“I don’t suppose you’ll understand me,” she said, “but welcome to Thalassa.”

The visitors smiled, and the older of the two — a handsome, grey-haired man in his late sixties — held up his hands in response.

“On the contrary,” he answered, in one of the deepest and most beautifully modulated voices that Brant had ever heard, “we understand you perfectly. We’re delighted to meet you.”

For a moment, the welcoming party stood in stunned silence. But it was silly, thought Brant, to have been surprised. After all, they did not have the slightest difficulty understanding the speech of men who had lived two thousand years ago. When sound recording was invented, it froze the basic phoneme patterns of all languages. Vocabularies would expand, syntax and grammar might be modified — but pronunciation would remain stable for millennia.

Mayor Waldron was the first to recover.

“Well, that certainly saves a lot of trouble,” she said rather lamely. “But where have you come from? I’m afraid we’ve lost touch with — our neighbours — since our deep-space antenna was destroyed.”

The older man glanced at his much taller companion, and some silent message flashed between them. Then he again turned towards the waiting mayor. There was no mistaking the sadness in that beautiful voice, as he made his preposterous claim.

“It may be difficult for you to believe this,” he said. “But we’re not from any of the colonies. We’ve come straight from Earth.”

6. Planetfall

Even before he opened his eyes, Loren knew exactly where he was, and he found this quite surprising. After sleeping for two hundred years, some confusion would have been understandable, but it seemed only yesterday that he had made his last entry in the ship’s log. And as far as he could remember, he had not had a single dream. He was thankful for that.