A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  Of course there was one more record to check. Deeply uneasy, she went back to the military service records and extended her search.

  She discovered that unlike Abdi and Casey, no “original” of herself was to be found in Afghanistan, serving the Army, living on oblivious. Of course she hadn’t expected to find “herself” out there, for otherwise the Army wouldn’t have been looking for her. It was still an eerie confirmation, however.

  She tried to absorb this. If she was the only one who had vanished altogether from this version of Earth, then she had somehow, and for some reason, been treated differently by the Firstborn, who had been responsible for all this in the first place. That was disturbing enough.

  But how much stranger it might have been if she had discovered a version of herself living on in Afghanistan…

  15: BOTTLENECK

  Miriam Grec tried to focus on what Siobhan McGorran was telling her.

  It wasn’t easy. This briefing room was on the fortieth floor of the Livingstone Tower—or the “Euro-needle” as every Londoner called it, including Miriam when off camera. The windows were broad sheets of toughened glass, and the October sky was a shade of blue that reminded her of childhood visits to Provence with her French-born father. What color would Papa have called that sky? Cerulean? Powder blue?

  On such a day, under such a sky, with London spread out like a shining tapestry before her, it was hard for Miriam to remember that she was no longer a small child but Prime Minister of all Eurasia, with grave responsibilities. And it was hard to accept such bad news as Siobhan’s.

  Siobhan sat calmly, waiting for her words to sink in.

  Nicolaus Korombel, Miriam’s press secretary, was the only other person in the room for this sensitive meeting. Polish-born, he had a habit of wearing shirts a couple of sizes too small for his spreading desk-job girth, and Miriam could actually see belly hair curl past its straining buttons. But he was the inner-circle advisor on whom she relied most heavily, and his assessment of Siobhan would be important in her final judgment of what she had to say.

  Now Nicolaus sat back, locked his fingers behind his head, and blew out his cheeks. “So we’re looking at the mother of all solar storms.”

  “You could put it that way,” Siobhan said dryly.

  “But we survived June 9, and everybody said that was the worst storm in recorded history. What can we expect this time? To lose the satellites, the ozone layer…”

  Siobhan said, “We’re talking about an energy injection many orders of magnitude greater than June 9.”

  Miriam held her hands up. “Professor McGorran, I was a lawyer in the days when I had a real job. I’m afraid such phrases mean little to me.”

  Siobhan allowed herself a smile. “I apologize. Prime Minister—”

  “Oh, call me Miriam. I have a feeling we’re going to be working together rather closely.”

  “Miriam, then. I do understand. Astronomer Royal I may be, but this isn’t my specialty. I’m struggling with it too.” Siobhan brought up a summary slide, a table of numbers that filled the big wall softscreen. “Let me go through the bottom line again. In April 2042, just four and a half years from now, we anticipate a major solar event. There will be an equatorial brightening of the sun, essentially, an outflux of energy that will bathe the orbital plane of Earth, and the other planets. We anticipate that Earth will intercept some ten to power twenty-four joules of energy. That’s a central figure; we have a ninety-nine percent confidence limit of an order of magnitude up or down.”

  There was that term again. “Order of magnitude?”

  “A power of ten.”

  Nicolaus rubbed his face. “I hate to admit my ignorance. I know a joule is a measure of energy, but I have no idea how large it is. And all those exponents—I understand that ten to power twenty-four means, umm, a trillion trillion, but—”

  Siobhan said patiently, “The detonation of a one-megaton nuclear weapon releases around ten to power fifteen joules—that’s a thousand trillion. The world’s nuclear arsenal at its Cold War peak was around ten thousand megatons; we’re probably down to some ten percent of that today.”

  Nicolaus was doing arithmetic in his head. “So your injection of ten to power twenty-four joules from the sun—”

  “It amounts to a billion megatons, pouring over Earth. Or a hundred thousand times the energy that would have been released in a worst-case nuclear conflagration.” She said the words coolly, meeting their eyes. She was trying to make them understand, step by step, Miriam saw; she was trying to make them believe.

  Nicolaus said grimly, “Why did nobody alert us to this before? Why did it take you to dig this out? What’s going on up there on the Moon?”

  But it wasn’t the Moon that was the problem, it seemed; it was the muddled head of the young scientist who had figured all this out.

  “Eugene Mangles,” Miriam said.

  “Yes,” Siobhan said. “He’s brilliant, but not quite connected to the rest of us. We need him. But we have to dig the bad news out of his head.”

  Nicolaus snapped, “And what else isn’t he telling us?”

  Miriam held up a hand. “Siobhan—just give me a headline. How bad will this be?”

  “The modeling is still uncertain,” Siobhan said. “But that much energy—it would strip away the atmosphere altogether.” She shrugged. “The oceans will boil, vaporize. The Earth itself will survive: the rocky planet. Life in the deep rocks, kilometers down, might live through it. Extremophile bacteria, heat lovers.”

  “But not us,” Nicolaus said.

  “Not us. And nothing of the surface biosphere, on the land, in the air, or the seas.” In the silence that followed, Siobhan said, “I’m sorry. This is a terrible thing to have brought home from the Moon. I don’t know any way to soften this.”

  They fell silent again, trying to digest what she had said.

  Nicolaus brought Miriam a cup of tea on a monogrammed saucer. It was Earl Grey, the way she preferred it. The old myth that the British were addicted to their watery, milky cuppas was at least half a century out of date, but Miriam, a Prime Minister of Europe and with a French father, always took great pains not to offend the sensibilities of anybody on this still residually Euro-skeptic island. So she took her Earl Grey hot and without milk, out of sight of the cameras.

  In this silent pause for thought, with her teacup cradled in her hands, Miriam was drawn to the window, and the city.

  The silver stripe of the Thames cut through London’s geography, as it always had. To the east the City, still second only to Moscow as a Eurasian financial center, was a clutter of skyscrapers. The City occupied much of what had once been Roman London, and in her time as a student here Miriam had once walked the line of the wall of that primal settlement, a trail that ran a few kilometers from the Tower to Blackfriars Bridge. When the Romans had gone the Saxons had developed a new town to the west of the old walls, the area now known as the West End. With the great expansion of the cities that had followed the Industrial Revolution, those complicated knots of multilayered history had been drowned by new suburban development, until London was the heart of a vast conurbation that today reached out as far as Brighton in the south and Milton Keynes to the north.

  The basic geography of London hadn’t changed much since the 1950s, perhaps. But a witness from that receding age would have been astonished by the glimmering width of the Thames, and the massive flanks of the new flood barriers that could be dimly glimpsed past the shoulders of buildings. The Thames had been tamed over the centuries, pushed into a deepening, narrowing channel, its tributaries bricked over, its floodplain built on. Until the turn of the century, London had got away with it. But the world’s climate shifts had brought an inexorable rise in sea levels, and humans had been forced to retreat before the Thames’s determined retaking of its ancient territories.

  The reality of climate change and its effects were undeniable, and a day-to-day political reality for Miriam. Remarkably the argument about the
cause of it all still continued. But that decades-old debate was moot now, as attention had gradually switched to the need to fix things. There was a will to act, Miriam thought, a gladdening and growing realization that things had gone too far, that something must be done.

  But it was surprisingly hard to focus that energy. Long-term demographic changes had led to an aging of the population in the West: more than half of all Western Europeans and Americans were now over sixty-five, mostly unproductive, and conservative with it. Meanwhile the interconnectedness of the world had culminated with the great UNESCO program to equip every twelve-year-old on the globe with a phone of her own. The result was a detachment from traditional political structures among the young and middle-aged, who, educated and interconnected, often showed more loyalty to others like them around the world than to the nations of which they were nominally citizens.

  If you looked at the world as a whole, this was probably the most truly democratic, educated, and enlightened age in history. The growth of a literate, interconnected elite certainly made major wars a lot less likely in the future. But it did make it hard to get anything done—especially when tough choices had to be made.

  And it seemed that tough choices faced Miriam now.

  At fifty-three, Miriam Grec was in her second year as Prime Minister of the Eurasian Union. She was the senior political figure across a swath of the Old World that stretched from the Atlantic coast of Ireland to the Pacific coast of Russia, and from Scandinavia in the north to Israel in the south. It was an empire no Caesar or Khan could have contemplated—but Miriam was no emperor. Enmeshed in the complicated federal politics of the young Union, buffeted by tensions between the great power blocs that dominated the world of the mid-twenty-first century, and having to cope with more primitive forces of religion, ethnicity, and residual nationalism, she sometimes felt as if she were trapped in a spiderweb.

  Of course, she would never have swapped places with her only nominal superior in Eurasia, the President, who had the power to do nothing but launch spaceplanes and visit the sick. However, the present incumbent was well suited by heredity and upbringing to such a role—though there had been universal astonishment at his election. Perhaps it said something about the yearning of the people for tradition and stability that the third democratically elected President of Eurasia was the King of Great Britain…

  Miriam tried to assess Siobhan McGorran. The Astronomer Royal, a rather earnest woman with a dark Celtic intensity, had clearly taken her mission to provide Miriam with a briefing on the events of June 9 very seriously, including that trip to the Moon, which Miriam rather envied. But Miriam’s problem was that Siobhan was not the first person to have stood before her and pronounced on global doom and gloom.

  This was a dangerous century, the experts kept saying. Climate change, eco-collapse, demographic changes—a bottleneck for humankind, some called it. Miriam accepted that basic view. But already it was clear that some of the very worst projections from the beginning of this century of change hadn’t come to pass. Miriam had learned that she had to apply a filter, a very unscientific and inexpert screen of judgment, to sort the wheat from the chaff, a judgment based as much on her impression of the character of the bringer of each bit of bad news as on the content of what she had to say.

  That was why she was coming to think that she would have to take Siobhan McGorran very seriously indeed.

  Nicolaus said, “Of course we’ll have to check everything out.”

  “But you do believe me.” Siobhan seemed neither gratified nor humble; she just wanted to get on with the job, Miriam thought.

  But what a dreadful job that was. Miriam banged her small fist on the tabletop. “Damn, damn.”

  Siobhan turned to her. “Miriam?”

  “You know, in my job things generally look grim, day to day. Here we are right in the throat of this bottleneck of history. We make mistakes, we squabble, we never agree, we take one step back for every two forward. And yet we’re finding our way through.” It was true. America, for instance, which had taken more of a beating on June 9 than any other region, had already recovered substantially, and was now even sending aid convoys out around the world. “I believe that we’re coming together as a species as a result of our coping with all these crises. Growing up, if you like. We work together, we help each other. We take care of the place we live.”

  Siobhan nodded. “My daughter has signed up for the Animal Ethics movement.” This was a grouping determined to extend the concept of human rights to other intelligent mammals, birds, and reptiles. Its case had been reinforced by the taxonomists reclassifying the two chimp species as part of the genus Homo, along with humans—immediately making them Legal Persons (Nonhuman) with equivalent rights to humans, and indeed equivalent to Aristotle, the planet’s other fully sentient inhabitant. “It might be too little too late but—”

  Miriam said, “I had hopes that if we could just get through this mess of a century, we could be on the verge of greatness. And now, when the future shows such promise, this.”

  Siobhan was looking absent. “I had similar conversations on the Moon. Bud Tooke said it was “ironic” this should happen just now. You know, scientists are suspicious of coincidences. A conspiracy theorist certainly might wonder if the fact that our capabilities are growing, and the arrival of this incoming disaster, at the same time, really is just bad luck.”

  Nicolaus frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Siobhan said. “A loose thread of thought…”

  Miriam said firmly, “Let’s stay focused. Siobhan, tell us what we need to do.”

  “Do?”

  “What options do we have?”

  Siobhan shook her head. “I’ve been asked that before. It’s not as if this is an asteroid we might push away. This is the sun, Miriam.”

  Nicolaus asked, “What about Mars? Isn’t Mars farther from the sun?”

  “Yes—but not so far it will make a difference to anything alive on its surface.”

  Miriam said, “You mentioned something about the deep life on Earth surviving.”

  “The deep hot biosphere, yes. It’s thought that that’s the wellspring from which life started on Earth in the first place. I suppose that could happen again. Like a reboot. But it would take millions of years just for single-celled life-forms to recolonize the land.” She smiled wistfully. “I doubt if any future intelligence would even know we had ever existed.”

  Nicolaus said, “Could we survive down there? Could we eat those bugs?”

  Siobhan looked dubious. “Maybe a deep enough bunker… How could it be self-sufficient? And the surface would be ruined; there would be no possibility of reemergence. Ever.”

  Miriam stood up, anger fueling her energy. “And is that what we’re to tell people? That they should dig a hole in the ground and wait to die? I need something better than that, Siobhan.”

  The Astronomer Royal stood. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We’ll speak again.” Restless, Miriam began pacing. She said to Nicolaus, “We’ll have to clear my schedule for the rest of the day.”

  “Already done.”

  “And set up some calls.”

  “America first?”

  “Of course…”

  She led the way from the room, energetic, bristling, planning. This wasn’t over yet. In fact this was just the beginning.

  For Miriam Grec, the end of the world had become a personal challenge.

  16: DEBRIEF

  Bisesa had to go through it all once again.

  “And then you came home,” Corporal Batson said with exaggerated emphasis. “From this—other place.”

  Bisesa suppressed a sigh. “From Mir. Yes, I came home. And that’s the hardest to explain.”

  The two of them sat in George Batson’s small office, here in Aldershot. The room was painted in reassuring pastel colors, and there was a seascape hanging on the wall. It was an environment designed to reassure nutcases, she thought wryly.
<
br />   Batson was watching her carefully. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “I saw an eclipse…”

  She had somehow been drawn into an Eye, a great Eye in ancient Babylon. And through the Eye she had been brought home, to her flat in London, to the early morning of that fateful day, June 9.

  But she hadn’t come straight home. There had been one other place she had visited: she and Josh, though he had been allowed to go no farther. It had been a blasted plain of crimson rock and dirt. Thinking about it now, it reminded her of the barren wastes patiently photographed by the crew of the Aurora 1, explorers on Mars. But she could breathe the air; surely this was the Earth.

  And then there was the eclipse. The sun had been high in the sky. The Moon’s shadow had drawn over the sun—but had not covered it; a ring of light had been left hanging.

  Batson’s pencil made soft, careful scratching sounds, recording this fantastic tale.

  The Army was trying to be fair.

  After she had reported to her commanding officer in Afghanistan, she had been ordered to report to a Ministry of Defense office in London, and then sent for medical and psychological tests here in Aldershot. For the time being they allowed her to go back home to Myra each evening. They had given her a tag, though, a smart tattoo on the sole of her foot.

  And now, as she waited for the results of her physical tests, she was being “debriefed,” as he had put it, by this facile young psychologist.

  She had decided to tell the Army everything. She couldn’t see how it would help her to lie. And her story—if it was true—was after all of shattering, transcendent importance. She was a soldier, and she believed she had a duty: the authorities, beginning with her own chain of command, had to know what she knew, and she had to try to make them believe it.