Encounter With Tiber Read online

  The suction had only removed most of the support liquid; the rest came up in a savage fit of coughing, hard gutwrenching coughs followed by deep painful whoops for the hot, foul air. It was still, comparatively, wonderful.

  At last my coughing subsided into occasional hard hacks, and I could pay a little more attention to my surroundings. The others around me were also just coming out of their coughing.

  My lungs felt as if I had just had severe pneumonia, or been rescued from a near-drowning. But much as they burned and stung, it was a wonderful relief. At last I could breathe, and think.

  The velocity gauge showed that we had multiplied our speed by a factor of ten, and it was still rising. I lay back and thought, The worst is over. Now all it would take would be patience.

  It took a lot of patience. For the next twelfth of a day, there was nothing to see but the pictures of the sail and the sun behind us. The sun, mercifully, was shrinking, and the sail was growing less bright, but though that was good, it was hardly enough to keep a person amused for the long time I lay there, still weighing too much to safely move.

  When acceleration was down to four times normal gravity, Poiparesis’s voice said, “Do not try to sit up, but you can now remove your mouthpieces if you like.”

  My arm, four times its normal weight, at first seemed impossible to lift, but with an effort I raised it, gripped my mouthpiece, and pushed it upward away from me.

  “Don’t forget,” Poiparesis added, “the relation between weight and inertia is different. Things are hard to lift, but they still have the same momentum you’re used to.”

  I let my arm sink beside me and breathed the comfortable cabin air; outside temperature had dropped almost back to normal, internal cooling had taken hold, and from the other numbers crawling across the screen it appeared that the ship had come through unharmed. “All right,” Poiparesis said, “now that we’ve all breathed—how is everyone?”

  “Fine here,” the Captain said.

  “Fine,” Poiparesis said, and Soikenn said, “Sore, but nothing serious.”

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Priekahm added, and then Otuz asked, “Does being really bored count as damage?”

  Poiparesis laughed. “If it does, we’re all dead. Mejox, are you all right?”

  The answer was just slow enough in coming so that I dreaded it before I heard it. “Uh, uh …”

  “Are you all right?” Poiparesis repeated.

  Mejox’s voice was strained and unhappy. “I got, uh, caught, trying to scratch, just when the charge went off. I thought I could do it and my leg itched so much—”

  “Mother Sea’s blood,” Poiparesis said, softly. I had never heard him swear before. “Is there any bleeding?”

  “Not that I can tell. Can I try to raise my head and look?”

  “Very slowly,” Poiparesis said. “Come up slowly, take one look, gently bring your head back to the couch, and then tell us what you saw.”

  There was a long moment while we all worried, and then Mejox said, “I am not bleeding, but there’s a great big lump on the side of my thigh, and it hurts too much to try to move my hand out from under myself. I’m sorry, Poiparesis, I didn’t mean to break the rules but I thought—”

  Poiparesis sighed. “I’m not worried about the rules, I’m worried about your condition. I bet it must hurt a lot.”

  “Yeah,” Mejox said. There was a trace of a sniffle in his voice.

  “I’m going over to him,” Kekox said.

  “No, you’re not.” Captain Osepok’s voice was absolutely firm. “You could easily break your spine doing that.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” Soikenn said. “Mejox is a big kid and he’s hurt, but he’s not dying. Mejox, it’s going to be at least a twenty-fourth of a day before we can get to you, and a lot longer than that before we can do much for you. That’s a long time to lie there in pain. I think you’d better just give yourself a shot of anesthesia. Can you reach the button?”

  “Yeah. It’s the other hand that got hurt.” There was a long pause, and when he spoke again it was slurred. “I didn’t mean to break the rules!”

  “That doesn’t matter now,” Poiparesis said gently. “Is the anesthesia helping?”

  “Some. I still hurt.”

  “If you want to give yourself a double shot, the control system won’t let you overdose. Go ahead and do that. It really would be common sense.”

  Mejox sighed. “I know, but I’m scared, and I hate to quit talking to all of you and be all alone again. It was really scary before I could take out the mouthpiece.”

  “It must have been,” Poiparesis said, sympathetically. “Really, just give it two good squeezes and I’ll keep talking to you till you fall asleep. Then when you wake up your hand will be splinted, that internal hemorrhage in your leg will be drained, and you’ll have all that uncomfortable support liquid out of you. Just give it two more squeezes, and keep talking to us, and it’ll be just like falling asleep after you’re tucked in.”

  “That is, if we tucked you in by piling rocks on your chest,” Otuz added.

  Mejox made a little noise that might have been a laugh. “All right, I guess that’s common sense. Squeezing the button now … it really does hurt.”

  “Of course it does,” Poiparesis said. “Having your hand crushed hurts. So does internal bleeding. You’re dealing with it really well.”

  “Yeah,” Mejox said. “Kekox, what do they do about these in the Imperial Guard?”

  “We saw off the leg and use it to beat the patient to death,” Kekox said.

  It was so unexpected that we all laughed, even Mejox. The old Imperial Guard added, “Mejox, you don’t have to prove how brave you are to all of us. Save being brave for when you have to use it. For right now just make yourself comfortable and we’ll have you mostly fixed when you wake up.”

  “Is it going to be safe for me to make the pass by Zoiroy?” Mejox asked.

  “The cast will be stronger than the bone, so it should be,” Poiparesis said.

  “Besides, it’s not like you can get out and walk,” Otuz added.

  “Guess not.” We heard a long sigh from him. “I’m getting really sleepy now. I really was scared, you know, when I first came out of blackout and started to feel the pain. And I’m still really sorry about breaking a rule.”

  “Anybody would be scared,” Poiparesis assured him. “And you can stop worrying about the rules. Now go to sleep.”

  He didn’t answer. We lay on our couches for another third of a day; Kekox told a couple of stories, and Poiparesis sang for us, and we made up games in our heads, but it was still a long dull time, and we were all worried about Mejox.

  Finally, when the acceleration was down to little more than double normal gravity, and the sun in the screens was still huge but no longer the all-devouring ball of fire it had been, Soikenn and Kekox very carefully climbed from their couches and moved over to look at Mejox. “Crushed hand and a hematoma, just as we thought,” Soikenn said.

  “Will he be all right?” Kekox asked.

  “He’s going to be fine. And he’s a brave kid. That must have hurt a lot more than he was letting us know.”

  “He did directly do what we told him not to do.”

  “Yeah, that’s Mejox. But I bet he’s acquired a new respect for rules and advice.”

  When the acceleration had come down still further, they moved him onto a cart and took him down to the outer deck. With only eight people, none of whom were expected to be sick very often, we didn’t have a sick bay or infirmary, but three of the rooms could be converted to emergency surgical spaces. The gravity was still too high for Soikenn to do any surgery on Mejox, but they could get the room set up.

  Meanwhile the rest of us were left with just our thoughts for company. “You all can sit up,” Poiparesis said, “but we don’t need any more injuries, so I suggest you just sit. Your portable terminals are by your couches, so you can read, do homework
, or play games, but I really don’t think anyone should get up and walk who doesn’t have to. I’m going down to the outer deck also, to see if I can help. I’m afraid we may have to wait till we’re back to much lower accelerations before we can do anything much for Mejox. One more failure of planning—we never thought we might need to do surgery while accelerating. It’s a good thing his hemorrhage wasn’t worse. Anyway, don’t add to our troubles by moving around and getting hurt.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on them,” Captain Osepok said. “There’s not really any use for me in the cockpit till it’s time for course correction and furling the sail.”

  “Thanks,” Poiparesis said. He climbed slowly and carefully to the door—the direction of down was still almost ninety degrees from what we were used to—and went out.

  “Is Mejox really going to be all right?” Priekahm asked.

  “Well, Soikenn is about as good a doctor as you can be without doing it full time,” the captain said, “and Kekox has seen a lot of injuries. And they both seemed worried, but they didn’t act like it was anything that they couldn’t handle. It should be all right. Would you all like to get that foam out of yourselves? You won’t need it anymore, not till we make our close pass at Zoiroy.”

  She wasn’t as gentle as Soikenn, maybe because of the high gravity, so the needles and tubes hurt more going in, but she was efficient, and it felt good to have all that filler removed. As soon as it was out, we all noticed that we were exhausted, and ended up stretching back out on the couches to sleep. Priekahm and I slept right through Mejox’s operation, three-eighths of a day, and only heard about it over the first meal after we were allowed to move around again. But Otuz said that even though she was awake, they wouldn’t let her watch. “They said it might upset me and I said how can anyone get upset watching people stick knives into Mejox.”

  “That isn’t funny,” I said. “He was really hurt.” We were sitting in the common dining area, still working on that huge meal. Not having eaten for a full day gives you an appetite.

  “That’s what Soikenn said. Nobody has a sense of humor anymore. But I gave him a lot of my blood to replace what he lost, so I figure if he’s going to get the blood, the jokes come with it.”

  “I just hope he’s all right,” Priekahm said.

  “I do, too,” Otuz said. “But all the adults say that—”

  Poiparesis leaned in the doorway and said, “You all have a friend who’d like to see you.” It took only a couple of breaths before we were gathered around Mejox in the improvised surgery.

  “Hi,” Mejox said. “Hope I didn’t scare anybody too badly. I feel really stupid, but I’m glad to be here. And thanks for your blood, Otuz.”

  She was so startled at his being polite that she barely gasped out a “You’re welcome.”

  Five days later we were all piled together at the entry to the cockpit to watch Captain Osepok furl the sail. By now we were almost four times as far from the Sun as Sosahy and Nisu were, plunging on toward Zoiroy. The acceleration from the sail fell off with the cube of our distance, so it was now only one one-thousandth of a normal gravity; we would need to have the sail furled again when we passed by the smaller star, so that we could unfurl it as we were moving away and thus receive another big kick along our trajectory.

  It turned out to be just about the dullest thing we had ever watched. The robot winches slowly wound in the cable, and since the sail they were winding up was the area of a large island back in Shulath, or of a province in Palath, that took a very long time. Nor could we escape from watching the process. Captain Osepok pointed out that we would next get to see this several years from now—then many years after that—and finally we would have to do it ourselves. “If you’re only going to get to see it three times,” she said, “and the whole success of the mission depends on you doing it right as long as seventy years from now, I think just maybe you had better not miss chances to watch.”

  So we watched cable strain on readouts, and looked at what radar was showing us about how the sail folded in front of us, and spent a long, boring day before finally the ship was ballistic again and we were headed for our close approach to Zoiroy. It wasn’t till shortly before bedtime that Otuz muttered to me, “Did you notice Mejox?”

  “What about him?”

  “When have you ever seen him sit still for so much boredom?”

  “He has to sit still—his hand’s in a cast and his leg’s sore.”

  “You know what I mean. He didn’t make any trouble.”

  “I’d think you’d be glad.”

  “Oh, I am. And when I spied on the adults earlier this evening, they were all really happy about it, too. But it sure isn’t much like him. I suppose getting hurt and not being able to do anything about it must have made an impression on him.”

  Something about the incident did seem to change Mejox for the better. Certainly he became quieter and politer. I spent a lot of time coaching him on math, and within a day or two I felt that we were as good a pair of friends as ever.

  About fifty days later we were in final approach to Zoiroy. I don’t know what the others did, but I squeezed the button for anesthesia. Zoiroy was a much smaller star than the Sun, so it was only going to be eight gravities. We wouldn’t need support liquid in the lungs. Still, I had seen everything of close approaches that I wanted to see.

  By the time I was out of anesthesia, Captain Osepok had jettisoned the extra part of the sail that we would not need, maneuvered us onto the laser beam that we would ride for the next few years, and headed us out into the dark reaches of interstellar space. We had raced across our solar system, from the Sun to Zoiroy, in just sixty days—a distance that the first expedition to Kahrekeif, the one Kekox had been on, had taken two years, just under a thousand days, to cross.

  With the laser pushing us, we would reach the great cloud of cometoids which marked the outer boundary of our solar system in just about a year—and beyond them, then, we would voyage for more than twenty more years.

  I made a game of it to myself: going around the equator of Nisu was a long way—we had spent days doing it on the final tour. And Nisu’s orbit around Sosahy was forty times that far. And the distance from Nisu to the Sun was one hundred times as far as that. And the distance from the Sun to Zoiroy was about thirteen times as far as that, at the time we went. So we had already gone 52,000 times as far as it was around Nisu, and we had done it in only sixty days, and with the push from the laser beam we would eventually be moving at seven times our present speed. …

  And it would still take twenty-three and one quarter years, nine eightdays, and three and two-fifths days, in all, from the moment of our launch until we entered orbit around Setepos, to get there. When I thought about how fast we were moving and yet how immense the distances were, I would end up staring out a viewport at the endless blackness between the stars, until one of the other children would sneak up on me and startle me. After a while I lost the habit of looking out viewports at all, or even of thinking of us as moving. Our world was our little metal torus, in the middle of a void dark, huge, and empty beyond imagining, chasing after a vast, dimly glowing disk.

  6

  A LONG TIME LATER, when I had too much time to think about the past, I would think of the first twenty years of the voyage, before any of us entered puberty and while things were still on the plan, as the “happy time.” I know it wasn’t perfect. I squabbled with the other children, and I remember many hurt feelings and apologies. Once I broke my wrist in the gym and had to wear a cast, and once Otuz got angry at Priekahm and beat her badly. There was a period of more than a year when Soikenn and Osepok would not speak to each other and none of us children knew why.

  But for all that, time went by pleasantly. Automatic machinery ran the ship’s functions, and it was so reliable that after the first few eight-weeks, Captain Osepok visited the cockpit once per day only to make sure that things were functioning normally; years went by and nothing unusual ever happened. Every few eight
days, she would spend a couple of days practicing with the simulators, to keep her skills current, and now and again she would have me or Otuz practice the same maneuvers. Really, however, the controls were much simpler than they were for the lander simulations that we worked every few days, and steering and navigating Wahkopem Zomos was much simpler than operating an ordinary aircraft.

  That left us a great deal of time to occupy, and with our immense library, including all sorts of visual and auditory recordings, we probably became the eight most educated people ever. We studied literature, music, history, dead languages, all the sciences, a dozen games of skill and strategy. We all worked out in the gym frequently.

  And of course there was an immense amount of research to be done. Though dozens of unmanned probes were passing through interstellar space ahead of us, they could only relay back what they had been programmed to report; if there was an interesting anomaly in the data, it took years for the data itself to reach Nisu, then more years for any radio message changing the program to get back to the probe. By that time, the probe, moving at half the speed of light or more, would be far away from the anomaly, so a new probe would have to be dispatched—in the hope that it could find the same spot in the vast reaches of empty space, and that the phenomenon would still be going on a decade or more later.

  But we were right there with our instruments. When any of the thousands of readings we took per second started to show something interesting, one or more of us could take additional observations; experiment with laser, radar, or particle beam probing; compare it with all the data up to the present—in short, we could really do science, interacting directly with our environment, in the way that people back home could not. That advantage, plus having so much time available, made us some of the most productive research scientists in history.