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
They 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
The 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)
1956
Detection of neutrino
1967
Solar neutrino anomaly discovered
2000
Sun’s fate confirmed
100
Interstellar probes
200
300
Robot seeders planned
400
Seeding started
2500
(embryos)
600
(DNA codes)
700
751
SEEDER LEAVES FOR THALASSA
800
900
999
LAST MILLENNIUM
3000
/> THALASSA
100
LORDS
OF
THE
LAST
DAYS
3109
First Landing
0
200
Birth of Nation
100
Contact with Earth
300
200
Mt. Krakan Erupts
400
Contact Lost
300
3500
400
QUANTUM DRIVE
600
FINAL EXODUS
Stasis
617
STARSHIP MAGELLAN
3620
END OF EARTH
3864
Magellan arrives
718
3865
Magellan leaves
720
4135
SAGAN 2
1026
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.)
Ten years later, H. D. Froning of McDonnell Douglas Astronautics introduced the idea at the British Interplanetary Society’s Interstellar Studies Conference, London (September 1979) and followed it up with two papers: “Propulsion Requirements for a Quantum Interstellar Ramjet” (JBIS, Vol. 33,1980) and “Investigation of a Quantum Ramjet for Interstellar Flight” (AIAA Preprint 81-1534, 1981).
Ignoring the countless inventors of unspecified “space drives,” the first person to use the idea in fiction appears to have been Dr. Charles Sheffield, Chief Scientist of Earth Satellite Corporation; he discusses the theoretical basis of the “quantum drive” (or, as he has named it, “vacuum energy drive”) in his novel The McAndrew Chronicles (Analog magazine 1981; Tor, 1983).
An admittedly naive calculation by Richard Feynman suggests that every cubic centimetre of vacuum contains enough energy to boil all the oceans of Earth. Another estimate by John Wheeler gives a value a mere seventy-nine orders of magnitude larger. When two of the world’s greatest physicists disagree by a little matter of seventy-nine zeros, the rest of us may be excused a certain scepticism; but it’s at least an interesting thought that the vacuum inside an ordinary light bulb contains enough energy to destroy the galaxy … and perhaps, with a little extra effort, the cosmos.
In what may hopefully be an historic paper (“Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated conductors,” Physical Review, Vol. 30B, pp. 1700-1702, 15 August 1984) Dr. Robert L. Forward of the Hughes Research Labs has shown that at least a minute fraction of this energy can be tapped. If it can be harnessed for propulsion by anyone besides science-fiction writers, the purely engineering problems of interstellar – or even intergalactic – flight would be solved.
But perhaps not. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Alan Bond for his detailed mathematical analysis of the shielding necessary for the mission described in this novel and for pointing out that a blunt cone is the most advantageous shape. It may well turn out that the factor limiting high-velocity interstellar flight will not be energy but ablation of the shield mass by dust grains, and evaporation by protons.
The history and theory of the “space elevator” will be found in my address to the Thirtieth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation, Munich, 1979: “The Space Elevator: “Thought Experiment” or key to the Universe?” (Reprinted in Advances in Earth Orientated Applications of Space Technology, Vol. I, No. 1, 1981, pp. 39-48 and Ascent to Orbit: John Wiley, 1984). I have also developed the idea in the novel The Fountains of Paradise (Del Rey, Gollancz, 1978).
My apologies to Jim Ballard and J. T. Frazer for stealing the title of their own two very different volumes for my final chapter.
My special gratitude to the Diyawadane Nilame and his staff at the Temple of the Tooth, Kandy, for kindly inviting me into the Relic Chamber during a time of troubles.
Table of Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I – Thalassa
1. The Beach at Tarna
2. The Little Neutral One
3. Village Council
4. Tocsin
5. Night Ride
II – Magellan
6. Planetfall
7. Lords of the Last Days
8. Remembrance of Love Lost
9. The Quest for Superspace
III – South Island
10. First Contact
11. Delegation
12. Heritage
13. Task Force
14. Mirissa
15. Terra Nova
16. Party Games
17. Chain of Command
18. Kumar
19. Pretty Polly
20. Idyll
IV – Krakan
21. Academy
22. Krakan
23. Ice Day
24. Archive
25. Scorp
26. Snowflake Rising
27. Mirror of the Past
28. The Sunken Forest
29. Sabra
30. Child of Krakan
V – The Bounty Syndrome
31. Petition
32. Clinic
33. Tides
34. Shipnet
35. Convalescence
36. Kilimanjaro
37. In Vino Veritas
38. Debate
39. The Leopard in the Snows
40. Confrontation
41. Pillow Talk
42. Survivor
43. Interrogation
VI – The Forests of the Sea
44. Spyball
45. Bait
46. Whatever Gods May Be…
VII – As the Sparks Fly Upward
47. Ascension
48. Decision
49. Fire on the Reef
VIII – The Songs of Distant Earth
50. Shield of Ice
51. Relic
52. The Songs of Distant Earth
53. The Golden Mask
54. Valediction
55. Departure
56. Below the Interface
IX – Sagan 2
57. The Voices of Time
CHRONOLOGY
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Songs of Distant Earth Page 21
