Arthur Clarke - The Songs of Distant Earth

He had been born on Mars, and this world had everything his own barren planet had lacked. He had seen the labour of generations of his ancestors dissolve in flame; why start again centuries from now on yet another world — when Paradise was here?

And, of course, a girl was waiting for him, down there on South Island…

He had almost decided that when the time came, he would jump ship. The Terrans could go on without him, to deploy their strength and skills — and perhaps break their hearts and bodies — against the stubborn rocks of Sagan 2. He wished them luck; when he had done his duty, his home was here.

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.

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.