Sunstorm

  She felt cold. He’d never told her he had a son.

  And she thought it through further. “You’re in on this, too. You’re doing your share of skimming, aren’t you?”

  He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Look,” he said at last. “There’s a firm in Montana. They bought up old nuclear weapon silos from the USASF, long ago decommissioned. Those things were designed to survive a nuclear strike, and to support their crews for weeks afterward. I’ve seen the specs. It’s possible that if you were stuck down there, you might survive the sunstorm.”

  “Even if the shield failed?”

  “It’s a chance,” he said defiantly. “But you can imagine the cost of a ticket. Can’t you see? Up here I can’t do a thing for Todd and his kids; I can’t so much as dig a hole in the ground. But this way, just by diverting a tiny fraction of one percent of one percent of the shield budget—”

  “And everybody else up here is doing it too?”

  “Not everybody.” He was watching her. “So now you know. When we go back to Aurora I’ll give you all the records you want, of every last damn cent that went astray . . . I know you could have me recalled to Earth over this.”

  “That would be suicidal when we’re just months from the goal.”

  His relief was obvious.

  “But the graft can’t go on,” she said. “The idea that you are using shield funds to preserve your own families is corrosive of trust—and trust is fragile enough right now.” She thought it over. “We have to bring this out in the open. But your people up here are away from their families in a time of unprecedented crisis, and most of you will stay here right through the storm itself. You ought to be reassured that everything possible will be done to protect your families on your behalf. I’ll see to it. Call it an advance on your salaries. And I’ll try to persuade them not to prosecute until after you’ve finished saving the Earth.”

  He grinned. “I’ll settle for that.” He pushed forward on the stick to take them home.

  She said carefully, “Bud, you never told me you had a son.”

  “Long story. A messy divorce, long ago.” He shrugged. “He isn’t part of my life, and never would have been part of yours.”

  In that moment Siobhan knew she had lost him—if she’d ever had him at all. But her affair with Bud wouldn’t be the only relationship to have cracked under the strain of these strange times.

  She turned to watch the vast landscape of the shield as it prepared to swallow her up.

  32: Legal Person

  Back on the shield, with relief, Siobhan made ready for the formal purpose of her visit.

  The shield might have been big enough to wrap up the Moon like a Christmas present, but the people who had built it had given themselves precious little space, and there was no room for ceremonial. For this special moment, the quickening of the shield’s AI, Bud had decided that only the bridge of the grand old Aurora would do. It was a shame that it had long since been converted to a shower room, but a hasty reconversion took only a few hours, leaving just a faint lingering smell of soap and sweat.

  Siobhan drifted at the front of the room, clinging with one hand to a strut. Bud was here, with a handful of his co-workers. Other shield workers were linked to this place electronically, as were friends on the Moon and on the Earth, including representatives of the governments of Eurasia and the United States.

  “And,” Siobhan said as she began her speech, “the most important person today is here too—not in this room, but all around us, like God—”

  “And the tax man,” somebody called to rather tense laughter.

  “I’m honored to be present at this birth,” Siobhan said. “Yes, it is a birth in a real sense. When I close the switch before me a computer will be booted up—but more than that, a new person will arrive in the universe. Unlike Aristotle and Thales before her, who had to demonstrate their personhood to us, from the very moment of her awakening she will be a Legal Person (Nonhuman), with rights every bit as full and rich as those I enjoy.

  “It’s marvelous to think that the mind who will begin her existence today will emerge from a network of the billions of components created in the gardens and farms, rooftops and window boxes of human beings across the planet. She owes her existence to all of us, in a sense—but it is a debt she must pay back. She will begin work immediately, on the great task of turning the shield to face the sun. From the moment of her awakening she will bear a grave responsibility.”

  She glanced at Bud. “As for her name, it’s Colonel Tooke’s idea. As a child I grew up knowing the old Greek myth of Perseus, son of Zeus. Perseus faced the Medusa, whose gaze would have turned him to stone. So he held up a shield of solid bronze. He could see Medusa by her reflection, and he slew her. Bud informs me that, according to some versions of the myth, the shield actually belonged to Perseus’s sister, a goddess in her own right. And so the name Bud has suggested, the name of that warrior-goddess, seems entirely appropriate to me.”

  She held her hand over the touch pad before her. “Welcome to the world—and to a vital place in our future.” She pressed down her palm.

  Nothing obvious changed. The people crammed in the room glanced at each other. But it seemed to Siobhan that there was something different in the air: an expectancy, an energy.

  Then somebody called, “Look! The shield!”

  Bud hastily brought up a softscreen image of the shield’s whole disk, taken from a monitoring platform high above the central axis. The sun’s long shadows streaked across its plane—but now ripples of rocket sparks spiraled out across the face of the disk.

  Bud said, “Look at that. She’s already started work.” He glanced up. “Can you hear me?”

  The voice came out of the air. A little unsteady in tone, smooth and free of accent, it was like a female version of Aristotle.

  “Good morning, Colonel Tooke. This is Athena. I am ready for my first lesson.”

  33: Core

  The damaged sun grew quiet. To a casual observer, it might have looked as if nothing had happened, as if the rogue Jovian had never come this way.

  But that, of course, was the design. The complex waves washing through the sun’s core would take centuries before they reached their resonant peak. All of it followed logically from the moment that metaphorical pebble had been thrown just so, in a solar system sixteen light-years away.

  As the anticipated sequence of events played itself out, on Earth, empires rose and fell.

  When one young civilization rediscovered the thinking of a long-vanished ancestor, a profound revolution began. For the first time since antiquity European minds turned to the sun, not with awe, but with curiosity and analytical skills. In 1670 Isaac Newton split sunlight with a prism, creating a captive rainbow. A little later John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, used Newton’s laws to map the movements of the planets, and determined the size and distance of the sun. In 1837 William Herschel let sunlight warm a bowl of water, and so measured the star’s power. By the twentieth century astronomers were using neutrinos to study the workings of its deepest interior.

  These were a new sort of people, to whom the sun became an everyday object, a specimen to study. And yet they were just as dependent on the sun’s bounty of heat and light as their sky-worshiping ancestors.

  And all the while, deep in the heart of the sun, something was stirring.

  It began in the core, as do all the sun’s processes.

  Since the great blow struck by the rogue Jovian two millennia before, the core had been ringing like a bell. Now its complex and cross-leaking modes of vibration at last combined in a concentration almost as energetic as the planet’s impact in the first place. It detonated beneath the stultifying layer of the radiative zone. But—of course, as had been planned—it happened right beneath the unhealed wound cut through the radiative zone by the Jovian’s passage.

  Energy cascaded up through the radiative zone, releasing some of the pent-up energy in that million-year storage tank into the bar
gain. And, two-thirds of the way to the surface of the sun, these energies reached the tacholine: the frontier between radiative and convective zones, above which point the substance of the sun boils like water in a pan. The tacholine was the place where the sun’s active regions had their deepest magnetic roots. And it was into the tacholine, this troubled border, that the core’s oscillations vented their anger.

  Sun-girdling flux tubes writhed like snakes, and immediately began to rise. Normally it would take months for a flux loop to reach the sun’s surface. But these mighty toroids, shouldering aside the cooler plasma above, took only days. And such was the disturbance in the sun’s deeper layers that energy poured after the loops, like air escaping from a balloon.

  Even in quiet times, loops of magnetic flux breach the sun’s surface. They form a carpet above the photosphere, a weaving of loops and patches and fibrils of plasma. The smallest of such loops is immense on the scale of Earth. The loops that arose now were monstrous, rising high above the sun’s surface, dragging plasma streams behind them. This huge magnetic disruption interfered with the flow of energy from the sun, and for a time the area at the base of this forest of magnetism, starved of energy, actually grew darker than the rest of the star. Human eyes and instruments saw an immense sunspot region blossom across the sun’s shining face.

  The loops that protruded above the surface were like trees packed together, with roots buried deep beneath the photosphere. The loops braided, twisted, jostled, and sheared as they tried to shed energy and find a new equilibrium. At last, at the heart of this writhing forest, two loops crossed like wizards’ wands. The loops merged and snapped. The release of energy into the surrounding forest was catastrophic, driving currents of plasma to a frenzy, and in turn driving the other loops to further thrashing. Soon there were more reconnections all across the continent of disturbance.

  The magnetic forest delivered up its energy in a cascade of events, and a great pulse of hard X-rays, gamma rays, and high-energy protons gushed out into space.

  This was a titanic event—but it was just a solar flare, though an immense one, a flare created by the processes by which a restless sun had always shed its energy. What followed was unprecedented.

  The immense sunspots beneath the magnetic forest began to break up. Through the deep wound burrowed into the sun’s flesh two thousand years before, a harder light began to shine. Soon the sun would shed, in a few hours, energy that could have kept it shining for a year.

  Just as had been planned, far away and long ago. It was April 19, 2042.

  34: Sunset (I)

  Bisesa woke.

  She sat up, rubbing at her shoulder. She had been napping on the sofa in the living room of her flat. While she had been asleep the flat had grown dark.

  “Aristotle. Time, please.”

  To her surprise he didn’t give her a clock time in response. Instead he said: “Sunset, Bisesa.”

  This was April 19, the day before the sunstorm itself. And so this was the last sunset.

  On the Moon, Eugene was predicting that the storm would break during the night, at about three A.M. British time. So the far side of the planet would suffer the storm’s initial effects. But the world would turn as it always did, and over Britain the sun would rise.

  Things would be different in the morning.

  She shivered. “Even now it doesn’t seem real,” she said.

  “I understand,” Aristotle said.

  Bisesa made her way to the bathroom and splashed water on her face and neck. The flat was empty. Myra was evidently out somewhere, and Bisesa’s cousin Linda had moved back to Manchester to be with her immediate family during the storm.

  She thought over Aristotle’s simple phrase: “I understand.” Aristotle was a being whose electronic senses were distributed over the whole planet and beyond, and everybody knew that his cognitive powers far exceeded any human’s. Surely his level of understanding of what was to come far outstripped hers—and in a sense Aristotle was in as much personal danger as she was. But she couldn’t think of a thing to say to him about it.

  “So where’s Myra?”

  “Up on the roof. Would you like me to call her down?”

  She glanced out uneasily at the gathering dark. “No. I’ll go get her. Thanks, Aristotle.”

  “My pleasure, Bisesa.”

  She took the staircase to the roof. The Mayor’s office had made fulsome promises that disruption to power supplies would be kept to the minimum possible, but Bisesa already distrusted lifts and escalators. And besides, according to the emergency authority’s latest decree, all such gadgets were to be shut down at midnight anyhow, and all electronic locks fixed on open, to avoid people being trapped when the hammer blow fell.

  She reached the roof. The Dome stretched over the rooftops of London, with deep blue rectangles of sky showing where the last panels had yet to be closed. As the Dome’s immense roof had been closed off, stage by stage, it had felt increasingly as if they were all living in a vast cathedral, she thought, a single huge building.

  As the regular cycle of day and night had become less marked, Bisesa wasn’t the only one whose sleep pattern was disrupted, according to Aristotle; other sufferers ranged from the Mayor herself to the squirrels in London’s parks.

  On the roof, Myra was lying on her belly on an inflatable mat. She was working on what looked like homework, on a softscreen tiled with images.

  Bisesa sat beside her daughter, cross-legged. “I’m surprised you have work to do.” School had been out for a week.

  Myra shrugged. “We’re all supposed to blog.”

  Bisesa smiled. “That’s a very old-fashioned idea.”

  “If a teacher wasn’t old-fashioned you’d be worried. They even gave us pads of paper and pens for when the softscreens get fritzed. They said, when historians write about what happens tomorrow, they will have all our little viewpoints to put in.”

  If there are any historians after tomorrow, Bisesa thought. “So what are you writing?”

  “Whatever hits me. Look at this.” She tapped a corner of her softscreen and a small tile magnified. It showed a ring of monolithic stones, a gathering of white-robed people, a handful of heavily armed police.

  “Stonehenge?” Bisesa asked.

  “They’re there for the last sunset.”

  “Are they Druids?”

  “I don’t think so. They’re worshiping a god called Sol Invictus.”

  Everybody had become an expert on sun gods. Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, was one of the more interesting of his breed, Bisesa thought. He had been one of the last of the great pagan gods; his cult had flourished in the late Roman Empire just before Christianity had become the state religion. To Bisesa’s disappointment, however, there had been no trace of anybody reviving Marduk, the Babylonian god of the sun. “It would be nice to see the old guy again,” she had said to Aristotle, to his confusion.

  Myra said, “Of course there’s no Dome over Stonehenge. I wonder if the stones will be standing tomorrow. In the heat, they might crumble and crack. That’s a sad thought, isn’t it? After all these thousands of years.”

  “Yes.”

  “Those sun botherers say they will be there for sunrise too.”

  “That’s their privilege,” Bisesa said. Tonight the world had more than its fair share of crazies, preparing to use the storm to commit suicide in a variety of more or less ingenious ways.

  Bisesa was distracted by a distant crackle, what sounded like shouting. She stood up, walked to the edge of the roof, and looked out over London.

  As the daylight was fading, the usual orange-yellow glow of the streetlights gleamed, and Dome-mounted spotlights splashed a whiter illumination over the capital’s great buildings. There was plenty of traffic, rivers of lights flowing around the Dome’s support pillars. In the city in the last few days there had been a sense of nervous excitement. She knew that some people were planning to party all night long, as if this were some greater New Year’s Eve. In antic
ipation the police had kept Trafalgar Square, the very center of the Dome and the traditional focus of London’s festivities and demonstrations alike, cordoned off for days.

  All this activity was covered over by the Tin Lid. Immense strip lights, some as long as a hundred meters, were suspended from that vast ceiling. Their pearly glow caught the slim columns of the supporting pillars, which rose up out of the city like searchlight beams. Sparks swirled around the upper reaches of the pillars and settled in the huge rafters: London’s pigeons had discovered new ways to live under this astounding roof.

  And there was that crackling sound again.

  You couldn’t be sure what was going on anymore. News had been carefully censored since Valentine’s Day, when martial law had at last been imposed. Rather than factual reports, you were much more likely to find yourself watching some feel-good squib on the heroically huge fans, with names like “Brunel” and “Barnes Wallis,” that would clean London’s air during the period the Dome was shut, or on the Tower’s ravens, whose presence traditionally kept London safe, being carefully protected as the daylight was shut out.

  But Bisesa could guess the truth. In the last few days the shield had begun visibly to close over the sun. It was the first tangible, physical sign since June 9, 2037, that something really was going to happen—and it was a strange light in the sky, a darkening of the sun, a portent straight out of Revelation. There had been a huge rise in tension; the cultists, conspiracy theorists, and bad guys of all stripes had been stirred up as never before.

  And as well as the crazies there were the refugees, seeking somewhere safe to hide. On this last day London was packed to the rafters already—and Bisesa’s flat wasn’t far from the Fulham Gate. She heard another series of pops. Bisesa was a soldier; that sounded like gunfire to her. And now she thought she could smell smoke.