The Songs of Distant Earth Read online

  “It’s always seemed a little odd to me,” Kaldor said mildly, “that after two thousand years we’ve not found anything better than radio waves.”

  “The Universe came equipped with only one electromagnetic spectrum, Dr. Kaldor – we have to make the best use of it we can. And the Lassans are fortunate; because even the extreme ends of the North and South Islands are only three hundred kilometres apart, Mount Krakan can blanket them both. They can manage very nicely without comsats.

  “The only problem is accessibility – and weather. The local joke is that Krakan’s the only place on the planet that has any. Every few years someone has to climb the mountain, repair a few antennas, replace some solar cells and batteries – and shovel away a lot of snow. No real problem but a lot of hard work.”

  “Which,” interjected Surgeon-Commander Newton, “Lassans avoid whenever possible. Not that I blame them for saving their energies for more important things – like sports and athletics.”

  She could have added “making love”, but that was already a sensitive subject with many of her colleagues, and the remark might not be appreciated.

  “Why do they have to climb the mountain?” Kaldor asked. “Why don’t they just fly to the top? They’ve got vertical-lift aircraft.”

  “Yes, but the air’s thin up there – and what there is tends to be boisterous. After several bad accidents, the Lassans decided to do it the hard way.”

  “I see,” Kaldor said thoughtfully. “It’s the old non-interference problem. Will we weaken their self-reliance? Only to a trivial extent, I’d say. And if we don’t accede to such a modest request, we’d provoke resentment. Justified, too, considering the help they’re giving us with the ice plant.”

  “I feel exactly the same way. Any objections? Very good. Mister Lorenson – please make the arrangements. Use whichever spaceplane you think fit, as long as it’s not needed for Operation Snowflake.”

  Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.

  From the rim of the great caldera, he could look down into a sea of lava, long since congealed but still emitting wisps of smoke from a dozen crevasses. Beyond that, far to the west, both the big islands were clearly visible, lying like dark clouds on the horizon.

  The stinging cold and the need to make each breath count, added a zest to every moment. Long ago he had come across a phrase in some ancient travel or adventure book: “Air like wine.” At the time he had wished he could ask the author just how much wine he’d breathed lately; but now the expression no longer seemed so ridiculous.

  “Everything’s unloaded, Moses. We’re ready to fly back.”

  “Thank you, Loren. I felt like waiting here until you collect everyone in the evening, but it might be risky to stay too long at this altitude.”

  “The engineers have brought oxygen bottles, of course,”

  “I wasn’t thinking only of that. My namesake once got into a lot of trouble on a mountain.”

  “Sorry – I don’t understand.”

  “Never mind; it was a long, long time ago.”

  As the spaceplane lifted off the rim of the crater, the work party waved cheerfully up at them. Now that all the tools and equipment had been unloaded, they were engaged in the essential preliminary to any Lassan project. Someone was making tea.

  Loren was careful to avoid the complex mass of antennas, of practically every known design, as he climbed slowly up into the sky. They were all aimed towards the two islands dimly visible in the west; if he interrupted their multiple beams countless gigabytes of information would be irretrievably lost, and the Lassans would be sorry that they ever asked him to help.

  “You’re not heading towards Tarna?”

  “In a minute. I want to look at the mountain first. Ah – there it is!”

  “What? Oh, I see. Krakan!”

  The borrowed expletive was doubly appropriate. Beneath them, the ground had been split into a deep ravine about a hundred metres wide. And at the bottom of that ravine lay Hell.

  The fires from the heart of this young world were still burning here, just below the surface. A glowing river of yellow, flecked with crimson, was moving sluggishly towards the sea. How could they be sure, Kaldor wondered, that the volcano had really settled down and was not merely biding its time?

  But the river of lava was not their objective. Beyond it lay a small crater about a kilometre across, on the rim of which stood the stump of a single ruined tower. As they came closer, they could see that there had once been three such towers, equally spaced around the rim of the caldera, but of the other two only the foundations were left.

  The floor of the crater was covered with a mass of tangled cables and metal sheets, obviously the remains of the great radio reflector that had once been suspended here. At its centre lay the wreckage of the receiving and transmitting equipment, partly submerged in a small lake formed by the frequent rainstorms over the mountain.

  They circled the ruins of the last link with Earth, neither caring to intrude on the thoughts of the other. At last Loren broke the silence.

  “It’s a mess – but it wouldn’t be hard to repair. Sagan 2 is only twelve degrees north – closer to the Equator than Earth was. Even easier to point the beam there with an offset antenna.”

  “Excellent idea. When we’ve finished building our shield, we could help them get started. Not that they should need much help, for there’s certainly no hurry. After all, it will be almost four centuries before they can hear from us again – even if we start transmitting just as soon as we arrive.”

  Loren finished recording the scene, and prepared to fly down the slope of the mountain before turning towards South Island. He had descended scarcely a thousand metres when Kaldor said in a puzzled voice, “What’s that smoke over to the northeast? It looks like a signal.”

  Halfway to the horizon, a thin white column was rising against the cloudless blue of the Thalassan sky. It had certainly not been there a few minutes before.

  “Let’s have a look. Perhaps there’s a boat in trouble.”

  “You know what it reminds me of?” said Kaldor.

  Loren answered with a silent shrug.

  “A spouting whale. When they came up to breathe, the big cetaceans used to blow out a column of water vapour. It looked very much like that.”

  “There are two things wrong with your interesting theory,” Loren said. “That column is now at least a kilometre high. Some whale!”

  “Agreed. And whale spouts only lasted a few seconds – this is continuous. What’s your second objection?”

  “According to the chart, that’s not open water. So much for the boat theory.”

  “But that’s ridiculous – Thalassa is all ocean – oh, I see. The Great Eastern Prairie. Yes – there’s its edge. You’d almost imagine that was land down there.”

  Coming swiftly towards them was the floating continent of seaborne vegetation which covered much of the Thalassan ocean and generated virtually all the oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere. It was one continuous sheet of vivid – almost virulent – green and looked solid enough to walk upon. Only the complete absence of hills or any other change of elevation, revealed its true nature.

  But in one region, about a kilometre across, the floating prairie was neither flat nor unbroken. Something was boiling beneath the surface, throwing up great clouds of steam and occasional masses of tangled weed.

  “I should have remembered,” Kaldor said. “Child of Krakan.”

  “Of course,” Loren answered. “That’s the first time it’s been active since we arrived. So this is how the islands were born.”

  “Yes – the volcanic plume is moving steadily eastward. Perhaps in a few hundred years the Lassans will have a whole archipelago.”

  They circled for another few minutes, then turned back towards East Island. To most spectators, this submarine volcano, still struggling to be born, would have been an awesome sight.

&nbs
p; But not to men who had seen the destruction of a solar system.

  23. Ice Day

  The presidential yacht, alias Inter-Island Ferry Number 1, had certainly never looked so handsome at any previous stage of its three-centuries-long career. Not only was it festooned with bunting, but it had been given a new coat of white paint. Unfortunately, either paint or labour had become exhausted before the job was quite finished, so the captain had to be careful to anchor with only the starboard side visible from land.

  President Farradine was also ceremonially attired in a striking outfit (designed by Mrs. President) that made him look like a cross between a Roman emperor and a pioneer astronaut. He did not appear altogether at ease in it; Captain Sirdar Bey was glad that his uniform consisted of the plain white shorts, open-neck shirt, shoulder badges, and gold-braided cap in which he felt completely at home – though it was hard to remember when he had last worn it.

  Despite the president’s tendency to trip over his toga, the official tour had gone very well, and the beautiful onboard model of the freezing plant had worked perfectly. It had produced an unlimited supply of hexagonal ice wafers just the right size to fit into a tumbler of cool drink. But the visitors could hardly be blamed for failing to understand the appropriateness of the name Snowflake; after all, few on Thalassa had ever seen snow.

  And now they had left the model behind to inspect the real thing, which covered several hectares of the Tarna coastline. It had taken some time to shuttle the president and his entourage, Captain Bey and his officers, and all the other guests from yacht to shore. Now, in the last light of day, they were standing respectfully around the rim of a hexagonal block of ice twenty metres across and two metres thick. Not only was it the largest mass of frozen water that anyone had ever seen – it was probably the largest on the planet. Even at the Poles, ice seldom had a chance to form. With no major continents to block circulation, the rapidly moving currents from the equatorial regions quickly melted any incipient floes.

  “But why is it that shape?” the president asked.

  Deputy Captain Malina sighed; he was quite sure that this had already been explained several times.

  “It’s the old problem of covering any surface with identical tiles,” he said patiently. “You have only three choices – squares, triangles, or hexagons. In our case, the hex is slightly more efficient and easier to handle. The blocks – over two hundred of them, each weighing six hundred tons – will be keyed into each other to build up the shield. It will be a kind of ice-sandwich three layers thick. When we accelerate, all the blocks will fuse together to make a single huge disk. Or a blunt cone, to be precise.”

  “You’ve given me an idea.” The president was showing more animation than he had done all afternoon. “We’ve never had ice-skating on Thalassa. It was a beautiful sport – and there was a game called ice-hockey, though I’m not sure I’d like to revive that, from the vids I’ve seen of it. But it would be wonderful if you could make us an ice-rink in time for the Olympics. Would that be possible?”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” Deputy Captain Malina replied, rather faintly. “It’s a very interesting idea. Perhaps you’ll let me know how much ice you’d need.”

  “I’ll be delighted. And it will be an excellent way of using all this freezing plant when it’s done its job.”

  A sudden explosion saved Malina the necessity of a reply. The fireworks had started, and for the next twenty minutes the sky above the island erupted with polychromatic incandescence.

  The Lassans loved fireworks and indulged in them at every opportunity. The display was intermingled with laser imagery – even more spectacular, and considerably safer, but lacking the smell of gunpowder that added that final touch of magic.

  When all the festivities were over and the VIPs had departed to the ship, Deputy Captain Malina said thoughtfully, “The president’s full of surprises, even though he does have a one-track mind. I’m tired of hearing about his damned Olympics – but that ice-rink is an excellent idea and should generate a lot of goodwill for us.”

  “I’ve won my bet, though,” Lieutenant Commander Lorenson said.

  “What bet was that?” Captain Bey asked.

  Malina gave a laugh.

  “I would never have believed it. Sometimes the Lassans don’t seem to have any curiosity – they take everything for granted. Though I suppose we should be flattered that they have such faith in our technological know-how. Perhaps they think we have antigravity!”

  “It was Loren’s idea that I should leave it out of the briefing – and he was right. President Farradine never bothered to ask what would have been my very first question – just how we’re going to lift a hundred and fifty thousand tons of ice up to Magellan.”

  24. Archive

  Moses Kaldor was happy to be left alone, for as many hours or days as he could be spared, in the cathedral calm of First Landing. He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and knowledge of mankind. The experience was both exhilarating and depressing; a whole universe lay at his fingertips, but the fraction of it he could explore in an entire lifetime was so negligible that he was sometimes almost overwhelmed with despair. He was like a hungry man presented with a banquet that stretched as far as the eye could see – a feast so staggering that it completely destroyed his appetite.

  And yet all this wealth of wisdom and culture was only a tiny fraction of mankind’s heritage; much that Moses Kaldor knew and loved was missing – not, he was well aware, by accident but by deliberate design.

  A thousand years ago, men of genius and goodwill had rewritten history and gone through the libraries of Earth deciding what should be saved and what should be abandoned to the flames. The criterion of choice was simple though often very hard to apply. Only if it would contribute to survival and social stability on the new worlds would any work of literature, any record of the past, be loaded into the memory of the seedships.

  The task was, of course, impossible as well as heartbreaking. With tears in their eyes, the selection panels had thrown away the Veda, the Bible, the Tripitaka, the Qur’an, and all the immense body of literature – fiction and nonfiction – that was based upon them. Despite all the wealth of beauty and wisdom these works contained, they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds.

  Lost also in the great purge were virtually all the works of the supreme novelists, poets, and playwrights, which would in any case have been meaningless without their philosophical and cultural background. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy, Melville, Proust – the last great fiction writer before the electronic revolution overwhelmed the printed page – all that was left were a few hundred thousand carefully selected passages. Excluded was everything that concerned war, crime, violence, and the destructive passions. If the newly designed – and it was hoped improved – successors to H. sapiens rediscovered these, they would doubtless create their own literature in response. There was no need to give them premature encouragement.

  Music – except for opera – had fared better, as had the visual arts. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of material was so overwhelming that selection had been imperative, though sometimes arbitrary. Future generations on many worlds would wonder about Mozart’s first thirty-eight symphonies, Beethoven’s Second and Fourth, and Sibelius’s Third to Sixth.

  Moses Kaldor was deeply aware of his responsibility, and also conscious of his inadequacy – of any one man’s inadequacy, however talented he might be – to handle the task that confronted him. Up there aboard Magellan, safely stored in its gigantic memory banks, was much that the people of Thalassa had never known and certainly much that they would greedily accept and enjoy, even if they did not wholly understand. The superb twenty-fifth century recreation of the Odyssey, the war classics that looked back in anguish across half
a millennium of peace, the great Shakespearean tragedies in Feinberg’s miraculous Lingua translation, Lee Chow’s War and Peace – it would take hours and days even to name all the possibilities.

  Sometimes, as he sat in the library of the First Landing Complex, Kaldor was tempted to play god with these reasonably happy and far-from-innocent people. He would compare the listings from the memory banks here with those aboard the ship, noting what had been expunged or condensed. Even though he disagreed in principle with any form of censorship, often he had to admit the wisdom of the deletions – at least in the days when the colony was founded. But now that it was successfully established, perhaps a little disturbance, or injection of creativity, might be in order …

  Occasionally, he was disturbed himself either by calls from the ship or by parties of young Lassans being given guided tours back to the beginning of their history. He did not mind the interruptions, and there was one that he positively welcomed.

  Most afternoons, except when what passed for urgent business in Tarna prevented her, Mirissa would come riding up the hill on her beautiful palomino gelding, Bobby. The visitors had been much surprised to find horses on Thalassa, since they had never seen any alive on Earth. But the Lassans loved animals, and had recreated many from the vast files of genetic material they had inherited. Sometimes they were quite useless – or even a nuisance, like the engaging little squirrel monkeys that were always stealing small objects from Tarnan households.

  Mirissa would invariably bring some delicacy – usually fruit or one of the many local cheeses – which Kaldor would accept with gratitude. But he was even more grateful for her company; who would believe that often he had addressed five million people – more than half the last generation! – yet was now content with an audience of one …