The Songs of Distant Earth

The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke Page B

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Authors: Arthur C. Clarke
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articulated tanks, control units, and road-laying mechanisms to move slowly past. Loren could not resist touching the freshly extruded surface; it was warm and slightly yielding, and looked moist even though it felt perfectly dry. Within seconds, however, it had become as hard as rock; Loren noted the faint impression of his fingerprint and thought wryly. I’ve made my mark on Thalassa – until the robot comes this way again.
    Now the road was rising up into the hills, and Loren found that unfamiliar muscles in thigh and calf were beginning to call attention to themselves. A little auxiliary power would have been welcomed, but Mirissa had spurned the electric models as too effete. She had not slackened her speed in the least, so Loren had no alternative but to breathe deeply and keep up with her.
    What was that faint roar from ahead? Surely no one could be testing rocket engines in the interior of South Island! The sound grew steadily louder as they pedalled onward; Loren identified it only seconds before the source came into view.
    By Terran standards, the waterfall was not very impressive – perhaps one hundred metres high and twenty across. A small metal bridge glistening with spray spanned the pool of boiling foam in which it ended.
    To Loren’s relief, Mirissa dismounted and looked at him rather mischievously.
    “Do you notice anything… peculiar?” she asked, waving towards the scene ahead.
    “In what way?” Loren answered, fishing for clues. All he saw was an unbroken vista of trees and vegetation, with the road winding away through it on the other side of the fall.
    “The trees – the trees!”
    “What about them? I’m not a – botanist.”
    “Nor am I, but it should be obvious. Just look at them.”
    He looked, still puzzled. And presently he understood, because a tree is a piece of natural engineering – and he was an engineer.
    A different designer had been at work on the other side of the waterfall. Although he could not name any of the trees among which he was standing, they were vaguely familiar, and he was sure that they came from Earth … yes, that was certainly an oak, and somewhere, long ago, he had seen the beautiful yellow flowers on that low bush.
    Beyond the bridge, it was a different world. The trees – were they really trees? – seemed crude and unfinished. Some had short, barrel-shaped trunks from which a few prickly branches extended; others resembled huge ferns; others looked like giant, skeletal fingers, with bristly haloes at the joints. And there were no flowers …
    “Now I understand. Thalassa’s own vegetation.”
    “Yes – only a few million years out of the sea. We call this the Great Divide. But it’s more like a battlefront between two armies, and no one knows which side will win. Neither, if we can help it! The vegetation from Earth is more advanced; but the natives are better adapted to the chemistry. From time to time one side invades the other – and we move in with shovels before it can get a foothold.”
    How strange, Loren thought as they pushed their bicycles across the slender bridge. For the first time since landing on Thalassa, I feel that I am indeed on an alien world …
    These clumsy trees and crude ferns could have been the raw material of the coal beds that had powered the Industrial Revolution – barely in time to save the human race. He could easily believe that a dinosaur might come charging out of the undergrowth at any moment; then he recalled that the terrible lizards had still been a hundred million years in the future when such plants had flourished on Earth …
    They were just remounting when Loren exclaimed, “Krakan and damnation!”
    “What’s the matter?”
    Loren collapsed on what, providentially, appeared to be a thick layer of wiry moss.
    “Cramp,” he muttered through clenched teeth, grabbing at his knotted calf muscles.
    “Let me,” Mirissa said in a concerned but confident voice.
    Under her pleasant, though somewhat

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