Visions of the Future Read Free

baseball-sized yellow disk. And the four planets were clearly visible, ranging from pea-sized to as big as grape.
    “Magnify on Soror,” I said.
    One of the peas became a billiard ball, although Tau Ceti grew hardly at all.
    “More,” said Ling.
    The planet grew to softball size. It was showing as a wide crescent, perhaps a third of the disk illuminated from this angle. And—thankfully, fantastically—Soror was everything we’d dreamed it would be: a giant polished marble, with swirls of white cloud, and a vast, blue ocean, and—
    Part of a continent was visible, emerging out of the darkness. And it was green, apparently covered with vegetation.
    We hugged again, squeezing each other tightly. No one had been sure when we’d left Earth; Soror could have been barren. The Pioneer Spirit was ready regardless: in its cargo holds was everything we needed to survive even on an airless world. But we’d hoped and prayed that Soror would be, well—just like this: a true sister, another Earth, another home.
    “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Ling.
    I felt my eyes tearing. It was beautiful, breathtaking, stunning. The vast ocean, the cottony clouds, the verdant land, and—
    “Oh, my God,” I said, softly. “Oh, my God.”
    “What?” said Ling.
    “Don’t you see?” I asked. “Look!”
    Ling narrowed her eyes and moved closer to the screen. “What?”
    “On the dark side,” I said.
    She looked again. “Oh…” she said. There were faint lights sprinkled across the darkness; hard to see, but definitely there. “Could it be volcanism?” asked Ling. Maybe Soror wasn’t so perfect after all.
    “Computer,” I said, “spectral analysis of the light sources on the planet’s dark side.”
    “Predominantly incandescent lighting, color temperature 5600 kelvin.”
    I exhaled and looked at Ling. They weren’t volcanoes. They were cities.
    Soror, the world we’d spent twelve centuries traveling to, the world we’d intended to colonize, the world that had been dead silent when examined by radio telescopes, was already inhabited.

    The Pioneer Spirit was a colonization ship; it wasn’t intended as a diplomatic vessel. When it had left Earth, it had seemed important to get at least some humans off the mother world. Two small-scale nuclear wars—Nuke I and Nuke II, as the media had dubbed them—had already been fought, one in southern Asia, the other in South America. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Nuke III, and that one might be the big one.
    SETI had detected nothing from Tau Ceti, at least not by 2051. But Earth itself had only been broadcasting for a century and a half at that point; Tau Ceti might have had a thriving civilization then that hadn’t yet started using radio. But now it was twelve hundred years later. Who knew how advanced the Tau Cetians might be?
    I looked at Ling, then back at the screen. “What should we do?”
    Ling tilted her head to one side. “I’m not sure. On the one hand, I’d love to meet them, whoever they are. But…”
    “But they might not want to meet us,” I said. “They might think we’re invaders, and—”
    “And we’ve got forty-eight other colonists to think about,” said Ling. “For all we know, we’re the last surviving humans.”
    I frowned. “Well, that’s easy enough to determine. Computer, swing the radio telescope toward Sol system. See if you can pick anything up that might be artificial.”
    “Just a sec,” said the female voice. A few moments later, a cacophony filled the room: static and snatches of voices and bits of music and sequences of tones, overlapping and jumbled, fading in and out. I heard what sounded like English—although strangely inflected—and maybe Arabic and Mandarin and…
    “We’re not the last survivors,” I said, smiling. “There’s still life on Earth—or, at least, there was 11.9 years ago, when those signals started out.”
    Ling exhaled. “I’m glad we didn’t blow ourselves up,” she said.