Arthur Clarke: The Songs of Distant Earth

“We’re nearly there,” Loren said in a voice that was now hushed and solemn. “And this is the Guardian.”

Taken completely by surprise, Mirissa floated towards the golden face staring at her out of the alcove until she was about to collide with it. She put out her hand, and felt cold metal. So it was real — and not, as she had first imagined, a holodisplay.

“What — who — is it?” she whispered.

“We have many of Earth’s greatest art treasures on board,” Loren said with sombre pride. “This was one of the most famous. He was a king who died very young — when he was still a boy.

Loren’s voice faded away as they shared the same thought. Mirissa had to blink away her tears before she could read the inscription below the mask.

TUTANKHAMUN

1361–1353 bc

(Valley of the Kings, Egypt, ad 1922)

Yes, he had been almost exactly the same age as Kumar. The golden face stared out at them across the millennia, and across the light-years — the face of a young god struck down in his prime. There was power and confidence here but not yet the arrogance and cruelty that the lost years would have given.

“Why here?” Mirissa said, half guessing the answer.

“It seemed an appropriate symbol. The Egyptians believed that if they carried out the right ceremonies, the dead would exist again in some kind of afterworld. Pure superstition, of course — yet here we have made it come true.”

But not in the way I would have wished, Mirissa thought sadly. As she stared into the jet-black eyes of the boy king, looking out at her from his mask of incorruptible gold, it was hard to believe that this was only a marvellous work of art and not a living person.

She could not tear her eyes away from that calm yet hypnotic gaze across the centuries. Once more she put forth her hand, and stroked a golden cheek. The precious metal suddenly reminded her of a poem she had found in the First Landing Archives, when she set the computer searching the literature of the past for words of solace. Most of the hundreds of lines had been inappropriate, but this one (‘Author unknown —?1800–2100’) fitted perfectly:

They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man, The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

Loren waited patiently until Mirissa’s thoughts had run their course. Then he slid a card into an almost invisible slot beside the death-mask, and a circular door opened silently.

It was incongruous to find a cloak-room full of heavy furs inside a spaceship, but Mirissa could appreciate the need for them. Already the temperature had fallen many degrees, and she found herself shivering with the unaccustomed cold.

Loren helped her into the thermosuit — not without difficulty in zero gravity — and they floated towards a circle of frosted glass set in the far wall of the little chamber. The crystal trapdoor swung towards them like an opening watchglass, and out of its swirled a blast of frigid air such as Mirissa had never imagined far less experienced. Thin wisps of moisture condensed in the freezing air, dancing round her like ghosts. She looked at Loren as if to say, “Surely you don’t expect me to go in there!”

He took her arm reassuringly and said, “Don’t worry — the suit will protect you, and after a few minutes you won’t notice the cold on your face.”

She found this hard to believe; but he was right. As she followed him through the trapdoor, breathing cautiously at first, she was surprised to find the experience not at all unpleasant. Indeed, it was positively stimulating; for the first time she could understand why people had willingly gone into the polar regions of the Earth.

She could easily imagine that she was there herself, for she seemed to be floating in a frigid, snow-white universe. All around her were glittering honeycombs that might have been made of ice, forming thousands of hexagonal cells. It was almost like a smaller version of Magellan’s shield — except that here the units were only about a metre across, and laced together with clusters of pipes and bundles of wiring.

So here they were, sleeping all around her — the hundreds of thousands of colonists to whom Earth was still in literal truth, a memory of only yesterday. What were they dreaming, she wondered, less than halfway through their five-hundred-year sleep? Did the brain dream at all in this dim no-man’s-land between life and death? Not according to Loren; but who could be really sure?

Mirissa had seen videos of bees scurrying about their mysterious business inside a hive; she felt like a human bee as she followed Loren, hand over hand along the grid-work of rails crisscrossing the face of the great honeycomb. She was now quite at ease in zero gravity and was no longer even aware of the bitter cold. Indeed, she was scarcely aware of her body and sometimes had to persuade herself that this was not all a dream from which she would presently awake.

The cells bore no names but were all identified by an alphanumeric code; Loren went unerringly to H-354. At the touch of a button, the hexagonal metal-and-glass container slid outward on telescopic rails to reveal the sleeping woman inside.

She was not beautiful — though it was unfair to pass judgement on any woman without the crowning glory of her hair. Her skin was of a colour that Mirissa had never seen and which she knew had become very rare on Earth — a black so deep that it held almost a hint of blue. And it was so flawless that Mirissa could not resist a spasm of envy; into her mind came a fleeting image of intertwined bodies, ebon and ivory — an image which, she knew, would haunt her in the years ahead.

She looked again at the face. Even in this centuries-long repose, it showed determination and intelligence. Would we have been friends? Mirissa wondered. I doubt it; we are too much alike.

So you are Kitani, and you are carrying Loren’s first child out to the stars. But will she really be the first, since she will be born centuries after mine? First or second, I wish her well…

She was still numb, though not only with cold, when the crystal door closed behind them. Loren steered her gently back along the corridor and past the Guardian.

Once more her fingers brushed the cheek of the immortal golden boy. For a shocked moment, it felt warm to her touch; then she realized that her body was still adjusting to normal temperature.

That would take only minutes; but how long, she wondered, before the ice would melt around her heart?

This is the last time I shall talk to you, Evelyn, before I begin my longest sleep. I am still on Thalassa, but the shuttle will be lifting for Magellan in a few minutes; there is nothing more for me to do — until planetfall, three hundred years from now…

I feel a great sadness, for I have just said good-bye to my dearest friend here, Mirissa Leonidas. How you would have enjoyed meeting her! She is perhaps the most intelligent person I have met on Thalassa, and we had many long talks together — though I fear that some were more like the monologues for which you so often criticized me…

She asked about God, of course; but perhaps her shrewdest question was one I was quite unable to answer.

Soon after her beloved young brother was killed, she asked me, “What is the purpose of grief? Does it serve any biological function?”

How strange that I had never given any serious thought to that!

One could imagine an intelligent species which functioned perfectly well if the dead were remembered with no emotion — if indeed they were remembered at all. It would be an utterly inhuman society, but it could be at least as successful as the termites and the ants were on Earth.

Could grief be an accidental — even a pathological — by-product of love, which of course does have an essential biological function? It’s a strange and disturbing thought. Yet it’s our emotions that make us human; who would abandon them, even knowing that each new love is yet another hostage to those twin terrorists, Time and Fate?