This distributed, interconnected intelligence was to be achieved by the manufacture of a “smartskin.” The shield’s epidermis, less than a micrometer thick, would not just be a reflective skin but would be packed with circuitry. The local smartness, interconnected, would of course add up to a total powerful intelligence. The completed shield would, it was thought, be the smartest single entity humankind had yet constructed—smarter even, probably, than Aristotle, the only uncertainty coming because nobody knew quite how smart Aristotle was.
So much for the design, complicated enough in itself. The implementation was something else.
The manufacture of the smartskin was one headache today; there weren’t enough nano-factories to turn it out in time. But even more serious was the problem caused by the pressure of sunlight. Although it could be used for active position control, its very existence caused a fundamental difficulty—which was the day’s second showstopper.
***
“Let’s go through it step by step,” Bud said. “The sunlight presses on the reflective face of the mirror. The light pressure acts against the sun’s gravity—so it’s as if the sun’s gravity is effectively reduced, and the L1 balance point is moved toward the sun along the Earth—sun line.
“Now, we’re trying to minimize the shield’s design mass. But the lighter the shield is, the more the sunlight can push it back. And the farther it drifts toward the sun, the bigger the shield has to be to shade the whole Earth. So its mass actually starts increasing again … These two effects counteract to provide a minimum solution. Am I right? For a given thickness of film there is a theoretical minimum mass for the shield, below which there is no feasible design solution.”
Siobhan said, “And without the Chinese—”
“We can’t meet that minimum,” Rose said with a kind of grim pleasure.
The problem was a shortfall of heavy-lift capacity. Although the Chinese government had initially declined to participate in the shield program, Miriam Grec had been sure that after enough emollient diplomacy, and a little horse trading, the Chinese would come on board. Miriam had actually instructed Siobhan to factor into her plans the availability of the Chinese fleet of Long March heavy-lift boosters.
Well, Miriam Grec had proven to be right about many things, but not about the Chinese. Their resistance to participation had not altered one jot, and their space launch capabilities were being dedicated, it seemed, to some secretive scheme of their own.
Whatever the Chinese were up to didn’t matter to Siobhan. All she did care about was that despite months of frantic redesign they had failed to come up with a feasible solution: without the Chinese and their Long March boosters—and maybe even with them, said the pessimists—there just wasn’t any way to get that minimum mass to L1 in time.
Siobhan knew that momentum was everything for this project. The shield was hugely, horribly, ruinously expensive: the project absorbed more than the net GDP of the United States, and therefore a respectable fraction of the whole world’s economic output. Indeed the shield was thought to be humankind’s single most expensive project in real terms since the “project” of winning the Second World War. The money didn’t come out of nowhere, and many other programs, notably climate-change mitigation efforts in the desiccated heart of Asia and drowning Polynesia, were being put on hold, to predictable protests.
As the project became more real, it was provoking sincere political anger. In a way Siobhan welcomed that; it meant that more than a year after Alvarez’s Christmas announcement, the “phony war” was coming to an end, and people were starting to believe enough in the sunstorm to care what was being done about it. Of course there were technical problems to solve; what they were attempting had never been done before. But Siobhan knew that if she allowed a hint of doubt to seep out of her management structure, it would soon erode the fragile political consensus behind the project—an infrastructure every bit as essential to the shield as the glass struts and booms being shipped up from the Moon.
Siobhan massaged her temples. “So we find another way to do it. What can we change?”
Rose ticked points off on her strong fingers. “You can’t change the basic forces involved. You can’t change the gravity fields of sun or Earth, or the pressure per square centimeter of sunlight. You can’t shrink the shield. If it was transparent, sunlight would pass straight through the shield without troubling it, of course.” She smiled. “But then there would be no point in building it in the first place, would there?”
“There must be something, damn it,” Siobhan snapped.
She looked around at the softscreens that lined the walls of the room. The faces that peered back at her, her senior project managers, were projected from various corners of the Earth, the Moon, and L1 itself. The expressions of Bud and Mikhail Martynov as always radiated sympathy and support. Rose was wearing her usual it-can’t-be-done scowl. Many of the others were more reserved. Some may actually have been grateful to Rose and her showstoppers, as she gave them something to hide their own issues behind.
They just didn’t get it, Siobhan thought. There was a failure of imagination, even among her people, some of the smartest engineers and technologists around, who were closer to the project than anybody else. They weren’t just building a bridge here, or just flying to Mars; this wasn’t just another project, another line on a curriculum vitae. This was the future of humanity they were dealing with. If they fouled up, whatever the cause, there would be no tomorrow in which to hand out blame: there would be no careers to wreck, no new directions to seek. Siobhan ought to welcome Rose’s bluntness, she thought; at least from her you got the straight skinny, whatever the consequences.
“I’m not going to give you a pep talk,” she said. “Let me just remind you what President Alvarez said. Failure is not an option. It still isn’t. We are going to work on this until our foreheads bleed, and we are going to find solutions to both these problems of ours today, come what may.”
Bud murmured, “We’re with you, Siobhan.”
“I hope that’s true.” She stood, pushing back her chair. She said to Toby, “I need a break.”
“I don’t blame you. Just a reminder—your ten o’clock is outside.”
Siobhan glanced at a softscreen diary page. “Lieutenant Dutt?” The soldier who had, it seemed, spent more than a year trying to get access to Siobhan, with grave news she wouldn’t divulge to anybody else, and had finally drifted to the top of the in-tray. More problems. But at least different problems.
She stretched, trying to dissipate the ache in her upper neck. “If anybody cares I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”
22: Turning Point
Lieutenant Bisesa Dutt, British Army, was waiting for Siobhan in the City of London Rooms. She was drinking coffee and studying her phone.
As Siobhan crossed the room she was distracted by a peculiar shadow. Looking out the window, she glimpsed a gaunt framework rising beyond the rooftops of London: it was the skeleton of what would become the London Dome, the city’s own effort to protect itself from the sunstorm. It was already the mightiest construction project in London’s long history, although predictably it was dwarfed by still mightier shelters being raised over New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
From the beginning they had always known, just as Alvarez had announced, that the shield was not going to save the Earth from one hundred percent of the sun’s rage, even assuming it got built at all. Some of it was going to get through—but the shield would give humanity a fighting chance, a chance that had to be taken. The trouble was that nobody knew how much pain the world below, and cities like London, would have to absorb.
The Dome was merely the most visible of the changes befalling the city. Across London the government had begun a program of laying up stores of nonperishable food, fuel, medical supplies, and the like, and the prices of such items were escalating. Even water rates were increasing as the authorities siphoned off supplies to fill immense underground tanks under the city’s parks. I
t was like preparing for war, Siobhan thought. But the necessity was very real.
Certainly the building of the Dome, a physical manifestation of the danger to come, had started at last to make people believe, deep in their guts, that the sunstorm was real. Across the city there was a sense of apprehension, and the medical services reported upsurges in anxiety and stress. But there was excitement too, in a way, even anticipation.
Siobhan had been traveling extensively, and she’d found that things were much the same everywhere.
In the United States especially she thought there was a sense of determination, of unity; America, as always, was having to bear a disproportionately heavy weight of the global effort. Across the nation, even where domes were impractical, there was a neighborhood-level drive to prepare, as the National Guard, the Scouts, and a hundred volunteer drives dug shelters into their own backyards and their neighbors’, filled underground tanks with rainwater, and collected aluminum cans to be filled up with emergency rations. Meanwhile there was a less obvious but equally dramatic effort to archive as much knowledge as possible, in digital and hardcopy forms, in great storage facilities in deep mine shafts, wells, Cold War—era bunkers, and even on the Moon. This was after all the true treasure of the nation, indeed of humankind—but this program gathered more controversy from those who argued that you should save “people first and last.” President Alvarez was proving expert once more in guiding her nation’s spirits; she was planning a program of celebrations of World War II centenary events, leading up to Pearl Harbor in 2041, to remind her fellow citizens of great trials they had faced before, and overcome.
There was dissension, all over the world. Aside from genuine differences of opinion about how to respond to this emergency, there were plenty of devout types who thought it was all a punishment by God, for one crime or another—and others who were angry at a God who had allowed this to happen. And some, the radical green types, said humankind should just accept its fate. This was a kind of karmic punishment for the way we had messed up the planet: let the Earth be wiped clean, and start again. Which might be a comforting idea, Siobhan thought grimly, if you could be sure there would be anything left after the sunstorm to start again with.
But even so there was still an unreal sheen to things. With the sun shining brightly over London, the Dome seemed as inappropriate as a Christmas tree in July. Most people just got on with their lives—even those who thought it was all a scam by the construction companies.
And in the middle of all this, here was Lieutenant Bisesa Dutt, and another mystery for Siobhan.
***
She reached Bisesa’s table and sat down, asking an attendant for coffee.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Bisesa began. “I know how busy you must be.”
“I doubt if you do,” Siobhan said ruefully.
“But,” Bisesa said calmly, “I think you’re the right person to hear what I have to say.”
As she sipped her coffee Siobhan tried to get a sense of Bisesa. As Astronomer Royal she had always been expected to deal with people—sometimes thousands of them at once, when she gave public lectures. But since being press-ganged by Miriam Grec into this position of extraordinary responsibility, as a sort of general manager of the shield project, she believed she was acquiring a protective skill in sizing people up: the quicker you understood what faced you, the better you could deal with it.
And so here was Bisesa Dutt, Army officer, out of uniform, far from her posting. She was of Indian extraction. Her face was symmetrical, her nose long, and her gaze was strong but troubled. She was above medium height, with the physical confidence of a soldier. But she was gaunt, Siobhan thought, as if she had been hungry in the past.
Siobhan said, “Tell me why I need to listen to you.”
“I know the date of the sunstorm. The exact date.”
Because the authorities, guided by teams of psychologists, were continuing to work to minimize panic, that was still a closely guarded secret. “Bisesa, if there has been a security leak, it’s your duty to tell me about it.”
Bisesa shook her head. “No leak. You can check.” She lifted one foot and tapped the sole with her fingernail. “I’m tagged. The Army has been monitoring me since I turned myself in.”
“You went AWOL?”
“No,” Bisesa said patiently. “They thought I had. Now I’m on compassionate leave, as they call it. But they are monitoring me anyhow.”
“And so the date—”
“April 20, 2042, you mean?”
Siobhan regarded her. “Okay, I’ll bite. How do you know that?”
“Because there is a solar eclipse on that day.”
Siobhan raised her eyebrows. She murmured, “Aristotle?”
“She’s correct, Siobhan,” Aristotle whispered in her ear.
“Okay. But so what? An eclipse is just a lining up of sun, Moon and Earth. It has nothing to do with the sunstorm.”
“But it does,” Bisesa said. “I was shown an eclipse, during my journey back home.”
“Your journey.” Siobhan had only glanced at Bisesa’s file. She’d come down to meet her on impulse, to get away from her teleconference for a while. Now she was beginning to regret it. “I know something of the story. You had some kind of vision—”
“Not a vision. I don’t want to use up our time discussing it. You have the files; if you believe me, you will check up on it later. Right now I need you to listen. I knew that something dreadful was going to happen to the Earth, the day I got back. And by showing me the eclipse they were telling me it had something to do with the sun.”
“They? …”
Bisesa’s face clouded, as if she didn’t quite believe it all herself—and she rather wished she didn’t have to. But she plowed on.”Professor McGorran, I believe that the sunstorm is no accident. I believe it is the result of intentional harm being done to us by an alien power.”
Siobhan pointedly glanced at her watch. “What alien power?”
“The Firstborn. That’s what we called them.”
“We? … Never mind. I don’t suppose you have any proof.”
“No—and I know what you’re thinking. People like me never do.”
Siobhan allowed herself a smile, for she had been thinking exactly that.
“But the Army did find some anomalies in my physical condition they couldn’t explain. That’s why they gave me leave. That’s proof of a sort. And then there’s the principle of mediocrity.”
That threw Siobhan. “Mediocrity?”
“I’m no scientist, but isn’t that what you call it? Copernicus’s principle. There should be nothing special about any given location in space or time. And if you have a chain of logic that indicates there is something special about a given moment—”
“Never trust coincidences,” Siobhan said.
Bisesa leaned forward intently. “Doesn’t it strike you that the sunstorm, occurring now, is the mightiest coincidence of all time? Think about it. Humanity is a mere hundred thousand years old. The Earth, and the sun, are forty thousand times as old as that. If it were purely natural, surely the sunstorm could have occurred at any time in Earth’s history. Why should the sun blow its top now, just in this brief moment when there happens to be an intelligence running around on the planet?”
For the first time in the course of the conversation Siobhan felt faintly disturbed. After all, she’d had, independently, vague thoughts along these lines. “You’re saying this is no accident.”
“I’m saying the sunstorm is intentional. I’m saying we are the target.” Bisesa left the word hanging in the air.
Siobhan turned away from the intensity of her gaze. “But this is all just philosophy. You have no actual proof.”
Bisesa said firmly, “But I believe that if you look for proof you will find it. That’s what I’m asking you to do. You’re close to the scientists who are studying the sunstorm. You could make it happen. It could be vital.”
“Vital?”
“F
or the future of humankind. Because if we don’t understand what we’re dealing with, how can we beat it?”
Siobhan studied this intent woman. There was something odd about her—something of another world, perhaps, another place. But she had an intelligent soldier’s clarity and conviction. She could be wrong in what she says, Siobhan thought. But I don’t think she’s mad.
***
On a whim she dug into her jacket pocket and dug out a scrap of material. “Let me show you what we’re actually working on right now, the problems I’m wrestling with. Have you ever heard of smartskin? …”
This was a prototype sample of the material that would some day, if all went well, be stretched over the gaunt lunar-glass framework of the shield. It was a glass-fiber spiderweb, complex and full of components, detailed on scales as small as the eye could see. “It contains superconducting wires to transmit power and to serve as comms links. Diamond fibers, too small to see, for structural strength. Sensors, force multipliers, computer chips, even a couple of tiny rocket motors. There, can you see?” The scrap, the size of a pocket handkerchief, weighed almost nothing; the little rocket motors were like pinheads.
“Wow,” Bisesa said. “I thought it was just a big dumb mirror.”
Siobhan shook her head ruefully. “That would be too easy, wouldn’t it? The whole shield won’t have to be smart fabric, but maybe one percent of it will. It’s like a huge cooperative organism.”
Bisesa touched the material reverently. “So what’s the problem?”
“The manufacture of the smartskin. The trouble is, it has to be nanotechnological …”
Nanotechnologies were still in their infancy. But nanotech, a process that built atom by atom, was the only way to manufacture a material like this, with a complexity that went down below the molecular.
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