Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  “Certainly,” Osepok said. “But Diehrenn is our best scholar and she speaks Real-People without an accent.” She motioned me forward, and I nervously approached the Political Officer. I had already decided it was at least as frightening a title as Nim.

  Father added, “She is my daughter, and Otuz’s.”

  Streeyeptin nodded. “I know. Diehrenn is mentioned toward the end of your records, as they are stored in the main computer of Wahkopem Zomos.”

  “Then, ah, you know—”

  “A great deal. That was why we declared amnesty as soon as we landed. I didn’t want any foolishness about hiding past acts, let alone to have to arrest you for them.”

  Father seemed to relax all at once.

  Streeyeptin turned to me. His eyes ran over me once, not as if he were interested, but just to memorize and file my appearance for future reference. “So, you are a historic figure,” he said. “The first Nisuan born offworld. How very appropriate that you are a Hybrid! Many people at home will be pleased by that.” Not knowing what to say, I stayed silent. He held the message up to me. “Can you read it aloud?”

  “I haven’t had much practice, but I’ll try,” I said, and took the page from him. It was easy enough, I realized with relief, as I turned it toward the lights from the lander. ‘“Everyone of Nisuan descent is to be brought to this lander; no one is to harm any of them. Bring all Nisuans to the lander at once,’” I read, in Nisuan. “Ah, there’s no Real-People word for ‘lander’—why don’t I say ‘Palace Square,’ which is where your lander is sitting?”

  “Excellent,” he said. “Thetakisus, set her up with a loudspeaker, take a party of the other assistants and a couple of ordinary spacers, arm everyone, and make the announcement all over town. Shoot only if provoked, but once they provoke you, make an example that will make them think twice. We want the Seteposians to understand that they want to do what we tell them, and they don’t want to do anything we disapprove off.”

  “Yes, sir,” Thetakisus said. He turned and shouted orders to someone aside. At once four people ran down the steps to join him. Very formally, he said to them, “May I present Diehrenn? She will be acting as our translator tonight. Diehrenn, this is Bepemm.” Assistant to the Astrogator. She was a tall female with a friendly smile. “This is Assistant to the Engineer Krurix.” He was a squat, muscular male, but he smiled just as nicely as Bepemm. “And this is Itenn and Sereterses, both ordinary spacers, or so their rank says.” The two smiled at that. Itenn was older, some gray showing in her fur, a Palathian with a huge crest; Sereterses was another mixed-race male (what was the word Streeyeptin had used? Hybrid, that was it), about my age.

  I nodded to all of them, politely, having no idea what else I should do. If I did anything wrong, they didn’t let me know.

  We walked across Palace Square, away from the lander, into the dark and the rain. I wasn’t quite sure where we were going or why. The shock of the massacre I had seen was beginning to settle in, along with one wonderful, burning feeling of joy: No more masters.

  Even so I winced as I passed the massacred Palace Guard. In the dim light and at the distance from them, I had not seen the horrible gouges, big enough to stick the whole first joint of my thumb into them, dotting the bodies, nor that the ground had been sprayed with a fine mist of blood.

  “The holes are made by the slugs exiting,” Krurix said. “They’re so small and go in so fast that you can’t see where they go in. The wounds happen when they burst out the other side and—”

  “Krurix,” Bepemm said, “we don’t know much about the situation. It’s possible that Diehrenn has friends among the dead, maybe many friends.”

  “But-”

  “Bepemm was looking for a polite way to say ‘shut up,’ Krurix,” Thetakisus explained. “It may have been a mistake for her to try to be polite.”

  Krurix sighed. “Probably. I’m sorry, Diehrenn. It was thoughtless of me.”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to being taken so seriously. It seemed wrong, somehow, that I was getting that much attention. “Some of them I knew very well,” I said, thinking of Set—how just the day before he and I had worked together when we found the probe, and of the years when he had been whatever protection I had.

  It got darker as we reached the edge of the square, and I noticed the cool rain more as it made the clay mud slicker under my feet. I felt bad because I didn’t regret Set’s death more, I realized. Though I had often benefited from his protection, I had still been his slave, and that was the reason he had protected me. Sometimes he had interceded when I had been very afraid of what some Seteposian might do to me. But I had worked when I was too tired, borne pain and sickness, sweated in the heat and shivered in the cold, just so Set could have trivial pleasures and pointless baubles. I had done what he told me, and I had never told him no, because I could not, and because I was so afraid of being given to a worse master.

  I felt a little strange about watching him die. But after twenty years with the best master that I could have hoped for—since I didn’t have to fear getting a crueler one anymore—all I could summon up for Set was the feeling that I hadn’t liked watching him torn in half. I liked that he was dead.

  I suppose, if you’re a master, that’s about as much as you can expect from your slaves. It occurred to me, too, that many of us had bigger grudges against some Seteposians than I had against Set. I wondered whether these newly arrived Nisuans would let us get our hands on those killing cylinders. I hoped so; we were the ones who knew which Seteposians needed killing.

  As I thought this, I walked, with my head down, into the dark at the edge of Palace Square. Away from the lander it was now full night, and the clouds had closed in, so that I looked at my feet, partly not to stumble, partly to sort out my feelings, and mainly to avoid thinking about walking in the streets of Real People Town with beings out of my parents’ stories.

  * * * *

  5

  WHEN WE WERE ALL STANDING AT THE EDGE OF PALACE SQUARE, FACING THE street that led by the stone tower to the main gate in the inner, stone wall of the town, I felt Thetakisus’s hand on my shoulder. Softly, he said, “I’d like you to get used to the loudspeaker. Let’s get you a light so you can see what you’re reading.”

  He took out a thin circlet of some material and fastened it around my forehead, getting it snug but not tight; then he pressed something on it and a beam of light stabbed out from the middle of my forehead, so that it pointed wherever I was looking. “Now,” he said, “you can see. Let’s equip you to talk.” He handed me the same small cube he had used when announcing our amnesty, whatever that was, and said, “Look at the surfaces. The side with the narrow slits is the one you talk into. When you want to be loud you just press down here, on this thing that sticks up. And the sound comes out of the round holes on the other side. Go ahead and try it.” He took it back from me for a moment, held down the thing that stuck up, and spoke into the narrow slits. “Like this.” His voice boomed across Palace Square.

  He handed it back to me, and timidly I copied what he had done. “Like—?” I asked, and was so startled at how loud my voice had become that I almost dropped it.

  I saw Krurix and Bepemm fighting smiles and felt ashamed. Thetakisus’s face was kind. He said, “Just let the amplifier make things louder; you won’t need to shout into it. Try again.”

  “Like this?” I asked timidly, and this time my voice was loud but not overwhelming.

  “Just like that. All right, now you read the text aloud, over and over, just like you and Streeyeptin agreed you would, into the amplifier, and we’ll walk with you through the city to protect you and maybe collect some refugees.”

  The next part of the night came back to me in dreams for years afterwards. I quickly got used to what they were asking me to do, and after a few times through the short message I had my Real-People translation of it memorized, so I no longer needed the page. That left me free to look around me.

  Everywhere, Real People
Town was falling into confusion and chaos. The only thing that seemed to be certain was that Nisuans were supposed to go to the Palace Square, so there were a number of Nisuan children and house slaves winding through the streets, with everyone giving them a wide berth. Now and then a Seteposian would hurry by, carrying a Nisuan baby that the family had been given by Rar to bring up in slavery; once one of them shouted to me, “Please, Diehrenn, if you will, can you tell them I am taking this child to the square as quickly as I can, and we have been good to him?”

  I repeated what they had said in Nisuan, and Bepemm said, “Tell her that if that is true, no harm will come to her or her family.” I repeated that to the woman. The Seteposian woman seemed to be almost fainting with fear, but she headed toward the brightly lit lander that towered above Real People Town.

  “You looked startled,” Thetakisus observed, “when she spoke to you. What surprised you?”

  I looked down at the ground. “Well,” I said, “I’m really not used to anyone asking me rather than telling me, and she said ‘please’, the same thing as the Nisuan request for courtesy—it’s only used between equals. No Seteposian ever spoke to me that way before. So even though she used my name, it took me a moment to realize she was speaking to me.”

  I didn’t know quite what the glances the Nisuans exchanged meant. They didn’t seem to be disapproval of me, yet I could tell they were not pleased.

  “Well,” Thetakisus said, “I guess we still have some ground to cover, and we should get that done. Streeyeptin wanted to get the word out before anyone got any stupid ideas about harming Nisuans or taking them hostage.”

  We had already circled the square, first in the inner ring of streets and then in the outer, and thus covered the territory within the stone wall; as I explained to Thetakisus, this meant that we had reached almost all the Nisuans and their masters within Real People Town, because the people beyond the stone wall gate, in the larger outer part of town, were usually too poor to merit Nisuan slaves. “But there are a few outside,” I said, “all close to the stone wall. It will be faster if we just go to their huts.”

  The Nim was not completely heartless or impractical; some Nisuan slaves were invalids from one injury or another; a few, like Captain Osepok and my father, were really too old to work; and then there were a number of “breeders,” very fertile females who were kept constantly pregnant or nursing. There were no more than ten Nisuans in the outer town, counting two not-yet-weaned babies, and most were on the gate side of the stone wall. It was a matter of only a few moments to go to each hut.

  Still it took us a long while, because we quickly realized that many of the people we were talking to could not move themselves. Soon our party was burdened: two Nisuans lamed by their cruel masters were leaning on Krurix, as a sort of shared crutch; my younger sister Geremm, disabled with pneumonia, was leaning on me; Itenn was carrying two babies, and we were accompanied by mothers carrying two more, plus several Nisuans who could shuffle along but not carry anything themselves. When we reached my father’s hut, our last stop, I was relieved to discover that my mother was not there, and there was a note lettered by my father hanging from the lintel that said he and Priekahm had already gotten her to the Palace Square.

  As we moved our little party of invalids through the streets back toward the shining tower of the lander, I used the amplifier to repeat the announcement a few times, just in case there were any stragglers or anyone still holding out or hiding. We were getting near Palace Square when something hissed by my face, so close I felt the cool wind of the arrow before I fully knew what it was.

  Thetakisus and Sereterses were thinking faster than I was; I later learned that those huge masks they wore permitted them to see in the dark. At the time all wonders seemed possible; if they had both turned into wolves or walked straight up the wall of a house I would have been no more and no less surprised. From their utility harnesses they pulled cylinders small enough to fit in the palms of their hands, touched their own faces once, and then turned and clicked the cylinders with their thumbs, all in one swift movement. At once, from the surrounding darkness, I heard screams. The two Nisuans dashed into the dark together. There were more screams, and I heard a couple of Seteposian voices begging for their lives, then “not my children,” and then more screams. A moment later flames leaped up from a house, and by their light I could see Thetakisus and Sereterses dragging still bodies out of the house to line up in the street in front of it.

  They returned to us, and Thetakisus said, “I’m afraid I’ll need you as translator. This is going to be unpleasant, but it’s highly necessary.” He turned to Bepemm and said, “Get everyone back to the square. If you’re assaulted, same drill I followed—kill the attackers, everyone near them, and everyone in any building they came out of or fled to. Burn all the buildings connected with them. Display the bodies.”

  Under his mask Krurix looked a little ill; Thetakisus asked him sharply if there was a problem. “No, sir, I’ll follow orders, of course,” he said.

  I got Geremm set up to be supported by three of the mothers who could walk. They headed out to Palace Square, and I returned with the two males to the burning building. A crowd had gathered around, looking at the bodies. Thetakisus and Sereterses kept the cylinders out where people could see them. “It’s a hand maser,” Thetakisus said as we approached the crowd. “Shoots an invisible beam that cooks flesh in an instant and will set wood or fabric on fire.” He pointed at a part of the roof of the house that was not yet on fire and squeezed his hand maser, making another click. With a soft whoosh, flames shot up from where he had pointed. The crowd of Seteposians moaned with fear.

  “Okay, now use your amp and tell them what I say to you,” he said.

  I held it to my mouth and translated as Thetakisus explained that he had killed “this bag of garbage” (pointing to the corpse that still wore a quiver of arrows) for taking a shot at us, four others for being with him, and the rest for allowing them to hide behind their house. “This is what will happen to everyone who raises a hand against us and to everyone who assists them in the smallest way, whether deliberately or not,” he said, and I repeated it to the Seteposians. “Furthermore, there is to be no gathering or mourning for these bags of garbage; they are to receive no burial or funeral honors and no one is to gather for any purpose connected with their deaths. This crowd is in violation of that order, but because we are merciful we will only punish a few of you this time, so that the rest of you can explain our rules to the other animals.”

  They stood stunned, not understanding what was about to happen. Sereterses walked into the crowd and grabbed three of them, dragging them forward into the light of the burning house.

  I saw something and darted into the crowd for a moment. I heard Thetakisus cry out in surprise, but I didn’t stop to explain—I just grabbed and got her by the hair—Esser, the five-year-old who I had been attending. The little beast had had me whipped many times, for no reason other than that I had frustrated some whim or other. I wrapped my fingers in her hair and dragged her over to join the three others, screaming and crying. To make sure she stayed put, I pushed her down onto the pavement, hard, and treated myself to kicking her in the head. She wailed in fear and pain. It was wonderful. “Her too,” I said to the startled Thetakisus.

  He gestured agreement, his expression under the mask a little baffled. He had me announce that these would suffer the penalty for having formed a crowd around the site of an execution, as an example to the others, and then he and Sereterses clicked the cylinders at them, pointing at their heads. They died instantly in an odor of roasting meat.

  Thetakisus held up the maser and announced, through me and the amplifier, that he would use it on anyone who was still in sight after he counted five. The crowd broke and ran in terror. He turned to me and gestured at Esser’s body, asking “Why?”

  “Because she was my most recent master,” I said, “and because she’s of the Nim’s family. It helped make it clear that they
can expect nothing and that they are to obey.” I kicked the little corpse once. “Why did you say this was going to be unpleasant?”

  * * * *

  It was our first time back on Republic after seven days, local time, on the ground, and Bepemm and I had just finished showering and dressing and were considering what to have for dinner. We decided to have everything.

  “What a job,” I said, after we had both spent a while stuffing our faces. “I don’t think I slept an eighth of a day uninterrupted after we got down there.”

  She yawned. “That’s my big plan for after this. A long nap. Who’d have thought . . . well, any of it?”

  During those seven days, we had discovered two things: every Nisuan in Real People Town was hell-bent on taking revenge for the decades of slavery, and the inhabitants of Real People Town both expected to be slaughtered and expected to be fed. When the gods arrive, apparently, there’s no need to be responsible anymore. At the direction of Prirox, who had managed a great deal of the agriculture for years, we had had to force them to clear canals, carry water, weed and hoe, and do all the other necessary tasks. Then we had discovered that we also had to manage the granaries and put out fires—in short, do almost everything that they had been doing for themselves before we got there. Just before the lander had shuttled us up here for rest and normal food, a group of Seteposians had come to us wanting us to settle a dispute over land, and another group had come to complain that various surrounding villages were not paying taxes they “owed” to the Real People.