by Buzz Aldrin
There was a very long silence.
Then Streeyeptin said, “I would like to hear the probe report.”
Krurix and I gave it, as quickly as we could, describing everything we had seen and stressing that no Nisuan appeared to be in charge down there.
Streeyeptin nodded, and said, “Questions?” There were none. Everyone was too stunned. “Very well, then,” he continued, “I should draw your attention to the real nature of the prerevolutionary regime and the kind of consciousness it engendered. No sooner did they reach a new world with a new sapient species than they set out to replicate the worst of the old—slavery, monarchy, racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, the whole business. But I’m sure that lesson can’t have been lost on you. Now we have at least some idea of what we face down there. Even if the Seteposians have taken it over—and I think Krurix and Thetakisus should be able to confirm that with a couple more probe missions, flown, as they suggest, with a little more stealth—even if it is a Seteposian slave empire now, it is unquestionably a slave empire. Therefore our task is twofold: to reeducate the Nisuans living there, whether they are slaves or masters, and to overthrow the present regime and empower the Seteposians to develop into a free and equal republic. If we succeed, we will have new and loyal friends in the universe. Should we fail, well, I need only point to what has already happened.” He turned to Captain Baegess and added, “It’s clear that we need to begin as soon as we have all information in hand. Get our worthy assistants on the job as soon as they’re fed and rested. And I would think a round of applause from the assembled officers is owed to all three assistants.”
They gave it to us, and then swarmed out of the room, back to duties or bunks—since it was plain we were going to be busy. On his way out, Streeyeptin leaned over to Krurix and said, very softly, “Well, you’ve redeemed yourself,” then went out the door before Krurix could react. When I looked at the engineer’s assistant, he was pale around the eyes with fear.
4
BECAUSE OF THE RAIN and the dark that had lain like a cold blanket over the Nim’s empire for ten days now, all the Nisuan slaves who had independent living quarters were allowed fires. My father had built his in front of the one-room hut he shared with my mother, just close enough so that we could sit under the overhang, relatively dry while the fire blazed in front of us and the light misting rain hissed and spatted around its edges.
I had put Esser to bed—no great problem as I’d had her romping outside in the mud all day to tire her out—and gotten permission to spend the evening down here with Father and Mother. It was the first chance, really, to talk alone with Father about what everyone was calling the Pillar of Fire, the strange glowing vertical cloud to the west of us that had appeared the night before it began to rain so unseasonably. I don’t suppose I’d have gotten permission if anyone had been thinking about it—the Nisuan probes creeping through town by night and around the outskirts by day, seen by dozens of people now, had made all of Real People Town nervous and fearful. But after a few gloomy gray days and with the Pillar visible whenever an opening appeared in the clouds, with the whole city rife with rumors of avenging Nisuans about to return, of Inok returned from the sky to punish his father for exiling him there, and that the probes themselves seemed to be alive and thinking in a way no one could recall, the nobility of the Real People had become thoroughly demoralized, and when I had asked my mistress’s permission, she had simply waved a hand at the door. I didn’t stay to discuss her feelings with her.
That evening, Mother was no better; she was still having lucid intervals once or twice a day, but otherwise she either slept or babbled nonsense. Her muscles were terribly weak and visibly wasting away. So far she had no sign of a cough, but both Soikenn and Mejox had finally been killed by pneumonia, as far as we could tell, brought on by being bedridden and perhaps by atrophy of the muscles. We turned her and changed the straw under her, to prevent bedsores, and since she seemed to be unconscious, we left her in what we hoped was a comfortable position and went outside to talk.
“So,” Father said, in Nisuan, “it looks very much as if they did send an expedition back to us. Poor old Mejox—he’d have liked to see it, and if he’d lasted just a little longer he might have. Oh, well, it pleases me to see an end come to the Nim, and Osepok will be ecstatic I’m sure. And perhaps they can do something for Otuz as well.”
“You’re sure it’s them and not someone else?” I asked.
He almost laughed at me, then caught himself. “I suppose, growing up here and getting what education you could mostly in secret, it’s hard for you to understand. But there is no civilization advanced enough to do any of this on Setepos, and the odds of there being any other civilization nearby—and of its coming here—are vanishingly small. No, it’s from Nisu. Another clue is that they appear to be using a zero-point energy laser to hover over the planet’s surface—”
“Is that what the Pillar is?”
“Does it help you to know the name of the thing?”
“Sometimes. At least it lets me feel like I’m not one of our savage masters,” I said. “But how do you know what it is?”
“While we were en route, as you know, Otuz and I, plus your Grandmother Soikenn and poor Poiparesis, who you never met, all of us did a great deal of scientific work, and we read a great deal of other people’s work.”
“It’s always sounded to me like that was all you did.”
“Very nearly. Anyway, one of the reports that came in from Nisu was of an energy source called zero-point energy. Essentially it works because throughout the universe there is always energy popping in and out of existence, and, if you will, it’s a gadget for trapping energy on this side of existence. Physically it’s two vibrating plates very close together, so that when the plates are apart there is just enough time for the energy to come into existence, and when they spring together they trap it before it has enough time to pop back out of existence.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” I confessed.
“Now that I don’t have the math ability I once did,” Father said, “it doesn’t really to me, either. But when you get down to atomic scale—down to things so small that you can hardly imagine them—you really can’t visualize things the way you can in our everyday world. So you just have to take what the math tells you and make whatever sense of it you can—and follow the math, not the sense, if you see what I mean. Anyway, it was a tremendously powerful source of energy, and shortly afterwards another report we got said that they had demonstrated it was lasable—meaning you could use it to make laser light, the same kind of light that Wahkopem Zomos sailed here on, but even more powerful. At the time we thought perhaps that would allow them to send us more power on the return trip laser, and thus shorten our way home, but by then it was becoming clear that money for science and research and exploration was drying up. Well, clearly the spring started running again sometime in the last forty years, because here they are with a very high-powered laser—much more powerful than Wahkopem Zomos used to get here—and one that fits right inside their ship. So besides Nisuans being the only people likely to show up, these people have exactly the right technology to be likely to be Nisuans. If you see what I mean.”
“Close enough,” I said, though I had understood perhaps half of it. I hated to remind him how little he and Mother had been able to teach even the oldest Nisuan children born here—it always made him terribly sad.
“Anyway,” he said, “at the top of the Pillar is a Nisuan ship. It’s been sending the probes. They are scouting the ground down here before they commit a party of people, which is exceedingly smart of them in light of what happened to us. The reason the new probes are so hard to catch is that instead of being simple robots that only know how to do a few things, they are being remotely controlled from the ship. So never fear—there will be an invasion. Soon, I think.”
“I think,” I said, “that the Nim thinks so, too. He’s said to have withdrawn into his palace, won’t t
alk to anyone, issues orders suddenly in a blind haste and then countermands them half a day later. …”
“He senses what’s coming,” Father said. “And don’t forget that when he first met us, he was quite seriously worshiping us as gods. It’s our bad luck that he was smart enough to figure out how weak we were, while we were ill, and brave enough to act on the knowledge. He’s a very tough and dangerous opponent, as every village for six days journey around here has learned. But with all that, he is still really only the master of two thousand Seteposians with various kinds of pointed sticks. He is one of the few of the Real People old enough to have seen a steam rifle in action, and the only one old enough to have seen us destroy the original Real People Town in less time than it now takes him to take his bath. So he’s very afraid and he’s doing his best to find a way to win out again, even though it’s probably hopeless. That combination might make anyone mad.”
“So you think he’s as sure as you are that they are Nisuans, and they are going to land.”
“Diehrenn, is your father still so sure of that?” a soft voice said, from the dark. Aunt Priekahm came into the firelight from the dark mist, looking sort of like a bad copy of a Seteposian. The last few years she had complained constantly of being cold, and had taken to wearing shawls and skirts like they did.
“Well, it is what makes sense,” Father said.
“Zahmekoses, so far nothing has happened that wouldn’t be consistent with an artificially intelligent robot mission,” Priekahm said, “and we may well have to wait for many years till anything that can take us home comes out to see if we’re still here. I think it’s foolish to get your hopes up when—”
I could tell from the tone of their voices that this was one of the eternal arguments they had come to love as they grew older—and worse yet, it was a new one and thus they were still inventing new things to say, so if they got into this one they’d argue all night. I broke in and asked, “Well, if there are people on that ship, what do you think they’ll do?”
Priekahm thought for a moment and then laughed. “Well, the one thing that probably hasn’t changed is that we are a contentious species, Diehrenn. The only guarantee is that they won’t approve of what they find, though exactly what they’ll disapprove of and why is a good question. And the other thing to trust in is that they will ‘fix’ whatever they don’t like first, and then ask questions later. Assuming they really are Nisuans.”
Father gestured agreement. “It’s a bitter joke, but you’re right,” he said. “I suppose a species that all got along perfectly with each other would never make it to the stars, because they’d never argue enough to make their ideas work. And a species that thought everything through first wouldn’t get there because they’d never get around to it. So the galaxy will eventually be ruled by impetuous bickerers.”
Priekahm laughed again. “This is what comes of following logic too rigorously.” It was good to hear the old ones just talking, now that there were so few Seteposians really watching us anymore. If there had been anywhere to go—or if we hadn’t wanted to see what was about to happen right here—for the first time I could remember, it would have been easy to run away.
“Well, so they won’t be pleased,” I said, “I’m not entirely pleased either. Perhaps—”
“Diehrenn?” my mother called softly from inside the little hut. I went in silently; she was lucid so rarely now that we tried not to waste an instant of it.
The hut was small and very dark. “I’m here, Mother.”
“Has the new ship arrived?” she asked. Her voice was very soft and weak.
“It’s still up there, but they haven’t come down,” I said, sitting close to her and taking her hand. I could barely make out her shape by the dim firelight coming through the door. “How did you know—”
“Zahmekoses has been telling me about it whenever I’m awake. He’s so excited about it, says they must have developed better technology.” Her breath hissed in her slack throat as she spoke; I leaned in close to her mouth to hear better. “He adds up the time and says they must have … I think he’s being optimistic … I wanted to see you tonight because … oh, look, the water’s all pink again.” She began to sing in a low, tuneless moan, with occasional words, as she always did after a lucid moment. I pressed my face to hers, and then went back out to Father and Aunt Priekahm. “She’s the same,” I said, before they could ask. “Clear but weak for a little while, and then nothing.”
“I wish Soikenn had lived this long—or that I had paid more attention to my medical studies,” Father said glumly. “It’s got to be something to do with the modified protein processing, toxins that build up and slowly cause brain damage and muscular atrophy, perhaps a by-product of the process that allows us to eat their food. If only Soikenn hadn’t been the first, or pneumonia hadn’t come so quickly after, or even if she’d just thought of—”
Aunt Priekahm interrupted to point out that without the equipment of Wahkopem Zomos or the Gurix, Soikenn’s knowledge would probably have been useless anyway. Since Soikenn had died a year and a half ago, they had argued exactly this question in exactly this way many times. What made me shudder was that when the argument had started, Mother and Uncle Mejox had been part of it.
On occasion I had gotten to talk about it with Prirox and Weruz, the Nisuans who had been born in the same year I was (especially Prirox, because every few months the Seteposians tried to breed me to him again; they couldn’t seem to believe that apparently the birth of my sixth child had left me sterile). We all saw it the same way: either you got the disease from getting old on Setepos, or you got it from living on Setepos a long time. Since Osepok was so much older than either my mother or Uncle Mejox, that argued all too well that you got it from living on Setepos for a long time—and that meant that all of us were likely candidates, too.
Aside from that, those of us with any knowledge of Nisu at all were dying pretty fast—three in less than two years, plus of course the occasional ones who ran away, were killed by cruel masters, or suffered accidents. There were probably fewer than ten of us who could really speak Nisuan, surely fewer than twenty who knew any Nisuan at all, all of us more than thirty-five. Only the generation that had come in Wahkopem Zomos had managed to pass on anything of Nisuan culture to their children; of my own four living, not one spoke the language.
I had drifted quietly into that gloomy stream of thoughts, letting my mind wander away from the new hope from the sky, when suddenly shouting pierced the air.
I looked up and cocked my ears, trying to make out the direction; in a moment we all agreed it was coming from the Palace Square, the blasted area in front of the palace where the Gurix had landed, where because the ground had been baked into stone it was impossible to dig a foundation, grow a tree, or indeed do anything much except leave it bare. Beside me, Priekahm and Father were also standing. He looked in for a moment to make sure that Mother was all right and, since there was little enough we could do for her and the Palace Square was a short distance away, hurried there.
What had attracted the attention in the first place was becoming plainer by the moment: there was a light descending from the sky. At first it was just a blue glow; then we heard a low rumble, like thunder, as it got larger and brighter.
The light became several lights: a great blue one on the underside, and many more floating above it. The thunder grew deafening, and still the lander—that was what it had to be, though I had never seen one—came closer and closer. Now we could see, dimly, the sides of the ship, a gray-white smear illuminated by the lights it carried; it resolved itself into a great cone, resting on its base, and as it drew nearer I could see lettering on its side.
We had kept the secret of reading and writing from the Seteposians, but at the cost of very little practice for those of us who did learn, so my skills were very rusty. While I was still spelling it out, Father read out loud, “‘Ship’s Launch of the People’s Space Exploration Foundation Vessel Number One: Egalitarian Repub
lic’ So that’s just one of its landers. Amazing—it’s got to be bigger than the whole Wahkopem Zomos was. The ship must be huge. And if it’s named Egalitarian Republic, then—”
“Then there’ve been a lot of changes back home,” Aunt Priekahm said. “Which I think we’re about to learn about. Maybe even some good changes.”
The lander was now low enough so that the pale blue flame that boiled from its underside touched the ground, right in the center of the black, hardened area that the Gurix had burned out forty years before. Abruptly, brilliant white light blazed from the lander’s underside, a hideous hooting scream emerged over the roar of the engines, and the blue flame went out. The lander descended, still hooting loudly.
“Well, they don’t have to ride the jet all the way in—some kind of internal aerostat?” Priekahm suggested.
“Probably,” Father said, “especially when you look at how huge that thing is. And if they can carry that inside their ship—well, things have changed a lot.”
“Wonder how long it took them to get here?” Priekahm said.
“Well, if they can take a straight line—unlike us—the minimum is around four years, at lightspeed. I don’t guess modern physics has repealed the speed of light limitation. But we got up to forty percent of lightspeed with a laser that couldn’t do a thousandth of what theirs can. They might easily have come here at just barely below lightspeed—”
“I have an idea, Zahmekoses,” Aunt Priekahm said. “Let’s walk over and ask them.”