The Songs of Distant Earth

A Del Rey® Book

Published by the Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright © 1986 by Serendib BV

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by the Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1986.

Cover art by Michael Whelan

http://www.randomhouse.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-26825

ISBN 0-345-32240-1

First Hardcover Edition: May 1986

First International Edition: November 1986

First U.S. Mass Market Edition: May 1987

For Tamara and Cherene,

Valerie and Hector

–for love and loyalty

Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments … may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever…

–
Loren Eiseley,
The Immense Journey
(1957)

I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.

–
Melville to Hawthorne (1851)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel is based on an idea developed almost thirty years ago in a short story of the same name (now in my collection
The Other Side of the Sky).
However, this version was directly – and
negatively –
inspired by the recent rash of space-operas on TV and movie screen. (Query: what is the opposite of inspiration – expiration?)

Please do not misunderstand me: I have enormously enjoyed the best
of Star Trek
and the Lucas / Spielberg epics, to mention only the most famous examples of the
genre.
But these works are fantasy, not science fiction in the strict meaning of the term. It now seems almost certain that in the real universe we may never exceed the velocity of light. Even the very closest star systems will always be decades or centuries apart; no Warp Six will ever get you from one episode to another in time for next week’s installment. The great Producer in the Sky did not arrange his programme planning that way.

In the last decade, there has also been a significant, and rather surprising, change in the attitude of scientists towards the problem of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The whole subject did not become respectable (except among dubious characters like the writers of science fiction) until the 1960s: Shklovskii and Sagan’s
Intelligent Life in the Universe
(1966) is the landmark here.

But now there has been a backlash. The total failure to find any trace of life in this solar system, or to pick up any of the interstellar radio signals that our great antennae should be easily able to detect, has prompted some scientists to argue “Perhaps we
are
alone in the Universe…” Dr. Frank Tipler, the best-known exponent of this view, has (doubtless deliberately) outraged the Saganites by giving one of his papers the provocative title “There Are No Intelligent Extra-Terrestrials”. Carl Sagan
et al
argue (and I agree with them) that it is much too early to jump to such far-reaching conclusions.

Meanwhile, the controversy rages; as has been well said,
either
answer will be awe-inspiring. The question can only be settled by “evidence”, not by any amount of logic, however plausible. I would like to see the whole debate given a decade or two of benign neglect, while the radio astronomers, like gold-miners panning for dust, quietly sieve through the torrents of noise pouring down from the sky.

This novel is, among other things, my attempt to create a wholly
realistic
piece of fiction on the interstellar theme – just as, in
Prelude to Space
(1951), I used known or foreseeable technology to depict mankind’s first voyage beyond the Earth. There is nothing in this book which defies or denies known principles; the only really wild extrapolation is the “quantum drive”, and even this has a highly respectable paternity. (See
Acknowledgements
.) Should it turn out to be a pipe-dream, there are several possible alternatives; and if we twentieth-century primitives can imagine them, future science will undoubtedly discover something much better.

Arthur C. Clarke

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

JULY 1985

I – Thalassa

1. The Beach at Tarna

E
ven before the boat came through the reef, Mirissa could tell that Brant was angry. The tense attitude of his body as he stood at the wheel – the very fact that he had not left the final passage in Kumar’s capable hands – showed that something had upset him.

She left the shade of the palm trees and walked slowly down the beach, the wet sand tugging at her feet. When she reached the water’s edge, Kumar was already furling the sail. Her “baby” brother – now almost as tall as she was, and solid muscle – waved to her cheerfully. How often she had wished that Brant shared Kumar’s easygoing good nature, which no crisis ever seemed capable of disturbing …

Brant did not wait for the boat to hit the sand, but jumped into the water while it was still waist-deep and came splashing angrily towards her. He was carrying a twisted mass of metal festooned with broken wires and held it up for her inspection.

“Look!” he cried. “They’ve done it again!”

With his free hand, he waved towards the northern horizon.

“This time – I’m not going to let them get away with it! And the mayor can say what she damn well pleases!”

Mirissa stood aside while the little catamaran, like some primeval sea-beast making its first assault on the dry land, heaved itself slowly up the beach on its spinning outboard rollers. As soon as it was above the high-water line, Kumar stopped the engine, and jumped out to join his still-fuming skipper.

“I keep telling Brant,” he said, “that it must be an accident – maybe a dragging anchor. After all, why should the Northers do something like this
deliberately?”

“I’ll tell you,” Brant retorted. “Because they’re too lazy to work out the technology themselves. Because they’re afraid we’ll catch too many fish. Because –”

He caught sight of the other’s grin and sent the cat’s cradle of broken wires spinning in his direction. Kumar caught it effortlessly.

“Anyway – even if it is an accident, they shouldn’t be anchoring here. That area’s clearly marked on the chart: keep out – research project. So I’m still going to lodge a protest.”

Brant had already recovered his good humour; even his most furious rages seldom lasted more than a few minutes. To keep him in the right mood, Mirissa started to run her fingers down his back and spoke to him in her most soothing voice.

“Did you catch any good fish?”

“Of course not,” Kumar answered. “He’s only interested in catching statistics – kilograms per kilowatt – that sort of nonsense. Lucky I took my rod. We’ll have tuna for dinner.”

He reached into the boat and pulled out almost a metre of streamlined power and beauty, its colours fading rapidly, its sightless eyes already glazed in death.

“Don’t often get one of these,” he said proudly. They were still admiring his prize when History returned to Thalassa, and the simple, carefree world they had known all their young lives came abruptly to its end.

The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky, as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapour trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.

And now a distant thunder was rolling down from the edge of space. It was a sound that Thalassa had not heard for seven hundred years but which any child would recognize at once.

Despite the warmth of the evening, Mirissa shivered and her hand found Brant’s. Though his fingers closed about hers, he scarcely seemed to notice; he was still staring at the riven sky.

Even Kumar was subdued, yet he was the first to speak.

“One of the colonies must have found us.”

Brant shook his head slowly but without much conviction.

“Why should they bother? They must have the old maps
–
they’ll know that Thalassa is almost all ocean. It wouldn’t make any sense to come here.”

“Scientific curiosity?” Mirissa suggested. “To see what’s happened to us? I always said we should repair the communications link…”

This was an old dispute, which was revived every few decades. One day, most people agreed, Thalassa really should rebuild the big dish on East Island, destroyed when Krakan erupted four hundred years ago. But meanwhile there was so much that was more important – or simply more amusing.

“Building a starship’s an
enormous
project,” Brant said thoughtfully. “I don’t believe that any colony would do it – unless it had to. Like Earth…”

His voice trailed off into silence. After all these centuries, that was still a hard name to say.

As one person, they turned towards the east, where the swift equatorial night was advancing across the sea.

A few of the brighter stars had already emerged, and just climbing above the palm trees was the unmistakable, compact little group of the Triangle. Its three stars were of almost equal magnitude – but a far more brilliant intruder had once shone, for a few weeks, near the southern tip of the constellation.

Its now-shrunken husk was still visible, in a telescope of moderate power. But no instrument could show the orbiting cinder that had been the planet Earth.

2. The Little Neutral One

M
ore than a thousand years later, a great historian had called the period 1901-2000 “the Century when everything happened”. He added that the people of the time would have agreed with him – but for entirely the wrong reasons.

They would have pointed, often with justified pride, to the era’s scientific achievements – the conquest of the air, the release of atomic energy, the discovery of the basic principles of life, the electronics and communications revolution, the beginnings of artificial intelligence – and most spectacular of all, the exploration of the solar system and the first landing on the Moon. But as the historian pointed out, with the 20/20 accuracy of hindsight, not one in a thousand would even have heard of the discovery that transcended all these events by threatening to make them utterly irrelevant.

It seemed as harmless, and as far from human affairs, as the fogged photographic plate in Becquerel’s laboratory that led, in only fifty years, to the fireball above Hiroshima. Indeed, it was a by-product of that same research, and began in equal innocence.

Nature is a very strict accountant, and always balances her books. So physicists were extremely puzzled when they discovered certain nuclear reactions in which, after all the fragments were added up, something seemed to be missing on one side of the equation.

Like a bookkeeper hastily replenishing the petty cash to keep one jump ahead of the auditors, the physicists were forced to invent a new particle. And, to account for the discrepancy, it had to be a most peculiar one – with neither mass nor charge, and so fantastically penetrating that it could pass, without noticeable inconvenience, through a wall of lead
billions
of kilometres thick.