Arthur Clarke: The Songs of Distant Earth

The first seedship left the solar system in 2553, heading towards the Sun’s near twin, Alpha Centauri A. Although the climate of the Earth-sized planet Pasadena was subject to violent extremes, owing to nearby Centauri B, the next likely target was more than twice as far away. The voyage time to Sirius X would be over four hundred years; when the seeder arrived, Earth might no longer exist.

But if Pasadena could be successfully colonized, there would be ample time to send back the good news. Two hundred years for the voyage, fifty years to secure a foothold and build a small transmitter, and a mere four years for the signal to get back to Earth — why, with luck, there would be shouting in the streets, around the year 2800.

In fact, it was 2786; Pasadena had done better than predicted. The news was electrifying, and gave renewed encouragement to the seeding programme. By this time, a score of ships had been launched, each with more advanced technology than its precursor. The latest models could reach a twentieth of the velocity of light, and more than fifty targets lay within their range.

Even when the Pasadena beacon became silent after beaming no more than the news of the initial landing, discouragement was only momentary. What had been done once could be done again — and yet again — with greater certainty of success.

By 2700 the crude technique of frozen embryos was abandoned. The genetic message that Nature encoded in the spiral structure of the DNA molecule could now be stored more easily, more safely, and even more compactly, in the memories of the ultimate computers, so that a million genotypes could be carried in a seedship no larger than an ordinary thousand-passenger aircraft. An entire unborn nation, with all the replicating equipment needed to set up a new civilization, could be contained in a few hundred cubic metres, and carried to the stars.

This, Brant knew, was what had happened on Thalassa seven hundred years ago. Already, as the road climbed up into the hills, they had passed some of the scars left by the first robot excavators as they sought the raw materials from which his own ancestors had been created. In a moment, they would see the long-abandoned processing plants and —

“What’s that?” Councillor Simmons whispered urgently.

“Stop!” the mayor ordered. “Cut the engine, Brant.’ She reached for the car microphone.

“Mayor Waldron. We’re at the seven-kilometre mark. There’s a light ahead of us — we can see it through the trees — as far as I can tell it’s exactly at First Landing. We can’t hear anything. Now we’re starting up again.”

Brant did not wait for the order, but eased the speed control gently forward. This was the second most exciting thing that had happened to him in his entire life, next to being caught in the hurricane of ‘09.

That had been more than exciting; he had been lucky to escape alive. Perhaps there was also danger here, but he did not really believe so. Could robots be hostile? Surely there was nothing that any outworlders could possibly want from Thalassa, except knowledge and friendship…

“You know,” Councillor Simmons said, “I had a good view of the thing before it went over the trees, and I’m certain it was some kind of aircraft. Seedships never had wings and streamlining, of course. And it was very small.”

“Whatever it is,” Brant said, “we’ll know in five minutes. Look at that light — it’s come down in Earth Park — the obvious place. Should we stop the car and walk the rest of the way?”

Earth Park was the carefully tended oval of grass on the eastern side of First Landing, and it was now hidden from their direct view by the black, looming column of the Mother Ship, the oldest and most revered monument on the planet. Spilling round the edges of the still-untarnished cylinder was a flood of light, apparently from a single brilliant source.

“Stop the car just before we reach the ship,” the mayor ordered. “Then we’ll get out and peek around it. Switch off your lights so they won’t see us until we want them to.”

“Them — or It?” asked one of the passengers, just a little hysterically. Everyone ignored him.

The car came to a halt in the ship’s immense shadow, and Brant swung it round through a hundred and eighty degrees.

“Just so we can make a quick getaway,” he explained, half seriously, half out of mischief; he still could not believe that they were in any real danger. Indeed, there were moments when he wondered if this was really happening. Perhaps he was still asleep, and this was merely a vivid dream.

They got quietly out of the car and walked up to the ship, then circled it until they came to the sharply defined wall of light. Brant shielded his eyes and peered around the edge, squinting against the glare.

Councillor Simmons had been perfectly correct. It was some kind of aircraft — or aerospacecraft — and a very small one at that. Could the Northers? — No, that was absurd. There was no conceivable use for such a vehicle in the limited area of the Three Islands, and its development could not possibly have been concealed.

It was shaped like a blunt arrowhead and must have landed vertically, for there were no marks on the surrounding grass. The light came from a single source in a streamlined dorsal housing, and a small red beacon was flashing on and off just above that. Altogether, it was a reassuringly — indeed, disappointingly — ordinary machine. One that could not conceivably have travelled the dozen light-years to the nearest known colony.

Suddenly, the main light went out, leaving the little group of observers momentarily blind. When he recovered his night vision, Brant could see that there were windows in the forepart of the machine, glowing faintly with internal illumination. Why — it looked almost like a manned vehicle, not the robot craft they had taken for granted!

Mayor Waldron had come to exactly the same astonishing conclusion.

“It’s not a robot — there are people in it! Let’s not waste any more time. Shine your flashlight on me, Brant, so they can see us.”

“Helga!” Councillor Simmons protested.

“Don’t be an ass, Charlie. Let’s go, Brant.”

What was it that the first man on the Moon had said, almost two millennia ago? ‘One small step…’ They had taken about twenty when a door opened in the side of the vehicle, a double-jointed ramp flipped rapidly downward, and two humanoids walked out to meet them.

That was Brant’s first reaction. Then he realized that he had been misled by the colour of their skin — or what he could see of it, through the flexible, transparent film that covered them from head to foot.

They were not humanoids — they were human. If he never went out into the sun again, he might become almost as bleached as they were.

The Mayor was holding out her hands in the traditional “See — no weapons!” gesture as old as history.

“I don’t suppose you’ll understand me,” she said, “but welcome to Thalassa.”

The visitors smiled, and the older of the two — a handsome, grey-haired man in his late sixties — held up his hands in response.

“On the contrary,” he answered, in one of the deepest and most beautifully modulated voices that Brant had ever heard, “we understand you perfectly. We’re delighted to meet you.”

For a moment, the welcoming party stood in stunned silence. But it was silly, thought Brant, to have been surprised. After all, they did not have the slightest difficulty understanding the speech of men who had lived two thousand years ago. When sound recording was invented, it froze the basic phoneme patterns of all languages. Vocabularies would expand, syntax and grammar might be modified — but pronunciation would remain stable for millennia.