The Songs of Distant Earth Read online

  A full-scale hibership could indeed be built to reach a tenth of the speed of light. It would require about a million tons of somewhat exotic elements as propellant; difficult, but not impossible.

  But in order to cancel that velocity at the end of the voyage, the ship must start not with a million – but a preposterous million, million tons of propellant. This, of course, was so completely out of the question that no one had given the matter any serious thought for centuries.

  And then, by one of history’s greatest ironies, Mankind was given the keys to the Universe – and barely a century in which to use them.

  8. Remembrance of Love Lost

  How glad I am, thought Moses Kaldor, that I never succumbed to that temptation – the seductive lure that art and technology had first given to mankind more than a thousand years ago. Had I wished, I could have brought Evelyn’s electronic ghost with me into exile, trapped in a few gigabytes of programming. She could have appeared before me, in any one of the backgrounds we both loved, and carried on a conversation so utterly convincing that a stranger could never have guessed that no one – nothing – was really there.

  But I would have known, after five or ten minutes unless I deluded myself by a deliberate act of will. And that I could never do. Though I am still not sure why my instincts revolt against it, I always refused to accept the false solace of a dialogue with the dead. I do not even possess, now, a simple recording of her voice.

  It is far better this way, to watch her moving in silence, in the little garden of our last home, knowing that this is no illusion of the image-makers but that it really did happen, two hundred years ago on Earth.

  And the only voice will be mine, here and now, speaking to the memory that still exists in my own human, living brain.

  Private recording One.Alpha scrambler. Autoerase program.

  You were right, Evelyn, and I was wrong. Even though I am the oldest man on the ship, it seems that I can still be useful.

  When I awoke, Captain Bey was standing beside me. I felt flattered – as soon as I was able to feel anything.

  “Well, Captain,” I said, “this is quite a surprise. I half expected you to dump me in space as unnecessary mass.”

  He laughed and answered. “It could still happen, Moses; the voyage isn’t over yet. But we certainly need you now. The Mission planners were wiser than you gave them credit.”

  “They listed me on the ship’s manifest as quote Ambassador-Counsellor unquote. In which capacity am I required?”

  “Probably both. And perhaps in your even better-known role as –”

  “Don’t hesitate if you wanted to say crusader, even though I never liked the word and never regarded myself as a leader of any movement. I only tried to make people think for themselves – I never wanted anyone to follow me blindly. History has seen too many leaders.”

  “Yes, but not all have been bad ones. Consider your namesake.”

  “Much overrated, though I can understand if you admire him. After all, you, too, have the task of leading homeless tribes into a promised land. I assume that some slight problem has arisen.”

  The captain smiled and answered. “I’m happy to see that you’re fully alert. At this stage, there’s not even a problem, and there’s no reason why there should be. But a situation has arisen that no one expected, and you’re our official diplomat. You have the one skill we never thought we’d need.”

  I can tell you, Evelyn, that gave me a shock. Captain Bey must have read my mind very accurately when he saw my jaw drop.

  “Oh,” he said quickly, “we haven’t run into aliens! But it turns out that the human colony on Thalassa wasn’t destroyed as we’d imagined. In fact, it’s doing very well.”

  That, of course, was another surprise, though quite a pleasant one. Thalassa – the Sea, the Sea! – was a world I had never expected to set eyes upon. When I awoke, it should have been light-years behind and centuries ago.

  “What are the people like? Have you made contact with them?”

  “Not yet; that’s your job. You know better than anyone else the mistakes that were made in the past. We don’t want to repeat them here. Now, if you’re ready to come up to the bridge, I’ll give you a bird’s-eye view of our long-lost cousins.”

  That was a week ago, Evelyn; how pleasant it is to have no time pressures after decades of unbreakable – and all too literal – deadlines! Now we know as much about the Thalassans as we can hope to do without actually meeting them face-to-face. And this we shall do tonight.

  We have chosen common ground to show that we recognize our kinship. The site of the first landing is clearly visible and has been well kept, like a park – possibly a shrine. That’s a very good sign: I only hope that our landing there won’t be taken as sacrilege. Perhaps it will confirm that we are gods, which should make it easier for us. If the Thalassans have invented gods – that’s one thing I want to find out.

  I am beginning to live again, my darling. Yes, yes – you were wiser than I, the so-called philosopher! No man has a right to die while he can still help his fellows. It was selfish of me to have wished otherwise … to have hoped to lie forever beside you, in the spot we had chosen, so long ago, so far away … Now I can even accept the fact that you are scattered across the solar system, with all else that I ever loved on Earth.

  But now there is work to be done; and while I talk to your memory, you are still alive.

  9. The Quest for Superspace

  Of all the psychological hammer blows that the scientists of the twentieth century had to endure, perhaps the most devastating – and unexpected – was the discovery that nothing was more crowded than “empty” space.

  The old Aristotelian doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum was perfectly true. Even when every atom of seemingly solid matter was removed from a given volume, what remained was a seething inferno of energies of an intensity and scale unimaginable to the human mind. By comparison, even the most condensed form of matter – the hundred-million-tons-to-the-cubic-centimetre of a neutron star – was an impalpable ghost, a barely perceptible perturbation in the inconceivably dense, yet foamlike structure of “superspace.”

  That there was much more to space than naive intuition suggested was first revealed by the classic work of Lamb and Rutherford in 1947. Studying the simplest of elements – the hydrogen atom – they discovered that something very odd happened when the solitary electron orbited the nucleus. Far from travelling in a smooth curve, it behaved as if being continually buffeted by incessant waves on a sub-submicroscopic scale. Hard though it was to grasp the concept, there were fluctuations in the vacuum itself.

  Since the time of the Greeks, philosophers had been divided into two schools – those who believed that the operations of Nature flowed smoothly and those who argued that this was an illusion; everything really happened in discrete jumps or jerks too small to be perceptible in everyday life. The establishment of the atomic theory was a triumph for the second school of thought; and when Planck’s Quantum Theory demonstrated that even light and energy came in little packets, not continuous streams, the argument finally ended.

  In the ultimate analysis, the world of Nature was granular – discontinuous. Even if, to the naked human eye, a waterfall and a shower of bricks appeared very different, they were really much the same. The tiny “bricks” of H2O were too small to be visible to the unaided senses, but they could be easily discerned by the instruments of the physicists.

  And now the analysis was taken one step further. What made the granularity of space so hard to envisage was not only its sub-submicroscopic scale – but its sheer violence.

  No one could really imagine a millionth of a centimetre, but at least the number itself – a thousand thousands – was familiar in such human affairs as budgets and population statistics. To say that it would require a million viruses to span the distance of a centimetre did convey something to the mind.

  But a million-millionth of a centimetre? That was comparable to the size of
the electron, and already it was far beyond visualization. It could perhaps be grasped intellectually, but not emotionally.

  And yet the scale of events in the structure of space was unbelievably smaller than this – so much so that, in comparison, an ant and an elephant were of virtually the same size. If one imagined it as a bubbling, foamlike mass (almost hopelessly misleading, yet a first approximation to the truth) then those bubbles were …

  a thousandth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth …

  … of a centimetre across.

  And now imagine them continually exploding with energies comparable to those of nuclear bombs – and then reabsorbing that energy, and spitting it out again, and so on forever and forever.

  This, in a grossly simplified form, was the picture that some late twentieth-century physicists had developed of the fundamental structure of space. That its intrinsic energies might ever be tapped must, at the time, have seemed completely ridiculous.

  So, a lifetime earlier, had been the idea of releasing the new-found forces of the atomic nucleus; yet that had happened in less than half a century. To harness the “quantum fluctuations” that embodied the energies of space itself was a task orders of magnitude more difficult – and the prize correspondingly greater.

  Among other things, it would give mankind the freedom of the universe. A spaceship could accelerate literally forever, since it would no longer need any fuel. The only practical limit to speed would, paradoxically, be that which the early aircraft had to contend with – the friction of the surrounding medium. The space between the stars contained appreciable quantities of hydrogen and other atoms, which could cause trouble long before one reached the ultimate limit set by the velocity of light.

  The quantum drive might have been developed at any time after the year 2500, and the history of the human race would then have been very different. Unfortunately – as had happened many times before in the zig-zag progress of science – faulty observations and erroneous theories delayed the final breakthrough for almost a thousand years.

  The feverish centuries of the Last Days produced much brilliant – though often decadent – art but little new fundamental knowledge. Moreover, by that time the long record of failure had convinced almost everyone that tapping the energies of space was like perpetual motion, impossible even in theory, let alone in practice. However – unlike perpetual motion – it had not yet been proved to be impossible, and until this was demonstrated beyond all doubt, some hope still remained.

  Only a hundred and fifty years before the end, a group of physicists in the Lagrange 1 zero-gravity research satellite announced that they had at last found such a proof; there were fundamental reasons why the immense energies of superspace, though they were real enough, could never be tapped. No one was in the least interested in this tidying-up of an obscure corner of science.

  A year later, there was an embarrassed cough from Lagrange 1. A slight mistake had been found in the proof. It was the sort of thing that had happened often enough in the past though never with such momentous consequences.

  A minus sign had been accidentally converted into a plus.

  Instantly, the whole world was changed. The road to the stars had been opened up – five minutes before midnight.

  III – South Island

  10. First Contact

  Perhaps I should have broken it more gently, Moses Kaldor told himself; they all seem in a state of shock. But that in itself is very instructive; even if these people are technologically backward (just look at that car!) they must realize that only a miracle of engineering could have brought us from Earth to Thalassa. First they will wonder how we did it, and then they will start to wonder why.

  That, in fact, was the very first question that had occurred to Mayor Waldron. These two men in one small vehicle were obviously only the vanguard. Up there in orbit might be thousands – even millions. And the population of Thalassa, thanks to strict regulation, was already within ninety per cent of ecological optimum …

  “My name is Moses Kaldor,” the older of the two visitors said. “And this is Lieutenant Commander Loren Lorenson, Assistant Chief Engineer, Starship Magellan. We apologize for these bubble suits – you’ll realize that they are for our mutual protection. Though we come in friendship, our bacteria may have different ideas.”

  What a beautiful voice, Mayor Waldron told herself- as well she might. Once it had been the best-known in the world, consoling – and sometimes provoking – millions in the decades before the End.

  The mayor’s notoriously roving eye did not, however remain long on Moses Kaldor; he was obviously well into his sixties, and a little too old for her. The younger man was much more to her liking, though she wondered if she could ever really grow accustomed to that ugly white pallor. Loren Lorenson (what a charming name!) was nearly two metres in height, and his hair was so blond as to be almost silver. He was not as husky as – well, Brant – but he was certainly more handsome.

  Mayor Waldron was a good judge both of men and of women, and she classified Lorenson very quickly. Here were intelligence, determination, perhaps even ruthlessness – she would not like to have him as an enemy, but she was certainly interested in having him as a friend. Or better …

  At the same time, she did not doubt that Kaldor was a much nicer person. In his face and voice she could already discern wisdom, compassion, and also a profound sadness. Little wonder, considering the shadow under which he must have spent the whole of his life.

  All the other members of the reception committee had now approached and were introduced one by one. Brant, after the briefest of courtesies, headed straight for the aircraft and began to examine it from end to end.

  Loren followed him; he recognized a fellow engineer when he saw one and would be able to learn a good deal from the Thalassan’s reactions. He guessed, correctly, what Brant’s first question would be about. Even so, he was taken off balance.

  “What’s the propulsion system? Those jet orifices are ridiculously small – if that’s what they are.”

  It was a very shrewd observation; these people were not the technological savages they had seemed at first sight. But it would never do to show that he was impressed. Better to counterattack and let him have it right between the eyes.

  “It’s a derated quantum ramjet, adapted for atmospheric flight by using air as a working fluid. Taps the Planck fluctuations – you know, ten to the minus thirty-three centimetres. So of course it has infinite range, in air or in space.” Loren felt rather pleased with that “of course”.

  Once again he had to give Brant credit; the Lassan barely blinked and even managed to say, “Very interesting,” as if he really meant it.

  “Can I go inside?”

  Loren hesitated. It might seem discourteous to refuse, and after all, they were anxious to make friends as quickly as possible. Perhaps more important, this would show who really had the mastery here.

  “Of course,” he answered. “But be careful not to touch anything.” Brant was much too interested to notice the absence of “please”.

  Loren led the way into the spaceplane’s tiny airlock. There was just enough room for the two of them, and it required complicated gymnastics to seal Brant into the spare bubble suit.

  “I hope these won’t be necessary for long,” Loren explained, “but we have to wear them until the microbiology checks are complete. Close your eyes until we’ve been through the sterilization cycle.”

  Brant was aware of a faint violet glow, and there was a brief hissing of gas. Then the inner door opened, and they walked into the control cabin.

  As they sat down side by side, the tough, yet scarcely visible films around them barely hindered their movements. Yet it separated them as effectively as if they were on different worlds – which, in many senses, they still were.

  Brant was a quick learner, Loren had to admit. Give him a few hours and he could handle this machine – even though he would never be able to grasp the
underlying theory. For that matter, legend had it that only a handful of men had ever really comprehended the geodynamics of superspace – and they were now centuries dead.

  They quickly became so engrossed in technical discussions that they almost forgot the outside world. Suddenly, a slightly worried voice remarked from the general direction of the control panel, “Loren? Ship calling. What’s happening? We’ve not heard from you for half an hour.”

  Loren reached lazily for a switch.

  “Since you’re monitoring us on six video and five audio channels, that’s a slight exaggeration.” He hoped that Brant had got the message: We’re in full charge of the situation, and we’re not taking anything for granted. “Over to Moses – he’s doing all the talking as usual.”

  Through the curved windows, they could see that Kaldor and the mayor were still in earnest discussion, with Councillor Simmons joining in from time to time. Loren threw a switch, and their amplified voices suddenly filled the cabin, more loudly than if they had been standing beside them.

  “ – our hospitality. But you realize, of course, that this is an extraordinarily small world, as far as land surface is concerned. How many people did you say were aboard your ship?”

  “I don’t think I mentioned a figure, Madame Mayor. In any event, only a very few of us will ever come down to Thalassa, beautiful though it is. I fully understand your – ah – concern, but there’s no need to feel the slightest apprehension. In a year or two, if all goes well, we’ll be on our way again.”

  “At the same time, this isn’t a social call – after all, we never expected to meet anyone here! But a starship doesn’t delta-vee through half the velocity of light except for very good reasons. You have something that we need, and we have something to give you.”