The Songs of Distant Earth (27 page)

A strange calmness has come upon me. For the first time, I feel that I really understand my old Buddhist friends’ concepts of Detachment – even of Nirvana …

And if I do not wake on Sagan 2, so be it. My work here is done, and I am well content.

55. Departure

T
he trimaran reached the edge of the kelp bed just before midnight, and Brant anchored in thirty metres of water. He would start to drop the spyballs at dawn until the fence was laid between Scorpville and South Island. Once that was established, any comings and goings would be observed. If the scorps found one of the spyballs and carried it home as a trophy, so much the better. It would continue to operate, doubtless providing even more useful information than in the open sea.

Now there was nothing to do but to lie in the gently rocking boat and listen to the soft music from Radio Tarna, tonight uncharacteristically subdued. From time to time there would be an announcement or a message of goodwill or a poem in honour of the villagers. There could be few people sleeping on either island tonight; Mirissa wondered fleetingly what thoughts must be passing through the minds of Owen Fletcher and his fellow exiles, marooned on an alien world for the rest of their lives. The last time she had seen them on a Norther Videocast, they had not appeared at all unhappy and had been cheerfully discussing local business opportunities.

Brant was so quiet that she would have thought he was sleeping, except that his grip on her hand was as firm as ever, as they lay side by side, looking up at the stars. He had changed – perhaps even more than she had. He was less impatient, more considerate. Best of all, he had already accepted the child, with words whose gentleness had reduced her to tears: “He will have two fathers.”

Now Radio Tarna was starting the final and quite unnecessary launch countdown – the first that any Lassan had ever heard except for historic recordings from the past. Will we see anything at all, Mirissa wondered?
Magellan
is on the other side of the world, hovering at high noon above a hemisphere of ocean. We have the whole thickness of the planet between us…

“… Zero …” Tarna Radio said – and instantly was obliterated by a roar of white noise. Brant reached for the gain control and had barely cut off the sound when the sky erupted.

The entire horizon was ringed with fire. North, south, east, west – there was no difference. Long streamers of flame reached up out of the ocean, halfway towards the zenith, in such an auroral display, as Thalassa had never witnessed before, and would never see again.

It was beautiful but awe-inspiring. Now Mirissa understood why
Magellan
had been placed on the far side of the world; yet this was not the quantum drive itself but merely the stray energies leaking from it, being absorbed harmlessly in the ionosphere. Loren had told her something incomprehensible about superspace shockwaves, adding that not even the inventors of the drive had ever understood the phenomenon.

She wondered, briefly, what the scorps would make of these celestial fireworks; some trace of this actinic fury must filter down through the forests of kelp to illuminate the byways of their sunken cities.

Perhaps it was imagination, but the radiating, multicoloured beams that formed the encircling crown of light seemed to be creeping slowly across the sky. The source of their energy was gaining speed, accelerating along its orbit as it left Thalassa forever. It was many minutes before she could be quite sure of the movement; in the same time, the intensity of the display had also diminished appreciably.

Then abruptly, it ceased. Radio Tarna came back on the air, rather breathlessly.

“… everything according to plan … the ship is now being reorientated … other displays later, but not so spectacular … all stages of the initial breakaway will be on the other side of the world, but we’ll be able to see
Magellan
directly in three days, when it’s leaving the system.”
Mirissa scarcely heard the words as she stared up into the sky to which the stars were now returning – the stars that she could never seen again without remembering Loren. She was drained of emotion now; if she had tears, they would come later.

She felt Brant’s arm around her and welcomed their comfort against the loneliness of space. This was where she belonged; her heart would not stray again. For at last she understood; though she had loved Loren for his strength, she loved Brant for his weakness.

Good-bye, Loren, she whispered – may you be happy on that far world which you and your children will conquer for mankind. But think of me sometimes, three hundred years behind you on the road from Earth.

As Brant stroked her hair with clumsy gentleness, he wished he had words to comfort her, yet knew that silence was the best. He felt no sense of victory; though Mirissa was his once more, their old, carefree companionship was gone beyond recall. All the days of his life, Brant knew, the ghost of Loren would come between them – the ghost of a man who would not be one day older when they were dust upon the wind.

When, three days later,
Magellan
rose above the eastern horizon, it was a dazzling star too brilliant to look upon with the naked eye even though the quantum drive had been carefully aligned so that most of its radiation leakage would miss Thalassa.

Week by week, month by month, it slowly faded, though even when it moved back into the daylight sky it was still easy to find if one knew exactly where to look. And at night for years it was often the brightest of the stars.

Mirissa saw it one last time, just before her eyesight failed. For a few days the quantum drive – now harmlessly gentled by distance – must have been aimed directly towards Thalassa.

It was then fifteen light-years away, but her grandchildren had no difficulty in pointing out the blue, third magnitude star, shining above the watchtowers of the electrified scorp-barrier.

56. Below the Interface

T
hey were not yet intelligent, but they possessed curiosity – and that was the first step along the endless road.

Like many of the crustaceans that had once flourished in the seas of Earth, they could survive on land for indefinite periods. Until the last few centuries, however, there had been little incentive to do so; the great kelp forests provided for all their needs. The long, slender leaves supplied food; the tough stalks were the raw material for their primitive artifacts.

They had only two natural enemies. One was a huge but very rare deep-sea fish – little more than a pair of ravening jaws attached to a never-satisfied stomach. The other was a poisonous, pulsing jelly – the motile form of the giant polyps – which sometimes carpeted the seabed with death, leaving a bleached desert in its wake.

Apart from sporadic excursions through the air-water interface, the scorps might well have spent their entire existence in the sea, perfectly adapted to their environment. But – unlike the ants and termites – they had not yet entered any of the blind alleys of evolution. They could still respond to change.

And change, although as yet only on a very small scale, had indeed come to this ocean world. Marvellous things had fallen out of the sky. Where these had come from, there must be more. When they were ready, the scorps would go in search of them.

There was no particular hurry in the timeless world of the Thalassan sea; it would be many years before they made their first assault upon the alien element from which their scouts had brought back such strange reports.

They could never guess that other scouts were reporting on
them.
And when they finally moved, their timing would be most unfortunate.

They would have the bad luck to emerge on land during President Owen Fletcher’s quite unconstitutional, but extremely competent, second term of office.

IX – Sagan 2

57. The Voices of Time

T
he starship
Magellan
was still no more than a few light-hours distant when Kumar Lorenson was born, but his father was already sleeping and did not hear the news until three hundred years later.

He wept to think that his dreamless slumber had spanned the entire lifetime of his first child. When he could face the ordeal, he would summon the records that were waiting for him in the memory banks. He would watch his son grow to manhood and hear his voice calling across the centuries with greetings he could never answer.

And he would see (there was no way he could avoid it) the slow ageing of the long-dead girl he had held in his arms – only weeks ago. Her last farewell would come to him from wrinkled lips long turned to dust.

His grief, though piercing, would slowly pass. The light of a new sun filled the sky ahead; and soon there would be another birth, on the world that was already drawing the starship
Magellan
into its final orbit.

One day the pain would be gone; but never the memory.

CHRONOLOGY

(Terran years)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The first version of this novel, a 12,500-word short story, was written between February and April 1957 and subsequently published in IF Magazine (US) for June 1958 and
Science Fantasy
(UK) in June 1959. It may be more conveniently located in my own Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich collections
The Other Side of the Sky
(1958) and
From the Ocean, From the Stars
(1962).

In 1979, I developed the theme in a short movie outline that appeared in
OMNI Magazine
(Vol. 3, No. 12,1980). This has since been published in the illustrated Byron Preiss / Berkley collection of my short stories,
The Sentinel
(1984), together with an introduction explaining its origin and the unexpected manner in which it led to the writing and filming of
2010: Odyssey Two.

This novel, the third and final version, was begun in May 1983 and completed in June 1985.

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

1 JULY 1985

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The first suggestion that vacuum energies might be used for propulsion appears to have been made by Shinichi Seike in 1969. (“Quantum electric space vehicle”; 8th Symposium on Space Technology and Science, Tokyo.)