Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  “You mean—you’re going to stay here for ten more years?” Krurix asked, incredulous.

  “One doesn’t always get to pick what one’s duty is,” Streeyeptin said. “There are other implications as well. First of all notice it’s ten years until the rescue ship gets here, then another four and a half before it gets back to Nisu. So it will be more nearly fifteen years before I see home again. But secondly, because there will be a permanent team here, there is no special need for Egalitarian Republic to remain. As soon as necessary equipment has been delivered to the ground, the ship can leave. So for those who do stay on board the ship, this cuts the mission short by almost a year.”

  “Lucky them,” Krurix said, looking down. “You said a team would be staying with you?”

  “Well, what I need are several junior officers with a mix of skills,” Streeyeptin said. “I’m purely a social planner and a policeman, you know. Relevant to the job but not capable of doing it all by myself. I need people with technical backgrounds and officer training to help get a functional society going here. Senior officers have to fly the ship, ordinary spacers don’t have enough education …”

  I saw which way it was going and used the same good common sense that had gotten me the job of captain’s assistant. “I’ll stay,” I said. When it’s clear that they want you to volunteer, it’s a bad idea to drag your feet. And everyone knows you really can’t fight a Political Officer. Had I tried to get out of staying, I knew things would go badly for me, and I would still end up staying. By volunteering, I at least got the credit for doing it. Besides, though it probably would not help me make captain, it would give me an important role in a major scientific project, it would establish me as one of the people most experienced on frontier worlds at just the time when they were figuring out who would hold executive positions for the Migration itself—and doing Streeyeptin a big favor would probably set up some political connections. There was more than one way to climb the pyramid of power.

  And, a small voice in the back of my head said, there was always Diehrenn.

  I never asked Bepemm what her reasons were for volunteering; probably many of them were the same as mine. I was much more surprised when, with a strange shudder, Krurix followed suit. Maybe it was because Bepemm and I were the closest thing he had to friends, or perhaps he had just figured out the situation about the same way I had. There are things it’s better not to know about each other, I guess.

  And just like that, we were in for a decade more on Setepos, trying to bring the former slaves and former masters together, through a hundred centuries of progress, almost overnight. When I lay down to take my nap, I made sure I slept well and long. I had a feeling it would be a very long time before that happened again.

  6

  TWO EIGHTDAYS LATER, KRURIX and I were sweating over the fourth crate of lab supplies that we had wrestled into headquarters—the former palace—that morning. “Quote me some numbers,” I said to him.

  He grunted and lifted; I grabbed the other side of the crate, and with one big heave we got it onto the table where it was supposed to go. Then he sighed and said, “All right. Current schedule is for seventeen more lander trips to and from Egalitarian Republic. Last three trips bring down the dialysis rig. You and I unload all that by ourselves because Bepemm is going to be busy cramming enough medical information to pass as our doctor. One last down and up for our farewell dinner and to get Otuz, Priekahm, Osepok, and Zahmekoses onto Egalitarian Republic. Eighteen trips at one per day for two landers means nine days, but they’re taking longer and longer to get each fresh trip underway. So my current bet is that we get three more leaves on the ship before it departs. Pick your three favorite meals and think about your three favorite kinds of shower.”

  I sighed. “Same numbers as before, then.”

  “Always worth rechecking,” he said. “Well, that’s all they left on the porch this time. It’s half a day till the next lander comes back down, and Bepemm doesn’t like to work with either of us on the stuff she’s setting up. Want to get some food and rest a little?”

  “Suits me completely.” I mopped my face with the piece of native cloth that hung down around my head; we had gotten in the habit of wearing the same head covering the Seteposians and the Nisuans born there did. It was one more thing Bepemm was angry at us about. “I think I saw the cooks roasting a couple of goats earlier this morning. Let’s go see if those are done.”

  We walked through the camp that had been Real People Town, saying hello to people who waved and said hello to us. That was mostly Nisuans, but a few Seteposians had learned that as long as they accepted the new order, we weren’t going to make life impossible for them. Except for the greetings, we didn’t talk much, but it was a friendly, companionable silence.

  It occurred to me how strange that was. I wasn’t sure how much I had changed, but Krurix surely had, all for the better, and somehow though our forty-four eightweeks subjective aboard ship hadn’t made us friends, the short time working together on Setepos had. Some of it, I knew, was that the more accepted he felt, the fewer jokes he made and the easier he was to talk to. He was smart, and very loyal to anyone who was kind to him.

  Then too, since Bepemm had decided she was permanently mad at me, he was who I had to hang around with. Perhaps some of my not liking him before had been a matter of seeing him through Bepemm’s eyes.

  And finally, unlike Bepemm and Streeyeptin, hard as it was to admit, we sort of liked it here. Not enough to look forward to losing our favorite foods, showers, recorded entertainment, and comfortable bunks, but enough so that whenever it was time to “hurry up and wait,” we tended to go exploring in town or nearby together, even if it was only to try some Seteposian food or to get the view from a hilltop.

  “Streeyeptin seems pretty worried,” Krurix commented as we sat down with our sticks of chunks of roasted goat and onions. “I don’t think it’s just that there’s so much to get done and so little time to do it, either. I think his political meetings with the younger Nisuans haven’t been going the way he wishes they would. And it’s not only because he doesn’t speak Real-People very well, or because they haven’t learned much Nisuan just yet.”

  I took a bite and chewed for a moment or two. “Well,” I said, “remember it took us a while to find out that he was basically a decent guy, even if he does have kind of a rules-are-rules approach to things. With the language barrier—and the fact that he’s trying to talk them into exactly what they don’t want to do, establishing a decent relationship with Seteposians—well, there’s bound to be a clash, just as you said. I don’t see why you have to look for any other causes for the trouble.”

  Krurix sighed. “I just have a feeling that that’s not all of it,” he said. “You know, they may have been in the Stone Age a few eightdays ago, but they aren’t stupid. And the first thing an intelligent animal learns is to tell other intelligent animals, particularly ones in authority, what they want to hear.”

  I almost choked on the goat. “Too right,” I said, laughing. “Well, when does he get back here to resume political education? He was supposed to be on this last flight—did his note say when he would be back?”

  “Apparently it’s taking him a while to get arrangements made on Egalitarian Republic for Itenn to take over as Acting Political Officer, and that’s cutting into the time for writing and transmitting his reports,” Krurix said. “He’s afraid that if our transmitter here goes down or doesn’t work well, it might be a long time before any of his reports get back to Nisu, and they might not realize how urgent the situation is here. But it is a nuisance not to have him around. He’s the one with the plan and the authority, after all—”

  At first I thought the deep rumble was thunder, but then it was much too loud, and went on too long. A great light shone through the clouds.

  Krurix leaped to his feet, letting his lunch land wherever, and I followed him as we raced back to the palace. The thunder grew louder, the light from overhead grew brighter, and
as we ran we felt a low pulsing rumble through our feet. Suddenly we were knocked from our feet by a savage, hot wind; we rolled, got up, ran again, and were knocked down twice more by further shocks.

  By the time we got to headquarters Bepemm was already there, talking frantically into the radio. “Acknowledge contact, please, Egalitarian Republic,” she was saying. “Please acknowledge contact.” She groaned with frustration. Without looking up from the control panel, she added, “Run playback on the communications link, please, Krurix. I want to make sure we don’t miss any message that might—”

  Krurix was at the other board in an instant and his fingers raced over the keys. “One message, short,” he said, “which probably means—”

  The played back message crackled through the speaker. The voice was flat and expressionless. “Baegess, Egalitarian Republic, reporting. Zero-point energy plates locked up in main ship drive laser. Ship is in free fall toward Setepos. Unable to disable the emergency plate separator, hence engines will reactivate with probable catastrophic results. We are attempting—”

  The message broke off.

  The rumble through our feet had ceased, and when I looked outside the door, there was no longer a great light shining through the clouds; rather, it was becoming as dark as night, and a high wind was rising rapidly, sucking up dust and ripping thatch from roofs. I felt rather than saw Bepemm and Krurix come up behind me. “You were right,” Bepemm said softly to him. “You were completely right.”

  “It sure doesn’t matter now,” he responded. “What are we going to do?”

  “Well,” I said, “first question is what is it going to do out there. What I’d say is we try to work that out, then make some plans, and then see how many people we can get to follow the plans.”

  “Back to basics,” Bepemm said. “So first the big laser cut off. What happened then?”

  “The sea stopped boiling and the steam above it stopped superheating,” Krurix said. “Given how hot that was, it cooled very fast. Probably in almost no time at all you had pretty good vacuum at the center—which might account for the booming noise we heard, just like the way the air rushes back together after a lightning stroke is over. Then the laser came back on when the emergency separator took hold—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “There was an interval there—while it wasn’t running—and in that time Setepos rotated. So when the laser came back on, the ship was not only much lower but also some distance to the west.”

  Bepemm’s face grew pale. “That means almost for certain that instead of down into already-formed clouds, the laser fired abruptly with everything it had out of a clear sky and onto the sea. And from much lower down—”

  “Probably it had fallen more than halfway to the surface,” Krurix said. “So four times the energy intensity at the surface. A lot of seawater blew up into steam, and the column of superheated air killed the ship. So we have a great big vacuum at one point, and an enormous load of steam at high pressure just west of it.”

  “A hurricane,” I said. “It’s going to make a huge hurricane, within an eighth of a day at the outside. The wind’s about to get very high, and it is really going to rain. And we’re sitting in a river valley with a lot of high ground around us, and almost all our people are in flimsy shelters that are going to get knocked down by the wind. We’ve got to get to some solid shelter, on high ground, right away.”

  “I can take you to a dry cave some distance up one of the mountains, anyway,” Diehrenn said, running up to us out of the rain. “What’s going on? Does the big thunder mean something happened to your ship? And what does your word ‘hurricane’ mean?”

  “A big storm,” I said. “Probably bigger than anyone here can remember.” I explained the situation in a few short sentences.

  “We probably have only an eighth of a day or so,” Krurix added. “Is there room for everyone in that cave?”

  “There’s room for all the Nisuans,” Diehrenn said, “and that’s all who’re going. If your ship isn’t there to back you up anymore, we can’t afford to take care of the Seteposians anymore. And they’ll manage a lot better than we will in any case; they’re native here and we don’t belong. So, especially since your political officer isn’t here anymore, let’s not hear any more about what we ‘owe’ our Seteposian ‘brothers.’”

  Rather than start an argument when it would have been pointless, I said, “We need to get going in as short a time as we can manage. Can you get everyone together—”

  “Right here, as fast as I can. It won’t be long,” Diehrenn said, and ran back into the rain.

  All of us grabbed our packs and rammed everything we could think of into them; as we were finishing that, the first Nisuans started to arrive. We had spare packs and bags, and all of these we loaded with emergency rations; any spare space in the packs of anyone just arriving got something vital or something edible. That was as much organization as we could manage.

  Meanwhile, outside, the rain was picking up and the winds were rising. “We’ll need to get moving soon or we won’t be able to move,” Krurix was saying as Diehrenn returned with Prirox.

  “We’ve gotten everyone who can walk or be carried together,” she said. “Prirox, the cave the Nim’s children used to play in is what I’ve got in mind. I think we’ll have to take the straight uphill trail because the easier one crosses two streams and that’s not going to be possible today.”

  “Right,” Prirox said. “Are we ready to go?”

  No one argued so we were. We let Diehrenn and Prirox lead, and we three assistants, weapons drawn, brought up the rear. When we stepped outside the building, the wind was howling and the cold rain blew in sheets; fortunately the high ground was downwind from town, so most of the two hundred and fifty or so refugees had their backs to the weather. Unfortunately for us, as the rearguard, we had to walk backwards and try to keep our eyes clear.

  Hand masers are useless in the rain—the microwaves they put out in a tight beam are scattered and absorbed by the water drops—so we were carrying microslug guns. We had not gotten forty steps from headquarters before we saw Seteposians racing for it. Of course, by letting all the Nisuans in town know that we needed to leave, we had also let the Seteposians know that we were leaving—Diehrenn had to announce it in Real-People because so few of our people spoke their own language. You would think that might mean Seteposians would also flee to the hills, and for all I know some of them did. Most, however, decided to see what they could loot now that we were leaving.

  We had locked the doors behind us, but that wasn’t going to keep the mob out for long; they were quite capable of pulling the building down with their bare hands. And since so much of the equipment we would need if we survived the storm was still in there, we couldn’t let them loot and burn. Perhaps the winds or the flood would destroy the building—we could do nothing about those—but we could at least try to make sure that the would-be looters didn’t.

  We fired short bursts into the crowd; the front rank wavered, then broke and ran. In the heavy rain we could barely see what we were firing at, but we could see shapes moving so we kept shooting until we couldn’t see any more. Krurix chanced a shot with his hand maser; it couldn’t get through the rain, but it did make an impressive rumbling boom as the rain it hit exploded into steam and then recondensed.

  “Not a bad trick!” I shouted over the rain. “Bet it scares them!” We all fired a few maser shots, and as the headquarters building faded into the rain, we stopped for a moment, letting the refugees gain a little distance from us, and then sprayed the area with microslugs. The screams were gratifying. “I guess some people just can’t grasp an idea,” I said. “And at least in this weather they can’t get much use out of those bow-and-arrow contraptions. I think we’ve done all we can and now we might as well catch up with the group.”

  As we went over the first ridge outside of town, water and wind lashing us further, we looked back; it looked like flames were leaping up from Real People Town. “Proba
bly getting a little carried away about the end of the world,” Bepemm shouted. “Nothing we can do about it right now!

  “How far is the cave?” I asked, shouting to Krurix.

  “One more ridge and then a mountainside, I think,” he shouted back. “At least after this next valley we’re up above the flood level—I think.”

  It wasn’t long before we were between the two ridges, but even then water ran over the tops of our feet and we had to go carefully, a dry wash was about to become a raging river and there was an obvious danger of flash flood. Still, we made it to the top of the second ridge without much incident, except of course that almost everyone was tired and cold, and since we were following the ridgeline from there on, we were more exposed to the wind. Rain was falling so thick that I never noticed when the ridge joined the low mountain. It all seemed to be up, up, and more up until finally, staggering and gasping, I found myself stumbling into a dark place where it wasn’t raining. “Here we are,” Diehrenn said next to me, but it was so dark I couldn’t see her. “I think we all made it.”

  I turned back and looked; very dim gray light came into the cave through curtains of windblown rain. The cave smelled of clay and bodies.

  “I think I can make a fire under the overhang,” Krurix said, “if we’ve got any fuel.”

  There was a big pile of wood that Prirox and Diehrenn had left for the trips up here that the Nim’s children and grandchildren liked to make, and that was quickly passed forward to Krurix. He stacked the logs into a neat pile, then stepped back and shot them several times with his hand maser. Flames leaped up from where he pointed, and after about twenty shots he had the beginnings of a comfortable fire. Some of the smoke went into the cave, and because it was acrid, now and then when the wind blew the wrong way it would start people coughing. All the same, we all packed up around it, enjoying the warmth (even though perhaps more of that came from each other), the light, and the sense of being out of immediate danger.