Arthur Clarke - The Songs of Distant Earth

Moses Kaldor was happy to be left alone, for as many hours or days as he could be spared, in the cathedral calm of First Landing. He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and knowledge of mankind. The experience was both exhilarating and depressing; a whole universe lay at his fingertips, but the fraction of it he could explore in an entire lifetime was so negligible that he was sometimes almost overwhelmed with despair. He was like a hungry man presented with a banquet that stretched as far as the eye could see — a feast so staggering that it completely destroyed his appetite.

And yet all this wealth of wisdom and culture was only a tiny fraction of mankind’s heritage; much that Moses Kaldor knew and loved was missing — not, he was well aware, by accident but by deliberate design.

A thousand years ago, men of genius and goodwill had rewritten history and gone through the libraries of Earth deciding what should be saved and what should be abandoned to the flames. The criterion of choice was simple though often very hard to apply. Only if it would contribute to survival and social stability on the new worlds would any work of literature, any record of the past, be loaded into the memory of the seedships.

The task was, of course, impossible as well as heartbreaking. With tears in their eyes, the selection panels had thrown away the Veda, the Bible, the Tripitaka, the Qur’an, and all the immense body of literature — fiction and nonfiction — that was based upon them. Despite all the wealth of beauty and wisdom these works contained, they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds.

Lost also in the great purge were virtually all the works of the supreme novelists, poets, and playwrights, which would in any case have been meaningless without their philosophical and cultural background. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy, Melville, Proust — the last great fiction writer before the electronic revolution overwhelmed the printed page — all that was left were a few hundred thousand carefully selected passages. Excluded was everything that concerned war, crime, violence, and the destructive passions. If the newly designed — and it was hoped improved — successors to H. sapiens rediscovered these, they would doubtless create their own literature in response. There was no need to give them premature encouragement.

Music — except for opera — had fared better, as had the visual arts. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of material was so overwhelming that selection had been imperative, though sometimes arbitrary. Future generations on many worlds would wonder about Mozart’s first thirty-eight symphonies, Beethoven’s Second and Fourth, and Sibelius’s Third to Sixth.

Moses Kaldor was deeply aware of his responsibility, and also conscious of his inadequacy — of any one man’s inadequacy, however talented he might be — to handle the task that confronted him. Up there aboard Magellan, safely stored in its gigantic memory banks, was much that the people of Thalassa had never known and certainly much that they would greedily accept and enjoy, even if they did not wholly understand. The superb twenty-fifth century recreation of the Odyssey, the war classics that looked back in anguish across half a millennium of peace, the great Shakespearean tragedies in Feinberg’s miraculous Lingua translation, Lee Chow’s War and Peace — it would take hours and days even to name all the possibilities.

Sometimes, as he sat in the library of the First Landing Complex, Kaldor was tempted to play god with these reasonably happy and far-from-innocent people. He would compare the listings from the memory banks here with those aboard the ship, noting what had been expunged or condensed. Even though he disagreed in principle with any form of censorship, often he had to admit the wisdom of the deletions — at least in the days when the colony was founded. But now that it was successfully established, perhaps a little disturbance, or injection of creativity, might be in order…

Occasionally, he was disturbed himself either by calls from the ship or by parties of young Lassans being given guided tours back to the beginning of their history. He did not mind the interruptions, and there was one that he positively welcomed.

Most afternoons, except when what passed for urgent business in Tarna prevented her, Mirissa would come riding up the hill on her beautiful palomino gelding, Bobby. The visitors had been much surprised to find horses on Thalassa, since they had never seen any alive on Earth. But the Lassans loved animals, and had recreated many from the vast files of genetic material they had inherited. Sometimes they were quite useless — or even a nuisance, like the engaging little squirrel monkeys that were always stealing small objects from Tarnan households.

Mirissa would invariably bring some delicacy — usually fruit or one of the many local cheeses — which Kaldor would accept with gratitude. But he was even more grateful for her company; who would believe that often he had addressed five million people — more than half the last generation! — yet was now content with an audience of one…

“Because you’ve descended from a long line of librarians,” Moses Kaldor said, “you only think in megabytes. But may I remind you that the name “library” comes from a word meaning book. Do you have books on Thalassa?”

“Of course we do,” Mirissa said indignantly; she had not yet learned to tell when Kaldor was joking. “Millions… well, thousands. There’s a man on North Island who prints about ten a year, in editions of a few hundred. They’re beautiful — and very expensive. They all go as gifts for special occasions. I had one on my twenty-first birthday — Alice in Wonderland. ”

“I’d like to see it someday. I’ve always loved books, and have almost a hundred on the ship. Perhaps that’s why whenever I hear someone talking bytes, I divide mentally by a million and think of one book… one gigabyte equals a thousand books, and so on. That’s the only way I can grasp what’s really involved when people talk about data banks and information transfer. Now, how big is your library?”

Without taking her eyes off Kaldor, Mirissa let her fingers wander over the keyboard of her console.

“That’s another thing I’ve never been able to do,” he said admiringly. “Someone once said that after the twenty-first century, the human race divided into two species — Verbals and Digitals. I can use a keyboard when I have to, of course — but I prefer to talk to my electronic colleagues.”

“As of the last hourly check,” Mirissa said, “six hundred and forty-five terabytes.”

“Um — almost a billion books. And what was the initial size of the library?”

“I can tell you that without looking it up. Six hundred and forty.”

“So in seven hundred years —

“Yes, yes — we’ve managed to produce only a few million books.”

“I’m not criticizing; after all, quality is far more important than quantity. I’d like you to show me what you consider the best works of Lassan literature — music, too. The problem we have to decide is what to give you. Magellan has over a thousand megabooks aboard, in the General Access bank. Do you realize just what that implies?”

“If I said “Yes”, it would stop you from telling me. I’m not that cruel.”

“Thank you, my dear. Seriously, it’s a terrifying problem that’s haunted me for years. Sometimes I think that the Earth was destroyed none too soon; the human race was being crushed by the information it was generating.