I noted that into our report and said, “So. We’ll want to try again soon. I don’t think we’re going to get much of a look by chasing sentries.”
Krurix scratched behind one ear and then rubbed his crest vigorously. “We need to go at night, to begin with. Put all the cameras on infrared, show no lights, do very low-powered hops so we don’t show much flame, really use the audio pickups heavily. More or less the way we’d try to sneak in, in person, I guess. We should probably come in straight down, so we don’t have to sneak past any guards, and sometime when there’s no moon in the sky.”
We had just figured out that we were close to a new moon, the best of all times to go, when Beremahm came over and rested a hand on each of our shoulders. “The captain wants all officers to the main conference room—including me, so we’re leaving the ship in the hands of the ordinary spacers. Tisix,” she added, “you will promise not to crash us?”
“If the ship blows up, you can dock my pay, sir,” the helmsman said.
“Anyway,” Beremahm said, “given how many standing orders and regs this goes against, there’s obviously something big happening. Apparently we’re going to hear your friend Bepemm’s report, and the captain and the Political Officer would also like it very much if you would please present something or other as well—he says it doesn’t have to be organized, but he doesn’t want to completely surprise you when he asks. Unofficially I suggest you take a few minutes to pull out a file of pictures before you go down.”
The main conference room was also the dining hall and where recreational games were played and Political Education lectures given. There was room for everyone there, and since the ship’s crew was about half officers, this meant everyone could have spread out. Instead, we piled into the front two rows, leaning forward, trying to guess what Captain Baegess and Political Officer Streeyeptin had heard from Bepemm to cause this unprecedented meeting.
The last to come in were Proyerin, the engineer’s mate, and Depari, the astrogator, both of whom had been asleep. As soon as they were seated, Captain Baegess began. “Well, after today I am not sure I will ever believe there can be such a thing as too-wild speculation. As we all know, some of the most bizarre ideas about what happened to the Wahkopem Zomos expedition have turned out to be true. It was clear before now that they landed near a village of intelligent Seteposians and that at least some of their descendants still live there, so in that sense the greatest shock is over with. But what Astrogator’s Assistant Bepemm has turned up is not merely surprising—it is shocking, and I don’t use that word lightly in this case. Most of you will be shocked. Therefore I want you to give her your full attention without interruption. And you may find that harder than you think. Still, I want to hold all discussion until we have heard all the facts—with one exception. I wish to exercise my captain’s privilege of pointing out to you all that Bepemm has done a superb job, very rapidly finding the relevant documents and compiling them into the strange and horrifying story you are about to hear, and is greatly to be commended. So now, give her your full attention. Bepemm?”
It was certainly unheard of for one of us assistants to address the whole session of the ship’s officers; normally the whole session met only before and after a voyage, not during one. And for that matter, most of the time we were invisible as we ran from one duty to the next. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that Bepemm looked a little frightened. She glanced toward me and Krurix, and we covertly gestured approval at her; that seemed to relax her, and she began.
The captain’s preface had not been exaggerated. The story was horrifying. It began with the murder of the only morally decent crew-member, the only one who had advocated equality with the Seteposians and who had not had racist ideas about cross-marriages. Apparently he had dissented from a plan to establish a slave empire on Setepos—Bepemm was still looking for exact evidence on that point.
The “crash” message received on Nisu—the very message that had been the trigger for the Revolution—had been a fraud, intended to keep anyone from coming to see what was going on. For us, the children of the Revolution—and for older officers who had fought in it—this was perhaps the hardest blow.
But not the worst thing we heard. Records uploaded from the Gurix’s computer showed that the Nisuans had indeed established a slave empire, overrunning some twenty neighboring settlements.
Finally we got the story of the disease that developed among them. After Mejox made the last run for medical supplies, records came to an abrupt end until almost three years later, when the Gurix suddenly took off at maximum acceleration and continued right on out of the solar system, beyond radio range, till finally its engines flamed out at just about the distance that could be explained as running out of fuel. “They took off in no particular direction,” Bepemm noted. “The nearest star they could have been trying for is a red dwarf more than twenty light-years away, which the Gurix still won’t reach for decades—about seven gravities for about an eightday only got it up to about thirteen percent of the speed of light. And the Gurix was unequipped for a crew to survive that much acceleration. I can’t believe that trip was intentional.”
Captain Baegess waited a long moment and then said, “You should give us your hypothesis on this one, Bepemm. Political Officer Streeyeptin and I agree that it makes a great deal of sense.”
Bepemm looked nervous. “Well, er, the problem is that it happens to have no real evidence. I just thought that the voyages between Wahkopem Zomos and the surface probably stopped because they just didn’t need anything more from the ship to run their empire. If you look at the plans and lists when they started out, the Gurix actually made one more trip than it was supposed to—the one for medical supplies. So I think they had planned that their little empire would be independent of the ship. If it hadn’t been for the illness, Mejox Roupox would not have needed to make that last trip.
“Then as for what happened three years later—I think most likely Soikenn, who had been close to Poiparesis, who had frequently dissented, and whose child—the youngest among them—was extremely sick and might well have died, did it as an act of suicide, and also to take away the basis of the Nisuan empire on Setepos. Probably after seeing how things had turned out, she decided to eliminate herself and the access to Wahkopem Zomos at the same time. If she was careful about how she did it, she would have been killed on takeoff, and she wouldn’t have suffered much.”
There was a very long silence.
Then Streeyeptin said, “I would like to hear the probe report.”
Krurix and I gave it, as quickly as we could, describing everything we had seen and stressing that no Nisuan appeared to be in charge down there.
Streeyeptin nodded, and said, “Questions?” There were none. Everyone was too stunned. “Very well, then,” he continued, “I should draw your attention to the real nature of the prerevolutionary regime and the kind of consciousness it engendered. No sooner did they reach a new world with a new sapient species than they set out to replicate the worst of the old—slavery, monarchy, racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, the whole business. But I’m sure that lesson can’t have been lost on you. Now we have at least some idea of what we face down there. Even if the Seteposians have taken it over—and I think Krurix and Thetakisus should be able to confirm that with a couple more probe missions, flown, as they suggest, with a little more stealth—even if it is a Seteposian slave empire now, it is unquestionably a slave empire. Therefore our task is twofold: to reeducate the Nisuans living there, whether they are slaves or masters, and to overthrow the present regime and empower the Seteposians to develop into a free and equal republic. If we succeed, we will have new and loyal friends in the universe. Should we fail, well, I need only point to what has already happened.” He turned to Captain Baegess and added, “It’s clear that we need to begin as soon as we have all information in hand. Get our worthy assistants on the job as soon as they’re fed and rested. And I would think a round of applause from the assembled officers
is owed to all three assistants.”
They gave it to us, and then swarmed out of the room, back to duties or bunks—since it was plain we were going to be busy. On his way out, Streeyeptin leaned over to Krurix and said, very softly, “Well, you’ve redeemed yourself,” then went out the door before Krurix could react. When I looked at the engineer’s assistant, he was pale around the eyes with fear.
* * * *
4
BECAUSE OF THE RAIN AND THE DARK THAT HAD LAIN L1KE A COLD BLANKET over the Nim’s empire for ten days now, all the Nisuan slaves who had independent living quarters were allowed fires. My father had built his in front of the one-room hut he shared with my mother, just close enough so that we could sit under the overhang, relatively dry while the fire blazed in front of us and the light misting rain hissed and spatted around its edges.
I had put Esser to bed—no great problem as I’d had her romping outside in the mud all day to tire her out—and gotten permission to spend the evening down here with Father and Mother. It was the first chance, really, to talk alone with Father about what everyone was calling the Pillar of Fire, the strange glowing vertical cloud to the west of us that had appeared the night before it began to rain so unseasonably. I don’t suppose I’d have gotten permission if anyone had been thinking about it—the Nisuan probes creeping through town by night and around the outskirts by day, seen by dozens of people now, had made all of Real People Town nervous and fearful. But after a few gloomy gray days and with the Pillar visible whenever an opening appeared in the clouds, with the whole city rife with rumors of avenging Nisuans about to return, of Inok returned from the sky to punish his father for exiling him there, and that the probes themselves seemed to be alive and thinking in a way no one could recall, the nobility of the Real People had become thoroughly demoralized, and when I had asked my mistress’s permission, she had simply waved a hand at the door. I didn’t stay to discuss her feelings with her.
That evening, Mother was no better; she was still having lucid intervals once or twice a day, but otherwise she either slept or babbled nonsense. Her muscles were terribly weak and visibly wasting away. So far she had no sign of a cough, but both Soikenn and Mejox had finally been killed by pneumonia, as far as we could tell, brought on by being bedridden and perhaps by atrophy of the muscles. We turned her and changed the straw under her, to prevent bedsores, and since she seemed to be unconscious, we left her in what we hoped was a comfortable position and went outside to talk.
“So,” Father said, in Nisuan, “it looks very much as if they did send an expedition back to us. Poor old Mejox—he’d have liked to see it, and if he’d lasted just a little longer he might have. Oh, well, it pleases me to see an end come to the Nim, and Osepok will be ecstatic I’m sure. And perhaps they can do something for Otuz as well.”
“You’re sure it’s them and not someone else?” I asked.
He almost laughed at me, then caught himself. “I suppose, growing up here and getting what education you could mostly in secret, it’s hard for you to understand. But there is no civilization advanced enough to do any of this on Setepos, and the odds of there being any other civilization nearby—and of its coming here—are vanishingly small. No, it’s from Nisu. Another clue is that they appear to be using a zero-point energy laser to hover over the planet’s surface—”
“Is that what the Pillar is?”
“Does it help you to know the name of the thing?”
“Sometimes. At least it lets me feel like I’m not one of our savage masters,” I said. “But how do you know what it is?”
“While we were en route, as you know, Otuz and I, plus your Grandmother Soikenn and poor Poiparesis, who you never met, all of us did a great deal of scientific work, and we read a great deal of other people’s work.”
“It’s always sounded to me like that was all you did.”
“Very nearly. Anyway, one of the reports that came in from Nisu was of an energy source called zero-point energy. Essentially it works because throughout the universe there is always energy popping in and out of existence, and, if you will, it’s a gadget for trapping energy on this side of existence. Physically it’s two vibrating plates very close together, so that when the plates are apart there is just enough time for the energy to come into existence, and when they spring together they trap it before it has enough time to pop back out of existence.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” I confessed.
“Now that I don’t have the math ability I once did,” Father said, “it doesn’t really to me, either. But when you get down to atomic scale—down to things so small that you can hardly imagine them—you really can’t visualize things the way you can in our everyday world. So you just have to take what the math tells you and make whatever sense of it you can—and follow the math, not the sense, if you see what I mean. Anyway, it was a tremendously powerful source of energy, and shortly afterwards another report we got said that they had demonstrated it was lasable—meaning you could use it to make laser light, the same kind of light that Wahkopem Zomos sailed here on, but even more powerful. At the time we thought perhaps that would allow them to send us more power on the return trip laser, and thus shorten our way home, but by then it was becoming clear that money for science and research and exploration was drying up. Well, clearly the spring started running again sometime in the last forty years, because here they are with a very high-powered laser—much more powerful than Wahkopem Zomos used to get here—and one that fits right inside their ship. So besides Nisuans being the only people likely to show up, these people have exactly the right technology to be likely to be Nisuans. If you see what I mean.”
“Close enough,” I said, though I had understood perhaps half of it. I hated to remind him how little he and Mother had been able to teach even the oldest Nisuan children born here—it always made him terribly sad.
“Anyway,” he said, “at the top of the Pillar is a Nisuan ship. It’s been sending the probes. They are scouting the ground down here before they commit a party of people, which is exceedingly smart of them in light of what happened to us. The reason the new probes are so hard to catch is that instead of being simple robots that only know how to do a few things, they are being remotely controlled from the ship. So never fear—there will be an invasion. Soon, I think.”
“I think,” I said, “that the Nim thinks so, too. He’s said to have withdrawn into his palace, won’t talk to anyone, issues orders suddenly in a blind haste and then countermands them half a day later . . .”
“He senses what’s coming,” Father said. “And don’t forget that when he first met us, he was quite seriously worshiping us as gods. It’s our bad luck that he was smart enough to figure out how weak we were, while we were ill, and brave enough to act on the knowledge. He’s a very tough and dangerous opponent, as every village for six days’ journey around here has learned. But with all that, he is still really only the master of two thousand Seteposians with various kinds of pointed sticks. He is one of the few of the Real People old enough to have seen a steam rifle in action, and the only one old enough to have seen us destroy the original Real People Town in less time than it now takes him to take his bath. So he’s very afraid and he’s doing his best to find a way to win out again, even though it’s probably hopeless. That combination might make anyone mad.”
“So you think he’s as sure as you are that they are Nisuans, and they are going to land.”
“Diehrenn, is your father still so sure of that?” a soft voice said, from the dark. Aunt Priekahm came into the firelight from the dark mist, looking sort of like a bad copy of a Seteposian. The last few years she had complained constantly of being cold, and had taken to wearing shawls and skirts like they did.
“Well, it is what makes sense,” Father said.
“Zahmekoses, so far nothing has happened that wouldn’t be consistent with an artificially intelligent robot mission,” Priekahm said, “and we may well have to wait for many years till anythin
g that can take us home comes out to see if we’re still here. I think it’s foolish to get your hopes up when—”
I could tell from the tone of their voices that this was one of the eternal arguments they had come to love as they grew older—and worse yet, it was a new one and thus they were still inventing new things to say, so if they got into this one they’d argue all night. I broke in and asked, “Well, if there are people on that ship, what do you think they’ll do?”
Priekahm thought for a moment and then laughed. “Well, the one thing that probably hasn’t changed is that we are a contentious species, Diehrenn. The only guarantee is that they won’t approve of what they find, though exactly what they’ll disapprove of and why is a good question. And the other thing to trust in is that they will ‘fix’ whatever they don’t like first, and then ask questions later. Assuming they really are Nisuans.”
Father gestured agreement. “It’s a bitter joke, but you’re right,” he said. “I suppose a species that all got along perfectly with each other would never make it to the stars, because they’d never argue enough to make their ideas work. And a species that thought everything through first wouldn’t get there because they’d never get around to it. So the galaxy will eventually be ruled by impetuous bickerers.”
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