Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  “I don’t need him for right now,” Azir said. “I want to run some routine checkouts on the engine.”

  “See that they’re routine,” Streeyeptin said.

  “Yes, sir.” She went out quickly, as if glad to get away.

  Krurix popped out the seat at the utility console next to mine and configured into parallel with me. Streeyeptin and Captain Baegess went to Streeyeptin’s cabin to confer—I was glad to be so busy that I didn’t have much thought to spare for whatever was going on in there. That left Beremahm as the commanding officer in the cockpit; Tisix, the helmsman for that watch; and us.

  Krurix and I had operated robot probes by remote control, together, many times in practice, and as long as I worked fast enough, he wouldn’t talk and irritate me, so I put myself to the pleasant task of getting the probe checked out and readied as quickly as possible. I had outfitted this one with a more powerful power plant than usual—an antimatter cell with a heated-gas rocket—so that it could run fast and hard if it needed to.

  As a side benefit, we wouldn’t need to descend by parachute; I could fly it all the way down on its engine, by remote control. Krurix sat backup on me, ready to take over if something distracted me, or if I asked him to. At least he knew enough not to do anything annoying at a time like this.

  “Ready for me to launch you?” he asked.

  “Launch on my mark,” I said. “Three. Two. One. Launch.”

  There was a faint shudder through our feet as the tail-end catapult tossed the rover out, dropping toward the planet, and as it all fell away from us, I checked its controls; response was excellent, almost as if we were in it.

  The job was nothing like flying down from orbit; Egalitarian Republic was hovering on its laser exhaust far above Setepos’s atmosphere, stationary relative to the surface, but nowhere near as high as geostationary orbit—Tisix was flying us sideways, using positioning jets, at a pace just enough to keep us above a constant point in the sea between Big and the Hook. So the probe I was operating had almost no velocity parallel to the surface of Setepos—it was more like dropping off an impossibly high building.

  I set the probe to fire a burst every time its speed of approach toward Setepos got too high, bringing itself to an all but complete stop each time. Thus, as we looked through the probe’s camera, we approached the ground in a series of leisurely jerks until we were almost down into the troposphere, without ever reaching a speed high enough to heat the probe’s skin much. “Like operating an elevator,” I said.

  “Nice flying,” Krurix said. “Do you want to try for the desert northwest of the village? I’ve got a position for you.”

  “Give it to me,” I said, letting the little probe hover where it was, still far above the ground but now well down into the atmosphere. At once a green dot appeared on my down-view camera, far off to the side. “Got it,” I said. “I’m going to go almost straight down on it so we don’t accidentally draw attention by flying low over anyone.” I angled my thrust very slightly, throttled up a bit, and moved the probe toward the green dot, watching the landscape crawl by underneath. I spun the probe around so that the thrust vectored the other way, let it drift to a stop, so that I was back to hovering. The dot was, as nearly as I could tell at the scale, directly under me.

  “That is nice flying,” Krurix repeated, “you got it in one pass.” More softly, he added, “And thanks for getting me out of that one. I was afraid the Political Officer was going to give me a full-fledged grilling and all, to see why I was interfering with the mission.”

  “He praised you,” I pointed out.

  Krurix looked at his feet and muttered, “Everyone knows that’s when they’re dangerous.”

  I had to let that pass because it was true. “Anyway, I wasn’t rescuing you, I was keeping the heat off all of us.”

  “I’ll take my rescues any way I can get them,” he said. “If you’re ready, let’s set the probe down and work out our next step.”

  “Sure,” I said, and cut the throttle back just a little. The probe drifted downward, gaining only a little speed before I opened the throttle a bit so that finally it hovered just a finger-thickness above the grainy desert soil. I let the throttle drift down quickly to zero, and the probe settled on the surface of Setepos.

  A quick camera scan around us showed low hills and dunes on most sides, with a range of high, rocky, forested hills rising to the east. “Okay,” Krurix said, next to me, “I’ve got a fix on the lander and the village, and I’m getting a decent radar topo of the area between. As you move toward those hills, you’ll encounter a series of low ridges, and between the ridges you’re going to find a lot of stuff that looks like cultivated fields, with little canals running through them. Those will probably have people working in them, so what we want to do is follow ridgelines, just low enough to not be silhouetted against them, cross from ridge to ridge wherever there’s cover, and eventually reach one of the ridges that looks across the river into the town.”

  “Good plan,” I said, because it was. “If you’ll jock the extra cameras and the instruments, that will leave me free to fly close and low.” We reconfigured for that. I lifted the probe a bodylength off the desert surface, far enough so that the little jet wouldn’t be at risk of setting any fires, and we sped off toward the line of ridges, Krurix calling off results as we went. “Temperature, pressure, gravity, humidity, all of that is just what we’d expect from all the other probes. The bio sampler is getting what looks like pollen and bacteria, mostly, plus a couple of insects. Still nothing different from what we’ve seen on any other probe. Certainly looks like we can walk around without any special suits. That should make the senior officers happy—we can get right into the next phase.”

  “They’ve got their orders too,” I reminded him, “and getting on with it will make their lives a lot better when they get back.”

  “What are you two muttering about over there?” Beremahm asked. Maybe she heard enough to know it wasn’t completely appropriate—at least not with our political officer acting up—or maybe she just distrusted assistants whose voices got too quiet.

  “Just some tricky technical stuff,” I said. “We’re flying right above the dirt and there’s a lot of fussing to do, and besides there’s more relevant data at the altitude.”

  We swept up the first ridge, avoiding staying on the two footpaths that we crossed. The more broken ground and thicker brush meant I had to bounce higher, but Krurix said there was no one to spot us, at least no one he had seen in any camera. We popped up for an instant, and through a distance lens Krurix saw two Seteposians hoeing a field, so we dropped back and glided along till we found a patch of broken woods and country that seemed to be unobserved. Weaving between trees, we made the next ridge, climbed a gully in its side, and began to repeat our little game of creeping along behind the ridge, looking for a suitable place.

  It took a good sixteenth of a day to cross the several ridges until Krurix assured me that the town would be over the very next one. “Well,” I said, “taking a peek is getting more and more dangerous.” As it was, we were sitting in a low depression on one side of the gully, hoping not to be noticed, but since three footpaths ran into the hollow, it seemed unlikely that we could be unnoticed for long. “Let’s make sure we take one really good peek, anyway. I’m going to just pop over the ridge—get all the cameras and instruments ready for quick high-resolution shots, in case that’s all we can do. As soon as I do this I’m going to have to start improvising.”

  I made the probe creep forward, a quarter-bodylength off the ground, until we got into a grove of trees that extended almost to the top of the ridge. Then I popped up out of an open spot in the canopy, dove over the ridge, and brought us to a fast hover two bodylengths off the ground on the other side. Beside me at the other console I heard Krurix’s little grunt of effort as he shot more pictures in less time than any of us had ever managed in a practice run.

  I had just looked around once when a sudden motion caught my
eye. It was a Seteposian, and he was throwing a spear at the probe. I slammed the side jet on and lurched out of the way; the Seteposian turned and ran.

  “Let’s chase him,” Krurix said. “Our cover is blown, we have plenty of juice to get out if we need to, and we might learn quite a bit by seeing who, if anybody, he reports to.”

  It sounded good to me. I vectored thrust and we sailed down the foot trail after the fleeing Seteposian as he charged down the badly eroded path straight down the hillside. Out of the corner of my eye I was aware that Krurix was getting many good shots of the town: the stone-walled inner part with its big buildings and tower, and the outer huddle of huts surrounded by a wooden palisade. In forty years or so it had grown far beyond what the single cryptic picture had shown us; most remarkable of all, right at its center, apparently attached to the largest building, was the burned-out hulk of one of Wahkopem Zomos’s landers.

  The figure in front of us continued running downhill, and I kept pursuing, trying to keep an eye on my side and rear cameras in case any friends showed up to help him. They wore more clothing than we did, I noticed—the fabric in which he wrapped his body was flapping madly as he ran. Probably this was the fastest he had ever run. I could hardly blame him.

  “Don’t let me distract you, Thetakisus,” Krurix said, “but there’s a really astonishing array of things in that town. That’s a full-fledged stone-age city, like they found back home on Nisu, twenty years ago, when they finally found First Dynasty Kratareni.”

  I glanced over at his screen, since we were now chasing our lone spearman across fairly flat planted field and I could trust the collision avoider for a few instants. The picture looked like it had come out of a historic motion picture back home. I went back to chasing my Seteposian.

  He was running up on a small wooden palisade by the trail; I didn’t know what might be inside it, but I figured I could—

  There was a sharp scream on the probe’s internal audio. I clicked for a fix on it and switched the cameras to scan the probe’s own outside; there was a decorated stick protruding from one external audio pickup. It took me a moment to realize that must be a projectile fired by a Seteposian weapon of some kind.

  Two more of the sticks shot by—they were miniature stone-tipped spears with something tied to their backs to make them fly straight. I jigged around to spoil their aim. Now I could see other Seteposians, advancing across the field we had just crossed, fitting the small spears to bent sticks, which they clearly used to launch them somehow. Then twenty more came rushing out of the little fort in front of us; they were carrying spears.

  “I suggest we get the probe out of there before we lose it,” Krurix said.

  I hit the preprogrammed command, and the probe boosted at four gravities. The down-pointing cameras showed a flock of spears, large and small, rising after the probe, then falling back. The field and fort blended into the green around them, then the town and ridges disappeared into the land as well.

  “Not completely friendly, are they?” Krurix commented. “I think we want to be pretty careful about approaching them. And I don’t like the fact that Seteposians were all there was in that fort. It kind of suggests to me that it wasn’t our side that ended up in charge. I’d have expected a Nisuan officer if the Wahkopem people had won out.”

  I logged off from the probe, leaving it to find its own way back up to Egalitarian Republic, something it could easily do. Free now to just talk, I grinned at the other assistant. “Would you say we have a good handle on what happened to the robot probes?”

  He gestured agreement. “It has to be. I couldn’t swear to it from that encounter, but you know, I think they knew what they were doing. Did you see how quickly they moved to surround the probe? The robots are programmed to move away from anything big that moves toward them. I think our friends have worked out how to confuse a probe’s program so that it runs out of ideas.”

  I noted that into our report and said, “So. We’ll want to try again soon. I don’t think we’re going to get much of a look by chasing sentries.”

  Krurix scratched behind one ear and then rubbed his crest vigorously. “We need to go at night, to begin with. Put all the cameras on infrared, show no lights, do very low-powered hops so we don’t show much flame, really use the audio pickups heavily. More or less the way we’d try to sneak in, in person, I guess. We should probably come in straight down, so we don’t have to sneak past any guards, and sometime when there’s no moon in the sky.”

  We had just figured out that we were close to a new moon, the best of all times to go, when Beremahm came over and rested a hand on each of our shoulders. “The captain wants all officers to the main conference room—including me, so we’re leaving the ship in the hands of the ordinary spacers. Tisix,” she added, “you will promise not to crash us?”

  “If the ship blows up, you can dock my pay, sir,” the helmsman said.

  “Anyway,” Beremahm said, “given how many standing orders and regs this goes against, there’s obviously something big happening. Apparently we’re going to hear your friend Bepemm’s report, and the captain and the Political Officer would also like it very much if you would please present something or other as well—he says it doesn’t have to be organized, but he doesn’t want to completely surprise you when he asks. Unofficially I suggest you take a few minutes to pull out a file of pictures before you go down.”

  The main conference room was also the dining hall and where recreational games were played and Political Education lectures given. There was room for everyone there, and since the ship’s crew was about half officers, this meant everyone could have spread out. Instead, we piled into the front two rows, leaning forward, trying to guess what Captain Baegess and Political Officer Streeyeptin had heard from Bepemm to cause this unprecedented meeting.

  The last to come in were Proyerin, the engineer’s mate, and Depari, the astrogator, both of whom had been asleep. As soon as they were seated, Captain Baegess began. “Well, after today I am not sure I will ever believe there can be such a thing as too-wild speculation. As we all know, some of the most bizarre ideas about what happened to the Wahkopem Zomos expedition have turned out to be true. It was clear before now that they landed near a village of intelligent Seteposians and that at least some of their descendants still live there, so in that sense the greatest shock is over with. But what Astrogator’s Assistant Bepemm has turned up is not merely surprising—it is shocking, and I don’t use that word lightly in this case. Most of you will be shocked. Therefore I want you to give her your full attention without interruption. And you may find that harder than you think. Still, I want to hold all discussion until we have heard all the facts—with one exception. I wish to exercise my captain’s privilege of pointing out to you all that Bepemm has done a superb job, very rapidly finding the relevant documents and compiling them into the strange and horrifying story you are about to hear, and is greatly to be commended. So now, give her your full attention. Bepemm?”

  It was certainly unheard of for one of us assistants to address the whole session of the ship’s officers; normally the whole session met only before and after a voyage, not during one. And for that matter, most of the time we were invisible as we ran from one duty to the next. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that Bepemm looked a little frightened. She glanced toward me and Krurix, and we covertly gestured approval at her; that seemed to relax her, and she began.

  The captain’s preface had not been exaggerated. The story was horrifying. It began with the murder of the only morally decent crewmember, the only one who had advocated equality with the Seteposians and who had not had racist ideas about cross-marriages. Apparently he had dissented from a plan to establish a slave empire on Setepos—Bepemm was still looking for exact evidence on that point.

  The “crash” message received on Nisu—the very message that had been the trigger for the Revolution—had been a fraud, intended to keep anyone from coming to see what was going on. For us, the children of the Revo
lution—and for older officers who had fought in it—this was perhaps the hardest blow.

  But not the worst thing we heard. Records uploaded from the Gurix’s computer showed that the Nisuans had indeed established a slave empire, overrunning some twenty neighboring settlements.

  Finally we got the story of the disease that developed among them. After Mejox made the last run for medical supplies, records came to an abrupt end until almost three years later, when the Gurix suddenly took off at maximum acceleration and continued right on out of the solar system, beyond radio range, till finally its engines flamed out at just about the distance that could be explained as running out of fuel. “They took off in no particular direction,” Bepemm noted. “The nearest star they could have been trying for is a red dwarf more than twenty light-years away, which the Gurix still won’t reach for decades—about seven gravities for about an eightday only got it up to about thirteen percent of the speed of light. And the Gurix was unequipped for a crew to survive that much acceleration. I can’t believe that trip was intentional.”

  Captain Baegess waited a long moment and then said, “You should give us your hypothesis on this one, Bepemm. Political Officer Streeyeptin and I agree that it makes a great deal of sense.”

  Bepemm looked nervous. “Well, er, the problem is that it happens to have no real evidence. I just thought that the voyages between Wahkopem Zomos and the surface probably stopped because they just didn’t need anything more from the ship to run their empire. If you look at the plans and lists when they started out, the Gurix actually made one more trip than it was supposed to—the one for medical supplies. So I think they had planned that their little empire would be independent of the ship. If it hadn’t been for the illness, Mejox Roupox would not have needed to make that last trip.

  “Then as for what happened three years later—I think most likely Soikenn, who had been close to Poiparesis, who had frequently dissented, and whose child—the youngest among them—was extremely sick and might well have died, did it as an act of suicide, and also to take away the basis of the Nisuan empire on Setepos. Probably after seeing how things had turned out, she decided to eliminate herself and the access to Wahkopem Zomos at the same time. If she was careful about how she did it, she would have been killed on takeoff, and she wouldn’t have suffered much.”