\nLast night I think I heard a lion.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nMy 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\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nI bought an overlander to make my escape. The first time my bratty pre-teen sister, Catherine, saw it, she pouted and sulked. \u201cWhy do you have to go away?\u201d She demanded. \u201cYou\u2019re leaving me to deal with Dad all by myself.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHe\u2019s never here anyway,\u201d I told her. \u201cHe just works all the time.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\nIt 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. \u201cThey look sad,\u201d she said.\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYes.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like in those old documentaries you\u2019re always watching, when they used to live free.\u201d She looked up at me. I guess she must have seen in my face how I felt because she took my hand. \u201cLet\u2019s go home.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cI want to see what\u2019s left,\u201d I told her as the car drove us back, \u201cbefore it\u2019s all gone. I know there\u2019s no lions or tigers or elephants in the wild, but I want to see what I can.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\nSoon enough the day came when I was ready to leave. She hugged me, sniffling into my chest. \u201cI wish I could come with you,\u201d she said.\n<\/p>\n
\nI 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\u2019s wildlife.\n<\/p>\n
\nWhen 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\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe door behind me opened, Catherine leaned against the wooden door frame. She\u2019d grown into a gregarious, vivacious, optimistic young woman, ten years younger than me back then, though to look at her you\u2019d have thought twenty. Her perpetual smile had a tinge of sadness about it. \u201cCan\u2019t you find what you want here?\u201d she said, bringing back a fond memory of the bratty child she had been.\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYou know I\u2019ve tried,\u201d I said. \u201cEverywhere in this world is desolation, or…\u201d I turned again towards the industrial countryside at the foot of the hill. \u201c… or it\u2019s like this.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s so far, you\u2019ll be away so long.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThere\u2019s life there, I have to see.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHenry will miss you.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHe barely knows me, he\u2019s what, four?\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cNearly seven, and he idolises you.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\nShe came and put her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. \u201cI\u2019l<\/em>l miss you.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI\u2019ll be back.\u201d I gave her a brief, awkward hug and walked through to the front of the house where the car waited on the gravel drive.\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n \nI\u2019d 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\u2019s company, I\u2019d liquidated a substantial part of my holding to pay for it.\n<\/p>\n \nThe 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\u2019d have liked to travel further, somewhere I could be the first, but I wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s all we had to go on until someone went to see.\n<\/p>\n \nThe 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. <\/em>\n<\/p>\n \nI didn\u2019t 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 <\/em>becomes there and then, <\/em>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\u2019d 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.\n<\/p>\n \n \nOn 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\u2019t 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\u2019d been away. She was now older than me by ten years, but to look at her it might have been twenty.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cDid you find your lush alien forests teeming with strange creatures?\u201d she asked once we were back in the car.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cTepid seas filled with something very like algae. It gave me a rash when I touched it.\u201d I held up a hand covered in red blotches. \u201cI thought I\u2019d have to quarantine but they said the same happened with the first expedition. Just a mild allergic reaction.\u201d The car rolled along, the road had been upgraded with an extra lane to cope with even more traffic. \u201cHow have you been?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nShe 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. \u201cBetter lately, I guess. Henry\u2019s been out of rehab nearly a year, I think he\u2019s turned a corner. He\u2019s become obsessed with astronomy, stars and planets and alien life.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nHe idolises you: <\/em>the words she spoke to me a few short weeks ago rang through my brain.\n<\/p>\n \nAs if she read my mind, Catherine looked at me and an echo of her old smile appeared. \u201cI know you had to go, Jacob. You\u2019ve got your own demons to tame. It\u2019s not your fault.\u201d She patted my thigh. \u201cBut he\u2019ll have a lot to say, a lot to ask you. Be kind to him, be patient.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \nThe sun had set by the time we got back to the house. Henry was waiting, full of questions, and of opinions.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cOf 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\u2019s an oxygen signature on a moon of the gas giant.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nI did my best to engage Henry\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n \n \nI found my old bedroom much as I\u2019d 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.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cThey don\u2019t need biomass for energy any more, Uncle Jacob.\u201d Henry explained over breakfast. \u201cThe ponds are engineered diatoms to grow plastics. Energy comes from the orbital solar farms.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI saw one before I landed. Must have been a kilometre square.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cThe ones at Kardashev are a million times bigger\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cKardashev?\u201d I recognised the name, but couldn\u2019t place it.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cThree thousand light years. Some people are still trying to argue it\u2019s a natural phenomenon, but no-one\u2019s convinced. When the SKT, the six-kilometer telescope, is finished, we\u2019ll have clear images.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \nI 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.\n<\/p>\n \nThe world\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou\u2019re leaving again.\u201d Catherine said as we sat on the terrace one evening, watching the flashes of satellites crossing the night sky.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI don\u2019t know if I should.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou don\u2019t have to stay for me. I\u2019ll be alright.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nShe watched me in the twilight. I couldn\u2019t meet her eyes. \u201cI think Henry wants to come.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nA long pause. \u201cWhere would you go?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cChalawan. Forty-six years away.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \n\u201cYou won\u2019t be the first,\u201d Henry said over breakfast the next morning. \u201cThe Murdoch expedition left to go there a year ago.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cThey won\u2019t be back for ninety years,\u201d I said. \u201cI won\u2019t know what\u2019s there unless I go myself.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI wish I could go with you.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cIt would break your mother\u2019s heart.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI know. That\u2019s why I have to stay.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nHenry\u2019s words stabbed hot needles of guilt into my conscience. Not for leaving, but for the relief I felt that he was staying.\n<\/p>\n \n \nWhen I returned from Chalawan they put me in the quarantine facility on the moon. I told them that all I\u2019d done was to deploy a drone to investigate the Murdoch expedition\u2019s silent ship. When I saw the images it transmitted, I came straight back, there was no possibility that I was infected, but they didn\u2019t listen. They were taking no chances.\n<\/p>\n \nIt 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\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n \nNothing 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\u2019d seen. Remote counselling helped, and by the end of three months, I was able to sleep a night through.\n<\/p>\n \nI 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\u2019d joined a grand tour expedition to nearby stars. He was not expected to return for decades more.\n<\/p>\n \nI 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.\n<\/p>\n \nI turned off that feed and instead watched old recordings I\u2019d 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.\n<\/p>\n \nSome time in my second year I went a little crazy. I ignored all calls from Mariam, or the therapist. I\u2019d 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.\n<\/p>\n \nIt was on one of my better days\u2014I had showered and dressed, combed my hair and beard\u2014that 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\u2019t 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.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou\u2019re Jacob, is that right? Jacob Talis?\u201d She was out of her vacsuit now. Short dark hair, elfin features, petite.\n<\/p>\n \nI nodded and backed into my room, inviting her to follow.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cHow long have you been here, Jacob?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nI shook my head. I didn\u2019t know, I\u2019d lost track.\n<\/p>\n \nA man\u2019s voice called from down the hall. \u201cAsk him how long they\u2019re going to keep us here!\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nShe tsked! <\/em>in irritation and closed the bedroom door.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou were at Chalawan?\u201d I said. She nodded.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWe\u2019ll be here until we die.\u201d My own words shocked me. I told her what I\u2019d been unwilling or unable to tell myself. \u201cThey don\u2019t know that we haven\u2019t been contaminated and they can\u2019t take the chance. I went a year after Murdoch, then you. How many others since? They\u2019ll all come back, ninety-two years after leaving Earth and they\u2019ll all end up here.\u201d It was like I\u2019d woken up, my brain started to work. \u201cDid you land? Did you enter Murdoch\u2019s ship, or bring back anything?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cWe picked up the warning beacon you left.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cOne day someone will come back who is contaminated, they\u2019ll put them in here with us and we\u2019ll all die.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \nIt was strangely exhausting, speaking to real people in the flesh. Layna\u2014that was her name\u2014grasped 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\u2019d ever had, that was ninety-two years before.\n<\/p>\n \nOver 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\u2019t be overheard. The next time I spoke to Mariam, I asked her \u201cHow many expeditions have gone to Chalawan?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cFive,\u201d she said. \u201cincluding Murdoch and your two expeditions, two have yet to return. There is an interdiction on any further travel there.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou can\u2019t be sure that either of them will return a sample, and you need one.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYes, we\u2019re going to send a robotic sample-return mission.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cMake it a manned mission. Send us.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nWe weren\u2019t getting out until they had a sample, which wouldn\u2019t 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.\n<\/p>\n \n \nSix 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.\n<\/p>\n \nSo 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.\n<\/p>\n \nWe found Murdoch\u2019s derelict in the same orbit. The beacon I\u2019d 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.\n<\/p>\n \nWe didn\u2019t 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.\n<\/p>\n \nThe 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.\n<\/p>\n \nLayla 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 <\/em>grew, moved, and fed. It all happened slowly\u2014the growth, the movement. It was a low energy environment so far from the local sun. Life wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t apply, being a classification specific to Earth life\u2019s evolutionary trajectory.\n<\/p>\n \nEach 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.\n<\/p>\n \nWe\u2019d been there ten weeks when a ship appeared. I hailed it. The face of a middle-aged man appeared on my screen.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou need to leave,\u201d I said. \u201cYou should have been notified before you left Earth, this system is under an interdiction. You\u2019ll be quarantined when you return.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nHe gave a half-smile. He reminded me a little of my father. \u201cAhh, 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.\u201d The smile broadened. The penny dropped.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cHenry?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cHello, Uncle Jacob.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \nWe docked our small ship with their much larger one and opened the hatch to an emotional reunion\u2014the family, the world that I had thought forever lost, back again in the person of Henry, twenty-something years older than when I\u2019d last seen him, probably a little older than me now\u2014it wasn\u2019t that easy to work out exactly.\n<\/p>\n \nHenry 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.\n<\/p>\n \nI 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\u2019s sake\u2014she was enjoying the change, new people, new conversations. Henry came to my rescue, focussing in on me so I could focus on him.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cHow many systems have you visited?\u201d I asked him.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cSeventeen, so far,\u201d he answered.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cAll of them with life?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cNo, 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.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWhat\u2019s the most complex thing you\u2019ve found.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cBasic multi-celled organisms mostly, something like simple plants or fungi.\u201d He grasped my arm and beamed with excitement. \u201cBut we did find something very much like a primitive worm. Simple digestive system\u2014nerves<\/em>!\u201d He took a drink, I sipped mine. \u201cBut here\u2019s the interesting thing, we\u2019ve found three distinct biochemistries. Every living system we find falls into one of the three in terms of the basic molecular blocks they\u2019re built on.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nI grimaced. \u201cNot panspermia!\u201d An idea that raised its ugly head every generation, that explained nothing but posed new questions.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cNo, 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.\u201d He took another drink.\n<\/p>\n \nLayna reached across the table. \u201cWhat do you think of Chalawan?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nHenry sat back and grinned. \u201cI only had a brief look at the video you sent me. It\u2019s more complex than anything we\u2019ve seen. I wonder, to be able to infect Earth life like that, if it has the same biochemical basis. I can\u2019t wait to get down there for a closer look.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cNO!\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nSilence fell around the table at my shout.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cYou can\u2019t go down there. It\u2019s too dangerous. Our lab, it\u2019s all unmanned, at arm\u2019s length. We can share the data with you.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cWith 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\u2019re doing.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \n\u201cFamiliarity breeds contempt, that\u2019s what your grandfather always said.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nHenry was unmoved. \u201cWe\u2019ll be fine Uncle Jacob. Don\u2019t worry.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nWe 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\u2019s company.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cStay here with me when they land,\u201d I begged her. \u201cGo back to him when they come back up.\u201d She wouldn\u2019t listen. \u201cYou\u2019re just jealous.\u201d was her response. I could find no way to persuade her that it wasn\u2019t so. Maybe it was, a little, but that wasn\u2019t the reason.\n<\/p>\n \n \n\u201c… Goo\u2019bye, Unc\u2019e Jacob. Pleathe thee our fin\u2019ingth ge\u2019 back \u2019o Earth.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nI could only imagine what the infection was doing to distort his speech so\u2014he\u2019d 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\u2014Henry had been my last link to my own past.\n<\/p>\n \nThe AI had gathered its samples and conducted its tests and with its own data and Henry\u2019s team\u2019s it vanished from the here and now, it would be back at Earth in another forty-six years.\n<\/p>\n \nThe 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.\n<\/p>\n \nI wondered if it was always so throughout the galaxy, throughout the universe. Whether intelligence led inevitably to such loss.\n<\/p>\n \nI 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.\n<\/p>\n \nKardashev. Three thousand light years.\n<\/p>\n \n \nIt 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.\n<\/p>\n \nThe 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.\n<\/p>\n \nKardashev\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.\n<\/p>\n \nThis 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.\n<\/p>\n \nI 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.\n<\/p>\n \n \nMy 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\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n \nI 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.\n<\/p>\n \nThere were <\/em>lions here before, in zoos and parks. They might have escaped or been released when the people went away. I\u2019m sure it was a lion I heard. I\u2019ll keep watch, maybe I\u2019ll see it.\n<\/p>\n 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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,20136],"tags":[20137],"class_list":["post-140344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-tcl-51-spring-2024","tag-the-colored-lens-51-spring-2024","entry entry-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/107961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140345,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140344\/revisions\/140345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecoloredlens.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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