From the Ocean from teh Stars (60 page)

is, if you overlooked the fact that they must have passed out of fashion
a hundred years ago—unless they had come back and were now the
latest thing). In Clyde's opinion Leon's technique was very poor and the
dances were ugly; the interest that Lora showed in them was perfectly
ridiculous.

He had been foolish enough to tell her so when his opportunity came; and that had been the last dance he had had with Lora that
evening. From then onward, he might not have been there, as far as she
was concerned. Clyde had endured the boycott as long as he could, then
had left for the bar with one objective in mind. He had quickly attained it, and not until he had come reluctantly to his senses the next morning
did he discover what he had missed.

The dancing had ended early; there had been a short speech from
the president—his third that evening—introducing the commander of
the starship and promising a little surprise. Captain Gold had been
equally brief; he was obviously a man more accustomed to orders than
orations.

"Friends," he began, "you know why we're here, and I've no need to
say how much we appreciate your hospitality and kindness. We shall
never forget you, and we're only sorry that we have had so little time to see more of your beautiful island and its people. I hope you will forgive us for any seeming discourtesy, but the repair of our ship, and the safety
of our companions, has had to take priority in our minds.

"In the long run, the accident that brought us here may be fortunate
for us both. It has given us happy memories, and also inspiration. What
we have seen here is a lesson to us. May we make the world that is wait
ing at the end of our journey as fair a home for mankind as you have
made Thalassa.

"And before we resume our voyage, it is both a duty and a pleasure
to leave with you all the records we can that will bridge the gap since
you last had contact with Earth. Tomorrow we shall invite your scientists and historians up to our ship so that they can copy any of our information
tapes they desire. Thus we hope to leave you a legacy which will enrich
your world for generations to come. That is the very least we can do.

"But tonight, science and history can wait, for we have other treas
ures aboard. Earth has not been idle in the centuries since your fore
fathers left. Listen, now, to some of the heritage we share together, and
which we will leave upon Thalassa before we go our way."

The lights had dimmed; the music had begun. No one who was present would ever forget that moment; in a trance of wonder, Lora
had listened to what men had wrought in sound during the centuries of

separation. Time had meant nothing; she had not even been conscious
of Leon standing by her side, holding her hand, as the music ebbed and
flowed around them.

These were the things that she had never known, the things that be
longed to Earth, and to Earth alone. The slow beat of mighty bells,
climbing Uke invisible smoke from old cathedral spires; the chant of
patient boatmen, in a thousand tongues now lost forever, rowing home
against the tide in the last light of day; the songs of armies marching
into battles that time had robbed of all their pain and evil; the merged
murmur of ten million voices as man's greatest cities woke to meet the dawn; the cold dance of the Aurora over endless seas of ice; the roar of
mighty engines climbing upward on the highway to the stars. All these
she had heard in the music and the songs that had come out of the night
—the songs of distant Earth, carried to her across the light-years. . . .

A clear soprano voice, swooping and soaring like a bird at the very
edge of hearing, sang a wordless lament that tore at the heart. It was a
dirge for all loves lost in the loneliness of space, for friends and homes
that could never again be seen and must fade at last from memory. It was a song for all exiles, and it spoke as clearly to those who were
sundered from Earth by a dozen generations as to the voyagers to whom
its fields and cities still seemed only weeks away.

The music had died into the darkness; misty-eyed, avoiding words,
the people of Thalassa had gone slowly to their homes. But Lora had
not gone to hers; against the loneliness that had pierced her very soul,
there was only one defense. And presently she had found it, in the warm
night of the forest, as Leon's arms tightened around her and their souls
and bodies merged. Like wayfarers lost in a hostile wilderness, they had
sought warmth and comfort beside the fire of love. While that fire
burned, they were safe from the shadows that prowled in the night; and
all the universe of stars and planets shrank to a toy that they could hold
within their hands.

To Leon, it was never wholly real. Despite all the urgency and peril
that had brought them here, he sometimes fancied that at journey's end
it would be hard to convince himself that Thalassa was not a dream that
had come in his long sleep. This fierce and foredoomed love, for example;
he had not asked for it—it had been thrust upon him. Yet there were
few men, he told himself, who would not have taken it, had they, too,
landed, after weeks of grinding anxiety, on this peaceful, pleasant world.

When he could escape from work, he took long walks with Lora in
the fields far from the village, where men seldom came and only the

robot cultivators disturbed the solitude. For hours Lora would question him about Earth—but she would never speak of the planet that was the
Magellan's
goal. He understood her reasons well enough, and did his
best to satisfy her endless curiosity about the world that was already
"home" to more men than had ever seen it with their own eyes.

She was bitterly disappointed to hear that the age of cities had
passed. Despite all that Leon could tell her about the completely decen
tralized culture that now covered the planet from pole to pole, she still
thought of Earth in terms of such vanished giants as Chandrigar, London,
Astrograd, New York, and it was hard for her to realize that they had
gone forever, and with them the way of life they represented.

"When we left Earth," Leon explained, "the largest centers of popu
lation were university towns like Oxford or Ann Arbor or Canberra;
some of them had fifty thousand students and professors. There are no
other cities left of even half that size."

"But what happened to them?"

"Oh, there was no single cause, but the development of communica
tions started it. As soon as anyone on Earth could see and talk to anyone else by pressing a button, most of the need for cities vanished. Then anti-gravity was invented, and you could move goods or houses or any
thing else through the sky without bothering about geography.
That
com
pleted the job of wiping out distance, which the airplane had begun a
couple of centuries earlier. After that, men started to live where they
liked, and the cities dwindled away."

For a moment Lora did not answer; she was lying on a bank of grass,
watching the behavior of a bee whose ancestors, like hers, had been citizens of Earth. It was trying vainly to extract nectar from one of
Thalassa's native flowers; insect life had not yet arisen on this world, and
the few indigenous flowers had not yet invented lures for air-borne vis
itors.

The frustrated bee gave up the hopeless task and buzzed angrily
away; Lora hoped that it would have enough sense to head back to the
orchards, where it would find more co-operative flowers. When she spoke
again, it was to voice a dream that had now haunted mankind for almost
a thousand years.

"Do you suppose," she said wistfully, "that we'll ever break through
the speed of light?"

Leon smiled, knowing where her thoughts were leading. To travel
faster than light—to go home to Earth, yet to return to your native world
while your friends were still alive—every colonist must, at some time or
other, have dreamed of this. There was no problem, in the whole history

of the human race, that had called forth so much effort and that still
remained so utterly intractable.

"I don't believe so," he said. "If it could be done, someone would
have discovered how by this time. No—we have to do it the slow way,
because there isn't any other. That's how the universe is built, and there's nothing we can do about it."

"But surely we could still keep in touch!"

Leon nodded. "That's true," he said, "and we try to. I don't know
what's gone wrong, but you should have heard from Earth long before
now. We've been sending out robot message carriers to all the colonies, carrying a full history of everything that's happened up to the time of
departure, and asking for a report back. As the news returns to Earth,
it's all transcribed and sent out again by the next messenger. So we have
a kind of interstellar news service, with the Earth as the central clearinghouse. It's slow, of course, but there's no other way of doing it. If the last messenger to Thalassa has been lost, there must be another on the way—
maybe several, twenty or thirty years apart."

Lora tried to envisage the vast, star-spanning network of message
carriers, shuttling back and forth between Earth and its scattered chil
dren, and wondered why Thalassa had been overlooked. But with Leon
beside her, it did not seem important. He was here; Earth and the stars were very far away. And so also, with whatever unhappiness it might
bring, was tomorrow. . . .

By the end of the week, the visitors had built a squat and heavily
braced pyramid of metal girders, housing some obscure mechanism, on a rocky headland overlooking the sea. Lora, in common with the 571
other inhabitants of Palm Bay and the several thousand sight-seers who
had descended upon the village, was watching when the first test was
made. No one was allowed to go within a quarter of a mile of the machine
—a precaution that aroused a good deal of alarm among the more nervous islanders. Did the Earthmen know what they were doing? Suppose
that something went wrong. And
what
were they doing, anyway?

Leon was there with his friends inside that metal pyramid, making
the final adjustments—the "coarse focusing," he had told Lora, leaving
her none the wiser. She watched with the same anxious incomprehension
as all her fellow islanders until the distant figures emerged from the
machine and walked to the edge of the flat-topped rock on which it was
built. There they stood, a tiny group of figures silhouetted against the
ocean, staring out to sea.

A mile from the shore, something strange was happening to the water. It seemed that a storm was brewing—but a storm that kept within an

area only a few hundred yards across. Mountainous waves were building
up, smashing against each other and then swiftly subsiding again. Within
a few minutes the ripples of the disturbance had reached the shore, but
the center of the tiny storm showed no sign of movement. It was as if,
Lora told herself, an invisible finger had reached down from the sky and
was stirring the sea.

Quite abruptly, the entire pattern changed. Now the waves were no
longer battering against each other; they were marching in step, moving
more and more swiftly in a tight circle. A cone of water was rising from
the sea, becoming taller and thinner with every second. Already it was a
hundred feet high, and the sound of its birth was an angry roaring that
filled the air and struck terror into the hearts of all who heard it. All, that
is, except the little band of men who had summoned this monster from the deep, and who still stood watching it with calm assurance, ignoring
the waves that were breaking almost against their feet.

Now the spinning tower of water was climbing swiftly up the sky,
piercing the clouds like an arrow as it headed toward space. Its foam-capped summit was already lost beyond sight, and from the sky there began to fall a steady shower of rain, the drops abnormally large, like
those which prelude a thunderstorm. Not all the water that was being
lifted from Thalassa's single ocean was reaching its distant goal; some
was escaping from the power that controlled it and was falling back from the edge of space.

Slowly the watching crowd drifted away, astonishment and fright al
ready yielding to a calm acceptance. Man had been able to control
gravity for half a thousand years, and this trick—spectacular though it
was—could not be compared with the miracle of hurling a great starship
from sun to sun at little short of the speed of light.

The Earthmen were now walking back toward their machine, clearly
satisfied with what they had done. Even at this distance, one could see
that they were happy and relaxed—perhaps for the first time since they
had reached Thalassa. The water to rebuild the
Magellan's
shield was
on its way out into space, to be shaped and frozen by the other strange
forces that these men had made their servants. In a few days, they would
be ready to leave, their great interstellar ark as good as new.

Even until this minute, Lora had hoped that they might fail. There
was nothing left of that hope now, as she watched the man-made waterspout lift its burden from the sea. Sometimes it wavered slightly, its base shifting back and forth as if at the balance point between immense and
invisible forces. But it was fully under control, and it would do the