The Songs of Distant Earth Page 11

  “Because you’ve descended from a long line of librarians,” Moses Kaldor said, “you only think in megabytes. But may I remind you that the name “library” comes from a word meaning book. Do you have books on Thalassa?”

  “Of course we do,” Mirissa said indignantly; she had not yet learned to tell when Kaldor was joking. “Millions … well, thousands. There’s a man on North Island who prints about ten a year, in editions of a few hundred. They’re beautiful – and very expensive. They all go as gifts for special occasions. I had one on my twenty-first birthday – Alice in Wonderland.”

  “I’d like to see it someday. I’ve always loved books, and have almost a hundred on the ship. Perhaps that’s why whenever I hear someone talking bytes, I divide mentally by a million and think of one book … one gigabyte equals a thousand books, and so on. That’s the only way I can grasp what’s really involved when people talk about data banks and information transfer. Now, how big is your library?”

  Without taking her eyes off Kaldor, Mirissa let her fingers wander over the keyboard of her console.

  “That’s another thing I’ve never been able to do,” he said admiringly. “Someone once said that after the twenty-first century, the human race divided into two species – Verbals and Digitals. I can use a keyboard when I have to, of course – but I prefer to talk to my electronic colleagues.”

  “As of the last hourly check,” Mirissa said, “six hundred and forty-five terabytes.”

  “Um – almost a billion books. And what was the initial size of the library?”

  “I can tell you that without looking it up. Six hundred and forty.”

  “So in seven hundred years –”

  “Yes, yes – we’ve managed to produce only a few million books.”

  “I’m not criticizing; after all, quality is far more important than quantity. I’d like you to show me what you consider the best works of Lassan literature – music, too. The problem we have to decide is what to give you. Magellan has over a thousand megabooks aboard, in the General Access bank. Do you realize just what that implies?”

  “If I said “Yes”, it would stop you from telling me. I’m not that cruel.”

  “Thank you, my dear. Seriously, it’s a terrifying problem that’s haunted me for years. Sometimes I think that the Earth was destroyed none too soon; the human race was being crushed by the information it was generating.”

  “At the end of the Second Millennium, it was producing only – only! – the equivalent of a million books a year. And I’m referring merely to information that was presumed to be of some permanent value, so it was stored indefinitely.”

  “By the Third Millennium, the figure had multiplied by at least a hundred. Since writing was invented, until the end of Earth, it’s been estimated that ten thousand million books were produced. And as I told you, we have about ten per cent of that on board.”

  “If we dumped it all on you, even assuming you have the storage capacity, you’d be overwhelmed. It would be no kindness – it would totally inhibit your cultural and scientific growth. And most of the material would mean nothing at all to you; you’d take centuries to sort the wheat from the chaff.”

  Strange, Kaldor said to himself, that I’ve not thought of the analogy before. This is precisely the danger that the opponents of SETI kept raising. Well, we never communicated with extraterrestrial intelligence, or even detected it. But the Lassans have done just that – and the ETs are us …

  Yet despite their totally different backgrounds, he and Mirissa had so much in common. Her curiosity and intelligence were traits to be encouraged; not even among his fellow crew members was there anyone with whom he could have such stimulating conversations. Sometimes Kaldor was so hard put to answer her questions that the only defence was a counterattack.

  “I’m surprised,” he told her after a particularly thorough cross-examination on Solar politics, “that you never took over from your father and worked here full-time. This would be the perfect job for you.”

  “I was tempted. But he spent all his life answering other people’s questions and assembling files for the bureaucrats on North Island. He never had time to do anything himself.”

  “And you?”

  “I like collecting facts, but I also like to see them used. That’s why they made me deputy director of the Tarna Development Project.”

  “Which I fear may have been slightly sabotaged by our operations. Or so the director told me when I met him coming out of the mayor’s office.”

  “You know Brant wasn’t serious. It’s a long-range plan, with only approximate completion dates. If the Olympic Ice Stadium is built here, then the project may have to be modified – for the better, most of us believe. Of course, the Northers want to have it on their side – they think that First Landing is quite enough for us.”

  Kaldor chuckled; he knew all about the generations-old rivalry between the two islands.

  “Well – isn’t it? Especially now that you have us as an additional attraction. You mustn’t be too greedy.”

  They had grown to know – and like – each other so well that they could joke about Thalassa or Magellan with equal impartiality. And there were no longer any secrets between them; they could talk frankly about Loren and Brant, and at last Moses Kaldor found he could speak of Earth.

  “… Oh, I’ve lost count of my various jobs, Mirissa – most of them weren’t very important, anyway. The one I held longest was Professor of Political Science in Cambridge, Mars. And you can’t imagine the confusion that caused, because there was an older university at a place called Cambridge, Mass – and a still older one in Cambridge, England.”

  “But towards the end, Evelyn and I got more and more involved in the immediate social problems, and the planning for the Final Exodus. It seemed that I had some – well, oratorical talent – and could help people face what future was left to them.”

  “Yet we never really believed that the End would be in our time – who could! And if anyone had ever told me that I should leave Earth and everything I loved…”

  A spasm of emotion crossed his face, and Mirissa waited in sympathetic silence until he had regained his composure. There were so many questions she wanted to ask that it might take a lifetime to answer them all; and she had only a year before Magellan set forth once more for the stars.

  “When they told me I was needed, I used all my philosophical and debating skills to prove them wrong. I was too old; all the knowledge I had was stored in the memory banks; other men could do a better job … everything except the real reason.”

  “In the end, Evelyn made up my mind for me; it’s true, Mirissa, that in some ways women are much stronger than men – but why am I telling you that?”

  “They need you,” said her last message. “We have spent forty years together – now there is only a month left. Go with my love. Do not try to find me.”

  “I shall never know if she saw the end of the Earth as I did – when we were leaving the solar system.”

  25. Scorp

  He had seen Brant stripped before, when they had gone on that memorable boat-ride, but had never realized how formidably muscled the younger man was. Though Loren had always taken good care of his body, there had been little opportunity for sport or exercise since leaving Earth. Brant, however, was probably involved in some heavy physical exertion every day of his life – and it showed. Loren would have absolutely no chance against him unless he could conjure up one of the reputed martial arts of old Earth – none of which he had ever known.

  The whole thing was perfectly ridiculous. There were his fellow officers grinning their stupid heads off. There was Captain Bey holding a stopwatch. And there was Mirissa with an expression that could only be described as smug.

  “… two … one … zero … GO!” said the captain. Brant moved like a striking cobra. Loren tried to avoid the onslaught but discovered to his horror that he had no control over his body. Time seemed to have slowed down … his legs were made of lead a
nd refused to obey him … he was about to lose not only Mirissa but his very manhood …

  At that point, luckily, he had woken up, but the dream still bothered him. Its sources were obvious, but that did not make it any the less disturbing. He wondered if he should tell it to Mirissa.

  Certainly he could never tell it to Brant, who was still perfectly friendly but whose company he now found embarrassing. Today, however, he positively welcomed it; if he was right, they were now confronted with something very much greater than their own private affairs.

  He could hardly wait to see the reaction when Brant met the unexpected visitor who had arrived during the night.

  The concrete-lined channel that brought seawater into the freezing plant was a hundred metres long and ended in a circular pool holding just enough water for one snowflake. Since pure ice was an indifferent building material, it was necessary to strengthen it, and the long strands of kelp from the Great Eastern Prairie made a cheap and convenient reinforcement. The frozen composite had been nicknamed icecrete and was guaranteed not to flow, glacier like, during the weeks and months of Magellan’s acceleration.

  “There it is.” Loren stood with Brant Falconer at the edge of the pool, looking down through a break in the matted raft of marine vegetation. The creature eating the kelp was built on the same general plan as a terrestrial lobster – but was more than twice the size of a man.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that before?”

  “No,” Brant answered fervently, “And I’m not at all sorry. What a monster! How did you catch it?”

  “We didn’t. It swam – or crawled – in from the sea, along the channel. Then it found the kelp and decided to have a free lunch.”

  “No wonder it has pinchers like that; those stems are really tough.”

  “Well, at least it’s a vegetarian.”

  “I’m not sure I’d care to put that to the test.”

  “I was hoping you could tell us something about it.”

  “We don’t know a hundredth of the creatures in the Lassan sea. One day we’ll build some research subs and go into deep water. But there are so many other priorities, and not enough people are interested.”

  They soon will be, Lorenson thought grimly. Let’s see how long Brant takes to notice for himself…

  “Science Officer Varley has been checking the records. She tells me that there was something very much like this on Earth millions of years ago. The palaeontologists gave it a good name – sea scorpion. Those ancient oceans must have been exciting places.”

  “Just the sort of thing Kumar would like to chase,” Brant said. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Study it and then let it go.”

  “I see you’ve already tagged it.”

  So Brant’s noticed, thought Loren. Good for him.

  “No – we haven’t. Look more carefully.”

  There was a puzzled expression on Brant’s face as he knelt at the side of the tank. The giant scorpion ignored him completely as it continued to snip away at the seaweed with its formidable pinchers.

  One of those pinchers was not altogether as nature had designed it. At the hinge of the right-hand claw there was a loop of wire twisted round several times like a crude bracelet.

  Brant recognized that wire. His jaw dropped, and for a moment he was at a loss for words.

  “So I guessed right,” Lorenson said. “Now you know what happened to your fish trap. I think we’d better talk to Dr. Varley again – not to mention your own scientists.”

  “I’m an astronomer,” Anne Varley had protested from her office aboard Magellan. “What you need is a combination of zoologist, palaeontologist, ethologist – not to mention a few other disciplines. But I’ve done my best to set up a search program, and you’ll find the result dumped in your Bank 2 under file heading SCORP. Now all you need to do is to search that – and good luck to you.”

  Despite her disclaimer, Dr. Varley had done her usual efficient job of winnowing through the almost-infinite store of knowledge in the ship’s main memory banks. A pattern was beginning to emerge; meanwhile, the source of all the attention still browsed peacefully in its tank, taking no notice of the continual flow of visitors who came to study or merely to gape.

  Despite its terrifying appearance – those pinchers were almost half a metre long and looked capable of taking off a man’s head with one neat snip – the creature seemed completely nonaggressive. It made no effort to escape, perhaps because it had found such an abundant source of food. Indeed, it was generally believed that some trace chemical from the kelp had been responsible for luring it here.

  If it was able to swim, it showed no inclination to do so, but was content to crawl around on its six stubby legs. Its four-metre long body was encased in a vividly coloured exoskeleton, articulated to give it surprising flexibility.

  Another remarkable feature was the fringe of palps, or small tentacles, surrounding the beaklike mouth. They bore a striking – indeed, uncomfortable – resemblance to stubby human fingers and seemed equally dexterous. Although handling food appeared to be their main function, they were clearly capable of much more, and it was fascinating to watch the way that the scorp used them in conjunction with its claws.

  Its two sets of eyes – one pair large, and apparently intended for low light, since during the daytime they were kept closed – must also provide it with excellent vision. Altogether, it was superbly equipped to survey and to manipulate its environment – the prime requirements for intelligence.

  Yet no one would have suspected intelligence in such a bizarre creature if not for the wire twisted purposefully around its right claw. That, however, proved nothing. As the records showed, there had been animals on Earth who collected foreign objects – often man-made – and used them in extraordinary ways.

  If it had not been fully documented, no one would have believed the Australian bowerbird’s, or the North American pack rat’s, mania for collecting shiny or coloured objects, and even arranging them in artistic displays. Earth had been full of such mysteries, which now would never be solved. Perhaps the Thalassan scorp was merely following the same mindless tradition, and for equally inscrutable reasons.

  There were several theories. The most popular – because it put the least demands on the scorp’s mentality – was that the wire bracelet was merely an ornament. Fixing it in place must have required some dexterity, and there was a good deal of debate as to whether the creature could have done it without assistance.

  That assistance, of course, could have been human. Perhaps the scorp was some eccentric scientist’s escaped pet, but this seemed very improbable. Since everyone on Thalassa knew everyone else, such a secret could not have been kept for long.

  There was one other theory, the most farfetched of all – yet the most thought provoking.

  Perhaps the bracelet was a badge of rank.

  26. Snowflake Rising

  It was highly skilled work with long periods of boredom, which gave Lieutenant Owen Fletcher plenty of time to think. Far too much time, in fact.

  He was an angler, reeling in a six-hundred-ton catch on a line of almost unimaginable strength. Once a day the self-guided, captive probe would dive down towards Thalassa, spinning out the cable behind it along a complex, thirty-thousand-kilometre curve. It would home automatically on to the waiting payload, and when all the checks had been completed, the hoisting would begin.

  The critical moments were at lift-off, when the snowflake was snatched out of the freezing plant, and the final approach to Magellan, when the huge hexagon of ice had to be brought to rest only a kilometre from the ship. Lifting began at midnight, and from Tarna to the stationary orbit in which Magellan was hovering, took just under six hours.

  If Magellan was in daylight during the rendezvous and assembly, the first priority was keeping the snowflake in shadow, lest the fierce rays of Thalassa’s sun boil off the precious cargo into space. Once it was safely behind the big radiation shield, the claws of the r
obot teleoperators could rip away the insulating foil that had protected the ice during its ascent to orbit.

  Next the lifting cradle had to be removed, to be sent back for another load. Sometimes the huge metal plate, shaped like a hexagonal saucepan lid designed by some eccentric cook, stuck to the ice, and a little carefully regulated heating was required to detach it.

  At last, the geometrically perfect ice floe would be poised motionless a hundred metres away from Magellan, and the really tricky part would begin. The combination of six hundred tons of mass with zero weight was utterly outside the range of human instinctive reactions; only computers could tell what thrusts were needed, in what direction, at what moments of time, to key the artificial iceberg into position. But there was always the possibility of some emergency or unexpected problem beyond the capabilities of even the most intelligent robot; although Fletcher had not yet had to intervene, he would be ready if the time came.

  I’m helping to build, he told himself, a giant honeycomb of ice. The first layer of the comb was now almost completed, and there were two more to go. Barring accidents, the shield would be finished in another hundred and fifty days. It would be tested under low acceleration, to make sure that all the blocks had fused together properly; and then Magellan would set forth upon the final leg of its journey to the stars.

  Fletcher was still doing his job conscientiously – but with his mind, not with his heart. That was already lost to Thalassa.

  He had been born on Mars, and this world had everything his own barren planet had lacked. He had seen the labour of generations of his ancestors dissolve in flame; why start again centuries from now on yet another world – when Paradise was here?

  And, of course, a girl was waiting for him, down there on South Island …

  He had almost decided that when the time came, he would jump ship. The Terrans could go on without him, to deploy their strength and skills – and perhaps break their hearts and bodies – against the stubborn rocks of Sagan 2. He wished them luck; when he had done his duty, his home was here.