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
Moses 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 bro
ught 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
The 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.
Whatever its destination might be, it seemed to have found it, at a depth of two hundred and fifty metres. Thereafter, it still kept moving around, but inside a very limited area. This continued for two more days; then the signals from the ultrasonic pinger suddenly stopped in mid-pulse.
That the scorp had been eaten by something even bigger and nastier than itself was far too naive an explanation. The pinger was enclosed in a tough metal cylinder; any conceivable arrangement of teeth, claws, or tentacles would take minutes – at the very least – to demolish it, and it would continue to function quite happily inside any creature that swallowed it whole.
This left only two possibilities, and the first was indignantly denied by the staff of the North Island Underwater Lab.
“Every single component had a back-up,” the director said. “What’s more, there was a diagnostic pulse only two seconds earlier; everything was normal. So it could not have been an equipment failure.”
That left only the impossible explanation. The pinger had been switched off. And to do that, a locking-bar had to be removed.
It could not happen by accident; only by curious meddling – or deliberate intent.
The twenty metre twin-hull Calypso was not merely the largest, but the only, oceanographic research vessel on Thalassa. It was normally based on North Island, and Loren was amused to note the good-natured banter between its scientific crew and their Tarnan passengers, whom they pretended to treat as ignorant fishermen. For their part, the South Islanders lost no opportunity of boasting to the Northers that they were the ones who had discovered the scorps. Loren did not remind them that this was not strictly in accord with the facts.
It was a slight shock to meet Brant again, though Loren should have expected it, since the other had been partly responsible for Calypso’s new equipment. They greeted each other with cool politeness, ignoring the curious or amused glances of the other passengers. There were few secrets on Thalassa; by this time everyone would know who was occupying the main guest-room of the Leonidas home.
The small underwater sledge sitting on the afterdeck would have been familiar to any oceanographer of the last two thousand years. Its metal framework carried three television cameras, a wire basket to hold samples collected by the remote-controlled arm, and an arrangement of water-jets that permitted movement in any direction. Once it had been lowered over the side, the robot explorer could send its images and information back through a fibre-optic cable not much thicker than the lead of a pencil. The technology was centuries old – and still perfectly adequate.
Now the shoreline had finally disappeared, and for the first time Loren found himself completely surrounded by water. He recalled his anxiety on that earlier trip with Brant and Kumar when they had travelled hardly a kilometre from the beach. This time, he was pleased to discover, he felt slightly more at ease, despite the presence of his rival. Perhaps it was because he was on a much larger boat …
“That’s odd,” Brant said, “I’ve never seen kelp this far to the west.”
At first Loren could see nothing; then he noticed the dark stain low in the water ahead. A few minutes later, the boat was nosing its way through a loose mass of floating vegetation, and the captain slowed speed to a crawl.
“We’re almost there, anyway,” he said. “No point in clogging our intakes with this stuff. Agreed, Brant?”
Brant adjusted the cursor on the display screen and took a reading.
“Yes – we’re only fifty metres from where we lost the pinger. Depth two hundred and ten. Let’s get the fish overboard.”
“Just a minute,” one of the Norther scientists said. “We spent a lot of time and money on that machine, and it’s the only one in the world. Suppose it gets tangled up in that damned kelp?”
There was a thoughtful silence; then Kumar, who had been uncharacteristically quiet – perhaps overawed by the high-powered talent from North Island – put in a diffident word.
“It looks much worse from here. Ten metres down, there are almost no leaves – only the big stems, with plenty of room between them. It’s like a forest.”
Yes, thought Loren, a submarine forest, with fish swimming between the slender, sinuous trunks. While the other scientists were watching the main video screen and the multiple displays of instrumentation, he had put on a set of full-vision goggles, excluding everything from his field of view except the scene ahead of the slowly descending robot. Psychologically, he was no longer on the deck of Calypso; the voices of his companions seemed to come from another world that had nothing to do with him.
He was an explorer entering an alien universe, not knowing what he might encounter. It was a restricted, almost monochrome universe; the only colours were soft blues and greens, and the limit of vision was less than thirty metres away. At any one time he could see a dozen slender trunks, supported at regular intervals by the gas-filled bladders that gave them buoyancy, reaching up from the gloomy depths and disappearing into the luminous “sky” overhead. Sometimes he felt that he was walking through a grove of trees on a dull, foggy day: then a school of darting fish destroyed the illusion.
“Two hundred fifty metres,” he heard someone call. “We should see the bottom soon. Shall we use the lights? The image quality is deteriorating.”
Loren had scarcely noticed any change, because the automatic controls had maintained the picture brilliance. But he realized that it must be almost completely dark at this depth; a human eye would have been virtually useless.
“No – we don’t want to disturb anything until we have to. As long as the camera’s operating, let’s stick to available light.”
“There’s the bottom! Mostly rock – not much sand.”
“Naturally.Macrocystis thalassi needs rocks to cling to – it’s not like the free-floating Sargassum.”
Loren could see what the speaker meant. The slender trunks ended in a network of roots, grasping rock-outcroppings so firmly that no storms or surface currents could dislodge them. The analogy with a forest on land was even closer than he had thought.
Very cautiously, the robot surveyor was working its way into the submarine forest, playing out its cable behind it. There seemed no risk of becoming entangled in the serpentine trunks that reared up to the invisible surface, for there was plenty of space between the giant plants. Indeed, they might have been deliberately –
The scientists looking at the monitor screen realized the incredible truth just a few seconds after Loren.
“Krakan!” one of them whispered. “This isn’t a natural forest – it’s a – plantation?”
29. Sabra
They called themselves Sabras, after the pioneers who, a millennium and a half before, had tamed an almost equally hostile wilderness on Earth.
The Martian Sabras had been lucky in one respect; they had no human enemies to oppose them – only the fierce climate, the barely perceptible atmosphere, the planet-wide sandstorms. All
these handicaps they had conquered; they were fond of saying that they had not merely survived, they had prevailed. That quotation was only one of countless borrowings from Earth, which their fierce independence would seldom allow them to acknowledge.
For more than a thousand years, they had lived in the shadow of an illusion – almost a religion. And, like any religion, it had performed an essential role in their society; it had given them goals beyond themselves, and a purpose to their lives.
Until the calculations proved otherwise, they had believed – or at least hoped – that Mars might escape the doom of Earth. It would be a close thing, of course; the extra distance would merely reduce the radiation by fifty per cent – but that might be sufficient. Protected by the kilometres of ancient ice at the Poles, perhaps Martians could survive when Men could not. There had even been a fantasy – though only a few romantics had really believed it – that the melting of the polar caps would restore the planet’s lost oceans. And then, perhaps, the atmosphere might become dense enough for men to move freely in the open with simple breathing equipment and thermal insulation …
These hopes died hard, killed at last by implacable equations. No amount of skill or effort would allow the Sabras to save themselves. They, too, would perish with the mother world whose softness they often affected to despise.
Yet now, spread beneath Magellan, was a planet that epitomized all the hopes and dreams of the last generations of Martian colonists. As Owen Fletcher looked down at the endless oceans of Thalassa, one thought kept hammering in his brain.
According to the star-probes, Sagan Two was much like Mars – which was the very reason he and his compatriots had been selected for this voyage. But why resume a battle, three hundred years hence and seventy-five light-years away, when Victory was already here and now?
Fletcher was no longer thinking merely of desertion; that would mean leaving far too much behind. It would be easy enough to hide on Thalassa; but how would he feel, when Magellan left, with the last friends and colleagues of his youth?
The Songs of Distant Earth Page 12
