Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Louie the Linchpin could see how that was going to turn out.

  No, as far as his business was concerned, the solar flare had been a bust. He could find only a handful of good, leveraged cases from the thousands that had been filed on it Bingham was even thinking of an article for his monthly investors' newsletter, advising his clients to keep away from the astronomical-accident cases for a while. He'd write some kind of catchy title, like "Stick to Astrology for Now."

  No, divorce law and transit crashes—those were meat and potatoes in the tort business. Louie the Linchpin crimped his jaw muscles twice to change the registers in his goggles.

  Let's see how the vote was flowing in homicides today.

  Chapter 31

  Star Watch

  Shuffle…

  Stamp...

  Tickle…

  Sneeze!

  McMath Solar Telescope, Tucson, Arizona, May 5, 2081

  Piero Mosca looked around the dead cellar room. A pale ghost of the sky, reflected and passed down the shaft by the relay of mirrors overhead, lit the chamber softly. A dozen wandering flashlights, held by Po and his companions, punctuated the corner shadows. Little puffs of dust billowed up from around their feet and showed golden in the beams.

  The facility was in worse shape than Mosca had expected, and in far worse shape on the inside than it appeared from the outside. In fact, viewed from a distance, as from the road leading up to the cluster of domed stellar observatories on top of Kitt Peak, the McMath telescope had the striking perfection of a piece of origami.

  The thirty-meter-tall tower that supported the facility's sun-following heliostat was a crisp oblong. Glaring panels of flat, white metal shielded its winches and tracking mechanisms from the direct force of the wind and also concealed and protected the hexagon of cement piers which reached deep into the mountainside. The other visible structure, the top end of the optical tunnel—a water-cooled tube arranged on a polar axis to conduct the sun's image down 140 meters under the mountain—was a white-sheathed parallelogram tilted on a forty-five-degree angle to touch the tower's top corner.

  These two structures, tower and tunnel hood, looked like something cut from clean paper and pasted together with toothpicks by an imaginative child. Over the decades since the telescope was abandoned, the Arizona climate had been kind to the structure. The sun could only bleach its sides whiter and, where the paint peeled, the prevailing wind scoured its metal surfaces bright before the infrequent rain could blot them with rust.

  Under the hill, however, the facility had not survived as gracefully. Stray winds from the tunnel's open upper end had deposited little scalloping dunes of brown dust at the stations where the concave primary and secondary mirrors bent the solar image, now a full meter-and-a-half wide, around and back up and finally into the buried observation room and spectrograph pit. Here, at recesses ranging from ten meters under the surface down to thirty, had been the labyrinth of plates and cameras and diffraction grids that once massaged the solar disk into direct film views and thermally graded or wavelength-specific proofs.

  These working precincts had fared the worst, as Po and his colleagues had discovered. After the McMath facility was given up, no one had thought to remove—or even plunder—the massive heliostat and the fixed mirrors in the tunnel. But all of the less weighty and more portable equipment had been broken up, bartered away, or sold off. The offices and observation room were cold, echoing cement boxes with their own thin dunes. Cut ends of exposed cabling and broken power conduits and water pipes extended from the bare walls. Even the light fixtures had been removed over the years.

  Po looked overhead, into the last mirror positioned above the observation room and, through it, back up to the permanently misaligned heliostat. There a reversed image loomed, composed of ninety percent blue sky shaded with a tinge of haze in one quadrant, and ten percent a nail paring of the dusty green chaparral that surrounded the site, now curving above the sky in the mirror. The image swam overhead like a landscape seen through a porthole or a periscope.

  "This place is a dump," Mosca said to the group in general. "Hopeless."

  Sultana Carr must have followed his gaze, because she clicked her tongue to get his attention, then met his eyes through the gloom when he glanced down at her.

  "Not so bad as all that," she said lightly. "The mirrors are sound. And unpitted—I checked that out already. When we replace the rusted clockwork up there with a really talented intelligence, the heliostat will track for us just fine."

  "Wouldn't it be better to go into orbit?" Po asked. "Or to the Moon?"

  The others in their team, all graduates from the JPL Institute who had studied and worked under the late Dr. Freede, stopped moving about and were waiting to hear the two acknowledged leaders argue this out.

  "We'd never get the money to launch a new tube, or sink one this deep into the lunar landscape," Carr answered. "Or not soon enough. Starting from scratch like that would put us out of action for two, three years. We can get this facility up and running in six months, tops....Besides, this setup will give us whole-light solar images a hundred and fifty centimeters across. That's wider than we could hope to get from any new facility built with current dollars. With plates this size, we can slice them up and analyze them any way we want."

  "If we don't mind looking through about five hundred kilometers of dirty atmosphere—"

  "So, okay, there are tradeoffs." Sultana Carr shrugged. "If we do good work here, we can hope to launch a tube on the next wave of funding."

  "Did you get Donaldson's promise on that?" Po asked. Hilary Donaldson was a NASA subdirector, one of Jamison's ultimate superiors and the highest level that Carr and her group had reached in the golden days of sorting out, after their warnings on the solar flare had proved too graphically accurate.

  "She didn't say in so many words," Sultana admitted. "But the clear implication was there."

  "Then we'd better make the best of this." Po grunted, scraping a toe in the dust across the vinyl tiles. "We're going to be here a lo-ong time."

  The others looked around at the empty walls.

  "And we won't be able to do ongoing magnetometer surveys," Po added after a while. "Not from down here.... And that's how we'll predict the onset of the next spot, you know. Freede's way. For that, we'll need a platform in close orbit around the sun, like Hyperion."

  "Well, NASA didn't promise they'd launch anything near as grand as a ship, not right away. But they did agree to a string of automated probes, reporting to us through Vandenberg."

  "We'll just have to make sure they include the cyber time to assimilate and collate the data," Po grumped.

  Carr didn't answer him. Instead, she wandered off, pushing her cone of light ahead of her through a doorway cut into the hillside rock and down the hallway beyond.

  "What'll it take to fix this place up, do you think?" Lowell Chen asked into the lull.

  "That's what we're here to find out," Po said. "If the structural survey passes on the tower piers—which have been my personal big worry—then the rest should just be sweat and tears....We'll have to put in all new equipment down here, obviously. And some of it we'll probably have to make ourselves—like the port framework, the diffraction grating, and the collimating mirrors for a hundred-and-fifty-centimeter spectrograph. They don't sell those at Pacific Instruments, I'll bet."

  That brought a chuckle from the men and women who had gathered around him.

  "Then there's the computer interface," he went on. "Nobody makes a charge-coupled plate that size. So we'll either have to spec one and do a special order from Singapore, or cobble up some kind of array from much smaller units. That would probably be the least expensive route."

  "Po?" Sultana called from the doorway. "Down here?"

  He went over and walked with her into the darkened corridor. Their flashlights made two roving dots crisscrossing on the concrete walls and tiled floors.

  "This is the office complex," she explained. "Stripped now, of
course. And I found some nests. Made by bears, or maybe people." When he stumbled beside her, she added, "Don't worry. They vacated some years ago."

  "How can you tell?"

  Carr shrugged and smiled.

  "We're sure going to have a fun time clearing this place out."

  She stopped at the second doorframe on the right, flicked her light into it. The room beyond was square, about four meters on a side. A line of bookcases stretched along the left wall, a bank of closets on the right. Po could just make out what looked like the porcelain surfaces of a private washroom behind one of the open doors.

  "This is your office," she announced.

  "Oh, come on, Sulie! I don't want an office." The place was huge by the Institute's standards. It had no window, of course, but the ceiling was high. You could teach a small seminar in there. "Next thing, you'll be offering me a title."

  "I was thinking of Director of Operations. Unless you'd like to be Dean of Students. Over the next few years we're going to be getting a lot of requests from people wanting to study with us. You're a good teacher… Besides, you always wanted Albert Withers' job one day, didn't you?" In the glow reflected off the fer wall, she was grinning.

  "Don't you think we're taking this whole thing a little fast, Sulie? I mean, we're only riding on the public hysteria caused by that solar flare. In another month, everyone will have forgotten the damage and disorder it caused. By then they'll be worrying about plagues or earthquakes or something else, and all that loose funding you're counting on will go to the bacteriologists or the seismologists or whoever is hot."

  "You are forgetting the grantsman's first rule," Carr told him.

  "Which is?"

  "While the money is flowing, take it and smile."

  "But it was only one sunspot, Sulie. A big one, to be sure, but an isolated incident just the same. You can't graph a curve with just one point of data."

  "Then you didn't see the report this morning...."

  "No, I was too busy packing for our field trip here."

  "Tsiolkovskii Observatory detected an anomaly and passed it along to NASA."

  "Detected what, for God's sake?"

  "A pair of spots, Po. Only little ones, really nothing compared to our Big Fellow. And they're so far up toward the pole—at about eighty-four degrees north—that the Wilson Effect makes them damned nearly invisible, foreshortened against the limb as they are. But still, sunspots is all they could be."

  "So have we got a cycle under way?" Po could feel his heart begin to race.

  "What else could it be?"

  "Then… that changes everything."

  "For a lot of people," she agreed. "All throughout the solar system. For one thing, people can expect a lot more interference with their communications and in their unshielded electronics. For another, the increased solar thermal output is going to change the climate in ways that the National Weather Office may not have anticipated. Such as, it wouldn't surprise me if the old folks were right all along about the Greenhouse Effect. It's certainly going to get a lot hotter here on Earth."

  "I hear what you're saying," Po told her. "But still, aren't you getting just a bit ahead of yourself?"

  "Hilary Donaldson called me first thing this morning with the news. She wants us to make good on that boast I made to Jamison—they must record everything there at Vandenberg—about our becoming a kind of solar weather bureau.

  "I think we can expect funding support, also, from the United Nations, from the International System Survey, and from a coalition of corporations in transport and communications," Carr added. "Hilary offered to begin contacting them today and piecing together a cooperative forum. When this thing really gets rolling, Po, then we'll have probes, platforms, sight tubes, cybernetic assistance—anything we can think, of, or have the balls to requisition."

  Mosca stuck his head through the door and shone his light around the office space.

  "Do you suppose this place is going to be big enough?" he asked.

  Chapter 32

  Invaders from the Beyond

  Green…

  Yellow…

  Red…

  Violet…

  Point-Twelve Lightyears Beyond the Oort Cloud

  The ship's hull pulsed around Red Halfspin Charm at frequencies passing up and down the baritone range of 10 cycles. He never tired of feeling these waves of photon flux, which the ship's core held in gravitationally bound curves. Such energy! And such control of energy! From within, the hull radiated in all colors, in all visible dimensions, yet it could pass unseen because of those self-devouring curves.

  Red Halfspin Charm knew that, should the hull constriction fail at this close distance to the new sun, the ship, he, and his crewmates would evaporate in a glare more intense than any supernova. And then any intelligence lodged on one of the many particle-energy nodes that surrounded this sun would see the light and be amazed.

  So that must not happen.

  He rebent his will to buffering the hull and encouraging the core. So intent was he on this exercise that he never felt the ping! of a higher-frequency electromagnetic burst impacting against the hull from outside.

  "What was that?" asked Blue Twicespun Strange. His senses were much keener than those of the Charm Flavor. For that reason, a Strange was always the mission leader, and that was as it should be.

  "I did not—" Red faltered and went quiet.

  "We passed through a wavefront with energies exceeding 10 cycles," Blue told him. "You are nearly blind in that range," the leader added, not unkindly.

  "I was concerned with the ship."

  "As you should be." Blue turned his full attention now on Yellow Spin Down, who was as concerned with where-we-are-going as Red was focused on where-we-are-now. "What do you see, Yellow?" the leader asked.

  "I see the dawning, the shining, the passing and returning, which makes all things of itself." The Downs always did radiate a sense of their own self-importance in the order of things. "I see the lord of eternity—or of 10 discrete cycles, which is close enough to make no difference," the quark added wryly.

  "Does the star burn clear?" Blue asked impatiently.

  "Yes, of course," Yellow answered too quickly. "I mean, with the exception of one blemish, which may be only the passing of a particle-body across my field of vision. I had thought to discount it—at least until we had moved closer."

  "And what of that wavefront which just passed us?"

  "Actually, it might be anything," Yellow temporized.

  "And if it was not?"

  "Then the blemish may be more than bad seeing."

  "What do the meepers say?" Blue asked.

  Ah, the meepers! Red Halfspin Charm had heard stories about these mindless creatures, massive constructs of charge and anticharge knit from the very fabric of a star's surface. They floated like lace across the bubbling sea of plasma, and the quark kin had programmed them to follow the magnetic anomalies there, which all middle-aged suns were prone to. Whole hadron-clusters of quarks must have destroyed themselves in placing just one of these meepers. And each of the midrange suns was rumored to boast thousands of these quasi-intelligences.

  Excitement and hunger were wired into the meeper mentality. They could draw strength and joy only from the interplay of conflicting field forces that built up deep within a star. As they played on its surface, they sang high-voltage arias in magnetic patterns that coded themselves into the solar wind. Then the quark kin could read those patterns from lightyears out and interpret them to discover the health of any nearby star. A happy meeper meant a sick sun. And that meant disappointment for any traveling quarks in the vicinity.

  "Yes," Red beamed, "what do the meepers say about this sun?"

  "I hear in them what I have not heard before," Yellow told them.

  "Describe what you hear," Blue insisted.

  "I hear a song of neither joy nor hunger. I hear a song of terror. It is a dirge of rending and passing away. I hear the finality."

  "That is
not as it should be," Blue commented.

  "No… I thought not," the Down admitted.

  "Yellow, that must be a sick star now. We should not be going there," Blue advised.

  "Understood."

  "You must bend us a new course," the leader commanded. "We need to move quickly at a high deflection. At all costs, we must avoid meeting up with the crowd of mesons and antiquarks that are sure to be mixed in with the scatter who are escaping that eruption. To join them would ignite just too joyous a reunion."

  "Understood," Yellow repeated, and turned his attention in other directions.

  Immediately Red began tweaking the ship's energies, shifting their position according to the new heading. They passed across the gravity waves that the nearby sun—at once so near and soon so distant—pumped out as extravagantly as it poured forth frequencies.

  "So? Where to next, Yellow?" the leader asked cheerfully.

  "I have a young giant on the list. He's impetuous, heady, and not at all reliable. But he should be fun—not cranky, like that Main Sequence dwarf we just missed." The Down Flavor was, by its nature, quick to reject what it could not have. "This fellow's good for at least 1030 cycles."

  "That is as it should be," Blue told him. "Proceed."

  THE END