I had feared, Mejox did end up with a permanent limp. He said it wasn’t painful and that we really shouldn’t worry about him, but it was clear that though he could walk well enough with a cane, he would never run or jump again, unless we got him back up to the ship and used Wahkopem Zomos’s surgical equipment to rebreak and reconstruct his leg. Though Inok spoke to Nim Rar about it, we could not get permission to do that, even with most of us staying below as hostages.

  In the evenings, sometimes, when the guards didn’t seem to be too close, we would all lie down with our heads close together and murmur to each other in Windward Islands Shulathian. There was one thing that was clear to all six of us adult survivors: that if we could just get ourselves, and our three babies, onto the Gurix, we would be safe and free again. The Seteposians had not managed to open the hatch, and the Gurix was still sitting there, ready to go.

  Unfortunately they knew perfectly well that it was our one means of escape, and no more than two of us were ever allowed out of confinement at a time.

  “I’ve got an idea about all that,” Mejox said. “How do you all feel about Inok?”

  “Smart kid,” Soikenn said.

  “If I knew him in other circumstances I think I’d like him,” Otuz said.

  Priekahm agreed. “He’s very considerate and he is smart. You must have noticed that he’s wonderful at tending Weruz and Diehrenn—but that also means they’re becoming attached to him, and if we stay here till they grow up, they’ll be his most loyal slaves. He’s cunning.”

  I added, “Well, the only thing I have to add about Inok is that he seems to be more genuinely curious than Rar, and certainly a lot more interested in the wider world than most of the Real People. You could teach that boy just about anything.”

  Mejox scratched his crest; it had grown back in crooked, after his concussion, and between that and his limp, he now always looked as if he were falling over to the right. “Well, here’s the question: do you think he’d like to go to space?”

  We all gaped at him.

  “Think about it,” he said. “We can go places as long as we have him along. He’s already said he wants to learn to fly it.”

  “They’ll never let us all get onto it at the same time,” Osepok pointed out. “They aren’t stupid. We’ve already found out just how not-stupid they can be.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Mejox said. “But suppose we started lessons, as it were—so that, for example, he learned how to power it up and get it flight ready—with all three of you back here. And then, when it was powered up … if I got control and brought it over here to the prison in a short hop—well, you’d still have to find a way to knock out the door here, but then—”

  “I think Inok would probably object strongly to being kidnapped or having the lander taken away from him,” Priekahm pointed out.

  “That’s where what you all think of him comes in. What if we told him we were going to take him back to Nisu with us? Do you think he’d go for that?”

  “And would we?” Otuz demanded.

  “Go back to Nisu with my daughter of mixed race? Are you crazy? Maybe we should just offer to show him Wahkopem Zomos. He can come along with us if he wants to, when we build our colony on one of those islands—the ones you were right about, Soikenn, where
we should have gone in the first place. We could give him that much of a choice, though I doubt he’d take it. Anyway, after he visits Wahkopem Zomos, we could always drop him off a short distance from here, in the middle of the night. If we can get him to help us—most especially if we can make it happen honestly, which is the way I prefer—I think we owe it to him to give him the choice and at least let him see space.”

  Otuz said, “So the idea is really to win him over if you think you can?”

  “That would be best. Failing that, we can kidnap him temporarily, but well—I don’t like the thought of betraying a friend.”

  “Suppose we had to kill him to get away?” I asked.

  Mejox sighed. “Then we would. Of course.”

  “Good. Then it’s a plan, or the start of one.”

  From then on, we worked harder than ever at being Inok’s friend. That turned out to be easier than we had thought it might be, for though Inok was accorded a great deal of respect nowadays as the Nim’s son, it was clear that he had never had many friends, and better still—from our standpoint—he resented this.

  “It seems sort of natural to me,” Otuz was saying, as we waited one morning for Inok to finish showing Mejox something. “Rar was a nobody in the village until his initiative and courage—which he only got to display because we turned up—made him the Nim. Inok spent years as nobody’s son. And without any other way to win prestige; after all, what makes you important around here is being big and strong, and skilled with weapons. Inok is not large for a male his age, and he doesn’t seem to be very gifted athletically. So now that his father got to be the Nim on the strength of having captured us, he’s got a lot of prestige, but he’s still completely dependent on his father for it, and he knows better than anyone that none of his new friends really cares for him.”