From the Ocean from teh Stars (57 page)

The child pointed sullenly at the beach. "But it's too early. I haven't finished."

His father's reply held no trace of anger, only a great sadness. "There are many things, Bran, that will not be finished now."

Still uncomprehending, the boy turned to his mother.

"Then can I come again tomorrow?"

With a sense of desolating wonder, Bran saw his mother's eyes fill with sudden tears. And he knew at last that never again would he play upon the sands by the azure waters; never again would he feel the tug of the tiny waves about his feet. He had found the sea too late, and now must leave it forever. Out of the future, chilling his soul, came the first faint intimation of the long ages of exile that lay ahead.

He never looked back as they walked silently together across the clinging sand. This moment would be with him all his life, but he was still too stunned to do more than walk blindly into a future he could not understand.

The three figures dwindled into the distance and were gone. A long while later, a silver cloud seemed to lift above the hills and move slowly out to sea. In a shallow arc, as though reluctant to leave its world, the last of the great ships climbed toward the horizon and shrank to nothingness over the edge of the Earth.

The tide was returning with the dying day. As though its makers still walked within its walls, the low metal building upon the hills had begun to blaze with light. Near the zenith, one star had not waited for the sun to set, but already burned with a fierce white glare against the darkling sky. Soon its companions, no longer in the scant thousands that man had once known, began to fill the heavens. The Earth was now near the center of the universe, and whole areas of the sky were an unbroken blaze of light.

But rising beyond the sea in two long curving arms, something black and monstrous eclipsed the stars and seemed to cast its shadow over all the world. The tentacles of the Dark Nebula were already brushing against the frontiers of the solar system. . . .

In the east, a great yellow moon was climbing through the waves. Though man had torn down its mountains and brought it air and water, its face was the one that had looked upon Earth since history began, and it was still the ruler of the tides. Across the sand the line of foam moved steadily onward, overwhelming the little canals and planing down the tangled footprints.

On the sky line, the lights in the strange metal building suddenly died, and the spinning mirrors ceased their moonlight glittering. From far in-

land came the blinding flash of a great explosion, then another, and an
other fainter yet.

Presently the ground trembled a little, but no sound disturbed the
solitude of the deserted shore.

Under the level light of the sagging moon, beneath the myriad stars,
the beach lay waiting for the end. It was alone now, as it had been at
the beginning. Only the waves would move, and but for a little while,
upon its golden sands.

For Man had come and gone.

☆
TEE SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH

B
eneath the palm trees Lora waited, watching the
sea. Clyde's boat was already visible as a tiny notch on the far horizon—
the only flaw in the perfect mating of sea and sky. Minute by minute it grew in size, until it had detached itself from the featureless blue globe that encompassed the world. Now she could see Clyde standing at the
prow, one hand twined around the rigging, statue-still as his eyes sought
her among the shadows.

"Where are you, Lora?" his voice asked plaintively from the radio
bracelet he had given her when they became engaged. "Come and help
me—we've got a big catch to bring home."

So! Lora told herself;
that's
why you asked me to hurry down to the
beach. Just to punish Clyde and to reduce him to the right state of
anxiety, she ignored his call until he had repeated it half a dozen times.
Even then she did not press the beautiful golden pearl set in the "Transmit" button, but slowly emerged from the shade of the great trees and
walked down the sloping beach.

Clyde looked at her reproachfully, but gave her a satisfactory kiss as
soon as he had bounded ashore and secured the boat. Then they started
unloading the catch together, scooping fish large and small from both hulls of the catamaran. Lora screwed up her nose but assisted gamely,
until the waiting sand sled was piled high with the victims of Clyde's skill.

It was a good catch; when she married Clyde, Lora told herself
proudly, she'd never starve. The clumsy, armored creatures of this young planet's sea were not true fish; it would be a hundred million years before
nature invented scales here. But they were good enough eating, and the
first colonists had labeled them with names they had brought, with so
many other traditions, from unforgotten Earth.

"That's the lot!" grunted Clyde, tossing a fair imitation of a salmon
onto the glistening heap. "I'll fix the nets later—let's go!"

Finding a foothold with some difficulty, Lora jumped onto the sled
behind him. The flexible rollers spun for a moment against the sand, then
got a grip. Clyde, Lora, and a hundred pounds of assorted fish started
racing up the wave-scalloped beach. They had made half the brief jour
ney when the simple, carefree world they had known all their young
lives came suddenly 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 vault of heaven. Even
as Clyde and Lora watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at its
edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud.

And now they could hear, falling down through the miles above their
heads, a sound their world had not known for generations. Instinctively
they grasped each other's hands, as they stared at that snow-white furrow across the sky and listened to the thin scream from the borders of space. The descending ship had already vanished beyond the horizon
before they turned to each other and breathed, almost with reverence,
the same magic word: "Earth!"

After three hundred years of silence, the mother world had reached
out once more to touch Thalassa. . . .

Why? Lora asked herself, when the long moment of revelation had
passed and the scream of torn air ceased to echo from the sky. What
had happened, after all these years, to bring a ship from mighty Earth
to this quiet and contented world? There was no room for more colonists
here on this one island in a watery planet, and Earth knew that well
enough. Its robot survey ships had mapped and probed Thalassa from
space five centuries ago, in the early days of interstellar exploration. Long before man himself had ventured out into the gulfs between the
stars, his electronic servants had gone ahead of him, circling the worlds of alien suns and heading homeward with their store of knowledge, as
bees bring honey back to the parent hive.

Such a scout had found Thalassa, a freak among worlds with its
single large island in a shoreless sea. One day continents would be born
here, but this was a new planet, its history still waiting to be written.

The robot had taken a hundred years to make its homeward journey,
and for a hundred more its garnered knowledge had slept in the electronic memories of the great computers which stored the wisdom of Earth. The
first waves of colonization had not touched Thalassa; there were more
profitable worlds to be developed—worlds that were not nine-tenths wa
ter. Yet at last the pioneers had come; only a dozen miles from where
she was standing now, Lora's ancestors had first set foot upon this planet
and claimed it for mankind.

They had leveled hills, planted crops, moved rivers, built towns and
factories, and multiplied until they reached the natural limits of their
land. With its fertile soil, abundant seas, and mild, wholly predictable weather, Thalassa was not a world that demanded much of its adopted
children. The pioneering spirit had lasted perhaps two generations;
thereafter the colonists were content to work as much as necessary (but
no more), to dream nostalgically of Earth, and to let the future look after itself.

The village was seething with speculation when Clyde and Lora ar
rived. News had already come from the northern end of the island that
the ship had spent its furious speed and was heading back at a low
altitude, obviously looking for a place to land. "They'll still have the old maps," someone said. "Ten to one they'll ground where the first expedi
tion landed, up in the hills."

It was a shrewd guess, and within minutes all available transport
was moving out of the village, along the seldom-used road to the west.
As befitted the mayor of so important a cultural center as Palm Bay
(population: 572; occupations: fishing, hydroponics; industries: none), Lora's father led the way in his official car. The fact that its annual coat of paint was just about due was perhaps a Utile unfortunate; one could
only hope that the visitors would overlook the occasional patches of bare
metal. After all, the car itself was quite new; Lora could distinctly re
member the excitement its arrival had caused, only thirteen years ago.

The little caravan of assorted cars, trucks, and even a couple of
straining sand sleds rolled over the crest of the hill and ground to a halt
beside the weathered sign with its simple but impressive words:

LANDING SITE OF THE FIRST EXPEDITION TO THALASSA

1 JANUARY, YEAR ZERO

(28 May
a.d.
2626)

The
first
expedition, Lora repeated silently. There had never been a
second one—
but here it was.
. . .

The ship came in so low, and so silently, that it was almost upon them before they were aware of it. There was no sound of engines— only a brief rustling of leaves as the displaced air stirred among the
trees. Then all was still once more, but it seemed to Lora that the shining ovoid resting on the turf was a great silver egg, waiting to hatch and to
bring something new and strange into the peaceful world of Thalassa.

"It's so small," someone whispered behind her. "They couldn't have
come from Earth in
that
thing!"

"Of course not," the inevitable self-appointed expert replied at once.
"That's only a lifeboat—the real ship's up there in space. Don't you
remember that the first expedition—"

"Sshh!" someone else remonstrated. "They're coming out!"

It happened in the space of a single heartbeat. One second the seamless hull was so smooth and unbroken that the eye looked in vain for any sign of an opening. And then, an instant later, there was an oval doorway with a short ramp leading to the ground. Nothing had moved, but something had
happened.
How it had been done, Lora could not imagine, but she accepted the miracle without surprise. Such things were only to be
expected of a ship that came from Earth.

There were figures moving inside the shadowed entrance; not a sound
came from the waiting crowd as the visitors slowly emerged and stood
blinking in the fierce light of an unfamiliar sun. There were seven of
them—all men—and they did not look in the least like the super-beings
she had expected. It was true that they were all somewhat above the
average in height and had thin, clear-cut features, but they were so pale
that their skins were almost white. They seemed, moreover, worried and
uncertain, which was something that puzzled Lora very much. For the
first time it occurred to her that this landing on Thalassa might be un
intentional, and that the visitors were as surprised to be here as the is
landers were to greet them.

The mayor of Palm Bay, confronted with the supreme moment of
his career, stepped forward to deliver the speech on which he had been
frantically working ever since the car left the village. A second before he opened his mouth, a sudden doubt struck him and sponged his memory
clean. Everyone had automatically assumed that this ship came from Earth—but that was pure guesswork. It might just as easily have been
sent here from one of the other colonies, of which there were at least a dozen much closer than the parent world. In his panic over protocol, all
that Lora's father could manage was: "We welcome you to Thalassa.
You're from Earth—I presume?" That "I presume?" was to make
Mayor Fordyce immortal; it would be a century before anyone discov
ered that the phrase was not quite original.

In all that waiting crowd, Lora was the only one who never heard the confirming answer, spoken in English that seemed to have speeded up a
trifle during the centuries of separation. For in that moment, she saw
Leon for the first time.

He came out of the ship, moving as unobtrusively as possible to join his companions at the foot of the ramp. Perhaps he had remained behind
to make some adjustment to the controls; perhaps—and this seemed