Sunstorm (24 page)

But Bisesa’s face was dark. “I don’t know about God. But others are watching us, I’m sure of that.”

Siobhan said carefully, “You’re still thinking about the Firstborn.”

“How can I not?” Bisesa said, drawn.

With fresh coffee, they huddled together on Bisesa’s overstuffed furniture. It was an incongruously domestic setting, Siobhan thought, to be discussing one of the most philosophically profound discoveries ever made. “I suppose it is the dream of ages,” she said. “We’ve been speculating on intelligence beyond the Earth since the Greeks.”

Bisesa looked distant. “Even now I can’t get used to the idea.”

“It’s tough for any scientist,” Siobhan said. “ ‘Arguments by design’—that is, to build your theories about the universe on the assumption that it was designed for some conscious purpose—went out of fashion three hundred years ago. Darwin hammered the last nail in that particular coffin. Of course it was God who was the fashionable designer back then, not ET. For a scientist it goes against all training to think in such terms. Which is why it was my instinct to put you in touch with Eugene, Bisesa. I wondered what would happen if you jolted him into thinking differently. I guess that instinct was right. But it still feels unnatural.” She sighed. “A guilty pleasure.”

Bisesa said, “How do you think people are going to take this, when they are finally told?”

Siobhan explored her own feelings. “The implications are immense—political, social, philosophical. Everything changes. Even if we discover nothing else about these creatures you call the Firstborn, Bisesa, and no matter how the sunstorm turns out, just the fact that we know they exist proves that we are not unique in the universe. Any future we care to imagine now contains the possibility of others.”

“I think people have a right to know,” Bisesa said.

Siobhan nodded; it was an old point of disagreement between them.

Bisesa said, “We reached the Moon, and Mars. Here we are building a structure as big as a planet. And yet all our achievements count for nothing—not against a power that can do
this.
But I don’t believe people will be overawed. I think people will feel angry.”

“I still don’t understand,” Siobhan said. “
Why
would these Firstborn of yours want to put us under threat of extinction?”

Bisesa shook her head. “I know the Firstborn better than anybody else, I guess. But I can’t answer that. One thing I’m sure about, though. They
watch.
”

“Watch?”

“I think that’s what Mir was all about. Mir was a montage of all our history, right up to the moment of this—our possible destruction. Mir wasn’t about us but about the Firstborn. They forced themselves to look at what they were destroying, to face what they had done.”

She spoke hesitantly, obviously unsure of her thinking. Siobhan imagined her sitting alone for long hours, obsessively exploring her memories and her own uncertain feelings.

Bisesa went on, “They don’t want anything we know, or can make. They aren’t interested in our science or our art—otherwise they would be saving our books, our paintings, even some of us. Our
stuff
is far beneath them. What they do want—I think—is to know how it feels to be
us,
to be human. And how it feels even as we’re put to the fire.”

“So they value consciousness,” Siobhan mused. “I can see why an advanced civilization would prize mind above all other things. Perhaps it is rare in this universe of ours. They prize it, even as they destroy it. So they have ethics. Maybe they are guilty about what they’re doing.”

Bisesa laughed bitterly. “But they’re doing it even so. Which doesn’t make sense, does it? Can gods be insane?”

Siobhan glanced out at the gaunt shadows of the Dome. “Perhaps there’s a logic, even in all this destruction.”

“Do you believe that?”

Siobhan grinned. “Even if I did, I’d reject it. The hell with them.”

Bisesa answered with a fierce grin of her own. “Yes,” she said. “The hell with them.”

29: Impact

The rogue planet flew out of the sky’s equator.

While light flashed from Altair to Sol in sixteen years, the wandering planet had taken a millennium to complete its interstellar journey. Even so it approached the sun at some five
thousand
kilometers per second, many times the sun’s own escape velocity: it was the fastest major object ever to have crossed the solar system. As it fell toward the sun’s warmth, the Jovian’s atmosphere was battered by immense storms, and trillions of tonnes of air were stripped away, to trail behind the falling world like the tail of an immense comet.

On Earth, it was the year 4
B.C.

If the rogue had come in the twenty-first century, humanity’s Spaceguard program would have spotted it. Spaceguard had its origins in a twentieth-century NASA program designed to survey all the major comets and asteroids following orbits that might bring them into a collision with the Earth. The organization’s scientists had debated many ways to deflect an incoming threat, including solar sails or nuclear weapons. But while such methods might have worked on a flying-mountain asteroid, there would have been nothing to be done about a mass
this
size.

In 4
B.C.
, of course, there was no Spaceguard. The ancient world had known lenses since the great days of the Greeks, but it had not yet occurred to anybody to put two of them together into a telescope. But there were those who watched the sky, for in its intricate weavings of light they thought they glimpsed the thoughts of God.

In April of that year, across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, a great new light approached the sun. To the astrologers and astronomers, who knew every naked-eye object in the sky far better than most of their descendants of the twenty-first century, the Jovian was a glaring anomaly, and a source of fascination and fear.

Three scholars in particular watched it in awe. They called themselves
magi,
or
magoi,
which means “astrologers”—stargazers. And in the Jovian’s final days, as it neared the sun and became a morning star of ever more brilliant beauty, they followed it.

The planet battered its way through the sun’s wispy outer atmosphere, the corona. Now the star itself lay before it, unprotected.

The Jovian was a planet a fifth the diameter of the sun itself. Even at such speeds, a collision between two such immense bodies was stately. It took a full minute for the whole planet to sink into the body of the star.

In normal times the sun’s surface is a delicate tapestry of granules, the upper surfaces of huge convection cells with roots in the sun’s deep interior. When the Jovian hit, that complex hierarchical structure was disturbed, as if a baseball had been thrown into a pan of boiling water. Immense waves washed away from the point of impact and rolled around the curvature of the star.

Meanwhile the planet itself was immersed in a bath of intense heat. Through direct collisions between the sun’s plasma and the planet’s atmosphere, the sun’s energy poured into this outrageous invader. In response, the planet desperately tried to shed heat by losing its own substance. The upper layers of its air, mostly hydrogen and helium, were soon stripped off, exposing the inner layers, exotic high-pressure liquid and solid forms of hydrogen, which in turn boiled away. It was exactly as
Apollo
capsules had once entered Earth’s atmosphere behind ablative shields, allowing bits of the disintegrating spacecraft to carry away the heat of friction. For the Jovian the strategy worked for a while. The planet had entered the sun with the mass of fifteen Jupiters, and had the capacity to soak up a
lot
of heat before it was done.

Deeper and deeper the Jovian sank, through the sun’s roiling convective layer, and then into the denser, static radiative layer beneath. It was like a driving fist, and it left behind a tunnel drilled brutally through the sun’s strata, a flaw that would take millennia to heal.

By the time the Jovian reached the edge of the sun’s fusing core, it was reduced to a knot of its densest, hardest stuff—and yet it still retained a mass many times that of Jupiter. Here the last of the Jovian’s mass was broken up and dispersed—but not before it struck the core of the sun a mighty blow. There was a vast fusion surge, like an immense bomb going off at the edge of this natural reactor. That great impulse sent shock fronts pushing deep into the fusing core.

As Eugene Mangles would understand, the core was temperamental, its rate of fusion highly sensitive to changes in temperature. The Jovian was gone, but its impact had created a pattern of energetic oscillations in the core that would persist for millennia.

Meanwhile on the surface, though the planet had disappeared into the sun’s maw, the point of impact was a place of roiling turmoil.

On its way into the heart of the star, the Jovian had torn through a sensitive boundary called the tacholine: the boundary between convective and radiative zones. The dull sea of the radiative zone rotates with the sun’s core, almost as a rigid body. But the convective zone’s motion is much more complex; different parts of the sun’s surface can actually be seen to rotate at different speeds. So, at the tacholine, there is friction: the convective material moves over the radiative like a tremendous wind.

The sun is laced by a powerful magnetic field. Its interior is full of “flux tubes,” currents of magnetic energy that flow through the plasma sea. At the tacholine the differing rotations of the sun’s layers stretch the flux tubes around the sun’s equator. Mostly the churning convection above keeps them in their place. But sometimes a kink will develop in a sun-girdling rope, and it will force its way up toward the surface of the sun, dragging plasma flows with it. This is the sequence of events that leads to the “active regions” that give rise to flares and mass ejections.

So it was now. The Jovian’s crashing through the tacholine caused the stretched and tangled field lines to writhe like snakes. Flux tubes surged up through the body of the sun, broke the surface, and thrashed above the enormous scar left by the Jovian. Energy was dumped into space in a great flare of light, as high-frequency radiation, and in a fountain of charged particles that gushed out across the solar system.

A huge solar storm battered at the Earth. With the planet’s own magnetic field flapping like a loose sail, immense auroras were visible all across the world. The Jovian’s most severe effects lay far in the future. But right here, right now, it announced its arrival in uncompromising fashion.

On Earth in 4
B.C.
there was no high technology to be harmed—but millions of natural computers, running on biomolecules and electricity, were subtly affected by the magnetic turbulence. People suffered blackouts, fits, seizures; some unlucky souls died of no cause anybody could detect. As Miriam Grec would learn to her supreme cost, magnetic disturbances can stimulate religious impulses in human brains: there was a plague of prophets and doomsayers, miracles and visions.

And in a shabby room in Bethlehem, a newborn child, lying on dirty hay, stirred and gasped, tormented by images He could not comprehend.

30: Telescope

Ever since President Alvarez’s devastating announcement in December 2037, the sunstorm crisis had been oddly bound up with Christmas. The last Christmas before the sunstorm, in 2041, with only four months left before the storm was due to break, was a frenzy of forced gaiety. Bisesa suspected that everybody was secretly glad when it was over.

As for herself, she bought a telescope. And one bright morning in January 2042, with the help of Myra and Linda, she hauled it up to the roof of her apartment block. On this January day, bright and clear, the sun was low in the eastern sky, and the view from this Chelsea rooftop was spectacular. The Dome’s buttresses gleamed like sunbeams, and the smartskin blankets draped over every exposed surface shone like so many huge flowers.

The telescope was a ten-centimeter refractor, secondhand, a big clunky thing more than twenty years old, and it was cheap. But it was smart enough that it could determine its own position and attitude by consulting the Global Positioning System. And then, if you told it what you wanted to look at, with a hum and a whir it would point itself that way and immediately begin tracking, compensating for the Earth’s rotation. Linda had laughed at the gadget’s antiquated user interface—it actually featured that comical horror, a menu system—but it worked well enough.

In central London, with an increasing fraction of the sky blocked out by the Dome, telescopes were of little use, unless you wanted to spy on the gangs of workers who crawled over the inside of the Dome’s roof day and night. But what Bisesa wanted to look at was the sun.

When Bisesa told it what she wanted to see, the telescope’s nanny software immediately started bleating warnings about safe usage. Bisesa already knew all about the dangers. You couldn’t look directly at the sun through a telescope, unless you wanted your eye burned out, but you could project an image. So Bisesa brought up a folding chair and set up a broad sheet of white cartridge paper behind the telescope’s eyepiece. The final positioning of the paper in the telescope’s shadow, and the focusing of the instrument, was a little tricky. But at last, in the middle of the telescope’s complicated shadow, a disk of milky white appeared.

Bisesa was surprised by the clarity of the image, and its size, maybe a third of a meter across. Toward the rim of the disk the brightness faded a little, so she had a clear sense that she was looking at a sphere, a three-dimensional object. Sunspot groups were speckled around the sun’s midlatitudes, easily visible, looking like motes of dust in a shining bowl. It was galling to think that each of those dwarfed dust-speck anomalies was larger than the whole Earth, and, glowing at temperatures of thousands of degrees, they showed as shadows only because they were cooler than the rest of the sun’s surface.

But it was not sunspots that Bisesa had bought her telescope to see.

A line crossed the face of the sun, a stripe of watery gray that traversed from northeast to southwest. It was, of course, the shield. Hanging up there at its station at L1, it was still turned almost edge-on to the sun. But already it cast a shadow on the Earth.