Arthur Clarke: The Songs of Distant Earth

She often talked to me about you, Evelyn. It puzzled her that a man could love only one woman in all his life and not seek another when she was gone. Once I teased her by saying that fidelity was almost as strange to the Lassans as jealousy; she retorted that they had gained by losing both.

They are calling me; the shuttle is waiting. Now I must say good-bye to Thalassa forever. And your image, too, is beginning to fade. Though I am good at giving advice to others, perhaps I have clung too long to my own grief, and it does no service to your memory.

Thalassa has helped to cure me. Now I can rejoice that I knew you rather than mourn because I lost you.

A strange calmness has come upon me. For the first time, I feel that I really understand my old Buddhist friends’ concepts of Detachment — even of Nirvana…

And if I do not wake on Sagan 2, so be it. My work here is done, and I am well content.

The trimaran reached the edge of the kelp bed just before midnight, and Brant anchored in thirty metres of water. He would start to drop the spyballs at dawn until the fence was laid between Scorpville and South Island. Once that was established, any comings and goings would be observed. If the scorps found one of the spyballs and carried it home as a trophy, so much the better. It would continue to operate, doubtless providing even more useful information than in the open sea.

Now there was nothing to do but to lie in the gently rocking boat and listen to the soft music from Radio Tarna, tonight uncharacteristically subdued. From time to time there would be an announcement or a message of goodwill or a poem in honour of the villagers. There could be few people sleeping on either island tonight; Mirissa wondered fleetingly what thoughts must be passing through the minds of Owen Fletcher and his fellow exiles, marooned on an alien world for the rest of their lives. The last time she had seen them on a Norther Videocast, they had not appeared at all unhappy and had been cheerfully discussing local business opportunities.

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.

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.