Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  As the day grew dimmer and the wind more fierce, we banked the fire and everyone piled together in groups in the cave to sleep. Outside the wind howled louder and harder and rain came down thicker; the hurricane itself had hit.

  It had been an exhausting day. I was sound asleep as soon as I lay down. When I woke in the morning, I was already beginning to understand that we might very well be on this planet for good. Nothing helps the acceptance of hard facts as much as sleeping on them.

  When two hundred and fifty people sleep together in about twenty communal piles, it doesn’t take much to get everyone awake on a cold summer morning outdoors; for one thing, if you try to remain asleep, your “blankets” get up and walk away, and your “pillows” crawl out from under you. Thus everyone was up and about the next morning at about the same time. Daylight showed us a mountainside redecorated with mudslides and a scoured landscape below partially buried in deep clay mud.

  The artificial hurricane, though fierce, had not been long lived. Probably it would have done little damage if it had happened in a normal season. But the rain that fell out from the plume of steam that Egalitarian Republic had formed, after forty days, had so saturated the ground that there was no place for any of the water that fell except as runoff. As it had poured fiercely down the mountainside, the weakened and rotting brush, dying from soaked roots and lack of sun, ripped out by howling winds, had not done much to hold it. Water, mud, brush, and all had washed down between the ridges and into the rivers, forming temporary dams of rubble here and there. The lakes behind those dams had filled and spilled within sixteenths of days, sending huge waves cascading down onto the floodplains.

  We made our way back slowly, keeping a good guard ahead and behind, because we had no idea how many Seteposians might have survived, but we knew for certain who they would blame for this, and they might well think that with the ship gone our power was gone as well. In fact, we saw only three of them, and they broke and ran as soon as they saw the company of us. Diehrenn said she thought they were escaped slaves, not Real People. Probably they had been afraid that we were still working for the Real People.

  We reached Real People Town just after noon, delayed by the problems of mud, flooding, and having to take so many of the old, weak, sick, and very young with us. Still, so far as we could determine, more by luck than by skill, we had gotten the whole surviving Nisuan population of Setepos out of town and back with no deaths or even serious injuries. I mentioned that to Krurix, and he grinned at me. “Well, if I were a review board, I’d give us all medals,” he said. “Unfortunately, those wouldn’t do us any more good than not getting them, which I think is more likely.”

  I laughed; maybe I was getting used to his sense of humor. “Well, I’ll take anything that’ll make me feel better right now,” I said. “And there’s not much to feel good about.”

  We had rigged a line from a piece of rubble to a broken tree across the river; now our little band was crossing, clinging to the line, with able bodies between anyone who might have trouble keeping a grip. The water was only waist high on an adult anyway, so it was more a case of being careful than of any great danger. Now the last of our group, escorted by Prirox and Weruz, were coming up on the bank, and we were forming up for a cautious advance into Real People Town. To judge from the mud and rubble in front of us, the flood had been deep enough to sweep right through the town, but probably not to cover it. What we had seen from the ridge had looked like many buildings still standing, but there had been nothing moving and no signs of life.

  The main track to the front gate was no longer visible as such; it had been cut through with gullies, buried by rubble in other places, and mostly had just reverted to mud, its deeply worn spots filled in with silt.

  We picked our way along carefully, past drowned goats and piles of brush, till we reached the remains of the wooden palisade. Probably the huge holes we had knocked into it had helped keep the rest up; it was in surprisingly good shape where it still stood. Much of the wreckage from the town had washed up against it: logs, thatch, bits of garments. There was a dead infant Seteposian in one pile as well.

  “Nothing of use to us, and it’s a sanitation hazard,” Bepemm said. “Once we’ve scouted the whole works, probably we should burn the larger piles.”

  “Looks like someone beat us to it,” Krurix said. “There are fire scars on all the standing hut walls.”

  He was right; a little distance further into the ruins showed us many that were more fire-damaged still. We found more bodies of very young and very old Seteposians, and at least one young female whose body had been battered severely, though whether by other Seteposians or by the water and storm was impossible for us to tell.

  “There wasn’t much lightning to start a fire—at least not up on the mountain—and it’s hard to see how a fire could have spread in all that rain,” I said. “And most of it didn’t burn much. I think they probably fired every building they could. It looks like at least one of the old ones died of knife wounds, not drowning. I wonder what happened here?”

  Diehrenn raised her shoulders and let them drop, a gesture the Nisuans here had learned from the Seteposians. It could mean a lot of things: complete indifference, lack of knowledge, contemptuous dismissal, sometimes only that an answer was too obvious to bother with. Bepemm, who was the best of us at speaking Real-People, had begun to do it as well. When there was no answer for a few more steps, I finally said, “Er, my question was serious. Do you think you know what happened?”

  Bepemm answered. “I would guess they were panicked. It looked like something bad had happened which only the gods knew about. Probably they heard Diehrenn and Prirox summoning people to the palace and figured that whatever was going to get us might get them as well. And so …”

  “But why would they panic and burn their own town down?” Krurix asked.

  “Because they’re savages,” Diehrenn said flatly. “The bulk of the population were slaves who just wanted to go back to their conquered villages, and all they knew was that the Nim’s army came and took them and made them work here. So when they got the chance they ran for it; a lot of them set fires to cover their tracks. And besides, many of the Real People themselves were children of mothers taken captive in war, and they didn’t have much idea what was going on either. The Nim didn’t spread a lot of knowledge around, so they had only a vague knowledge of what was going on. After we took over, they were hanging around here because we fed them and helped them rebuild and they didn’t have anywhere else to be anyway. So when it looked like everything was falling apart, there was nothing much to keep them here, and their first thought was that something a lot bigger than themselves was angry. And once someone got the idea that the town was what the gods hated, well, in practically every religion around here, you purify things by burning them. They had to get rid of the bad town. The smart ones ran up into the hills and are probably still running. The dumb ones just ran until the flood caught them. And that’s the end of the Real People, which is a fine thing if you ask me.”

  We had come to the ruin of the old stone gate for the inner wall of the city: a crude affair, formed with a lintel with stones piled on top of it, rather than any sort of arch. We had blown it up, along with the tower, because it was a symbol of the old Nim’s power. Now it was blocked; the heaps of stones had furnished solid objects for junk to catch on. It took us some time, even with lots of people helping, to clear out the rubble.

  The stone part of town showed just as many signs of fire damage, especially inside the buildings; probably, since it was a little higher up, the water had gotten there later. It looked as if the flood had crested about a bodylength high on most walls.

  Our headquarters had been burned and most of the furniture smashed. Many small objects were missing, but whether from fire, flood, or theft it was impossible to say. The old plank roof had fallen in at two points.

  It looked like a complete loss, but a little more searching revealed that they hadn’t bothered to o
pen crates, a lot of things strewn about were merely dirty and muddy, and whatever theft had happened had been extremely hasty. Too, it looked like the rain and flood had extinguished the fire before it destroyed everything. “There’s a lot we can salvage,” I said, “and I guess what we can do is set up the best camp we can, get everything out of here we can, and then go … somewhere. Or stay here and settle. Or something.”

  “There seems to be a failure in our planning department,” Krurix said.

  Bepemm turned on him. “Oh, of course. And I suppose you have some plan for making all this work? In two generations we’ll be back to the Stone Age like every other savage around here, unless we—”

  Krurix raised a hand; I had been trying to get him to apologize rather than defend, so I was happy that he said, “Just a badly placed joke. Look, since yesterday afternoon we’ve been doing nothing but run. Between all the packs we probably have two days food. With the flood and all, we’re going to have to rig up a still or something before we can even think about drinking the water around here. Everyone’s tired and there’s too much work to do. I was teasing Thetakisus because we just went through this horrible mess, with him leading most of the way, and everyone is safe and alive, and he was about to start blaming himself for not knowing exactly what to do next. It was a joke between friends. I’m sorry I offended you.”

  Bepemm sat down abruptly on a log. “I’m sorry, too. And I’m very tired. If anyone has any suggestions—”

  I shrugged. “We’ll have to set a watch, build a couple of fires, and sleep in the open tonight, probably right on Palace Square, since that looks sort of dry. It’s a good thing it’s summer, I suppose. We can lay some log floors out of driftwood to get ourselves out of the mud—that shouldn’t take long. After that I suggest we mostly get food and rest, and then tomorrow morning we start clearing mud out of the usable buildings. Not much of a plan, but it will do for the moment, I think.”

  At least it gave everyone something to do. We got our little camp together and set some of the younger males on watch, teaching them how to use the hand masers and microslug guns and just sort of hoping that either they would be responsible enough or the Seteposians would be too afraid to approach us.

  I couldn’t say which was the case, because I was asleep instantly and I was aware of nothing until Diehrenn awoke me the next morning. Breakfast was a ration bar and a drink of water, not any worse than what we’d often had during training years ago, and apparently a party had gone out to see if it could bring in goat, deer, or pig, so there was some hope of a better meal to come by nightfall. “Well,” I said, “I guess we pick the stone buildings that aren’t too full of mud and junk, and get everyone to work. A couple of days hard labor should get us enough places for everyone to sleep under a roof, and then—”

  Suddenly I heard the most wonderful sound I had ever heard in my life: a duet of screeching hoots that went on and on. In a moment, everyone was looking at the sky. There, hardly bigger than the tip of my small finger now, but growing rapidly as they drew nearer, descending slowly using only their aerostats, were both of Egalitarian Republic’s landers.

  7

  THE NEXT FEW MOMENTS were long; it was beyond hope that all the rest of the crew had been on the lander, and so we knew we would hear bad news mixed with the good. They must already know from our not responding that we had no radio.

  “Why would they have gone to aerostat so high up?” Bepemm asked. “That’s a tricky landing—they’re going to have to come down out in the fields.”

  “Hmmm.” Krurix looked at the descending ship. “Could be they weren’t en route when the fall started. If they had to do a quick getaway from the ship, they might have burned a lot of propellant without a chance to take on more—or if they got away really late, the shockwave from the atmospheric explosion might have given them some damage.”

  “So they might be just as helpless as we are?” Bepemm asked.

  “Not quite. They always have their antimatter charge. The propellant is plain old liquid hydrogen, and they can make that from water here. Built in equipment for it. So they might be good as new in twenty-four hours.” He sighed. “If that’s true, all we need is somewhere to go.”

  Given that none of us was formally a leader, I suppose you can’t really say that discipline fell apart as the lander descended. Everyone rushed out onto the field in front of the ruined wooden palisade to watch the first lander come in. “I think you’re right,” I noted to Krurix, as we ran with the others. “Look how little he’s using the positioning jets—just enough to avoid coming down on rocks and trees or in the big mud pot there. He’s trying to conserve propellant, for sure.”

  We came to a halt in the mud, and Bepemm said, “He?”

  “Captain Baegess,” I said.

  There was a long silence while my two friends looked at each other. Very gently, Krurix said, “Thetakisus, he’d be the last one to leave the ship. There wouldn’t have been time. Whoever it is—”

  The lander slid downward, moving very slowly sideways in the slight breeze, before settling onto the muddy plain. I had a bad moment when I thought a leg might sink in a soft spot and tip the lander over, but it settled almost straight, a short spray of mud squirting up. There was a loud slurping hiss as the ballast tanks filled with compressed air, and the lander had arrived.

  Immediately, without waiting, the next lander came in. It seemed to be flown even more awkwardly, and abruptly I realized—“That one’s empty, someone’s flying it on remote,” I said. It bumped down to the landing field, sending up huge sprays from puddles, but it stayed upright even when the air hissed back in for compression and it settled onto its feet.

  The steps of the first lander came down, and First Officer Beremahm stepped out. I was glad to see her—and miserable because I knew it meant Captain Baegess had not gotten away. We approached slowly; Itenn came down the steps, followed by Tisix and Proyerin, still pulling off the remote rig he had used to fly the other lander down. And that was all.

  I walked forward, the two other assistants behind me. Beremahm looked as if she expected us to strike her. “These are all we saved,” she said. “We were on board doing repairs when the ship started to fall. The captain overrode our doors to seal us, then she punched jettison and we were outside before we knew what she was doing. Then she jettisoned the empty lander and all of a sudden its robot pilot was calling for a signal from us—she must have told it to do that in her last few moments alive. I …” She fell forward and I caught her; she was sobbing.

  “She’s been very … not good … ever since,” Proyerin whispered to us. I nodded, and we got Beremahm back up the steps and into the lander, hustling her over to a temporary bunk. Bepemm had had more medical training than any of the rest of us, so we let her attend to Beremahm. Krurix and Proyerin immediately started jabbering about exactly what shape each lander was in and how much repair it would need—listening with half an ear, it sounded to me like it wouldn’t be much. I turned to Itenn and Tisix, two ordinary spacers, both among our best crew, and said, “Well, I guess I should hear from you. If the First Officer’s … not well, then I guess Proyerin is our senior officer, and I’m theoretically his second. What happened exactly?”

  Itenn sighed. She looked exhausted, as if she had been asking herself that question for the whole day since the ship had gone down. “Just what Beremahm said. One moment we were using the ship’s vacuum system to clean up junk from the last trip up we’d made, wiping down and greasing and tightening, you know, all the stuff you have to do around a working machine. Proyerin was in the back. He’d just finished flushing out the liquid hydrogen tank and he had it about five percent filled. Beremahm was doing a checklist run through the lander astrogation system … and then all of a sudden we were weightless. Just like that.”

  Tisix picked up the story. “Well, sir, something clicked for me and Beremahm at the same time. We’d been in the cockpit when Krurix was talking about the thing that might go wrong, how the
plates might stick together, so we both knew. We were closed but not sealed, so we started for the doors—I don’t know, hoping to get to the bridge, I suppose—but when you’re suddenly weightless, well, there’s not much you can do. We had no footing, nothing to grab onto right away, and while we were getting ready, there’s a sudden thump and hiss, and we know we’ve been sealed from outside. Then there was a huge thud and we fell sideways into a bulkhead, and by the time we got untangled from that there was space and sky and Setepos under us, all whirling around in the viewport. I braced my feet on the bulkhead, jumped to the controls, slammed one fist on the power-up button and the other on the emergency autopilot. In a second we started to get the right attitude, with our tail down, as the side jets kicked in and the autopilot got us righted. Then the autopilot asked me for a course. I saw the Republic falling away below us, already starting to glow orange, and felt the lander shaking and rocking. I had about one breath to decide, or I’d never have done it, but I pointed at the first thing on the menu that would work, ‘low ballistic orbit,’ and then the main engine fired hard enough to knock us all flat and nearly black us out—we must’ve pulled five gravities instantaneously, and none of us braced for it. But it did throw us up to safety—using more than half our remaining fuel.”

  Itenn added, “It was brilliant that he did that in such a short time—and brilliant of the captain to remember he could save us and the other lander. I just wish there had been a crew in it; I think they must have been taking a break at that moment.

  “Our cameras caught what happened to Egalitarian Republic and it was horrible. They must have been well down toward the stratosphere and parts of the ship already burned off—with luck all of them were dead from the heat—before the emergency separator kicked in and the ship’s computer fired the engine with everything it had. The blast ate the ship instantly, and we saw waves with the naked eye, a hundred bodylengths high or more, rolling away from the blast. The air and steam was white-hot all the way up into the ionosphere. If Tisix had been two breaths later, we might still have started to climb out of the atmosphere, but that white-hot shock wave would have had us for sure.”