The Songs of Distant Earth Read online

  THE SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH

  Arthur C. Clarke

  A DEL REY® BOOK

  BALLANTINE BOOKS ● NEW YORK

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by the Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1986 by Serendib BV

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by the Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1986.

  Cover art by Michael Whelan

  http://www.randomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-26825

  ISBN 0-345-32240-1

  First Hardcover Edition: May 1986

  First International Edition: November 1986

  First U.S. Mass Market Edition: May 1987

  For Tamara and Cherene,

  Valerie and Hector

  –for love and loyalty

  Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments … may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever…

  –Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957)

  I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.

  –Melville to Hawthorne (1851)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is based on an idea developed almost thirty years ago in a short story of the same name (now in my collection The Other Side of the Sky). However, this version was directly – and negatively – inspired by the recent rash of space-operas on TV and movie screen. (Query: what is the opposite of inspiration – expiration?)

  Please do not misunderstand me: I have enormously enjoyed the best of Star Trek and the Lucas / Spielberg epics, to mention only the most famous examples of the genre. But these works are fantasy, not science fiction in the strict meaning of the term. It now seems almost certain that in the real universe we may never exceed the velocity of light. Even the very closest star systems will always be decades or centuries apart; no Warp Six will ever get you from one episode to another in time for next week’s installment. The great Producer in the Sky did not arrange his programme planning that way.

  In the last decade, there has also been a significant, and rather surprising, change in the attitude of scientists towards the problem of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The whole subject did not become respectable (except among dubious characters like the writers of science fiction) until the 1960s: Shklovskii and Sagan’s Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) is the landmark here.

  But now there has been a backlash. The total failure to find any trace of life in this solar system, or to pick up any of the interstellar radio signals that our great antennae should be easily able to detect, has prompted some scientists to argue “Perhaps we are alone in the Universe…” Dr. Frank Tipler, the best-known exponent of this view, has (doubtless deliberately) outraged the Saganites by giving one of his papers the provocative title “There Are No Intelligent Extra-Terrestrials”. Carl Sagan et al argue (and I agree with them) that it is much too early to jump to such far-reaching conclusions.

  Meanwhile, the controversy rages; as has been well said, either answer will be awe-inspiring. The question can only be settled by “evidence”, not by any amount of logic, however plausible. I would like to see the whole debate given a decade or two of benign neglect, while the radio astronomers, like gold-miners panning for dust, quietly sieve through the torrents of noise pouring down from the sky.

  This novel is, among other things, my attempt to create a wholly realistic piece of fiction on the interstellar theme – just as, in Prelude to Space (1951), I used known or foreseeable technology to depict mankind’s first voyage beyond the Earth. There is nothing in this book which defies or denies known principles; the only really wild extrapolation is the “quantum drive”, and even this has a highly respectable paternity. (See Acknowledgements.) Should it turn out to be a pipe-dream, there are several possible alternatives; and if we twentieth-century primitives can imagine them, future science will undoubtedly discover something much better.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

  JULY 1985

  I – Thalassa

  1. The Beach at Tarna

  Even before the boat came through the reef, Mirissa could tell that Brant was angry. The tense attitude of his body as he stood at the wheel – the very fact that he had not left the final passage in Kumar’s capable hands – showed that something had upset him.

  She left the shade of the palm trees and walked slowly down the beach, the wet sand tugging at her feet. When she reached the water’s edge, Kumar was already furling the sail. Her “baby” brother – now almost as tall as she was, and solid muscle – waved to her cheerfully. How often she had wished that Brant shared Kumar’s easygoing good nature, which no crisis ever seemed capable of disturbing …

  Brant did not wait for the boat to hit the sand, but jumped into the water while it was still waist-deep and came splashing angrily towards her. He was carrying a twisted mass of metal festooned with broken wires and held it up for her inspection.

  “Look!” he cried. “They’ve done it again!”

  With his free hand, he waved towards the northern horizon.

  “This time – I’m not going to let them get away with it! And the mayor can say what she damn well pleases!”

  Mirissa stood aside while the little catamaran, like some primeval sea-beast making its first assault on the dry land, heaved itself slowly up the beach on its spinning outboard rollers. As soon as it was above the high-water line, Kumar stopped the engine, and jumped out to join his still-fuming skipper.

  “I keep telling Brant,” he said, “that it must be an accident – maybe a dragging anchor. After all, why should the Northers do something like this deliberately?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Brant retorted. “Because they’re too lazy to work out the technology themselves. Because they’re afraid we’ll catch too many fish. Because –”

  He caught sight of the other’s grin and sent the cat’s cradle of broken wires spinning in his direction. Kumar caught it effortlessly.

  “Anyway – even if it is an accident, they shouldn’t be anchoring here. That area’s clearly marked on the chart: keep out – research project. So I’m still going to lodge a protest.”

  Brant had already recovered his good humour; even his most furious rages seldom lasted more than a few minutes. To keep him in the right mood, Mirissa started to run her fingers down his back and spoke to him in her most soothing voice.

  “Did you catch any good fish?”

  “Of course not,” Kumar answered. “He’s only interested in catching statistics – kilograms per kilowatt – that sort of nonsense. Lucky I took my rod. We’ll have tuna for dinner.”

  He reached into the boat and pulled out almost a metre of streamlined power and beauty, its colours fading rapidly, its sightless eyes already glazed in death.

  “Don’t often get one of these,” he said proudly. They were still admiring his prize when History returned to Thalassa, and the simple, carefree world they had known all their young lives came abruptly to its end.

  The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky, as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapour trail began to fray at the edges, breaking
up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.

  And now a distant thunder was rolling down from the edge of space. It was a sound that Thalassa had not heard for seven hundred years but which any child would recognize at once.

  Despite the warmth of the evening, Mirissa shivered and her hand found Brant’s. Though his fingers closed about hers, he scarcely seemed to notice; he was still staring at the riven sky.

  Even Kumar was subdued, yet he was the first to speak.

  “One of the colonies must have found us.”

  Brant shook his head slowly but without much conviction.

  “Why should they bother? They must have the old maps – they’ll know that Thalassa is almost all ocean. It wouldn’t make any sense to come here.”

  “Scientific curiosity?” Mirissa suggested. “To see what’s happened to us? I always said we should repair the communications link…”

  This was an old dispute, which was revived every few decades. One day, most people agreed, Thalassa really should rebuild the big dish on East Island, destroyed when Krakan erupted four hundred years ago. But meanwhile there was so much that was more important – or simply more amusing.

  “Building a starship’s an enormous project,” Brant said thoughtfully. “I don’t believe that any colony would do it – unless it had to. Like Earth…”

  His voice trailed off into silence. After all these centuries, that was still a hard name to say.

  As one person, they turned towards the east, where the swift equatorial night was advancing across the sea.

  A few of the brighter stars had already emerged, and just climbing above the palm trees was the unmistakable, compact little group of the Triangle. Its three stars were of almost equal magnitude – but a far more brilliant intruder had once shone, for a few weeks, near the southern tip of the constellation.

  Its now-shrunken husk was still visible, in a telescope of moderate power. But no instrument could show the orbiting cinder that had been the planet Earth.

  2. The Little Neutral One

  More than a thousand years later, a great historian had called the period 1901-2000 “the Century when everything happened”. He added that the people of the time would have agreed with him – but for entirely the wrong reasons.

  They would have pointed, often with justified pride, to the era’s scientific achievements – the conquest of the air, the release of atomic energy, the discovery of the basic principles of life, the electronics and communications revolution, the beginnings of artificial intelligence – and most spectacular of all, the exploration of the solar system and the first landing on the Moon. But as the historian pointed out, with the 20/20 accuracy of hindsight, not one in a thousand would even have heard of the discovery that transcended all these events by threatening to make them utterly irrelevant.

  It seemed as harmless, and as far from human affairs, as the fogged photographic plate in Becquerel’s laboratory that led, in only fifty years, to the fireball above Hiroshima. Indeed, it was a by-product of that same research, and began in equal innocence.

  Nature is a very strict accountant, and always balances her books. So physicists were extremely puzzled when they discovered certain nuclear reactions in which, after all the fragments were added up, something seemed to be missing on one side of the equation.

  Like a bookkeeper hastily replenishing the petty cash to keep one jump ahead of the auditors, the physicists were forced to invent a new particle. And, to account for the discrepancy, it had to be a most peculiar one – with neither mass nor charge, and so fantastically penetrating that it could pass, without noticeable inconvenience, through a wall of lead billions of kilometres thick.

  This phantom was given the nickname “neutrino” – neutron plus bambino. There seemed no hope of ever detecting so elusive an entity; but in 1956, by heroic feats of instrumentation, the physicists had caught the first few specimens. It was also a triumph for the theoreticians, who now found their unlikely equations verified.

  The world as a whole neither knew nor cared; but the countdown to doomsday had begun.

  3. Village Council

  Tarna’s local network was never more than ninety-five per cent operational – but on the other hand never less than eighty-five per cent of it was working at any one time. Like most of the equipment on Thalassa, it had been designed by long-dead geniuses so that catastrophic breakdowns were virtually impossible. Even if many components failed, the system would still continue to function reasonably well until someone was sufficiently exasperated to make repairs.

  The engineers called this “graceful degradation” – a phrase that, some cynics had declared, rather accurately described the Lassan way of life.

  According to the central computer, the network was now hovering around its normal ninety-five per cent serviceability, and Mayor Waldron would gladly have settled for less. Most of the village had called her during the past half-hour, and at least fifty adults and children were milling round in the council chamber – which was more than it could comfortably hold, let alone seat. The quorum for an ordinary meeting was twelve, and it sometimes took draconian measures to collect even that number of warm bodies in one place. The rest of Tarna’s five hundred and sixty inhabitants preferred to watch – and vote, if they felt sufficiently interested – in the comfort of their own homes.

  There had also been two calls from the provincial governor, one from the president’s office, and one from one North Island news service, all making the same completely unnecessary request. Each had received the same short answer: Of course we’ll tell you if anything happens … and thanks for your interest.

  Mayor Waldron did not like excitement, and her moderately successful career as a local administrator had been based on avoiding it. Sometimes, of course, that was impossible; her veto would hardly have deflected the hurricane of ‘09, which – until today – had been the century’s most notable event.

  “Quiet, everybody!” she cried. “Reena – leave those shells alone – someone went to a lot of trouble arranging them! Time you were in bed, anyway! Billy – off the table! Now!”

  The surprising speed with which order was restored showed that, for once, the villagers were anxious to hear what their mayor had to say. She switched off the insistent beeping of her wrist-phone and routed the call to the message centre.

  “Frankly, I don’t know much more than you do – and it’s not likely we’ll get any more information for several hours. But it certainly was some kind of spacecraft, and it had already reentered – I suppose I should say entered – when it passed over us. Since there’s nowhere else for it to go on Thalassa, presumably it will come back to the Three Islands sooner or later. That might take hours if it’s going right round the planet.”

  “Any attempt at radio contact?” somebody asked.

  “Yes, but no luck so far.”

  “Should we even try?” an anxious voice said.

  A brief hush fell upon the whole assembly; then Councillor Simmons, Mayor Waldron’s chief gadfly, gave a snort of disgust.

  “That’s ridiculous. Whatever we do, they can find us in about ten minutes. Anyway, they probably know exactly where we are.”

  “I agree completely with the councillor,” Mayor Waldron said, relishing this unusual opportunity. “Any colony ship will certainly have maps of Thalassa. They may be a thousand years old – but they’ll show First Landing.”

  “But suppose – just suppose – that they are aliens?”

  The mayor sighed; she thought that thesis had died through sheer exhaustion, centuries ago.

  “There are no aliens,” she said firmly. “At least, none intelligent enough to go starfaring. Of course, we can never be one hundred per cent certain – but Earth searched for a thousand years with every conceivable instrument.”

  “There’s another possibility,” said Mirissa, who was standing with Brant and Kumar near the back of the chamber. Every head turned towards her, bu
t Brant looked slightly annoyed. Despite his love for Mirissa, there were times when he wished that she was not quite so well-informed, and that her family had not been in charge of the Archives for the last five generations.

  “What’s that, my dear?”

  Now it was Mirissa’s turn to be annoyed, though she concealed her irritation. She did not enjoy being condescended to by someone who was not really very intelligent, though undoubtedly shrewd – or perhaps cunning was the better word. The fact that Mayor Waldron was always making eyes at Brant did not bother Mirissa in the least; it merely amused her, and she could even feel a certain sympathy for the older woman.

  “It could be another robot seedship, like the one that brought our ancestor’s gene patterns to Thalassa.”

  “But now – so late?”

  “Why not? The first seeders could only reach a few percent of light velocity. Earth kept improving them – right up to the time it was destroyed. As the later models were almost ten times faster, the earlier ones were overtaken in a century or so; many of them must still be on the way. Don’t you agree, Brant?”

  Mirissa was always careful to bring him into any discussion and, if possible, to make him think he had originated it. She was well aware of his feelings of inferiority and did not wish to add to them.

  Sometimes it was rather lonely being the brightest person in Tarna; although she networked with half a dozen of her mental peers on the Three Islands, she seldom met them in the face-to-face encounters that, even after all these millennia, no communications technology could really match.

  “It’s an interesting idea,” Brant said. “You could be right.”

  Although history was not his strong point, Brant Falconer had a technician’s knowledge of the complex series of events that had led to the colonization of Thalassa. “And what shall we do,” he asked, “if it’s another seedship, and tries to colonize us all over again? Say ‘Thanks very much, but not today’?”