Sunstorm (36 page)

“Yes,” she admitted miserably. “I couldn’t tell you, Bud. I just couldn’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because you might have stopped me.”

It took a couple of minutes to extract the principle of Athena’s solution. It was simple enough. Indeed, both Mikhail and Eugene knew all about the method long before the fateful stirring of the sun.

Earth’s “van Allen radiation belts” reach from a thousand kilometers above the equator out to sixty thousand kilometers from Earth. There, charged particles from the solar wind, mass ejections, and other events are trapped by the magnetosphere. This has practical consequences: satellites anywhere in the zone are continually prone to a degradation of their electrical components from the steady wind of charged particles.

But, it had been learned, it was possible to “drain” the particles out of the van Allen belts. The idea was to use very low-frequency radio waves to push aside the particles. At the magnetic poles they would leak out of the van Allen trap into the upper atmosphere. This principle had been exploited since 2015, when a suite of protective satellites had been set up in orbit around the belts. It didn’t take much power, Bud learned now: an output of just a few watts per satellite could halve the time an electron spent in the van Allen belts.

“These cleansers are kept mostly dormant,” Mikhail said. “But they are switched on after the most severe solar storms—oh, and after 2020, when the nuclear destruction of Lahore threw a lot of high-energy particles into the upper atmosphere.”

Eugene said, “It’s interesting that we’ve never actually observed the van Allen belts in their natural state. Just after their discovery in 1958 the United States detonated two big nukes over the Atlantic, swamping the belts with charged particles. And since then, everyday radio transmissions have been affecting the speed at which the charged particles drain away—”

Bud held up his hand. “Enough. Athena, is this how you are planning to deflect the particle storm?”

“Yes,” Athena said, a bit too brightly. “After all, the shield is like one big antenna, and it is laced with electronic components.”

“Ah.” Mikhail turned away, murmuring to Eugene, and punched at a softscreen. “Colonel, it could work. The shield’s electronic components are light and low-powered. But with some smart coordination by Athena, they could be used to produce pulses of very long-wavelength radio waves—as long as the shield’s diameter, if we wish. The particle storm is so wide we can’t reach it all. But Athena could punch a hole in it, an Earth-sized hole.” He checked his numbers and shrugged. “It won’t be perfect. But it will be pretty good, I think.”

Eugene put in, “Of course it’s the thinness of this cloud that has saved the day.”

Bud didn’t understand. “What has the thinness got to do with it?”

“That means the cloud will pass quickly. And that’s important. Because the shield won’t survive long.” Eugene said this in his usual cold, unemotional way. “Do you see?”

Mikhail studied Bud. “Colonel Tooke, the shield was not designed for this. The power loads—the components will be overloaded, burned out, quite quickly.”

Bud saw it. “And Athena?”

Mikhail said bleakly, “Athena won’t survive.”

Bud rubbed his face. “Oh, girl.”

Her voice was small. “Did I do something wrong, Bud?”

“No. No, you didn’t do anything wrong. But that’s why you couldn’t tell me, wasn’t it?”

When she realized she could save the Earth by throwing herself into the fire, Athena had known her duty immediately. But she had been afraid that Bud might stop her—and then the Earth would be forfeit—and that she couldn’t allow.

She had known all this, been faced with this tangled dilemma, from the moment she had been booted up.

“No wonder you’ve been confused,” Bud said. “You should have talked to us about it. You should have talked to
me.
”

“I couldn’t.” She hesitated. “I meant too much to you.”

“Of course you mean a lot to me, Athena—”

“I’m here with you, while your son is stuck on Earth. Here in space, I’m your family. Like your daughter. I do understand, you see, Bud. That’s why you might have been tempted to save me, despite everything else.”

“And you thought I would stop you because of this.”

“I was afraid you would, yes.”

On the softscreens Mikhail and Eugene wore carefully grave expressions. Athena’s grasp of human psychology was as weak as her sense of ethics, if she thought that she could ever be some kind of recompense for Bud’s isolation from his son. But now wasn’t the time to tell her.

Bud felt his battered heart tear a little more. Poor Athena, he thought. “Girl, I would never stop you doing your duty.”

There was a long pause. “Thank you, Bud.”

Mikhail said gently, “Athena, just remember that there is a copy of you, encoded into the Extirpator’s blast. You might live forever, whatever happens today.”

“
It
might,” Athena said. “The copy. But
it
isn’t me, Doctor Martynov. Less than thirty minutes to go,” she said calmly.

“Athena—”

“I’m properly positioned and ready to go to work, Bud. By the way, I have sent distributed commands to my local processors. The shield will continue to function even after my central cognitive functions have broken down. That will give you a few more minutes’ protection.”

“Thank you,” Mikhail said gravely.

Athena said, “Bud, am I one of the team now?”

“Yes. You’re one of the team. You always have been.”

“I have always had the greatest enthusiasm for the mission.”

“I know, girl. You always did your best. Is there anything you want?”

She paused for more than a second, an eternity for her. “Just talk to me, Bud. You know I always enjoy that. Tell me about yourself.”

Bud rubbed his grimy face and sat back. “But you know a lot of it already.”

“Tell me anyhow.”

“All right. I was born on a farm. You know that. I was always a dreamy sort of kid—not that you’d have known it to look at me . . .”

It was the longest twenty-eight minutes of his life.

48: Cerenkov Radiation

Bisesa and Myra followed the crowd to the river.

They arrived at the Thames not far from Hammersmith Bridge. The river was high, swollen with rain runoff. They were lucky not to be flooded, in fact. They sat side by side on a low wall and waited silently.

Pubs and tony restaurants crowded the riverbank here, and in summer you could drink cold beer, and watch pleasure boats and rowers in their eights sliding along the water. Now the pubs were boarded up or burned out, but in their riverside gardens a crude tent city had been set up, and the flag of the Red Cross hung limply on a pole. Bisesa was impressed by even this much organization.

It was deepest night now. To the west, outer London still burned, and plumes of smoke and sparks towered into the air. And to the east, flames licked fitfully at the great shoulder of the London Dome. Even the river wasn’t immune. Its surface was a carpet of debris, some of it glowing. Perhaps there were bodies in there, slowly drifting toward the final graveyard of the sea; Bisesa didn’t want to look too closely.

She was vaguely amazed that she was still alive. But mostly she felt nothing at all. It was a wrung-out sensation that she recognized from her military training: delayed shock.

“Oh,” Myra said. “Thank you.”

Bisesa turned. A woman laden with a tray of polystyrene mugs was working her way through the listless crowd.

Myra took a sip and pulled a face. “Chicken soup. Made from powder too. Yuck.”

Bisesa drank some of the soup. “It’s a miracle they’re this organized so quickly. But—yes, yuck.”

She turned back to the battered city. She wasn’t really used to cities, and had never much liked London life. She had grown up on that Cheshire farm. Her military training had taken her to the wastes of Afghanistan—and then her jaunt to Mir had dumped her in an all-but-empty world. Her Chelsea flat had been a legacy from a fond aunt, too valuable to turn down, too convenient a home for herself and Myra; she’d always meant to sell it someday.

But since returning home she had rarely left London. After the emptiness of Mir she had enjoyed the sense of people around her, the millions of them comfortingly arrayed in their offices and flats, in the parks and the roads, and crammed into Underground tunnels. And when the threat of the sunstorm had been raised, she had become even more deeply attached to London, for suddenly the city and the human civilization it represented was under threat.

But this was a deep-rooted place, where the bones of the dead lay crowded a hundred generations deep in the ground. Against that perspective, even the sunstorm’s wrath was nothing. Londoners would rebuild, as they always had before. And archaeologists of the future, digging into the ground, would find a band of ash and flood debris, pressed between centuries-thick layers of history, like the bands of ash left by Boudicca and the Great Fire and the Blitz, others who had tried and failed to burn London down.

She was distracted by a faint blue glow in the air above the Dome. It was so faint it was difficult to see through all the smoke, and she wasn’t even sure it was real. She said to Myra, “Do you see that? There—there it is again. That blue shining. Can you see?”

Myra looked up and squinted. “I think so.”

“What do you think it is?”

“A Cerenkov glow, probably,” Myra said.

After years of public education about the sunstorm, everybody was an expert on this kind of thing. You’d encounter Cerenkov radiation around a nuclear reactor. The visible light was a secondary effect, a kind of optical shock wave given off by charged particles forcing their way through a medium such as air, faster than the local speed of light.

But in the sunstorm’s elaborate physical sequence,
this
wasn’t supposed to happen, not now.

Bisesa said, “What do you think it means?”

Myra shrugged. “The sun’s up to something, I suppose. But there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? I think I’m all worried out, Mum.”

Bisesa took her daughter’s hand. Myra was right. There was nothing they could do but wait, under the unnatural sky, in air glowing faintly blue, to see what happened next.

Myra drained her mug. “I wonder if they have any more soup.”

PART 6

A TIME ODYSSEY

49: Pacific

The platform in the sea, some two hundred kilometers west of Perth, was unprepossessing. To Bisesa, looking down from the chopper, it looked like an oil rig, and a small one at that.

It was impossible to believe that if all went well today, this place would become Earth’s first true spaceport.

The chopper landed, a bit bumpily, and Bisesa and Myra clambered out. Bisesa flinched as the full force of the Pacific sun hit her, despite the broad hat strapped to her head. Five years after the sunstorm, though fleets of aircraft day and night patrolled the skies towing electrically charged grids and pumping out chemicals, the ozone layer had still not fully recovered.

None of this seemed to bother Myra, though. Eighteen years old, she was as sun-creamed as her mother, but somehow she wore it elegantly. She was actually wearing a skirt today, uncharacteristically for her, a long billowy creation that didn’t impede her at all as she clambered out of the chopper.

A red carpet striped across the rig’s steel surface to a cluster of buildings and unidentifiable machinery. Side by side, mother and daughter walked along this path. Press reporters lined the carpet, cameras hovering at their shoulders.

Waiting to greet them at the end of the carpet was a small, round woman: the Prime Minister of Australia, and the first Aborigine to hold that position. An aide murmured in the Prime Minister’s ear, evidently informing her who these peculiar-looking people were, and her greeting was generous.

Bisesa didn’t know what to say, but Myra chatted confidently, charming everybody in sight. Myra had her heart set on becoming an astronaut—and there was every chance she would make it; astronautics was one of the world’s biggest growth areas. “And so I’m fascinated by the Space Elevator,” she said. “I hope I’ll be riding up it someday soon!”

Nobody paid Bisesa much attention. She was here today as the guest of Siobhan Tooke, née McGorran, but nobody knew who she was or what her connection was with Siobhan, which was the way she preferred it. The cameras loved Myra, though, and Myra, a bit mockingly, made the most of it. Myra was quite unrecognizable as the bedraggled thirteen-year-old refugee of that terrible night after the sunstorm. She had become a very intelligent and confident young woman—not to mention acquiring a willowy beauty that Bisesa had never enjoyed.

Bisesa was proud of Myra, but she herself felt stranded on the wrong side of some intangible barrier of age. After the multiple shocks she had endured—her experience on Mir, the sunstorm itself, and the years of slow and painful recovery that had followed—she had done her best to rebuild her life, and to provide a stable platform for Myra’s future. But she still felt like a mess inside, and probably always would.

Somehow the storm had been good for the world’s young people, however. This new breed seemed energized by the challenges that faced humankind. Which was not entirely a comfortable thought.

More guests were clattering in on more choppers, and the Prime Minister moved on.

Aides guided Bisesa and Myra toward a marquee full of drinks-laden tables and flower settings, incongruous on this island of engineering.

There was quite a crowd here, including notable figures from around the globe, such as former President Alvarez of the United States, the heir to the British throne—and, Bisesa suspected, plenty of that cowardly overfed crew who had spent the sunstorm skulking in the shadows of L2 while everybody else took the heat.

Children squirmed between the legs of the adults, plenty of them under five; after the dip in the birthrate before the sunstorm there had been a plethora of pregnancies since. As ever these little people were only interested in each other, and Bisesa was charmed that below the adults’ eye level an entirely separate social event was happening.

“Bisesa!”

Siobhan came shoving through the crowd. Her husband Bud was at her side, resplendent in the uniform of a general of the U.S. Air and Space Force, and beaming from ear to ear. With them came Mikhail Martynov and Eugene Mangles. Mikhail was walking with a stick; he smiled fondly at Bisesa.

But Myra, as Bisesa should have guessed, only had eyes for Eugene. “Wow. Who ordered
that
?”

Eugene was now in his late twenties or maybe thirty, Bisesa calculated, probably more than a decade older than Myra. He was still as good-looking as hell; in fact age, which had hardened the planes of his face a little, had improved him even more. But he looked frankly ridiculous in a suit. And as Myra closed in on him he looked terrified.

“Hi. I’m Myra Dutt, Bisesa’s daughter. We met a few years ago.”

He stammered, “Did we?”

“Oh, yes. One of those medal ceremonies. You know, the gongs and the Presidents. They all blur together, don’t they?”

“I suppose—”

“I’m eighteen, I just started university, and I’m planning to go into astronautics. You’re the one who figured out the sunstorm, didn’t you? What are you doing now?”

“Well, in fact, I’m working on the application of chaos theory to weather control.”

“So from space weather to Earth weather?”

“Actually the two aren’t as disconnected as you might think . . .”

Myra took his arm and led him away toward a drinks table.

Bisesa approached Siobhan and the others a bit gingerly; it had been a long time. But they all smiled, swapped kisses, and embraced.

Siobhan said, “Myra’s relentless, isn’t she?”

“She gets what she wants,” Bisesa said ruefully. “But that’s what kids are like nowadays.”

Mikhail nodded. “Good for them. And if it turns out to be what Eugene wants too—well, let’s hope it all works out.”

Even now Bisesa could hear the regret and loss in his voice. On impulse she hugged him again—but carefully. He felt shockingly frail; the word was that during the buildup to the sunstorm he had spent too long on the Moon and had neglected his health. She said, “Let’s not marry them off just yet.”

He smiled, his face crumpling. “He knows how I feel about him, you know.”

“He does?”

“He always has. He’s kind, in his way. It’s just there’s not much room in that head of his for anything but work.”

Siobhan snorted. “I have a feeling Myra will make room, if anybody can.”

Bisesa and Siobhan had remained close e-mail buddies, but hadn’t met in person for years. Now in her fifties, Siobhan’s hair was laced with a handsome gray, and she was dressed in a colorful but formal suit. She looked every inch what she was, Bisesa thought, still the Astronomer Royal, a popular media figure and a favorite of the British, Eurasian, and American establishments. But she still had that sharp look in her eye, that bright intelligence—and the humorous open-minded skepticism that had enabled her to consider Bisesa’s odd story of aliens and other worlds, all those years ago.

“You look terrific,” Bisesa said honestly.

Siobhan waved that away. “Terrifically older.”

“Time passes,” Bud said, a bit stiffly. “Myra was right, wasn’t she? The last time we were all together was at the time of the medals-and-flags stuff after the storm.”

“I enjoyed all that,” Mikhail said. “I always loved disaster movies! And every good disaster movie should end with a medal ceremony, or a wedding, or preferably both, ideally in the ruins of the White House. In fact, if you recall, the very last occasion we all met was the Nobel Prize ceremony.”
That
had nearly been a disaster in itself. Eugene had had to be pressured to go up and accept his award for his work on the sunstorm: he had insisted that nobody who had got it so badly wrong had any right to recognition, but Mikhail had talked him around. “I think he’ll thank me someday,” he had said.

Bisesa turned to Bud. Now in his late fifties, a head shorter than his wife, Bud had matured into the kind of tanned, lean, unreasonably handsome senior officer that the American armed forces seemed to turn out by the dozen. But Bisesa thought she saw a strain about his smile, a tension in his posture.

“Bud, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “Did you hear Myra say she’s going into astronautics? I was hoping you might have a word with her.”

“To encourage her?”

“To talk her out of it! I worry enough as it is, without seeing her sent up
there.
”

Bud touched her arm with his massive scarred hand. “I think she’s going to do what she wants to do, whatever we say. But I’ll keep an eye on her.”

Mikhail leaned forward on his stick. “But tell her never to neglect her exercises—look what happened to me!”

Siobhan caught Bisesa’s eye warningly. Bisesa understood: Mikhail clearly knew nothing about Bud’s cancer, the sunstorm’s final bitter legacy. Bisesa thought it was a viciously cruel fate for Siobhan and Bud to have been granted so little time together—even if, as she suspected, the illness had actually brought about their reconciliation, after their sad falling-out during the pressures of the storm itself.

Myra came fluttering back, by now towing Eugene by the hand. “Mum, you know what—Eugene really is working on how to control the weather! . . .”

Bisesa actually knew a little about the project. It was the latest in a whole spectrum of recovery initiatives since the sunstorm—and not even the most ambitious. But it was a time when ambition was precisely what humankind needed most.

Ninety percent of the human population had come through the sunstorm alive.
Ninety percent:
that meant a billion had died, a billion souls. It could, of course, have been far worse.

But planet Earth had been struck a devastating blow. The oceans were empty, the lands desiccated, and the works of humanity burned to ruins. Food chains had been severed on land and in the seas, and while frantic early efforts had ensured that there had been few actual species extinctions, the sheer number of living things on the planet had crashed.

The first priority in those early days had been just to shelter and feed people. The authorities had been prepared to some extent, and heroic efforts to sustain adequate water supplies and sanitation had mostly fended off disease. But food stocks, set aside before the storm, had quickly run down.

The months after the storm, spent trying to secure the first harvests, had been a terrifying, wearying time. Lingering radioactive products in the soil and their working their way into the food chain hadn’t helped. And with all the energy that had been poured into the planet’s natural systems, leaving the atmosphere and oceans sloshing like water in a bathtub, the climate during that first year had been all over the place. In battered London there had been a momentous evacuation from the floodplain of a relentlessly widening Thames into tent cities hastily erected on the South Downs and in the Chilterns.

Because the sunstorm had occurred in the northern hemisphere’s spring, northern continents had suffered most severely; North America, Europe, and Asia had all had their agricultural economies almost wiped out. The continents of the south, recovering more rapidly in the strange season that followed, had led the revival. Africa especially had turned itself into the breadbasket of the world—and those with a sense of history noted the justness that Africa, the continent where humankind was born, was now reaching out to support the younger lands in this time of need.

As hunger cut in, there had been some tense standoffs—but the darkest prestorm fears, of opportunistic wars over lebensraum, or even simple grudge settling, hadn’t come to pass. Instead there had been a generous globewide sharing. Harder heads had begun to speculate, though, about longer-term shifts in geopolitical power.

Once the crisis of the first year was passed, more ambitious recovery programs were initiated. Active measures were taken to promote the recovery of the ozone layer, and to cleanse the air of the worst of the post-sunstorm crud. On land fast-growing trees and topsoil-fixing grasses were planted, and in the oceans iron compounds were injected to stimulate the growth of plankton, the little creatures at the base of the oceanic food chains, and so to accelerate biomass recovery in the seas. Earth was suddenly a planet crawling with engineers.

Bisesa was old enough to remember anguished turn-of-the-century debates about this kind of “geo-engineering,” long before anybody had heard of the sunstorm. Was it
moral
to apply such massive engineering initiatives to the environment? On a planet of intricately interconnected systems of life and air, water and rock, could we even predict the consequences of what we were doing?

Now the situation had changed. In the wake of the sunstorm, if there was to be a hope of keeping the planet’s still-massive human population alive, there was really little choice but to try to rebuild the living Earth—and now, happily, there was a great deal more wisdom available about how to do it.

Decades of intensive research had paid off in a deep understanding of the working of ecologies. Even a small, limited, and contained ecosystem turned out to be extraordinarily complex, with webs of energy flows and interdependence—networks of who ate whom—complicated enough to baffle the most mathematical mind. Not only that, ecologies were intrinsically chaotic systems. They were prone to crash and bloom of their own accord, even without any outside interference. Fortunately, however, human ingenuity, supplemented by electronic support, had accelerated to the point where it could riddle out even the complexities of nature. You could manage chaos: it just took a lot of processing.