Mikhail and Toby, this motley crew, was her last gamble. But she wasn’t about to tell them that. She said briskly, “Let’s get on with it.”
Mikhail glanced at notes off camera. “I have Eugene’s latest predictions.”
Graphics glowed in the smart top of the table before Siobhan and Toby, showing energy flux plotted against wavelength, particle mass, and other parameters. “Nothing substantial has changed, I’m afraid. We are looking at a major influx of solar energy on April 20, 2042. It will last most of twenty-four hours, so that almost every point on Earth’s surface will be turned directly into the fire. We won’t even have the shelter of night. As we will be close to the spring equinox, even the poles won’t be spared. At this stage do you need the details of what will become of the atmosphere, the oceans? No. Suffice to say the Earth will be sterilized to a depth of tens of meters beneath the ground.
“But,” Mikhail went on, “we now have a much more precise handle on how the energy will be delivered. We are looking at flaws in the radiative and convective zones, where a great deal of energy is in normal times stored . . .” He tapped the hidden surface before him, and one tabletop chart was highlighted.
“Ah,” Siobhan said. “The intensity will peak in the visible spectrum.”
“As the spectrum of sunlight does normally,” Mikhail said. “In green light, as it happens. Which is where our eyes are most sensitive, and where chlorophyll works best—which is why, no doubt, chlorophyll was selected by evolution to serve as the photosynthetic chemical that fuels all aerobic plant life.”
“Then that’s what we face: a storm of green light from the sun,” Siobhan said firmly. “Let’s talk about options to deal with it.”
Toby grinned. “The fun part!”
Mikhail offered, “Shall I begin?” He tapped at his softscreen, and on the displays before Siobhan a number of schematics, tables, and images came up.
“As it happens,” Mikhail said, “even before our present crisis a number of thinkers have considered ways to reduce the solar insolation—the proportion of the sun’s energy flux that reaches the planet. Of course this was mostly in the context of blocking sunlight to mitigate global warming.” He brought up images of clouds of dust injected into the high atmosphere. “One proposal is to use space launchers to fire sub-micrometer dust up into the stratosphere. That way you would mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption; after a big bang like Krakatoa you often get a global temperature drop of a degree or two for a few years. Or you could inject sulfur particles up there, which would burn in the atmosphere’s oxygen to give you a layer of sulfuric acid. That might be rather lighter and so easier to deliver.”
Siobhan said, “But how much of the storm would this screen out?”
Mikhail and Toby displayed their figures. It turned out to be only a few percent.
“Enough to mitigate global warming, perhaps,” Mikhail said sadly. “But far from adequate for the problem we face now. We are going to have to take out almost all of the incoming radiation—letting even one percent through may be far too much.”
“Then we’ll have to think bigger,” Siobhan said firmly.
Toby said slyly, “Bigger it is. If you want to inject dust into the air, rather than trying to mimic a volcano—why not just set one off?”
Mikhail and Siobhan glanced at each other, startled. Then they went to work.
Coming up with such ideas was precisely why Siobhan had invited Toby to these sessions.
He had been unsure. “Siobhan, why me? I’m an events manager, for heaven’s sake! My contribution should have ended at making sure there were enough biscuits to go around.”
She had studied him with fond exasperation. He was a big, somewhat overweight, shambling man, with raggedly cut brown hair and a weak chin. He wasn’t even a scientist; he had majored in languages. He was a peculiarly English type who would always be valued by stuffy British institutions like the Royal Society, not only for his intelligence and obvious competence, but also for his comforting air of upper-middle-class safeness. But he had one typically English characteristic that she, born in Northern Ireland and so something of an outsider, didn’t value so highly, and that was an excess of self-deprecation.
“Toby, you’re not here for biscuits, appreciated though they are, but for your other career.”
He looked briefly baffled. “My books?”
“Precisely.” Toby had published a whole series of lyrically written popular histories of forgotten corners of science and technology. And that was what had prompted her to turn to him. “Toby, we’re faced by a megaproblem. But since Tsiolkovski people have been dreaming up a whole suite of more or less wacky mega-engineering possibilities. And that’s what I think we’re going to need to draw on now.”
There had been one group in London she was thinking of particularly, called the British Interplanetary Society. “I gave them a chapter in one of my books,” Toby had told her when she mentioned them. “The Society has been absorbed into a pan-European grouping now, and doesn’t seem to be half so much fun. But in its heyday it was a place to play for a lot of respectable scientists and engineers. They dreamed up lots of ways to bother the universe . . .” This sort of fringe thinking was what they needed to draw on now, she believed.
He grinned. “So I’m an ambassador from the lunatic fringe? Thanks very much.”
But Mikhail had said, “We must consider ways to protect the whole Earth. Nobody has faced such responsibility before. I think in the circumstances a little lunacy might be just what we need!”
With some hard work on their softscreens, and frequent calls to Aristotle, they hurriedly fleshed out Toby’s volcano option. Perhaps it could be done—but it would have to be a big volcanic bang, far bigger than any in recorded history and possibly bigger than anything in the geological record. As nobody had tried such a thing before, its effects would be quite unpredictable, and possibly a remedy even worse than the problem. Siobhan stored the discussion in a file in Aristotle’s capacious memory that she labeled “last resorts.”
They quickly rattled through some more research on so-called “intrinsic” methods of protection, things you could do within the Earth’s atmosphere, or maybe from low orbit. But they all provided inadequate screening. There was no reason why some of these methods shouldn’t be put in place. They would provide an extra few percent of cover—and would at least give the impression to the public that something was being done, a not inconsiderable political factor. But if they couldn’t dig up a way to knock out almost all of the sun’s ferocious glare, such projects would be nothing but sops, which wouldn’t make any difference to the final outcome.
“So we move on,” Siobhan said. “What next?”
Toby said, “If we can’t protect the Earth, perhaps we have to flee.”
Mikhail growled, “Where? The storm will be so intense that even Mars is not safe.”
“The outer planets, then. An ice moon of Jupiter—”
“Even at five times Earth’s distance, the reduction in intensity of the storm would not be sufficient to save us.”
“Saturn, then,” Toby pressed. “We could hide on Titan. Or a moon of Uranus, or Neptune. Or we could flee the solar system altogether.”
Siobhan said quietly, “The stars? Can we build a starship, Toby?”
“Make it a generation starship. That’s the most primitive sort: an ark, big enough to hold a few hundred people. It might take a thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri, say. But if the emigrants’ children, living and dying on the ship, could continue the mission—and then their children would do the same—eventually humans, or at least descendants of humans, would reach the stars.”
Mikhail nodded. “Another idea of Tsiolkovski’s.”
Toby said, “Actually, I think it was Bernal.”
Siobhan said, “How many people could we save that way?”
Mikhail shrugged. “A few hundred, maybe?”
“A few hundred is better than none,” Toby said grimly.
“A gene pool of that size is enough to start again.”
Mikhail said, “The Adam and Eve option?”
“It’s not good enough,” Siobhan said. “We are not about to give up on saving the billions who are to be put to the torch. We have to do better, guys.”
Mikhail sighed sadly. Toby averted his eyes.
As the silence lengthened, she realized that they had nothing more to offer. She felt despair settle inside her, suffocating—despair and guilt, as if this huge catastrophe, and their inability to think their way out of it, were somehow her fault.
There was a modest cough.
Surprised, she looked up into the empty air. “Aristotle?”
“I’m sorry to break in, Siobhan. I’ve been taking the liberty of running supplementary searches of my own based on your conversation. There is an option you may have missed.”
“There is?”
Mikhail, in his softscreen image, leaned forward. “Get to the point. What do you suggest?”
“A shield,” Aristotle said.
A shield? . . .
Data began to download to their displays.
18: Announcement
The President of the United States took her seat behind her desk in the Oval Office.
The place was calm, for once. Just a single camera faced her, a single microphone loomed over her, and a single technician watched her. The office was equipped with only simple props: a Stars and Stripes, and a Christmas tree to mark this month of December 2037. As the tech counted her down on his fingers in the time-honored way, the President touched the simple necklace at her throat, but she resisted the temptation to adjust the black hair, now threaded with silver, that her makeup artist had spent so long sculpting.
Juanita Alvarez was the first Hispanic woman to become President of what remained overwhelmingly the most powerful single nation on the planet. With her compassion, her blunt common sense, and her obvious gut instinct for the health of a democracy, the people who had voted for her, and many who hadn’t, had taken her to their hearts.
But today she was speaking to more than just the citizens of America. Today her message, simultaneously translated by Aristotle and Thales into all the spoken, written, and gestural languages of humanity, would be broadcast by TV, radio, and webcast to three planets. Later her words and their implications would be analyzed and parsed, praised and criticized, until the last bit of sense had been wrung out of them, as none of her words had ever been examined before—and almost immediately, of course, based as much on what she had not said as on the words themselves, a legion of conspiracy theories would spring up.
That was to be expected. It was hard to imagine that any President, even the great wartime leaders, had ever had a more important message for her people and the world. And if Alvarez fouled up, her words themselves, through creating panic, disorder, and economic instability, could cause more damage than some small wars.
But if she was nervous, it showed only in the slightly uncertain motions of her hands.
The tech’s fingers folded down. Three, two, one.
“My fellow Americans. My fellow citizens of planet Earth, and beyond. Thank you for listening to me today. I think many of you will anticipate what I have to say to you. It’s probably the sign of a healthy democracy that not even the Oval Office is leakproof.” A small smile, expertly delivered. “I have to tell you that we all face a grave danger. And yet if we work together, with courage and generosity, I assure you there is hope.”
Siobhan sat with her daughter Perdita in her mother’s small flat in Hammersmith.
Because of her increasing deafness Maria had her softwall’s sound turned up so high it was sometimes painful. The din didn’t seem to bother twenty-year-old Perdita, though. Even as the President was talking, she let a competing show from another channel run on the small softscreen implant on her wrist. It was nice to know, Siobhan thought wryly, that the world’s media outlets provided choice, even at a time like this.
Maria came bustling through from the kitchen with three glasses of a cream liqueur—small glasses, Siobhan noticed a bit sourly, and no sign of the bottle for replenishment.
“Well, this is nice,” Maria said, handing out the glasses. She smiled, and the small facial scars of her surgery puckered. “It must be a long time since all three of us got together, aside from an occasional Christmas. It’s a shame it took the end of the world to make it happen.”
Perdita laughed around a salted cracker. “There’s always an edge to you, Grandma! We do have lives of our own, you know.”
Siobhan glared at her daughter. Since Perdita herself had reached age twelve Siobhan had sympathized with her own mother’s occasional clinginess. “Let’s not argue,” Siobhan said. “And it isn’t the end of the world, Mother. You shouldn’t go around saying that. Especially not if people think it’s me that’s saying it. You could start a panic.”
Maria sniffed, as always unreasonably miffed at being told off.
Perdita said now, “Of course a lot of what Alvarez is going to say is guff. Isn’t it, Mum?”
“Guff?”
“Do you think anybody’s going to believe it? Saving the world is so 1990s disaster movie! I heard a guy on the TV the other day saying it’s all a form of denial, a displacement activity. And of course it’s such a fascistic dream!”
There could be something in that, Siobhan thought uneasily. It wouldn’t be the first time the sun had been co-opted as a source of authority.
As it happened, sun cults were quite rare in history. They tended to arise in organized, heavily centralized states—the Romans, the Egyptians, the Aztecs—the central power of the sun serving as a source of authority for the one ruler. Maybe in this situation the sudden malevolence of the sun might similarly be utilized by those who sought power on Earth. That sort of suspicion fueled conspiracy theories among those who, despite the memory of June 9, suspected the whole business of the storm on the sun was a scam, a power grab by some cabal of businessmen or hidden government, a coup arising out of a new center fueled by fear and ignorance.
“Nobody believes it,” Perdita said. “Nobody believes in heroes anymore, Mum—certainly not chisel-jawed astronauts and public-spirited politicians. Life just doesn’t work that way.”
“Well, maybe so,” Siobhan said, irritated. “But what can you do but try? And, Perdita—if we can’t save the planet after all—how will it make you feel?”
Perdita shrugged. “I’ll get on with things, until—” She mimed an explosion with her hands. “Blammo, I guess. What else can you do?”
Maria touched Siobhan’s shoulder. “Perdita’s young. When you’re twenty you think you’re immortal. All this is probably beyond her imagination.”
“And mine,” Siobhan said. She looked at Perdita, distracted. “At least until I had a kid. After that the future got personal . . . You know, I’m relieved it’s out in the open. I’ve felt guilty walking around London, mixing with people going about their lives, knowing I had a devastating secret locked up in my head like an unexploded bomb. It didn’t seem right. Who was I to keep back a truth like that? Even if we do cause some panic.”
“I think most people will behave pretty well,” Maria said. “People generally do, you know.”
They listened to the President’s words.
“What will happen in April 2042 is unprecedented,” President Alvarez said. “So far as our experts can tell, there has been no event like it in the recorded history of humankind, or indeed in the silent eons before us. In a single day the sun will inflict on the Earth as much energy as it would normally transmit to us in a year. The scientists call this the sunstorm, and the name strikes me as apt.
“The consequences for Earth, and indeed for the Moon and Mars, are grave. I will not spare you the full truth. We face the sterilization of the surface of Earth—the elimination of all life—and the blasting away of the air and the oceans. Earth will be left like the Moon. There are links attached to this message that will give you al
l the details we have; there are to be no secrets.
“We clearly face a mortal danger. And it is not just ourselves who are at risk. In these times of a widening ethical horizon, a development I have always supported, we will not forget the threat posed to the creatures who share this Earth with us, and without whom we could not survive ourselves—and indeed the newest kind of life to arrive on our world, the Legal Persons known as Aristotle and Thales through whom I am speaking to many of you now.
“This is a terrible message, then, and it grieves me to have to be the one to deliver it.” She leaned forward. “But, as I told you, there is hope.”
Mikhail and Eugene sat in the Clavius canteen, lukewarm cups of coffee on the table before them. The face of the President, relayed from Earth, was projected from a big wall-mounted softscreen. The canteen was all but deserted. Even though most people here at Clavius knew almost everything Alvarez had to say before she opened her mouth, it seemed that they preferred to absorb the bad news alone, or with those closest to them.
Mikhail wandered to the big picture window and looked out at the broken landscape of the crater floor. The sun was low, but the rim mountains that shouldered over the horizon glowed with light, as if their peaks were coated with burning magnesium.
Everything he saw in this landscape was a product of violence, he thought: violence from the tiny impacts of the micrometeorites that even now sandblasted the ground, scaling up all the way back up to the sculpting of great basins like Clavius, and the unimaginably savage collision that had split the Moon from the Earth in the first place. Over the brief lifetime of humanity, this little corner of the cosmos had been relatively peaceful, the solar system turning like orderly clockwork about the faithful light at its heart. But now the ancient violence was returning. Why should humans have ever imagined it had gone away in the first place?