Last night I think I heard a lion.
The bright sun shines down from a clear blue sky onto a sea of green grass dotted with ancient oaks where deer graze and watch nervously. They must have heard it, too.
My name is Jacob Talis, and I grew up here in the High Weald of Sussex. Of the house where I lived, no trace remains, nor of the towns and villages that once sprawled across the Low Weald. During my childhood it was very different here. At the foot of the hill an ancient flint wall marked the boundary between the grounds and the estate farm. but by the time I left home the farm’s patchwork of woods and fields was gone, replaced by a maze of winding streets and small houses. Beyond, the clay of the Low Weald had been covered by acres of solar panels and a broad sea of identical gene-spliced dwarf trees cropped for biomass. The crest of the South Downs on the horizon was punctuated with a line of giant wind turbines.
I bought an overlander to make my escape. The first time my bratty pre-teen sister, Catherine, saw it, she pouted and sulked. “Why do you have to go away?” She demanded. “You’re leaving me to deal with Dad all by myself.”
“He’s never here anyway,” I told her. “He just works all the time.”
It took me some weeks to prepare, fitting out the van, stowing my gear, and Catherine was always underfoot. I took her to a wildlife park one day to quiet her. Wire fences ringed a compound where a pair of tigers sprawled on a decaying wooden platform. “They look sad,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It’s not like in those old documentaries you’re always watching, when they used to live free.” She looked up at me. I guess she must have seen in my face how I felt because she took my hand. “Let’s go home.”
“I want to see what’s left,” I told her as the car drove us back, “before it’s all gone. I know there’s no lions or tigers or elephants in the wild, but I want to see what I can.”
Soon enough the day came when I was ready to leave. She hugged me, sniffling into my chest. “I wish I could come with you,” she said.
I travelled for years, often alone, though sometimes I would find a companion who would travel with me for a time. Some grew tired of my restlessness, others proved more restless even than me. In my journeys I crossed equatorial deserts paved with solar farms and boreal forests of genetically engineered firs. Where rainforests once ringed the globe I found plantations that grew the oils and chemicals that fed our industries. Only the most desolate, inhospitable, useless places held any semblance of wilderness. Lichens, mosses, insects, crows and pigeons, the occasional rodent, were what remained of Earth’s wildlife.
When my father died I was in my late thirties. I returned to the family home on the High Weald where Catherine still lived with her young son. We inherited father’s shares in Talis Aerospace but neither of us had the skills or the inclination to take over the running of the company. I sold the overlander but soon became restless again. So it was that a year later, I stood on the terrace at the back of the house with my hands in my pockets, recalling the view as it had been in my childhood.
The door behind me opened, Catherine leaned against the wooden door frame. She’d grown into a gregarious, vivacious, optimistic young woman, ten years younger than me back then, though to look at her you’d have thought twenty. Her perpetual smile had a tinge of sadness about it. “Can’t you find what you want here?” she said, bringing back a fond memory of the bratty child she had been.
“You know I’ve tried,” I said. “Everywhere in this world is desolation, or…” I turned again towards the industrial countryside at the foot of the hill. “… or it’s like this.”
“It’s so far, you’ll be away so long.”
“There’s life there, I have to see.”
“Henry will miss you.”
“He barely knows me, he’s what, four?”
“Nearly seven, and he idolises you.”
She came and put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll be back.” I gave her a brief, awkward hug and walked through to the front of the house where the car waited on the gravel drive.
I’d put the house and my other remaining assets into the family trust. The bulk of my fortune waited for me on the tarmac, a dull grey cylinder twenty metres lying lengthways on its extended legs. Cooling vanes for the reactor looked like fins in their deployed position. Windows and a door at the front were reminiscent of the overlander. This was one of the smaller vessels built by my late father’s company, I’d liquidated a substantial part of my holding to pay for it.
The first expedition had left five years before but Epsilon Eridani was over ten light years away. It would be another sixteen years before they returned, twenty-one before I would be back. I’d have liked to travel further, somewhere I could be the first, but I wasn’t quite ready to cut all ties to home and family. There were dozens of stars in the solar neighbourhood with planets that showed signs of life, and more were being found every year. Epsilon Eridani wasn’t the nearest, but from the images in the giant space-based telescopes, its second planet looked more like Earth than any that were nearer. Hints of oxygen, shades of green, that’s all we had to go on until someone went to see.
The telescopes revealed that life was commonplace in the galaxy. No-one had yet found evidence of intelligence though hardly a month went by without someone claiming detection of an alien civilisation. The latest was from a Russian astronomer who said that the light curve of a G2 star, over three thousand light years away, could only be explained by immense artificial orbiting structures. The star had previously been known only by numbers in catalogues. They gave it the name Kardashev.
I didn’t look back as I climbed the steps but it frightened me a little how easy it was. My earlier travels had been gruelling overland treks of weeks or months through mountains and deserts and farmland and cities. The Talis drive that my father invented reaches down to the layer beneath the reality that we perceive, where time and space exist only as an abstract projection, and with a subtle twist of entangled quanta, here and now becomes there and then, because space and time, even if they are an illusion, are a single thing and one cannot move in space without also moving in time. I’d spent months planning, but then I was in the ship with the vector laid and a simple push of a button took me there in an instant. An instant, except that for every light-year travelled, a year passed in the universe outside.
On my return after three weeks at Epsilon Eridani I found the Gatwick spaceport little changed. The tarmac had more cracks and the Talis building was looking a little shabby. Catherine was waiting for me but I almost didn’t recognise her. She closed in on me and pulled me into a long, hard hug. She was tired, worn. The once-perpetual smile dragged down by the weight of the twenty-one years I’d been away. She was now older than me by ten years, but to look at her it might have been twenty.
“Did you find your lush alien forests teeming with strange creatures?” she asked once we were back in the car.
“Tepid seas filled with something very like algae. It gave me a rash when I touched it.” I held up a hand covered in red blotches. “I thought I’d have to quarantine but they said the same happened with the first expedition. Just a mild allergic reaction.” The car rolled along, the road had been upgraded with an extra lane to cope with even more traffic. “How have you been?”
She let out a long heavy sigh and her eyes drifted towards the window. A row of high-rise farms lined the road, obscuring the view of the wind turbines. “Better lately, I guess. Henry’s been out of rehab nearly a year, I think he’s turned a corner. He’s become obsessed with astronomy, stars and planets and alien life.”
He idolises you: the words she spoke to me a few short weeks ago rang through my brain.
As if she read my mind, Catherine looked at me and an echo of her old smile appeared. “I know you had to go, Jacob. You’ve got your own demons to tame. It’s not your fault.” She patted my thigh. “But he’ll have a lot to say, a lot to ask you. Be kind to him, be patient.”
The sun had set by the time we got back to the house. Henry was waiting, full of questions, and of opinions.
“Of course the life at Epsilon Eridani was primitive, the star is only eight hundred million years old. You should have gone to one as old as our sun. Like Chalawan, 47 Ursae Majoris. There’s an oxygen signature on a moon of the gas giant.”
I did my best to engage Henry’s enthusiasm, talk to him, listen to him, but it was wearing. Three weeks away and twenty-one years of change to catch up on. It drained me.
I found my old bedroom much as I’d left it. The carpet and curtains had faded, the paint yellowed. Sunrise revealed the view from the window over the Low Weald. The creeping sprawl of housing had spread, and great swathes of dwarf trees had gone, replaced by a grid of scummy green rectangular ponds.
“They don’t need biomass for energy any more, Uncle Jacob.” Henry explained over breakfast. “The ponds are engineered diatoms to grow plastics. Energy comes from the orbital solar farms.”
“I saw one before I landed. Must have been a kilometre square.”
“The ones at Kardashev are a million times bigger”
“Kardashev?” I recognised the name, but couldn’t place it.
“Three thousand light years. Some people are still trying to argue it’s a natural phenomenon, but no-one’s convinced. When the SKT, the six-kilometer telescope, is finished, we’ll have clear images.”
I tried to pick up the threads of my old life. Henry was an invaluable aide in helping me adapt to the changes in the world, and an utter pest in asking me about Epsilon Eridani and about the ship.
The world’s population was growing as average life expectancy rose above a hundred and twenty and all those people wanted more of the material comforts of modern life. Humanity’s demands on the planet left other species ever more marginalised, except for those that had been tamed, bred, engineered to suit our needs. All the things that had driven me to leave to find a better world were still there. I began to spend more time reviewing the literature on exo-planets. Henry was there asking questions, or diving into the published research to find answers to questions I had yet to ask.
“You’re leaving again.” Catherine said as we sat on the terrace one evening, watching the flashes of satellites crossing the night sky.
“I don’t know if I should.”
“You don’t have to stay for me. I’ll be alright.”
She watched me in the twilight. I couldn’t meet her eyes. “I think Henry wants to come.”
A long pause. “Where would you go?”
“Chalawan. Forty-six years away.”
“You won’t be the first,” Henry said over breakfast the next morning. “The Murdoch expedition left to go there a year ago.”
“They won’t be back for ninety years,” I said. “I won’t know what’s there unless I go myself.”
“I wish I could go with you.”
“It would break your mother’s heart.”
“I know. That’s why I have to stay.”
Henry’s words stabbed hot needles of guilt into my conscience. Not for leaving, but for the relief I felt that he was staying.
When I returned from Chalawan they put me in the quarantine facility on the moon. I told them that all I’d done was to deploy a drone to investigate the Murdoch expedition’s silent ship. When I saw the images it transmitted, I came straight back, there was no possibility that I was infected, but they didn’t listen. They were taking no chances.
It was comfortable enough, and spacious for one, I had a well-equipped kitchen, a gym, a dozen bedrooms. I was fortunate to be the kind of person content in my own company. Every few weeks a supply drone came down on the crater floor outside and robots unloaded it of food and other consumables. Once empty, the drones were incinerated, reduced to a black stain where the molten metal sank into the regolith. My own ship sat tauntingly out of reach fifty metres from the facility’s airlock that would not open for me. Sometimes I argued with Mariam, my principle contact. I understood their caution but it frustrated me how misplaced it was. There was no possibility that I carried a latent alien infection.
Nothing was allowed to leave the facility. Having seen what happened to Murdoch and her crew I could understand their caution. I still had nightmares about what I’d seen. Remote counselling helped, and by the end of three months, I was able to sleep a night through.
I could call anyone on Earth but there was no-one left who I knew. Catherine had died only twenty years after my departure. Henry had turned his obsession into a career and become a noted exobiologist. With his mother gone there was nothing to hold him back. Seventy years before, he’d joined a grand tour expedition to nearby stars. He was not expected to return for decades more.
I had a feed set up to project the view from my house on the High Weald onto a wall screen. The house had stood empty for the seventy years since Henry left. Income from the family trust paid for the bots that kept it clean, and stripped and repainted the window frames, and repointed the brickwork, and mowed the grass and kept the gardens in order. The Low Weald at the foot of the hill was filled with housing, factories, high-rise farms, sports complexes, all the way to the foot of the South Downs. Ever-growing population, ever-increasing life-spans, and ever-rising demands for the luxuries of life were turning the whole world into a uniform suburbia.
I turned off that feed and instead watched old recordings I’d seen a hundred times before. A naturalist from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries exploring the deep wildernesses and extravagant wildlife that even in his day were in retreat from the relentless demands of humankind. Then I was drawn to the images taken by the SKT telescope and its even bigger successors. Maps of planets hundreds or thousands of light years away. There were pictures of the mysterious structures orbiting the star Kardashev. Thousands of kilometres in extent, as flat and thin as a piece of paper. The simplest explanation was that they were huge solar panels.
Some time in my second year I went a little crazy. I ignored all calls from Mariam, or the therapist. I’d been without genuine human contact for a year or more but I could cope with that, it was the confinement that turned me. I endlessly paced the rooms and hallways that had once seemed so spacious. I searched for the cameras they used to monitor me and ripped out every one I found. The robots replaced them when I slept, so I tried not to sleep. I would stand and stare through the window at the bleak, grey emptiness of the lunar landscape, or at the airlock door that refused to open for me. If I could have I would have stepped through that airlock onto the lunar surface naked.
It was on one of my better days—I had showered and dressed, combed my hair and beard—that I was standing by the window when a ship landed. The hatch opened and four people emerged in vacsuits and bounded towards the facility airlock. I wanted to run and hide, but there was nowhere to go. I pulled myself together and waited by the airlock door. When they emerged, led by a woman holding her helmet in one hand, I couldn’t speak. I turned away to hide the tears streaming from my eyes and ran to my room and shut myself in. A little while later there was a timid knock at my door.
“You’re Jacob, is that right? Jacob Talis?” She was out of her vacsuit now. Short dark hair, elfin features, petite.
I nodded and backed into my room, inviting her to follow.
“How long have you been here, Jacob?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know, I’d lost track.
A man’s voice called from down the hall. “Ask him how long they’re going to keep us here!”
She tsked! in irritation and closed the bedroom door.
“You were at Chalawan?” I said. She nodded.
“We’ll be here until we die.” My own words shocked me. I told her what I’d been unwilling or unable to tell myself. “They don’t know that we haven’t been contaminated and they can’t take the chance. I went a year after Murdoch, then you. How many others since? They’ll all come back, ninety-two years after leaving Earth and they’ll all end up here.” It was like I’d woken up, my brain started to work. “Did you land? Did you enter Murdoch’s ship, or bring back anything?”
“No,” she said. “We picked up the warning beacon you left.”
“One day someone will come back who is contaminated, they’ll put them in here with us and we’ll all die.”
It was strangely exhausting, speaking to real people in the flesh. Layna—that was her name—grasped the situation. The other three were in denial, outraged at the loss of their liberties, trying to garner support for their situation, but all the friends and colleagues, institutional and political contacts they’d ever had, that was ninety-two years before.
Over the next days, Layna and I retreated to my room to talk about our situation. We spoke to Mariam. She admitted there was no possibility of us leaving the facility until a sample of the vector was recovered, analysed, characterised and an eradication strategy devised. Layna and I talked about escape, but we knew there was nowhere our words wouldn’t be overheard. The next time I spoke to Mariam, I asked her “How many expeditions have gone to Chalawan?”
“Five,” she said. “including Murdoch and your two expeditions, two have yet to return. There is an interdiction on any further travel there.”
“You can’t be sure that either of them will return a sample, and you need one.”
“Yes, we’re going to send a robotic sample-return mission.”
“Make it a manned mission. Send us.”
We weren’t getting out until they had a sample, which wouldn’t be for another ninety-two years, unless one of the later expeditions returned, infected. I figured we could kill time, ninety-two years of it, by making the trip ourselves.
Six months later, the expedition was ready. One ship with an extensive biosciences lab run by AIs and robots. Another where Layna and I would live. The rest of her crew elected to remain in quarantine, still under the illusion that they could eventually secure their release.
So we left in that instant of translation across space and time. What had once been an awful commitment of years, decades, seemed almost inconsequential, I was already so far adrift from the shores of my past.
We found Murdoch’s derelict in the same orbit. The beacon I’d left was dead, power drained long ago. We sent a drone in to retrieve samples from the now thoroughly dessicated corpses. They went to the lab in the other ship where they were introduced into sealed compartments containing live rats. We watched and waited, days passed, the rats were fed, their air purified, there droppings analysed. It seemed that the infectious agent was unable to survive nearly a hundred years in vacuum.
We didn’t have that much in common, Layna and I, but we had both already left our old lives behind and we were, as far as we knew, the only two human beings for light-years, so we drifted together. On my part I had no hopes or expectations for the relationship on our return, but I was content with the unassuming companionship that permeated our small home in the stars.
The AI sent landers down to retrieve samples from the surface, just as Murdoch must have done. A number of unfortunate rats met the same fate as Murdoch and her crew.
Layla and I watched in fascination the video feed from a camera left by the lander. In the dim red-orange tinged light that filtered through the thick atmosphere things grew, moved, and fed. It all happened slowly—the growth, the movement. It was a low energy environment so far from the local sun. Life wouldn’t have been possible at all but for tidal heating from the gas giant. We tried to deduce what was plant and what was animal before finally concluding that the distinction didn’t apply, being a classification specific to Earth life’s evolutionary trajectory.
Each day we transmitted reports back to Earth: our own observations, progress reports, details of what had been learned by the lab AI about the indigenous life.
We’d been there ten weeks when a ship appeared. I hailed it. The face of a middle-aged man appeared on my screen.
“You need to leave,” I said. “You should have been notified before you left Earth, this system is under an interdiction. You’ll be quarantined when you return.”
He gave a half-smile. He reminded me a little of my father. “Ahh, that must have been after we left, a hundred and twenty years ago, real-time. We came a long way around, on a grand tour.” The smile broadened. The penny dropped.
“Henry?”
“Hello, Uncle Jacob.”
We docked our small ship with their much larger one and opened the hatch to an emotional reunion—the family, the world that I had thought forever lost, back again in the person of Henry, twenty-something years older than when I’d last seen him, probably a little older than me now—it wasn’t that easy to work out exactly.
Henry was one of a crew of ten, two to fly the ship and eight exobiologists, planetologists, and astronomers. They invited us to join them for dinner, we were the first people they had seen for four years by their ship time.
I was never good with crowds and as the meal wore on and the conversation fragmented and grew louder my anxiety level rose. I held on for Layna’s sake—she was enjoying the change, new people, new conversations. Henry came to my rescue, focussing in on me so I could focus on him.
“How many systems have you visited?” I asked him.
“Seventeen, so far,” he answered.
“All of them with life?”
“No, we drew a blank on three, but at another there were two worlds, life from a common parent, like the archaea of Mars and Earth.”
“What’s the most complex thing you’ve found.”
“Basic multi-celled organisms mostly, something like simple plants or fungi.” He grasped my arm and beamed with excitement. “But we did find something very much like a primitive worm. Simple digestive system—nerves!” He took a drink, I sipped mine. “But here’s the interesting thing, we’ve found three distinct biochemistries. Every living system we find falls into one of the three in terms of the basic molecular blocks they’re built on.”
I grimaced. “Not panspermia!” An idea that raised its ugly head every generation, that explained nothing but posed new questions.
“No, no. Similar molecular structures but wildly different developmental pathways. Parallel evolution, I suspect the three systems are the only ones possible, that once life gets established using one of them it crowds out the others on that world.” He took another drink.
Layna reached across the table. “What do you think of Chalawan?”
Henry sat back and grinned. “I only had a brief look at the video you sent me. It’s more complex than anything we’ve seen. I wonder, to be able to infect Earth life like that, if it has the same biochemical basis. I can’t wait to get down there for a closer look.”
“NO!”
Silence fell around the table at my shout.
“You can’t go down there. It’s too dangerous. Our lab, it’s all unmanned, at arm’s length. We can share the data with you.”
“With all due respect, Uncle Jacob, we understand biosecurity. This is our field of expertise, and we have direct experience of more forms of exolife than your AI. Probably more experience than anyone, anywhere. We know what we’re doing.”
“Familiarity breeds contempt, that’s what your grandfather always said.”
Henry was unmoved. “We’ll be fine Uncle Jacob. Don’t worry.”
We had that argument a hundred times in the weeks while they prepared their landing. During that time Layna and I drifted apart, she spent more and more time in the company of the other crew. In Henry’s company.
“Stay here with me when they land,” I begged her. “Go back to him when they come back up.” She wouldn’t listen. “You’re just jealous.” was her response. I could find no way to persuade her that it wasn’t so. Maybe it was, a little, but that wasn’t the reason.
“… Goo’bye, Unc’e Jacob. Pleathe thee our fin’ingth ge’ back ’o Earth.”
I could only imagine what the infection was doing to distort his speech so—he’d turned off his camera so I only had his voice. Henry was the last to succumb, Layna had been the first. For a time she had been my anchor, bringing me back to myself in the quarantine facility, now she was gone. And Henry—Henry had been my last link to my own past.
The AI had gathered its samples and conducted its tests and with its own data and Henry’s team’s it vanished from the here and now, it would be back at Earth in another forty-six years.
The irony was that Henry had proved the organism was not contagious. The bodies it infected were as lethal to it as it was to us. It could grow and kill a host, but could produce no spores, there could be no secondary infection. I could return to Earth, free and clear, but there was no-one left who knew me, and nothing else to go back for. It was a world where nothing remained that was wild, natural, and beautiful.
I wondered if it was always so throughout the galaxy, throughout the universe. Whether intelligence led inevitably to such loss.
I laid in the vector for my own journey to a place I had never thought to go. Henry was the one who had been fascinated, all the way back when the first tentative observations were made. Maybe I did it for Henry, or maybe I was already so far adrift that time and distance no longer held any meaning for me.
Kardashev. Three thousand light years.
It had taken three thousand years for the light from Kardashev to reach the mirrors of the SKT to make the images I had seen. Another three thousand passed in the instant of my journey there. What little I knew was six thousand years out of date by the time of my arrival. It should not have been a surprise that things had changed.
The abandoned remains of their technology were everywhere: vast machines of unknown purpose, buildings on airless moons, stations and satellites and ships in silent orbits. A remnant of those gossamer sheets seen by the SKT lay draped around an asteroid. Wherever I found an opening I sent in a drone to investigate, sometimes I suited up to search through the dark airless passages myself. I found no trace of the builders, no clue as to what had happened to them. No bodies, no sign of damage or violence. But I had neither the skills nor the equipment to conduct a serious investigation. I was an ignorant tourist tramping through ancient ruins turning over random stones.
Kardashev’s third planet was a blue-green jewel. I sent a drone to the surface, and with the knowledge Henry had given me I was able to determine that the life there was of the same biochemical class as that at Epsilon Eridani. Harmless to me, so I landed on what might have been a grassy hillside at the edge of a forest, but the growth underfoot wasn’t grass, and the forest was of trees unlike any I had seen. Four-legged creatures that from a distance bore a striking resemblance to deer grazed the undergrowth.
This was their home world, of that, I was sure. Hidden in the forests, half-buried in the grasslands, worn down by blowing sands in the deserts there were traces: stone and concrete foundations of buildings in concentric circles and ellipses, the eroded piers of a bridge over a river. These were all that remained after millennia of assault by sun and rain, by burrowing creatures and probing roots.
I roamed that untamed planet soaking up the strangeness and beauty, revelling in the wildness of it all, but after six months my food ran out. The life there could not sustain me so it was with sorrow and regret that I set the vector to bring me back home.
My ship now rests on the hillside of the Sussex High Weald where, six thousand years ago, my house stood. Whatever happened here, it happened a long time ago. Just as at Kardashev, there are no people on Earth or off it. There is no sign of violent struggle or catastrophe, just traces of old buildings worn away by weather and by nature. It’s the oldest ones that endure: the pyramids, the Pantheon, even a section of the Pont du Gard still stands. Anything more modern has long gone. Steel cores corrode, cracking the concrete, the glass and light cladding breaks and falls.
I wonder sometimes what happened to everyone. Did they die? Did they leave? Willingly or crying desperately in the night? I could take the ship and search the old stations in space and on the moon where there are no worms or tree roots, no rain or rust. There might be answers somewhere up there.
There were lions here before, in zoos and parks. They might have escaped or been released when the people went away. I’m sure it was a lion I heard. I’ll keep watch, maybe I’ll see it.
David is a retired software engineer who now spends his time playing guitar badly and writing. He lives in West Sussex with his wife and two cats and occasional returning offspring