Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  He breathed deeply a couple of times and then at last spoke again. “I’ve struggled not to see it, and I’ve deluded myself that as an Imperial Guard I had a stronger loyalty to home than all of you. But this place has been my home as long as it has been all of yours, and I could bear that all of Nisu had been blown apart far easier than I could bear this.” He drew a deep breath and said, “I’ve lost my dearest friend and I never told him that that’s what he was. I’ve spent years struggling to make everyone behave according to rules that didn’t really even matter to me anymore. I’ve behaved shamefully toward several of you. Well, now, too late, I can at least do what he’d have wanted me to do—forgive, forget, join with the rest of you. I will. Let that be my monument to my best friend.” He set Poiparesis’s hand down tenderly and gently pressed his fingers down on his forehead, the same gesture of putting a child to sleep that we all remembered so well. Then he looked up. “And I love all of you. You are all my family.”

  So far we had been following the tradition for a burial at sea, the analogy they had suggested in our standing orders. Now we did something new; we stood in a circle as we watched the little cargo elevator carry Poiparesis up into the central services core. A moment later, as we stood quietly with each other, in a linked circle of hands, there was a hard, shuddering thud through the ship; our probe catapult had hurled Poiparesis out and away, ahead of us, into the dark of space. We were still above escape velocity for our new sun. He would make a fast hyperbolic orbit around it, then continue on out into the depths of space forever.

  * * * *

  For two days after the funeral, we went by “sick rules,” the provisions that had been made in case the whole crew fell ill at once; no one felt like working or attempting the simplest things. The third day, we held a meeting of the whole crew, and at least for me, Poiparesis was only absent physically. In most senses his was the biggest presence there.

  The first question was what, if anything, to tell them back on Nisu. Despite orders we had not been reporting daily for many years. In fact we had come to realize, by comparing timing of responses, that the messages we did send were being spooled and sometimes not read for several eightdays. It would be at least another eightday before we had to transmit.

  “You know what they would make of it,” Otuz said. “It would become entertainment. By the time we got back, if we decided to do anything as foolish as go back, we’d be nothing more than a set of freaks for exhibition, the survivors of ‘the most famous murder case in history’ or something. And long before we get any message from them we’re going to have to settle everything anyway. So why tell them? Why even talk to them at all?”

  We all must have appeared a little surprised, because she looked around impatiently, as if wondering why we could not see it. “If we’re never going back and we want no more to do with them—and those are at least the positions I’m in favor of—then why do we have to shame ourselves in front of them? You know that they’re never going to understand anyway, because they won’t want to understand. They’ll do what Nisuans always do: make a big flap, do a lot of talking, throw around all kinds of feelings and expressions and make sure everyone gets heard—and upset, and then arrive at the conclusion that we should have consulted them and that it was a terrible thing. Probably it will be an excuse for just turning off the laser, canceling everything, and partying till the rocks fall.”

  After a pause, Soikenn said, “I don’t see what purpose it could serve to tell them what’s happened, either. If Poiparesis just disappears from the story, it will occur to someone to wonder and there will be all kinds of wild speculation. If we tell them the truth, we’ll end up as material for sensational news-telling. Nothing we can do will get them to think about species survival, that’s plain. Nisu sent us out and then forgot about us. So your idea is that we just stop transmitting?”

  Otuz nodded. “Or even better, we make our landing and leave behind a message that breaks off, as if we had crashed on landing. Maybe if we can’t get them to come out here to save civilization, a news-teller company might finance an expedition to find out what happened to us. And by the time they get here, our great-grandchildren will have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “There are other advantages, too,” Mejox said. “Back on Nisu there’s bound to be a lot of controversy about these intelligent animals. Look at how we all reacted here. So whatever solution we arrive at will already be in place—for generations—before they ever hear about it. And I trust us, and our descendants, a lot more than I trust Nisuans.”

  “Not only that,” Priekahm pointed out, “but if we just vanish, they have to build two more starships. One to find out what happened to us and one to get a backup destination in case whatever killed us might prevent their using Setepos. Nisu gets two refuge worlds and two chances to survive. And they’ll afford it if they have to—let’s not forget that the total mission cost for putting another ship on its way out here, now that the big laser is built, is only about the budget of one big entertainment show.”

  Kekox nodded. “So we might be more valuable as a silence than as a presence.”

  I thought about it and decided not to speak. It seemed to me that we didn’t actually know what was going on back on Nisu, and especially we didn’t know what effect the data coming from the last two years of probes had had on Nisuan public opinion. For all we knew the Nisuans had thrown out Fereg Yorock and the Planetary Improvement Program, the empress was dead in childbirth, and the new emperor had ordered the whole Migration Project sped up. Indeed for all we knew there were four ships being launched behind us at this very moment, and they would all arrive within our lifetime. There were a lot of uncertainties.

  And everyone seemed to be rationalizing going off the air and not telling Nisu what had happened, sparing us vast amounts of shame. That seemed to be our unspoken first priority.

  I wasn’t about to say that, and I kept my peace. For many long years in the future I would wonder whether that had made any difference; I always concluded that if I had spoken up, it would have made no difference at all.

  We didn’t really even take a vote; everyone favored sending routine reports back for the twenty-eight days until we entered deceleration. Chances were that no one would pay much attention to the routine reports—more likely if anything got attention it would be the data coming back from the probes. The report from our close pass at the new sun, Kousapex, could be mainly technical, as could the maneuvers to get us into orbit around Setepos. And then we need only begin our landing in the usual fashion, and click off the required channel at the right moment— a robot circuit on Wahkopem Zomos could do that.

  With almost no discussion, we decided to make the real commitment to staying; Soikenn undid everyone’s sterilizations, because by now even if all four females got pregnant immediately, we should be safely down on the ground and settled before any of them began to be inconvenienced. Long before we rounded the sun, it was no surprise to discover that Otuz and Priekahm were both pregnant; a bit more surprising when it turned out that the captain was as well, but at least it gave Mejox and me something to tease Kekox about.

  Our plan for staying and settling got more and more advanced as we brought more probes to bear on the little settlements in the southwest corner of Big. We had ascertained a great deal about them, but we still weren’t sure whether they were smart animals or stupid people, so we developed plans for either case. Both plans were simple enough so that it was hard to see how anything could go wrong with them. And if our reasons for not returning and starting a colony of our own weren’t quite what we pretended they were, still, the effect back on Nisu might well do more good than not.

  * * * *

  As we fell into the new solar system we gave Poiparesis a kind of last tribute: we took thousands of observations and measurements of the Kousapex system’s eight planets, working at a frantic pace to make sure that all those observations got back to Nisu under his name before we had to cut off transmissions. Naturally it
also helped to conceal that he was no longer with us, but speaking for myself, anyway, knowing how much his scientific career had mattered to Poiparesis, I don’t think that’s why we did it; I think we just wanted his name remembered. During that same time, as Mejox and Priekahm worked the probes exploring Setepos, they often signed his name to that work as well.

  We multiplied our knowledge of the system manyfold as we steadily closed in on Kousapex. We jettisoned the magnetic drag loop, which we would not need again, and let it tumble on into space ahead of us; almost surely it would pass close enough to Kousapex to be annihilated, but it was such thin stuff, spread across such an immense distance, that our best instruments would be hard pressed to see it. We unfurled the sail and spun it up to full extension, facing the ever-brightening new star.

  There was another period of a day’s miserable high acceleration as we used the solar sail for braking, making a close pass at Kousapex; it reminded us far too much of twenty-three years before, when Poiparesis had been there to take care of us, and though there were no injuries this time, and indeed we were all adults and could take care of ourselves, still we were all quiet and withdrawn for a day or so afterward.

  We came out of the blazing light of our new star in a highly elliptical retrograde orbit and made a near pass by the second planet of the system, using its gravity to brake us further. Visually it was about the least interesting planet in the system, covered with a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere with an all-but-featureless cloud layer so that it merely looked like a shiny ball. Still, we all spent as much time as possible at the viewports as we swung by it. After twenty-three years en route, it was strange to see a planet, unmagnified, hanging in space. Its gravitation dragged at us as we made our near pass, and now we were just rising in Kousapex’s gravity fast enough so that when we intercepted Setepos, on the prograde side, we would fall into the right orbit—more or less. There were still a thousand tiny adjustments to be made.

  More eightdays went by as we closed in on Setepos. Once we had moved at a speed so great that we would have crossed this solar system in about a day and a quarter; now we were taking ten eightdays to get between two of its closer planets. When Wahkopem Zomos was within a hundred planetary radii of Setepos, we spent a day furling the sail, just as if we were going to use it again.

  Six days after furling the sail, we fired the rocket motors to bring us into orbit around our new world, and Osepok spent all of that day in her cabin, having been assured by the rest of us that we could handle the very small amount of manual work necessary. She was listening to music, we realized later, because this would be her last chance to lie in the comfort of her bunk, just listening. Kekox sat and gazed out the viewport, and Soikenn sat beside him, both silent and motionless as statues, watching Setepos grow from a dot until it filled the viewport. With Otuz at the helm, Priekahm monitoring engines, and Mejox and me reading instruments and verifying astrogation, we slipped into our new orbit. That evening at the last meal of the day, all three of the older generation congratulated us on doing it so neatly.

  The next thing we did had been a matter of some discussion. About a third of the central cylinder of the ship had been taken up with the furled sail, which we now, at least theoretically, were not going to need. We had now all gone off birth control, which meant after the children were born we would rapidly reach a point where we could no longer take everyone back with us. We had resolved to fake the accident. In every way we had committed to this system, and the sail that was to take us back was taking up a great bulk of room that we needed for the Wahkopem Zomos in its new capacity as the space station that would provide technical support for our civilization down on the surface. Thus the sensible thing to do was to get rid of the sail.

  And yet we hesitated, a little, because it was our only way to go anywhere else if this didn’t work out. Once we jettisoned the sail, the maneuvering engines on Wahkopem Zomos were so low-powered that we couldn’t even get out of orbit around Setepos; their primary intention was for station keeping. “But,” Mejox pointed out, “if we dock one of the landers at the back of this thing—well, then we can use it to push us up to escape velocity. We’d have to go to wherever else by ballistic flight, and that could take a few years, but so what? We’re used to living in this thing for years at a time, and anyway there really isn’t anywhere else worth going in this solar system. My vote is we jettison it.”

  His had been the last speech on the subject; we managed to overcome some premonitions and foreboding, and the next day we pointed the ship so that the sail would jettison behind us in orbit, and triggered jettison.

  Though the sail and its cables weighed many tons, because they were virtually single-molecule materials they had folded into tiny spaces. Now, as we watched it go, the great black-and-silver fabric began to unfurl in orbit as the sunlight caught it, and the diamond cables, one eightieth of the circumference of this planet, started to stretch out from it. Then, far below, we saw a spray of bright red lines as the spun-diamond cables began to drop into the atmosphere; the added drag yanked the sail open, so that for one instant it was immense in the sky, and then as the drag grew more intense, it billowed, folded, and fell at its awesome velocity into the upper atmosphere of Setepos. Only about three hundred atoms thick, it vaporized and burned in a sudden great flash, like a piece of tissue paper tossed into a hot chimney flue. It must have been quite a show, down below.

  Soikenn and the captain spent the next day frantically getting a set of up-close pictures of Setepos and its moon. That left Kekox plus the younger generation to ready the Gurix, the lander that would take us down to the surface. We had chosen it partly because of its name—General Gurix, after all, had conquered a world, whereas Rumaz, the empress after whom the other lander was named, had merely been on the throne when he had done it for her.

  We spent one long, nervous, frustrating day getting decades-old power and data systems up and running, and there were times when we all struggled not to voice the thought to each other: What if, after coming all this way, we can’t get one of our landers working, and we’re never able to touch the world that fills our viewports?

  At the end of that day of struggle, we finally seemed to have electric power everywhere we were supposed to, the containment on the antimatter mixing had held for a full tenth of a day, and all sensors were at last responding intelligibly. We set it to run a self-diagnostic while we slept, and then all but staggered through the narrow tunnels to the main body of Wahkopem Zomos and fell into our bunks. Tomorrow we would do the final checkout, then move on to outfitting the Rumaz.

  After we arose, and ate a long, relaxed meal, we went back into the central core to do the checkout. The lander had leaked most of the air in its cabin, and the computer had eventually shut off the air supply to avoid losing all of it into space.

  The Gurix’s seals and gaskets had deteriorated, whether from cryonic temperatures, vacuum, interstellar radiation flux, or aging, we had no way of knowing. There was nothing for it but to make a fresh batch of the plastics, cut new parts, and install them. The ship’s computer had all the specifications, but more days went by while we did that, and as we replaced parts, we often had to redo things we had done on the first day. Then, of course, we repeated the process on the Rumaz, and finally we had two working landers.

  “It’s a good thing we brought along tools and materials to make every part for the lander,” Mejox commented at dinner that night. “Someone back on Nisu knew what they were doing, amazing as that seems.”

  “What it makes me wonder about is whether everything would have held together on Wahkopem Zomos if we had tried to voyage back to Nisu,” Priekahm said. “After all, we’re only about a third of the way into the voyage they planned for us. A fifth of the way with Fereg Yorock’s revised schedule. If there’s that much deterioration on the Gurix, who knows what parts of Wahkopem Zomos might be about to go?”

  I shuddered, but I pointed out, “Well, we have been working with and monitoring everyt
hing on the main ship, replacing parts from time to time. I suppose if we had the raw materials we could build just about everything with the material fabricators and machine tools on board, except the sail, the shrouds, and the brakeloop. It’s not quite the same thing as leaving the landers in storage for all that time.”

  “Storage,” Kekox said. “We still haven’t even started to work out the logistics. Which stuff should go down on which lander flight?”

  That sent everyone scrambling for all the reports we had on the site, and then put us all to arguing about what we might need first—other than the steam rifles and the incendiary throwers needed to establish ourselves as the species in charge on Setepos. Everything had to change now that we were no longer planning a slow exploration followed by departure.

  It took several days, even after we had our lists in order. Much of the gear had been stowed with an eye to its convenience during the voyage, some things had been moved without the information being recorded, and of course among the things that had been stored for twenty years there was some deterioration and breakage that had to be dealt with, and things that had to be remanufactured. Furthermore, though no one talked about it, our feet dragged a little as we went about our tasks, because we were planning to begin moving out of home forever.