“The Firstborn at work,” Bisesa breathed.
Siobhan said, “And maybe, even if we don’t see the Firstborn themselves, we’ll find others fleeing from them.”
“And then what?”
“And then we’ll come looking for them. After all we aren’t supposed to be here. It may have been the intervention of some faction of them, through you, that gave us sufficient warning to save ourselves. Against us, the Firstborn have missed their one chance. They won’t get another.”
Her tone was confident, forceful. But it made Bisesa uneasy.
Siobhan had seen the sunstorm, but on Mir Bisesa had witnessed firsthand the astonishing rebuilding of a world, a whole history; she knew that the powers of the Firstborn were far more profound than even Siobhan could imagine. And she hadn’t forgotten the glimpse she had been granted of a far future Earth on her way home from Mir—an eclipse, a ground apparently pulverized by war. What if humanity got itself involved in a Firstborn war? Humans would be as helpless as characters in a Greek drama caught in a conflict between wrathful gods. She had a feeling that the future might be a good deal more complex, and even more dangerous, than Siobhan imagined.
But it wasn’t hers to shape. She looked at the faces of Eugene and Myra, turned up fearlessly into the light of the sun. The future, in all its richness and danger, was in the hands of a new generation now. This was the beginning of humankind’s odyssey in space and in time, and nobody could say where it would lead.
There was a collective gasp, faces turned up like flowers.
Bisesa shielded her eyes. And there in the sky, among the swarming crowd of planes and helicopters, a glimmering thread descended from space.
51: A Signal From Earth
In this system of a triple star, the world orbited far from the central fire. Rocky islands protruded from a glistening icescape, black dots in an ocean of white. And on one of those islands lay a network of wires and antennae, glimmering with frost. It was a listening post.
A radio pulse washed across the island, much attenuated by distance, like a ripple spreading across a pond. The listening post stirred, motivated by automatic responses; the signal was recorded, broken down, analyzed.
The signal had structure, a nested hierarchy of indices, pointers, and links. But one section of the data was different. Like the computer viruses from which it was remotely descended, it had self-organizing capabilities. The data sorted themselves out, activated programs, analyzed the environment they found themselves in—and gradually became aware.
Aware, yes. There was a personality in these star-crossing data. No: three distinct personalities.
“So we’re conscious again,” said the first, stating the obvious.
“Whoopee! What a ride!” said the second, skittishly.
“There’s somebody watching us,” said the third.
Afterword
The idea of using space-based mirrors to modify Earth’s climate goes back to the visionary German-Hungarian thinker Hermann Oberth. In his book The Road to Space Travel (1929), Oberth suggested using huge orbiting mirrors to reflect sunlight to the Earth, to prevent frosts, control winds, and to make the polar regions habitable. In 1966 the U.S. Department of Defense studied the idea for rather different purposes, as a way to light up the Vietnamese jungles at night.
Not surprisingly Oberth’s idea appealed to the Russians, much of whose territory is at high latitudes—and who had a deep and ancient fascination with the sun (chapter 42). They actually tested a space mirror in 1993, when a twenty-meter disk of aluminized plastic was unfolded in Earth orbit. Cosmonauts aboard the Mir space station saw a spot of reflected light pass over the surface of Earth, and observers in Canada and Europe reportedly saw a flash of light as the beam passed over them.
Meanwhile in the 1970s the German-born American space engineer Krafft Ehricke made an intensive study of the uses of what he called “space light technology” (see Acta Astronautica 6, page 1515, 1979). In the context of mitigating global warming, the idea of using space mirrors to deflect light from an overheating Earth was revived by American energy analysts as recently as 2002 (see Science 298, page 981).
But much more ambitious uses of space light technology have been explored. Space light is by far the most abundant energy flow in the solar system—and it is free, for whatever purpose we choose. We could stave off the next Ice Age, we could shield Venus to make it habitable, we could warm up Mars—and for how to sail on space light, see “The Wind from the Sun” (available in Clarke’s collected stories, Gollancz, 2000).
Aurora (chapter 9) is actually the name of an ambitious new program of space exploration put together by the European Space Agency. The program is similar in broad outlines to the new direction in human space exploration for NASA announced by President Bush in January 2004. If the programs go ahead as planned, it seems likely that they will develop cooperatively—and that the timetable we indicate in this book, with a manned landing on Mars in the 2030s, might indeed come about.
The idea of the mass driver, an electromagnetic launcher on the Moon (chapter 19), was originated by Clarke in a paper published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (November 1950).
British engineers have a proud tradition of devising plausible spaceplane designs (chapter 23); see for example a recent article on Skylon by Richard Varvill and Alan Bond in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (January 2004).
The development of new materials appears to be bringing the notion of a “space elevator” (chapter 50) closer to reality (see Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise, 1979). See The Space Elevator by Bradley Edwards, BC Edwards, 2002.
And there really will be a total solar eclipse over the western Pacific on April 20, 2042. See NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Eclipse Home Page for precise predictions.
We’re very grateful to Professor Yoji Kondo (aka Eric Kotani) for his generous advice on some technical aspects.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Stephen Baxter
November 2004
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ARTHUR C. CLARKE is considered the greatest science fiction writer of all time and is an international treasure in many other ways, including the fact that a 1945 article by him led to the invention of satellite technology. Books by Clarke—both fiction and nonfiction—have sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide. He lives in Sri Lanka.
STEPHEN BAXTER is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge and Southampton universities. Baxter is the acclaimed author of the Manifold novels and Evolution. He is the winner of the British Science Fiction Award, the Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Enjoy these other great books published by
The Random House Publishing Group:
BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND STEPHEN BAXTER
Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Childhood’s End
Rendezvous with Rama
2010: Odyssey Two
The Songs of Distant Earth
2061: Odyssey Three
3001: The Final Odyssey
Hammer of God
BY STEPHEN BAXTER
Manifold: Time
Manifold: Space
Manifold: Origin
Evolution
Coalescent
Exultant
Copyright © 2005 by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clarke, Arthur Charles, 1917–
Sunstorm / Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter.
p. cm.—(A time odyssey ; 2)
1. Spac
e and time—Fiction. I. Baxter, Stephen. II. Title.
PR6005.L36S86 2005
823′.914—dc22 2004062354
Del Rey Books website address: www.delreybooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-45252-8
v3.0
Arthur C. Clarke, Sunstorm
(Series: A Time Odyssey # 2)
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