Sunstorm

  But there was an intervention.

  The most dramatic single event in the formation of the Earth was the mighty collision that shattered the proto-Earth into twin worlds, Earth and Moon. For a few days the glow of the wrecked world was bright enough to be seen over hundreds of light-years.

  Those who watched had eyes sensitive to colors for which there are no words in human languages. But they watched nevertheless: they watched everything and everywhere, patiently, indefatigably. And they noticed Earth’s violent birth.

  They watched what followed too: the gathering of oceans from comet water, a brief age of chemical churning, the startlingly rapid rise of simple life-forms, the more sluggish progress toward complexity, and at last a glimmer of intelligence. It was a familiar story in its broad thrust, only the details differing from world to world.

  But those who watched did not regard this as “progress.”

  In an ancient conclave, at levels of discourse no human mind could have comprehended—and despite some dissension—the gravest of decisions was made.

  And a weapon was selected.

  A sterilizing agent.

  How do you move a planet? There are many ways, but the method used at Altair was well within humanity’s understanding.

  It was that rogue Jovian’s very perturbability that made it so useful. Since the 1970s human engineers had been using gravitational “slingshots” to boost their spacecraft on their way. A spacecraft such as Voyager, say, could be “bounced” off Jupiter’s gravity well—and, like a Ping-Pong ball rebounding off the windshield of an eighteen-wheeler truck, if you got the angles right the spacecraft would be hurled away with hugely increased momentum. The space engineers had become expert at this technique, finding ways to use ever more elaborate chains of slingshots to tap into the solar system’s store of energy and momentum and so to reduce the amount of rocket fuel they needed to loft into space.

  Because Jupiter was some ten trillion trillion times as massive as Voyager, such encounters had not disturbed the target planet significantly. But if a world comparable in mass to Jupiter had followed Voyager’s trajectory, both incoming and target worlds would have been flung away in new directions.

  And here was the principle: to use gravitational slingshots to move worlds.

  A single impulse would be difficult to arrange, and wasteful, for much energy would have been dissipated in tidal distortions. But you could use a stream of asteroids to shift the much mightier mass of a planet without such undesirable consequences.

  And smaller rocks yet could be used to deflect the asteroids in the first place. A hierarchy of encounters could be arranged, with the tiniest of initial deflections—like a pebble thrown into a pond—causing a sequence of ever more immense disturbances. It helped that the mechanics of many-body gravitational systems were intrinsically chaotic and so sensitive to small disturbances.

  It would take planning, of course, to make this multiple cannon shot pay off. But it was only a question of orbital mechanics. It was efficient too, with very little energy wasted. To those to whom economy was a guiding principle, it was a method whose elegance appealed.

  The pebble was thrown.

  It took a thousand years for the cascade of interactions to shift the Jovian from its elongated orbit: no more would it trouble the tormented inner worlds of Altair. It would take another thousand years for the Jovian to cross the gulf of space from one stellar sand grain to the next. But that was of no concern. This was a long game.

  When it was done, attention was turned away. Those who had intervened would watch the dénouement; they believed that was their bleak duty. But there was time enough to be ready for that.

  On Earth, humans built ziggurats in veneration of their sun, which they still imagined to be a god. And yet their fate was already sealed. Or so those who had intervened believed.

  27: The Tin Lid

  Siobhan arranged to meet Bisesa in the London Ark, the old zoo in Regent’s Park.

  She had to drive down from Liverpool to do it. She had been up there to visit the new Eurasian Prime Minister in his Bunker, as everybody called it, a huge new underground governmental center implanted, controversially, in the massive concrete crypt of the grand old city’s Roman Catholic cathedral.

  Traveling down the M1, Siobhan hit her first roadblock as she passed St. Albans, still thirty kilometers or more from central London. The journey back had already taken eight hours. A couple of years ago, in a fast smart car with no upper speed limit, it might have taken three. But since then London had become a fortress.

  On this hot day in September 2041 a series of cordons had been put in place around the capital. The outermost fence was a barrier of roadblocks, wire fencing, and tank traps that ran from Portsmouth on the south coast, up through Reading and Watford, and past Chelmsford to the east coast. The Navy controlled access from the sea and the river just as tightly, and there were constant RAF patrols in the air overhead. Even at this first checkpoint it took Siobhan an hour to queue to have her ident chip, retinas, and vehicle chip scanned: she might still have the ear of a Prime Minister, but nobody got a free pass in these increasingly paranoid times.

  It had to be so. With seven months left before the storm, the problem of refugees from the smaller towns and the countryside was already significant. London had been Britain’s center of gravity since 1066, when the Norman Conqueror had exerted his brutal control over the old Saxon kingdom from his new Tower. Everybody knew that it would be to London, in the final days, that half the population of southern England would flee, as if drawn into a great drain. Hence the layers of barriers.

  As she waited, Siobhan saw a plume of thick black smoke rising above the city of St. Albans. Aristotle told her that it was the mark of a vast bonfire, the centerpiece of a ferociously wild party on the site of the long-erased Roman city of Verulamium. As time went on, most people continued to behave reasonably well, to the authorities’ general relief. But there were some who called themselves, gloomily, the Lords of the Last Days—and they sported and partied as if they believed it.

  The St. Albans fire was being burned in defiance of all environmental protection laws, of course, but there were plenty who no longer cared about that, not if everything was going to be fried in seven months’ time anyhow. The same thing was happening on a wider scale, as oil wells and gas fields were being pumped dry, and noxious substances pumped carelessly into the air and the seas.

  Frozen sleepers were another symptom of the lunatic fringe.

  Up in Liverpool she had delivered a report on the impact of the new craze in the United States for “hibernacula,”—huge underground vaults inside which the rich were having themselves cryogenically stored. These refugees from reality were seeking to skip over the sunstorm and escape into a better future. The hibernacula were becoming ever more popular despite medical advice that the freezing process probably wouldn’t work successfully—and nobody could guarantee an uninterrupted power supply through the sunstorm anyhow, so that the big day might result in an unfortunate defrosting. Besides, even if the system worked technically, where was the morality in escaping the present and leaving others to clean up the mess, then “returning” when the worst was over to reap the rewards? The “cryonauts” would surely not be welcomed, even in the most optimistic scenarios. And Siobhan had projected gloomily that if things went pear-shaped—if civilization fell apart despite the shield’s protection—the hibernacula would most likely serve the starving survivors as cellars of thawing meat . . .

  Such craziness captured media attention, but was fortunately still rare. And while these last days saw much foolishness and venality, there was some dignity too. More people were trying to save what they cherished than to smash things up in a final frenzy; projects such as the London Dome were flooded with volunteer workers. Many people were turning, predictably, to religion for solace, but few became fanatics of the kind who had killed Miriam Grec. Most prayed to their gods with quiet gravity, in the austere beauty of c
athedrals, mosques, and temples, or simply in the privacy of their own hearts.

  Meanwhile the romantic poignancy of the end was evoking a flourishing of the arts, with literature, paintings, sculpture, and music of heartbreaking intensity being produced all over the world. It was a time for elegies.

  But many people, it seemed, faced the grimness of the future with a more private sadness. Populations worldwide were actually declining. There was a spate of suicides, but rather sadder was the news that birthrates were plummeting. This was not the time to bring a child into the world: indeed some religious leaders were arguing it might actually be sinful to procreate now, for a child who did not exist could not suffer.

  But those falling population numbers would make barely a dent before sunstorm day. Everything depended on the shield, as it always had.

  In September 2041, with only seven months left, the shield was as hair-raisingly behind schedule as ever, and yet it still progressed. Siobhan’s political masters in the Eurasian administration wanted endless facts, figures, Gantt charts to show progress achieved, critical-path diagrams to show bottlenecks and obstacles up ahead—and a few sexy photos of the staggering, Earth-sized structure growing in orbit.

  But nothing she said made any real difference, for there was nothing the pols could do differently, not now. Miriam Grec had got it right from the beginning. Her early intervention had given the project the worldwide political momentum it needed to begin. After Miriam herself had reaped the whirlwind, her successor, her deputy hastily installed into the top job, had been soundly beaten in the October 2040 poll by opponents who had run on a vaguely antishield ticket. But, just as Miriam had foreseen, once in office it was politically impossible for any Prime Minister to be the one who scrapped the shield. The logic had worked out just the same in the United States as in Eurasia.

  The new Prime Minister had not taken a shine to Siobhan, though. Siobhan was clearly still a key link in the communications and decision-making chain that led from the ground to orbit. But she was no longer among the favored inner few. That suited Siobhan fine. This was a time for getting on with the job, not for political arse kissing. And besides, the less she saw of the pols, the less chance there was of putting her foot in it.

  Beyond St. Albans, she worked her way through more roadblocks. At last, after some tricky inner-city driving, Siobhan reached the final barrier. This was the Camden Gate, one of ten great entrances set around the circumference of the Dome itself.

  As she queued she peered ahead curiously; she hadn’t come into the Dome from this direction before. The Gate, bright orange and peppered with searchlights and armed observation posts, rose like a Roman ruin above the mundanity of houses and shopping parades. And the smooth skin of the London Dome itself arced away into the washed-out blue of the sky beyond.

  The Dome was still incomplete, of course; the final enclosing panels would not be installed until the very last hours, so that the city would not have to survive without light for too long. But still, even now, its immense skeletal form was startling. Siobhan couldn’t actually make out much of it, for she was too close to the horizon of this huge spherical cap. It was an odd shame that this greatest of all of Britain’s architectural achievements should be all but invisible from the ground: as the Aurora 1 crew had remarked ruefully of many Martian features, from close up it was simply too big to take in.

  But if you viewed it from the air, you could see what a magnificent structure the Dome was. Based on a near-perfect circle about nine kilometers in diameter, the Dome was centered on Trafalgar Square, but it covered the Tower of London at the eastern end of the old Roman city wall, and in the west it enveloped the West End, slicing through Hyde Park and just extending to include the Albert Memorial and the great South Kensington museums. In the north the Dome would shelter King’s Cross and Regent’s Park, where Siobhan was headed now, and to the south it reached across the river to the Elephant and Castle and beyond. Siobhan thought it was rather appropriate that the Dome would protect a stretch of the Thames itself, the river that had always been the city’s lifeblood.

  Every Londoner, with characteristically cheerful disrespect, called this great architectural triumph “the Tin Lid.”

  At last Siobhan was allowed to pass through the Gate. Signs admonished her to turn on her headlights.

  The view in the sudden twilight beneath the Dome’s roof was astounding. Supporting pillars rose up from the ground, like slim rainforest-canopy trees incongruously rising out of London’s mulch of town houses and flats, offices and cathedrals, ministries and palaces. Above, the sky was darkened by scaffolding and struts, made misty by distance. Helicopters and blimps flew just beneath the roof’s low curve. All this was lit by shafts of watery sunlight that passed through the breaks in the roof. The prospect had something of the feel of an immense antique ruin, perhaps, a place of pillars and graceful curves, the remnant of a vanished empire. But everywhere cranes rose up like skeletal dinosaurs, building, building. This was a glimpse, not of the past, but of the future.

  The projections of how well the shield would work, even in the most optimistic scenarios, were still uncertain, and it wasn’t at all clear how much good even such mighty defenses as this Dome would do. But projects like this were as much an expression of popular will as of serious civic defense. Siobhan rather hoped that if the world survived the sunstorm the Tin Lid, or at least its skeleton, would be left intact, as a memorial to what people could do when they worked together.

  She drove on into the artificial twilight, ignoring the built-over sky and concentrating on the traffic.

  28: The Ark

  The London Ark was all but empty today. Goats climbed their concrete mountains, penguins flapped in blue-painted shallows, and multicolored birds sang for no audience but their keepers, and Siobhan. It wasn’t a time for zoos.

  But Bisesa was here. Siobhan found her at the Ark’s primate house, alone, cradling a coffee. In a broad, covered pit, a handful of chimpanzees were going about their rather languid business. The old-fashioned scene contrasted sharply with the new animated information plate that proudly pronounced these creatures as Homo troglodytes troglodytes, humankind’s nearest cousins.

  “Thanks for coming,” Bisesa said. “And I’m sorry for dragging you here.” She looked tired, pale.

  “Not at all. I haven’t been to this zoo—umm, the Ark—since I was a kid.”

  “It’s just I wanted to come here, one last time. It’s the last day these guys will be on show.”

  “I didn’t realize their move was so soon.”

  Bisesa said, “Now that they are recognized as Legal Persons, the chimps have full human rights—in particular the right to privacy when they pick their noses and scratch their backsides. So they’re to be moved to their own little refugee center, fully equipped with tire swings and bananas.”

  Bisesa’s voice was weary, rather flat, and Siobhan couldn’t decode her mood. “You don’t approve?”

  “Oh, of course I do. Though there are plenty who don’t.” Bisesa nodded at a soldier, heavily armed and very young looking, who patrolled on the other side of the pit.

  The debate about sheltering nonhuman life-forms from the sunstorm extended beyond the chimps, where the law was reasonably clear. As the sunstorm neared, a vast worldwide effort had been initiated to save at least a sample of the world’s major kingdoms of life. Much of it was necessarily crude: beneath the London Ark huge hibernacula had been installed to preserve the zygotes of animals, insects, birds, and fish, and the seeds of plants from grasses to pine trees. As for the animals, the Arks had been doing this sort of thing for decades already; since the turn of the century the western zoos had hosted reserve populations of animals that had long died out in the wild—all the elephants, the tigers, even one species of chimp.

  Of course it was essentially futile, said some ecologists. Though the diversity of life in cool, cloudy Britain, say, was nothing like as rich as in an equatorial rain forest, there were probably mo
re species to be found in a single handful of soil from a London garden, most of them unidentified, than had been known to all the naturalists in the world a century ago. You couldn’t save it all—but the alternative was to do nothing, and most people seemed to agree you had to try.

  But some resented as much as a finger being lifted to save anything other than a human being.

  “It’s a time of hard choices.” Siobhan sighed. “You know, the other day I spoke to an ecologist who said we should just accept what’s going on. This is just another extinction event, in a long string of such disasters. It’s like a forest fire, she said, a necessary cleansing. And each time the biosphere bounces back, eventually becoming richer than before.”

  “But this isn’t natural,” Bisesa said grimly. “Not even the way an asteroid impact is. Somebody did this, intentionally. Maybe this is why intelligence evolved in the first place. Because there are times—when the sun goes off, when the dinosaur killer strikes—when the mechanisms of natural selection aren’t enough. Times when you need consciousness to save the world.”

  “A biologist would say there is no intention behind natural selection, Bisesa. And evolution can’t prepare you for the future.”

  “Yes,” she smiled. “But I’m no biologist, so I can say it . . .”

  Such conversations were why Siobhan valued Bisesa’s company so much.

  Seven months before sunstorm day, the world worked frantically to prepare itself. But much of what was being done, however vital, was mundane. For instance, London’s latest Mayor had got herself elected on the basic but undeniably effective pledge that come what may she would ensure the city’s water supply, and since coming to office she had made good on that promise. A vast new pipeline laid the length of the country from the great Kielder reservoir in the north to the capital—though many in the northeast had grumbled loudly about the “southern softies” who were stealing “their” water. Such work was obviously essential—Siobhan herself was involved in many such projects—but it was banal.