Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  They wore their respirators; it would be a year before the test animals confirmed that there were no pathogens dangerous to Earth life in the air of Tiber. Indeed, Tiberian life was little more, now, than microorganisms; it was a planet of germs.

  The dust in the city street was almost half a meter deep in some of its drifts and dunes. It was a mixture of dirt blown off the exposed topsoil, and of recondensed bits of the Invader drifting down out of the atmosphere, falling more than thirty times since this had been a living city. Many buildings were fallen in, probably from the many hairline fractures that must form during the repeated deep cooling they received when Tiber was blanketed in black dust every quarter of a millennium.

  This first day on Tiber was more symbol than science; and rightly so, Clio thought, though Sanetomo had grumbled. It’s the symbols that we live by.

  They walked for a long time; Kaleps was several kilometers across, for it had been a great and important city at the time Tiber received its death sentence from space. The fine black dust blew around them and Clio was glad to be on a respirator. Above them, the vast bulk of Juno (no, she thought to herself, now that I am here I want to call it Sosahy), striped with pale bands, swirled by great dark hurricanes that probably had begun during the last bombardment a century ago, glowed overhead, lighting the sky with two thousand times the brightness of the full moon on Earth. They walked on in the swirls of dark dust, marveling at the strange, shrunken shadows that having such a wide light source in the sky caused, and at the way the dust floated so long in Tiber’s thicker air, and at how every building spoke of intelligence and yet not of anything human.

  Alpha Centauri B, a brilliant dot of light, was just emerging from the underside of Juno when at last they came to the park by the sea. Before them, over the sea, they could see a bright cloud that hung forever in the same part of the sky, midway between Juno’s edge and the horizon—the dust and ice trapped out of the bombardment at Tiber’s L4 point with Juno. The light seemed strange; it was diffuse from the huge object overhead, like fluorescent light, leaving few or no shadows.

  The many bombardments of dust had left Tiber chilled to near-Ice Age conditions, even a century after the most recent one. The seacoast now was prone to ice, even though it was summer, and there was a chill down here by the water, but they kept going until they were standing beneath the two statues, one of a Shulathian and one of a Palathian: the sacred monument humans had first learned of bare decades ago, from The Account of Zahmekoses. There stood the great organizer and conqueror, Gurix, squat and powerful; facing him was Wahkopem, tall and thin; each with arms outstretched. Nine thousand years and so much freezing had not harmed the metal of the statue, nor had they smoothed or altered those strange alien expressions that Zahmekoses assured us were all but neutral.

  Hardly knowing why she did it, Clio stepped forward, her boots crunching on the gravel that surrounded the pedestal, and then stepped up, reaching over her head to take a grip on the left statue’s leg. She pulled herself up to stand between them, as Zahmekoses and Mejox had once done—

  And she saw the small box, a lovely shade of off-white like the finest new ivory. On the lid of the box was a layer of the black dust found everywhere on Tiber now, the dust of the pulverized Intruder and the ruined topsoil of this world. She knew it was a most improper thing to do, that she would undoubtedly be as reviled later for having done this as the group that had torn through Tiber Base on the Moon sixty-five years before, but with a shrug, she lifted the box and brushed the black dust from its top.

  Years of practice had made her as adroit at reading Tiberian script as her own handwriting.

  “Greetings, lost brothers and sisters. We, the people of New Hope, came here in the 6891st year since the First Bombardment, and we found that the knowledge we have of our ancestors is true. We cannot spend much time on our dead past; we have returned to New Hope and we are pushing on with starships of our own, to twenty more worlds soon. It would give us such joy, lost ones of our species, if you came and joined us.” Directions followed for how to read the memory contained in the little white box—millennia of history from these people.

  “Clio, what is it?” Sanetomo asked, mounting the statue beside her. She showed him, and then everyone. With slowly dawning wonder, he said, “Then . . . some of them lived a long time, at least. They may still be out there. And New Hope is . . . er—”

  “Shame on an astronomer,” Clio said. “It’s Zeta Tucanae. About four times as far from here as we are from home.”

  He took the little box from her and reverently sealed it into a sample carrier; there would be plenty of time to read it later. As he closed it up, he said, “So . . . we’ve come all this way just to find out that we’ve only started?”

  Clio looked up at Juno, stretching far across the sky to the east of them, halfway down to the horizon and most of the way up to the zenith. The dark was now creeping across its face on its upper, west side; at any moment the brightening sky underneath it, to the east of them, would reveal Alpha Centauri A, as big as and the same shade of amber as Earth’s sun, climbing steadily into the sky from the land out behind the ancient city of Kaleps, the place she had come to for the first time after decades of studying it.

  She waited for her first chance to see the alien sun come up behind those strange towers and to feel its warmth on her face. Finally she said, “Yes, we have come all this way just to find out that we have farther to go. And who would want it any other way?”

  Dawn was everything she had hoped for and expected: dust in the air colored it deep red, and the spires and towers of Kaleps were etched against it, shimmering in the heat that rose as soon as the light touched the black dust. And yet, already, she was wondering how soon they could shake this dust from their feet and set off again. Somewhere out there was a species they needed to catch up with and join; and after that, still, they would be just beginning.