Sunstorm (12 page)

“So let’s think about the geometry,” Batson said. “What are the possibilities that could produce what you saw? Maybe the sun was bigger. Or the Moon smaller. Or the Earth was closer to the sun. Or the Moon farther away from Earth.”

She was surprised. “I hadn’t expected you to analyze my vision like this.”

He raised his eyebrows. “But you keep saying it wasn’t just a vision. I showed your sketches to an astronomer friend. She told me that actually the Moon
is
moving away from the Earth, over time. Did you know that? Something to do with the tides—can’t say I understand it. But there it is; you can prove it with laser beams. It’s a slow drift, though. We won’t get an eclipse like yours until at least 150 million years from now.” He eyed her. “Does that number mean anything to you?”

She tried to keep herself calm, through long habit, as she processed this new and startling bit of information. “What could it mean?”

“You’re supposed to be telling me, remember. You say you’ve been shown all this—indeed you’ve been brought home—for some purpose. A conscious purpose of those whom you believe have engineered all this. The ones you call—” He checked his notes.

“The Firstborn,” she said.

“Yes. Do you have any idea
why
you should be selected, manipulated in this way?”

“I challenged them,” she said. Then: “I’ve really no idea. I feel I’m being told something, but I can’t figure out the meaning.” She looked at him miserably. “Does that make me sound crazy?”

“Actually the contrary. My personal experience is that sane people accept that the world is bafflingly complex and arbitrarily unfair. Let’s face it, that’s certainly true in the Army! The crazies are the ones who think they understand it all.”

“So the fact that I can’t make any sense of all this inclines you to believe me,” she said dryly.

“I didn’t quite say that,” he cautioned. “But I knew from the moment you walked in that you are telling the truth, as you see it. I just haven’t yet been able to rule out the possibility all this actually happened . . .” A softscreen lit up on his desk. “Excuse me.” He tapped the surface, and she glimpsed tables and graphs scrolling.

After a moment he said, “Your report from the sawbones has come in. You’ll have to discuss the results with her, of course. But as far as I can see you’re certainly who you say you are: your DNA and dental records prove it. You’re healthy enough, though you appear to bear the relics of a number of rather exotic diseases. And your skin has soaked up rather more ultraviolet than is good for you.”

She smiled. “On Mir, the climate broke down. We all got sunburned.”

“And—ah.” He sat back, gazing at the screen.

“What is it?”

“According to
this
result—the quacks looked at your telomerase, whatever that is, something to do with the aging of your cells—you are more than five years older than you should be.” He eyed her and grinned. “Well, well. The plot thickens, Lieutenant.” He seemed rather pleased at the way things were turning out.

17: Brainstorm

Once more Siobhan sat with Toby Pitt in the Council Room of the Royal Society.

From a wall-mounted softscreen the crumpled, rather melancholy features of Mikhail Martynov peered out. Siobhan thought he always looked as if there ought to be a roll-up cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth, but even the latest noncarcinogenic, nonaddictive, nonpolluting comfort smokes would never be allowed in the enclosed environment of a Moon base. Mikhail said, “If only the problem were simpler—if only we faced nothing worse than an asteroid coming to knock us on the head! Where is Bruce Willis when you need him?”

Toby asked, “Who?”

“Never mind. I have an unhealthy fascination with bad movies of the last century . . .”

Siobhan let their nervous banter roll on. A week after her second return from the Moon she was overtired and stressed out, and a headache niggled behind her eyes. After interplanetary space she felt smothered in the fusty atmosphere of the Society, with its smell of furniture polish, the huge coffee dispenser gurgling away to itself in the corner, and the vast heap of digestive biscuits on a plate on the table. And she was close to despair. Since accepting Miriam’s mandate to find a way to deal with the solar event, after a month of research she had elicited nothing but waves of hopelessness and negative thinking from “experts” around the world.

Mikhail and Toby, this motley crew, was her last gamble. But she wasn’t about to tell them that. She said briskly, “Let’s get on with it.”

Mikhail glanced at notes off camera. “I have Eugene’s latest predictions.”

Graphics glowed in the smart top of the table before Siobhan and Toby, showing energy flux plotted against wavelength, particle mass, and other parameters. “Nothing substantial has changed, I’m afraid. We are looking at a major influx of solar energy on April 20, 2042. It will last most of twenty-four hours, so that almost every point on Earth’s surface will be turned directly into the fire. We won’t even have the shelter of night. As we will be close to the spring equinox, even the poles won’t be spared. At this stage do you need the details of what will become of the atmosphere, the oceans? No. Suffice to say the Earth will be sterilized to a depth of tens of meters beneath the ground.

“But,” Mikhail went on, “we now have a much more precise handle on
how
the energy will be delivered. We are looking at flaws in the radiative and convective zones, where a great deal of energy is in normal times stored . . .” He tapped the hidden surface before him, and one tabletop chart was highlighted.

“Ah,” Siobhan said. “The intensity will peak in the visible spectrum.”

“As the spectrum of sunlight does normally,” Mikhail said. “In green light, as it happens. Which is where our eyes are most sensitive, and where chlorophyll works best—which is why, no doubt, chlorophyll was selected by evolution to serve as the photosynthetic chemical that fuels all aerobic plant life.”

“Then that’s what we face: a storm of green light from the sun,” Siobhan said firmly. “Let’s talk about options to deal with it.”

Toby grinned. “The fun part!”

Mikhail offered, “Shall I begin?” He tapped at his softscreen, and on the displays before Siobhan a number of schematics, tables, and images came up.

“As it happens,” Mikhail said, “even before our present crisis a number of thinkers have considered ways to reduce the solar insolation—the proportion of the sun’s energy flux that reaches the planet. Of course this was mostly in the context of blocking sunlight to mitigate global warming.” He brought up images of clouds of dust injected into the high atmosphere. “One proposal is to use space launchers to fire sub-micrometer dust up into the stratosphere. That way you would mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption; after a big bang like Krakatoa you often get a global temperature drop of a degree or two for a few years. Or you could inject sulfur particles up there, which would burn in the atmosphere’s oxygen to give you a layer of sulfuric acid. That might be rather lighter and so easier to deliver.”

Siobhan said, “But how much of the storm would this screen out?”

Mikhail and Toby displayed their figures. It turned out to be only a few percent.

“Enough to mitigate global warming, perhaps,” Mikhail said sadly. “But far from adequate for the problem we face now. We are going to have to take out almost
all
of the incoming radiation—letting even one percent through may be far too much.”

“Then we’ll have to think bigger,” Siobhan said firmly.

Toby said slyly, “Bigger it is. If you want to inject dust into the air, rather than trying to mimic a volcano—why not just set one off?”

Mikhail and Siobhan glanced at each other, startled. Then they went to work.

Coming up with such ideas was precisely why Siobhan had invited Toby to these sessions.

He had been unsure. “Siobhan, why me? I’m an events manager, for heaven’s sake! My contribution should have ended at making sure there were enough biscuits to go around.”

She had studied him with fond exasperation. He was a big, somewhat overweight, shambling man, with raggedly cut brown hair and a weak chin. He wasn’t even a scientist; he had majored in languages. He was a peculiarly English type who would always be valued by stuffy British institutions like the Royal Society, not only for his intelligence and obvious competence, but also for his comforting air of upper-middle-class safeness. But he had one typically English characteristic that she, born in Northern Ireland and so something of an outsider, didn’t value so highly, and that was an excess of self-deprecation.

“Toby, you’re not here for biscuits, appreciated though they are, but for your other career.”

He looked briefly baffled. “My books?”

“Precisely.” Toby had published a whole series of lyrically written popular histories of forgotten corners of science and technology. And that was what had prompted her to turn to him. “Toby, we’re faced by a megaproblem. But since Tsiolkovski people have been dreaming up a whole suite of more or less wacky mega-engineering possibilities. And that’s what I think we’re going to need to draw on now.”

There had been one group in London she was thinking of particularly, called the British Interplanetary Society. “I gave them a chapter in one of my books,” Toby had told her when she mentioned them. “The Society has been absorbed into a pan-European grouping now, and doesn’t seem to be half so much fun. But in its heyday it was a place to play for a lot of respectable scientists and engineers. They dreamed up lots of ways to bother the universe . . .” This sort of fringe thinking was what they needed to draw on now, she believed.

He grinned. “So I’m an ambassador from the lunatic fringe? Thanks very much.”

But Mikhail had said, “We must consider ways to protect the whole Earth. Nobody has faced such responsibility before. I think in the circumstances a little lunacy might be just what we need!”

With some hard work on their softscreens, and frequent calls to Aristotle, they hurriedly fleshed out Toby’s volcano option. Perhaps it could be done—but it would have to be a
big
volcanic bang, far bigger than any in recorded history and possibly bigger than anything in the geological record. As nobody had tried such a thing before, its effects would be quite unpredictable, and possibly a remedy even worse than the problem. Siobhan stored the discussion in a file in Aristotle’s capacious memory that she labeled “last resorts.”

They quickly rattled through some more research on so-called “intrinsic” methods of protection, things you could do within the Earth’s atmosphere, or maybe from low orbit. But they all provided inadequate screening. There was no reason why some of these methods shouldn’t be put in place. They would provide an extra few percent of cover—and would at least give the impression to the public that something was being done, a not inconsiderable political factor. But if they couldn’t dig up a way to knock out almost all of the sun’s ferocious glare, such projects would be nothing but sops, which wouldn’t make any difference to the final outcome.

“So we move on,” Siobhan said. “What next?”

Toby said, “If we can’t protect the Earth, perhaps we have to flee.”

Mikhail growled, “Where? The storm will be so intense that even Mars is not safe.”

“The outer planets, then. An ice moon of Jupiter—”

“Even at five times Earth’s distance, the reduction in intensity of the storm would not be sufficient to save us.”

“Saturn, then,” Toby pressed. “We could hide on Titan. Or a moon of Uranus, or Neptune. Or we could flee the solar system altogether.”

Siobhan said quietly, “The stars? Can we build a starship, Toby?”

“Make it a generation starship. That’s the most primitive sort: an ark, big enough to hold a few hundred people. It might take a thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri, say. But if the emigrants’ children, living and dying on the ship, could continue the mission—and then
their
children would do the same—eventually humans, or at least descendants of humans, would reach the stars.”

Mikhail nodded. “Another idea of Tsiolkovski’s.”

Toby said, “Actually, I think it was Bernal.”

Siobhan said, “How many people could we save that way?”

Mikhail shrugged. “A few hundred, maybe?”

“A few hundred is better than none,” Toby said grimly. “A gene pool of that size is enough to start again.”

Mikhail said, “The Adam and Eve option?”

“It’s not good enough,”
Siobhan said. “We are not about to give up on saving the billions who are to be put to the torch. We have to do better, guys.”

Mikhail sighed sadly. Toby averted his eyes.

As the silence lengthened, she realized that they had nothing more to offer. She felt despair settle inside her, suffocating—despair and guilt, as if this huge catastrophe, and their inability to think their way out of it, were somehow her fault.

There was a modest cough.

Surprised, she looked up into the empty air. “Aristotle?”

“I’m sorry to break in, Siobhan. I’ve been taking the liberty of running supplementary searches of my own based on your conversation. There is an option you may have missed.”

“There is?”

Mikhail, in his softscreen image, leaned forward. “Get to the point. What do you suggest?”

“A shield,” Aristotle said.

A shield? . . .

Data began to download to their displays.

18: Announcement

The President of the United States took her seat behind her desk in the Oval Office.

The place was calm, for once. Just a single camera faced her, a single microphone loomed over her, and a single technician watched her. The office was equipped with only simple props: a Stars and Stripes, and a Christmas tree to mark this month of December 2037. As the tech counted her down on his fingers in the time-honored way, the President touched the simple necklace at her throat, but she resisted the temptation to adjust the black hair, now threaded with silver, that her makeup artist had spent so long sculpting.