Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  “What’s the time frame?” Beremahm asked, quietly.

  “Two eightdays to get a fusion reactor going; about the same to get the Wahkopem Zomos farm back on-line,” Bepemm said. “We move the six undialyzed people who are closest to the edge up to Wahkopem Zomos, where Otuz and Zahmekoses start teaching them to run the farm. We think it will only be a few eightdays more, after we get the reactor running, before we have the first sealed and pressurized environments on the moon. Then we seed the habitats, move the first group of colonists off Wahkopem Zomos to the moon, move the next group up to Wahkopem Zomos, and so forth. About twenty in a group—the bottleneck is Wahkopem Zomos itself. In half a year we have a trained cadre of farmers and workers on the moon, with room enough for everyone else. Both landers start running as a ferry; we move the last hundred and eighty in three quick swoops. And at that point we’ve got a base that could last us for centuries if it had to, especially because between the library and factory equipment on Wahkopem Zomos, and the computer and microindustry on the lander, we can make just about anything we might need, except good luck. And we’ll be completely independent of this planet and its poisons.”

  “What happens when we run out?” Beremahm said abruptly.

  “Run out of what?” I asked, staring stupidly.

  “How much ice is there at the south pole?”

  “A few centuries’ worth, maybe more, assuming we lose one percent per year to leaks,” Proyerin said. “That’s plenty of time for us to get rescued.”

  “Is it?” Beremahm asked. “You know, as your commanding officer, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, too, and I had a lot of time to sit and read in that lander while Bepemm did all those tests on me. And I had been thinking along pretty much the same lines as you all, but with a few interesting differences. Here’s what I came up with.

  “Think about the situation back home. The alien-protein-immune-sickness we discovered here is not only going to happen on Setepos, you know. It will happen anywhere where we are immersed in an alien ecosystem, at least until we genetically modify ourselves enough—and it will take decades to find out what must be done in each case, perhaps centuries to produce Nisuans who can live outside a Nisuan biosphere. And perhaps we can never succeed; perhaps we will always need to be under constant medical treatment to live in any other kind of biosphere. Some places the progress of the disease is bound to be more rapid than here, some places less, but it will happen.

  “So what does that imply? There are only about sixty Nisuan years left until the Second Bombardment. And we have just demonstrated to them that any living world is unsuitable to our long-term survival. Do you see what that means? For almost a century, we have been looking for the wrong planets to emigrate to! Worse yet, the fast zero-point-energy laser-drive scout ships that have departed in the last four years—at least four of them besides us—have all gone to the wrong places.

  “By the time they get our message they will have to scramble to find any suitable worlds at all. What they need are planets that can be ‘Nisu-formed,’ to coin a phrase—places where there is no life, but which could be modified to support Nisuan life. If they can find such planets, they can seed them with Nisuan life and gradually make them habitable for us. That process may take a few hundred years, but the big Migration Project ships are designed to hold crews of millions for centuries anyway; they can simply orbit the new worlds while they work on them. But when they get our message, they are going to figure out that they must find and scout Nisu-formable worlds immediately. Every available scoutship will have to be diverted to that purpose, quite a few of them diverted en route.

  “And remember there are far too many of us to move in a single scoutship; they would have to build a special rescue vessel, or send six or seven modified scoutships here. They won’t have time. Some of the places where they will be looking for Nisu-formable worlds will have to be twenty light-years and more away. That means twenty years for the scoutship to get there, and, if the place is suitable, twenty more for the radio message to come back, leaving only twenty to build a city in space and get it launched … no, they simply can’t spare the resources to come and get us. Everything has to go into scoutships and colony ships, flat out as hard as they can do it, right up till the rocks fall.

  “We are here for good.”

  It took a long time for that message to sink in. Finally Krurix said, “You’ve convinced me, anyway. I guess we can just settle on the moon and hope we think of something else before we run out of ice. Maybe we can improve recycling or find a way to get enough replacements from Setepos or—”

  Beremahm looked at us all with a little secret grin—the kind that we had all been giving her—and said, “But you all give up too easily. And so do I. You have half the solution right there—how our people can live for a century or so. And I have the other half—think about the fourth planet from Kousapex, the next one out from here.”

  “The War Star?” Diehrenn asked, in Real-People.

  “That’s the one,” Beremahm said. “All the stuff life needs, in huge quantities, but the probes found no life. Two small moons—perfect bases with plenty of raw materials. I rather strongly suspect that given a century to work, we can make a pretty good home there. We might or might not ever be able to breathe without a helmet, we might never be able to create a lake and go swimming there, but we can live a long time. Probably we can live for three hundred years, till the Migration Project ship gets there and starts Nisu-forming, with a better set of tools than we and our descendants will have.

  “I just hadn’t been able to figure out how we’d get that century or so that we needed to make a home there. Especially since I had forgotten that Wahkopem Zomos was still around, so I didn’t remember that we had crops and animal tissue from the ship’s farm, and of course our poor little lander’s life-support system would never make it as far as the War Star. I like that name, by the way. What does it mean?”

  I told her, and she laughed. “Well, then, what would be Real-People for ‘Peace Star’?”

  “They don’t have a word for peace,” Diehrenn said.

  “We really do need to leave this planet,” Beremahm said firmly. “Let’s keep their name for the fourth planet, then, but resolve to forget what it means.” She looked from one face to another, and gradually we all began to smile.

  “Twice,” she said, “expeditions have wrecked here on Setepos. For our people this appears to be the planet of bad luck, and I say, let’s leave it for good. But let’s not forget that twice we’ve survived disasters and gone on, through worse things than the people who sent us could ever imagine. I say, we’re not dead yet. Let’s get moving—we have two more worlds to conquer before we die.”

  FROM: Diehrenn Zahtuz

  TO: the Grand Council on Nisu:

  After all the stories that Thetakisus, my mate, and his friend Krurix had told me of Nisu, I was still astonished to find that a message had come in by radio from Nisu. I have grown used to how drastically my circumstances have changed since the day more than ten of Earth’s years ago when the Pillar of Fire first blazed in the skies over Real People Town; I was, after all, raised on stories of Nisu by my father Zahmekoses and mother Otuz; and yet, with all that, to actually see that a message transmitted from Nisu has arrived here—the first of many, apparently—fills me with awe.

  As was requested in your message, I have sent along my own account, supplemented by my mate Thetakisus, of how the decisions were first made. I do hope you will find room for it in the copier of the Great Volume of Knowledge sent out to the Migration Project ships, on their way to nine worlds.

  Ten worlds seems so many; I have only lived on three. But three is plenty for anyone who spent the first part of her life in a Stone-Age kingdom, I suppose, and I have no complaints.

  How many wonders can I tell you of? And would they even seem wondrous to you, who grew up among them, who are even now headed to the stars? Within a year I—I, who could barely read and write when Egalitarian R
epublic first made its blazing Pillar in our sky—was assistant operator for a fusion reactor on the moon. I confess it was some four years later before I really knew what a fusion reactor was or what it did, but that power was still there in me, and I dealt with it—very well, if I say so myself.

  A decade later I helped astrogate Wahkopem Zomos to the War Star, where we built this base on its inner moon—the place from which I now write, looking up at that faithful old ship, built the better part of a Nisuan century ago, now waiting for yet another voyage back to the Moon, sitting a short distance above us here. Beyond it I see the red face of the War Star, now blotchy with the green patches of lichen that we have seeded there.

  The genetics team says the lichens are dying, losing ground after an initial surge, and that this attempt was a failure. But we are patient and strong. We will simply try until we either succeed or die.

  Our next try will be with the dust that surrounds the south pole of the War Star; it is very fine and dark, and if we scatter it vigorously enough, we can darken the ice as summer comes on, and thus warm it enough to release the frozen carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn will warm up the rest of the planet, and perhaps give our experimental lichen a new lease on life and get some rivers flowing and lakes forming. But if that fails, we have other options. One way or another, sooner or later, we will warm the War Star and thicken its air.

  Even if we can’t get anything to grow on its face, we will live there within my lifetime, for I shall move down there in a few years. There is a circular crater near the north pole that has a place suitable for such a city, and construction has already begun there.

  On the Moon, they have found more ice than they had thought was there, and that colony has a new lease on life as well, so we need not hurry quite so much to get them all here. They are talking of building spaceships there, so that we no longer must rely on the single operating lander and Wahkopem Zomos exclusively.

  That remains our greatest fear. Right now one of Egalitarian Republic’s landers is useless as a spacecraft, because it must supply power and computer control for the life support systems at our base near the south pole of the moon. The other lander must work in tandem with the old Wahkopem Zomos, for the lander’s life support system cannot operate independently long enough to travel from Setepos to the War Star, and Wahkopem Zomos’s engines cannot even get it out of orbit around either planet. Further, the starship cannot land on the face of the War Star or on Setepos’s moon; so the remaining lander must supply the propulsion and the ability to land, and Wahkopem Zomos must keep the crew alive. If we lose the lander at the lunar south pole base, or the operating lander, or the starship, then we are surely doomed—but so far, years have gone by, and we are still here. They will all keep functioning, because they all must keep functioning.

  And from spaceship to starship is a small step, in the great scheme of things. In a century or two, if there is a suitable place within thirty light-years, and if no one has come to visit or join us, perhaps we will pack our bags and come to join you, wherever you may have gone.

  This account, and Father’s account of the first mission, are entrusted to you, now, for the Great Volume of Knowledge that you intend to send to every world. I can only hope that when it arrives here, it is a wonderful historical curiosity rather than an urgent necessity. I quite concur with your decision; since we are to move down to the surface, to the crater filled with ice that seems to have so much potential, it is far better to send the Great Volume there rather than here. And certainly sending one to the Moon, in case any of our people at the south pole there should decide to remain, or perhaps be forced to by circumstances, is wise as a backup. But do not fear; our descendants will be here to receive it and will remember you with gratitude when it arrives, though I understand that it may be a few centuries before it does. I am flattered that you wanted the story of the two expeditions to Setepos included; you honor our family with that request.

  I think your plan of setting up a robot radio station on Kahrekeif, from which a recorded message will be beamed to all the known ships and colonies every time that your sun and Zoiroy are widely separated from their perspective, so that all of our scattered people can always be found again, is probably unnecessary. I find it hard to imagine that any of us now would lose our historical or scientific knowledge, or forget the catalog of planets, or where our bases are. I think our victory is already won, even if our colonies here die out tomorrow, even if no Migration Project ship, with its millions of passengers, ever reaches another star system. We have won because, in our own eyes—the only eyes that can ever judge us—we have made ourselves deserve to win, deserve to go on living and expanding as a civilization. We might have become more soft, more fearful, more greedy, and died quietly at home. We have elected to die—or just possibly live—in the stars.

  But I had not intended to lecture you about our destiny, and most especially not to lecture whoever may read this in the far future. If this is being read, we have had a destiny, and they know more of it than I do.

  Nor am I scolding you about the extensive precautions you are taking to make sure that the Great Volume of Knowledge reaches our people wherever they go. If the effort of making duplicate Great Volumes of Knowledge and of posting the beacon on Kahrekeif should prove useless because it is not needed, it was still worth doing. If there is anything that all of us understand, here in this solar system and wherever our species may go from now on, it is that the universe is still a very dangerous place.

  Even now I find myself saying that if the antimatter plant of the lander that now powers our colony on Setepos’s moon were to fail, within hours many would die there and nothing could be done to save them. By the time we got there, they would undoubtedly all be dead. And if something were to happen to the lander, or to Wahkopem Zomos, here in orbit around the War Star—well, then we could not get back to Setepos’s moon, and I suppose both colonies might slowly die. And those thoughts will cross my mind, again and again, for years to come. These are the risks we assume because we must—because to do anything else meant dying for sure, whereas depending on these aging and irreplaceable machines to keep running until we finally do not need them anymore, was a chance to live. We grasped that chance, and so far this is paying off; any other considerations, since we cannot change our circumstances, are irrelevant.

  Goodness, I do go on about this! I suppose it’s because so many of our younger generation like to talk all the time about how thin our margins are and how great the chances and consequences of failure. But that has been the way for life ever since it started. I don’t think matters will actually ever be any different for living things anywhere. From the simplest bacterium up to the Nisuan level, we will just keep going on as long as we can, and the going on will be what makes us what we are.

  Warmest regards from the Kousapex System,

  Diehrenn, daughter of Otuz and Zahmekoses.

  Clio Trigorin: October 2077

  IT WAS ANOTHER ARBITRARY line in space, which meant it was time for another party. At about 100,000 AU from Alpha Centauri, the dim red star Proxima Centauri orbited the double star every 22,000 years. Since the formation of the triple star, Proxima had been sweeping comets out of the Oort Cloud and down into the inner system, which was a major part of the reason that the early bombardment had been so heavy and explained much about the geology of Tiber.

  Now they were crossing Proxima Centauri’s orbit, passing near enough so that the dim star was just visible to the naked eye as a kind of glowing spot; everyone was gathered in the common area to look at the relayed image of it on the screen, as probes launched months before made their way down into Proxima. Clio supposed it was impressive in its way, but though “any star is huge by comparison with anything human,” as Sanetomo said, it was about as ordinary a red dwarf as you could find.

  In the third year of the voyage, five years before, they had launched the probe carrier, a small missile with a cluster of ZPE lasers as its propulsio
n system and a group of probes in the nose, to diverge from their course and head off to the side, toward Proxima. Tenacity and the probe carrier had raced along in parallel ever since, like two cars on diverging roads.

  The probe carrier had started with greater acceleration, since it weighed far less than Tenacity in proportion to its engines’ thrust, but there was no one on the probe carrier to swap out bad ZPE lasers, and as one laser after another failed, the probe carrier eventually had gone into purely ballistic flight. As it neared Proxima Centauri, it had extended a magnetic loop like the one on the old Wahkopem Zomos and slowed down considerably. When it drew nearer to the red dwarf, the carrier ejected a family of probes, each on its own lightsail, and the probes in turn had slowed down, braking themselves with the dim light of the little cool sun (little and cool by the standards of stars; it was still immensely bigger than even gigantic Jupiter, and hot enough to vaporize iron). Now they were swarming around Proxima Centauri, many light-days away from Tenacity, like a flock of metal blue jays attacking a great glowing red owl, sweeping past the red dwarf, swooping over its poles, plunging into its fiery heart, and pouring back data in immense quantities. The crew of Tenacity was gathered here to watch the highlights of that historic flyby as they came in; they were seeing the first data to reach humanity from a star other than Sol.

  Tenacity herself was also entering the Alpha Centauri system, but it would still be another fifteen months before they deployed the magnetic loop to slow down. Although the distances between the stars are vaster, solar systems themselves are vast, and even though right now they were covering an astronomical unit every twenty-one minutes, still they had more than one and a half light-years to go, 100,000 AU remaining. They would have to travel deep into the Alpha Centauri System before they even began to slow down, and once they did deploy the magnetic loop and start deceleration (still at thirty-five AU from Juno and Tiber, farther than from Neptune to Earth), it would be two more long years before they came into orbit around Tiber.