The Songs of Distant Earth Page 3

  They got quietly out of the car and walked up to the ship, then circled it until they came to the sharply defined wall of light. Brant shielded his eyes and peered around the edge, squinting against the glare.

  Councillor Simmons had been perfectly correct. It was some kind of aircraft – or aerospacecraft – and a very small one at that. Could the Northers? – No, that was absurd. There was no conceivable use for such a vehicle in the limited area of the Three Islands, and its development could not possibly have been concealed.

  It was shaped like a blunt arrowhead and must have landed vertically, for there were no marks on the surrounding grass. The light came from a single source in a streamlined dorsal housing, and a small red beacon was flashing on and off just above that. Altogether, it was a reassuringly – indeed, disappointingly – ordinary machine. One that could not conceivably have travelled the dozen light-years to the nearest known colony.

  Suddenly, the main light went out, leaving the little group of observers momentarily blind. When he recovered his night vision, Brant could see that there were windows in the forepart of the machine, glowing faintly with internal illumination. Why – it looked almost like a manned vehicle, not the robot craft they had taken for granted!

  Mayor Waldron had come to exactly the same astonishing conclusion.

  “It’s not a robot – there are people in it! Let’s not waste any more time. Shine your flashlight on me, Brant, so they can see us.”

  “Helga!” Councillor Simmons protested.

  “Don’t be an ass, Charlie. Let’s go, Brant.”

  What was it that the first man on the Moon had said, almost two millennia ago? “One small step …” They had taken about twenty when a door opened in the side of the vehicle, a double-jointed ramp flipped rapidly downward, and two humanoids walked out to meet them.

  That was Brant’s first reaction. Then he realized that he had been misled by the colour of their skin – or what he could see of it, through the flexible, transparent film that covered them from head to foot.

  They were not humanoids – they were human. If he never went out into the sun again, he might become almost as bleached as they were.

  The Mayor was holding out her hands in the traditional “See – no weapons!” gesture as old as history.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll understand me,” she said, “but welcome to Thalassa.”

  The visitors smiled, and the older of the two – a handsome, grey-haired man in his late sixties – held up his hands in response.

  “On the contrary,” he answered, in one of the deepest and most beautifully modulated voices that Brant had ever heard, “we understand you perfectly. We’re delighted to meet you.”

  For a moment, the welcoming party stood in stunned silence. But it was silly, thought Brant, to have been surprised. After all, they did not have the slightest difficulty understanding the speech of men who had lived two thousand years ago. When sound recording was invented, it froze the basic phoneme patterns of all languages. Vocabularies would expand, syntax and grammar might be modified – but pronunciation would remain stable for millennia.

  Mayor Waldron was the first to recover.

  “Well, that certainly saves a lot of trouble,” she said rather lamely. “But where have you come from? I’m afraid we’ve lost touch with – our neighbours – since our deep-space antenna was destroyed.”

  The older man glanced at his much taller companion, and some silent message flashed between them. Then he again turned towards the waiting mayor. There was no mistaking the sadness in that beautiful voice, as he made his preposterous claim.

  “It may be difficult for you to believe this,” he said. “But we’re not from any of the colonies. We’ve come straight from Earth.”

  II – Magellan

  6. Planetfall

  Even before he opened his eyes, Loren knew exactly where he was, and he found this quite surprising. After sleeping for two hundred years, some confusion would have been understandable, but it seemed only yesterday that he had made his last entry in the ship’s log. And as far as he could remember, he had not had a single dream. He was thankful for that.

  Still keeping his eyes closed, he concentrated one at a time on all his other sense channels. He could hear a soft murmur of voices, quietly reassuring. There was the familiar sighing of the air exchangers, and he could feel a barely perceptible current, wafting pleasant antiseptic smells across his face.

  The one sensation he did not feel was that of weight. He lifted his right arm effortlessly: it remained floating in midair, awaiting his next order.

  “Hello, Mister Lorenson,” a cheerfully bullying voice said. “So you’ve condescended to join us again. How do you feel?”

  Loren finally opened his eyes and tried to focus them on the blurred figure floating beside his bed.

  “Hello … doctor. I’m fine. And hungry.”

  “That’s always a good sign. You can get dressed – don’t move too quickly for a while. And you can decide later if you want to keep that beard.”

  Loren directed his still-floating hand towards his chin; he was surprised at the amount of stubble he found there. Like the majority of men, he had never taken the option of permanent eradication – whole volumes of psychology had been written on that subject. Perhaps it was time to think about doing so; amusing how such trivia cluttered up the mind, even at a moment like this.

  “We’ve arrived safely?”

  “Of course – otherwise you’d still be asleep. Everything’s gone according to plan. The ship started to wake us a month ago – now we’re in orbit above Thalassa. The maintenance crews have checked all the systems; now it’s your turn to do some work. And we have a little surprise for you.”

  “A pleasant one, I hope.”

  “So do we. Captain Bey has a briefing two hours from now, in Main Assembly. If you don’t want to move yet, you can watch from here.”

  “I’ll come to assembly – I’d like to meet everyone. But can I have breakfast first? It’s been a long time.”

  Captain Sirdar Bey looked tired but happy as he welcomed the fifteen men and women who had just been revived, and introduced them to the thirty who formed the current A and B crews. According to ship’s regulations, C crew was supposed to be sleeping – but several figures were lurking at the back of the Assembly room, pretending not to be there.

  “I’m happy you’ve joined us,” he told the newcomers. “It’s good to see some fresh faces around here. And it’s better still to see a planet and to know that our ship’s carried out the first two hundred years of the mission plan without any serious anomalies. Here’s Thalassa, right on schedule.”

  Everyone turned towards the visual display covering most of one wall. Much of it was devoted to data and state-of-ship information, but the largest section might have been a window looking out into space. It was completely filled by a stunningly beautiful image of a blue-white globe, almost fully illuminated. Probably everyone in the room had noticed the heart-breaking similarity to the Earth as seen from high above the Pacific – almost all water, with only a few isolated landmasses.

  And there was land here – a compact grouping of three islands, partly hidden by a veil of cloud. Loren thought of Hawaii, which he had never seen and which no longer existed. But there was one fundamental difference between the two planets. The other hemisphere of Earth was mostly land; the other hemisphere of Thalassa was entirely ocean.

  “There it is,” the captain said proudly. “Just as the mission planners predicted. But there’s one detail they didn’t expect, which will certainly affect our operations.”

  “You’ll recall that Thalassa was seeded by a Mark 3A fifty-thousand unit module which left Earth in 2751 and arrived in 3109. Everything went well, and the first transmissions were received a hundred and sixty years later. They continued intermittently for almost two centuries, then suddenly stopped, after a brief message reporting a major volcanic eruption. Nothing more was ever heard, and it was assumed th
at our colony on Thalassa had been destroyed – or at any rate reduced to barbarism as seems to have happened in several other cases.”

  “For the benefit of the newcomers, let me repeat what we’ve found. Naturally, we listened out on all frequencies when we entered the system. Nothing – not even power-system leakage radiation.”

  “When we got closer, we realized that didn’t prove a thing. Thalassa has a very dense ionosphere. There might be a lot of medium – and short-wave chatter going on beneath it, and nobody outside would ever know. Microwaves would go through, of course, but maybe they don’t need them, or we haven’t been lucky enough to intercept a beam.”

  “Anyway, there’s a well-developed civilization down there. We saw the lights of their cities – towns, at least – as soon as we had a good view of the nightside. There are plenty of small industries, a little coastal traffic – no large ships – and we’ve even spotted a couple of aircraft moving at all of five hundred klicks, which will get them anywhere in fifteen minutes.”

  “Obviously, they don’t need much air transport in such a compact community, and they have a good system of roads. But we’ve still not been able to detect any communications. And no satellites, either – not even meteorological ones, which you’d think they’d need … though perhaps not, as their ships probably never get out of sight of land. There’s simply no other land to go to, of course.”

  “So there we are. It’s an interesting situation – and a very pleasant surprise. At least, I hope it will be. Now, any questions? Yes, Mister Lorenson?”

  “Have we tried to contact them, sir?”

  “Not yet; we thought it inadvisable until we know the exact level of their culture. Whatever we do, it may be a considerable shock.”

  “Do they know we’re here?”

  “Probably not.”

  “But surely – our drive – they must have seen that!”

  It was a reasonable question, since a quantum ramjet at full power was one of the most dramatic spectacles ever contrived by man. It was as brilliant as an atomic bomb, and it lasted much longer – months instead of milliseconds.

  “Possibly, but I doubt it. We were on the other side of the sun when we did most of our braking. They wouldn’t have seen us in its glare.”

  Then someone asked the question that everybody had been thinking.

  “Captain, how will this affect our mission?”

  Sirdar Bey looked thoughtfully at the speaker.

  “At this stage, it’s still quite impossible to say. A few hundred thousand other humans – or whatever the population is – could make things a lot easier for us. Or at least much more pleasant. On the other hand, if they don’t like us –”

  He gave an expressive shrug.

  “I’ve just remembered a piece of advice that an old explorer gave to one of his colleagues. If you assume that the natives are friendly, they usually are. And vice versa. “So until they prove otherwise, we’ll assume that they’re friendly. And if they’re not …”

  The Captain’s expression hardened, and his voice became that of a commander who had just brought a great ship across fifty light-years of space.

  “I’ve never claimed that might is right, but it’s always very comforting to have it.”

  7. Lords of the Last Days

  It was hard to believe that he was really and truly awake, and that life could begin again.

  Lieutenant Commander Loren Lorenson knew that he could never wholly escape from the tragedy that had shadowed more than forty generations and had reached its climax in his own lifetime. During the course of his first new day, he had one continuing fear. Not even the promise, and mystery, of the beautiful ocean-world hanging there below Magellan could keep at bay the thought: what dreams will come when I close my eyes tonight in natural sleep for the first time in two hundred years?

  He had witnessed scenes that no one could ever forget and which would haunt Mankind until the end of time. Through the ship’s telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth.

  That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen …

  … the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone …

  … the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift…

  … the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before …

  … the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away …

  … the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air …

  In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts – not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities – even countries – had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History’s closing act.

  It was a time of strange paradoxes, of wild oscillations between despair and feverish exhilaration. Many, of course, sought oblivion through the traditional routes of drugs, sex, and dangerous sports – including what were virtually miniature wars, carefully monitored and fought with agreed weapons. Equally popular was the whole spectrum of electronic catharsis, from endless video games, interactive dramas, and direct stimulation of the brain’s centres.

  Because there was no longer any reason to take heed for the future on this planet, Earth’s resources and the accumulated wealth of all the ages could be squandered with a clear conscience. In terms of material goods, all men were millionaires, rich beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors, the fruits of whose toil they had inherited. They called themselves wryly, yet not without a certain pride, the Lords of the Last Days.

  Yet though myriads sought forgetfulness, even more found satisfaction, as some men had always done, in working for goals beyond their own lifetimes. Much scientific research continued, using the immense resources that had now been freed. If a physicist needed a hundred tons of gold for an experiment, that was merely a minor problem in logistics, not budgeting.

  Three themes dominated. First was the continual monitoring of the Sun – not because there was any remaining doubt but to predict the moment of detonation to the year, the day, the hour …

  Second was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, neglected after centuries of failure, now resumed with desperate urgency – and, even to the end, with no greater success than before. To all Man’s questioning, the Universe still gave a dusty answer.

  And the third, of course, was the seeding of the nearby stars in the hope that the human race would not perish with the dying of its Sun.

  By the dawn of the final century, seedships of ever-increasing speed and sophistication had been sent to more than fifty targets. Most, as expected, had been failures, but ten had radioed back news of at least partial success. Even greater hopes were placed on the later and more advanced models, though they would not reach their distant goals until long after Earth had ceased to exist. The very last to be launched could cruise at a twentieth of the speed of light and would make planetfall in nine hundred and fifty years – if all went well.

  Loren could still remember the launching of Excalibur from its construction cradle at the Lagrangian point between Earth and Moon. Though he was only five, even then he knew that this seedship would be the very last of its kind. But why the ce
nturies-long programme had been cancelled just when it had reached technological maturity, he was still too young to understand. Nor could he have guessed how his own life would be changed, by the stunning discovery that had transformed the entire situation and given mankind a new hope, in the very last decades of terrestrial history.

  Though countless theoretical studies had been made, no one had ever been able to make a plausible case for manned space-flight even to the nearest star. That such a journey might take a century was not the decisive factor; hibernation could solve that problem. A rhesus monkey had been sleeping in the Louis Pasteur satellite hospital for almost a thousand years and still showed perfectly normal brain activity. There was no reason to suppose that human beings could not do the same – though the record, held by a patient suffering from a peculiarly baffling form of cancer, was less than two centuries.

  The biological problem had been solved; it was the engineering one that appeared insuperable. A vessel that could carry thousands of sleeping passengers, and all they needed for a new life on another world, would have to be as large as one of the great ocean liners that had once ruled the seas of Earth.

  It would be easy enough to build such a ship beyond the orbit of Mars and using the abundant resources of the asteroid belt. However, it was impossible to devise engines that could get it to the stars in any reasonable length of time.

  Even at a tenth of the speed of light, all the most promising targets were more than five hundred years away. Such a velocity had been attained by robot probes – flashing through nearby star systems and radioing back their observations during a few hectic hours of transit. But there was no way in which they could slow down for rendezvous or landing; barring accidents, they would continue speeding through the galaxy forever.

  This was the fundamental problem with rockets – and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.