And then there was the question of the span of time. Mir seemed to be constructed as a kind of sampling of humankind and its development, all the way from chimp-like australopithecines from two million years deep, up through variants of prehuman hominids, and all the ages of human history. But this great collating ended, as far as anybody could tell, on June 8, 2037, in the time slice that had carried Bisesa and her colleagues there. Why was there nothing from the farther future? Bisesa had wondered if that was because that date marked some kind of ending to human history—because there was no future to sample.
And then she, and she alone, had been brought home by the Eyes, or perhaps by the remote minds behind them—and found herself on the very next day, June 9, watching a lethal sun rise over London.
Bisesa was convinced that the construction of Mir hadn’t been some stupendous natural accident, but deliberate, the act of some terrible intelligence for its own purposes. But why had Earth’s history been taken apart? Why were the Eyes there to watch and listen? Was it all, as she feared, connected to the misbehavior of the sun?
And why had she been brought back home? To be returned to Myra had been what she had wanted, of course. On Mir, in the depths of her loneliness and despair she had even begged an Eye to save her. But she was sure her desires were irrelevant. The correct question was: what purpose did her return serve them?
Bisesa, stuck in her flat, toiled over her account, sifted through the news, obsessed over her memories and her fragmentary understanding, and tried to decide what to do.
12: BRIEFING
At Clavius Base, after a couple of hours’ sleep, Siobhan still felt mildly jet-lagged, or Moon-lagged, she thought, by a time difference from London equivalent to an Atlantic crossing.
To freshen up, she showered. She was entranced by the shimmering globules that came crowding out of her shower nozzle. She tried to be a good visitor to the Moon; she kept her shower curtain Velcroed up until the suction system had recovered every last precious molecule of the ancient water.
Liaising en route from the Komarov, she had asked Bud to set up a full briefing. As far as she could tell the Moon’s top solar scientists would all be in attendance, from helio-seismologists to students of electromagnetic emissions from radio wavelengths to X-rays—and, of course, the neutrino-astronomy prodigy who had tried to blow the whistle before June 9. Until they got to Clavius, none of the scientists was to be told what her mission was. Security remained tight.
There were few conference rooms on the Moon: evidently this wasn’t Carlton Terrace. Bud had tried to persuade her to use Clavius’s amphitheater for the session, but the very public space of the amphitheater wouldn’t do.
So he deployed some of his scarce resources to knock through the walls of a few living quarters. The result was a cramped but serviceable room, dominated by a “conference table” made of several smaller bits of furniture jammed together. Bud installed Faraday cages and jamming devices to exclude electronic eavesdropping, and active noise generators to put a stop to the more conventional sort of listening. Even Thales would not be free to come and go: while the door was locked, only a cut-down clone of the Moon’s electronic ghost would be allowed to operate within the room, and later a suite of smart systems, independent of Thales himself, would scrutinize and censor the flow of information out of the room.
Siobhan checked it over as best she could. “I’m no expert,” she said to Bud, “but this looks sufficient to me.”
He said fervently, “I hope so. I don’t mind telling you I took a few punches over this meeting—and not just about the security.” He scratched his shaven scalp. “Me, I’m just a military man. I’m used to an unpredictable life. These scientists hate to be dragged away from their work.”
“I can sympathize,” she said. “I’m a scientist too, remember. And right now all my own projects are probably running into the ground.”
Bud knew about her work. “But for now the life and death of the universe can wait.”
“Quite.” She smiled at him.
Ten o’clock arrived. With Bud at her side she braced herself and walked into the crowded room. Bud quietly closed the door behind her, and she heard a security lock click into place.
She stood at the head of the cobbled-together conference table. The twenty participants were already here with their softscreens spread out over the tabletop before them: twenty faces gazing back at her, with expressions varying from apathy to nervousness to blank hostility. The glow of the strip lights overhead was washed-out and harsh, and despite the noisy laboring of the air circulation systems this sealed box already smelled strongly of adrenaline and sweat. The people seemed alien too, their clothes, much recycled and patched, dark with use, and their gestures small and contained, conditioned by years in small spaces and a lethal environment. They made Siobhan feel gaudy, wispy, an outsider from sunny Earth out of place here in the cramped, dusty chambers of the Moon.
This is going to be a nightmare, she thought.
Most of the participants were geologists of one stripe or another, she knew; many of them had the big, practical, dust-stained hands of those used to working with rocks. Glancing around, she recognized two faces from the briefing material she had requested from Bud: Mikhail Martynov, the rather shy-looking Russian who was the lead scientist on solar weather here on the Moon—and Eugene Mangles, neutrino whiz kid.
Eugene had a distracted air, and he seemed to have trouble making eye contact. But he was startlingly good looking, better even than the images had suggested, with the perfect skin and open, symmetrical face of a synth-star singer. Siobhan felt her crusty heart skip a beat. And from the glances that Mikhail occasionally cast his way, it seemed that it wasn’t just women who were drawn to Eugene’s looks.
Bud, acting as chair, stood beside her. “Before we start, let me just say one thing,” he began. “Astronauts have a proud history in solar studies. It goes back to the Skylab guys who, in Earth orbit in 1973, operated an imaging spectrograph built for them by Harvard. Today we’re continuing that tradition. But we’re not just talking about science. Today we’re being asked for our help. As the commander of Clavius Base I consider it an honor to have Professor McGorran here—an honor that we on the Moon are seen as fit to be the focus of the response to this problem. Professor.” He nodded to Siobhan and sat down.
After that pep talk, not entirely appropriate, Siobhan glanced around the table. She caught just one friendly eye, a sympathetic half smile from Mikhail Martynov. Follow that.
“Good morning. I expect to do more listening than talking today, but I’d like to make some introductory remarks. My name is—”
“We know who you are.” The speaker was evidently one of the geologists, a stocky, big-armed woman with a square face. Her glare was about the most hostile in the room.
“Then you have me at a disadvantage, Doctor—”
“Professor. Professor Rose Delea.” She had a broad Australian accent. Siobhan had been briefed; Rose was an expert on the emplacement by sunlight of helium-3 in the lunar regolith. This helium isotope, a fuel for fusion reactors, was the Moon’s best economic prospect, and so Rose was a weighty figure here. “All I want to know is when you’re going to leave so I can get back to some real work. And I want to know the reason for all this secrecy. Since June 9 outgoing comms has been restricted, some areas of Thales’s databases and other information stores have been proscribed—”
“I know.”
“This is the Moon, Professor McGorran. If you hadn’t noticed, we’re all a long way from home and our families. Links to Earth are essential for our psychological well-being, not to mention our physical safety. And if you don’t want morale to fall farther—”
Siobhan held up her hand, a gesture of quiet command. To her relief, Rose fell silent. “I quite agree.” So she did. Secrecy didn’t come instinctively to her any more than to these Moon-folk, Siobhan suspected; openness was an essential component of the endless conversation that underpinned good sc
ience. She said, “The security blackout is difficult for all concerned, and would be unacceptable—in normal times. But these are not normal times. Please bear with me.
“I’m standing before you today as an emissary of both the British Prime Minister and the Prime Minister of the Eurasian Union. When I get home I’ll also be expected to brief other world leaders, including President Alvarez of the United States. And what they want to know is what to expect of the sun.”
She was met by mostly baffled stares. Her briefings by various world-weary politicians’ aides had warned her to expect a certain insularity up here on the Moon, where the Earth could seem a long way away, and not very important. So she had prepared a show-and-tell. “Thales, please…”
She gave them a five minute summary, in images, graphics, and words, of the devastating impact of June 9 on the Earth. This was watched in somber silence.
At the end she said, “And that’s the reason I’m here, Professor Delea. I need some answers—we all do. What’s wrong with the sun? Is June 9 going to hit us again? Can we expect something less—or worse? On the Moon—in this room, in fact—you have some of humankind’s top solar scientists. And the one person who made an accurate prediction of June 9 itself.”
Eugene didn’t react; his gaze unfocused, it was as if he was barely aware of the others around him.
Mikhail said dryly, “And of course the ease of controlling information from the Moon is purely coincidental.”
Siobhan frowned. “We have to take security seriously, sir. The governments really have no idea of what they’re facing yet. Until they do, information, unfortunately, must be managed. A panic could be vastly damaging in itself.”
Rose subsided, but she was glowering, and Siobhan hoped beyond hope that she hadn’t already made an enemy.
As brightly as she could she said, “Let’s start by making sure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. Doctor Martynov, I wonder if you’d be good enough to tell a mere cosmologist how the sun is supposed to work.”
“It will be a pleasure.” With a showman’s sense of theater Mikhail stood and made his way to the front of the room.
“All cosmologists know that the sun is fueled by fusion fire. What most cosmologists don’t know is that only the innermost heart of the sun is a fusion reactor. The rest of it is special effects…” Mikhail’s Russian accent was movie-actor thick, but quite compelling.
During her training, Siobhan had of course studied the sun. She had learned that the sun, like all stars, is simple in principle, but as the nearest star the sun had been scrutinized in minute detail. The detail, it turned out, was rather overwhelmingly complex and still little understood, even after centuries of study. But it was that detailed behavior that now seemed to be endangering humankind.
The sun is a ball of gas, mostly hydrogen, more than a million kilometers wide—that is, as wide as a hundred Earths strung side by side, and as massive as a million Earths. The source of its vast energy output is its core, a star within a star where, in complicated chains of reactions, swarming nuclei of hydrogen fuse to helium and other heavier elements.
The fusion energy must pass out through the body of the sun from the hot core to the cold sink of space, driven by temperature differences as surely as a head of pressure drives water through a pipe. But the core is swaddled by a thick belt of turgid gas called the “radiative zone,” opaque as a brick wall, through which the inner heat passes in the form of X-rays. In the next layer out, the “convective zone,” the densities have lessened to the point where the sun’s material can boil, like a pan heated from below. Here the core heat continues its journey to space by powering huge convective spouts, each many times taller than Earth, ascending at not much more than walking pace. Above the convective zone lies the visible surface of the sun, the photosphere, the source of sunlight and sunspots. And just as the meniscus of a boiling pan of water will organize itself into cells, so the sun bubbles with granules, constantly changing, tiling the photosphere like a Roman mosaic.
So immense and compressed are these layers that the sun is all but opaque to its own radiation; a given photon’s worth of energy takes millions of years to struggle from core to surface.
Once released from its cage of gases, the core energy, in the form of light, races away at lightspeed as if with relief, spreading with distance as it travels. At the distance of the Earth, eight light-minutes from the photosphere, sunlight still delivers about a kilowatt of power per square meter—and even at a distance of light-years the sunlight is bright enough for any eyes there to see it.
As well as the light it emits, the sun breathes a constant stream of hot plasma into the faces of its circling children. This “solar wind” is a complex, turbulent breeze. At certain frequencies of light can be seen dark patches on the sun’s surface—“coronal holes,” regions of magnetic anomaly, like flaws in the sun itself—from which pour higher-energy streams of solar wind. The turning sun sprays these streams around the solar system in spiral washes, like an immense lawn sprinkler.
Mikhail said, “We watch out for those sprinkler streams. Every time the planet runs into one we get problems, as the Earth and its magnetosphere are battered by high-energy particles.”
Still more problems are caused for the Earth by the sun’s occasional irregularities. Mikhail said, “You have coronal mass ejections—like the monster that hit us on June 9—large-scale outpourings of plasma flung at us from the sun’s surface. And then you have flares. These detonations on the sun’s surface, powered by magnetic flaws, are the largest explosions in the modern-day solar system, each amounting to the blast of billions of nuclear weapons. Flares bombard us with radiation from gammas to radio waves. Sometimes they are followed up by what we call ‘solar proton events’—cascades of charged particles.”
The restless sun follows an eleven-year “solar cycle,” at the peak of which sunspots swarm and flares erupt with much more vigor than at its minimum. Mikhail sketched the accepted mechanism behind the solar cycle. A “meridional flow” of plasma over the sun’s surface from equator to poles carries the relics of sunspots north and south. At the poles the cooling material sinks down into the body of the sun as far as the base of the convective zone, and then migrates back toward the equator. But the magnetic scars left by sunspots linger on through this cycle, ghosts that seed the next generation of active regions.
Mikhail described the complicated relationship of sun, Earth, and humanity.
Even in historical times the sun’s variability has affected the Earth’s climate. For more than seventy years, from around 1640 to 1710, very few sunspots were observed on the sun’s face—and the Earth was plunged into what the climatologists call the “Little Ice Age.” Europe suffered severe winters and cool summers; at the peak of it, in 1690, London children ice-skated on the Thames.
In the electronic age, a growing dependence on high technology made humans much more vulnerable to even mild solar tantrums. In April 1984 a flare knocked out communications on Air Force One; President Reagan, over the mid-Pacific, was left incommunicado for two hours. Before June 9 the most intense storm on record had occurred in September 1859; that one had melted telegraph wires.
“We actually came close to that again in 2003,” Mikhail said. “The sun suffered two eruptions in successive days, aimed right at the Earth. We were saved from more severe effects only by a chance alignment of magnetic fields.”
Rose Delea was getting restless. “All these phenomena are well known.”
Mikhail said, “Yes, we think we are getting a handle on measuring the effects of these different solar glitches—and predicting them, though that’s still more an art than a science…” He put up a slide of three “space weather scales” that the current Space Weather Service had inherited from the old American Space Environment Center, and had elaborated on since. “You can see we describe three types of problem for Earth: geomagnetic storms, solar radiation storms, and radio blackouts. Each type is calibrated with these scales
, from one to five—one being minor, and five being severe.”
Siobhan nodded. “And June 9—”
“June 9 was principally an outcome of a coronal mass ejection, and would be measured by our G-scale, our geomagnetic-storm scale.”
“And its rating?”
“Off the scale. June 9 was unprecedented. But the irony is that the event was better predicted than any solar glitch in history, thanks to Doctor Mangles.” He glanced at Eugene.
But Eugene, as distracted as ever, didn’t react to the cue; he seemed barely aware that the rest of the group existed.
There was an awkward silence. Bud called for a break.
You had to fetch your own coffee, it turned out; there were no spare hands to fetch and carry. And there were no digestive biscuits, not one on the whole damn Moon.
A line quickly formed at the coffee spigot at the back of the room. But Mikhail, near the front of the queue, picked up two plastic beakers of coffee and tentatively approached Siobhan, who accepted a beaker gratefully. Mikhail’s face was lugubrious and crumpled, and his voice was warm and rich; Siobhan liked him instinctively.
He said, “I imagine you’re the first Astronomer Royal to visit the Moon?”
“You know, I don’t think any of us even left Earth before.”
“Flamsteed would be proud of you.”
“I like to think so.” She sipped her coffee, and couldn’t help but grimace.
He smiled. “I apologize for Clavius coffee. And for the reception you’ve received here. We Moon-folk are an odd lot. A small society.”
“I was expecting a certain insularity.”
“But it’s more than that,” Mikhail said. “We are very self-reliant—we have to be. But that breeds a certain indifference to outsiders, and sometimes resentment. This meeting is all about Eugene, of course. And Eugene is—”
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