Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  “We really do need to leave this planet,” Beremahm said firmly. “Let’s keep their name for the fourth planet, then, but resolve to forget what it means.” She looked from one face to another, and gradually we all began to smile.

  “Twice,” she said, “expeditions have wrecked here on Setepos. For our people this appears to be the planet of bad luck, and I say, let’s leave it for good. But let’s not forget that twice we’ve survived disasters and gone on, through worse things than the people who sent us could ever imagine. I say, we’re not dead yet. Let’s get moving—we have two more worlds to conquer before we die.”

  * * * *

  FROM: Diehrenn Zahtuz

  To: the Grand Council on Nisu:

  After all the stories that Thetakisus, my mate, and his friend Krurix had told me of Nisu, I was still astonished to find that a message had come in by radio from Nisu. I have grown used to how drastically my circumstances have changed since the day more than ten of Earth’s years ago when the Pillar of Fire first blazed in the skies over Real People Town; I was, after all, raised on stories of Nisu by my father Zahmekoses and mother Otuz; and yet, with all that, to actually see that a message transmitted from Nisu has arrived here— the first of many, apparently—fills me with awe.

  As was requested in your message, I have sent along my own account, supplemented by my mate Thetakisus, of how the decisions were first made. I do hope you will find room for it in the copier of the Great Volume of Knowledge sent out to the Migration Project ships, on their way to nine worlds.

  Ten worlds seems so many; I have only lived on three. But three is plenty for anyone who spent the first part of her life in a Stone-Age kingdom, I suppose, and I have no complaints.

  How many wonders can I tell you of? And would they even seem wondrous to you, who grew up among them, who are even now headed to the stars? Within a year I—I, who could barely read and write when Egalitarian Republic first made its blazing Pillar in our sky— was assistant operator for a fusion reactor on the moon. I confess it was some four years later before I really knew what a fusion reactor was or what it did, but that power was still there in me, and I dealt with it—very well, if I say so myself.

  A decade later I helped astrogate Wahkopem Zomos to the War Star, where we built this base on its inner moon—the place from which I now write, looking up at that faithful old ship, built the better part of a Nisuan century ago, now waiting for yet another voyage back to the Moon, sitting a short distance above us here. Beyond it I see the red face of the War Star, now blotchy with the green patches of lichen that we have seeded there.

  The genetics team says the lichens are dying, losing ground after an initial surge, and that this attempt was a failure. But we are patient and strong. We will simply try until we either succeed or die.

  Our next try will be with the dust that surrounds the south pole of the War Star; it is very fine and dark, and if we scatter it vigorously enough, we can darken the ice as summer comes on, and thus warm it enough to release the frozen carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn will warm up the rest of the planet, and perhaps give our experimental lichen a new lease on life and get some rivers flowing and lakes forming. But if that fails, we have other options. One way or another, sooner or later, we will warm the War Star and thicken its air.

  Even if we can’t get anything to grow on its face, we will live there within my lifetime, for I shall move down there in a few years. There is a circular crater near the north pole that has a place suitable for such a city, and construction has already begun there.

  On the Moon, they have found more ice than they had thought was there, and that colony has a new lease on life as well, so we need not hurry quite so much to get them all here. They are talking of building spaceships there, so that we no longer must rely on the single operating lander and Wahkopem Zomos exclusively.

  That remains our greatest fear. Right now one of Egalitarian Republic’s landers is useless as a spacecraft, because it must supply power and computer control for the life support systems at our base near the south pole of the moon. The other lander must work in tandem with the old Wahkopem Zomos, for the lander’s life support system cannot operate independently long enough to travel from Setepos to the War Star, and Wahkopem Zomos’s engines cannot even get it out of orbit around either planet. Further, the starship cannot land on the face of the War Star or on Setepos’s moon; so the remaining lander must supply the propulsion and the ability to land, and Wahkopem Zomos must keep the crew alive. If we lose the lander at the lunar south pole base, or the operating lander, or the starship, then we are surely doomed—but so far, years have gone by, and we are still here. They will all keep functioning, because they all must keep functioning.

  And from spaceship to starship is a small step, in the great scheme of things. In a century or two, if there is a suitable place within thirty light-years, and if no one has come to visit or join us, perhaps we will pack our bags and come to join you, wherever you may have gone.

  This account, and Father’s account of the first mission, are entrusted to you, now, for the Great Volume of Knowledge that you intend to send to every world. I can only hope that when it arrives here, it is a wonderful historical curiosity rather than an urgent necessity. I quite concur with your decision; since we are to move down to the surface, to the crater filled with ice that seems to have so much potential, it is far better to send the Great Volume there rather than here. And certainly sending one to the Moon, in case any of our people at the south pole there should decide to remain, or perhaps be forced to by circumstances, is wise as a backup. But do not fear; our descendants will be here to receive it and will remember you with gratitude when it arrives, though I understand that it may be a few centuries before it does. I am flattered that you wanted the story of the two expeditions to Setepos included; you honor our family with that request.

  I think your plan of setting up a robot radio station on Kahrekeif, from which a recorded message will be beamed to all the known ships and colonies every time that your sun and Zoiroy are widely separated from their perspective, so that all of our scattered people can always be found again, is probably unnecessary. I find it hard to imagine that any of us now would lose our historical or scientific knowledge, or forget the catalog of planets, or where our bases are. I think our victory is already won, even if our colonies here die out tomorrow, even if no Migration Project ship, with its millions of passengers, ever reaches another star system. We have won because, in our own eyes— the only eyes that can ever judge us—we have made ourselves deserve to win, deserve to go on living and expanding as a civilization. We might have become more soft, more fearful, more greedy, and died quietly at home. We have elected to die—or just possibly live—in the stars.

  But I had not intended to lecture you about our destiny, and most especially not to lecture whoever may read this in the far future. If this is being read, we have had a destiny, and they know more of it than I do.

  Nor am I scolding you about the extensive precautions you are taking to make sure that the Great Volume of Knowledge reaches our people wherever they go. If the effort of making duplicate Great Volumes of Knowledge and of posting the beacon on Kahrekeif should prove useless because it is not needed, it was still worth doing. If there is anything that all of us understand, here in this solar system and wherever our species may go from now on, it is that the universe is still a very dangerous place.

  Even now I find myself saying that if the antimatter plant of the lander that now powers our colony on Setepos’s moon were to fail, within hours many would die there and nothing could be done to save them. By the time we got there, they would undoubtedly all be dead. And if something were to happen to the lander, or to Wahkopem Zomos, here in orbit around the War Star—well, then we could not get back to Setepos’s moon, and 1 suppose both colonies might slowly die. And those thoughts will cross my mind, again and again, for years to come. These are the risks we assume because we must—because to do any
thing else meant dying for sure, whereas depending on these aging and irreplaceable machines to keep running until we finally do not need them anymore, was a chance to live. We grasped that chance, and so far this is paying off; any other considerations, since we cannot change our circumstances, are irrelevant.

  Goodness, I do go on about this! I suppose it’s because so many of our younger generation like to talk all the time about how thin our margins are and how great the chances and consequences of failure. But that has been the way for life ever since it started. I don’t think matters will actually ever be any different for living things anywhere. From the simplest bacterium up to the Nisuan level, we will just keep going on as long as we can, and the going on will be what makes us what we are.

  Warmest regards from the Kousapex System,

  Diehrenn, daughter of Otuz and Zahmekoses.

  * * * *

  Clio Trigorin:

  October 2077

  IT WAS ANOTHER ARBITRARY L1NE IN SPACE, WHICH MEANT IT WAS TIME FOR another party. At about 100,000 AU from Alpha Centauri, the dim red star Proxima Centauri orbited the double star every 22,000 years. Since the formation of the triple star, Proxima had been sweeping comets out of the Oort Cloud and down into the inner system, which was a major part of the reason that the early bombardment had been so heavy and explained much about the geology of Tiber.

  Now they were crossing Proxima Centauri’s orbit, passing near enough so that the dim star was just visible to the naked eye as a kind of glowing spot; everyone was gathered in the common area to look at the relayed image of it on the screen, as probes launched months before made their way down into Proxima. Clio supposed it was impressive in its way, but though “any star is huge by comparison with anything human,” as Sanetomo said, it was about as ordinary a red dwarf as you could find.

  In the third year of the voyage, five years before, they had launched the probe carrier, a small missile with a cluster of ZPE lasers as its propulsion system and a group of probes in the nose, to diverge from their course and head off to the side, toward Proxima. Tenacity and the probe carrier had raced along in parallel ever since, like two cars on diverging roads.

  The probe carrier had started with greater acceleration, since it weighed far less than Tenacity in proportion to its engines’ thrust, but there was no one on the probe carrier to swap out bad ZPE lasers, and as one laser after another failed, the probe carrier eventually had gone into purely ballistic flight. As it neared Proxima Centauri, it had extended a magnetic loop like the one on the old Wahkopem Zomos and slowed down considerably. When it drew nearer to the red dwarf, the carrier ejected a family of probes, each on its own lightsail, and the probes in turn had slowed down, braking themselves with the dim light of the little cool sun (little and cool by the standards of stars; it was still immensely bigger than even gigantic Jupiter, and hot enough to vaporize iron). Now they were swarming around Proxima Centauri, many light-days away from Tenacity, like a flock of metal blue jays attacking a great glowing red owl, sweeping past the red dwarf, swooping over its poles, plunging into its fiery heart, and pouring back data in immense quantities. The crew of Tenacity was gathered here to watch the highlights of that historic flyby as they came in; they were seeing the first data to reach humanity from a star other than Sol.

  Tenacity herself was also entering the Alpha Centauri system, but it would still be another fifteen months before they deployed the magnetic loop to slow down. Although the distances between the stars are vaster, solar systems themselves are vast, and even though right now they were covering an astronomical unit every twenty-one minutes, still they had more than one and a half light-years to go, 100,000 AU remaining. They would have to travel deep into the Alpha Centauri System before they even began to slow down, and once they did deploy the magnetic loop and start deceleration (still at thirty-five AU from Juno and Tiber, farther than from Neptune to Earth), it would be two more long years before they came into orbit around Tiber.

  She and Sanetomo had been married now for more than a year, and it seemed to suit them better each passing day. Their professional lives went on smoothly; one of the great advantages of twelve years aboard a starship, with the combined libraries of Earth and Tiber in its data storage, was that nobody could phone you or ask you to go to a committee meeting, so they both worked steadily and effectively, with plenty of time to think, and still had all the time they wanted with each other.

  And their work had gone pretty well, on the whole. Sanetomo’s work on free oxygen in distant atmospheres had gained a great deal of approval back home (or so the more-than-three-years-late messages assured them). Her translation of The Account of Zahmekoses would still not reach Earth for almost two years, even now; at the moment it was a set of radio signals far out in the void. Now moving along behind it was her translation of The Account of Diehrenn, sent out just scant days ago. At least by the time she was reading any reviews of it, she’d have developed a certain detachment.

  She stood, sipping her wine and thinking about what the long delays could mean. It was finally time to write the last part of From the Moon to the Stars; she didn’t really think she could delay it any longer.

  On the screen before them, Proxima Centauri, like the orange ghost of a star, swelled rapidly as the probe closed in. The red dwarfs surface was blackened by huge dark swirls that marked the mighty hurricanes on its glowing face, far bigger than the sunspots of Earth’s sun. Sanetomo and three others were sitting close to the screen, watching the little parade of graphs and images that ran across the bottom, gabbling excitedly to each other about what it all meant and whose theories it confirmed or disproved. Proxima was only a minor sideshow on this trip, but still it was the biggest show there would be for months.

  She took another sip of wine and asked herself why settling back into writing From the Moon to the Stars was so hard. Perhaps it was just a matter of knowing that Uncle Jason and Aunt Olga might yet read it; at least as of about three years ago, allowing for radio lag, they had still been alive and healthy on Mars. She’d had a long video message from them only a few weeks ago, and it had said that after all the hassle and organizational fighting of two elderly people trying to get permission to return to the wild frontier of Mars, once they had finally gotten there, they had found it had been worth every minute. The lighter gravity and familiar faces seemed to have dropped years from them. She was beginning to think Uncle Jason wasn’t kidding about being there to welcome her back.

  And all that had paralyzed her a little. What if, in her account of the great events they had lived through, she didn’t do them justice? What if she had misunderstood some major thing Jason had told her in all of the taped sessions? By the time she found out that she’d gotten it wrong, the book could be in its fifth printing.

  Clio laughed at herself soundlessly. Because she tended to be shy and quiet, and everyone knew everyone’s habits well, no one was going to ask her what she was laughing about, and that was good, because she wasn’t sure she liked explaining that she was frightened of a partially written history book. Especially when you considered the situation around them. At the speeds they were moving, a grain of sand, had one ever gotten trough the deflection system, would have hit with the energy of a ton of TNT. For that matter, what was the dread of finishing a history book compared with the terrifying awareness that they were utterly alone— suppose Earth were suddenly hit by an asteroid, like the one that had wiped out the dinosaurs? Their only information on this was apt to be that four years later the signal would just stop. Conversely, if anything happened to them, in four years they would just vanish from Earth’s radio receivers—

  As the First Tiberian Expedition, the one with Zahmekoses, had done.

  She thought hard about that for a while. Was there finally any real difference between Tiberian and human? They had exhibited all the human traits, surely—courage and cowardice, greed and vision, spite and compassion—and finally they had failed, leaving some frozen corpses in the soil of Mars and th
e Moon, some bits and pieces of their technology, and of course the Encyclopedia . . .

  Had they failed? That was another odd question. Deciphering the Encyclopedia had finally explained, at least in large measure, what was going on. After the horrible experience of the failed First Tiberian Expedition, and the panic of getting ready for emigration after wasting most of fifty years between the first and second missions, it had never been far from the mind of any Tiberian planner that civilization was a fragile thing and many things could go wrong, that all sorts of knowledge and skills might be lost. So as a last assurance, they had sent an Encyclopedia to every system to which their people had gone, a backup repository of their civilization. And on Alba Longa, Minerva’s eccentric moon (which the Tiberians had called Kahrekeif), they had put a transmitter that sat waiting for the points in the combined orbits when it would have a clear shot at each of those systems and endlessly repeated the message to each of them about where to look for the Encyclopedia.

  And as a result, though there might well be no more Tiberians in the universe, they would live as long as human memory did. Moreover, Sanetomo had now detected free oxygen in eight of the nine systems the Tiberians had designated as visited, though on the world they had named Courage, it seemed to be only a seasonal phenomenon. The Tiberians, once they figured out the protein problem, had gone to worlds that were easily terraformed rather than to wild ones, so this argued powerfully that they had at least gotten self-sustaining ecologies going in the places where they had planted colonies. They might well live on there.