Arthur Clarke: The Songs of Distant Earth

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.

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.

(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

First Landing 0 200

Birth of Nation 100

Lords of The Last Days 200

Contact with Earth 300

Contact Lost 300

Mt Krakan Erupts, 400

3500 400

QUANTUM DRIVE

600 FINAL EXODUS

Stasis617

STARSHIP MAGELLAN 3620

END OF EARTH

3864 Magellan arrives 718

3865 Magellan leaves 720

4135 SAGAN 2 1026

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

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.

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

3 °Child of Krakan