Sunstorm (37 page)

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 humankind’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.”

“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