The Songs of Distant Earth - Paperback, by Arthur C. Clarke - Very Good

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The Songs of Distant Earth - Paperback, by Arthur C. Clarke - Very Good. Great blocks of ice being maneuvered. thirteen-part TV series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysteri-. years away, three hundred years. your gift. Behind this shield of ice, we. THE SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH. The Songs of Distant Earth. Very good condition. PRELUDE TO THE STARS There had been a fascinating, speeded-up space ballet, showing the great blocks of ice being maneuvered into place and keyed in to the steadily growing shield. Then the view had switched to the Magellan as it orbited in the shadow of the planet. The huge, greenish-white disk gleamed coldly beneath the floodlights; soon, it would move out into the few-degrees-above- absolute zero of the galactic night. "People of Thalassa," Ambass- ador Kaldor said, "we thank you for your gift. Behind this shield of ice, we hope to travel safely to the world that is waiting for us, seventy-five light- years away, three hundred years hence..." ----------- 2 ----------- THE TAOT A Del Rey Book Published by Ballantine Books Copyright © 1986 by Serendib BV All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy- right Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Lim- ited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. in 1986. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-26825 ISBN 0-345-32240-1 Manufactured in the United States of America First Hardcover Edition: May 1986 First International Edition: November 1986 First U.S. Mass Market Edition: May 1987 Cover Art by Michael Whelan ----------- 3 ----------- Author's Note CONTENTS 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 19. Pretty Polly 20. Idyll 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 ----------- 5 ----------- 21. Academy 22. Krakan 23. Ice Day 24. Archive 25. Scorp 26. Snowflake Rising 27. Mirror of the Past 28. The Sunken Forest IV. KRAKAN 29. Sabra 30. Child of Krakan V. THE BOUNTY SYNDROME 31. Petition 32. Clinic 33. Tides 34. Shipnet 35. Convalescence 36. Kilimanjaro 37. In Vino Veritas 38. Debate 39. The Leopard in the Snows 40. Confrontation 41. Pillow Talk 42. Survivor 43. Interrogation VI. THE FORESTS OF THE SEA 44. Spyball 45. Bait 46. Whatever Gods May Be... VII. AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD 47. Ascension 48. Decision 49. Fire on the Reef ----------- 5 ----------- VIII. THE SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH 50. Shield of Ice 51. Relic 52. The Songs of Distant Earth 53. The Golden Mask 54. Valediction 55. Departure 56. Below the Interface IX. SAGAN TWO 57. The Voices of Time Chronology Bibliographical Note Acknowledgments ----------- 6 ----------- Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There be may be wisdom; there may power; somewhere across space great instruments may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever... Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957) I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Melville to Hawthorne (1851) ----------- 8 ----------- AUTHOR'S NOTE 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 enor- mously 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 in- stallment. The great Producer in the Sky did not ar- range his program planning that way. In the last decade, there has also been a signifi- cant, and rather surprising, change in the attitude of scientists toward the problem of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The whole subject did not become re- spectable (except among dubious characters like the ----------- 8 ----------- PARADISE LOST Just a few islands in a planetwide ocean, Thalassa was a veritable paradise-home to one of the small colonies founded centuries before by robot Mother Ships when the Sun had gone nova and mankind had fled Earth. Mesmerized by the beauty of Thalassa and overwhelmed by its vast resources, the colonists lived an idyllic existence, unaware of the monumental evolutionary event slowly taking place beneath their seas... Then the Magellan arrived in orbit carrying one million refugees from the last, mad days on Earth. And suddenly uncertainty and change had come to the placid paradise that was Thalassa. FIRST PAPERBACK PUBLICATION ----------- 9 ----------- ABOUT THE AUTHOR Arthur C. Clarke was born at Minehead, Somerset, England, in 1917 and is a graduate of King's College, London, where he obtained First Class Honors in Physics and Mathematics. He is past Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, a member of the Academy of Astronautics, the Royal Astronomical Society, and many other scientific organizations. During World War II, as an RAF officer, he was in charge of the first radar talk-down equipment during its experimental trials. His only non-science-fiction novel, Glide Path, is based on this work. Author of fifty books, some twenty million-plus copies of which have been printed in over thirty lan- guages, his numerous awards include the 1961 Kal- inga Prize, the AAAS-Westinghouse science-writing prize, the Bradford Washburn Award, and the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Awards-all three of which were won by his novel Rendezvous with Rama. In 1968 he shared an Oscar nomination with Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his thirteen-part TV series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysteri- ous World has now been screened in many countries. He joined Walter Cronkite during CBS' coverage of the Apollo missions. His invention of the communications satellite in 1945 has brought him numerous honors, such as the 1982 Marconi International Fellowship, a gold medal of the Franklin Institute, the Vikram Sarabhai Pro- fessorship of the Physical Research Laboratory, Ah- medabad, and a Fellowship of King's College, Lon- don. The President of Sri Lanka recently nominated him Chancellor of the University of Moratuwa, near Colombo.