The Songs of Distant Earth (15 page)

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

I
t 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 robot 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.

Thirty thousand kilometres below, Brant Falconer had also made a crucial decision.

“I’m going to North Island.”

Mirissa lay silent; then, after what seemed to Brant a very long time, she said, “Why?” There was no surprise, no regret in her voice; so much, he thought, has changed.

But before he could answer, she added, “You don’t like it there.”

“Perhaps it is better than here – as things are now. This is no longer my home.”

“It will always be your home.”

“Not while
Magellan
is still in orbit.”

Mirissa reached out her hand in the darkness to the stranger beside her. At least he did not move away.

“Brant,” she said, “I never intended this. And nor, I’m quite certain, did Loren.”

“That doesn’t help much, does it? Frankly, I can’t understand what you see in him.”

Mirissa almost smiled. How many men, she wondered, had said that to how many women in the course of human history? And how many women had said, “What can you see in
her
?”

There was no way of answering, of course; even the attempt would only make matters worse. But sometimes she had tried, for her own satisfaction, to pinpoint what had drawn her and Loren together since the very moment they had first set eyes upon each other.

The major part was the mysterious chemistry of love, beyond rational analysis, inexplicable to anyone who did not share the same illusion. But there were other elements that could be clearly identified and explained in logical terms. It was useful to know what they were; one day (all too soon!) that wisdom might help her face the moment of parting.

First there was the tragic glamour that surrounded all the Terrans; she did not discount the importance of that, but Loren shared it with all his comrades. What did he have that was so special and that she could not find in Brant?

As lovers, there was little to choose between them; perhaps Loren was more imaginative, Brant more passionate – though had he not become a little perfunctory in the last few weeks? She would be perfectly happy with either. No, it was not
that …

Perhaps she was searching for an ingredient that did not even exist. There was no single element but an entire constellation of qualities. Her instincts, below the level of conscious thought, had added up the score; and Loren had come out a few points ahead of Brant. It could be as simple as that.

There was certainly one respect in which Loren far eclipsed Brant. He had drive, ambition – the very things that were so rare on Thalassa. Doubtless he had been chosen for these qualities; he would need them in the centuries to come.

Brant had no ambition whatsoever, though he was not lacking in enterprise; his still-uncompleted fish-trapping project was proof of that. All he asked from the Universe was that it provided him with interesting machines to play with; Mirissa sometimes thought that he included her in that category.

Loren, by contrast, was in the tradition of the great explorers and adventurers. He would help to make history, not merely submit to its imperatives. And yet he could – not often enough but more and more frequently – be warm and human. Even as he froze the seas of Thalassa, his own heart was beginning to thaw.

“What are you going to do on North Island?” Mirissa whispered. Already, they had taken his decision for granted.

“They want me there to help fit out
Calypso.
The Northers don’t really understand the sea.”

Mirissa felt relieved; Brant was not simply running away – he had work to do.

Work that would help him to forget – until, perhaps, the time came to remember once again.

27. Mirror of the Past

M
oses Kaldor held the module up to the light, peering into it as if he could read its contents.

“It will always seem a miracle to me,” he said, “that I can hold a million books between my thumb and forefinger. I wonder what Caxton and Gutenberg would have thought.”

“Who?” Mirissa asked.

“The men who started the human race reading. But there’s a price we have to pay now for our ingenuity. Sometimes I have a little nightmare and imagine that one of these modules contains some piece of absolutely vital information – say the cure for a raging epidemic – but the address has been lost. It’s on
one
of those billion pages, but we don’t know which. How frustrating to hold the answer in the palm of your hand and not be able to find it!”

“I don’t see the problem,” the captain’s secretary said. As an expert on information storage and retrieval, Joan LeRoy had been helping with the transfers between Thalassa Archives and the ship. “You’ll know the key words; all you have to do is set up a search program. Even a billion pages could be checked in a few seconds.”

“You’ve spoiled my nightmare.” Kaldor sighed. Then he brightened. “But often you even don’t know the key words. How many times have you come across something that you didn’t know you needed – until you found it?”

“Then you’re badly organized,” said Lieutenant LeRoy.

They enjoyed these little tongue-in-cheek exchanges, and Mirissa was not always sure when to take them seriously. Joan and Moses did not deliberately try to exclude her from their conversations, but their worlds of experience were so utterly different from hers that she sometimes felt that she was listening to a dialogue in an unknown language.

“Anyway, that completes the Master Index. We each know what the other has; now we merely –
merely! –
have to decide what we’d like to transfer. It may be inconvenient, not to say expensive, when we’re seventy-five lights apart.”

“Which reminds me,” Mirissa said. “I don’t suppose I should tell you – but there was a delegation from North Island here last week. The president of the science academy, and a couple of physicists.”

“Let me guess. The quantum drive.”

“Right.”

“How did they react?”

“They seemed pleased – and surprised – that it really
was
there. They made a copy, of course.”

“Good luck to them; they’ll need it. And you might tell them this. Someone once said that the QD’s real purpose is nothing as trivial as the exploration of the Universe. We’ll need its energies one day to stop the cosmos’ collapsing back into the primordial Black Hole – and to start the next cycle of existence.”

There was an awed silence, then Joan LeRoy broke the spell.

“Not in the lifetime of
this
administration. Let’s get back to work. We still have megabytes to go, before we sleep.”

It was not all work, and there were times when Kaldor simply had to get away from the Library Section of First Landing in order to relax. Then he would stroll across to the art gallery, take the computer-guided tour through the Mother Ship (never the same route twice – he tried to cover as much ground as possible) or let the Museum carry him back in time.

There was always a long line of visitors – mostly students, or children with their parents – for the Terrama displays. Sometimes Moses Kaldor felt a little guilty at using his privileged status to jump to the head of the queue. He consoled himself with the thought that the Lassans had a whole lifetime in which they could enjoy these panoramas of the world they had never known; he had only months in which to revisit his lost home.

He found it very difficult to convince his new friends that Moses Kaldor had never been in the scenes they sometimes watched together. Everything they saw was at least eight hundred years in his own past, for the Mother Ship had left Earth in 2751 – and he had been born in 3541. Yet occasionally there would be a shock of recognition, and some memory would come flooding back with almost unbearable power.

The “Sidewalk Cafe” presentation was the most uncanny, and the most evocative. He would be sitting at a small table, under an awning, drinking wine or coffee, while the life of a city flowed past him. As long as he did not get up from the table, there was absolutely no way in which his senses could distinguish the display from reality.

In microcosm, the great cities of Earth were brought back to life. Rome, Paris, London, New York – in summer and winter, by night and day, he watched the tourists and businessmen and students and lovers go about their ways. Often, realizing that they were being recorded, they would smile at him across the centuries, and it was impossible not to respond.

Other panoramas showed no human beings at all, or even any of the productions of Man. Moses Kaldor looked again, as he had done in that other life, upon the descending smoke of Victoria Falls, the Moon rising above the Grand Canyon, the Himalayan snows, the ice cliffs of Antarctica. Unlike the glimpses of the cities, these things had not changed in the thousand years since they were recorded. And though they had existed long before Man, they had not outlasted him.

28. The Sunken Forest

T
he scorp did not seem to be in a hurry; it took a leisurely ten days to travel fifty kilometres. One curious fact was quickly revealed by the sonar beacon that had been attached, not without difficulty, to the angry subject’s carapace. The path it traced along the seabed was perfectly straight, as if it knew precisely where it was going.