A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  “Special?”

  He smiled. “Something like that. His personality is clearly difficult. And his social situation isn’t helped by his choice of discipline. For the last generation of solar physicists, neutrinos were, for a long time, something of an embarrassment.”

  “Ah. The ‘neutrino anomaly.’” When it had first been studied closely, the flood of neutrinos detected coming from the core of the sun was significantly less than had been predicted by then-current models of particle physics. It had turned out that the physics was wrong—neutrinos, thought to be massless, actually were not—and when that was put right in the theoretical models, the “anomaly” went away.

  “You know how it is in science,” Mikhail said gloomily. “Fashions come and they go. My area of work, this messy solar weather with its plasma storms and tangled-up magnetic fields, has never been fashionable. But after the business of the anomaly, solar neutrino studies were definitely not a sexy subject area. And then Eugene annoyed everybody by detecting yet another sort of neutrino anomaly—just when everybody thought it was sorted out for good.”

  “Okay. But even though he’s prickly, I get the sense that he’s popular here.”

  Mikhail pulled his lip. “I wouldn’t say popular. But it’s well known that it was Eugene’s work that gave us our only early warning of the June 9 event. Nobody believed a word until the event was actually in progress, of course—he came to me at the South Pole so I could raise the alarm—but even so Eugene’s warning saved a lot of lives. That’s made him something of a folk hero, you see, among us exiles from Earth. So when an outsider like yourself shows up, no matter how highly qualified—”

  “I understand.” She eyed him and said carefully, “You just wouldn’t think that a brain like Eugene’s could reside behind such a face.”

  Mikhail looked at Eugene with undisguised longing. “But I think his face, his body, is his curse. Everybody assumes he must be no more than an ‘airhead jock,’ as my American colleagues say. Nobody takes him seriously. Even I find his looks—”

  “Distracting?” She smiled. “Welcome to the club, Mikhail.”

  Mikhail said edgily, “But it is what goes on inside that beautiful head that is so disturbing.”

  Bud reconvened the session.

  13: NEUTRINOS

  When Eugene Mangles spoke, every eye turned his way curiously. His accent was small-town American, Siobhan thought, and he sounded like a teen, younger than his midtwenties; his looks didn’t fit what he had to say.

  And his presentation about the anomalies he had discovered at the heart of the sun, while no doubt technically accurate, was anything but lucid.

  Siobhan actually knew a lot about neutrinos. There are three known ways to make neutrinos: with fusion processes in the heart of a star like the sun, by turning a nuclear reactor on and off, and in the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe itself, the titanic event whose large-scale consequences were Siobhan’s own subject matter. What makes neutrinos so useful to solar astronomers is that matter is all but transparent to them. And so neutrinos provide a unique way of studying the sun’s inner structure, including the fusing core, a place from which even light struggles to escape.

  That much was clear. But as Eugene displayed screen-filling equations and graphs in several dimensions, and as he talked ever more rapidly, Siobhan wondered how he had ever got through his doctorate oral exam.

  Eventually she broke in. “Eugene. Slow down, please; I’m afraid you’re leaving us all behind.” He glared at her with a resentful intensity. But this was the heart of the matter; she needed to get this clear. “You’re showing us results of your neutrino measurements.”

  “Yes, yes. Of the three flavors of neutrinos, which are interrelated by—”

  She waved that away. “You are seeing oscillations in the neutrino flow.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that in turn,” she pressed on doggedly, “reflects oscillations in the fusion processes in the core.”

  “Precisely,” he said sarcastically. “The neutrino flux tracks back to local changes in core temperature and pressure. Which in turn I’ve been able to model as dynamic oscillations of the core as a whole.” He displayed dense mathematics, which Siobhan recognized as nonlinear wave equations. “As you can see—”

  “Eugene,” Mikhail said gently, “don’t you have some kind of picture of this?”

  Eugene looked surprised by the question. “Of course I do.” He tapped his softscreen and brought up an image of a sphere. It was covered by a kind of gridwork, like lines of longitude and latitude. And the pattern faded and pulsed rhythmically.

  Bud Tooke whistled. “And this is the core of the sun? Our sun? The damn thing’s ringing like a bell.”

  Rose Delea folded her arms and pulled her face. “Forgive a mere geologist for being skeptical, but the core of a star is a pretty massive bloody thing. How can it suddenly start to oscillate?”

  Now Eugene’s rather terrifying glare was turned on her. “But that’s trivial.”

  Trivial: among academics that word was a killer put-down. Rose’s face was a mask of hostility.

  Siobhan said quickly, “Take it step by step, Eugene.”

  He said, “It goes back to the work of Cowling in the 1930s. Cowling showed that the rate of nuclear energy generation in the core is dependent on the fourth power of temperature. Which makes conditions in the core of the sun extremely sensitive to temperature changes…”

  He was right, Siobhan realized uneasily. That fourth-power factor would lead to even small changes being magnified. Huge as it was, the core wasn’t necessarily stable at all, and any small perturbation could disrupt it significantly.

  Bud Tooke interrupted with a raised finger. “I don’t get it, Eugene. So what? Even if the whole core explodes, it would take megayears for the bang to work its way out to the surface.”

  Rose Delea grinned sourly. “Don’t tell me. The radiative layer is screwed too, right?”

  She was correct; another of Eugene’s images showed it. That great tank of slow-propagating energy was flawed by a puckered scar, like a wound stitched through flesh by a bullet. And so, Siobhan realized uncomfortably, the million-year lagging around the core wouldn’t work as a protective layer: any energy released in the core could be squirted straight out to space.

  Eugene looked at Rose, puzzled. “How did you know about the flaw?”

  “Because this is turning out to be that kind of day.”

  Eugene talked on about his models of the core oscillations, and how he was hoping to run them back in time. “I’m intending to develop models of the inciting event of this instability, which—”

  “Never mind the past for now,” Siobhan interrupted. “Look forward. Show us what’s to come.”

  Eugene seemed puzzled that the future should even be of interest compared with the deep physical mystery of the origin of this anomaly. But he obediently ran his graphic forward in time, at an accelerated pace.

  Siobhan could see that the wave propagation through and around the core was complex, with multiple harmonics added to the base oscillations, and waves that were nonlinear, as the specialists would say, with energy leaking from one mode into another. But she immediately saw that there were patterns of interference, of dissipation—and, more ominously, of resonance, when the energy she could so clearly see flowing around the core of the sun gathered into powerful peaks.

  Eugene froze the image. “Here’s the most recent spike, the June 9 event.” One side of the core was flaring bright with false color. “The observational data confirms my preliminary modeling, and validates my future projections…” By observational data, Siobhan thought ruefully, he meant a devastating storm that had cost thousands of human lives.

  She asked, “And what’s to come?”

  He ran the model forward at a greater pace. The patterns of oscillation shifted and swam in Siobhan’s vision, too rapid to follow in detail.

  Then, suddenly, the image flared bright, all
over the core, almost bright enough to dazzle. People flinched, briefly shocked.

  Eugene shut down his graphics. He said laconically, “That’s it.”

  Rose Delea said dangerously, “What do you mean, that’s it?”

  “At this point the model breaks down. The oscillations become so large that—”

  “Your damn model!” Delea shouted. “Is that all you can think about?”

  “Let’s take it easy,” Siobhan said, thinking fast. “Eugene, we’re looking at another event here. Correct? Another June 9.”

  “Yes.”

  “But more energetic.”

  He looked at her, puzzled by her ignorance once more. “That’s obvious.”

  Siobhan glanced around the table, at wide-eyed, uncomfortable faces. Evidently Eugene hadn’t shared these results with anybody before, not even Mikhail.

  Bud asked, “How much more? And how will it manifest itself? How will it hit us, Eugene?”

  Eugene tried to answer, but he descended quickly into technicalities.

  Mikhail laid a hand on Bud’s arm. “I don’t think he can say. Not yet. I’ll work with him on it.” He went on thoughtfully, “But you know, this isn’t unprecedented. We might be looking at another S Fornax.”

  “S Fornax?”

  For decades the astronomers had been studying middle-aged stars of the sun’s class, and on many of them had noticed cycles of activity similar to the sun’s. But some stars showed rather more variability than others. An unspectacular star in the constellation called Fornax had suddenly flared up one day, shining twenty times as bright as usual, for maybe an hour.

  Mikhail said, “If the sun erupted like S Fornax, the energy input would have been something like ten thousand times as bad as our worst solar storms.”

  “And what would that do?”

  Mikhail shrugged. “Disable the whole satellite fleet. Destroy Earth’s ozone layer. Melt the surfaces of the ice moons—”

  Siobhan remembered dimly that the constellation name, Fornax, meant “furnace.” How appropriate, she thought.

  But Eugene actually laughed. “Oh, this core nonlinearity will be much more energetic than that. Orders of magnitude worse. Don’t you even see that much?”

  That crack brought him looks of resentment, even hatred.

  Siobhan studied him, baffled. It was as if all this were no more than a mathematical exercise to him. He was just a boy who saw patterns, she thought, patterns in the data; the patterns’ meaning in human terms was invisible to him. She felt almost frightened of him.

  But she must concentrate on what he had said, not the way he said it. Orders of magnitude. To a physicist, indeed to a cosmologist, an order of magnitude meant a factor of ten. So whatever was coming would be ten, a hundred, a thousand times worse than June 9, worse even than this S Fornax event of Mikhail’s. Her imagination quailed.

  And there was one obvious question that had yet to be asked. “Eugene, do you have a date for this event?”

  “Oh, yes,” Eugene said. “The model’s already good enough for that.”

  “When, Eugene?”

  He tapped at his softscreen and gave a date in Julian days, an astronomer’s date. It took Mikhail to translate it into human terms.

  “April 20, 2042.”

  Bud looked at Siobhan. “Less than five years.”

  Suddenly Siobhan felt hugely weary. “Well, I guess I’ve found out what I came here to know. And maybe now you can see the need for security.”

  Rose Delea snorted. “Security, my arse. We could all run around naked with bags on our heads for the next five years and it wouldn’t make any difference. You heard him. We,” she said concisely, “are fucked.”

  Bud said firmly, “Not if I can help it.” He stood up. “Lunchtime. I guess you might want to call your Prime Minister, Siobhan. Either of them. Then we get back to work.”

  14: MISSING IN ACTION

  Too soon, time ran out for Bisesa.

  Myra’s school reopened. The headmistress understood that for some families, bereaved, displaced, shocked, or simply frightened, more recovery time was needed. But as the weeks wore by a note of insistence crept in. Disaster or no disaster, the education of the young had to go on: that was the law, and it was up to parents to fulfill their obligations.

  For Bisesa, the pressure was mounting. She was going to have to release Myra before the social services came looking for her. The cocoon she had built around the two of them was starting to crack.

  But it was the British Army that finally broke her out into the daylight. Bisesa received a polite e-mail asking her to report in to her commanding officer.

  As far as the Army knew Bisesa had simply disappeared from her posting on June 8, before the solar storm, and her five-years-too-old ident chip making her untraceable, she had not been heard of since. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the Army, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, had had other things to think about. But now the service’s bureaucratic patience was running out.

  Her bank accounts hadn’t been frozen, not yet, but her salary had been stopped. Linda was still able to draw on the funds for shopping and bills, but Bisesa’s level of savings, never high, was quickly dropping.

  Then, still unable to find her, the Army switched its assessment of the cause of her vanishing from “possibly AWOL” to “missing in action.” Letters were hand-delivered to her next of kin: her own parents in Cheshire, and Myra’s paternal grandmother and father, parents of the child’s deceased father.

  Bisesa was lucky that the grandparents reacted first, and called her flat in a great flurry of concern. Their call gave Bisesa the chance to contact her parents before they opened their own letter. She wasn’t close to her parents; the family had fallen out when her father had sold off the farm where Bisesa had grown up. She hadn’t even contacted them since June 9, though she felt a little guilty about that. But they certainly didn’t deserve the shock of opening such a letter, with its grave Ministry of Defense language about how all efforts were being made to trace her, and her effects would be returned to them, with deepest sympathies expressed … et cetera, et cetera.

  She was able to spare her parents that. But she’d had to give away her location, and when the authorities came looking for her seriously she wouldn’t be hard to find.

  So she braced herself, and asked Aristotle to put her through to her commanding officer, in the UN base in Afghanistan.

  While she waited for a reply, she continued to worry at her peculiar memories.

  Of course there was one obvious explanation for it all. She did have scraps of physical evidence for her adventures on Mir—her own apparent aging, the scrambling of her ident chip. But all she really had to rely on were her own recollections of the event. And it didn’t need the construction of a whole new Earth to explain that. Perhaps she had gone through some kind of episode that had scrambled her mind, impelled her to go AWOL, and brought her home to London. She might, after all, be crazy. She didn’t think so, but it was a simpler explanation, and in the mundane calm of London it was a hard possibility to discount.

  So she looked for verification.

  She had known Abdikadir Omar and Casey Othic, her companions on Mir, before the Discontinuity, of course. Now she used Aristotle, and a not-yet-canceled password, to hack into Army databases and check out their service records.

  She found that Abdi and Casey were still out there in Afghanistan. After June 9 they had been pulled off their peacekeeping duties to help out with civil emergencies in the nearby town of Peshawar, Pakistan. They were still there now, quietly doing their duties. There was no sign that they had gone through anything resembling Bisesa’s experience.

  She tried to make sense of all this. Abdi and Casey had undoubtedly followed her to Mir—but it seemed that those “versions” of Abdi and Casey on Mir had been extrapolated from a slice of time, the moment of Discontinuity as they had called it on Mir, while the “originals,” oblivious, lived out their lives here on Earth.

 
She didn’t speak to either of them directly. She had grown very close to them in the course of their shared experiences on Mir. It would be hard to bear if they were distant now.

  She began to dig into the characters she remembered from 1885.

  Kipling’s life of course had been covered by many biographers. As a young journalist, he had indeed been in the area of Jamrud in 1885, and had gone on, apparently unperturbed by his passage through the Discontinuity, to international fame later. She couldn’t trace any of the Empire-period British officers she had encountered, but that was no surprise; time and subsequent wars had taken a heavy toll on such records. Of the more remarkable historical figures whose paths had crossed hers she could learn little new; they were so remote in time that she could only confirm that nothing in their accepted biographies was contradicted by her experience.

  There was another, less famous name for her to check, though. It took her some digging: most of the world’s genealogical databases were now online, but after June 9 many electronic memory stores were still more or less scrambled.

  There had indeed been a Joshua White, she found. Born in 1862 in Boston, his father had been a journalist who had covered the War Between the States, just as Josh had told her, and Josh himself had become a war correspondent in his father’s footsteps. It gave her quite a start when she found a grainy photograph of Josh, aged just a few years older than when she had known him, proudly displaying a book based on his reportage of the British Empire’s military escapades on the North–West Frontier, and later in South Africa.

  It was eerie to page forward through the sparse accounts of a life lived on to ages much older than when she had known him. He had fallen in love, she saw with a pang of loss: aged thirty-five, he married a Boston Catholic, who gave him two sons. But he was cut down in his fifties, dying in the blood-sodden mud of Passchendaele, as he sought to cover yet another war.

  This was a man who, on a different world, had fallen in love with her—an unconditional love she had clung to, but sadly had been unable to return. And yet this Joshua was the original, and the lost boy who loved her had been a mere copy. His had been a love she had never even wanted—and that had never, in some real sense, even happened at all. But the historical existence of Josh was surely proof that all this was real; there was no plausible way she could have heard of this obscure nineteenth-century journalist and built a delusion around him.