Uploaded August 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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Sung by Bill Roper. Thanks to rocketman0739 for providing high-quality versions of these songs.
Download the album here: archive.org/details/filk_unreal_estate
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Lyrics:

The melody is over, the last transmission done,
The cool of Earth is turned to flame with the dying of the Sun.
The nova flare will burn away the world of mankind's birth
And fire will be the ending of the songs of distant Earth.

The sentence was pronounced: the death of Earth would come,
The Sun burn briefly bright, all history'd be done,
And all the things they cared for, the laughter and the tears,
Be ended by the nova's flame in fifteen hundred years.

But although die they must, man might outlive his home:
The stars were waiting there, with planets of their own.
The telescopes peered outward; the probes were sent to fly,
To seek a world that they might seed, that mankind need not die.

No man of Earth may walk beneath a foreign sun,
But the seedships sent their life; a new race has begun.
On twenty worlds we've gathered, the human voice grows strong,
And we carry on their writing, their poetry, their song.

The melody is over, but the echoes linger on
From the seeds of life they planted 'gainst the dying of the Sun.
The echo's growing stronger as it calls of man's rebirth
And a score of worlds are singing now the songs of distant Earth.