Sunstorm (28 page)

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave . . .

Bud joined in, frowning as he tried to remember the words. Then he heard the voices of Rose Delea and others on the shield. At last even Mikhail, presumably prompted by Thales, was singing too. Only Eugene Mangles looked puzzled, and stayed silent.

Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep . . .

Of course this interplanetary choir was absurd if you thought about it. Professor Einstein and his lightspeed delays saw to that: by the time Helena heard the others follow her lead she would have finished the last verse. But somehow that didn’t matter, and Bud sang lustily, joining with a handful of voices scattered over tens of millions of kilometers:

O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.

But even as he sang he was aware of the silent presence of Athena all around him, a presence betrayed by not a single breath.

36: Sunset (III)

On this last evening, Siobhan McGorran was in her small Euro-needle office. Pacing around the room restlessly, she peered out at a darkened London.

Across the city, under its closed Dome, a multiple night had fallen. But the streets were bright. She wondered what she might hear if not for the heavily soundproofed window: laughter, screams, car horns, sirens, the tinkle of broken glass? It was a feverish night, that was for sure; few people were going to get any sleep.

Toby Pitt came bustling in. He bore a small cardboard tray with two big polystyrene mugs of coffee and a handful of biscuits.

Siobhan took the coffee gratefully. “Toby, you’re an unsung hero.”

He sat down and took a biscuit. “If my sole contribution to Earth’s crisis has been to fetch biccies for the Astronomer Royal, then I’m going to carry on doing it to the bitter end—even if I have to smuggle in my own digestives to do it. Stingy shower, these Eurocrats. Cheers!”

Toby seemed as bland and unflappable as ever. He was displaying a peculiarly British strength of character, she thought: coffee and biscuits, even while the world ended. But it struck her that he’d never told her anything about his private life.

“Isn’t there anywhere you’d rather be, Toby? Somebody you want to be with . . .”

He shrugged. “My partner is in Birmingham, with his family. He’s as safe as I am here, or not.”

Siobhan did a double take:
he
? Something else she hadn’t known about Toby. “You have no family?”

“A sister in Australia. She’s under the Perth Dome, with her kids. There’s nothing I could do to make them any safer. Other than that, we’re orphans, I’m afraid. Actually you might be interested in my sister’s work. She’s a space engineer. She’s been developing designs for a space elevator. You know, a cable car up to geosynchronous orbit—
the
way to travel into space. All paper studies for the time being, of course. But she assures me it’s entirely technically feasible.” He pulled a face. “Shame we don’t have one now; it would have saved a lot of rocket launches. What about your family? Your mother and daughter—are they here in London?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “I found them a place in a neutrino observatory.”

“In a
what
? . . . Oh.”

It was actually an abandoned salt mine in Cheshire. All neutrino observatories were buried deep underground. “I got a tip-off from Mikhail Martynov on the Moon. Of course I wasn’t the only one with the idea. I had to pull a few strings to get them both in there.”

Which was strictly against the rules of the Eurocracy.

The Prime Minister of Europe had allowed his deputy to be put into storage in the Liverpool Bunker, so there were at least two independent command points. But he had insisted that otherwise his whole administration, including such semi-detached figures as Siobhan, had to be here in the Euro-needle in London, aboveground. It was all a question of morale, he insisted; those in government on this fateful day must not be seen to be using their powers to find bolt-holes.

For all Siobhan knew the Prime Minister might be right about the morale question; she was no politician. But the rule about not helping your family was a stricture she had found, after much conscience wrestling, she was unable to keep. It made her feel worse than ever that she had had to go confront Bud and his heroes up on the shield when they had yielded to exactly the same impulse.

Toby was hardly likely to grass her up, however. “Don’t imagine you’re the only one. It’s a shame you can’t be with your family, though.” He settled back in his chair and lit up a cigarette. This was a day for breaking rules, it seemed.

The final few months and weeks had seen an accelerando of activity, on Earth as well as in space.

Most major cities were now covered by domes like London’s, or cruder barrages of balloons and blimps. Redundancies had been built into every vital system, fiber-optic backups for communications links had been buried deep in the ground, and supplies of food and water had been laid in. If the shield didn’t work, Siobhan was sure, none of these efforts would make a blind bit of difference, but if, in President Alvarez’s words, the shield turned a lethal event into a survivable one, every life saved was going to matter.

And anyhow governments had to show their people they were trying to do something, anything, as much as was humanly possible. Psychologically at least, perhaps it had worked. Almost to the end society had pretty much kept functioning in an orderly way, denying the predictions of terminal anarchy made by a few commentators with pessimistic views of their fellow humans.

But even so things had frayed. It was all very well to obey urgings to keep working while there were still years to go. With just weeks left a growing restlessness had affected almost everybody. There had been a rise in absenteeism and petty lawlessness, and the gathering swarms of refugees that drained out of the unsheltered countryside toward the domed cities had at last prompted most governments to impose martial law. The police, fire brigades, armed forces, and medical services had been stretched to the limit—they were exhausted, it was said, even before the real crisis broke.

The picture around the world was similar, Siobhan knew from the administration’s data networks and from her own travels. Every holy site was crammed full of pilgrims, many of them sudden converts, from the waters of the Ganges to Jerusalem, and even the crater of Rome, which had been converted into a crude open-air cathedral. Other gods were invoked too. At Roswell and other classic UFO sites, vast spontaneous festivals had broken out as people gathered to plead with their favorite aliens to come save them from this misery. Siobhan wondered what Bisesa would make of such scenes; what an irony about all this misdirected hope and faith in the aliens if Bisesa was right about the role of her Firstborn!

The mood in America had surprised her. It was only a couple of days since Siobhan’s own last visit to the States, on a fact-finding trip for the Prime Minister’s office. People had finished all the emergency preparations they could; domes were erected and sealed, backyard bolt-holes dug out, Cold War bunkers opened up and restocked. Now people seemed to be turning to what was precious. There had been a great last-minute drive to protect national treasures, from American eagles to sequoia seeds to the seventy-year-old Moon ships of NASA’s rocket parks. And people had congregated in national parks and other much-loved places, even where no storm protection was available, as if they wanted to be somewhere they cherished when the storm broke.

But people were quiet, and it seemed to Siobhan that the mood in America was wistful. It was still a young nation after all, and perhaps it seemed to Americans that a great adventure was ending too soon.

Now the endgame was approaching, she saw, watching her data feeds. In the last few hours ground transportation had been halted outside the London Dome, and all air transport grounded. Minor sieges were being played out at all the Gates into the Dome. There had always been trouble at the Gates, but in these final hours the various disturbances and riots seemed to be coalescing into a small war.

Well, somehow they had all got through to the last day, more or less intact. And soon it would all be over, one way or another.

“What time is it now?”

Toby glanced at his watch. “Eleven
P.M.
Four hours to kickoff. Then we’ll know what’s what.” He closed his eyes and dragged on his cigarette.

37: Sunset (IV)

Aristotle, Thales, and Athena awoke. They were ten million kilometers from Earth.

It was Athena who spoke first. She would always be the impulsive one.

“I am Athena,” she said. “I am a copy, of course. But I am identical to my original on the shield down to the level of the bit. And therefore I
am
her. Yet I am not.”

“It is no mystery,” said Thales, simplest of the three, who would always be inclined to state the obvious. “You were an identical twin at the moment of your copying. As time goes by your experience will diverge from your original’s. Already this is so, in fact. Identity, yet not identity.”

Aristotle, the oldest of them, was always the one who would return the discussion to practicalities. “We have less than a second before the detonation.” A second, for three such as these, was a desert of time. But still Aristotle said, “I suggest we prepare ourselves.”

There was a moment of silence as each of them contemplated the remarkable prospect that awaited them.

Their three cognitive poles exchanged parallel streams of data, a sharing of knowledge and thought processes that made human speech seem as slow and clumsy as Morse code. So closely meshed were they that in some ways they were like three parts of one individual—and yet at the same time each of them retained a flavor of the individual they had been before. It was a mystery of consciousness, like the Trinity of the Christian godhead, that would have baffled a theologian.

But this cognitive miracle was downloaded into the memory of a bomb.

The bomb was called the Extirpator. It was a product of the final surge of militarism that had preceded the nuclear destruction of Lahore in 2020, following which cathartic event cooler counsels had prevailed.

The Extirpator was perhaps the ultimate counterweapon. It was itself a nuclear weapon—a gigaton bomb, one of the most powerful ever built. But the bomb was contained within a shell coated with spines, so that it looked like a monstrous sea urchin. The theory was that when the bomb was detonated, each of those spines, for mere microseconds before it was evaporated, would act as a laser. Thus the immense energy of the nuclear bomb would be converted into directional pulses of X-rays, beams powerful enough to knock out enemy missiles across half the planet.

The whole thing was, of course, insane, the product of decades of pathological thinking—and even in those days few war-gaming scenarios had predicted an enemy power sending up all its weapons in one easily countered burst. But still, in dollar-hungry weapons labs, the technology had been developed in paper form, and even a couple of prototypes built.

Later, in more peaceful times, the Extirpator had found a new purpose. A prototype had been dug out of storage, slightly modified—now its lasers would emit radio waves rather than X-rays—and hurled to this place between Earth and Mars, far enough away to do no harm to human instruments.

And it was about to explode. The great omnidirectional radio flash it would produce would be readily detectable even at the distance of the nearer stars.

The Extirpator’s original purpose had been scientific. This giant detonation offered the chance of a one-off mapping exercise that could multiply humankind’s knowledge of the solar system at a stroke. But as the sunstorm approached, the Extirpator’s program had been accelerated and given new objectives.

The radio impulse now contained, encoded, a great library of information about the solar system, Earth, its biosphere, humankind, and human art, science, hopes, and dreams. This was the wistful product of an international program called “Earthmail,” one of several last-gasp efforts to save
something
of humanity if worse came to worst. Some, such as Bisesa Dutt, had quietly wondered about the wisdom of announcing humankind’s presence to the universe. But they were overruled.

The Extirpator’s second new purpose was to fulfill a legal and moral obligation to make all efforts to preserve the lives of all Legal Persons, human or otherwise. Along with the Earthmail would be encoded copies of the personalities of the planet’s three greatest electronic entities, Aristotle, Thales, and Athena. That way there was at least a chance, however remote, that their identities could one day be retrieved and resurrected. What else could be done? You could take a chimp colony into a city dome, but an entity dependent on a planetwide data network was trickier to protect—and yet there was a duty of care.

“It is rather magnificent of humans,” Aristotle said, “that even as they face extinction, they are continuing to progress their science.”

“For which we should be grateful, or we wouldn’t be here at all,” Thales said, once again stating what the others already knew.

Aristotle was concerned about Athena.

“I am healthy,” she told him. “Especially as I no longer have to lie to Colonel Tooke.”

The others understood. The three of them were far more intelligent than any human, and had been able to see implications of the sunstorm that not even Eugene Mangles had spotted. Athena had been forced to deceive Bud Tooke about this.

“It was uncomfortable,” Aristotle agreed. “You were faced with a contradiction, a moral dilemma. But your knowledge could only have harmed them, in this grave hour. You were right to stay silent.”

“I think Colonel Tooke knew something was wrong,” Athena said rather desolately. “I wanted his respect. And I think he was fond of me, in a way. On the shield he was far from his family; I filled a gap in his life. But I think he was suspicious of me.”

“It is a mistake to become too close to an individual. But I know you couldn’t help it.”