Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [2]
The instrument panel lights blinked out. And suddenly the only sound was the whisper of the wind.
The flyer fell through the night.
He fought the controls, trying frantically to restart as the trees rushed up. Above him, silhouetted against Glory, the largest moon, the cloud was trying to re-form. And in those last moments, riven with fear and despair, a brilliant white light erupted on the slopes of Mount Hope. A second sun. He watched it expand, watched it engulf the world.
And he felt a final rush of satisfaction. It had to be the ship. The thing’s masters, at least, were dead.
And then it ceased to matter.
1
■ New Year’s Eve, 599
It seems safe now to assume that the terrestrial origin of life was a unique event. Some will quibble that we have, after all, seen only a few thousand of the billions of worlds drifting through the gently curving corridors we once called biozones. But we have stood on too many warm beaches and looked across seas over which no gulls hover, that throw forth neither shells, nor strands of weed, nor algae. They are peaceful seas, bounded by rock and sand.
The universe has come to resemble a magnificent but sterile wilderness, an ocean which boasts no friendly coast, no sails, no sign that any have passed this way before. And we cannot help but tremble in the gray light of these vast distances. Maybe that is why we are converting the great interstellar liners into museums, or selling them for pans. Why we have begun to retreat, why the Nine Worlds are now really six, why the frontier is collapsing, why we are going home to our island.
We are coming back at last to Earth. To the forests of our innocence. To the shores of night. Where we need not listen to the seaborne wind.
Farewell, Centaurus. Farewell to all we might have been.
—ELIO KARDI, “The Shores of Night,” Voyagers, 571
“Nova goes in three minutes.”
Dr. Kimberly Brandywine looked out across the dozen or so faces in the briefing room. In back, lenses were pointed at her, sending the event out across the nets. Behind, her projections read HELLO TO THE UNIVERSE and KNOCK and is ANYBODY OUT THERE?
Several flatscreens were positioned around the walls, showing technicians bent over terminals in the Trent. These were the teams that would ignite the nova, but the images were fourteen hours old, the time required for the hyper-comm transmissions to arrive.
Everyone present was attractive and youthful, except sometimes for their eyes. However vital and agile people were, their true age tended to reveal itself in their gaze. There was a hardness that came with advancing years, eyes that somehow lost their depth and their animation. Kim was in her midthirties, with exquisite features and hair the color of a raven’s wing. In an earlier era, they would have launched ships for her. In her own age, she was just part of the crowd.
“If we haven’t found anybody after all this time,” the representative from Seabright Communications was saying, “it can only be because there’s nobody to find. Or, if there is, they’re so far away it doesn’t matter.”
She delivered her standard reply, discounting the great silence, pointing out that even after eight centuries humans had still inspected only a few thousand star systems. “But you may be right,” she admitted. “Maybe we are alone. But the fact is that we really don’t know. So we’ll keep trying.”
Kim had long since concluded that Seabright was right. They hadn’t found so much as an amoeba out there. Briefly, at the beginning of the Space Age, there’d been speculation that life might exist in Europa’s seas. Or in Jupiter’s clouds. There’d even been a piece of meteoric rock thought to contain evidence of Martian bacteria. It was as close to extraterrestrial life as we’d ever come.
Hands were still waving.
“One more question,” she said.
She gave it to Canon Woodbridge, a science advisor for the Grand Council of the Republic. He was tall, dark, bearded, almost satanic in appearance, yet a congenial fiend, one who meant no harm. “Kim,” he said,