Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]
Page 37
Mejox laughed ruefully. “I sure did. A nice, safe, tame, untamed world.”
I had finally pulled out a thought that might be useful. “Remember our vow, way back on Nisu?”
They all gestured assent.
“Well,” I said, “here’s the thing. We pledged to be united. We pledged to belong to each other first, Nisu next, and not at all to our individual races. And it seems to me the time has come to start thinking as a group of friends—and as Nisuans. What’s the biggest problem on our homeworld? Don’t answer the rhetorical question . . . just think about how Kekox just reacted, and that poor stupid old bastard is trying not to be a bigot. And why is the prejudice so deep? Because the races are so different, right? Now right now we know nothing of these things on the planet’s surface—or almost nothing. But don’t we all agree they’re hideous? And clearly they’re crude and stupid . . . look at the way they live. And . . . well. Here’s my guess. As soon as we have a 256th of a day’s real acquaintance with them, we’ll hate them to the bone. So will the adults, for that matter. The Seteposians sure aren’t attractive, and if there’s anything that our own history teaches us, it’s that race hatred is natural and normal. They won’t like us either. So I say ... if it’s going to be hatred, and it’s us or them, we should get the jump on them.”
Otuz gestured her agreement. “And think about this too. Before the Conquest, all the little principalities of Shulath, even though they had sworn allegiance to the same General Court in principle, were constantly at war with each other. There were traditional hatreds between different islands and cities and branches of Mother-Sea-Worship that went back too far for anyone to know how they’d started. But after the Conquest . . . well, all that disappeared in a hurry. Everybody who was tall, crestless, and long-eared learned that there was only one enemy worth hating—the one who had conquered them. In a couple of generations all Shulathians were brothers. Nowadays no one even knows which of the many original nations any one Shulathian is descended from.” She gestured at us all. “Well, compared to our differences with those intelligent Seteposian animals, we’re all identical twins.”
Priekahm was gesturing eager assent. “You’re right,” she said, “on both counts. First the difference it might make in our culture to find real aliens to hate, and secondly that we don’t really have any basis for calling the Seteposians people. There are pets on Nisu that could be taught to build a hut or even to till a garden. Until we know that they’re anything more than smart animals, we shouldn’t be calling them people.”
“I hope you’re not talking about us adults,” Poiparesis said, coming in. “There you all are. Well, as you might have guessed, we have a sudden emergency research project. Get a snack if you need one and meet me in the rear computer lab in a sixty-fourth of a day. I’ve got a long list of tasks for all of you; we have a meeting at the end of the eightday to decide what to do, and we’ll need to get every piece of information we can together by then.” He turned and went.
I guess I was still angry; I turned to the others and said, “Well, there you have it. As soon as anything important comes up they drop all this silly pretense about discussing with us as equals.” It came out in a nasty, sarcastic tone that I disliked as I said it, but perhaps only I heard the tone, for everyone else was gesturing assent.
“How about we hold a meeting of our own, real soon?” Mejox said. “Maybe after evening meal tonight?”
* * * *
9
AT THE END OF THE EIGHTDAY, WAHKOPEM’S WHOLE CREW MET IN THE common dining area. “Let’s begin by facing facts,” Osepok said. “The decision has to be entirely ours. No matter what we decide, a lot of Nisuans won’t like it. Right?”
We all gestured agreement. “All right, then,” she said. “It seems to me then that what we do is decide, plan what we’re going to do, and then radio back the plan with the news. That way we don’t give anyone back on Nisu a chance to argue about what we ought to do before they know what it is. At least they can’t get mad about being made irrelevant.”
Again everyone agreed.
“So much for the easy part,” she said. “Now what do we do? Let’s turn this over to Mejox, who operated the two mobile probes we used for looking into this.”
Mejox got up and dimmed the lights. “Here’s highlights from motion pictures taken by probe one, which I sent to a high hill that overlooks a settlement site.”
The first picture dashed any hope we might have had that the whole thing was somehow our misunderstanding. The village was surrounded by a wooden palisade with stones piled around its base, and fields around it were planted with grain and various other plants. “Let me bring up some details,” Mejox said. “If you look here, you’ll see what’s pretty clearly a crude irrigation system, and when we enlarged and enhanced this part, we found this gadget: the long lever raises the animal skin bag full of water out of the river, as you see, and then they swing it around to the trough and set it down. The bag empties into the trough, the trough spills into the ditch, and the ditch carries it out to the field.”
Poiparesis grunted. “And is that smoke?”
“Oh, yes,” Mejox said. “They have fire. The tools are stone, but some of the ornaments on their necks and wrists look like metal, maybe gold or copper, something easy to smelt in a cellulose fire.”
“Cellulose?”
“Yep. Amazing, isn’t it? Something we only know as a synthetic is basic to life here. Thanks to their habit of burning trees for fuel, we were able to get a spectroscope shot of the flames, and cellulose is what Seteposian trees are made out of. Which is why Seteposian forests grow a lot taller than ours, I suspect—Seteposian trees aren’t limited by the water pressure needed to hold them up. Probably the core of the tree is just deposited cellulose and isn’t even alive. I bet they don’t have to bake the wood before using it to build with. But anyway, it looks like a thousand of the animals probably live in that village. Now here’s the clip from probe two, which I sent in after the first probe disappeared.”
“Disappeared? You mean it stopped transmitting—” Osepok said.
“No, disappeared. A satellite overhead saw it on one pass and didn’t see it on the next. This made me suspect that the animals in the village had something to do with it. So I sent the next probe to a hilltop farther away, got the pictures, and told it to fly out into the desert when it was done. That drained the last of the batteries and it had to sit and soak up desert sunshine for two full days to get operational again. But it was definitely the way I had to do it—let me show you. Now in the earlier clip you noticed this big building I’m sure—” He popped a still picture onto the screen. “I thought it was a granary, or maybe the boss male’s den. But look here—”
They had pulled off large parts of one side of the building. Inside there was a statue, probably of stone, of one of their females sitting cross-legged; in front of it were the remains of the probe, solar panels torn off, sections missing from its wings, thrusters gone, instrument package ripped open. I looked closer. “Did it get covered with all that mud when—”
“That’s not mud,” Mejox said. “Watch.”
The clip changed. One of them, in a long robe, a strange mask over its face, raised a small struggling animal—not the same species, this one was covered with thick hair—over his head, then forced it down onto the flat upper surface of the probe’s right wing. With a gleaming stone knife, he cut its throat and let it bleed over the probe.
“Oh, no,” Poiparesis said. “No. This just keeps getting worse.”
“Exactly,” Osepok said. “I’d be pretty surprised if that’s anything other than what it looks like. A religious ritual. Not too different from the ones the sacrifice cults did when Wahkopem found their islands, assuming his description was accurate. Either they think the probe is a god, or they think it was sent by one, and they’re giving it gifts.”
“My guess is that they don’t think at all,” Mejox said. “They’re interesting animals, but let’s not g
et carried away.”
The next shot was a slow pan. Nearly half the crude log-and-mud buildings in the village had wing sections or chunks of solar panel over the door, and several close-ups of individuals showed that they were wearing thrusters or instruments on thongs around their necks.
“So far, not only are they there first, but they seem to be outwitting us,” Kekox commented.
“Otuz will have the next section, about the problem of the distribution of these things,” Mejox said.
She got up and brought up the lights. “I wish I had Mejox’s flair for the dramatic, but I don’t. So I’ll just say that I’ve got everything documented and I can show you the detail if you need more proof. But here’s the gist of it: we used all the pictures we had of these animals to set up a program that processed through every satellite and probe picture we had, looking for evidence of them elsewhere on the planet. And the quick answer is that these animals are the kind of vermin that spreads everywhere. We found them on all the large land masses except the ice-covered one, in desert, grassland, mountains, swamps. Almost certainly they’re in the forest areas, too, but we can’t see them under the tree canopy. The biggest parts of the planet where there aren’t any, as far as we can tell, are some islands here and there. Some of the islands are quite decent places—these two southeast of Southland, this one by the Hook, and many of these small chains in mid-ocean, all have nice enough climates, but any island we picked might become infested with them before the colony got here, a few hundred years from now.” She scratched her ear fiercely, something she did when she had to tell you bad news. “It’s not clear that they’ve gotten anywhere by sea yet—they may have walked on land bridges ten thousand years ago when there was much more ice and the oceans were lower—but if you look at this satellite picture, it wouldn’t quite resolve, but it does look like a log raft traveling across this strait here. We’ll probably know more later, but for right now I’m not sure we can say any part of the planet is secure against them, except perhaps the ice continent.”
“So conflict is bound to come,” Mejox said.
“So, if we settle there, conflict is absolutely bound to come,” Soikenn agreed, emphatically. “They’re already living in towns, possibly doing some metalwork, and growing crops, and it looks like their population dispersal has been rapid and recent because they don’t differ physically nearly as much as Shulathian and Palathian—it looks like except for minor pigmentation differences they’re still all one race.”
Otuz agreed emphatically. “Right. We really can’t avoid these animals. Like it or not we’re going to be moving into their way.”
Poiparesis winced and said, “These ‘animals,’ as you call them, show every sign of being as bright as we are—”
Mejox asked impatiently, “So where’s their spaceship?”
“Where was ours a hundred years ago?” Soikenn demanded. “As I see it, the only thing we can do is land as far from their settlements as we can— probably on islands in the big ocean—and try not to let them see too much more of us. We can capture huge amounts of scientific information here— both about the huge variety of ecosystems this planet has, and about the development and deployment of the intelligent species here. The information is absolutely priceless. But once we’ve done that, we need to remove whatever traces our base has left. I’d suggest building it close to a coastline and simply blowing it up after we leave with one of the spare sail-deployment fusion charges, so that whatever isn’t blasted or burned can wash into the sea. The little bit of residual radioactivity won’t have any effects you could detect after a couple of decades.
“Then we take all that data we’ve acquired, and all eight of us head back to Nisu. I know we older ones will die on the way, and the idea of being buried in the cold dark between the stars gives me chills, but we don’t dare leave our bodies or camp behind for those people to find. We’ve got to leave them free to find their own road to civilization, first of all because they have a right to it just as we did, and secondly because we’ll be able to study them while they do it. When we radio our reports back to Nisu, I have no doubt they’ll dispatch a small permanent colony to observe these people as they develop—probably a main base on the moon of this world, and then various surface bases anywhere where they can operate without interfering. And in a few thousand years, probably, we’ll be ready to talk.
“Meanwhile, though, this ought to get those idiots back home off their self-satisfied rumps and get the five other scouting missions restarted. Intelligence is obviously not as rare as we thought it would be, but living worlds are still very common and we can find a more suitable one. Better yet, several suitable ones, with a big ship going to each one. Do you see it, everyone? If we treat these people fairly, learn from them and study them—well, then. It can be a model for our whole new civilization, for a future when Nisuan ships sail between ten different stars, and when we bring them in as our partners, maybe twenty thousand years from now.”
There was a long pause before Captain Osepok spoke. “I’m not sure I’m so optimistic about the people back home doing the right thing. This Fereg Yorock isn’t likely to want to do anything that doesn’t pay off in two eightdays, preferably at two hundred percent. But at least it will get them to dispatch one or two more scoutships, and maybe to think a little about the future. And we can follow the course of action that’s right . . . and just hope that the people back home and in the next generations will follow through.” Her voice seemed to gain confidence as she thought about it. “And I don’t suppose we’re responsible for what people will do in the future.” She smiled at Soikenn. “That’s a great solution to the problem.”
Soikenn seemed to relax.
Poiparesis drew a deep breath and let it out. He was sitting with his arms folded across his chest. “Well, I’m not sure that it’s the best course.”
I felt a deep relief and I noticed Otuz relax as well. At least all the adults weren’t going to be irrational.
“It seems to me,” Poiparesis said, “that there’s no special reason why these people should have to fall over the same bumps in the road as we did. Sooner or later, just to mention the most obvious example, one of their civilizations will get ahead of the others militarily, and will probably conquer and enslave everyone else—and they’ll have the same kind of horrible relations within their species that we have between Shulathian and Palathian.
“I mean, we didn’t train the children by letting them touch hot stoves or leaving out sharp knives to play with. We didn’t force them to repeat every experiment in the history of physics or chemistry, especially not the poisonous or explosive ones. Why should we let this younger species make the same mistakes we did, the ones we’re all still paying for? I say we should study them—and then make contact, tell them who we are and why we’re coming, perhaps even make a point of asking their permission to land.” He smiled warmly and looked from face to face; it was clear that somehow he thought he had found a compromise position, or the best of all possible ones. Perhaps if we had all heard his argument first, things might have been different—I thought that often, many years later. But probably not; however kind and gentle Poiparesis’s words often were, the actions of the other adults shouted them down. “But,” Poiparesis added, “we old ones have been doing all the talking. Perhaps we should hear from the younger generation.”
We had prepared for this carefully; Otuz, Priekahm, and 1 all turned to Mejox as one, making it clear that we expected him to speak for all of us.
Mejox drew a slow, deep breath, and said, “All right, then. Let me make this as simple and as clear as I can.
“No doubt if the people back on Nisu had kept the Migration Project on track, we would be able to reserve this planet as a scientific preserve, send probes to lots of others, and find somewhere that was more comfortable. And I’m sure many Nisuans, scientists particularly, would greatly prefer that. I suppose the animals down there would prefer it if we just went away.
“But we hav
e to think of Nisu. That’s what this mission is about. And from that standpoint, I think that the discovery of intelligent animals on Setepos is not a drawback but a tremendous advantage. I propose that we land right where the most advanced groups of the animals live, attack and subjugate their civilization, domesticate the survivors, and establish an economic basis for a colony that will exploit these animals to the fullest, for the benefit of all our people. Then I propose that we simply radio back to Nisu, explain what we have done, and tell them to come join us. We undo our sterilizations, settle down to run the plantation, and our greatgrandchildren will be there to greet the colony—with a vast economic base set up so that everyone can live in comfort.
“Now, obviously it’s better for us because we don’t have to spend the rest of our lives in this metal box. Just as obviously it’s better for the settlers to come, because they arrive on a planet that’s ready to accommodate them. But what it’s really—”
“You aren’t going to try to claim it’s better for those people?” Poiparesis broke in sarcastically.
“What people?”
“The ones on Setepos.”
“There aren’t any, yet. There are some unusually smart animals,” Mejox said firmly. “And that’s the point I’m getting to. What has been the great disaster in Nisuan history? The split between Palathian and Shulathian, the failure to see that we’re united by being Nisuan. So here we have animals smart enough to have a kind of primitive religion and government, and do all kinds of work, but not smart enough to have ascended from living the way our remotest ancestors did.