Encounter With Tiber Read online

  Kekox came in and made sure that the cover was over me; he very lightly touched the top of my head with two fingers, the little gesture for “sleep” that mothers make to their children. I don’t know where an Imperial Guard learned to do something like that, but a mother’s touch couldn’t have worked better; I was asleep instantly.

  The next morning they took us out to Battle Gorges, a set of braided badlands canyons falling away from the Creation Mountains of Palath. The canyons led up from the plains into the breaks of the Alpiax River and then into a wide pass through the mountains, forming a natural set of roads between the dry plains to the east and the hilly, brushy country of the west. The most natural invasion route through the middle of Palath, they had been busy places for millennia. It was said that if you dug anywhere here, you would find the bones from battle after battle, going back way before written history.

  But in modern times Battle Gorges had become famous for something else. In the old Palathian religion, Sosahy was the Creator, and in their tradition Battle Gorges, directly under Sosahy, was where people had come into existence. Then a century ago scientists had discovered the oldest known remains of people in caves, sealed with clay, all over the Battle Gorges—a hundred times older than any remains found elsewhere, a window into life a million years ago.

  The people they had found here, mummified in the cold anoxic clay, had not quite looked like Palathians, but more like them than like us—the cave people were even shorter and hairier than Palathians, but with long pointed ears and faces like Shulathians. “This is where we began,” Soikenn was saying, “all of us.”

  The sunlight was bright—the sun had climbed most of the way up the sky and was drawing on toward Sosahy, which formed a great lighted bow, its center bent outward toward the sun. Within the arms of the bow lay the dark bulk of the huge planet, the part not lit by the sun at that moment. I looked around, blinking at the bright light. I imagined the people who had lived in the caves up there … before there were Shulathians or Palathians, making their spears, cooking meat over fires, the children running and playing. If they could see this place now, I wondered, would they recognize it? Would it be the same place as before, or completely unfamiliar?

  By my side Mejox was listening, eagerly, like me. Otuz too was rapt in Soikenn’s stories, about how scientists had found drawings on the walls, and stones laid in elaborate geometries on the cave floors, and the tallies of different kinds of animals taken at different seasons of the year.

  “Why do you suppose they ended up here?” Otuz asked.

  “They had to be somewhere,” Mejox said.

  “They did indeed,” Soikenn agreed. “They may simply have begun here and stayed here. If they wandered in from anywhere else, probably they picked here because of the caves—somewhere to live without the trouble of building—and for pretty much the same reason that the area later became a battleground. It sits right where several different ecosystems come together, so there were many kinds of food available. Of course, also, because conditions were so perfect for preserving their bodies, whether or not this place was important to them, this was where we were likely to find them. And they might really have originated right here, anyway. The fossil record shows all kinds of things that might have been our ancestors or our cousins, all right around here. The old legends just might be true. I suppose that’s why we call these the Creation Mountains.”

  Usually the captain didn’t speak much except when she taught math and science, so we were all startled when Osepok suddenly added, “And there’s another lesson here. They found forest fire ashes, evidence of earthquake collapses, layers of volcanic ash, all kinds of things in this area. We might have started here, but it was a tough place to stay alive. So we spread out—down the rivers, up into the hills, across the plains, eventually over the seas to Shulath—and now out into space. There’s not a place in the universe that’s safe forever; the universe is telling us, ‘Spread out, or wait around and die.’”

  We were all so surprised Osepok had spoken that we said nothing for a long minute. Smiling, she added, “I’m sorry. I don’t suppose that lesson needed driving home right now. Hey, look, the eclipse is about to start.”

  The noon eclipse in Palath was the only time you could see the stars, because Sosahy, hanging over us in the sky, was bright enough to turn the sky blue most of the time. But right during the daily eclipse, Sosahy blocked the sun, and we faced the part of it that was having night, and then the stars would pop out.

  We glanced up and saw that the sun was near Sosahy, almost touching its huge disk; Sosahy takes up about fifty-five times the width of the Sun in the sky, a number everyone learns early. It was no more than the time of two long breaths before the sun disappeared behind our big mother planet, and we were plunged into darkness. “There it is,” Captain Osepok said softly, pointing up into the sky, off to the west. “We are standing where we began, and there’s the thing that’s going to put an end to us. Or it’s going to try, but we won’t let it.”

  The white smear in space might have been mistaken for a tiny cloud or a puff of smoke, but none of us had any trouble identifying it; we’d been shown it almost every night since we were small. The first time I could remember seeing it, it had been smaller than the tip of my smallest finger held at arm’s length; now I needed almost two fingers to cover it. “The Intruder,” Mejox said softly, beside me.

  “The Intruder,” the captain agreed. “This is why we brought you to this place at this hour. Because you are standing where our species began to climb up toward the stars, and you are looking at the greatest threat to our existence.”

  It was ninety-five years since the Intruder, the great ball of dark matter one third the size of our world itself, had been captured into our system by our double star, then had looped in close to the Sun and been torn apart by tidal forces. It had fractured into billions of chunks, ranging in size from pieces no bigger than your fist, all the way up to pieces as big as mountains. The devastation it had left in its wake had started the long struggle that had led to our building Wahkopem Zomos, the first starship—and the ship on which I, the other three children, and our four teachers would soon leave for a distant star, to see if we could find a new home for our people.

  “The only reason we can see it is because it’s spread out half as wide as the distance from here to the sun, and so it’s such a big reflector. If it had all stayed in one piece, we wouldn’t be able to see it at all,” Soikenn said. “Not until it was almost on top of us, like the last time.”

  “It’s going to miss this time?” Priekahm said, sounding a little fearful—but then, I think we were all a little fearful, just because we knew plenty about what was coming. From the training base on the Windward Islands, on a clear day we could see the Ring, a string of high mountains forming a circle wider than the biggest city in the world, reared up above the sea by one of the impacts.

  “Of course it will miss,” Soikenn said. “And besides, we’ll have left by then. We’ll be getting close to halfway to Setepos.”

  We watched the Intruder, but after all it was just a smear in the sky, not to do anything for the next fifteen years. After a while I looked around. In the opposite direction, just above the horizon, distant Zoiroy gleamed. I wondered how it must feel for Kekox, who had been there, to see it in the sky. Our Sun and Zoiroy circled each other in the sky; by the time that the Intruder passed through our orbit again, we would be on the other side of our circle with Zoiroy. Most likely nothing at all would strike Nisu, and only a few detectable pieces would hit Sosahy.

  The time after would be our turn again. And the Second Bombardment was predicted to be much the worst: Sosahy, and Nisu with it, would pass directly through the center of the cloud of rocks formed by that Intruder.

  We stayed till the sun came back out from behind Sosahy and Battle Gorges was flooded with light again. Then we had to go to a public presentation; it was very boring because we’d all been through it so many times before. A group
of leaders, mostly Palathian, made speeches, and the speeches mostly said that unless we found a new world to start civilization on, our species would be dead. Then one Shulathian got up and talked about how important it was that Palathians and Shulathians were working together.

  Meanwhile we stood there in the hot sun, being as dignified as we could. I stood a little behind Mejox, so that older Palathians who didn’t like the equality idea could sort of think I looked like his servant, but Shulathians could still see me and feel equal. Priekahm stood the same way behind Otuz. We had all learned to make our minds go blank and smile whenever the crowd applauded.

  The next day we flew to East Island. No one knew for sure, but it was the farthest east bit of Palath, almost a four-day sail from the mainland, and it was thought that probably the ancestors of the Shulathians had been people blown off course from here, maybe in canoes or rafts, and carried all the way to the Windward Islands. That was where the oldest evidence of settlement in Shulath was, and as you went on east through Shulath, you found newer and newer settlements. There had been a long pause when the early Shulathians ran into the long, thin, snaking continent that stretched between the poles; it had taken centuries to settle and explore there, for the land was not hospitable, the high coastal range made a passage across very difficult, and the deep desert to the east of the coastal range made it difficult to reach the sea at all, and once you did, the coast you reached offered no materials for building ships.

  But eventually the great trading kingdoms had spread out from the islands and planted large colonies on the continent, forced roads across the desert, and dug a couple of canals through the continent. By that time people were writing history, and so the settlement of the Eastern Ocean, right out to the little rocky island dots of the Leeward Islands in the Far East, had come fairly quickly and we knew the names of all the explorers for that area.

  If we had been following history in chronological order, we would have flown next to visit the Windwards, but that was where our training base was, and we had seen, almost every day, the Dawn Stone, the big rock on which Shulathian legend claimed that Mother Sea placed the first people. So instead we made a tour of Palath, visiting mostly ruined cities near the center and thriving ports around the edges. Palath was like a big lumpy oval, cut into quarters by an east-west mountain range and a north-south row of scarps, with a big, deep arc of lakes curling around the middle.

  The histories of the two sides of our world were very different. For long centuries the Shulathians had flung themselves into trading and exploring, with a certain amount of piracy and conquest on the side. The League of Ports had barely been a government at all. Its General Court was really just a committee of representatives from the larger trading cities, mostly interested in suppressing piracy, blockading ports that endangered business and quarreling over religion and philosophy. The League Judges had always been slow to act and spent a lot of time arguing and deliberating.

  Meanwhile in Palath great empires had been built, flourished, torn apart, built up again, replaced, reconquered, and so forth in a dizzying whirl. It had taken a very long time to establish the Imperium, and then a thousand years of fighting until the Imperium finally ruled all of Palath, until rebellion was impossible. Then Palath had “settled down to finally develop the fruits of peace”—that was what our history book said. They built roads and temples, monuments and statues everywhere, destroyed old run-down cities to build bright shining ones in their places, and, under the first nineteen emperors, built a government strong enough to rule Palath effectively.

  There were still rebellions, of course, during that time. The Imperial Guards still had to march out and put down trouble on a regular basis. Many Palathians, apparently, didn’t want to pay their taxes when harvests were bad, or didn’t want to contribute their fair share of labor to building temples. The history books said it was more or less what you had to expect.

  I always felt, secretly, a little bad about it all, because I had a lot of trouble understanding the “government” and “leadership” parts of the book. Every so often I liked to imagine myself as an old-time Shulathian pirate, out terrorizing the seas. (I never understood why it said that, either—all of the money was in the ports, so why terrorize the seas?) I knew it was probably a good thing that the Palathians, once they conquered Shulath and gave it a real government and leadership, had wiped out the pirates; but it was fun to dream about them, not least because it gave me a chance to imagine being really bad. I suppose any child who is usually very well behaved and studies hard, every so often, likes to feel that he has the potential to go bad.

  We spent a whole eightday standing on famous battlefields and among ruins all over Palath, trying to keep the names of all the kings and republics straight. They made still and moving pictures of Mejox in front of every statue, war memorial, and ruin in Palath, or so it seemed to Priekahm and me. They kept trying to get Otuz to do it, too, but she would scowl or make faces and they finally gave up.

  On the last day in Palath, we went out to Kaleps, which was now a great city, but we didn’t go right away to its huge civic center, or the grand Municipal Mausoleum, or any of its halls of art or science. They chased away all the picture-makers and news-tellers so that the eight crew members could be alone in the quiet of the little park by the waterfront.

  I suppose if anywhere is sacred, on the whole round world, it’s that place. The little park had been there for well over four hundred years, and in that time there had been many different monuments there: the first one had showed Palathian soldiers conducting a line of chained, head-bowed Shulathians, and General Gurix standing with his foot on Captain Wahkopem’s throat, but that had been long ago. Now there was a simple statue of the two men, facing each other, hands open and empty, standing on their single common pedestal together. The inscription below read:

  On this place, in the eighth

  year of the reign of

  the Empress Rumaz, Family of Roupox,

  and the 28th Year of the League of Ports 92nd General Court,

  Captain Wahkopem Zomos

  arrived here after a voyage of six eightdays. He submitted to the authority of

  General Gurix Zowakou.

  Through the courage and bold action of both,

  peace and law were secured throughout the world.

  The place was eerily quiet. General Gurix had a hard, flat face, like Kekox, but much more so; he didn’t look like he was thinking anything or doing anything, more like he was just waiting. Wahkopem looked like he was about to smile; there was a faraway look in his eyes that I guess is the way you look after fifty days at sea watching an empty horizon.

  After we had looked at it, in silence, for a very long time, they brought in one picture-maker, and a couple of officials. They made pictures of all of us laying big bunches of flowers and baskets of fruit at the base, several times. Then they asked Mejox and me to climb up and stand next to the statues and take some poses, holding the hands of the two leaders, standing between them with our arms around each other, and so forth. I wasn’t sure why I was involved in this. Usually they only wanted to take pictures of Mejox.

  That night Kekox sat down and very quietly told us the true story. At least he said it was true and at that time I trusted all four adults completely. He started out by saying to Mejox and Otuz, “Understand that I’ve decided to tell you all this myself because I want you all to understand that this is not Egalitarian propaganda, and it’s not Shulathians making up stories. As far as we can tell, this is what happened. Is that clear?”

  They nodded that it was.

  Then he turned and said, “Priekahm, Zahmekoses, the other side of the issue is that although a great wrong was done to Shulathians a long time ago, and many wrong things are still being done to them, this is not grounds for any sort of grudge or feeling of superiority. Do you understand that?”

  We both said we did.

  “All right, then, and a question for all of you: do you understand that t
onight, and tomorrow, and from then on, you will be exactly the same people you were before? That what you learn changes nothing about who you are or what our mission is?”

  He must have felt satisfied with what he saw among us, because he began to tell the story. Kekox was good at telling a story, and soon we were caught up in it, just as if it had been any adventure tale before bed.

  Wahkopem had already been the greatest captain in all Shulath, an explorer credited with charting dozens of islands, for years before he had finally put together the financing from a dozen banks for his dream—a voyage to settle the argument between the Big Worlders and the Small Worlders.

  The argument was this: by observing the position of the sun, and the way shadows moved on the ground, it was possible to work out how big a curve the world moved through as it turned around. The number was huge; it suggested that there must be hundreds of thousands of times the width of the known world of open ocean out there, or perhaps that there might be many, many archipelagos and continents. That was the position of the Big Worlders.

  And yet, when surveyors measured the curvature of the world, by studying how far away the horizons were, they found that the other side of the world couldn’t be much bigger than Shulath itself. That was the position of the Small Worlders, who turned out to be right—or mostly right, since they argued that it must be all empty ocean, because surely if there were people over there, we’d have found each other.

  Of course, looking backward, we know that what the Big Worlders were actually measuring was the width of Nisu’s orbit around Sosahy—but Sosahy is not visible from anywhere in Shulath, so the Shulathian astronomers had no idea that they were circling a gas giant. They might have found out if anyone had managed to reach either pole, but the great barrier of the glaciers, the high mountains, and the bitter cold—especially because the glaciers were so thick that the air was too thin to breathe on top of them—had made that impossible.

  The debate had raged for centuries, and might have gone on for many more. Kekox tried to keep the amusement out of his voice in telling us about this, but I could tell he was thinking, how typical of Shulathians to spend forever debating an issue. Privately I thought, how like Palathians not to notice that there was an issue.