Encounter With Tiber Read online

  Finally, Wahkopem had put together the necessary money and permissions for his voyage; that took a long time, for the old General Court of Shulath did nothing fast and debated everything very thoroughly. At last his new ship, Sunseeker—an improved design he had arrived at with the help of the new calculus, just developed by his half-sister—set sail eastward from the Leewards for the unknown. Sunseeker had been designed to cross the whole ocean if need be, to run all the way around the world and come back to the Windward Islands. To have a chance to do that, and leave a safety margin, Wahkopem had optimized his ship for greatest speed, largest capacity, and smallest crew, so that they could go as far as possible before food and water ran out.

  The Small Worlders had always argued that if there were anyone else anywhere on the ocean, they would already have found Shulath or been found, because after all, the wind blew west to east and sooner or later ships would go right around the world. The Big Worlders, on the other hand, said that the distances were so immense that there might be no land for twice the width of Shulath, and there could still be forty worlds like Shulath over the sea. The reason that no ship ever returned when it was blown far to the east was, if you were a Small Worlder, that there was never enough food for them to survive so many eightdays on an empty ocean before coming back into Shulath from the east; for the Big Worlders, it was proof that the distance to the next islands, if any, was huge.

  No one knew enough meteorology to understand that the spurs off the polar continents made the sea a few days west of Shulath savage beyond belief. Nor could anyone imagine that since Palath was one vast expanse of land, with just a scattering of nearby islands, there was so little reason to make ocean voyages there that it had never occurred to anyone to explore the easy, eastward direction from East Island, which they could have done even in their few crude coastal freighters.

  Most of all, no one knew that in a hundred years about a dozen ships, blown off course from the Leeward Islands, had wrecked on the coast of Palath.

  That is, no one in Shulath did. General Gurix was a disgraced son of the Zowakou family, one of the most unpopular nobles in Palath, but he was also too well connected to execute and he had inherited the right to his command. The miserable West Country to which he had been assigned as governor hadn’t produced a decent load of taxes, ever, and no one there had the energy for a rebellion. The general had a great deal of time on his hands, and he spent much of it reading old records and going through the museum.

  Slowly, he became convinced that there was land on the other side of the ocean. His predecessors had simply seized the ships coming in, sold any surviving crew into slavery, and kept the more interesting objects as curios. Each time, they had simply confirmed that this wasn’t the first time a mystery ship had washed up, and then, since it was not unprecedented, done more or less what the district officer had done the time before—written up a report and forgotten about it.

  But General Gurix was a different sort of person. He had not become disliked because he was incompetent, but because he tended to do and say what he thought was right, and he was usually right. Worse yet, he had a tendency to say, “I told you so.”

  Now he bent all the power of his mind to the problem of where those ships came from, and what kind of place it might be. He had made a lengthy list of facts: there were seldom many weapons aboard the ships, and they were not built to fight, if the drawings and preserved parts could be trusted. Conclusion: the people to the west must be unskilled in war.

  It took him a very long time to figure out the workings of the nine clocks, and a bit longer to decipher the purpose of the four sextants in the Governor’s Museum. But the most interesting thing came to him only after ten years of study. He realized that the oldest ones were inferior to the newest ones. And once he realized that, studying the drawings, he could see there had been improvements in the ships themselves. A hundred twenty years before his time, these people to the west had been making things as good as the best workmanship in Palath, and they had gotten steadily better ever since. And there had been very little progress or change in Palath in the last few reigns; it was widely believed that everything worthwhile had been invented long ago, during the Ages of War, and that nothing important remained to be found. Conclusion: Palath was falling behind these people, possibly very rapidly.

  He had written a long letter about this to the empress, still keeping his old bad habit of saying what he thought. Somewhere out west were people who had more and better things than anyone in Palath, but weren’t much as fighters. If they could be located and conquered—the sooner the better—there might be great wealth and advantage for everyone. If the situation were ignored long enough, the civilization over the seas would be far in advance of Palath—and fighters or not, they might well conquer. Given the constant improvement in ships, contact was inevitable.

  After almost a year of waiting, Gurix received a short note from one of the empress’s anonymous underlings, suggesting that General Gurix didn’t have enough to do (which was true) and that he was crazy (which wasn’t). Gurix barely read the note; he had finally found two survivors of the last shipwreck, twenty-two years before, both of whom had been sold as slaves. He had confiscated those two survivors from their owners and spent a long time talking to them, slowly beginning to piece together their language and a little idea of what Shulath must be like. He was confused for a while by the fact that their accents were different, because they were from different islands; baffled briefly by the apparent absence of a government in Shulath (it sounded like the whole area was ruled by lawyers); puzzled by the whole idea of “astronomy” and that over on the other side of the world apparently there was an “eclipse” that lasted half a day. But he liked puzzles and mysteries, and he went on learning.

  And as he went on learning, he moved his headquarters to Kaleps, because it was the best port on the coast (even if it harbored only a fishing fleet and a few coastal freighters) and that was where the next mystery ship would come, when it came. He gave strict orders about how a mystery ship was to be dealt with. And he waited.

  Four years later, having successfully made it through the worst storms anyone in the crew had ever seen, Sunseeker, the best ship in the world, commanded by Wahkopem Zomos, sailed into the harbor at Kaleps. Sunseeker was greeted with appropriate signals and directed to an anchorage; meanwhile, General Gurix called together his personal bodyguard and instructed them, then summoned his two Shulathian slaves to act as interpreters.

  Most of the Shulathians didn’t know there was a fight until it was over, and Gurix had command of the ship. Kekox was visibly uncomfortable, but forced himself to tell us children about what Gurix had done, sparing the details but making it clear that he had tortured and enslaved the crew and that Wahkopem Zomos had gone to meet the empress as a bound prisoner.

  Proven right, Gurix rose rapidly at court, especially because he was not only proven right but had a scheme for making Palath—and all its royalty and nobility—wealthier than they had ever been. He had achieved all-important popularity, and now mobs flocked wherever he went to cheer wildly for him. The Palathian mob was notoriously fickle; when it took Gurix to its heart, suddenly his blunt, abrasive personal style became the reason they trusted him and the measure of his honesty. Within a year he had married a member of the imperial family, and the alliance between the Roupox and Zowakou was formed; his direct descendants would include three emperors and four empresses—not to mention Mejox.

  In one way Gurix badly overestimated the Shulathians; he hadn’t been able to believe their complete lack of organization, or that their legal procedures were so complicated, and hence he expected them to organize a counterattack quickly and thought there would be a lot of hard fighting, especially with so many places to take—there were dozens of cities on the charts that Wahkopem had brought with him. Thus he overprepared, taking Wahkopem’s ship as a basis for his design and producing a hundred warships and a thousand troop transports, equipping his new army with
an improved version of the rifles he had found on board the ship.

  That mighty fleet struck at the Windward Islands without warning, and in less than a day, the whole archipelago was in their hands, and no ship had escaped to tell the tale. In less than a year, Gurix had overrun all of Shulath, and the world was under the Imperium for the first time. The ships ran back and forth at a great rate, and at times it seemed they would need all of the ships of Shulath just to carry all the loot back to Palath: art finer than anyone had ever seen before, beautiful furniture from a thousand palaces, slaves, whole libraries, gems and precious metals.

  Wahkopem Zomos died three floors beneath the Imperial Palace, still in chains, twenty-four years later. It was said that he never bowed to any empress or emperor, refused to swear loyalty to the Imperium, and kept faith with the General Court that had sent him—though it had long been replaced by a General Court appointed by the empress—until he died.

  “You see, that’s why our ship is named after him,” Kekox said. “He’s the real founder of our world civilization, and a hero to both our peoples, both for his boldness and his steadfastness. Never forget that we would not have a whole-world civilization now if he had not had the skill and courage to make that voyage, and that when everyone else had consented to the new order, or been silenced, he remained the one person who demanded justice. But never forget either that all of this happened because he didn’t know what he was going to find. We can honor his courage, faith, and skill, but we must understand that the unexpected happens to everyone. I don’t know if more foresight or caution by Captain Wahkopem might have meant a happier result for him personally, or might have meant that Shulathian and Palathian would have met on more equal terms. Perhaps not—on the day the General Court was seized, eight months after the Windward Islands fell, there was still a debate raging in there between Big Worlders and Small Worlders, and no one had been able to get a discussion of defense onto the floor. We’ll never know what use Shulath might have made of more foresight—but we do know this: they never got to try. So as we set out, keep asking yourselves, What are we overlooking? What are we blind to? What do we take for granted here that isn’t true at all where we’re going? Remember how much went wrong with the expedition to Kahrekeif, for that matter. Never economize on information or forethought.

  “The only other thought I have is this. You children have been under our care, and that will continue. But years from now, sooner or later, you will be in direct contact with the base back here. And I have no doubt at all that someone will try to stir up trouble, whether it’s a Shulathian agitator or a Palathian bigot. That’s why we were all very careful to tell you the truth about the relations between the races and about past history. Now some of you might feel a little tempted to think of yourselves as special—or as having been wronged—because of some of what you’ve been learning. I want you to remember this … look around the room and look at your friends. These are your people. Someday, maybe, the whole world will be as good as you kids are at getting along. Not yet, I’m sorry to say. But you’re our hope for the future—in more ways than just the expedition. We can hope the world will be a little better place when you get back—not only from the advances we’ll make, but from your example. Never forget the whole world is watching you, and you need to act like what is best about our people. All our people.”

  3

  THAT NIGHT, BECAUSE WE didn’t have to be up early the next morning and we were getting a few days’ break before doing the Shulath part of our world tour, Mejox and I were awake late together in his room. It never seemed to cause any trouble, even when one of us fell asleep in the other’s room, probably because the adults wanted us to be friends so much.

  After Poiparesis had come through and said goodnight, I slipped out of my bed, gently opened the door, and slid into the hallway without making a sound, carefully closing the door behind me. A moment later Mejox welcomed me into his room.

  Not much happens in the lives of children, especially happy children, but still they find a great deal to talk about. For a while we just chatted about all the times we’d had to stand on parade; the crowds were always the same, because Mejox’s family, the Roupoxes, had so much power and influence that they were able to turn out big, enthusiastic crowds on cue. Furthermore, the Roupoxes controlled some of the major news-teller groups, and those had been saying really good things about all of us too.

  “It’s all the same, though,” Mejox said. “The news-tellers only do it because they’re told to. Next week they’ll do it for a singer or an athlete, or a policeman with a bunch of arrests, or a salesperson who set a record. Everything is always about the cheering, nothing’s about the doing.”

  “Yeah. Some of the uniforms are fun to look at, but we have to stand so still, we miss half of what there is to see.”

  Mejox gestured agreement. “Sometimes I wish I could watch the parade instead of be in it.”

  There was a very soft knock on the door. “C’mon, boys, let us in,” Otuz whispered. “We know you’re in there.”

  I lurched to my feet, but Mejox beat me to it, opening the door with a sweeping bow. “Enter, ladies. We have just decided to admit female members in the Can’t Sleep Club.”

  “Hah. We just came down the hall to accept you into the Bedtime Is Too Early Association,” Otuz said.

  The only furniture in the place was a chair and bed. Mejox took the chair, which left me sitting on the bed between the two girls.

  “Now,” Mejox said, “what’s the occasion?”

  “Same one it is for you,” Otuz said. “At least I think so. We couldn’t sleep. The things Kekox told us. I feel like crying; I never knew what had happened to Wahkopem—isn’t it funny how they just stop talking about him, in the history lessons, after the voyage?—and now I’m upset.”

  “He’s been dead a long time,” I said.

  Priekahm said softly, “I tried to tell her that already. You two didn’t steal anything from us. You’re our friends. And Zahmekoses and I would never have had this chance—”

  Mejox sighed, a heavy sound. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too,” he said. “The trouble is, you know, I am a Roupox. What General Gurix stole—half the world!—is a big part of what I’m going to inherit—if I inherit, don’t forget that the Senate has to ask my family for a candidate, and the family has to pick me, and then all the other cousins they could have picked have to agree—so I really wish people wouldn’t keep talking about me being emperor, I wish I’d never heard of the idea, it just makes me think funny and throw my weight around …” He sounded more unhappy than I had ever heard him. “I don’t like being this way, I don’t, but whenever I want something … it just kind of … pops out and I start acting that way. And it’ll be even worse if I get to be emperor—”

  I reached forward and took his hands. “You’re not as bad as you think you are.”

  “You’re not even as bad as I think you are,” Otuz assured him. “I mean, it’s not like we really did anything bad ourselves, but I found myself thinking about all kinds of things I’ve seen and heard, the way people talk about Shulathians when there aren’t any around—”

  “Not Kekox,” Mejox said, ever loyal.

  “No, I guess not him. Not everybody. But I guess I never realized before today how terrible that all was. I guess I never realized how much of society is built around the Conquest.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say something, but Priekahm, who had been sitting very quietly, beat me to it. “Well,” she said, “we aren’t going to hold any personal grudges. Really. And you couldn’t pay us back even if you tried and we wanted you to, and we don’t want you to. Right?”

  “Right.” I agreed.

  “So it’s just what Kekox said, is all. We are not going to live the way grownups did before. We’re going to make a new society, our way, and it’s going to be equal. We’re all in this together.”

  In the dim light, I saw Otuz stick her hand out, into the center of the gr
oup. Priekahm reached for it, and then before I knew what I was doing, I had grasped their hands and Mejox had taken all of our hands. We sat there, not sure what to do, and then very softly Otuz said, “We promise that we will make a world where Palathian and Shulathian are equal, and where everyone has a fair chance. We will use our influence to make the world a better place.”

  We all said we promised, and I looked from face to face in the dark and thought, these are the best friends I could have had. I cleared my throat and said, “And we will stick together, with each other, no matter what.”

  “No matter what,” everyone echoed.

  “We will do what seems right to us and we won’t do anything stupid just because it’s traditional,” Priekahm said, and we all agreed to that.

  We hadn’t exactly planned to swear oaths when we started out, let alone that each of us would come up with one, so I felt a little twinge of sympathy for my friend; Mejox would have to come up with something for all of us, and we’d sort of said all the easy things first.

  I felt his hand tremble for a second, and then he said, “You know what’s important to me? You know how sometimes they make Otuz and me go spend a day or two with other kids from royal families?”

  Priekahm and I nodded.

  “Otuz,” he said, “aren’t you always glad to come back? Do you feel like you’re ‘royal’?”

  “Now that you mention it, no, I don’t feel like one of my family, and of course I’m glad to come back to you all. I thought that was just because I didn’t see much of my family. They don’t seem to want me to visit as much as the Roupoxes want you to, Mejox, so I just wasn’t very attached to them—but when I listen to you, I don’t think that it’s just that my family doesn’t want to see me; I think it’s that you all make me feel so welcome. You’re my home, all of you.”