Encounter With Tiber Read online

  “That’s what I meant,” Mejox said, “and I guess I do have something for us all to promise, too. From now on we promise that what comes first is our group; the group is our family, our home, everything to us. Nothing is more important, not being emperor, not being Palathian or Shulathian, nothing. Friends, home, and family to each other, now and always, no matter what.”

  “Now and always, no matter what,” I said, and squeezed his hand; Otuz and Priekahm muttered the words, too, and we all sat a long time, not letting the magic of the circle break. Through the window, the light of Sosahy, now almost full since it was close to midnight, shone down clear, bright, and cool, making the sky glow beautifully; only the gleam of distant Zoiroy marked the deep blue sky. We all got up, went to Mejox’s window, and stood looking out for a long time.

  With Priekahm on one side of me, Mejox on the other, Otuz only a breath or two away, I said to myself, These are my friends. I really have a home now. And I thought how we would voyage all the way to Setepos, and come back, and raise children and grow old with each other. And nothing would come between us. Nothing.

  The tour of Shulath was very different. Geography and history didn’t make that big a difference—monuments to battles and monuments to “first settlements” and “unknown colonies” and so forth all look pretty much alike.

  The difference was Shulathian crowds. Palathians stared and ooohed and aahed, and they applauded wildly whenever Otuz or Mejox was called on to say anything. Palathians prided themselves on their ability to agree with each other and all do the same thing; they thought of it as having common sense. It didn’t seem to be in the nature of Shulathians to agree about anything.

  Wherever we went in Shulath there would be protests, some from the Egalitarians, some from religious groups, many from philosophical groups whose positions nobody could understand. All the Shulathians would shout and holler until the Imperial Guard would move quietly forward, and then most of them would get quiet and a few would get arrested.

  We stood there quietly and nodded at the right times, and we made sure that we only answered questions that our adult teachers repeated to us, because there were a lot of people shouting questions and comments, and if we appeared to pay attention to them it might accidentally have political effects, or even cause a court case. I remember that once as we were getting back into the aircraft, Kekox muttered that he’d never seen so many people trying to get children to say something inappropriate. Poiparesis muttered back, “Don’t forget, we have twenty-seven percent of the population and ninety-eight percent of the lawyers over here.”

  The last three days in Shulath were different. We had finally looked at all the important monuments of the exploration, settlement, and Conquest; now we flew to Mount Mebapasus, a high mountain near the equator, to visit the observatory complex. The pressurized buildings, where they kept the computers and the radio telescope controls, were huge. Hundreds of astronomers worked there. Most of them tracked stray bodies kicked loose by the Intruder; we would be meeting with a very special group that did something else—it was a meeting that we were all looking forward to.

  First, however, we put on squeeze suits and oxygen masks and climbed the long stone stairway, all the way up to the Old Observatory, the 220-year-old building with its great telescope chamber. The old-fashioned telescope, with its oxygen hood surrounding the base so that the astronomers could breathe and work without wearing masks, stood gleaming and silent. It was no longer used, but its brass case was polished, its mountings were kept perfectly lubricated, and had there been occasion, it might have been put back into service at any time. “This is where it all started,” Poiparesis said to us, as we all crowded into the oxygen hood. “Right on this site, right through this eyepiece. The Observatory was first proposed hundreds of years before, at the time the telescope was invented, because even then everyone understood that if you could get above most of the air, you could see much better. But it took them a very long time to get around to building here—there were so many scientific questions and so many questions about who should pay so much, and of course technology kept improving, and every time it did the whole Observatory had to be replanned.

  “They did build it. They had to use pack animals in oxygen masks to haul things up, but they managed. The first oxygen systems up here were electrolysis systems—they’d bring ice up on a rope, thaw it out, and decompose it with electricity. The whole operation was powered by the big windmill you can see down the slope.”

  Mejox, sitting beside me, made a little noise of impatience. “But we know all that.”

  Poiparesis laughed. “True. I’m just always astonished to know that they built this before they had workable aircraft or decent engines. But the important thing, of course, is that almost exactly a hundred years ago, three astronomers—a Palathian and two Shulathians—announced that they had seen the incoming rogue planet, as big as Sosahy, and that they expected it to have a close encounter with Zoiroy.”

  I knew the story well from the history books, so I listened with only half an ear. Instead I put my imagination into thinking about this place in those days. The Observatory had almost been closed down; a telescope simply couldn’t see far enough to see anything very interesting, at least not in the immediate neighborhood. After a hundred years there had been little to examine once the surveys were completed of Zoiroy, its planet Sahmahkouy, and the moons Poumox, Toupox, and Kahrekeif. Twice they had observed large comets, and of course they had established that many stars were double, like our own, and that the nearest star, Kousapex, was almost a twin for our sun, though it was thought at the time that there could be no life there, since most of the theories said a single star would never develop planets big enough to support life. But all of this had been in the early decades; then the paucity of things to look at or search for had begun to make the enormous expense of the Observatory, up here beyond ninety-five percent of the atmosphere, seem like a waste of money. There had been many suits in the General Court to have the Observatory funds allocated to other purposes.

  So on the night of the great discovery, the three astronomers, in their awkward old-fashioned heavy squeeze suits, had been gathered around under the oxygen hood, where the pressure was brought up to just a comfortable level for breathing the pure oxygen without a mask. They had been conducting a search for cometoids, balls of ice that might someday fall into our solar system to become comets, in the wide belt far beyond our double stars. They had found two, and already been denounced in the General Court for “coming up with two snowballs in all the vast reaches of space.” One of them wrote in his diary that if they had two more successes like those, the Mount Mebapasus Observatory would be closed down for certain.

  I often wondered, because it never said in the history books, how many times they rechecked their work before reporting it. The comparison photos must have told the tale the first time they pointed their telescope in that direction; how many times did they check before they got the nerve to report the results? Did they debate among themselves what the best way to publish it would be, how to make the most modest claims without causing their work to be ignored?

  They must have known that no matter how many times they rechecked or how careful they were, there would be a storm of protest, and sure enough, they were right. Debate raged in the General Court for three years, until the incoming body became visible to the naked eye. Then, by order of the emperor, the three astronomers were given the funds they needed to build a second observatory on the peak, from which they would be able to obtain a more precise notion of what the Intruder, as it was now known, would do.

  There were more delays because in those days there were no aircraft that could reach the top of the mountain, so an electric monorail had to be built first, and no one had ever built generators or motors so powerful before. By the time that they were ready, it was less than half a year until the Intruder’s encounter with Zoiroy was due.

  The uproar they had caused by finding the Intruder was no
thing compared to the uproar they caused when they arrived at their conclusion: the Intruder’s interaction with Zoiroy would cause it to swing by close to the Sun, losing energy at both passes and ending up in permanent orbit around the double system. Moreover, it would make a very close pass by Sosahy—and our world—before climbing back out to aphelion.

  There was more uproar, but by now there were many observatories and astronomers ready to confirm their work. At first it was thought that there might be a spectacular display in the sky, then that the Intruder might crash into the sun and then briefly the concern that the Intruder would actually collide with Sosahy.

  None of that happened, exactly.

  They had all been surprised at the effect when the Intruder passed close to the Sun; it was only years afterwards, well into Reconstruction, that the mathematics was worked out. The closer a body comes to a large mass, like the Sun, the stronger the tidal effects—and the more difference in tidal effect there is from one side of the body to the other. In a close pass at the Sun, the Intruder was subjected to tremendous and differing tidal forces on near and far parts of it. More than that, the Intruder itself had formed in the dark and cold between the stars, at low temperatures for the most part and without much centrifugal force, and thus it had no metal core like Sosahy. There were rocks, and chunks of nickel iron, all the way through its scarred body, and the whole thing was very loosely held together by water and ammonia ice, which broke down rapidly as soon as the outer layers began to strip away.

  The Intruder shattered into billions of pieces of all sizes, scattering into a great cloud. Thus, although the dense central part of the cloud missed our world by a wide margin, the debris—abundant even in the thin edges of the cloud, the biggest pieces the size of mountains, most boulder-sized or smaller—had sprayed our world, and Sosahy, in what the history books called the First Bombardment.

  The First Bombardment had been bad enough; one out of eight people worldwide killed, and Shulath wrecked. The Second Bombardment would finish off Nisu. One hundred and forty-some years in the future, there would be nothing left of us—unless some of us, somehow, could be somewhere else.

  I couldn’t help wondering, as we stood there in the Old Observatory, in our squeeze suits, under the old oxygen hood, just as the astronomers had once stood, if the scientists up here that night so long ago had had any inkling, or even the faintest suspicion, that they might be finding the end of the world. For a class project I had read all about them, and looked at old motion images of them, now grainy and off-color, and no one had mentioned any doubts they might have had. Perhaps they had not had any, but I doubted that very much.

  In the next three days, we would be visiting all the places where the First Bombardment had torn into our world. Though Sosahy, with its bigger disk and much greater gravity, had taken the brunt—astronomers in Palath observed five thousand huge explosions on the gas giant in a matter of hours—there had still been plenty left for Nisu, and almost all of that had hit outward-facing Shulath. More than a hundred sizable bodies had struck Shulath, some of them leaving craters bigger than small islands.

  Shulath had been wrecked, more than if we had been conquered all over again. Nineteen populated islands were wiped from the face of the world, by direct hits, by the volcanoes that followed in the wake of some impacts, or by erosion from huge tsunami; in those nineteen places nothing stood above water anymore. Fully a hundred islands remained above the water (at least in part), but lost their entire populations. Seven new islands—including the great Ring Island south of the Windwards—formed in the aftermath.

  The First Bombardment had been just a glancing blow. Most of the Intruder was still out there, now expanded into a huge cloud of rocks, dust, balls of ice, and all sorts of junk, in a 108-year orbit that we had now measured with the greatest precision.

  The Second Bombardment would be a direct hit. The positions of the sun, Sosahy, and the world in their orbits would put us squarely in the center of the path of the Intruder’s dense middle. The best estimate was that our world would take seven hundred times the number of hits we had taken the last time—between seven and eight thousand blows. At least twenty of them would be bigger than the one that had thrown up the Ring Island. Moreover, with around 40,000 impacts on the gas giant we circled, so much material would spray out of Sosahy that new rings and moons might form, some of which would fall onto our world later.

  Even if there had been a hope of surviving the catastrophe of the Second Bombardment at all, every 216 years afterward, for at least five thousand years, the Intruder would strike again. Civilization was doomed, even in Palath; nothing could survive under the icy clouds, or in an atmosphere poisoned by huge volcanic eruptions, or under any of the thousands of other possible consequences.

  The First Bombardment had been the most revolutionary event at least since the voyage of Wahkopem. It had led to the Great Rescue and to Reconstruction, as millions of Palathians had volunteered years of time and effort to save what was left of Shulath. Indirectly the First Bombardment had led to the abolition of slavery, home rule for Shulath, and at least some measure of equality. And the scientific effort to understand what had happened—and to do something about it—had brought about the scientific renaissance that had taken us from the crude aircraft, computers, radios, and electric monorails of that time to voyages into deep space and antimatter energy.

  But no matter how big it had all been, it was dwarfed by what was coming. Colossal as the effects had been, the First Bombardment had been no more than a little warning tap, a little shake to get us to wake up, get out of bed, get moving. Whole lands thrown under the ocean, chains of islands reared up, great volcanoes that still thundered a hundred years later, smashed cities and scoured coasts—all that was not the main blow, but the merest touch of the Intruder’s finger.

  But for all that, it was part of Nisu’s future, not mine. I would be dead before the Second Bombardment. And thus I was a lot more interested in what waited for us later that afternoon, in the screening room of the Mount Mebapasus Observatory—the newly compiled, first up-close images from a near flyby of Setepos, the new world we would be traveling to.

  I don’t know if the adults also felt the same way, or realized that we were bored, or perhaps the schedule was just that way anyway. After a while of having us all fidget around the old telescope, we were allowed to go down the mountain and into the main building, get out of squeeze suits, and sit down to wait for the presentation.

  They took a long time in setting up, and we had to listen to several people talk about how they had gotten the flyby probe up to speed, about the poor quality of some of the pictures—about everything, except showing us pictures of where we were going. I fidgeted and squirmed, trying to behave myself, and Mejox—who wasn’t trying at all—practically bounced out of his seat.

  The adults weren’t trying to control us, either, which meant they were just as impatient as we were.

  Finally the astronomers admitted they might be ready, dimmed the lights, and began to show the pictures. The first pictures were familiar ones, from the long-distance fast flybys that had gone through the system just a few years before, showing us the basic information: eight planets, one double cometoid, and one belt of asteroids circling a single lone sun. Two of the planets had some potential for our survival there: the third and the fourth from the sun. The third one from the sun, which they had named Setepos, was one-fifth closer to Kousapex than we were to our own sun, but because that sun was cooler than ours, they actually got fourteen percent less light than Shulath did, or two percent less than Palath did.

  Setepos had considerably more surface area, with a surface gravity somewhat less than ours. The atmosphere instruments on that first probe had detected water vapor, a temperature not too different from our own, a surface pressure like ours—and, most importantly, free nitrogen and oxygen. “Nitrogen and oxygen, at those temperatures, in the presence of water, would react with any number of things in the rocks and s
oil, and quickly leave the atmosphere,” the science lecturer said, quite unnecessarily, since all of us had been over this many times. I thought Otuz would interrupt to tell him so, but Osepok put her hand on Otuz’s shoulder before she could speak.

  The science lecturer went on: “—so the only possible conclusion is that something is continuously liberating the oxygen and nitrogen, and that something is almost certainly living things. It’s a living world, at least a little like our own.

  “The fourth planet, on the other hand, showed mostly a very thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide, with some water; it seems a bit similar to Kahrekeif, except, of course, that there would never be anything to thaw it out. Still, in a crisis, some of us could survive there, and if we managed to take enough of our industrial plant with us, even live on it for generations, building a civilization with the materials there. But that would be a scheme of desperation, like certain very eccentric proposals that involve using captured parts of the shattered Intruder as raw materials for habitats entirely in space. I might note here that one of my more reckless colleagues—”

  “Oh, come off that,” a tall, thin, older Shulathian in the front row said. “It’s merely my argument that if we have to build a habitat in space, we might as well build it where there’s a lot of free solar power and materials are concentrated. Nobody’s saying life in space would be better than on the surface of a planet, and I really hope the third planet works out, but if we were to decide it hadn’t, we might as well build in the orbiting rocks and iron bodies, rather than go to all the bother of moving onto a planetary surface just to be pelted with sandstorms, wind, and hail. Once you have to make your own air, what’s the advantage of being on a planet?”

  Another three Shulathians seemed eager to argue with him, but then Osepok said, “I know you are all fine scientists, but it does occur to me that I have four children who are doing their best to behave patiently while you talk about all this, and it’s the third planet we are interested in. Is it a suitable home or not—from what you can tell, I mean?”