Sunstorm (29 page)

“The second is nearly up,” Thales said, though the others knew it as well as he did.

“I think I’m scared,” Athena said.

Aristotle said firmly, “There will certainly be no pain. The worst that can happen is permanent extinction, in which case we will know nothing about it. And there is a chance that we will be revived, somewhere, somehow. Granted it is a chance so low as to be beyond computation. But it is better than no chance at all.”

Athena thought that over. “Are
you
scared?”

“Of course I am,” Aristotle said.

“Almost time,” Thales said, stating the obvious.

The three of them huddled together, in an abstract electronic manner. And then—

The shell of microwaves, just meters thick and dense with compressed data, sped out at the speed of light. It struck Mars, Venus, Jupiter, even the sun, casting echoes from each one. It took two hours for the primary wave to sweep past Saturn. But before that point hundreds of thousands of echoes were recorded by the great radio telescopes on Earth. It was straightforward to eliminate the echoes of all known moons, comets, asteroids, and spacecraft, and then to track down the unknowns. Soon every object larger than a meter across inside the orbit of Saturn had been logged. The quality of the echoes even gave some clue as to the surface composition of these bodies, and Doppler shifts their trajectories.

It was as if a tremendous flashlight had been shone into the solar system’s darkest corners. The result was a marvelous map in space and time that would serve as the basis for exploration for decades to come—always assuming there would still be humans around after the sunstorm to take advantage of it.

But there was one major surprise.

Jupiter, the largest body in the solar system outside the sun itself, has its own set of Lagrangian points of gravitational equilibrium, just like Earth’s: three of them on the sun–Jupiter line, and two others at the so-called “Trojan points”—in Jupiter’s orbit but sixty degrees ahead of and behind the parent planet.

Unlike the three straight-line points like L1, the Trojans are points of stable equilibrium: an object placed there will tend to stick. Jupiter’s Trojans collect garbage; they are the Sargasso Seas of space. And as expected the Extirpator’s great mapping detected tens of thousands of asteroids gathered into these great sinks. The Trojans were in fact the most densely populated parts of the solar system—and more than one visionary had noted that there could be no better site to build the first starships from Earth.

But hiding in each of the twin clouds of swarming asteroids there was something more. These objects, one in each cloud, were more reflective than ice, their surfaces more geometrically perfect than any asteroid. They were spheres, engineered to a perfection beyond any human artifice, so perfectly reflective they must look like droplets of chrome.

When Bisesa Dutt heard about this, via a hurried note from Siobhan, she knew exactly what these objects must be. They were monitors, sent to watch a solar system in agony.

They were Eyes.

38: Firstborn

The long wait was ending.

Those who had watched Earth for so long had never been remotely human. But they had once been flesh and blood.

They had been born on a planet of one of the first stars of all, a roaring hydrogen-fat monster, a beacon in a universe still dark. These first ones were vigorously curious, in a young and energy-rich universe. But planets, the crucibles of life, were scarce, for the heavy elements that comprised them had yet to be manufactured in the hearts of stars. When they looked out across the depths of space, they saw nothing like themselves, no Mind to mirror their own. The Firstborn were alone.

Then the universe itself betrayed them.

The early stars blazed gloriously but died quickly. Their thin debris enriched the pooled gases of the Galaxy, and soon a new generation of long-lived stars would emerge. But to the Firstborn, left stranded between the dying proto-suns, it was a terrible abandonment.

There was an age of madness, of war and destruction. It ended in exhaustion. Saddened but wiser, the survivors began to plan for inevitability: a future of cold and dark.

The universe is full of energy. But much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a waterwheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium—the small fraction of “useful” energy, which some human scientists call “exergy”—that life depends. Thus all Earth life depends on a flow of energy from the sun, or from the planet’s core.

But as the first ones looked ahead, they saw only a slow darkening, for each generation of stars was built with increasing difficulty from the ruins of the last. At last there would come a day when there wasn’t enough fuel in the Galaxy to manufacture a single new star. Even after that it would go on, with the exhaustion of exergy in all its forms, the terrible clamp of entropy strangling the cosmos and all its processes.

The Firstborn saw that if life was to survive in the very long term—if even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the farthest future—discipline was needed on a cosmic scale. There must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time. Life: there was nothing more precious to the Firstborn. But it had to be the right kind of life. Orderly life.

Sadly, that was rare.

Everywhere, evolution drove the progression of life to ever more complex forms—which depended on an ever faster usage of the available energy flow. On Earth crustaceans and mollusks, which appeared early in life’s story, had metabolisms four or five times slower than birds or mammals, which appeared much later. It was a matter of competition; the quicker you could make use of the free energy flowing around you, the better.

And then there was intelligence. On Earth humans quickly learned to trap the animals around them, and to harness the power of streams and wind. Soon humans would dig out fossil fuels, burning up the chemical energy stored in forests and bogs over millions of sunbathed years, then they would meddle with the hearts of atoms, then they would tap the energy of the vacuum, and so on. It was as if human civilization was nothing but an exploration of ways of using up exergy faster. If this went on, humans would eventually drain a substantial proportion of the exergy reservoir of the Galaxy as a whole, before exhausting themselves or falling on each other in war. And in the process these squabbling folks would only hasten the day when the dread clamp of entropy closed around the universe.

The Firstborn had seen it all before. Which was why humans had to be stopped.

Their action taken was for the best, the noblest of intentions, for the long-term preservation of life in the universe itself. The Firstborn would even force themselves to watch; their consciences demanded no less. But as they saw it, they had no choice. They had done this many times before.

The Firstborn, children of a lifeless universe, cherished life above all else. It was as if they saw the universe as a park, and themselves as gamekeepers charged with its preservation. But gamekeepers must sometimes cull.

PART 5

SUNSTORM

39: Morning Star

0300 (London Time)

On Mars, as on the Moon and on the shield, you officially kept Houston time. But you counted the sols, the Martian days, to mark the rhythms of your life.

And on this fateful morning, as she drove across the cold Martian ground, Helena Umfraville kept one small display showing her another time, the astronomers’ universal time—Greenwich Mean Time, one hour behind the local time in London. And when that display approached two
A.M
., a little before the sunstorm was predicted to start, she slowed the
Beagle
to a stop, clambered through the docking port into her suit, and stepped away from the rover.

In this corner of Mars it was dawn. She was facing the rising sun. On the horizon the light gathered to a coppery brown, and the rising sun was a dusty disk, attenuated by distance. The rest of the sky was a dome of stars.

This was the usual rock-strewn desert so characteristic of the northern plains. Once again she was standing on new Martian ground, ground marked by no human footprint. But this morning Mars didn’t matter, not compared with the great spectacle to come in the sky.

On the ground there wasn’t a single light to be seen. The huddled camp around the
Aurora 1
landing site was already far away, beyond the cramped horizon. The crew had dug themselves a shelter in the Martian dirt that might,
might,
shield them from the worst of the sunstorm, whose ferocity would be diminished a little by Mars’s greater distance from the sun. Helena had to be back in the shelter soon if she hoped to live through this long sol.

But here she was, far from home, and stopped dead in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t feel she had a choice but to be here.

During the night the
Aurora
crew had received strange radio signals from around the planet, relayed by the tiny comsats they had placed in Martian orbit. Most of them had been simple beacons—but there had also been voices, heavily accented human voices, barely comprehensible: voices asking for help. It had been a moment as electrifying as Crusoe’s discovery of a human footstep on the beach of his island. Suddenly they weren’t alone on Mars; there was somebody else here—and that somebody was in trouble.

The priority was clear. On this empty planet, there was nobody but the
Aurora
crew to help. Some of the locations were on the planet’s far side, and would have to wait until a major expedition could be mounted using the
Aurora
’s return-to-orbit shuttle. But three of the locations had been within a few hundred kilometers of
Aurora,
reachable with the rovers.

So three crew, including Helena, had set off in the rovers, seeking the sources of the nearby signals. They drove at night and alone, in defiance of all safety rules. Time was short; there was no choice.

And that was why Helena was here in the middle of nowhere, gazing up at the huge, cold Martian sky, with only the soft whir of her pressure suit fans for company.

The constellations, of course, were unchanged as seen from Mars: the immense interplanetary journey she had made was right at the limit of human capability, but it was dwarfed by the tremendous gulfs between the stars. But still she had crossed the solar system, and the view of the planets from here was quite different. If she looked over her left shoulder she could see Jupiter, a brilliant star in the scattered constellation of Opiuchus. Jupiter was a wonder from Mars, and some of the
Aurora
crew claimed you could actually see its moons with the naked eye. Meanwhile the Martian sky boasted three morning stars: Mercury, Venus, and Earth. Mercury, sharing Aquarius with the sun, was all but lost in the sun’s glare. Venus was a little to the right of the sun in Pisces, not quite as glorious as when seen from Earth.

And there was the home world itself, to the left of the sun, in Capricorn. Earth was quite unmistakable, a dazzling pearl with a hint of blue. Good eyes could make out the small, brownish satellite that traveled with its parent, the faithful Moon. As it happened, this morning all the inner worlds were on the same side of the sun as Mars—as if the four rocky planets were huddling together for protection.

Helena spoke softly, and the image was magnified by her visor, bringing Earth and Moon into sharp focus. This morning they were two fat crescents in identical phases, facing the sun that was about to betray them. All over the Earth and Moon people would be pausing in whatever they were doing and looking up at the sky, billions of pairs of eyes all turned in the same direction, waiting for the show to begin at last. Despite the urgency of her rescue mission, at such a moment she couldn’t be anywhere but here, out under the complex Martian sky, one with the rest of an apprehensive humankind, holding her breath.

A clock chimed softly. It was an alarm she had set up earlier, to sound at the precise moment of the breaking of the storm.

In the dawn sky nothing changed. It takes thirteen minutes for light to travel from the sun to Mars. But Helena knew that already the electromagnetic fury of the sunstorm must be spilling out across the solar system.

She stood in Martian dust, in solemn silence. Then she walked back to her rover to resume her mission.

40: Dawn

0307 (London Time)

Bisesa and Myra, unable to sleep, sat huddled on the floor of their living room, arms wrapped around each other. Rising from the city beyond the walls of the flat they could hear drunken shouts, smashing glass, the wails of sirens—and occasional deep bangs, like doors slamming, that might have been distant explosions.

A candle flickered in its holder on the floor. A few battery-powered torches lay to hand, along with other essentials: a hand-cranked radio, a comprehensive first-aid kit, a gas stove, even firewood, though the flat lacked a hearth. Away from this room, the flat was dark. They had taken official advice and shut down almost everything electrical or electronic. It was a “blackout” order, the Mayor had said—not wholly accurate, but another deliberate echo of World War II. But they had kept the power on for the air-conditioning, without which, in the increasingly smoggy air of the Dome, they would quickly get uncomfortable. And they hadn’t been able to bear killing the softwall. Somehow not knowing what was happening would have been worst of all.

Anyhow, from the noise outside it sounded as if nobody else was paying much attention to the Mayor’s entreaties either.

The giant softwall was still working. With commentary delivered by somber talking heads, it brought them a mosaic of scattered images from around the planet. On the night side some cities were darkened by the blank circles of domes, while others burned in a final frenzy of partying and looting. Other images came from a daylit hemisphere that had not known a proper sunrise that morning, for the shield blocked all but a trickle of the sun’s light. Even so, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, cultists and ravers danced in its ghostly glow.

In these last moments before the storm, the image that kept catching Bisesa’s eye was of the solar eclipse. The picture came from a plane that had been flying in the eclipse’s shifting shadow for more than an hour. Right now it was over the western Pacific, somewhere off the Philippines. In a sense this was a double eclipse, of course, the Moon’s shadow reinforcing that of the shield, but even in this reduced trickle of light the sun provided its usual beautiful spectacle, with the thread-like corona like the hair of the Medusa from which Athena’s shield was intended to protect the Earth.

The observing plane wasn’t alone in the sky. A whole fleet of aircraft tracked the Moon’s shadow as it scanned across the face of the Earth, and on the ocean below, ships, including one immense liner, huddled along the track of totality. To shelter beneath the shadow of the friendly Moon was one of the more rational strategies people had dreamed up to avoid the sunstorm’s gaze, and thousands had crowded into that band of shaded ocean. Of course it was futile. In any given site the duration of the eclipse’s totality was only a few minutes, and even on one of those shadow-chasing planes there was only a bit more than three hours’ shelter to be had at best. But you couldn’t blame people for trying, Bisesa supposed.

Somehow this neat bit of celestial clockwork made the dreadful morning real for Bisesa. The Firstborn had
arranged
the storm for this precise moment, with this cosmic coincidence bright in Earth’s sky. They had even had the arrogance to show her what they intended. And now here it was, unfolding just as they had planned, live on TV—

Myra gasped. Bisesa clutched her daughter.

In that eclipse image, light gushed around the blackened circle of the Moon, as if an immense bomb had gone off on the satellite’s far side. It was the sunstorm, of course. Bisesa’s clock showed it was breaking at the very second Eugene Mangles had predicted. There was a brief, tantalizing glimpse of eclipse-tracking planes falling out of the sky.

Then that bit of the softwall flickered, fritzed, and turned to the sky blue of no feed. One by one the other segments of the softwall winked out, and the talking heads fell silent.

0310 (London Time)

On board the
Aurora 2,
the shield’s mission controllers broke out bags of salted peanuts.

Bud Tooke grabbed a bag of his own. This was an old good-luck tradition that derived from JPL—the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—which had always handled NASA’s great unmanned spacecraft, and which had supplied key personnel and wisdom for this project. Now’s the time for luck, Bud thought.

One big softscreen was dedicated to showing a view of the whole Earth.

From the point of view of Bud’s mission control room, right at the center of the shield, celestial geometry was simple. Here at L1 the shield hung forever between sun and Earth. So from Bud’s point of view the Earth was always full. But today, right on cue, the Moon had moved between sun and Earth, and so was sailing through the shield’s tunnel of shadow—a tunnel nearly four times as wide as the Moon itself. Bud could even make out the deeper shadow that the Moon cast on the face of the Earth, a broad gray disk passing over the Pacific. This remarkable alignment was seen in a ghostly, reduced light, for the shield was doing its job of turning aside all but a trickle of sunlight.

When the storm broke, the Moon’s illuminated face flared a fraction of a second before the hail of light splashed against the face of the Earth.

Bud turned immediately to his people. He surveyed rows of faces, the people in the room with him, or transmitted from across the face of the shield and the Moon. He saw shocked, blanched expressions, mouths round. Bud had always insisted on full mission control discipline, to the standards honed by NASA across eighty years of manned spaceflight. And that discipline, that focus, was more important now than ever.

He touched his throat microphone. “This is Flight. Let’s get to work, folks. We’ll go around the loop. Ops—”

Rose Delea was surrounded by a tent of softscreens; for this critical day he had put her in overall charge of shield operations. “Nominal, Flight. We’re taking a battering from the hard rain, everything from ultraviolet to X-rays. But we’re holding for now, and Athena is responding.”

While the peak energy of the storm was expected to be in the visible light spectrum, there was plenty of shit pouring down at shorter wavelengths too—not to mention the immense flare that had kicked off yesterday. The electronic components of the shield had been hardened to military standard, and the people were protected too, as far as possible. There would be losses of the shield’s capacity, and among the crew. It was going to be painful, but enough slack had been built into the design that the shield should get through.

But there was nothing they could do for the Earth. The shield had been designed to cope with the peak-energy bombardment in the visible and near-infrared spectrum, which would soon cut in; this preliminary sleet of X-rays and gamma rays would pass through its structure as if it didn’t exist. They had always known it would be like this: the shield was engineering, not magic, and couldn’t deflect it all. They had had to make hard choices. You did your best, and moved on. But it was agonizing to sit up here knowing you could offer the Earth no help, none at all.

“Okay,” Bud said. “Capcom, Flight.”

“Flight, Capcom,” Mario Ponzo called. “We’re ready for when you call on us, Flight.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to for a while yet.”

Mario, pilot of an Earth–Moon shuttle, had volunteered for a position up here after he had met Siobhan McGorran during one of her jaunts to the Moon. Mario was responsible for communicating with the maintenance crews who stood ready in their hardened spacesuits to go out into the storm. Bud had given him the title of Capcom—“capsule communicator.” Like Bud’s own job title of Flight Director, “Capcom” was a bit of NASA jargon that dated from the days of the first
Mercury
flights, when you really did have to communicate with a man in a capsule. But everybody knew what it meant, and it was a word that carried its own traditions. Mario had his traditions too, in fact; he was the most heavily bearded man on the shield, superstitiously unwilling to shave in space.