Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (28 page)

‘But tonight, science and history can wait,
for we have other treasures aboard. Earth has not been idle in the centuries
since your forefathers left. Listen, now, to some of the heritage we share
together, and which we will leave upon Thalassa before we go our way.’

The lights had dimmed; the music had begun.
No one who was present would ever forget that moment; in a trance of wonder,
Lora had listened to what men had wrought in sound during the centuries of
separation. Time had meant nothing, she had not even been conscious of Leon
standing by her side, holding her hand, as the music ebbed and flowed around
them.

These were the things that she had never
known, the things that belonged to Earth, and to Earth alone. The slow beat of
mighty bells, climbing like invisible smoke from old cathedral spires; the
chant of patient boatmen, in a thousand tongues now lost forever, rowing home
against the tide in the last light of day; the songs of armies marching into
battles that time had robbed of all their pain and evil; the merged murmur of
ten million voices as man’s greatest cities woke to meet the dawn; the cold
dance of the Aurora over endless seas of ice; the roar of mighty engines
climbing upward on the highway to the stars. All these she had heard in the
music and the songs that had come out of the night – the songs of distant
Earth, carried to her across the light-years …

A clear soprano voice, swooping and soaring
like a bird at the very edge of hearing, sang a wordless lament that tore at
the heart. It was a dirge for all loves lost in the loneliness of space, for
friends and homes that could never again be seen and must fade at last from
memory. It was a song for all exiles, and it spoke as clearly to those who were
sundered from Earth by a dozen generations as to the voyagers to whom its
fields and cities still seemed only weeks away.

The music had died into the darkness;
misty-eyed, avoiding words, the people of Thalassa had gone slowly to their
homes. But Lora had not gone to hers; against the loneliness that had pierced
her very soul, there was only one defence. And presently she had found it, in
the warm night of the forest, as Leon’s arms tightened around her and their
souls and bodies merged. Like wayfarers lost in a hostile wilderness, they had
sought warmth and comfort beside the fire of love. While that fire burned, they
were safe from the shadows that prowled in the night; and all the universe of
stars and planets shrank to a toy that they could hold within their hands.

To Leon, it was never wholly real. Despite
all the urgency and peril that had brought them here, he sometimes fancied that
at journey’s end it would be hard to convince himself that Thalassa was not a
dream that had come in his long sleep. This fierce and foredoomed love, for
example; he had not asked for it – it had been thrust upon him. Yet there were
few men, he told himself, who would not have taken it, had they, too, landed,
after weeks of grinding anxiety, on this peaceful, pleasant world.

When he could escape from work, he took long
walks with Lora in the fields far from the village, where men seldom came and
only the robot cultivators disturbed the solitude. For hours Lora would
question him about Earth – but she would never speak of the planet that was the
Magellan
’s goal. He understood her reasons well enough, and did his best
to satisfy her endless curiousity about the world that was already ‘home’ to
more men than had ever seen it with their own eyes.

She was bitterly disappointed to hear that
the age of cities had passed. Despite all that Leon could tell her about the
completely decentralised culture that now covered the planet from pole to pole,
she still thought of Earth in terms of such vanished giants as Chandrigar,
London, Astrograd, New York, and it was hard for her to realise that they had
gone forever, and with them the way of life they represented.

‘When we left Earth,’ Leon explained, ‘the
largest centres of population were university towns like Oxford or Ann Arbor or
Canberra; some of them had fifty thousand students and professors. There are no
other cities left of even half that size.’

‘But what happened to them?’

‘Oh, there was no single cause, but the
development of communications started it. As soon as anyone on Earth could see
and talk to anyone else by pressing a button, most of the need for cities
vanished. Then anti-gravity was invented, and you could move goods or houses or
anything else through the sky without bothering about geography.
That
completed the job of wiping out distance, which the airplane had begun a couple
of centuries earlier. After that, men started to live where they liked, and the
cities dwindled away.’

For a moment Lora did not answer; she was
lying on a bank of grass, watching the behaviour of a bee whose ancestors, like
hers, had been citizens of Earth. It was trying vainly to extract nectar from
one of Thalassa’s native flowers; insect life had not yet arisen on this world,
and the few indigenous flowers had not yet invented lures for air-borne
visitors.

The frustrated bee gave up the hopeless task
and buzzed angrily away; Lora hoped that it would have enough sense to head
back to the orchards, where it would find more co-operative flowers. When she
spoke again, it was to voice a dream that had now haunted mankind for almost a
thousand years.

‘Do you suppose,’ she said wistfully, ‘that
we’ll ever break through the speed of light?’

Leon smiled, knowing where her thoughts were
leading. To travel faster than light – to go home to Earth, yet to return to
your native world while your friends were still alive – every colonist must, at
some time or other, have dreamed of this. There was no problem, in the whole
history of the human race, that had called forth so much effort and that still
remained so utterly intractable.

‘I don’t believe so,’ he said. ‘If it could
be done, someone would have discovered how by this time. No – we have to do it
the slow way, because there isn’t any other. That’s how the universe is built,
and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘But surely we could still keep in touch!’

Leon nodded. ‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘and we
try to. I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but you should have heard from Earth
long before now. We’ve been sending our robot message carriers to all the
colonies, carrying a full history of everything that’s happened up to the time
of departure, and asking for a report back. As the news returns to Earth, it’s
all transcribed and sent out again by the next messenger. So we have a kind of
interstellar news service, with the Earth as the central clearinghouse. It’s
slow, of course, but there’s no other way of doing it. If the last messenger to
Thalassa has been lost, there must be another on the way – maybe several,
twenty or thirty years apart.’

Lora tried to envisage the vast,
star-spanning network of message carriers, shuttling back and forth between
Earth and its scattered children, and wondered why Thalassa had been overlooked.
But with Leon beside her, it did not seem important. He was here; Earth and the
stars were very far away. And so also, with whatever unhappiness it might
bring, was tomorrow …

By the end of the week, the visitors had
built a squat and heavily braced pyramid of metal girders, housing some obscure
mechanism, on a rocky headland overlooking the sea. Lora, in common with the
571 other inhabitants of Palm Bay and the several thousand sight-seers who had
descended upon the village, was watching when the first test was made. No one
was allowed to go within a quarter of a mile of the machine – a precaution that
aroused a good deal of alarm among the more nervous islanders. Did the Earthmen
know what they were doing? Suppose that something went wrong. And
what
were they doing, anyway?

Leon was there with his friends inside that
metal pyramid, making the final adjustments – the ‘coarse focusing’, he had
told Lora, leaving her none the wiser. She watched with the same anxious
incomprehension as all her fellow islanders until the distant figures emerged
from the machine and walked to the edge of the flat-topped rock on which it was
built. There they stood, a tiny group of figures silhouetted against the ocean,
staring out to sea.

A mile from the shore, something strange was
happening to the water. It seemed that a storm was brewing – but a storm that
kept within an area only a few hundred yards across. Mountainous waves were
building up, smashing against each other and then swiftly subsiding again.
Within a few minutes the ripples of the disturbance had reached the shore, but
the centre of the tiny storm showed no sign of movement. It was as if, Lora
told herself, an invisible finger had reached down from the sky and was
stirring the sea.

Quite abruptly, the entire pattern changed.
Now the waves were no longer battering against each other; they were marching
in step, moving more and more swiftly in a tight circle. A cone of water was
rising from the sea, becoming taller and thinner with every second. Alteady it
was a hundred feet high, and the sound of its birth was an angry roaring that
filled the air and struck terror into the hearts of all who heard it. All, that
is, except the little band of men who had summoned this monster from the deep,
and who still stood watching it with calm assurance, ignoring the waves that
were breaking almost against their feet.

Now the spinning tower of water was climbing
swiftly up the sky, piercing the clouds like an arrow as it headed toward
space. Its foam-capped summit was already lost beyond sight, and from the sky
there began to fall a steady shower of rain, the drops abnormally large, like
those which prelude a thunderstorm. Not all the water that was being lifted
from Thalassa’s single ocean was reaching its distant goal; some was escaping
from the power that controlled it and was falling back from the edge of space.

Slowly the watching crowd drifted away,
astonishment and fright already yielding to a calm acceptance. Man had been
able to control gravity for half a thousand years, and this trick – spectacular
though it was – could not be compared with the miracle of hurling a great
starship from sun to sun at little short of the speed of light.

The Earthmen were now walking back toward
their machine, clearly satisfied with what they had done. Even at this
distance, one could see that they were happy and relaxed – perhaps for the
first time since they had reached Thalassa. The water to rebuild the
Magellan
’s
shield was on its way out into space, to be shaped and frozen by the other strange
forces that these men had made their servants. In a few days, they would be
ready to leave, their great interstellar ark as good as new.

Even until this minute, Lora had hoped that
they might fail. There was nothing left of that hope now, as she watched the
man-made waterspout lift its burden from the sea. Sometimes it wavered
slightly, its base shifting back and forth as if at the balance point between
immense and invisible forces. But it was fully under control, and it would do
the task that had been set for it. That meant only one thing to her; soon she
must say goodbye to Leon.

She walked slowly toward the distant group
of Earthmen, marshalling her thoughts and trying to subdue her emotions.
Presently Leon broke away from his friends and came to meet her; relief and
happiness were written across his face, but they faded swiftly when he saw
Lora’s expression.

‘Well,’ he said lamely, almost like a
schoolboy caught in some crime, ‘we’ve done it.’

‘And now – how long will you be here?’

He scuffed nervously at the sand, unable to
meet her eye.

‘Oh, about three days – perhaps four.’

She tried to assimilate the words calmly;
after all, she had expected them – this was nothing new. But she failed
completely, and it was as well that there was no one near them.

‘You can’t leave!’ she cried desperately.
‘Stay here on Thalassa!’

Leon took her hands gently, then murmured:
‘No Lora – this isn’t my world; I would never fit into it. Half my life’s been
spent training for the work I’m doing now; I could never be happy here, where
there aren’t any more frontiers. In a month, I should die of boredom.’

‘Then take me with you!’

‘You don’t really mean that.’

‘But I do!’

‘You only think so; you’d be more out of
place in my world than I would be in yours.’

‘I could learn – there would be plenty of
things I could do. As long as we could stay together!’

He held her at arm’s length, looking into
her eyes. They mirrored sorrow, and also sincerity. She really believed what
she was saying, Leon told himself. For the first time, his conscience smote
him. He had forgotten – or chosen not to remember – how much more serious these
things could be to a woman than to a man.

He had never intended to hurt Lora; he was
very fond of her, and would remember her with affection all his life. Now he
was discovering, as so many men before him had done, that it was not always
easy to say goodbye.

There was only one thing to do. Better a
short, sharp pain than a long bitterness.

‘Come with me, Lora,’ he said. ‘I have
something to show you.’

They did not speak as Leon led the way to
the clearing that the Earthmen used as a landing ground. It was littered with
pieces of enigmatic equipment, some of them being repacked while others were
being left behind for the islanders to use as they pleased. Several of the
anti-gravity scooters were parked in the shade beneath the palms; even when not
in use they spurned contact with the ground, and hovered a couple of feet above
the grass.