Galaxy’s Edge Magazine: Issue 15, July 2015 by Mike Resnick

Author:Mike Resnick
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781612422770
Publisher: Phoenix Pick
Published: 2015-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

Robert J. Sawyer is the author of twenty-three novels including Hugo Award-winning Hominids, Nebula Award-wining The Terminal Experiment, plus Starplex, Frameshift, Factoring Humanity, Calculating God, and Wake, all of which were Hugo finalists. His novel Flash Forward was the basis for the television series. Canada’s leading science fiction writer, he was recently given an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Winnipeg.

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

by Robert J. Sawyer

I’ve spent a lot of time watching Earth—more than forty of that planet’s years. My arrival was in response to the signal from our automated probe, which had detected that the paper-skinned bipedal beings of that world had split the atom. The probe had served well, but there were some things only a living being could do properly, and assessing whether a lifeform should be contacted by the Planetary Commonwealth was one.

It would have been fascinating to have been present for that first fission explosion: it’s always a fabulous thing when a new species learns to cleave the atom, the dawn for them of a new and wondrous age. Of course, fission is messy, but one must glide before one can fly; all known species that developed fission soon moved on to the clean energy of controlled fusion, putting an end to need and want, to poverty, to scarcity.

I arrived in the vicinity of Earth some dozen Earth years after that first fission explosion—but I could not set down upon Earth, for its gravity was five times that of our homeworld. But its moon had a congenial mass; there I would weigh slightly less than I did at home. And, just like our homeworld, which, of course, is itself the moon of a gas-giant world orbiting a double star, Earth’s moon was tidally locked, constantly showing the same face to its primary. It was a perfect place for me to land my starbird and observe the goings-on on the blue-and-white-and-infrared world below.

This moon, the soul natural satellite of was devoid of atmosphere, bereft of water. I imagined our homeworld would be similar if its volatiles weren’t constantly replenished by material from Chirp-cluck-CHIRP-chirp, the gas-giant planet that so dominated our skies; a naturally occurring, permanent magnetic-flux tube passed a gentle rain of gases onto our world.

The moon that the inhabitants of Earth called “the moon” (and “La Lune,” and a hundred other things) was depressingly desolate. Still, from it I could easily intercept the tens of thousands of audio and audiovisual transmissions spewing out from Earth—and with a time delay of only four wingbeats. My starbird’s computer separated the signals one from the other, and I watched and listened.

It took that computer most of a smallyear to decipher all the different languages this species used, but, by the year—being a planet, not a moon, Earth had only one kind of year—the Earth people called 1958, I was able to follow everything that was happening there.

I was at once delighted and disgusted. Delighted, because I’d learned that in the years since that initial

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