Arthur Clarke - The Songs of Distant Earth

Del Rey

cover art by Michael Whelan

This novel is based on an idea developed almost thirty years ago in a short story of the same name (now in my collection The Other Side of the Sky). However, this version was directly — and negatively — inspired by the recent rash of space-operas on TV and movie screen. (Query: what is the opposite of inspiration — expiration?)

Please do not misunderstand me: I have enormously enjoyed the best of Star Trek and the Lucas/Spielberg epics, to mention only the most famous examples of the genre. But these works are fantasy, not science fiction in the strict meaning of the term. It now seems almost certain that in the real universe we may never exceed the velocity of light. Even the very closest star systems will always be decades or centuries apart; no Warp Six will ever get you from one episode to another in time for next week’s instalment. The great Producer in the Sky did not arrange his programme planning that way.

In the last decade, there has also been a significant, and rather surprising, change in the attitude of scientists towards the problem of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The whole subject did not become respectable (except among dubious characters like the writers of science fiction) until the 1960s: Shklovskii and Sagan’s Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) is the landmark here.

But now there has been a backlash. The total failure to find any trace of life in this solar system, or to pick up any of the interstellar radio signals that our great antennae should be easily able to detect, has prompted some scientists to argue ‘Perhaps we are alone in the Universe…’ Dr Frank Tipler, the best-known exponent of this view, has (doubtless deliberately) outraged the Saganites by giving one of his papers the provocative title ‘There Are No Intelligent Extra-Terrestrials’. Carl Sagan et al argue (and I agree with them) that it is much too early to jump to such far-reaching conclusions.

Meanwhile, the controversy rages; as has been well said, either answer will be awe-inspiring. The question can only be settled by “evidence, not by any amount of logic, however plausible. I would like to see the whole debate given a decade or two of benign neglect, while the radioastronomers, like gold-miners panning for dust, quietly sieve through the torrents of noise pouring down from the sky.

This novel is, among other things, my attempt to create a wholly realistic piece of fiction on the interstellar theme — just as, in Prelude to Space (1951), I used known or foreseeable technology to depict mankind’s first voyage beyond the Earth. There is nothing in this book which defies or denies known principles; the only really wild extrapolation is the ‘quantum drive’, and even this has a highly respectable paternity. (See Acknowledgements.) Should it turn out to be a pipe-dream, there are several possible alternatives; and if we twentieth-century primitives can imagine them, future science will undoubtedly discover something much better.

Arthur C. Clarke

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

JULY 1985

Even before the boat came through the reef, Mirissa could tell that Brant was angry. The tense attitude of his body as he stood at the wheel — the very fact that he had not left the final passage in Kumar’s capable hands — showed that something had upset him.

She left the shade of the palm trees and walked slowly down the beach, the wet sand tugging at her feet. When she reached the water’s edge, Kumar was already furling the sail. Her ‘baby’ brother — now almost as tall as she was, and solid muscle — waved to her cheerfully. How often she had wished that Brant shared Kumar’s easygoing good nature, which no crisis ever seemed capable of disturbing…

Brant did not wait for the boat to hit the sand, but jumped into the water while it was still waist-deep and came splashing angrily towards her. He was carrying a twisted mass of metal festooned with broken wires and held it up for her inspection.

“Look!” he cried. “They’ve done it again!”

With his free hand, he waved towards the northern horizon.

“This time — I’m not going to let them get away with it! And the mayor can say what she damn well pleases!”

Mirissa stood aside while the little catamaran, like some primeval sea-beast making its first assault on the dry land, heaved itself slowly up the beach on its spinning outboard rollers. As soon as it was above the high-water line, Kumar stopped the engine, and jumped out to join his still-fuming skipper.

“I keep telling Brant,” he said, “that it must be an accident — maybe a dragging anchor. After all, why should the Northers do something like this deliberately?”

“I’ll tell you,” Brant retorted. “Because they’re too lazy to work out the technology themselves. Because they’re afraid we’ll catch too many fish. Because —

He caught sight of the other’s grin and sent the cat’s cradle of broken wires spinning in his direction. Kumar caught it effortlessly.

“Anyway — even if it is an accident, they shouldn’t be anchoring here. That area’s clearly marked on the chart: KEEP OUT — RESEARCH PROJECT. So I’m still going to lodge a protest.”

Brant had already recovered his good humour; even his most furious rages seldom lasted more than a few minutes. To keep him in the right mood, Mirissa started to run her fingers down his back and spoke to him in her most soothing voice.

“Did you catch any good fish?”

“Of course not,” Kumar answered. “He’s only interested in catching statistics — kilograms per kilowatt — that sort of nonsense. Lucky I took my rod. We’ll have tuna for dinner.”

He reached into the boat and pulled out almost a metre of streamlined power and beauty, its colours fading rapidly, its sightless eyes already glazed in death.

“Don’t often get one of these,” he said proudly. They were still admiring his prize when History returned to Thalassa, and the simple, carefree world they had known all their young lives came abruptly to its end.

The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky, as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapour trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.

And now a distant thunder was rolling down from the edge of space. It was a sound that Thalassa had not heard for seven hundred years but which any child would recognize at once.

Despite the warmth of the evening, Mirissa shivered and her hand found Brant’s. Though his fingers closed about hers, he scarcely seemed to notice; he was still staring at the riven sky.

Even Kumar was subdued, yet he was the first to speak.

“One of the colonies must have found us.”

Brant shook his head slowly but without much conviction.