Sunstorm

  She held up her hands. “I really don’t want to know.” She glanced at the wall softscreens, which now showed a broadening glow, escalating through pink to white. It was like being inside a vast lightbulb, she thought. Must her life really end amid such beauty?

  She searched for anger, but found only emptiness, a kind of pity. After years of strain she was fundamentally exhausted, she thought, too tired to be angry, even about this. And maybe she had thought that something like this was inevitable, in the end. But she did want to understand.

  “What’s the point, Nicolaus? You know the polls better than I do. In six months I would be out of the way anyhow. And this really won’t make any difference to the project. If anything it’s likely to strengthen everybody’s resolve to get it done.”

  “Are you sure?” His grin was tight. “This is quite a stunt, you know. You are Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy. And nobody has taken down a spaceplane before. If confidence in flying into space is dented, even just a bit—if people on the shield start looking over their shoulders when they ought to be getting on with their work—I’ll have achieved what I set out to do.”

  “But you won’t live to see it, will you?” And neither will I . . . “You’re just another in a long line of suicide bombers, as careless of the lives of others as you are of your own.”

  He said coldly, “You don’t know me well enough to insult me. Even though I’ve worked at your side for ten years.”

  Of course that was true, she thought with a stab of guilt. She remembered her resolution on the way out to try to get Nicolaus to open up a little—but on the shield she had been too entranced by her surroundings even to notice him. Would it have made any difference even if she had? Perhaps it was just as well, she thought morbidly, that she would not live long enough to be plagued by such questions.

  “Tell me why, Nicolaus. I think you owe me that.”

  His voice tight with tension, he said, “I sacrifice my life for El, the One True God.”

  And that was enough to tell her everything.

  Siobhan glanced at the faces on Bisesa’s softwall. “Everybody online? Can you see us?”

  With the usual disconcerting lightspeed delays, the others responded.

  “No introductions needed, no ceremony. Who wants to start—Eugene?”

  When her words reached the Moon, Eugene visibly jumped, as if his attention had been fixed on something else. “Okay,” he said. “First some background. You’re aware of my work on the sun, of course.” The middle of the softwall filled up with an image of the sun, which then turned transparent to reveal onion-skin layers within. The heart of the sun, the fusing core—a star within a star—glowed a sullen red. It was laced by a crisscross pattern of dark and bright stripes, dynamic, elusive, ever shifting. There was a date stamp in the corner, showing today’s date, in March 2040. Eugene said, “These oscillations will lead in the near future to a catastrophic outpouring of energy into the external environment.”

  Casually he ran the model forward in time, until the image suddenly flared.

  Siobhan felt Toby flinch. He murmured, “He really doesn’t see the impact he has on the rest of us, does he? Sometimes that boy scares me more than the sun itself.”

  “But he’s useful,” Siobhan whispered back.

  Eugene said, “So the future projection is stable, reliable. But I have had more difficulty with projections into the past. Nothing in the standard models of stellar interior behavior served as a guide. I began to suspect a single impulsive event lay behind this anomalous condition—an anomaly behind the anomaly. But I had trouble converging on a model. My discussions with Lieutenant Dutt, after Professor McGorran put us in touch, gave me a new paradigm to work with.”

  Siobhan murmured to Toby, “Told you so.”

  Mikhail interceded, “I think you’d better just show us, son.”

  Eugene nodded curtly and tapped at an out-of-shot softscreen.

  The date stamp began to count down, and the reconstructed events ran backward. As wave modes fluttered across the surface of the core, detail appeared in sidebars: frequencies, phases, amplitudes, lists of the energy shares of the principal vibration modes. As interference, nonlinearity, and other effects worked on the three-dimensional waves, the core’s output peaked and dipped.

  Mikhail commented, “Eugene’s model is remarkably good. We have been able to map many of these resonant-peak anomalies onto some of the notable solar weather incidents in our history: the Little Ice Age, the 1859 storm . . .”

  Siobhan had studied wave propagation as applied to the early universe, and she could see the quality of the work here. She said to Toby, “If he gets this anywhere near right, it will be one of the keenest bits of analysis I’ve ever seen.”

  “Finest mind since Einstein,” Toby said dryly.

  Now things changed on the screen. The oscillations grew wilder. And it seemed to Siobhan that a concentration of energy was gathering in one place.

  Unexpectedly a brilliant knot of light rose out of the core, like a gruesome dawn inside the body of the sun itself. And as soon as the knot had left the core, those central oscillations all but ceased.

  Eugene paused his projection, leaving the point of light poised on the edge of the core but beneath the blanketing layers of sun above. “At this point my modeling of the core anomaly is smoothly patched to a new routine to project the behavior of the inert radiative zone that lies around the core, and—”

  Siobhan leaned forward. “Hold it, Eugene. What is that thing?”

  Eugene blinked. “A concentration of mass,” he said, as if it were obvious. He displayed graphs of density. “At this point the mass contained within three standard deviations of the center of gravity is ten to power twenty-eight kilograms.”

  She did some quick mental arithmetic. “That’s about five Jupiters.”

  Eugene glanced at her, as if surprised she would need a translation into such baby talk. “About that, yes.” He resumed his animation.

  That glowing fist of matter rose out of the sun’s heart, up through its layers. As it rose Siobhan saw disturbances like ripples flowing into the mass knot, a glowing tail almost like a comet’s, preceding it on its way to the surface. But she was watching this projection in reverse, she reminded herself. In reality this lump of matter had slammed its way down into the sun, leaving a turbulent wake behind, dumping energy and mass into the sun’s tortured bulk through those mighty waves.

  She said, “So that’s how the radiative zone was cut through.”

  “Precisely,” Mikhail said. “Eugene’s model is elegant: a single cause to explain many effects.”

  The knot of mass, backing out of the sun, now reached the surface and popped out through the photosphere. Again Eugene froze his animation. Siobhan saw that the emergence was close to the sun’s equator.

  The date stamp, she noted, showed 4 B.C.

  Eugene said, “Here is the moment of impact. The mass at this point was some ten to power—” He glanced at Siobhan. “About fifteen Jupiters. As it descended into the sun’s interior, the outer layers of the object were of course ablated away, but five Jupiters made it to the core.”

  Toby Pitt said, “Fifteen Jupiters. It was a planet—a Jovian, a big one. And, two thousand years ago—it fell into the sun. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not quite,” Eugene said. He tapped at his softscreen again, and the view abruptly changed. Now the sun was a bright pinpoint at the center of a darkened screen, and the planets’ orbits were traced out as shining circles. “From this point I made another patch, to a simple Newtonian gravity trajectory solution. Corrections for relativity aren’t significant until the impactor passed the orbit of Mercury, and even then they are small . . .”

  Knowing where and how fast his mighty Jovian had splashed into the sun, Eugene had projected back, using Newton’s gravity law, to figure out the path it must have followed to get there. A glowing line, starting in the sun and crossing all the planets’
orbits, swept out of the solar system and off the screen. It curved subtly but was remarkably straight, Siobhan saw.

  Toby said, “I don’t understand. Why do you say it didn’t fall into the sun?”

  Siobhan said immediately, “Because that trajectory is hyperbolic. Toby, the Jovian was moving faster than solar escape velocity.”

  Mikhail said somberly, “It didn’t fall into the sun. It was fired in.”

  Toby’s mouth opened, and closed.

  Bisesa didn’t seem surprised at all.

  The One-Godders had emerged as a kind of reaction to the benevolent Oikumen movement. Fundamentalists of three of the world’s great faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had appealed to their own shared roots. They united under the banner of the Old Testament God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: Yahweh, who was thought to have derived from a still older deity called El, a god of the Canaanites.

  And El was a meddling god, a brutish, partial, and murderous tribal god. In the late 2020s His first act, through His modern adherents, had been the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, when fanatics, in a self-destructive spasm, had used a nuclear grenade to take out a site of unique significance to at least two of their three intertwined creeds. Miriam remembered that Bud Tooke had been involved in the cleanup.

  “Nicolaus, why would you want to impede the work on the shield? You’ve been at my side throughout. Can’t you see how important it is?”

  “If God wishes us to be put to the fire of the sunstorm, so be it. And if He chooses to save us, so be it. For us to question His authority over us with this monstrous gesture—”

  “Oh, can it,” she said irritably. “I’ve heard it all before. A Tower of Babel in space, eh? And you’re the one to bring it down. How disappointing, how banal!”

  “Miriam, your mockery can’t hurt me anymore. I have found faith,” he said.

  And there was the real problem, she realized.

  In his conversion Nicolaus wasn’t alone. All the major faiths, sects, and cults worldwide had recorded a marked rise in conversions since June 9. You might expect a flight to God in the face of impending catastrophe—but there was a theory, still controversial and revealed to her only in confidential briefings, that increased solar activity was correlated with religious impulses in humans. The great electromagnetic energies that had washed over the planet since June 9 were, it seemed, able to work subtle changes in the complicated bioelectrical fields of a human brain, just as in power cables and computer chips.

  If that was true—if the agitation of the sun had somehow led, by a long and complicated causal chain, to a lethal ideological determination in the mind of Miriam’s closest colleague to kill her—well, what an irony it would be. She said blackly, “If God exists, He must be laughing right now.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Never mind.” A thought struck her. “Nicolaus—where will we come down?”

  He smiled coldly. “Rome,” he said.

  Siobhan asked, “Can we say where this rogue planet came from?”

  Not from the solar system, of course; it had been moving too fast to have been captured by the sun. Eugene displayed more of his “patched solutions,” projecting the path of his Jovian back to the distant stars. He rattled off celestial coordinates, but Siobhan stopped him and turned to Mikhail. “Can you put that into English?”

  “Aquila,” Mikhail said. “It came to us out of the constellation of the eagle.” This was a constellation close to the sky’s equator; from Earth the plane of the Galaxy appeared to run through it. Mikhail said, “In fact, Professor McGorran, we know that this object must have came from the star Altair.” Altair was the brightest star in Aquila. It was some sixteen light-years from Earth.

  Eugene cautioned, “Mikhail, I’m not sure we should talk about this. The projection gets fuzzy if you push it back that far. The error bars—”

  Mikhail said grimly, “My boy, this is not a time for timidity. Professor, it appears that Eugene’s rogue Jovian originated in orbit around Altair. It was flung out after a series of close encounters with other planets in the system, which are visible with our planet-finder telescopes. The details are understandably sketchy, but we hope to pin them down further.”

  “And,” Siobhan said, “it was hurled our way.”

  Toby pulled his nose. “It seems fantastic.”

  Mikhail said quickly, “The reconstruction is very reliable. It has been verified from multiple data sources using a variety of independent methods. I have checked over Eugene’s calculations myself. This is all quite authoritative.”

  Bisesa listened to all this quietly, without reacting.

  “Okay,” Toby said. “So a rogue planet fell into the sun. It’s an astonishing thing to happen, but not unprecedented. Remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy colliding with Jupiter in the 1990s? And—with respect—what does it have to do with Lieutenant Dutt and her theories about extraterrestrial intervention?”

  Eugene snapped, “Are you such a fool that you can’t see it?”

  Toby bit back, “Now look here—”

  Siobhan grabbed his arm. “Just take us through it, Eugene. Step by step.”

  Eugene visibly fought for patience. “Have you really no idea how unlikely this scenario is? Yes, there are rogue planets, formed independently of stars, or flung out of stellar systems. Yes, it may happen that such a planet could cross from one system to another. But it’s highly unlikely. The Galaxy is empty. To scale, the stars are like grains of sand, separated by kilometers. I estimate the chance of a planet like this coming anywhere near our solar system as being one in a hundred thousand.

  “And this Jovian didn’t just approach us—it didn’t just fall near the sun—it fell directly into the sun, on a trajectory that would take it directly toward the sun’s center of mass.” He laughed, disbelieving at their incomprehension. “The odds against such a thing are absurd. No naturalistic explanation is plausible.”

  Mikhail nodded. “Circumstantial, perhaps, but still . . . I’ve always thought Sherlock Holmes put it well. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

  “Somebody did this,” Toby said slowly. “That’s what you’re saying. Somebody deliberately fired a planet, a big fat Jovian, straight at our sun. We’ve been hit by a bullet from God.”

  Bisesa said briskly, “Oh, I don’t think it has anything to do with God.” She stood up. “More coffee?”

  “Nicolaus—your target is the Vatican?” But the destruction would be much more extensive than that. A spaceplane returning from orbit packed a lot of kinetic energy: the Eternal City would be hit by an explosion with the force of a small nuclear weapon. She had not felt like crying before, but now tears pricked her eyes: not for herself, but for the destruction that would come. “Oh, Nicolaus. What a waste. What a terrible—”

  And then the bomb went off. It felt like a punch in the back.

  She was still conscious, for a while. She could even breathe. The cabin had survived, and its systems were doing its best to protect her. But she could feel herself tumbling, and monstrous G-forces pushed her deep into her seat. She could hear nothing; the blast had left her deafened—not that it mattered anymore.

  She was falling through the sky, she supposed, trapped in a piece of wreckage thrown out of a fireball high above Rome.

  Still she felt no anger, no fear. Only sadness that she would not see the greatest job of her life through to the end. Sadness that she had had no chance to say goodbye to those she loved.

  But she had been tired, she thought. So very tired. It was up to the others now.

  In the last second she felt a hand creep into hers. Nicolaus’s, a last, raw human contact. She gripped it hard. Then, as the spinning worsened, she blacked out, and knew no more.

  PART 4

  PERTURBATION

  26: Altair

  The star called Altair is so far away that its light takes more than sixteen years to travel to Earth. And yet Altair
is a neighbor, comparatively; only a few dozen stars lie closer to the sun.

  Altair is a stable star, but more massive than the sun. Its surface, twice the temperature of Sol’s, glows white with none of the sun’s hint of yellowness, and it breathes out ten times as much energy into the faces of its scattered flock of planets.

  Of those planets six are immense Jovians, all but one more massive than Jupiter. They all formed close to the parent star on looping orbits, wheeling like a flock of monstrous birds. But with time the Jovians, plucking at each other with their mighty gravitational fields, gradually migrated outward. Most of them settled into a neat clockwork array of circular orbits. Complex physical and chemical processes churned in the planets’ hot, deep interiors—and, in the tranquillity of eons, on some of those worlds life was spawned.

  One planet was different, though.

  This swollen monster, fifteen times more massive than Jupiter, was peculiarly unlucky in its interactions with its brethren. It was flung far out of the parent system, on a looping elliptical orbit whose farthest reach took it into the chill realm of comets. This huge orbit took millions of years to complete—and so every few megayears Altair’s huddled family of inner planets was disturbed by the rogue giant’s plummeting visits from the depths of space. Worlds that might have been Earths rolled and quivered, plucked by the rogue’s gravity. Not only that, but the rogue’s passage through Altair’s broad belts of comets and asteroids sent a heavy rain pouring into the inner system. On Altair’s worlds, dinosaur-killer impacts were the norm, falling a hundred times more frequently than on Earth.

  In time this process of destruction would have run its course. In the very long run the rogue Jovian would have destroyed the smaller worlds. Or it might have smashed into another Jovian: a catastrophe for both planets. Or, most likely, this moody wanderer would have become detached from the Altair system altogether, perhaps by the passage of another star, and it would have drifted away into sunless space alone.