Siren Song
This was written for an anthology of space flight, with the restriction that it had to be limited to our solar system and that faster-than-light speeds were unattainable. I figured everyone else would write about intraseller exploration or war, so I decided to write about the successor to yacht races, with a tip of my hat to Greek mythology.
So let me tell you about the Great Regatta of 2237, because the press had it wrong, as usual, and when was the last time the self-appointed pundits ever knew anything except what other self-appointed pundits were thinking?
The public had grown increasingly weary of races on Earth’s oceans. After all, the oceans were so … well … limiting. Just lift your gaze, the reasoning went, and there’s a whole universe up there, and it’s a lot bigger than an ocean. Okay, we couldn’t reach most of it, couldn’t even visit Alpha Centauri during one lifetime, let alone make the return flight. But we could reach just about any place in the solar system, and even if the distances weren’t measured in parsecs they stirred the imagination the way mere miles and fathoms no longer did.
There were six ships entered in the race. Five were sleek, bullet-shaped vessels, powered by fission or fusion and then there was the Argo, the only ship in the Regatta that made its way through the void by the use of solar sails.
The course was mapped out by the most sophisticated computers: they would start from orbit—four of the ships had been built in space and would die before ever touching down on a planetary surface—and each ship would have to pass within a thousand miles of four buoys that would register their passage. The designers didn’t want to chance losing a ship due to the gas giants’ gravity, so while they put one buoy in orbit around Mars, the other three would be in position not around Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, but rather their moons: Ganymede, Titan, and Umbriel.
May 1 was a special day in many cultures—not for the reasons it once was, at least not in most countries—and it was decided that the race would begin at exactly twelve o’clock noon, Greenwich time, on that date.
The ships could choose any course they wanted, which was meaningful since their goals were in constant motion. Once the race began, they were not permitted to communicate with each other, even to warn of dangers such as ion storms or meteor showers. And finally, if a ship touched down on any solid surface—planet, moon, asteroid, anything—for any reason, it would be disqualified.
It was the Argo that caught the public’s fancy, partially because solar sails seemed somehow romantic, conjuring up visions of the sailing ships of yore, and partially because of the captain. His name—and no one except the public believed it could possibly be his real one—was FarTrekker Jones, with the capital T right in the middle of it, and they couldn’t have been more taken by a name if he’d chosen Odysseus or Horatio Hornblower.
He shared the Argo with two others, a co-pilot and a navigator—he didn’t trust navigational computers, though of course the ship had one—and the three of them were a hard-bitten lot. No one knew what had driven them to space (I almost said “driven them to sea”), and they weren’t much for giving interviews—but the people loved them anyway, and if no one knew anything much about them, why, that just lent a little romantic mystery to the race.
They lined the six ships up in orbit, each about five miles apart from the next, and suddenly they were off and running, or probably I should say off and flying. The Silver Streak jumped off to a quick lead, followed by the Galaxy Roamer. The Argo wasn’t exactly left at the gate—for one thing, they didn’t have a starting gate—but it was soon bringing up the rear.
They reached Mars in fourteen to sixteen days, depending on which ship you were rooting for. The Galaxy Roamer was now in the lead by seven hours, with the Silver Bullet and McGinty’s Marvel five minutes apart in second place, and the Argo still bringing up the rear.
The first five ships followed a predetermined route to get to Ganymede, which was their next checkpoint. It was a reasonable route, and a safe route. They had to go through the Asteroid Belt, of course, but bad stories and worse videos to the contrary, most of the asteroids are so far apart that actually seeing two or three while traversing the Belt breaks the monotony (and monotonous it is, for Jupiter is a lot farther from Mars than Earth is).
But not all the Belt is like that. Some of it is what you might call densely populated, not by people but by asteroids, and in fact there are a few places where there are so many and they are moving so swiftly, that they can be damned dangerous. Moreover, there’s a lot of rubble out there, rocks the size of bricks, or footballs if you prefer, that are so small and so fast that a ship’s sensors will miss half of them, but any one of them, if it hits the right spot at the right angle, can put a ship out of commission … and I mean permanently.
Of course you’ve figured out by now what I’m going to tell you, and you’re right: FarTrekker decided the only way to make up lost time was to take the shortest route to Ganymede, a route the other five ships had avoided because of the danger involved.
A number of media ships had been posted along the route, reporting back on the race, but when the Argo changed its course they followed it only long enough to determine where it was going, and then wisely refused to follow it. As they reported, only a crazy man would take this route, and especially in a ship with a solar sail, which presented a much bigger target to the myriad of flying rocks, and of course once the sail was destroyed the ship was without motive power. (“What will they do then?” asked one of the self-appointed pundits. “Row?” Twenty-seven other pundits used that same line during the next day, and eleven presented it as their own, which is of course what self-appointed pundits do.)
The Argo entered the Belt, and Knibbs the navigator—no one ever knew his first name—went to work, charting all the asteroids that were big enough to chart, and trying to position the ship so that anything too small to chart was more likely to hit the hull than the solar sail. They figured to be eight days crossing the Belt, but if they made it to the other side, they’d have picked up more than a week on their rivals.
And, oddly enough, they were not touched by so much as a pebble for the first five days. The sail remained intact, they actually were running two hours ahead of schedule, and Knibbs announced that they’d passed through the worst of it, that the asteroids were starting to look like baby planets again, rather than large rocks and small boulders.
And then, on the sixth day, the co-pilot (whose first name was Vladimir, and I won’t bother with his surname since no one could pronounce or spell it anyway), Vladimir was sitting at the control panel when he fell asleep, and his head or his hand—they never knew which, and it doesn’t really matter anyway—brushed against some of the buttons and switches and knobs, and suddenly the Argo was filled with this haunting sound, like a melody you heard when both you and the world were younger and more innocent, and try as you would you could never quite remember it, though you knew it had brought tears to your eyes the one time you’d heard it. In fact, you probably looked for it on and off for years, but privately, because you didn’t know quite how to tell anyone you were looking for a melody that made you cry.
“What is that?” asked FarTrekker, suddenly alert.
“I don’t know,” said Vladimir, blinking his eyes. He checked the control panel, but while a number of the switches and buttons had been flicked and pressed, none of them had anything to do with the ship’s radio.
“I know that song,” said Knibbs wistfully. “I heard it once, a long time ago.”
FarTrekker shook his head. “No, that’s my Leucosia’s song.”
“I didn’t you had a girl,” said Vladimir. “At least, I’ve never seen you with one.”
“I had one once,” said FarTrekker, staring sadly at the viewscreen. “She was coming home when her ship was lost. They never found her.”
“Surely they looked for her?”
“They did,” said FarTrekker. “But it’s a big solar system.” He sighed deeply. “That was her song.”
“It’s my Peisinoe’s favorite song, too,” said Knibbs. “Or it was, before I lost her.”
Suddenly FarTrekker frowned. “And that’s Leucosia’s voice!”
He examined the speakers, but the sound was not emanating from them. He then turned to Vladimir. “You’re our engineering expert,” he said. “Where the hell is that sound originating, and how can we be hearing it if it’s not being broadcast by the ship’s speaker system?”
Vladimir shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Theoretically we can’t be hearing it.”
“Spare me your theories,” said FarTrekker. “Can any external source be bypassing the speakers and broadcasting that melody directly into the ship, anything we can trace?”
“No,” said Vladimir. “We’re maintaining radio silence. However the sound is reaching us, it’s not through any mechanism on the Argo.”
The three men fell silent then, as the melody washed over them, caressing them with emotions and memories, some real, some they only wished were real.
“She’s alive,” said FarTrekker at last. “She’s alive, and she’s found a way to reach me!”
Knibbs agreed, except the “she” was his Peisinoe, and Vladimir, who remained silent, knew that the voice he heard, conjuring feelings he thought he’d forgotten, belonged to his Ligeia.
“We must be close!” said FarTrekker. “I never heard her on Earth, or in orbit, or even as we passed by Mars.”
“And Jupiter is still farther from us than Earth,” noted Vladimir.
“So she must be close by,” concluded FarTrekker, and the other two agreed with him, though each silently substituted a different name for “she.” “What’s the largest asteroid in the vicinity?”
Knibbs checked his computer. “Got one, maybe eight hundred miles in diameter, about ten thousand miles off to the right, and getting closer every second.” He paused. “Got a bit of an atmosphere, but nothing any human can breathe.”
“Does it have a name, or just the usual numbers and letters?” asked FarTrekker.
“Yeah, this one’s got a name: Anthemoessa.” Knibbs frowned. “Seems somehow familiar, though I’ll swear I never saw it referred to before.”
“I have,” said Vladimir. “But I’ll be damned if I can remember where.
The strangest expression crossed FarTrekker’s face. “I can remember.” Then he fell silent.
“Well?” demanded Knibbs.
“It’s the island where the Sirens lived,”
“You’re not suggesting Sirens are singing to us!” scoffed Vladimir.
“Besides, Anthemoessa, if it existed at all, was in Greece, remember?” added Knibbs.
“Maybe whoever named this asteroid knew something we don’t know,” said FarTrekker, and added “yet” silently.
“Ridiculous!” said Vladimir.
“Okay, maybe not,” said FarTrekker. “You explain the song.”
“I can’t.”
“But you can hear it, and you’ve heard it before,” persisted FarTrekker.
“I think so.”
“You know so,” said FarTrekker. “Admit it: don’t you recognize the voice?”
Vladimir seemed to be having a brief battle within himself. Finally he sighed. “Yes. It’s my Ligeia.”
“I’ve got something interesting here,” said Knibbs. The other two turned to him. “According to the computer, the asteroid was named almost a century ago by Mortimer Highsmith.”
“So?” asked FarTrekker.
Knibbs smiled. “He was a widower.”
“That’s all?” said Vladimir.
“He never came back.”
“Where did he die?” asked Fartrekker.
“No one knows,” answered Knibbs.
FarTrekker looked at the viewscreen. “We’ll find his body there,” he said, pointing to Anthemoessa. “Unless he’s still alive.”
“He’d be about a hundred and forty years old,” noted Knibbs.
“Who knows what wonders can transpire on Anthemoessa?” replied FarTrekker. “There’s only one way to find out.”
“He’d better not have laid a hand on my Ligeia!” muttered Vladimir.
“Maybe we should think this through,” said Knibbs. “If they’re Sirens or the equivalent, who knows what will happen if we answer their call? It’s a strange and not always friendly universe out here.”
The three men fell silent for a moment, considering their options—but the ship didn’t fall silent, and the hauntingly beautiful melody permeated every atom of it.
Finally FarTrekker spoke. “Just listening to this melody for the past ten minutes has made me happier than any time since my Leucosia died. It should hurt, but it doesn’t; it brings her back to me, and the only thing that hurts is being apart from her.” He looked at his two shipmates. “Maybe they’re who we hope they are. Maybe we’re in some parallel universe where they didn’t die. Maybe they’re Sirens. And maybe they’re something else.” He paused briefly. “Has anyone got anything better to do?”
Nobody did, FarTrekker saw no reason to report what had happened, none of the three had any soulmate to say good-bye to, and the Argo altered course and headed for Anthemoessa and out of this story.
What happened?
Well, the pundits say that they were either struck by an asteroid or crashed into one. The cynics say they knew they couldn’t win and were afraid to show their faces ever again. The romantics say they found exactly what they were looking for.
Who was right?
Anyone who wants can find out. Anthemoessa is still up there, its song available to anyone who is willing to listen.