The Solarians

by Norman Spinrad

  Well, he thought, as he entered the common room, whatever it is, it can’t last much longer. We’re only a day or so from Sol itself.

  He looked around the common room. The lighting seemed to be strangely subdued. Max and Linda were seated together on the couch, communing wordlessly with each other. Fran Shannon was puttering listlessly about the bookcases. Robin was standing next to the hi-fi. She nodded to him, turned on the hi-fi and sat down in a lounge chair. Palmer sat down next to her.

  He was about to say something trivial when the music she had put on caught his ear. It was like nothing he had ever heard before, a crazy jumping from theme to theme, melody to melody, style to style. Even the instruments playing the music seemed to change every few bars: traditional strings to guitar-and-banjo, to primitive drums, to a full orchestral percussion section, to flute-and-drum, to sounds and instruments he had never heard before.

  The mood, the tone, the whole feeling of the piece med to change every few seconds. It was orchestral, folk, electronic…every kind of music Palmer could remember hearing and more. Yet there was an uncanny unity to it, as if all the diverse elements were still part of some all-embracing whole.

  “What is that?” he asked Robin.

  She appeared lost in the music, staring moodily off into space.

  “Robin,” he said. “Robin, what is that?”

  She turned to him slowly, as if she were reluctantly rousing from some powerful, all-embracing dream.

  “That was composed not too long ago. A few months before we left Sol. It’s called the Song of Earth.”

  The music went on, and now Palmer began to understand it. The composer, for reasons of his own, had tried to capture all the music of Man’s home planet, the music of all times and all places, and put in into one kaleidoscopic piece that would capture the entire musical heritage of a variegated planet whole.

  It seemed that, to a remarkable degree, he had succeeded.

  As the music skittered about like a nervous chameleon, Fran Shannon walked over to the smell-organ and began to play, matching odor with melody, smell-chords with the ever-changing style of the music, so that the effect was as of an aural and olfactory odyssey through the endless panoply of cultures, races and peoples that through the millenia had shared the planet called Earth.

  Palmer had never thought very much about music or odor symphonies, but he found himself transported, taken over entirely by the mingling flux of sound and smell. Flutes and oak forests…bagpipes and heather…guitars and castinets and the smell of garlic and saffron…. Ever-changing, faster and faster, now flowing into one another, merging, combining, recombining.

  Palmer looked at Max and Linda. They had come out of their telepathic communion, and they were listening to the joyous music, the music and smells of Earth, the distillations of millenia of history and thousands of cultures, a heritage that was richer and more convoluted than the cultures of all planets in the Confederation combined. But the expressions on their faces were not in keeping with the scintillating patterns of smell and sound. Their mouths were grim and drawn, and their eyes were wet with tears….

  Palmer turned to Robin. She was biting her lower lip with her upper teeth. Her hands were balled into tight fists, and she was crying.

  And then the music began to subtly change, and the smells began to change with it.

  It was impossible for Palmer to tell just when the change had begun or what precisely it was. The shifts in styles and instruments and cultures began to speed up gradually. At some indefinable point, the music and the smells, the quick flux of the patterns crossed the threshold between the scintillating and the frantic.

  The quality of the tape changed too: it was as if it had been recorded at one speed, re-recorded at a faster speed, and then slowed down again. The effect was thinness, frenzy and an almost forlorn wailing quality.

  Fran had changed her style on the smell-organ to fit the change. The smells were coming far too fast now; they were mingling with each other in strange and nauseating combinations. Common, innocuous, even pleasant odors were combining into one pervasive, awful stench—the odor of decay, the stink of loss, the reek of death.

  Somehow, the gay kaleidoscopic sounds and smells had been transmitted into a frantic, forlorn, mournful dirge played at triple time. The entire composition now seemed like the final moments of a drowning man—a lifetime of impressions, sensations, memories trying hopelessly to crowd themselves into a few transitory moments.

  Faster and faster the music and the odors swirled, mounting into a hideous cry of mortal terror and loss, a choking, all-enveloping stench of destruction and lost civilizations, till Palmer could no longer stand it, till his ears ached and his stomach quivered.

  And then, suddenly, abruptly, without warning—silence.

  Utter silence, a silence so heavy, so deadening, so loud that it seemed the voice of death itself.

  For long moments, Palmer sat, stupefied. What would cause anyone to write a thing like that, he wondered numbly. It was a work of unbelievable genius but of equally unbelievable horror. And what was it called? The Song of Earth!

  Finally, Palmer turned to Robin. “What…” he muttered, “why…?”

  She turned to him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Jay…” she said, “in a million years, I wouldn’t be able to find the words to tell you. In a….”

  Suddenly, Raul Ortega stuck his head into the control room. “Come on, everyone!” he shouted. “Come on up to the control room. “We’re there! It’s time to come out of Stasis-Space!”

  Palmer got up and, along with Max and Linda and Robin, tensely followed Ortega down the corridor. The six Solarians were merely going home—although it had become obvious that, for some dark reason, they felt little joy in the homecoming.

  But he was about to see that which no living human of the Confederation had ever set eyes upon: Man’s original solar system, Sol; Man’s maternal planet, the Earth.

  Not for over two hundred and fifty years had a Confederal expedition even tried to penetrate the limits of the Sol system. That last expedition, two and a half centuries ago, had run into a vast minefield enclosing the system just beyond the orbit of Pluto with a globe of certain death: automated lase-cannon mines, like those the Doogs used; thousand megaton fusion bombs with five hundred mile radius proximity fuses; fragmenton mines that could fill ten cubic miles of space with near-microscopic, metal-eroding carborundum particles.

  Half that expedition had been destroyed trying to go through the minefield. The rest had finally turned back before reaching the orbit of Pluto, but not before catching glimpses of the Solarian armada waiting to destroy any ship that by crazy luck might penetrate the minefield. The Solarian ships had obviously been constructed without Stasis-Field generators, for they were so huge that it was mathematically impossible to construct a Stasis-Field big enough to contain them. In fact, they were probably little more than huge Resolution Field Generators, which could be built virtually any size—the perfect defensive weapon. Destined never to leave their own systems, there was no need to limit the size of the ships or their Resolution Field generators to that which could be encompassed by a Stasis-Field. Together with the minefields, the monster ships had made Sol virtually impregnable to Confederal forces.

  And now, at last, a Confederal general would penetrate to the heart of Fortress Sol, to Earth itself, unmolested.

  Palmer grimaced ironically to himself as he entered the control room. A few weeks ago, he would’ve given anything for this opportunity. Now it was essentially meaningless. The fate of the human race would be decided right here, and not by the Confederation, but by Solarians. If he lived to carry back word of any of the secrets he was about to learn, those secrets would have already become quite meaningless. And if the Confederation would still have use for such secrets, it would mean that he wouldn’t be around to tell anyone….

  “Well, Jay,” said Lingo, “in about one minute, you’ll see Sol itself. I suppose that’s a sight you neve
r thought to see.”

  “Not under these circumstances, anyway,” Palmer said.

  “Thirty seconds, Dirk,” Fran Shannon said. “Twenty…ten…five…four…three…two…one…now!”

  Lingo pressed the button. The swirl of Stasis-Space disappeared, and the stars came out, red, blue, yellow.

  Centered in the red circle indicating the ship’s line of flight was a bright yellow star, at this distance, the brightest thing in the viewscreen.

  A curious, unanimous sigh came from the throats of the Solarians as they stared somehow forlornly at that yellow sun.

  And Palmer gazed for the first time on Man’s home sun, the forlorn hope of a war-torn humanity, Fortress Sol.

  It was just another G-type star; in fact it could just as well have been Dugl. There was no way of telling, at this distance, and far-off Sirius was almost as bright. An obscure, medium-sized yellow star in an out-of-the-way part of the Galaxy, lost in a vast sea of similar balls of gas.

  But it was home.

  Palmer was astonished at what he felt. He had never seen this yellow sun; he had never even been within seventy light-years of it before. He had been born on the fourth planet of Brycion, a sun not even visible from Earth. Not one atom of his body had ever felt the heat of Sol.

  Yet somehow, the ordinary, middle-sized sun seemed far brighter than it should have; its light seemed somehow richer, somehow more benign, as if Sol itself were welcoming its long-lost son home.

  “It’s…it’s beautiful…” he muttered inanely.

  “It’s just another G-type star,” Lingo snapped unexpectedly, his voice heavy with bitterness. “Just another ball of gas.”

  “How can you say that, man?” Palmer exclaimed. “It’s Sol! It’s the home system of the human race. It’s your home sun. Don’t you have any feeling at all?”

  “Don’t I…?” Lingo fell silent, and no one else seemed willing to speak. The seven of them stared for long minutes at Sol, and Palmer thought he saw a tear form on Linda Dortin’s cheek. Max squeezed her hand and Robin leaned on Lingo’s shoulder.

  “Just another G-type sun,” Lingo finally repeated, with unnatural harshness. “There are a billion others just like it, so let’s stop mooning over it.” His voice quavered slightly.

  “Resolution Field on,” he said coldly. “We’ll soon be crossing the orbit of Pluto. Watch out for military secrets, Jay.” The joke fell very flat.

  As the ship began to accelerate faster and faster, Palmer saw that the nearby space was filled with mines—there must’ve been close to a billion of them surrounding Sol, for even in the limited field of vision of the viewscreen, he could see perhaps a dozen.

  As they passed close by one of the mines, Palmer could see that it was lasecannon type: muzzles projecting in all directions, and antennae of all kinds sprouting all over the globular mine. Of course the mine would not open fire—it would naturally be programmed to distinguish and pass Solarian ships. But….

  There was something very wrong. The various sensing devices and antennae were mounted on universal joints so that they could monitor space in all directions, sweeping their laser and radar beams in regular patterns through all quadrants, gathering data from all directions.

  But the antennae were not moving. They remained stationary. The mine was dead, deactivated.

  “That one’s defective,” he muttered to Lingo. “You ought to report it.”

  Lingo said nothing.

  As they neared the orbit of Pluto, they passed close to another mine. This one too was dead.

  p height="0em" width="13" align="justify">“Another dead one!” Palmer exclaimed. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Jay,” Lingo said. “They’re not defective. They’ve all been deactivated, except for tell-tale camera satellites scattered through the system to give us visual pickups from anywhere we want to see close up.”

  “What? But the Doogs….”

  Lingo grimaced. “This minefield was never designed to ward off a concentrated attack by four thousand warships,” he said. “There are several ways for that many ships to find a way through. That’s what the Council of Wisdom meant by it being mathematically impossible for any solar system to withstand attack by four thousand ships.”

  “We’re crossing the orbit of Pluto now,” Fran Shannon announced.

  “Okay, give me an indicator around Saturn.”

  A small circle appeared around a barely visible point of light. Lingo maneuvered the ship so that the smaller circle was centered in the larger one indicating the ship’s line of flight.

  “Why are we going to Saturn?” Palmer asked.

  “We’re not,” said Lingo. “I thought we’d give you the Grand Tour on the way in, Jay. The Rings of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars…. You’ve never seen any of it, and old Sol has some pretty interesting children, for an ordinary G-type sun. I thought…er…I thought you might like to see the sights, since…er….”

  Palmer studied the faces of the Solarians, and he thought he understood. They might pretend that the tour was for him, and he saw no reason to deny them the comfortable self-deception, but this might very well be the last chance they would ever have to see the planets of their own solar system…. In a few weeks this system, or what was left of it, might very well be just another part of the ever-growing Duglaari Empire….

  “Saturn,” said Lingo, in a tone of almost boyish pride, “the largest ringed planet in the known Galaxy, in fact one of only three such planets. Totally useless itself, but with a moon bigger than a lot of planets—Titan, one of the few satellites in the Galaxy with an atmosphere.”

  Palmer stared in wonder at the great gas giant surrounded by its rings of ice particles, like planet-wide rainbows shimmering in the black of space. Surely, one of the most beautiful sights in the Galaxy.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, unable to express any less banal a thought. Then a dark cloud crossed his mind.

  “The Doogs don’t even have the concept of beauty, do they?” he said. “It’d be just another uninhabitable gas giant to them, wouldn’t it? Just another piece of useless booty.”

  “The Doogs don’t even have the concept of booty,” Lingo said. “But I promise you one thing: one way or another, they’ll never occupy this system.

  “Never!” he hissed savagely.

  Onward they sped, past Jupiter, the giant of the Sol system, a gas giant so huge that Man came close to never being born. For had Jupiter been a magnitude or two bigger, had the birth of Sol gone just slightly different, Jupiter might’ve become a small star itself, combining its radiation with that of Sol to make Earth a planet where nothing organic could live.

  As they passed Mars, where a race that had died while Earth’s life was still confined to the oceans had futilely girdled a whole planet with canals to preserve an inexorably dwindling water supply, Palmer first realized that something was very wrong.

  Mars had been the first planet men had ever colonized; the colonization of Mars was the basis for countless plays, novels and other works of historical fiction. The surface of Mars had been speckled with domed cities for many centuries. Mars was Sol’s second most populous body.

  But the cities showed no lights. The skys showed no aircraft, and the space around Mars was totally devoid of ships.

  “What’s wrong?” Palmer asked. “The whole planet’s dead! The Doogs couldn’t have gotten here already, could they?”

  “Of course not,” said Lingo. “Calm down. The planet’s been evacuated. Remember, we planned for a Duglaari attack on Sol. We knew it would happen months, even years in advance, so….”

  “And Mars was too vulnerable, with all the breathable air confined in domed cities! Of course! The domed cities are sitting ducks.”

  “Uh, huh…” Lingo grunted non-committally.

  Palmer was beginning to wonder. There was something very peculiar going on. The mines deactivated…no ships sighted…Mars evacuated…the Solarians sullen and uncommunicative, touring the planets as if the
y were sure they would never see them again….

  Could…? No, it was impossible! No one could be willing to settle for that—let the Duglaari have every planet in the Sol system except Earth itself, every planet in the entire Galaxy save one. Have the pitiful remnants of the human race voluntarily confine themselves to Earth alone, give up even the planets of Man’s home system in the wild hope that the Doogs would let one planet survive as a kind of reservation.

  Condemn the human race to live in…in a zoo!

  It was unthinkable! Even for Solarians! And yet, it did add up…the apparent lack of resistance, the evacuation of Mars….

  Did the Doogs have zoos? Might they be interested in preserving a small remnant of a defeated human race as an exhibit?

  Or as a source of subjects for unusually unpleasant experiments?

  “Next stop, Earth,” Lingo said, snapping Palmer out of his troubled reverie.

  Ridiculous! Palmer told himself. I’ve no reason to think that of them; they’ve proved that they care about the survival of the human race.

  But might they care too much? Might not survival be Sol’s only goal?

  Survival at any price.

  He saw it first as a bright blue star, brighter than Venus as seen from its own surface. From just sunward of Mars, it was the fourth brightest object in space, outshone only by Mars, Jupiter and Sol itself.

  But as soon as he was able to distinguish it with his eye, it outshone all else in his soul.

  It was Earth.

  Earth, the original Earth-type planet; Earth, the planet of the original 1-gee gravitational field, which all other gravitational fields were defined in terms of; Earth, whose very name meant simply “the ground”, “the world”; Earth, the only 1.000 Earth-normal planet.

  Earth, the ancestral home of Man.

  The sight of that sapphire point of light, waxing into a disc as they sped towards it, released a torrent of associations, of primal emotions in Palmer, to whom the planet was little more than a legend; a man whose body contained not an atom of Earth, but who was a son of Man’s home planet nevertheless.