Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  He shook his head. “You couldn’t have guessed everything that might go wrong. Now we know that when we go back, in a day or two, we want to have a dry, bare spot picked out, and go right for it. We’ll see if any cameras on Aldrin can get us a precise view. Meanwhile, though, a damn fine job. If you’d let it do its regular abort, at that altitude, it would have tried to abort to ground, and very likely set off another explosion, with us lower down. We might have thrashed around from explosion to explosion until we either made a bad landing, low on fuel, or until we actually got flipped hard enough to hit.”

  “I didn’t think about all that, sir. I just knew there was something wrong with the ground and nothing wrong with the ship—or with space.”

  He nodded. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work. In all that spare time you have, Jason, I think you should add a little subroutine to our standard Mars navigation programs, so that a carbon dioxide pressure explosion behind the lander will trigger an abort to orbit. We can’t count on having every pilot as on top of things as you are.”

  The next trip was blissfully uneventful, from a standpoint of physical danger, and infinitely more interesting from any reasonable standpoint. We had picked out a wide piece of bare rock on the edge of what Nari was hoping would be the blast site, and I had worked out a straight-down approach, so that we wouldn’t kick anything up as we approached. Still, the cursor was on the abort sequence and my hand was on the button as we descended.

  This time, though, nothing happened that wasn’t supposed to. We descended onto the rock in a perfectly normal landing, I shut down the engines, and the captain gave the go-ahead to Nari, who immediately started the whole crew into a dozen tasks, all urgent. Working for him was always kind of an adventure—you never knew what you’d be doing, but there would always be too much to do, and invariably it would be complicated and need to be done right away.

  This time, though, there was a certain amount of common sense in it. The Martian antarctic was in winter, of course, and Rayleigh was farther south than Korolev was north; though the midnight Sun wouldn’t start back home for a few days yet, the long night had already settled in here, and without a moon of any size, down inside a crater that lay inside a bigger crater, it was good and dark. The first hour went into setting up the small lights that would at least let us find our way around the immediate site.

  We scrambled around on the dark slopes for about ten hours in all, tearing out soil samples, measuring radiation, running little chemical tests on the soil. As always, until he had the full set of data in hand and analyzed, Nari didn’t want to tell us how it was going, but from the way Doc C. and Paul were reacting, it seemed to be going pretty well. On the flight back, they were chattering happily to Nari and Akira, getting friendly but noncommittal responses.

  When we got back, we were just in time for the group dinner. Nari announced that he would know for sure, or as sure as it was going to get, in about three hours, so Olga and I decided to take a long walk. Not that you exactly had perfect privacy with having to talk to each other on radio where anyone could listen in, and carry a transponder so that they always knew where we were, but it beat crouching together in one of our personal compartments and whispering. Besides, everyone here, even all the new ones, were nice people, and our friends, and we sort of figured we could trust them not to intrude.

  For a long time we just walked, in the sliding way that had become natural because it minimized falling. Holding hands in a spacesuit doesn’t do much for anyone, I think, but it was a comfortable gesture.

  “That was quite an expedition today,” Olga said, finally. “I’m glad that mostly they plan on having us stay inside the MarsHabs and do analysis and study during the winter. I don’t know if I’ve ever been anywhere outdoors that was quite so dark before, at least not while trying to work there. I guess you’ll be glad to miss the winter.”

  I shrugged, then realized she couldn’t see that, and said, “Well, uh, um.” Clearly talking about anything important wasn’t going to be any easier here than it would have been on Earth. “Um, I kind of think I’m not going to take NASA up on their offer. Scotty can take Collins back, but I think I’m going to volunteer for permanent stationing here. That is, if it’s all right with you. … I mean, if you were planning to break up with me or anything, I guess it would get pretty awkward with about twenty people and five buildings … but that doesn’t mean I think you want to break up with me, I just mean that … oh, hell, Olga, I’m planning to stay, if you’d like me to. I’ve gotten to like being at Korolev, and it’s gotten to be home, and I might have stayed anyway, but the truth is I’m staying here to be with you.”

  Hugging in a pressure suit doesn’t really do much for anybody, either, but I guess it’s the thought that counts.

  When we came back from the walk, Nari had finished his results, and everyone was babbling madly. The interior crater in Rayleigh showed unmistakable signs of having been made by a nuclear bomb, and decay of fission products dated the explosion to about 7000 B.C.E., “in perfect accord with theory,” as Fleurant put it. Sometime during that party, I had a private conversation with Gander and explained that I was staying, and why. He seemed very pleased.

  With that settled, the rest of the long Martian polar summer—six Earth months long—passed very pleasantly. The physical work was hard, but there were enough hands to share it. I had time enough to do some serious studying and make myself more and more a real research assistant and less a pair of hands.

  About two weeks before the Encyclopedia was due to come up, Olga and I stood in front of Walter Gander, in the big MarsHab, which didn’t seem so big with everyone jammed in there. Gander had had quite a discussion with Earth about the procedures for this, and that had meant involving politicians, bureaucrats, and rule makers of every conceivable stripe, each making sure that they got at least one tiny bit of input into the whole process. Walter had been threatening to begin with, “In light of conflicting orders from over twenty governmental bodies and advisory councils, we are gathered together today …” but he didn’t.

  Instead, he just talked a little about how long it had taken us to get here, and how much there was yet to do, and the future he could imagine when Crater Korolev might house one of the great cities of Mars—“No, I don’t mean just of Mars. One of the great cities of the solar system.” He continued on to talk about the Encyclopedia, and about the Tiberian colony that had failed, and how finally, as he put it, “Nothing really stops life and intelligence. If we should fail—as we will not—like the Tiberians, there will be someone after us, no matter how long it takes, and sooner or later our galaxy—and perhaps those beyond it—will be filled with living intelligences.

  “Which brings me to why what we are about to do today is so terribly important. Human beings are social creatures, and to us, no place is real until our social life can happen there. And today, we make one of the most important parts of it happen, before the assembled population of Mars. The vows Olga and Jason are going to make are important, not just for their lives, but because people getting married here is one more way of saying that humanity is on Mars to stay.”

  Everybody, including Olga and me, cheered, and after that it was more or less like any military wedding. Scotty served as the best man and promised that he’d make sure that rings got shipped up soon; meanwhile, as he said, it wasn’t like there would be anyone in town that didn’t know we were married. A couple of the Five Alpha crew had managed to ferment some of that awful orange drink mix that NASA always sends along, and produced something they called GANTH—it stood for “gross, although not technically harmful.” Neither Olga nor I consumed any more of it than ceremonial purposes demanded, but several people seemed to like it a lot, and the party got livelier.

  Doc C. had managed to extract sugar from the onions that the farms produced in abundance, and with that, emulsified soy oil, flour made from dried potatoes, and heaven knows what else, he had fabricated something that looked quite a bit like
a cake, even adding an artistic Best wishes Jason and Olga” in a blue dye that the bio lab supply guide at least claimed was nontoxic. (Everyone’s tongue was blue for a week, but no one got sick, so I guess it was right.) The cake itself tasted like sweetened Vegemite; Olga and I each had to manage to get a whole piece down, and then to be very sincere in our thanks to Chalashajerian, who was standing there beaming with pride. At least with that cake there, GANTH wasn’t the foulest-tasting stuff ever produced on Mars.

  Later in the evening, I was sitting next to Dong and said, “Well, three weeks from now we get the Encyclopedia, and you’ll finally get the chance to work with something besides ice-cutting tools. It must have been a little frustrating all these months.”

  Dong smiled, a tight, secret smile. “I suppose I can tell you. People figured the anthropologist on the mission was going to be mainly of use in understanding the Tiberians, and of course that’s where the great bulk of my effort is going to go. But this has been an unprecedented chance for another reason; I’ve gotten to watch a new society coming into existence, the culture of the Crater Korolev Colony.”

  “Anything to note?” Olga asked from beside me.

  “So far, I haven’t seen much of a crime problem and there doesn’t seem to be a bad part of town,” he said. “It might be a surprisingly good place to raise kids, but be sure you let Earth know a couple of years in advance, and please wait until we’ve got adequate habitats. Other than that—” he peered up at me, and I realized he’d had quite a bit of GANTH “—here’s a strange one for you to think about, Jason. There are going to be many more weddings here, eventually, and what you and Olga did will be taken as a model. Therefore, something we did here today, just out of expediency, is going to be fundamental to Martian weddings from now on. Twenty years from now it will be too much of a tradition to change.”

  I don’t know if I believed him at the time or not. But twenty years later, so far Olga and I have been to every wedding in Martian history—and that awful cake of Doc Co.’s has been at every one of them. You can’t get married here without having your tongue turn blue; it’s a tradition, no Martian wedding is complete without it. At least GANTH has been replaced with a decent carrot beer.

  A month after our wedding, we watched as two reinforced cranes (one as a safety backup) raised the Encyclopedia from its icy grave. Later that day, with all the water apparently out of it, Nari and Vassily gave it the pulse of laser light to turn it on. A moment later Paul shouted in triumph as the first information began to pour into the receiver side he had plugged in, built carefully to Tiberian specifications from the message Earth had heard thirty years before.

  Running at a steady ten megabaud, the Encyclopedia downloaded for many days, as we relayed its contents to Phobos, to Earth, and to Tiber Base. Simultaneously it was recorded onto two separate and distinct computers, and backed up to optical storage as well. Having finally gotten hold of it, we were not about to take any chances on losing it again; we had come such a long way.

  Clio Trigorin: Carrying the Light—The Next Giant Leap

  2082

  FOR A MONTH NOW, as robots crawled over its face and as they wandered through it in telepresence, Tiber had filled their screens on one side, with the other side showing the immense bulk of Juno or the blackness between the stars. They had looked down on the old, eroded mountains of Palath, picked out Battle Gorges, photographed the last Palace of the Emperors from orbit; and shortly after they had looked down into the Windward Islands, and across the long, thin volcanic “string continent” of Shulath stretching nearly pole to pole.

  There were no Tiberians, but they had not expected to find them. The ruins showed what had happened, clearly enough, just as the Encyclopedia had said. To preserve their world the Tiberians had put ZPE lasers onto fast little starships, and sent the starships out to work among the rocks that swarmed in the vast smear in the sky they called the Intruder. Ten years of blasting away, hitting twenty rocks per second and knocking them to bits with the fierce heat, accelerating them out of the swarm so that fewer would fall at any one time, had beaten them down to a few billion chunks no bigger than a house back home, and many times that number of smaller pieces.

  The effort had been not to save their world as a place to live, which was impossible, but to preserve it as a museum from being wrecked. So many pieces of stone and iron falling into the Tiberian atmosphere every 240 years, for periods of several months, had recondensed into fine dark dust in the upper atmosphere, producing horribly low temperatures, destroying plant life, and killing the world of Tiber in something a thousand times worse than a nuclear winter. Yet because they had made the effort … once again, they lived, in their ruins, in the world that was more or less the same shape as it was when they had gone.

  The bell sounded and Clio and Sanetomo walked forward with the others. They would go down in four landers, to four different places, for a long stayover exploring primary sites. If there were any hazard that robots had been unable to detect and they didn’t know about, with luck it would not be planet wide. Captain Olshavsky would descend in the first lander, making him the first on Tiber by a matter of a few seconds.

  Nor would they need to hurry, really, because word of something they had been waiting for had come in. The new starship Excelsior, as fast as Egalitarian Republic of millennia before, had passed its preliminary tests (four years ago, according to the radio-lagged news). Rather than work here for five years and then take twelve more getting home, the crew of Tenacity was to work seven years. At the end of that time, Excelsior would arrive to take them back in less than five years, if they wanted to return. Tenacity itself would remain here, downgraded to a mere intra-system shuttle, because rapidly advancing technology had already made it so obsolete that it was easier to wait for a faster ship than to return in the old one.

  But for all the time they now had, their arrival seemed, somehow, to pass too fast. Too soon, the lander fell away from Tenacity and dropped into the Tiberian atmosphere; too soon, they were racing over the broad plains of Palath, ever westward toward the ocean; and before they could even appreciate that, their ship had stood on its tail and slowly descended outside the great city of Kaleps.

  They wore their respirators; it would be a year before the test animals confirmed that there were no pathogens dangerous to Earth life in the air of Tiber. Indeed, Tiberian life was little more, now, than microorganisms; it was a planet of germs.

  The dust in the city street was almost half a meter deep in some of its drifts and dunes. It was a mixture of dirt blown off the exposed top-soil, and of recondensed bits of the Invader drifting down out of the atmosphere, falling more than thirty times since this had been a living city. Many buildings were fallen in, probably from the many hairline fractures that must form during the repeated deep cooling they received when Tiber was blanketed in black dust every quarter of a millennium.

  This first day on Tiber was more symbol than science; and rightly so, Clio thought, though Sanetomo had grumbled. It’s the symbols that we live by.

  They walked for a long time; Kaleps was several kilometers across, for it had been a great and important city at the time Tiber received its death sentence from space. The fine black dust blew around them and Clio was glad to be on a respirator. Above them, the vast bulk of Juno (no, she thought to herself, now that I am here I want to call it Sosahy), striped with pale bands, swirled by great dark hurricanes that probably had begun during the last bombardment a century ago, glowed overhead, lighting the sky with two thousand times the brightness of the full moon on Earth. They walked on in the swirls of dark dust, marveling at the strange, shrunken shadows that having such a wide light source in the sky caused, and at the way the dust floated so long in Tiber’s thicker air, and at how every building spoke of intelligence and yet not of anything human.

  Alpha Centauri B, a brilliant dot of light, was just emerging from the underside of Juno when at last they came to the park by the sea. Before them, over the sea, they
could see a bright cloud that hung forever in the same part of the sky, midway between Juno’s edge and the horizon—the dust and ice trapped out of the bombardment at Tiber’s L4 point with Juno. The light seemed strange; it was diffuse from the huge object overhead, like fluorescent light, leaving few or no shadows.

  The many bombardments of dust had left Tiber chilled to near-Ice Age conditions, even a century after the most recent one. The seacoast now was prone to ice, even though it was summer, and there was a chill down here by the water, but they kept going until they were standing beneath the two statues, one of a Shulathian and one of a Palathian: the sacred monument humans had first learned of bare decades ago, from The Account of Zahmekoses. There stood the great organizer and conqueror, Gurix, squat and powerful; facing him was Wahkopem, tall and thin; each with arms outstretched. Nine thousand years and so much freezing had not harmed the metal of the statue, nor had they smoothed or altered those strange alien expressions that Zahmekoses assured us were all but neutral.

  Hardly knowing why she did it, Clio stepped forward, her boots crunching on the gravel that surrounded the pedestal, and then stepped up, reaching over her head to take a grip on the left statue’s leg. She pulled herself up to stand between them, as Zahmekoses and Mejox had once done—

  And she saw the small box, a lovely shade of off-white like the finest new ivory. On the lid of the box was a layer of the black dust found everywhere on Tiber now, the dust of the pulverized Intruder and the ruined topsoil of this world. She knew it was a most improper thing to do, that she would undoubtedly be as reviled later for having done this as the group that had torn through Tiber Base on the Moon sixty-five years before, but with a shrug, she lifted the box and brushed the black dust from its top.