Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  We were on our way.

  * * * *

  5

  IT TOOK TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS FOR US TO FALL INTO OUR CLOSE APPROACH to the Sun. In a sense, those twenty-eight days were the first “normal” ones in our lives—if “normal” means “the way things are supposed to be for most of your life.” Seventy years in all—twenty-four on the outward voyage, five exploring Setepos, and forty-one on the return trip—would be spent in the ship, with only ourselves for company. This was the first taste of our daily routine.

  Not surprisingly, Otuz and I adapted to it better than Mejox and Priekahm. We tended to like studying and reading anyway, so now that we didn’t have to stand in front of people and cameras all the time, and could spend a whole day concentrating, we were at no loss for amusement. Often, after a brief conversation with whichever adult was relevant to the subject, Otuz and I would simply tackle something we both wanted to learn, and would spend most of the rest of the day in companionable silence, working in the labs, running computer simulations, or assembling and reading a group of documents. Usually, late in the day, Kekox would have to remind us that we needed to put in our time in the gym and then get dressed for the short presentation that we radioed back to Nisu every day.

  Meanwhile Mejox and Priekahm worked out extra sessions in the gym, played make-believe games, and did assigned homework under the supervision of one or more adults. They didn’t seem to be able to take off for a day and work on something just because it was interesting. More and more, Mejox spent his time studying history with Kekox, doing the bare minimum in science, math, and arts; I could hardly have condemned him for it since I spent most of my time in math and science, only doing enough history to stay out of trouble. Once, I overheard Kekox and Soikenn discussing it; as always, I listened in—adults got very weird about being overheard, so I was careful to stay out of sight, but after all, those four people ran our universe, and we tried to know what they were thinking whenever we could.

  I didn’t know why they thought our specialization was so interesting, but after worrying about it for several minutes, they both seemed to agree that we would outgrow this phase, and take a “more balanced” approach later. “It doesn’t matter much what the order is as long as they learn,” Soikenn said.

  Kekox sighed. “I guess it’s not so much the over-concentration that worries me as it’s the reasons for it,” he said. “I wish I could get Mejox to quit thinking about what he’ll need when he’s emperor, or about all this romantic adventure stuff he’s going to do on Setepos and how it will look to the people at home. We had an expression in the Imperial Guard about not planning the victory parade until you’ve been to the battle, and it seems to me that’s just what he’s doing.”

  Soikenn laughed. “Where I come from we call that ‘accepting the prize before you do the experiment.’ He’s young, Kekox; it’s still more than twenty years before he even hits puberty- No doubt he’ll have other annoying habits in the future, and lose some of the ones he has now. You have to let kids be kids.”

  Kekox grunted. “Yeah. The trouble is some people have let the last couple of emperors be kids. It would be a great joke on everybody if Otuz ended up as empress.”

  “She’s brilliant,” Soikenn pointed out, “and she does her work. She’d probably be as good at that as she is at everything else.”

  “She’d get all the decisions made before noon so she could have the afternoon to read. And they’d be good decisions. Oh, well, all of us will be dead before we see any of it happen.”

  “Now there’s a cheerful thought,” Poiparesis said, joining them.

  “Kekox is trying to stop the crumbling of civilization,” Soikenn said. “Practically all by himself.”

  “So the subject is Mejox,” Poiparesis said.

  Both of them laughed, and the subject changed to trivia, and then to those inscrutable jokes about sex that adults liked. It sounded like the interesting part was over, so I got up and casually walked past the door. Kekox was muttering something in hushed tones.

  I was almost out of earshot when I heard Poiparesis say, “Well, it’s a risk that no one thought of. But they’re all twenty years from mating. For right now there’s no harm in their all just being friends. And it happens that our two serious students are Otuz and Zahmekoses, which sort of leaves the other two at loose ends.”

  I froze and leaned back against the wall. It had never occurred to me that things might be that way, that Otuz and I might be excluding Mejox, but as soon as it was mentioned I could see a dozen ways I had done it—I was interested in things that he wasn’t, I pushed on in academic stuff faster than he could go, and I was often off by myself.

  Well, I could fix some of that. I had gotten to enjoy my freedom to learn as fast as I could, and I wasn’t going to pretend anymore that he was the smarter one—he himself wouldn’t have believed it—but I could make some time for him, be a better friend ... I turned, headed the other way, and nearly collided with the captain.

  Very softly, she said, “What are they talking about in there?”

  “Mejox,” I said. I couldn’t have lied to the captain to save my life, and just then that was what I thought was at stake.

  She gave me a strange little smile. “Of course. It would be. Has it occurred to you that if you do anything about what you hear, they will know you listened?”

  I gulped. “I wasn’t going to—”

  “That’s right, you’re not going to. Mejox Roupox is your friend. He’s not your job. He needs to find his own way through life. You’ve done nothing wrong and you’ve consistently been a better friend to him than he deserves. Keep being his friend—but if we catch you making yourself his slave, both of you will be sorry.”

  That made me so angry, I actually talked back to the captain. “I’m not anyone’s slave,” I said.

  Her hands landed lightly on my shoulders. She drew a long breath. “No,” she said at last, “you’re right. There are no slaves anymore.” Then she smiled very slightly and added, “But it’s very clear to me that you’re Poiparesis’s student.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, but she let me go, so I tried not to worry about it—I already had enough to worry about.

  * * * *

  All the training in the world could not have prepared us for what it was like to round the Sun. This time we had no choice about where to be— acceleration webbing couldn’t possibly have held us against the accelerations we would be taking. Furthermore, passing so close to the Sun, most of the ship itself was going to be uninhabitable; only life support, the ship’s farm, some delicate scientific equipment, and the crew shelter on the inner deck could be kept at a comfortable temperature. The rest would get hot enough to sear flesh, and was being filled with an inert-gas atmosphere to keep flammable objects from exploding.

  As Poiparesis was strapping us in, he went over his explanation again. “Understand this is the most danger we will all ever be in, at least until it’s time for the return flight. And—” he turned to Priekahm, who seemed about to complain again “—we do have to make this close pass at the Sun, and then another one at Zoiroy. Almost one-fifth of our total speed is going to come from doing this, and the only way to get such a big boost is to go in very close, where our lightsail can do the most good. So we have to do this, and it is going to be very uncomfortable, and if anything goes wrong with the cooling and energy dissipation systems, we are all going to burn. That’s just the way it is.”

  I imagined Priekahm was still pouting, but I couldn’t see her. I had stretched out and was snugged far down in my own acceleration couch.

  The couches had been designed to fit our bodies exactly and to support specific bones and internal organs; we had all just had an incredibly uncomfortable procedure to fill our bowels and body cavities with support liquid, a nasty gelatinous goo. The fact that Soikenn had administered it, and had been very gentle and sympathetic, hardly compensated for having needles jabbed into us and being squirted full of the heavy liq
uid while another needle sucked out air.

  Once we were all in position on the couches, the mouthpieces that would protect our teeth and tongues went in next. If anyone was going to whine or complain, the chance had gone by.

  “Bite down hard,” Soikenn said. I did, and that triggered the mechanism; tiny clamps grabbed my teeth and a lever slid out of the mouthpiece to push my tongue flat against the floor of my mouth. Soikenn bent over the indicators as she pushed the button to take me to full IV. A moment later I felt the needle slide between my ribs and into the thick clump of veins behind my blood mixer, deep in my back.

  “Looks good,” Poiparesis said, joining Soikenn at the monitor stand, and triggered the support system; from now until it was time to release me, the needle sticking into my circulatory system would supply oxygen and sugar, and carry away carbon dioxide. I no longer needed to breathe through my lungs.

  The two of them watched the dial for what seemed a long time, until they were satisfied that they could trigger the next step. Finally they gestured agreement, and started the process.

  Until you’ve experienced it there’s no sensation anywhere like having your lungs filled with fluid. The suction pulled the air out abruptly, and I felt my reflexes try to stop it. Then the suppressor, a tiny electrode wired into the back of my brain, kicked in, and my diving and asphyxiation reflexes were suppressed.

  This meant I wasn’t in a panic anymore, but it did nothing for comfort. Cool glop flowed out of the tube and down into my lungs as the air was gradually taken up; it felt like a hideous chest cold.

  I lay there listening while they did it to all of the others. A peculiar sob/scream noise for a few seconds must have been Priekahm; it sounded like her suppressor wasn’t quite working and fluid had started to flow into her lungs without it, so that she was panicking and choking. There were quick, hasty footsteps, Poiparesis’s soothing voice, Soikenn’s low murmur, and then I heard Soikenn say “I think I have it working now” and Poiparesis add “Looks good, she’ll be fine.”

  That completed getting us into the bunks. “Now,” Poiparesis said, “last review. The ship will be running robotically for about a fifth of a day. The worst will be over after the first twelfth of a day, but do not try to get out of your couches until you’re allowed to. Remember that although you can lift several times your body weight with your thigh and hip muscles, most of your body is too delicate to take so much force.

  “I’m afraid the only amusement we can offer you is the screen over your couches, which will be showing you some scenes from outside. You’ll miss the most dramatic part anyway, first of all because you’ll probably black out—I hope so, because that’s about the most comfortable thing that can happen—and secondly because even if you do manage to stay awake, your eyes will distort under the force of the acceleration.

  “I’m afraid during the high acceleration you will be just about as alone as you’ll ever be—even though the rest of us are only a bodylength away, no one will be able to reach you.

  “I know you’ll all be brave about it, and if it’s any consolation, the pass at Zoiroy will be much more gentle than this one. And remember that everyone back on Nisu is holding their breath right now; if billions of prayers to the Creator and to Mother Sea can do us any good, we have them. Now I have to get to work on securing the adult crew and myself; I’m sorry I can’t be with you right up to when the acceleration starts. If I have any advice at all, it’s to try to sleep through the whole thing. Think about squeezing that anesthesia button! See you for our next meal.”

  Then he passed out of sight from my acceleration couch. The support liquid felt like the worst case of constipation I’d ever had in my life and I couldn’t imagine how Poiparesis was enduring having to walk and move, filled with it, while he got the adults secured.

  He had told us many times that we ought to just sleep through it. Even now I had only to extend one finger toward the anesthesia button by my left side, and I would be knocked unconscious within a minute or so. At peak acceleration, the brief period when we would be pulling more than twenty times the force of gravity, I would not be able to move that finger, so if I found I really couldn’t stand it, it would be too late then.

  But none of us had had any patience for the idea of going through the most dangerous part of the voyage—and the part that only two people, Steraz and Baibarenes, the test crew, had been through before—asleep in bed. Or at least that’s what we all said. It suddenly occurred to me that Poiparesis had rigged things so that if one of us decided to be unconscious, none of the others need ever know.

  The balance organ in my forehead was hurting, so I snorted hard to clear it. That drew more liquid into my lungs, and though the IV oxygenator was working fine, it still triggered a spasm in my chest. I could feel all of my hearts pounding, and there was an unpleasant gurgle from my blood mixer; I shook myself and the sloshy gurgle subsided. I could hear the others snorting and sloshing, and the sound was so funny I began to giggle, snort, and slosh as loudly as I could. Pretty soon we were all giving a whole concert with our internal organs, and then Poiparesis said, “All right, everyone, we all know what noises you can make, now stop that!”

  We subsided into occasional giggles, and now and then Mejox would softly snort, which would send us all off into laughter again—a sound that grew higher in pitch as the liquid slowly filled our lungs. I don’t know if Poiparesis was too busy to do anything about it, or had decided to let us get our high spirits out of our systems.

  At last we heard the captain’s voice, from her couch. “All right, everyone, let me just remind you all that I expect everyone to bear up well, but courage has nothing to do with this—it’s out of our control—and all we have to do is survive. I know you’ll bear it with patience. I have complete confidence in you, as does everyone back home on Nisu. And now I’ll put in my mouthpiece before Poiparesis comes around and makes me do it. Good luck!” Before she switched off her microphone, we heard the gurgle of liquid into her lungs. It set us all giggling—or rather sloshing—again.

  Long ages crept by and I watched my screen. I itched in a couple of places and quickly scratched those, always watching the clock on the screen to make sure that it wasn’t too close to sail deployment. Poiparesis had told us that if we got a hand trapped under ourselves, very likely we would break every bone in that hand and in our wrists, and give ourselves deep bruises in whatever flesh lay across the hand.

  Time crawled by slowly. The screen showed the sun bloated and swollen, almost as large as Sosahy seen from Nisu’s surface; the filters over the cameras meant we were seeing less than one ten-millionth of the actual brightness outside, and yet the screen was becoming uncomfortably bright to look at.

  If we had tried to use a rocket, to have made the trip to Setepos and returned within our lifetime would have taken a vastly larger ship that would have had to be almost all antimatter. As it was we had burned virtually all the antimatter of Nisu, nine years of production, in our booster at takeoff, and the speed it had gotten us up to would have taken tens of thousands of years to get us to Setepos. We needed more power than all of Nisu produced in a year, and we needed it early in the trip so that we could travel as much of it as possible at high speed.

  The solution was a light sail: a huge, flat parachute made of a super-thin weave of beryllium and boron, only about three hundred atoms thick.

  Light exerts pressure. Ordinarily the pressure is so slight we don’t feel it, but if it’s exerted by a really bright light on a really large surface, it adds up.

  The sail for the Wahkopem Zomos was wider across than the Ring Island, and all the billions of people on Nisu lying down on it wouldn’t have covered a twentieth of its surface area. But I had held scraps of the sail material in my hand, and they were so light that they couldn’t be felt. In essence the sail was one big beryllium-boron molecule, the individual atoms woven in an intricate matrix that was stronger than any other material (except for the spun-diamond shroud lines that held it
to our ship) and yet so thin that if you put a sheet of it next to the ceiling in an ordinary room and let it drop, its air resistance was so much greater than its weight that it might spend an eightday spiraling down to the floor.

  We would use this wisp of a sail first to catch the fury of the sun, kicking us up to fourteen times our current speed, and then to pick up another kick in our close pass by Zoiroy, so that as we left the system we would be moving at over twenty times our present speed. Then we would move onto the beam of the giant laser that had been built in solar orbit, and that would speed us up until at peak we were moving at two-fifths the speed of light, just about eighteen years from now. All of the energy required to reach such a tremendous speed—ninety times what the whole world of Nisu used in a year—would be caught and handled by that thin film of woven atoms.

  The clock crawled downward. The outside temperature on the ship was just below the point where we would have begun to glow cherry red, and the antenna of our reradiation system, which carried heat from the ship surface into a high-temperature collection system and then got rid of the energy as short-wavelength electromagnetic radiation, was glowing a strange deep violet color whenever the camera looked at it; most of the energy was now radiating away as ultraviolet light.