Sunstorm

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Bisesa’s voice was weary, rather flat, and Siobhan couldn’t decode her mood. “You don’t approve?”

  “Oh, of course I do. Though there are plenty who don’t.” Bisesa nodded at a soldier, heavily armed and very young looking, who patrolled on the other side of the pit.

  The debate about sheltering nonhuman life-forms from the sunstorm extended beyond the chimps, where the law was reasonably clear. As the sunstorm neared, a vast worldwide effort had been initiated to save at least a sample of the world’s major kingdoms of life. Much of it was necessarily crude: beneath the London Ark huge hibernacula had been installed to preserve the zygotes of animals, insects, birds, and fish, and the seeds of plants from grasses to pine trees. As for the animals, the Arks had been doing this sort of thing for decades already; since the turn of the century the western zoos had hosted reserve populations of animals that had long died out in the wild—all the elephants, the tigers, even one species of chimp.

  Of course it was essentially futile, said some ecologists. Though the diversity of life in cool, cloudy Britain, say, was nothing like as rich as in an equatorial rain forest, there were probably more species to be found in a single handful of soil from a London garden, most of them unidentified, than had been known to all the naturalists in the world a century ago. You couldn’t save it all—but the alternative was to do nothing, and most people seemed to agree you had to try.

  But some resented as much as a finger being lifted to save anything other than a human being.

  “It’s a time of hard choices.” Siobhan sighed. “You know, the other day I spoke to an ecologist who said we should just accept what’s going on. This is just another extinction event, in a long string of such disasters. It’s like a forest fire, she said, a necessary cleansing. And each time the biosphere bounces back, eventually becoming richer than before.”

  “But this isn’t natural,” Bisesa said grimly. “Not even the way an asteroid impact is. Somebody did this, intentionally. Maybe this is why intelligence evolved in the first place. Because there are times—when the sun goes off, when the dinosaur killer strikes—when the mechanisms of natural selection aren’t enough. Times when you need consciousness to save the world.”

  “A biologist would say there is no intention behind natural selection, Bisesa. And evolution can’t prepare you for the future.”

  “Yes,” she smiled. “But I’m no biologist, so I can say it…”

  Such conversations were why Siobhan valued Bisesa’s company so much.

  Seven months before sunstorm day, the world worked frantically to prepare itself. But much of what was being done, however vital, was mundane. For instance, London’s latest Mayor had got herself elected on the basic but undeniably effective pledge that come what may she would ensure the city’s water supply, and since coming to office she had made good on that promise. A vast new pipeline laid the length of the country from the great Kielder reservoir in the north to the capital—though many in the northeast had grumbled loudly about the “southern softies” who were stealing “their” water. Such work was obviously essential—Siobhan herself was involved in many such projects—but it was banal.

  Sometimes the volume of chatter overwhelmed her ability to see things clearly. It was Bisesa, sitting alone in her flat and just thinking, who was one of her touchstones, her viewpoints of the bigger picture. It was Bisesa, thinking out of the box, who had come up with the essential notion of community support for smartskin manufacture. And, after all, it was Bisesa who had given Siobhan an insight into the deepest mystery of all.

  Ever since that crucial videoconference, and Eugene Mangles’s proof that there was indeed an element of intention about the disturbance of the sun, Bisesa’s claims about the Firstborn and Mir had been taken seriously, and were being investigated in a slow-burning kind of way. Nobody believed the full story—not even Siobhan, she admitted to herself. But most of her ad hoc brains trust accepted that, yes, the disturbance of the sun so clearly reconstructed by Eugene could have been caused only by the intervention of some intelligent agency. That alone, even if you didn’t speculate about the intent of that intelligence, was a staggering conclusion to draw.

  Bisesa’s insights had helped guide Eugene and others to a fuller understanding of the physical mechanism behind the sunstorm, and had, conceivably, helped humankind to survive it. But the trouble was, as Siobhan had immediately understood, the meddling of the Firstborn just didn’t matter for now. Whatever the cause, it was the sunstorm itself that had to be dealt with. The news couldn’t even be made public: releasing rumors about alien intention would surely only cause panic, and to no effect. So the whole thing remained a secret, known only at the highest levels of government, and to a select few others. The Firstborn, Siobhan promised herself, if they existed, could be dealt with later.

  But that meant there was nothing Bisesa could do about the greatest issue in her life. She couldn’t even talk about it. She was still on “compassionate leave” from the Army, and would have been discharged altogether if not for some string pulling by Siobhan. But she had no meaningful work to do. In a fragile state, she was thrown back on her own resources. She had become reclusive, Siobhan thought, spending too much time alone in her flat, or wandering around London, coming to places like the Ark; she seemed to want no company save Myra.

  “Come on,” Siobhan said, and they linked arms. “Let’s go see the elephants. Then I’ll give you a lift home. I’d like to see Myra again…”

  * * *

  Bisesa’s flat, just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, was actually lucky to find itself under the Tin Lid. Half a kilometer farther west and it would have been outside the Dome altogether. As it was it nestled under the looming shadow of the wall, and when you drove along you could look up between the rooftops and see the Dome soar into the air, like the hull of some vast spaceship.

  It was a while since Siobhan had visited, and things had changed. There were heavy new security locks on the doors to the apartment building. And when she opened the door a rust-red blur ran out of the building, shooting between Bisesa’s legs, to vanish around the corner. Bisesa flinched, but laughed.

  Siobhan’s heart was hammering. “What was that? A dog?”

  “No, just a fox. Not really a pest if you take care of your garbage—although I’d like to know who let that one in the building. People haven’t the heart to get rid of them, not at a time like this. There are more of them around, I’m sure. Maybe they’re coming into the Dome.”

  “Perhaps they sense something is coming.”

  Bisesa led her upstairs to the flat itself. In the corridors and the stairwell Siobhan saw many strange faces. “Lodgers,” Bisesa said, pulling a face. “Government regulations. Every domicile within the Dome has to shelter at least so many adults per such-and-such square meters of floor space. They’re packing us in.” She opened her door to reveal a hallway piled high with bottled water and canned food, a typical family emergency store. “One reason why I keep Linda here. Better a cousin than a stranger…”

  In the flat Siobhan made for the window. South facing, it caught a lot of light. The great shadows of the Dome’s skeleton striped across the sky, but there was still a good view of the city to the east. And Siobhan could see that from every south-facing window and balcony, and on every rooftop, silvery blankets were draped. The blankets were smartskin, bits of the space shield being grown all across the city by ordinary Londoners.

  Bisesa joined her with a glass of fruit juice, and smiled. “Quite a sight, isn’t it?”

  “It’s magnificent,” Siobhan said sincerely.

  Bisesa’s inspiration had worked out remarkably well. To grow a bit of the shield that would save the world, all you needed was patience, sunlight, a kit no more complicated than a home darkroom, and basic nutrients: household waste would do nicely, appropriately pulped up. Raw material for the smart components had been a problem for a while, before turn-of-the-century landfill sites packed high with obsolete mobile pho
nes, computers, games, and other wasteful toys had been turned into mines of silicon, germanium, silver, copper, and even gold. In London there had been only one possible slogan for the program, even if it was terminologically inexact: Dig for Victory.

  Siobhan said, “It’s so damn inspirational: people all over the world, working to save themselves and each other.”

  “Yeah. But try telling that to Myra.”

  “How is she?”

  “Scared,” Bisesa said. “No, deeper than that. Traumatized, maybe.” Her face was composed, but she looked tired again, laden with guilt. “I try to see things from her point of view. She’s only twelve. When she was little her mother disappeared for months on end—and then turned up from nowhere, swivel-eyed. And now you have the threat of the sunstorm. She’s a bright kid, Siobhan. She understands the news. She knows that on April 20 all of this, the whole fabric of her life, all her stuff, the softwall, the synth-stars, her screens and books and toys, is just going to dissolve. It was bad enough I kept going away. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me for letting the world end.”

  Siobhan thought of Perdita, who seemed not to grasp what was to come at all—or anyhow chose not to. “It’s better than denying it, maybe. But there is no source of comfort.”

  “No. Not even religion, for me. I never was much of a God botherer. Though I did catch Myra watching the election of the new Pope.” After the destruction of Rome, the latest pontiff had taken up residence in Boston; the big American dioceses had long been far richer than the Vatican anyhow. “All the religiosity around worries me—doesn’t it you? These sun-cultists coming out of the closet.”

  Siobhan shrugged. “I accept it. You know, even up on the shield itself, a lot of praying goes on. Religions can serve a social purpose, in uniting us around a common goal. Maybe that’s why they evolved in the first place. I don’t think there’s any harm in people thinking of the shield as, umm, like building a cathedral in the sky, if it helps them get through the day.” She smiled. “Whether God is watching or not.”

  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.