The Songs of Distant Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth.
    That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen …
    … the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone …
    … the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift…
    … the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before …
    … the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away …
    … the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air …
    In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts – not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities – even countries – had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History’s closing act.
    It was a time of strange paradoxes, of wild oscillations between despair and feverish exhilaration. Many, of course, sought oblivion through the traditional routes of drugs, sex, and dangerous sports – including what were virtually miniature wars, carefully monitored and fought with agreed weapons. Equally popular was the whole spectrum of electronic catharsis, from endless video games, interactive dramas, and direct stimulation of the brain’s centres.
    Because there was no longer any reason to take heed for the future on this planet, Earth’s resources and the accumulated wealth of all the ages could be squandered with a clear conscience. In terms of material goods, all men were millionaires, rich beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors, the fruits of whose toil they had inherited. They called themselves wryly, yet not without a certain pride, the Lords of the Last Days.
    Yet though myriads sought forgetfulness, even more found satisfaction, as some men had always done, in working for goals beyond their own lifetimes. Much scientific research continued, using the immense resources that had now been freed. If a physicist needed a hundred tons of gold for an experiment, that was merely a minor problem in logistics, not budgeting.
    Three themes dominated. First was the continual monitoring of the Sun – not because there was any remaining doubt but to predict the moment of detonation to the year, the day, the hour …
    Second was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, neglected after centuries of failure, now resumed with desperate urgency – and, even to the end, with no greater success than before. To all Man’s questioning, the Universe still gave a dusty answer.
    And the third, of course, was the seeding of the nearby stars in the hope that the human race would not perish with the dying of its Sun.
    By the dawn of the final century, seedships of ever-increasing speed and sophistication had been sent to more than fifty targets. Most, as expected, had been failures, but ten had radioed back news of at least partial success. Even greater hopes were placed on the later and more advanced models, though they would not reach their distant goals until long after Earth had ceased to exist. The very last to be launched could cruise at a twentieth of the speed of light and would make planetfall in nine hundred and fifty years – if all went well.
    Loren could still remember the launching of Excalibur from its construction cradle at the Lagrangian point between Earth and Moon. Though he was only five, even then he knew that this seedship would be the very last of its kind. But why the centuries-long