Encounter With Tiber Read online

  Inside the central cylinder were the power plant, the reaction engines, the recycling system, the ship’s farm, and the squat, dark forms of the two landers, Gurix and Rumaz. Though it would be almost twenty-four years until we used them, they were always there, reminding us of what we were intending to do. The forward third of the cylinder was taken up with the sail, brakeloop, shrouds, and winches to operate them.

  Otuz and I climbed into the acceleration webbing, checked each other’s fastenings, and settled in to wait. Probably there would be another delay or two before we got started.

  There were acceleration webs nearly everywhere on the ship—lightweight, closed-top hammocks of strong webbing that would distribute the load, secured to a pole by a rotating cuff so that they could swing freely with the acceleration. It had been necessary because preliminary surveys had indicated that we would need to do a few rapid course corrections on the way out—at peak velocity, one-third of lightspeed, even a grain of sand striking the ship could be a disaster, and radar might not see it till we were within minutes of a hit. Thus there had to be some way to quickly and safely tie ourselves down when the collision alarm sounded.

  From the standpoint of us kids, this had meant that during the ship’s early boost phase, we had a wide variety of places where we could safely be.

  We strapped in with our faces pointed into the webbing, so that we could see through the gaps, because we knew that with the boost coming from the rear, the hammocks would swing so that their bottoms pointed toward the rear viewport. Now we floated next to each other, peering through the webbing, waiting for the big rocket behind us to fire.

  “You wouldn’t really have splatted against the bulkhead, you know,” I told Otuz. “The acceleration on this thing isn’t all that high. They just don’t want us twisting an ankle or getting hit by falling junk that someone forgot to put away. It won’t even get over one gravity of acceleration till the last half hour. It’s not like a regular rocket at all.”

  Otuz nodded. “I know. I was exaggerating for effect, Zahmekoses. You’re always so serious.”

  “It sort of comes naturally.”

  I must have sounded defensive, because she reached through the webbing and grabbed my hand. “I kind of like it. You really like the lessons and studying, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. So do you.”

  “Mejox and Priekahm—” she said, and hesitated.

  “I know, they’d be just as glad if we never had to learn a thing more. It’s okay, it’s not that I can’t see things about people, you know; it’s just that I kind of know how delicate things are and I have to watch myself, so I don’t usually say anything,” I explained.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Otuz said. “Just because I’m a princess I can say anything I want about anybody. But you have to watch out for Mejox because he’s royalty, and you have to stick together with Priekahm because she’s the other Shulathian, and—”

  “It’s all right, really,” I said. “I could still be back at the orphanage, hoping to qualify someday for a job as a mechanic or a dentist. And I really do like all of you, so it’s not that hard to be polite and watch out for what I say. Don’t worry about it too much.”

  “It’s still not fair,” she said.

  “Boost imminent,” Osepok’s voice said from the intercom.

  We turned to look out the big view port. Behind the ship, connected by a long, thin pole, was a big structure of struts and tanks, a third as wide as the ship and five times as long: the booster. It filled most of the window, shining silver in the harsh light of space. For a long breath or two nothing happened. Then a glow appeared behind the booster and spread to fill the rest of the window.

  There was no sound, of course, with no air to carry it; just the purplish-white glow. We sank into the webbing, and the hammocks swung around so that our faces were pointed down toward the view port as the ship began to accelerate. Moment by moment, we felt ourselves gaining weight, sinking deeper into the hammocks.

  Ordinary spacecraft had to take off from Nisu’s surface, starting with no velocity and fighting directly against gravity; they had to accelerate at about one and a half times the acceleration of gravity, increasing to three gravities, for periods of a thirty-second of a day or more, to leap up to orbit. But Wahkopem Zomos was already in orbit around Nisu, and Nisu was orbiting Sosahy; we could begin with a gentler thrust and let it run for a third of a day.

  At first the thrust was pushing Wahkopem Zomos, plus all those tanks and struts in the booster, plus the immense weight of fuel, thirteen times the weight of the ship itself. The ship and booster sped up very slowly. But with each passing instant, more of the fuel was gone, and yet the engines pushed just as hard. Acceleration increased, and the webs pressed harder against our faces.

  The glare we saw was hydrogen plasma, heated far beyond the point where its electrons and protons stayed together, so that it was a mere thin wisp of atomic particles. By weight the booster was almost all liquid hydrogen, and the rest was the assembly of girders, tanks, and pipes that held it together—but a tiny fraction of the total mass, held in one small compartment that any of us could have picked up and carried with one hand, was the key to the whole thing: antimatter. Mix liquid hydrogen just above absolute zero with one millionth of its weight in antimatter, and it became hydrogen plasma hotter than the core of the sun.

  Had we been outside, looking directly at the glow instead of seeing it through a shielded viewport, we would have been blinded; on Nisu below us, people had to be warned not to look directly at our boost out of orbit, and we briefly lit up the sky so brightly that night animals went back to their dens and plants opened their leaves to what they thought was sunrise.

  We hung there in the webbing for a long time, getting steadily heavier as the acceleration increased. The glare that danced around and behind the booster flickered and wavered in colored sheets, endlessly fascinating against the black of space, as occasional stars shone through it and now and then a glimpse of Nisu or Sosahy would appear as we swung outward in our escape orbit.

  It was always changing and yet always there, like a flame, and in the same way that after you watch a campfire for a while with an old, close friend, you begin to talk seriously, Otuz and I eventually slipped back into conversation. “Thank you for inviting me,” I said. “I’m glad to have someone to see this with.”

  “Well, I didn’t want you just moping in your compartment, with no friends,” she said. She was still holding my hand; I looked at the thick brown fur on her heavy forearm, next to the soft tan-yellow skin on my long slim one. “You’ve seemed kind of lost these last couple of eightdays, since Mejox and Priekahm have gotten so tight with each other. I mean, ever since you started standing up for yourself—”

  I was surprised. “I didn’t know that I was standing up for myself. Or that I wasn’t before.” A great cascading pink sheet rippled across the plasma outside, and we paused to watch it rip into pieces and vanish in little dark blue pulses.

  “Really?” Otuz said. “You don’t notice a difference? Priekahm and I certainly do. A few eightdays ago when we were on the last big tour of Nisu, just before we crossed over to visit Shulath, all of a sudden you stopped pacing yourself to hang just behind Mejox and started setting the pace for the rest of us. It was like overnight you just stopped being afraid of him. I guess he must not have liked that—he doesn’t deal very well with people disagreeing with him or showing him up, you know. I mean he’s very loyal and he doesn’t mean to be that way, but he gets angry and mean when he comes out behind. And then you just stopped worrying about it and let him sulk. I thought it was great.”

  “I didn’t even notice,” I said. “Maybe I just got some more confidence or something. You don’t think he’s still mad at me or anything? He is my friend and I don’t want bad feelings between us.”

  “He’ll get over it, if he’s really your friend. Anyway, it’s no big surprise that Priekahm is around him all the time now. He likes people to suck up
to him, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself if she isn’t sucking up to somebody.”

  “That’s nasty,” I pointed out. A great streamer of orange swayed across the viewport for a moment, seeming to curl around the crescent of Sosahy.

  “It’s also true. I like them, believe it or not. I just don’t think I have to lie to myself—or you—about what my friends are like.”

  I didn’t answer because I was watching another green sheet shimmer and twist. Besides, I had suddenly realized what had caused what Otuz thought was my “sudden change.” After Kekox had warned Mejox not to beat me up for doing better than he did, I had been afraid Mejox would be punished again just for doing better than me. So I had been careful to stay well ahead of him wherever I could. I’d even shown Mejox up in front of adults now and then, just to be on the safe side.

  But I had thought he would be relieved not to be punished. It hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t know that I knew …

  Were we still friends? With most of our lifetimes ahead of us, I hoped so.

  A great red and orange ball, silent like all the others, big as a large mountain, billowed out of the booster exhaust, then abruptly vanished as if it had been turned off. Otuz made a gulping noise in her throat.

  “Beautiful,” I agreed. “What a way to say good-bye.”

  We watched the dark, and felt our increasing weight sink into the webbing, but she didn’t say anything more and I drifted back into my thoughts. It was true, now that I thought about it, that Mejox had been spending a lot of time with Priekahm. But after all, our friendships waxed and waned all the time. Ever since we had become fully conscious and articulate, around the age of four, we had been together, constantly discovering each other, clashing over this and banding together over that. Mejox and I had been close for almost a year, but still, when we had first arrived at the training base, Priekahm had been my closest friend. If Mejox was fading, well, Otuz and I now had more in common, since we both liked school much better than the others did. There would be a lot of years, I thought, and we would all be friends of one kind or another for a long time.

  I hoped. I couldn’t help thinking that Mejox did hold grudges a long time.

  Had I offended him by not lagging behind him, as I’d done before? But if I hadn’t, Kekox would have surely hit him again.

  Or was this whole thing Otuz’s imagination? Priekahm often saw things between people that weren’t there—usually very dramatic things … was Otuz the same way, was it something all girls did? I suddenly missed my closeness with Mejox; he had been rude and pushy but comprehensible. I wondered if I would have to wait for twenty years or more, till puberty hit, before I would understand girls.

  Otuz was staring at me. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Just thinking.”

  The last part of the acceleration seemed like the longest; there were just as many bright colors and interesting effects, but by now most of the fuel mass was gone, and the acceleration was much greater, so we sank deep into the webbing face-first. It wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, and because the mesh was wide we could breathe and see, but it wasn’t as pleasant as it had been.

  Finally, the weight ceased all at once. “Remain in your webbing,” Osepok reminded us over the intercom. “Engine shutdown is complete, but we’re preparing to jettison the booster.”

  A long minute crawled by, and then a bright light flashed far out on the long spar connecting us to the booster. The explosive retaining ring had blown, and the now useless assemblage of tanks and engines was falling away from us. Briefly, a small rocket motor on it flared to life, to kick it safely into an orbit that would crash it into the Sun—since there would be so many operations in space in the next century, it was vital to keep space junk to a minimum. With a slight thud, the ship expelled the spar from its rear attachment, and that too whirled off into space.

  The explosive separation, the falling away, and the boost of the small motor all happened in complete silence. The only sound I could hear was Otuz breathing softly beside me. The acceleration webbing hung loosely, and we floated freely on the tethering lines.

  As the booster fell away behind us, there, hanging in the sky, was Sosahy, cut neatly into a dark and a light side by the terminator line. The gas giant was strangely shrunken, as much as it had been during the shakedown cruise, and as we watched, suddenly a crescent wedge formed on the curved side of the great bow of light that the day side of Sosahy made in the sky. Rapidly the much smaller curve grew to a half-circle, and if we squinted we could just see a few dark dots peeping through the clouds and water—a little bit of the Windward Islands or the Ring. By the naked eye at this distance it was hard to tell.

  “Priekahm will be insufferable,” Otuz said. “It’s right where she thought it would be.”

  The intercom crackled again. “All right, everyone stay in place for one more thing.”

  There was a faint rumble through Wahkopem Zomos, and the ship began to vibrate; we could feel it even through the web. Then Sosahy and Nisu began to roll over in the view port, faster and faster. Captain Osepok was using the attitude jets to spin the ship up to speed for the voyage. Our acceleration webs stretched and settled toward the deck. A few moments later, the captain gave permission, and we unfastened ourselves. We slipped out of the webbing and put our feet on the inner deck, standing up carefully. Outside the view port, Sosahy and Nisu looped crazily around each other, but the ship was big enough so that we did not feel ourselves spinning—rather, it was the sky outside the viewport that spun.

  We were on our way.

  5

  IT TOOK TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS for us to fall into our close approach to the Sun. In a sense, those twenty-eight days were the first “normal” ones in our lives—if “normal” means “the way things are supposed to be for most of your life.” Seventy years in all—twenty-four on the outward voyage, five exploring Setepos, and forty-one on the return trip—would be spent in the ship, with only ourselves for company. This was the first taste of our daily routine.

  Not surprisingly, Otuz and I adapted to it better than Mejox and Priekahm. We tended to like studying and reading anyway, so now that we didn’t have to stand in front of people and cameras all the time, and could spend a whole day concentrating, we were at no loss for amusement. Often, after a brief conversation with whichever adult was relevant to the subject, Otuz and I would simply tackle something we both wanted to learn, and would spend most of the rest of the day in companionable silence, working in the labs, running computer simulations, or assembling and reading a group of documents. Usually, late in the day, Kekox would have to remind us that we needed to put in our time in the gym and then get dressed for the short presentation that we radioed back to Nisu every day.

  Meanwhile Mejox and Priekahm worked out extra sessions in the gym, played make-believe games, and did assigned homework under the supervision of one or more adults. They didn’t seem to be able to take off for a day and work on something just because it was interesting. More and more, Mejox spent his time studying history with Kekox, doing the bare minimum in science, math, and arts; I could hardly have condemned him for it since I spent most of my time in math and science, only doing enough history to stay out of trouble. Once, I overheard Kekox and Soikenn discussing it; as always, I listened in—adults got very weird about being overheard, so I was careful to stay out of sight, but after all, those four people ran our universe, and we tried to know what they were thinking whenever we could.

  I didn’t know why they thought our specialization was so interesting, but after worrying about it for several minutes, they both seemed to agree that we would outgrow this phase, and take a “more balanced” approach later. “It doesn’t matter much what the order is as long as they learn,” Soikenn said.

  Kekox sighed. “I guess it’s not so much the over-concentration that worries me as it’s the reasons for it,” he said. “I wish I could get Mejox to quit thinking about what he�
�ll need when he’s emperor, or about all this romantic adventure stuff he’s going to do on Setepos and how it will look to the people at home. We had an expression in the Imperial Guard about not planning the victory parade until you’ve been to the battle, and it seems to me that’s just what he’s doing.”

  Soikenn laughed. “Where I come from we call that ‘accepting the prize before you do the experiment.’ He’s young, Kekox; it’s still more than twenty years before he even hits puberty. No doubt he’ll have other annoying habits in the future, and lose some of the ones he has now. You have to let kids be kids.”

  Kekox grunted. “Yeah. The trouble is some people have let the last couple of emperors be kids. It would be a great joke on everybody if Otuz ended up as empress.”

  “She’s brilliant,” Soikenn pointed out, “and she does her work. She’d probably be as good at that as she is at everything else.”

  “She’d get all the decisions made before noon so she could have the afternoon to read. And they’d be good decisions. Oh, well, all of us will be dead before we see any of it happen.”

  “Now there’s a cheerful thought,” Poiparesis said, joining them.

  “Kekox is trying to stop the crumbling of civilization,” Soikenn said. “Practically all by himself.”

  “So the subject is Mejox,” Poiparesis said.

  Both of them laughed, and the subject changed to trivia, and then to those inscrutable jokes about sex that adults liked. It sounded like the interesting part was over, so I got up and casually walked past the door. Kekox was muttering something in hushed tones.