Even now Bisesa could hear the regret and loss in his voice. On impulse she hugged him again—but carefully. He felt shockingly frail; the word was that during the buildup to the sunstorm he had spent too long on the Moon and had neglected his health. She said, “Let’s not marry them off just yet.”
He smiled, his face crumpling. “He knows how I feel about him, you know.”
“He does?”
“He always has. He’s kind, in his way. It’s just there’s not much room in that head of his for anything but work.”
Siobhan snorted. “I have a feeling Myra will make room, if anybody can.”
Bisesa and Siobhan had remained close e-mail buddies, but hadn’t met in person for years. Now in her fifties, Siobhan’s hair was laced with a handsome gray, and she was dressed in a colorful but formal suit. She looked every inch what she was, Bisesa thought, still the Astronomer Royal, a popular media figure and a favorite of the British, Eurasian, and American establishments. But she still had that sharp look in her eye, that bright intelligence—and the humorous open-minded skepticism that had enabled her to consider Bisesa’s odd story of aliens and other worlds, all those years ago.
“You look terrific,” Bisesa said honestly.
Siobhan waved that away. “Terrifically older.”
“Time passes,” Bud said, a bit stiffly. “Myra was right, wasn’t she? The last time we were all together was at the time of the medals-and-flags stuff after the storm.”
“I enjoyed all that,” Mikhail said. “I always loved disaster movies! And every good disaster movie should end with a medal ceremony, or a wedding, or preferably both, ideally in the ruins of the White House. In fact, if you recall, the very last occasion we all met was the Nobel Prize ceremony.” That had nearly been a disaster in itself. Eugene had had to be pressured to go up and accept his award for his work on the sunstorm: he had insisted that nobody who had got it so badly wrong had any right to recognition, but Mikhail had talked him around. “I think he’ll thank me someday,” he had said.
Bisesa turned to Bud. Now in his late fifties, a head shorter than his wife, Bud had matured into the kind of tanned, lean, unreasonably handsome senior officer that the American armed forces seemed to turn out by the dozen. But Bisesa thought she saw a strain about his smile, a tension in his posture.
“Bud, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “Did you hear Myra say she’s going into astronautics? I was hoping you might have a word with her.”
“To encourage her?”
“To talk her out of it! I worry enough as it is, without seeing her sent up there.”
Bud touched her arm with his massive scarred hand. “I think she’s going to do what she wants to do, whatever we say. But I’ll keep an eye on her.”
Mikhail leaned forward on his stick. “But tell her never to neglect her exercises—look what happened to me!”
Siobhan caught Bisesa’s eye warningly. Bisesa understood: Mikhail clearly knew nothing about Bud’s cancer, the sunstorm’s final bitter legacy. Bisesa thought it was a viciously cruel fate for Siobhan and Bud to have been granted so little time together—even if, as she suspected, the illness had actually brought about their reconciliation, after their sad falling-out during the pressures of the storm itself.
Myra came fluttering back, by now towing Eugene by the hand. “Mum, you know what—Eugene really is working on how to control the weather! . . .”
Bisesa actually knew a little about the project. It was the latest in a whole spectrum of recovery initiatives since the sunstorm—and not even the most ambitious. But it was a time when ambition was precisely what humankind needed most.
Ninety percent of the human population had come through the sunstorm alive. Ninety percent: that meant a billion had died, a billion souls. It could, of course, have been far worse.
But planet Earth had been struck a devastating blow. The oceans were empty, the lands desiccated, and the works of humanity burned to ruins. Food chains had been severed on land and in the seas, and while frantic early efforts had ensured that there had been few actual species extinctions, the sheer number of living things on the planet had crashed.
The first priority in those early days had been just to shelter and feed people. The authorities had been prepared to some extent, and heroic efforts to sustain adequate water supplies and sanitation had mostly fended off disease. But food stocks, set aside before the storm, had quickly run down.
The months after the storm, spent trying to secure the first harvests, had been a terrifying, wearying time. Lingering radioactive products in the soil and their working their way into the food chain hadn’t helped. And with all the energy that had been poured into the planet’s natural systems, leaving the atmosphere and oceans sloshing like water in a bathtub, the climate during that first year had been all over the place. In battered London there had been a momentous evacuation from the floodplain of a relentlessly widening Thames into tent cities hastily erected on the South Downs and in the Chilterns.
Because the sunstorm had occurred in the northern hemisphere’s spring, northern continents had suffered most severely; North America, Europe, and Asia had all had their agricultural economies almost wiped out. The continents of the south, recovering more rapidly in the strange season that followed, had led the revival. Africa especially had turned itself into the breadbasket of the world—and those with a sense of history noted the justness that Africa, the continent where humankind was born, was now reaching out to support the younger lands in this time of need.
As hunger cut in, there had been some tense standoffs—but the darkest prestorm fears, of opportunistic wars over lebensraum, or even simple grudge settling, hadn’t come to pass. Instead there had been a generous globewide sharing. Harder heads had begun to speculate, though, about longer-term shifts in geopolitical power.
Once the crisis of the first year was passed, more ambitious recovery programs were initiated. Active measures were taken to promote the recovery of the ozone layer, and to cleanse the air of the worst of the post-sunstorm crud. On land fast-growing trees and topsoil-fixing grasses were planted, and in the oceans iron compounds were injected to stimulate the growth of plankton, the little creatures at the base of the oceanic food chains, and so to accelerate biomass recovery in the seas. Earth was suddenly a planet crawling with engineers.
Bisesa was old enough to remember anguished turn-of-the-century debates about this kind of “geo-engineering,” long before anybody had heard of the sunstorm. Was it moral to apply such massive engineering initiatives to the environment? On a planet of intricately interconnected systems of life and air, water and rock, could we even predict the consequences of what we were doing?
Now the situation had changed. In the wake of the sunstorm, if there was to be a hope of keeping the planet’s still-massive human population alive, there was really little choice but to try to rebuild the living Earth—and now, happily, there was a great deal more wisdom available about how to do it.
Decades of intensive research had paid off in a deep understanding of the working of ecologies. Even a small, limited, and contained ecosystem turned out to be extraordinarily complex, with webs of energy flows and interdependence—networks of who ate whom—complicated enough to baffle the most mathematical mind. Not only that, ecologies were intrinsically chaotic systems. They were prone to crash and bloom of their own accord, even without any outside interference. Fortunately, however, human ingenuity, supplemented by electronic support, had accelerated to the point where it could riddle out even the complexities of nature. You could manage chaos: it just took a lot of processing.
Overall control of the great global eco-rebuilding project had been put in the metaphorical hands of Thales, the only one of the three great artificial minds to have survived the sunstorm. Bisesa was confident that the ecology Thales was building would prove to be durable and long lasting—even if it wasn’t entirely natural, and could never be. It was going to take decades, of course, and even then Earth
’s biosphere would recover only a fraction of the diversity it had once enjoyed. But Bisesa hoped she would live to see the opening up of the Arks, and the release of elephants and lions and chimpanzees back into something like the natural conditions they had once enjoyed.
But of all the great recovery projects, the most ambitious and controversial of all was the taming of the weather.
The first stabs at weather control, notably the U.S. military’s attempts to cause destabilizing rainstorms over North Vietnam and Laos in the 1970s, had been based on ignorance, and were so crude you couldn’t even tell if they had worked. What was needed was more subtlety.
The atmosphere and oceans that drove the weather added up to a complex machine powered by colossal amounts of energy from the sun, a machine depending on a multitude of factors including temperature, wind speed, and pressure. And it was chaotic—but that chaotic nature gave it an exquisite sensitivity. Change any one of the controlling parameters, even by a small amount, and you might achieve large effects: the old saw about the butterfly’s wing flap in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas had some truth.
How to flap that wing to order was a different problem, however. So mirrors were to be launched into Earth’s orbit, much smaller siblings of the shield, to deflect sunlight and adjust temperature. Arrays of turbines whipped up artificial winds. Aircraft vapor trails could be used to block sunlight from selected parts of the Earth’s surface. And so on.
Of course there was plenty of skepticism. Even today, as Eugene described his work, Mikhail said, a bit too loudly, “One man steals a rain cloud; another man’s crops fail through drought! How can you be sure that your tinkering will have no adverse effects?”
“We calculate it all.” Eugene seemed bemused that Mikhail would even raise such points. He tapped his forehead. “Everything is up here.”
Mikhail wasn’t happy. But this had nothing to do with the ethics of weather control, Bisesa saw: Mikhail was jealous, jealous of the contact her daughter had made with Eugene.
Bud put his arm around Mikhail’s shoulders. “Don’t let these youngsters get to you,” he said. “For better or worse they aren’t as we were. I guess the shield taught them that they can think big and get away with it. Anyhow it’s their world! Come on, let’s go find a beer.”
The little group fragmented.
Siobhan approached Bisesa. “So Myra has grown up.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I almost feel sorry for the boy—although I don’t think this new breed is in any need of sympathy from the likes of us.” She glanced at Eugene and Myra, tall, handsome, confident. “Bud’s right. We got them through the sunstorm. But everything is different now.”
“But they’re hard, Siobhan,” Bisesa said. “Or at least Myra is. To her the past, the time cut off by the storm, was nothing but one betrayal after another. A father she never knew. A mother who left her at home, and came back crazy. And then the world itself imploded around her. Well, she’s turned her back on it all. She’s not interested in the past, not anymore, because it failed her. But the future is there for her to shape. You see confidence in her. I see a diamond hardness.”
“But that’s how it has to be,” Siobhan said gently. “This is a new future, new challenges, new responsibilities. They, the young ones, will have to take those responsibilities. While we stand aside.”
“And worry about them,” Bisesa said ruefully.
“Oh, yes. We will always do that.”
“I couldn’t bear to lose her,” Bisesa blurted.
Siobhan touched her arm. “You won’t. No matter how far she travels. I know you both well enough for that. Some things are more important even than the future, Bisesa.”
Thales spoke smoothly in Bisesa’s ear. “I think the ceremony is about to begin.”
Siobhan sighed. “Well, we know that,” she snapped. “Do you ever miss Aristotle? Thales has this annoying habit of stating the bleeding obvious.”
“But we’re glad to have him even so,” Bisesa said.
Siobhan linked Bisesa’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go see the show.”
50: Elevator
Bisesa and Siobhan walked through the marquee to an area at the center of the rig. The children swarmed forward, at last distracted by something more interesting than each other.
The center of attention was an object like a squat pyramid, perhaps twenty meters tall. Its surface had been coated with marble slabs that gleamed in the sun. This unassuming structure was to be the anchor point for the Space Elevator, a line of nano-engineered carbon that would lead all the way up from the Earth to geosynchronous orbit thirty thousand kilometers high.
“Look at that lot.” Siobhan pointed upward. The clear blue sky was filling up with airplanes and helicopters. “I wouldn’t want to be flying around when thousands of kilometers of bucky-tube cable come uncoiling down into the atmosphere . . .”
The Prime Minister of Australia clambered, a bit heavy-footed, up a staircase to a podium right at the apex of the flat-topped pyramid. She held up a sample of the cable that was even now being cautiously dropped into Earth’s atmosphere. It was actually a broad ribbon, about a meter wide but only a micron thick. And she began to speak.
“A lot of people have expressed surprise that Australia was chosen by the Skylift Consortium as the site for the anchor of the world’s first Space Elevator. For one thing it’s a common myth that you have to anchor an elevator on the equator. Well, the closer the better, but you don’t have to be right on it; thirty-two degrees south is close enough. And in many other ways this is an ideal spot. Out here in the ocean we’re very unlikely to suffer lightning strikes or other unwelcome climatic phenomena. Australia is one of the most stable places on Earth, both geologically and politically. And we’re just a short hop away from the beautiful city of Perth, which is anticipating its role as a key hub in a new Earth–space transportation network . . .”
And so on. It was always this way with space projects, Bud had once told Bisesa, a mix of bullshit and wonder. On the ground it was always turf wars and pork-barrel politics—but today a cable from space really was to be dropped above the heads of this preening throng: today, in the sunshine, an engineering feat that would have seemed a dream when Bisesa was a child would be completed.
Of course the Elevator was just the beginning. The plans for the future were astonishing: with space opened up at last, asteroids would be mined for metals, minerals, and even water, and solar power stations the size of Manhattan would be assembled in orbit. A new industrial revolution was about to begin, and with the flow of free energy up there in space the possibilities for the growth of civilization were unbounded. But the heavy industries that had done so much harm in the past, mining and energy production among them, would now be transferred off the planet. This time Earth would be preserved for what it was good for: serving as the home of the most complex ecosystem known.
The shield, the first great astronautical engineering project, was already destroyed, though fragments of it would forever be cherished in the planet’s museums. But the confidence that the project’s success had given had not been lost.
Space, though, wasn’t just about power stations and mines. The sunstorm had bequeathed strange new worlds to humankind. Traces of life on Mars, dormant for a billion years, were now being discovered all over that world. Meanwhile a new Venus awaited a human footstep. Almost all of that planet’s suffocating coat of air had been conveniently blasted away. What was left was sterile, slowly cooling—and terraformable, some experts claimed, capable of becoming, at last, a true sister to Earth.
Beyond the transformed planets, of course, lay the stars, and deeper mysteries yet.
But at this moment, this crux of human history, the pyramidal cable anchor reminded Bisesa of the ziggurat she had once visited on Mir, in an ancient Babylon revived through the time-bending technology of the Firstborn. That ziggurat had been the prototype for the Bible’s myth of the Tower of Babel, the ultimate metaphor for humanki
nd’s hubris in its challenge of the gods.
Siobhan was studying her. “Penny for your thoughts.”
“I was just wondering if anybody else here is thinking about the ziggurat of Babylon. I doubt it somehow.”
“Mir is always with you, isn’t it?”
Bisesa shrugged.
Siobhan squeezed her arm. “You were right, you know. About the Firstborn. The Eyes we found in the Trojan points confirmed it. So what do you make of it all now? The Firstborn made the sun flare so it would torch the planet—and they watched. What are they, sadists?”
Bisesa smiled. “You’ve never been forced to kill a mouse? You’ve never heard how they have to cull elephants in African game parks? Breaks your heart every time—but you do it anyhow.”
Siobhan nodded. “And you don’t turn away when you do it.”
“No. You don’t turn away.”
“So they’re conflicted,” Siobhan said coldly. “But they tried to exterminate us. Regret doesn’t make that right.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop them trying again.” Siobhan leaned closer to Bisesa and spoke softly. “We’re already looking for them. There’s a huge new telescopic facility on the farside of the moon—Mikhail is heavily involved. Even the Firstborn must obey the laws of physics: they must leave a trace. And of course the traces they leave may not be subtle; it’s just a question of looking in the right places.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why should we assume that it’s only here the Firstborn have intervened? Remember S Fornax, Mikhail’s flaring star? We’re starting to look at the possibility that that event, and a number of others, wasn’t natural either. And then there’s Altair, where that rogue Jovian came from. According to Mikhail, over the last three-quarters of a century, about a quarter of the brighter novae—exploding stars—we have observed have been concentrated in one little corner of the sky.”