Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  She and Sanetomo had been married now for more than a year, and it seemed to suit them better each passing day. Their professional lives went on smoothly; one of the great advantages of twelve years aboard a starship, with the combined libraries of Earth and Tiber in its data storage, was that nobody could phone you or ask you to go to a committee meeting, so they both worked steadily and effectively, with plenty of time to think, and still had all the time they wanted with each other.

  And their work had gone pretty well, on the whole. Sanetomo’s work on free oxygen in distant atmospheres had gained a great deal of approval back home (or so the more-than-three-years-late messages assured them). Her translation of The Account of Zahmekoses would still not reach Earth for almost two years, even now; at the moment it was a set of radio signals far out in the void. Now moving along behind it was her translation of The Account of Diehrenn, sent out just scant days ago. At least by the time she was reading any reviews of it, she’d have developed a certain detachment.

  She stood, sipping her wine and thinking about what the long delays could mean. It was finally time to write the last part of From the Moon to the Stars; she didn’t really think she could delay it any longer.

  On the screen before them, Proxima Centauri, like the orange ghost of a star, swelled rapidly as the probe closed in. The red dwarf’s surface was blackened by huge dark swirls that marked the mighty hurricanes on its glowing face, far bigger than the sunspots of Earth’s sun. Sanetomo and three others were sitting close to the screen, watching the little parade of graphs and images that ran across the bottom, gabbling excitedly to each other about what it all meant and whose theories it confirmed or disproved. Proxima was only a minor sideshow on this trip, but still it was the biggest show there would be for months.

  She took another sip of wine and asked herself why settling back into writing From the Moon to the Stars was so hard. Perhaps it was just a matter of knowing that Uncle Jason and Aunt Olga might yet read it; at least as of about three years ago, allowing for radio lag, they had still been alive and healthy on Mars. She’d had a long video message from them only a few weeks ago, and it had said that after all the hassle and organizational fighting of two elderly people trying to get permission to return to the wild frontier of Mars, once they had finally gotten there, they had found it had been worth every minute. The lighter gravity and familiar faces seemed to have dropped years from them. She was beginning to think Uncle Jason wasn’t kidding about being there to welcome her back.

  And all that had paralyzed her a little. What if, in her account of the great events they had lived through, she didn’t do them justice? What if she had misunderstood some major thing Jason had told her in all of the taped sessions? By the time she found out that she’d gotten it wrong, the book could be in its fifth printing.

  Clio laughed at herself soundlessly. Because she tended to be shy and quiet, and everyone knew everyone’s habits well, no one was going to ask her what she was laughing about, and that was good, because she wasn’t sure she liked explaining that she was frightened of a partially written history book. Especially when you considered the situation around them. At the speeds they were moving, a grain of sand, had one ever gotten through the deflection system, would have hit with the energy of a ton of TNT. For that matter, what was the dread of finishing a history book compared with the terrifying awareness that they were utterly alone—suppose Earth were suddenly hit by an asteroid, like the one that had wiped out the dinosaurs? Their only information on this was apt to be that four years later the signal would just stop. Conversely, if anything happened to them, in four years they would just vanish from Earth’s radio receivers—

  As the First Tiberian Expedition, the one with Zahmekoses, had done.

  She thought hard about that for a while. Was there finally any real difference between Tiberian and human? They had exhibited all the human traits, surely—courage and cowardice, greed and vision, spite and compassion—and finally they had failed, leaving some frozen corpses in the soil of Mars and the Moon, some bits and pieces of their technology, and of course the Encyclopedia. …

  Had they failed? That was another odd question. Deciphering the Encyclopedia had finally explained, at least in large measure, what was going on. After the horrible experience of the failed First Tiberian Expedition, and the panic of getting ready for emigration after wasting most of fifty years between the first and second missions, it had never been far from the mind of any Tiberian planner that civilization was a fragile thing and many things could go wrong, that all sorts of knowledge and skills might be lost. So as a last assurance, they had sent an Encyclopedia to every system to which their people had gone, a backup repository of their civilization. And on Alba Longa, Minerva’s eccentric moon (which the Tiberians had called Kahrekeif), they had put a transmitter that sat waiting for the points in the combined orbits when it would have a clear shot at each of those systems and endlessly repeated the message to each of them about where to look for the Encyclopedia.

  And as a result, though there might well be no more Tiberians in the universe, they would live as long as human memory did. Moreover, Sanetomo had now detected free oxygen in eight of the nine systems the Tiberians had designated as visited, though on the world they had named Courage, it seemed to be only a seasonal phenomenon. The Tiberians, once they figured out the protein problem, had gone to worlds that were easily terraformed rather than to wild ones, so this argued powerfully that they had at least gotten self-sustaining ecologies going in the places where they had planted colonies. They might well live on there.

  No question that individual Tiberians had failed, for all their courage, fortitude, and intelligence. But no question either that as a culture the Tiberians had found at least one way to pass something on, to defy the cosmic oblivion descending on them. As for what had happened to them as a species, we didn’t know yet. That would have to wait at least for decades until there was any reply from the radio broadcasts to the visited worlds; and maybe a century until exploration ships reached all of them.

  Failure? What a silly way to look at it. In an intelligent species everybody dies, and perhaps most without learning any really new thing, but every generation can push back the ignorance a little farther.

  The phrase stuck in her head, and she found herself holding an imaginary conversation with Uncle Jason. He seemed to tell her to just tell the story, get it recorded, and make his story part of humanity’s. And something about that, finally, gave her the urge to get to work, and sit down and tell Uncle Jason’s story. She set down her wineglass and headed back toward the room she shared with Sanetomo.

  But before she reached the door, there was wild cheering. She turned and saw that the Fast Low Altitude Probe had succeeded in making a pass just above the glowing face of Proxima; she stayed to watch that. The deep red marked by black hurricanes bigger than the Earth itself whirled away beneath, often leaping up in great red peaks and sometimes boiling up in orange sheets. Then, as the probe whipped on around the dim little red sun, the hyperbolic orbit carried it away. The eternal stars popped into view, and the probe, having finished the job it was designed to do in less than half an hour, fell away into the eternal dark and cold, to go wherever it might for the next few thousands of millennia. It rotated 180 degrees and looked back as long as it could, but at its tremendous speed it was a very short time before it saw nothing but blackness, and then its radio signal faded.

  It was the kind of machine an intelligent species might build, Clio said to herself. She headed back to her desk to start playing through Uncle Jason’s tapes one more time.

  PART IV

  FIRST CLEAR LIGHT

  2017–2035

  1

  I HAD KNOWN LORI Kirsten almost my whole life; my mother and Sig had even encouraged me to call her “Aunt Lori.” Fate, which seemed to enjoy playing some obscure game with me, had made her the head of the astronaut corps just three days after I was accepted into astronaut training. She had had no i
nfluence on my getting in, but since she had been my father’s closest friend, and everyone knew who my father was, my arriving at the same time she did was taken as evidence of my legendary “pull” and “influence.” I got the usual hassle about it, and I dealt with it the usual way—I tried to do so well that everyone would agree that I had deserved the chance anyway.

  It didn’t work. It never had. By the time that I became an astronaut and Lori became head of the corps, though, I was twenty-eight, and I’d come to understand how things worked. Plenty of people would take me for what I was: not an extroverted genius like my dad, but just a guy who liked to fly in space and was really good at it. I had made friends at the Air Force Academy, in flight training, in my assignments, and finally in the astronaut corps, even if it was a little more difficult at first because my name was Jason Terence and I was a small part of a famous story.

  One thing I had to be careful about, though, was not socializing too much with Aunt Lori when anyone might see. With more than a thousand astronauts in the corps, it would look fishy for a mere rocket jockey to have lunch with the boss. Generally we saw each other at my mother and Sig’s place, where we could “coincidentally” bump into each other and catch up. For several years I saw Aunt Lori only at such gatherings, or on the rare occasions when she’d visit my squadron. By now, at age thirty-four, even though Aunt Lori was nominally my boss, I thought of her mainly as an old family friend I didn’t see very often.

  So I worked hard at my career and flew a lot, mostly taking crews of scientists up or down between the LEO ports Glenn or Shepherd, or sometimes out to the collection of habitats and trusses at the old Star Cluster, to Canaveral or Edwards, on Yankee Clippers, the first true single-stage-to-orbit system.

  And I thought of Lori Kirsten as Aunt Lori when I saw her socially and as Chief Kirsten whenever I had to think about the commander of the astronaut corps. Thus it felt very strange when out of nowhere, in October 2032, I got orders to report to her office the next morning at the Johnson Spacecraft Center outside Houston, especially because she had pulled me off a scheduled Clipper flight to do it, and NASA was still a little short of qualified Clipper pilots.

  Bill Amundsen, my squadron commander, was as puzzled as I was; he saw me off at the airfield, and while we waited for the early flight, he asked, once again, “And you have no idea what it’s about?”

  “None at all,” I said. “If she’d wanted me to know she’d have phoned. You know how she is; she’s still not used to there being such a big organization that there has to be a regular chain of command.”

  “Oh yeah.” He half chuckled. “She didn’t phone you, but she phoned me. Just making sure I wouldn’t offer any resistance.”

  “Resistance to what?”

  “Well, first of all, to pulling you from the upcoming flight. I think you’re right, sometimes she forgets how much space flight goes on these days. If you get back soon enough, you’ll still be flying into space, what, eight times this year? She still remembers when getting scrubbed from a mission might mean years before you got a chance again.” He paused, and squinted at the transport rolling toward us in the bright Florida sunlight.

  I let him have a minute, and then said, “You said ‘first of all.’ What else was she worried about you resisting?”

  “Hmmph.” Very softly he said, “You didn’t hear this, Jason. But she told me if I cooperated I could have my pick from the replacement pool.”

  The hair on the back of my neck rose. Whatever she had in mind would involve transferring me out of the First Aerospace Squadron. And I liked it here. I had been flying out of here for almost four years now, and besides handling flights up to orbit, I had made enough trips between the LEO ports (usually just Shepherd to Glenn or vice versa, but every so often out to the L1 Port Armstrong), and enough trips to the Moon to maintain my rating on Pigeons, the workhorse ships for orbital operations. Because I worked a lot, and never turned down a mission, I got used a lot, which was what I wanted. Also, I knew and liked the other astronauts in the First, and they accepted me.

  And why was Aunt Lori reaching down into the low levels of the organization like this? If I was wanted in some other squadron, normally that would have been worked out between Bill and whoever the squadron commander was.

  “Well,” I said, “if worse comes to worst, I’ll have to come back to pack. We can get people together for a beer or something before I go. Just to make sure—if I turn whatever it is down, you won’t mind if I stay here?”

  He shook his head, laughing. “You log more hours per year and you earn higher ratings than anyone else. I’d rather have you here. But when Lori Kirsten tells me this is a bad time to make waves, I don’t.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Just wanted to know I could come back if I want to—and if I win the argument with her.”

  Then they announced that the transport would be boarding, so I shook hands with Bill, lined up, and got aboard. It was a dull flight, so I spent most of it reading.

  Every so often I’d put the book down and work through the numbers again, trying to figure out what the devil she had in mind for me. My record was extremely good, I admitted, trying to avoid false modesty, so it might well be a promotion or a transfer to a special mission. NASA had three aerospace squadrons, which mainly flew missions from Earth up to orbit and back, and two orbital squadrons which flew Pigeons, between space stations, moonbases, and various things in orbit. I was qualified on Peregrines, Starbird IIs, Yankee Clippers, and Pigeons, so I could theoretically fly in any of those five squadrons—there would be no good reason to move me over to either of the two engineering squadrons. Crossing off the First Aerospace, since this was a transfer, left me with restationing to Vandenberg (flying Yankee Clippers, out in the California desert) with the Second Aerospace; Malmstrom (Great Falls, Montana) with the Sixth Aerospace (and they were still flying the old Peregrine, which, lovely though it had been in its day, was now distinctly old); Armstrong (the Big Can–based L1 port that NASA had built to support other lunar activities) with the Fourth Orbital (Pigeons, reusable landers, and all kinds of odd flying hardware that went into orbital operations); or the Eighth Orbital, at New Tranquillity on the Moon. None of which had the climate advantages of Florida, and all of which would put me a lot farther from my family. This whole situation really didn’t look good.

  As we touched down in Houston and taxied to the gate, I realized I couldn’t remember a word of the book I had theoretically finished. I looked down to remind myself; glanced up and realized I didn’t know what the title was, two seconds later. Making sure I remembered my bag, I got off the plane and caught the shuttle to Johnson Spacecraft Center, which we usually just called JSC. I had about two minutes of the pleasantly cool, sunny day—the only time Houston is really bearable is in the autumn—and then I was being whisked to the Blue Pyramid, as everyone called it, the new headquarters building that had been put up only a few years ago. It hadn’t made JSC any less remote—it was still a good twenty-five miles from the city—or any more attractive, but I suppose it was easier to find in a small plane.

  When I got to Aunt Lori’s office, half an hour early, I was shown right in. That made the whole thing that much more mysterious. As soon as the door closed, she grinned and hugged me. I had to admit, that made me feel a lot better. She took a step back to look at me, and I returned the inspection.

  Her crewcut hair was iron-gray now, and there were lines around her eyes and mouth, but she still looked like she could take on any three average people half her age and beat the hell out of them, and her blue eyes had the same old sparkle. “You look well,” she said.

  “So do you.”

  “Have a seat. Let’s start with the social part of things and then I’ll tell you all about what a certain computer program told me.”

  I sat in one of the two chairs in front of her desk; she took the other and dragged it over to sit closer to me. “And how’s your mother, and Sig?”

  “Mom’s the same as always,�
�� I said. “Still ten projects going all the time, still phoning from all over the world to make sure I’m eating right and ask when I’m going to find some nice girl who will help me make a grandmother of her. Which is a pretty strange conversation when she’s calling from the Amazon and I’m in orbit, but that’s Mom. And Sig … well, he’s the same, too.”

  Aunt Lori looked sympathetic. “Same old offer?”

  “Same old offer. Four times the money if I’ll fly one of his new Starliners.”

  “You could certainly afford a family on that kind of money,” she said, “and I don’t think there’s much question that the Starliners are going to be safer than most of what we fly—they’re drawing on more recent technology and they have the benefit of everyone else’s experience. Does the idea tempt you?”

  I shook my head. “No, ma’am. Not at all. It would be like giving up driving Indy cars to drive a city bus. They both take a lot of skill, but any ten-year-old can figure out which is more interesting.” I was exaggerating a little, but only a little. The Starliner was the commercial version of the Yankee Clipper, and its main cargo was not space crew or supplies but people. Consequently everything that could be done to make the ride smoother, gentler, and safer had been done; it just didn’t have the performance possibilities that the Clipper did.

  She chuckled. “Good boy. I thought I’d judged you right. And you’re happy right now in the First Aerospace? Your record there is as close to perfect as any I’ve seen, and Bill Amundsen thinks the world of you.”

  “I like it a lot,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind staying where I am for a long time.”