Read The Songs of Distant Earth for Free Online

programme had been cancelled just when it had reached technological maturity, he was still too young to understand. Nor could he have guessed how his own life would be changed, by the stunning discovery that had transformed the entire situation and given mankind a new hope, in the very last decades of terrestrial history.
    Though countless theoretical studies had been made, no one had ever been able to make a plausible case for manned space-flight even to the nearest star. That such a journey might take a century was not the decisive factor; hibernation could solve that problem. A rhesus monkey had been sleeping in the Louis Pasteur satellite hospital for almost a thousand years and still showed perfectly normal brain activity. There was no reason to suppose that human beings could not do the same – though the record, held by a patient suffering from a peculiarly baffling form of cancer, was less than two centuries.
    The biological problem had been solved; it was the engineering one that appeared insuperable. A vessel that could carry thousands of sleeping passengers, and all they needed for a new life on another world, would have to be as large as one of the great ocean liners that had once ruled the seas of Earth.
    It would be easy enough to build such a ship beyond the orbit of Mars and using the abundant resources of the asteroid belt. However, it was impossible to devise engines that could get it to the stars in any reasonable length of time.
    Even at a tenth of the speed of light, all the most promising targets were more than five hundred years away. Such a velocity had been attained by robot probes – flashing through nearby star systems and radioing back their observations during a few hectic hours of transit. But there was no way in which they could slow down for rendezvous or landing; barring accidents, they would continue speeding through the galaxy forever.
    This was the fundamental problem with rockets – and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.
    A full-scale hibership could indeed be built to reach a tenth of the speed of light. It would require about a million tons of somewhat exotic elements as propellant; difficult, but not impossible.
    But in order to cancel that velocity at the end of the voyage, the ship must start not with a million – but a preposterous million, million tons of propellant. This, of course, was so completely out of the question that no one had given the matter any serious thought for centuries.
    And then, by one of history’s greatest ironies, Mankind was given the keys to the Universe – and barely a century in which to use them.

8. Remembrance of Love Lost

    H ow glad I am, thought Moses Kaldor, that I never succumbed to that temptation – the seductive lure that art and technology had first given to mankind more than a thousand years ago. Had I wished, I could have brought Evelyn’s electronic ghost with me into exile, trapped in a few gigabytes of programming. She could have appeared before me, in any one of the backgrounds we both loved, and carried on a conversation so utterly convincing that a stranger could never have guessed that no one – nothing – was really there.
    But I would have known, after five or ten minutes unless I deluded myself by a deliberate act of will. And that I could never do. Though I am still not sure why my instincts revolt against it, I always refused to accept the false solace of a dialogue with the dead. I do not even possess, now, a simple recording of her voice.
    It is far better this way, to watch her moving in silence, in the little garden of our last home, knowing that this is no illusion of the image-makers but that it really did happen, two hundred years ago on Earth.
    And the only voice will be mine, here and now, speaking to