by Buzz Aldrin
Whatever Inok thought of the rest of us, it was clear that Mejox was his particular friend. Now, as Otuz and I waited for our time with the boy, we saw him leading Mejox over to talk to Nim Rar. Mejox now had an odd, rolling gait because his foot wouldn’t quite go straight without hurting, and one leg was a tiny bit shorter than the other. He tired quickly, too, when he had to walk any distance; he had told me one evening he was actually looking forward to getting back to Wahkopem Zomos to have his leg rebroken and reset. Well, perhaps we could do something about that soon.
Mejox and Inok talked to Nim Rar for what seemed like an unusually long time, and when they turned to join us, Nim Rar came with them. We bowed to the ground, as we had been taught to do when the Nim passed, and then in Nisuan, he said, “You may rise. Come with me to the Lookout Hill. We have much to talk about.”
It was a long walk up the hill, and Mejox had to go very slowly, but Rar seemed to be willing to pause for frequent rests. On the way he talked with us about the things we had told Inok—about how far away Nisu was, and how the emperor ruled it, and a great deal of our history. His accent was a bit strange, but he was completely understandable, and he made almost no errors of grammar. Sometimes we’d switch over to the language of the Real People.
He had brought us to the top of the hill because he was the first ruler in memory who actually ruled as far as he could see. But our stories had given him a bigger ambition. “Imagine how clever your emperor seems to me; he rules a whole world,” Nim Rar said to us. “Now tell me about—”
He seemed fascinated with what we thought were small details, but it was something to talk about, and it relieved the fear to some extent.
From the top of the hill, we could see that the country around was broken and rugged, so we could see other hilltops a long way away. There was a great deal of exposed stone, and the oak forest was broken and uneven. “It is said in the legends that the oaks once covered this whole area,” Rar said. “Now they will not grow even when we plant them; the old ones have deep roots and live on, but there’s not enough water to start a young one, except in the valleys. I suppose a day will come when nothing grows here; we can see where the floods once rose on the cliffs, but no one has ever seen the water rise that high, as far back as memory goes. The old priest said that the gods were once angry and drowned most of the world, but I myself think that there is just less water than there used to be.”
Otuz said, “That seems a reasonable supposition. Three thousand years ago—”
“What is a thousand?” Inok asked.
Otuz thought for a long moment, and then said, “I know your word hundred. A thousand is a hundred tens.”
Inok and Rar exchanged glances. “No one would count that high,” Inok said. “Everything we need to measure is smaller than that.”
“Nonetheless,” Otuz said, “the time I speak of was three thousand years ago. At that time, in the lands north of the Big Salt Sea, the land was covered with ice; the wind blew across the ice and picked up water, and when the wind blew against the hills down here, the water came down as rain, and it filled the rivers, watered the trees, and put water into the … aquifers. An aquifer is a river that flows under the ground and feeds the wells,” she hastened to explain. “Now, very slowly, this area is losing its water, because what the trees and aquifers capture is never as much as what the rivers carry away and the air picks up. So you are right, Nim Rar. There is much less water than there used to be.”
Rar sat back with a look we had come to realize meant he had heard exactly what he wanted to hear. Naturally his son decided to argue. “But how could you know what happened so long ago?”
“From high up,” I said, “we can see the scars on the land that the ice made, and we can see the little bits of the ice that remain to this day. And we know because of other worlds that we have studied that scars like that are made by ice, and from how much healing the land has had, we can guess how long ago the ice melted away.”
Inok seemed to be satisfied as well. “It is good to know these things,” he said.
Rar grunted assent. “But enough small talk. We are on this hill for a reason. It seems to me that in a few summers I might rule from the Dead Sea to the Big Salt Sea, north to the mountains and south to the desert, just as your emperor does. From this high place we can see the neighboring lands, and the horizons beyond. I wanted to talk to you, my most valued of slaves, about how we are to proceed.”
“Well, then, I can think of one thing,” I said, glancing significantly at Mejox. “Just as this hill puts you up high where you can see—”
Mejox caught my point and leaped in. “Exactly what I was going to suggest.” I thought he was overplaying the loyal slave routine a little more than necessary. “By using the Gurix, you will be able to scout out where the enemy is, take the enemy by surprise, perhaps even use the lander to terrify them into running away, or use its exhaust to set enemy villages on fire—”
“I don’t want to burn enemy villages, I want to take all their possessions and their good-looking women,” Rar said impatiently. “Your Kekox was much too bloodthirsty. You have much to learn about warfare; I am surprised your emperor is able to rule as much country as you say he does. But except for that silly suggestion, the rest is very well thought of. Perhaps it could even—in some circumstances, say, if we had them trapped on a hill like this—descend to burn most of the opposing fighters alive. It would save us all a great deal of trouble in killing them later. And of course there would still be some survivors that we could make work for us.”
“Father,” Inok said, “this idea is a very good one. Most especially if we can find the enemy quickly, we can be fresh and rested, while they are tired from a long journey. And we can surprise them, on their way, instead of meeting them at the traditional battlegrounds, and thus there can be a great killing of them.”
Rar clapped his hand on his son’s shoulder. I think that was the first time I realized that among Seteposians that is a gesture which indicates warm approval. “Very good thought, indeed. Well, then, as I see it, since I must command, it is my son who will fly the Gurix. You all must teach him how. But since I know any reasonable slave will run away if he can, I must insist that while my son learns to fly, any of you not teaching him at that moment must stay in your cell, or under my direct observation, as hostages.”
That night, when the three of us carried the news to the rest, we all congratulated each other. True, we hadn’t escaped yet, but we would now have our hands on the lander controls regularly, and it had enough anti-matter to allow it to make thousands of takeoffs and landings from surface to orbit. The more it flew, the better chance that our supervision would get lax—and as soon as that happened, somehow or other, using whatever tricks we could think of, we would all be back on Wahkopem Zomos.
Just before I drifted off to sleep that night, Inok came by and took me out on the hill to answer questions. He said he wanted to show me something. After a while, a bright star rose over the horizon and began to slowly crawl across the face of the heavens.
“I suppose a new, moving star in the sky would be a little upsetting,” I said.
“Can you tell me what it is?” the Nim’s son asked.
“It’s the ship we came from Nisu in,” I said. “So big that it carried the lander in its belly. It circles the world eight times during one of your days, which is why you can just see it moving now. And it shines because it is so high up that it is not shadowed by Setepos, and so it catches the sunlight.”
“My favorite slaves tell wonderful stories,” Inok said, but he hung around while I described Wahkopem Zomos in glowing detail, with special emphasis on the beauty of its sail full spread (without mentioning that we had thrown it away) and on the astonishing voyages it could undertake and the wonderful things to be seen. Finally when I had run out of glowing descriptions, he sat beside me, silently, and watched Wahkopem Zomos sink slowly over the horizon. I hoped he was learning to look with longing.
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sp; Flying lessons began the next day. The trick, we realized early, was to keep Inok hung up on small details. Since neither he nor any other of the Real People had any idea how long it should take to learn to fly, this could be dragged out a long time. I spent nearly a whole day “helping” him master the use of the combination lock for the door. (We thought about whether that should come later, but he didn’t seem to be so foolish as to play with the controls, and at least the lock itself had very little to do with making the ship fly.) Otuz taught him to read a long list of readouts, none of which could ever really be expected to be anything other than “go.” Soikenn coached him through extending and retracting landing gear, which of course he could not do while sitting on the ground. And all the time that we did these things, we encouraged him to talk about his feelings, who he wanted for a mate, how unfairly the other boys had treated him, how he would be the Nim someday, everything that might bend his loyalty away from the Real People and toward us.
We also talked a lot about the wonders of Nisu and of Wahkopem Zomos. He seemed to find all of it fascinating; some, we realized, because he was gleaning what we told him for military and political information that his father could use in creating an empire of his own, and some because the whole idea of customs being different (as opposed to wrong—the neighboring peoples had wrong customs) was so novel to him. But he also seemed to enjoy the many glowing accounts of life on board and life on Nisu. I’m sure those were made much more convincing by the passion with which we wished to be there.
There are only so many controls on even the most complex machine, however, and Inok was a fast learner. The day rapidly approached when we would have to begin teaching him something about how to fly the Gurix. That meant we would have to teach him how to do one of three things: power up the engines, work the flight controls, or program a mission into the ship’s computer. At least, we thought, until he had all three capabilities, he would not be dangerous.
We thought the flight controls might be the place to start; Inok was clearly getting impatient and wanted to impress his father, so it was about time for him to have a visible success. With luck our giving him this success would tighten his bond to us.
The day came for Inok to try his first flight, with Mejox operating the engines. The “mission” was simply to ascend high enough so that the exhaust would not be a danger, circle the town, and land in the same spot again. They were going to leave the door open the whole time, so that Inok could be seen at the controls by all the chiefs of the conquered villages.
Our group stood a safe distance back, with Nim Rar himself. We didn’t think Mejox should try anything this time; Inok was not yet reliably on our side, and getting us away from the Nim’s guards would be too hard. So this flight was to be played strictly legitimately.
Behind us was an immense crowd by local standards—village chiefs from all over the Real People’s ever-growing empire, everyone from the town, and many people from outlying towns who had made the time to be here. The excitement was so contagious that even we caught it.
Inok was almost shaking. “Everyone’s terrified on their first flight,” I said to him. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m trying not to.”
Then Nim Rar nodded to Inok and Mejox, and the two of them set out across the open space together. Mejox was hobbling more than usual—he had said his leg was hurting him a great deal that morning. After a few steps we saw Mejox rest a hand on the young Seteposian’s shoulder as they went out to the lander. It made an odd picture to us, the possible heir to the imperial throne—and to sixty centuries of civilization—walking with a cane, partly supported by a young barbarian dressed in skins and rough cloth, headed across the town’s biggest open space to the gleaming lander.
They climbed in, did the checkout—taking much longer than any of us ever would have, but Inok didn’t know that—and then Inok moved to the controls, taking hold of the twin sticks as if he’d always held them.
We had done everything we could to emphasize Inok’s place as the pilot. He turned and shouted a crisp order to Mejox to power up the engines, and though the order was in Nisuan, and no one but us and Nim Rar understood it, a cheer went up from the crowd—they must have been reacting to Inok’s tone.
Mejox brought the power on line by the book, a particularly slow way—we wanted Nim Rar and his guards to think takeoffs took much longer than they actually did, against the day when we might need to surprise them by doing a takeoff in a hurry.
There was a deep bass rumble through the ground, and a shimmer of heat under the main nozzles. The lander bumped visibly on its landing gear.
And then, without warning, Inok turned, seized Mejox by the collar, and threw him out the door. He fell four times his body length, landed on his back, and rolled over, pushing himself to his feet with his hands. Meanwhile, the ladder retracted abruptly, and the last we saw of Inok was as he reached to slam the door.
“What is he doing?” Otuz shouted, over the wild cries of the crowd. “Mejox!”
Our friend was standing up now, obviously badly shaken, and began to stagger toward us, as fast as he could without his cane.
“He will probably let Mejox get a safe distance,” Nim Rar said. “But we have watched you and how you teach. We know you do things slowly and with unnecessary steps. My son Inok is clever; he knew that there were only three controls for the engines. Now he has seen what they do, and he knows how to work the flight controls. He can make it fly, and he is going to. He is going up to this wonderful Wahkopem Zomos you say is the bright star over our southern horizon, to bring back good things with which I shall reward my chiefs. You slaves are clever, and I do not fault you for that, but you must learn you are not as clever as the Nim and his son.”
We stared at him in horror; how do you explain so many things at once, when there’s no time, when the person who needs to know them isn’t there anyway? I knew it was hopeless to save either the lander or Inok at that moment, but I turned to see if Mejox would make it. He was staggering and fighting his way across the square, and without thinking that I might get an arrow in the back, I ran out to grab him up and carry him over my shoulders, as fast as I could, back toward the crowd and safety. As I turned with Mejox slung over my back, I saw that all the Nisuans had gone flat to the ground in a bunch, sheltering the babies under them.
Perhaps Inok was impatient, or maybe he didn’t realize how far out the exhaust would spread across the square. Surely he didn’t know that you couldn’t just throw the throttle wide open—and if the computer had been engaged it wouldn’t have let him do what he did. But we had never told him there was a computer, we thought you couldn’t fly the lander without it, but we were wrong—you just couldn’t fly the lander anywhere on purpose without it.
With a terrible roar behind me, the lander took off. It must have been pulling seven gravities, the maximum the engines could give it. Probably Inok was knocked to the floor, out of reach of the controls, at that moment; I have always hoped he just died, of a fractured skull or any number of other injuries, when the floor leaped up to crush him.
Meanwhile, I had no time to worry about Inok; Mejox and I were caught at the edge of the blast, his fur singed all over his back, and we were thrown rolling across the ground. The pain was horrible and indescribable. The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness was Otuz frantically beating out my smoldering fur with her hands, while Seteposians tossed dirt on me to smother the flames. Mejox didn’t remember even that much; he must have been knocked unconscious by the blast itself, and he never recalled the terrible burns that cost him an arm later on, or Soikenn and Osepok throwing him into an irrigation ditch to douse the flames.
In a sense, we were lucky compared to the rest of the Nisuans. When they could spare a moment, they looked up to see the tiny dot of the Gurix vanishing into the sky, probably still accelerating at seven gravities. If, as I surmise, Inok was knocked to the floor and unable to change the controls, there was enough antimatter available to ke
ep that engine running at full clip for several days, and the life-support systems could have continued running indefinitely. There were stocks of food aboard, if he figured out how to get to them, and if he survived the high acceleration while lying in a heap on the floor. But somewhere out there, sooner or later, as the Gurix plunged out into space at far above the escape velocity for that solar system, if he didn’t die of injuries, he starved to death. Unless it fell into the sun or one of the planets, I have no doubt that the Gurix is still out there, somewhere deep in space between the stars, serving as the coffin of the first Seteposian to venture into space.
All these thoughts came later. I was unconscious for days, and then when I woke my first concerns were the terrible pain of my burns, and then whether Mejox would survive. But I did eventually think all that through, and work out what might have happened to Inok. A slave has lots of time to think.
Clio Trigorin:
May 2075–December 2076
CLIO DECIDED THAT SANETOMO was going to ask her to marry him after about a month of spending time with him every day. She knew that it was very likely that he had arrived at the same decision by that time. She also wasn’t about to spoil it all by even faintly suggesting it for a while.
And truth to tell it wasn’t as big a deal as it would have been on Earth, even though the idea of getting married was so much more serious, she thought as she sat and worked at the problem of Zahmekoses’s use of the impersonal rude in so much of his private notes. Combining impersonal nouns with rude verb forms had two possible implications in Standard Tiberian: either Zahmekoses had been gently condescending toward his homeworld, or he had wanted them to look down on him slightly. It issued a challenge to the reader to decide who was superior or inferior; there was nothing like it in English at all, and “in Japanese,” Sanetomo said, “you can indicate whether someone else is your superior or inferior, but you can’t challenge them to decide.”