A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  25: SMOKING GUN

  For the reentry into Earth’s atmosphere aboard the spaceplane, Nicolaus chose to sit beside Miriam. He seemed stiff and rather silent, as he had been all the way back from the shield, and indeed for much of their time up there.

  But Miriam, though she knew she was exhausted on some deep level, felt good. She stretched luxuriously. The big softscreens around her showed the broad blue-gray face of Earth below, and a pink glow building up at the leading edge of Boudicca’s stubby wings as they bit into the thickening air. But there was no real sense of deceleration, only the mildest of vibrations, a tickle of pressure at her chest. It was all remarkably beautiful, and comfortable. “After seven days in space I feel wonderful,” she said. “I could get used to this. What a shame it’s over.”

  “All things must end.”

  There was something odd in Nicolaus’s tone. She looked at him, but though his posture remained stiff his face was blank. A distant alarm bell rang in her head.

  She looked past Nicolaus across the narrow aisle to see Captain Purcell, who had been quiet for a while. Purcell’s head was lolling like a puppet’s.

  Immediately she understood. “Oh, Nicolaus. What have you done?”

  Siobhan arrived at the Chelsea flat, with Toby Pitt at her side. It was an ordinary place, Siobhan thought, and this was an unremarkable March day. But there was nothing unremarkable about the woman who opened the door.

  “Thank you for coming,” Bisesa said. She looked tired—but then, Siobhan reflected, two years out from sunstorm day, everybody looked tired.

  Siobhan followed her through the flat’s short hallway to the living room. The room had the clutter you would expect: a soft-looking sofa big enough for three, occasional tables littered with magazines and rolled-up softscreens. The main feature on which money had been spent was a big kid-friendly softwall. Bisesa was a single parent, Siobhan knew, with her one daughter, Myra, now eleven, at school today. The other tenant was Bisesa’s cousin, a student in bioethics who was now working on a pre-sunstorm conservation program run by an alliance of British zoos.

  In a suit and tie, out of his natural environment in this domestic scene, Toby Pitt looked uncomfortable. “Nice softwall,” he said.

  Bisesa shrugged. “It’s a bit out of date now. It kept Myra company when her squaddie mum was away. Now Myra has other interests,” she said with a mother’s fond exasperation. “And we don’t watch so much. Too much bad news.”

  That was a common pattern, Siobhan knew. Anyhow, today the softwall was now hooked up to a government comms channel, and was showing the flickering images of Mikhail, Eugene, and others, images relayed from the Moon and Earth orbit to this living room in a flat in Chelsea.

  Bisesa bustled away to make coffee.

  Toby leaned toward Siobhan and said quietly, “I still think this is a mistake. To be pursuing theories of alien intention behind the sunstorm—people are becoming too disengaged as it is.”

  Siobhan knew he had a point.

  The impending sunstorm itself was bad enough for the public mood. Now the preparations for it were starting to bite significantly into people’s lives. Immense construction projects like the Dome were causing monumental traffic problems. Across the city routine work was being rushed or neglected, and that was starting to show; just the lack of fresh paintwork on London’s major buildings was making the place look shabby. Aside from the huge diversion of resources to the Dome, everybody was stockpiling, it seemed, and there was a continual plague of shortages in the stores. A recent upsurge of global terrorism and the subsequent wave of paranoia and security clampdowns had made things worse yet. It was a time of fretfulness and anxiety, a time from which people increasingly wanted to escape.

  All the major news organizations reported catastrophic slumps in ratings—while sales of synth soap operas, which allowed you to pretend the outside world didn’t exist at all, had boomed. The world’s leaders were becoming concerned that if there was more bad news of any kind, everybody would just hide away at home until the dreadful dawn of April 20, 2042 finally put an end to all their stories.

  “But,” Siobhan said slowly, “what if Bisesa’s right?” That was the slim, disturbing possibility that had guided her actions since the day Bisesa had first bluffed her way into the Royal Society, already more than a year ago, and why she had diverted a small percentage of the energies at her command to looking into Bisesa’s ideas. “If this is the truth, Toby, there’s no hiding away, whatever it costs.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “You have my full support. You know that. It’s just that I’ve always felt that putting Bisesa I-was-abducted-by-aliens-and-fell-in-love-with-Alexander-the-Great Dutt in touch with Eugene the-greatest-mind-since-Einstein-if-only-you-would-listen Mangles was asking for trouble.”

  She forced a smile. “Yes, but what fun!”

  Bisesa returned with a tray of coffees, and a pot for refills.

  “There’s nothing you can do about it, Miriam,” Nicolaus said, his voice thickened by stress. “The plane’s communications are cut off, and anyhow we will soon be isolated by reentry plasma. Even Aristotle is out of touch. The fact that the plane is automated actually made it easier. The device is on a tamperproof timer, which, even if we could get to it—”

  She held up her hands. “I really don’t want to know.” She glanced at the wall softscreens, which now showed a broadening glow, escalating through pink to white. It was like being inside a vast lightbulb, she thought. Must her life really end amid such beauty?

  She searched for anger, but found only emptiness, a kind of pity. After years of strain she was fundamentally exhausted, she thought, too tired to be angry, even about this. And maybe she had thought that something like this was inevitable, in the end. But she did want to understand.

  “What’s the point, Nicolaus? You know the polls better than I do. In six months I would be out of the way anyhow. And this really won’t make any difference to the project. If anything it’s likely to strengthen everybody’s resolve to get it done.”

  “Are you sure?” His grin was tight. “This is quite a stunt, you know. You are Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy. And nobody has taken down a spaceplane before. If confidence in flying into space is dented, even just a bit—if people on the shield start looking over their shoulders when they ought to be getting on with their work—I’ll have achieved what I set out to do.”

  “But you won’t live to see it, will you?” And neither will I… “You’re just another in a long line of suicide bombers, as careless of the lives of others as you are of your own.”

  He said coldly, “You don’t know me well enough to insult me. Even though I’ve worked at your side for ten years.”

  Of course that was true, she thought with a stab of guilt. She remembered her resolution on the way out to try to get Nicolaus to open up a little—but on the shield she had been too entranced by her surroundings even to notice him. Would it have made any difference even if she had? Perhaps it was just as well, she thought morbidly, that she would not live long enough to be plagued by such questions.

  “Tell me why, Nicolaus. I think you owe me that.”

  His voice tight with tension, he said, “I sacrifice my life for El, the One True God.”

  And that was enough to tell her everything.

  Siobhan glanced at the faces on Bisesa’s softwall. “Everybody online? Can you see us?”

  With the usual disconcerting lightspeed delays, the others responded.

  “No introductions needed, no ceremony. Who wants to start—Eugene?”

  When her words reached the Moon, Eugene visibly jumped, as if his attention had been fixed on something else. “Okay,” he said. “First some background. You’re aware of my work on the sun, of course.” The middle of the softwall filled up with an image of the sun, which then turned transparent to reveal onion-skin layers within. The heart of the sun, the fusing core—a star within a star—glowed a sullen red. It was laced
by a crisscross pattern of dark and bright stripes, dynamic, elusive, ever shifting. There was a date stamp in the corner, showing today’s date, in March 2040. Eugene said, “These oscillations will lead in the near future to a catastrophic outpouring of energy into the external environment.”

  Casually he ran the model forward in time, until the image suddenly flared.

  Siobhan felt Toby flinch. He murmured, “He really doesn’t see the impact he has on the rest of us, does he? Sometimes that boy scares me more than the sun itself.”

  “But he’s useful,” Siobhan whispered back.

  Eugene said, “So the future projection is stable, reliable. But I have had more difficulty with projections into the past. Nothing in the standard models of stellar interior behavior served as a guide. I began to suspect a single impulsive event lay behind this anomalous condition—an anomaly behind the anomaly. But I had trouble converging on a model. My discussions with Lieutenant Dutt, after Professor McGorran put us in touch, gave me a new paradigm to work with.”

  Siobhan murmured to Toby, “Told you so.”

  Mikhail interceded, “I think you’d better just show us, son.”

  Eugene nodded curtly and tapped at an out-of-shot softscreen.

  The date stamp began to count down, and the reconstructed events ran backward. As wave modes fluttered across the surface of the core, detail appeared in sidebars: frequencies, phases, amplitudes, lists of the energy shares of the principal vibration modes. As interference, nonlinearity, and other effects worked on the three-dimensional waves, the core’s output peaked and dipped.

  Mikhail commented, “Eugene’s model is remarkably good. We have been able to map many of these resonant-peak anomalies onto some of the notable solar weather incidents in our history: the Little Ice Age, the 1859 storm…”

  Siobhan had studied wave propagation as applied to the early universe, and she could see the quality of the work here. She said to Toby, “If he gets this anywhere near right, it will be one of the keenest bits of analysis I’ve ever seen.”

  “Finest mind since Einstein,” Toby said dryly.

  Now things changed on the screen. The oscillations grew wilder. And it seemed to Siobhan that a concentration of energy was gathering in one place.

  Unexpectedly a brilliant knot of light rose out of the core, like a gruesome dawn inside the body of the sun itself. And as soon as the knot had left the core, those central oscillations all but ceased.

  Eugene paused his projection, leaving the point of light poised on the edge of the core but beneath the blanketing layers of sun above. “At this point my modeling of the core anomaly is smoothly patched to a new routine to project the behavior of the inert radiative zone that lies around the core, and—”

  Siobhan leaned forward. “Hold it, Eugene. What is that thing?”

  Eugene blinked. “A concentration of mass,” he said, as if it were obvious. He displayed graphs of density. “At this point the mass contained within three standard deviations of the center of gravity is ten to power twenty-eight kilograms.”

  She did some quick mental arithmetic. “That’s about five Jupiters.”

  Eugene glanced at her, as if surprised she would need a translation into such baby talk. “About that, yes.” He resumed his animation.

  That glowing fist of matter rose out of the sun’s heart, up through its layers. As it rose Siobhan saw disturbances like ripples flowing into the mass knot, a glowing tail almost like a comet’s, preceding it on its way to the surface. But she was watching this projection in reverse, she reminded herself. In reality this lump of matter had slammed its way down into the sun, leaving a turbulent wake behind, dumping energy and mass into the sun’s tortured bulk through those mighty waves.

  She said, “So that’s how the radiative zone was cut through.”

  “Precisely,” Mikhail said. “Eugene’s model is elegant: a single cause to explain many effects.”

  The knot of mass, backing out of the sun, now reached the surface and popped out through the photosphere. Again Eugene froze his animation. Siobhan saw that the emergence was close to the sun’s equator.

  The date stamp, she noted, showed 4 B.C.

  Eugene said, “Here is the moment of impact. The mass at this point was some ten to power—” He glanced at Siobhan. “About fifteen Jupiters. As it descended into the sun’s interior, the outer layers of the object were of course ablated away, but five Jupiters made it to the core.”

  Toby Pitt said, “Fifteen Jupiters. It was a planet—a Jovian, a big one. And, two thousand years ago—it fell into the sun. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not quite,” Eugene said. He tapped at his softscreen again, and the view abruptly changed. Now the sun was a bright pinpoint at the center of a darkened screen, and the planets’ orbits were traced out as shining circles. “From this point I made another patch, to a simple Newtonian gravity trajectory solution. Corrections for relativity aren’t significant until the impactor passed the orbit of Mercury, and even then they are small…”

  Knowing where and how fast his mighty Jovian had splashed into the sun, Eugene had projected back, using Newton’s gravity law, to figure out the path it must have followed to get there. A glowing line, starting in the sun and crossing all the planets’ orbits, swept out of the solar system and off the screen. It curved subtly but was remarkably straight, Siobhan saw.

  Toby said, “I don’t understand. Why do you say it didn’t fall into the sun?”

  Siobhan said immediately, “Because that trajectory is hyperbolic. Toby, the Jovian was moving faster than solar escape velocity.”

  Mikhail said somberly, “It didn’t fall into the sun. It was fired in.”

  Toby’s mouth opened, and closed.

  Bisesa didn’t seem surprised at all.

  The One-Godders had emerged as a kind of reaction to the benevolent Oikumen movement. Fundamentalists of three of the world’s great faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had appealed to their own shared roots. They united under the banner of the Old Testament God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: Yahweh, who was thought to have derived from a still older deity called El, a god of the Canaanites.

  And El was a meddling god, a brutish, partial, and murderous tribal god. In the late 2020s His first act, through His modern adherents, had been the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, when fanatics, in a self-destructive spasm, had used a nuclear grenade to take out a site of unique significance to at least two of their three intertwined creeds. Miriam remembered that Bud Tooke had been involved in the cleanup.

  “Nicolaus, why would you want to impede the work on the shield? You’ve been at my side throughout. Can’t you see how important it is?”

  “If God wishes us to be put to the fire of the sunstorm, so be it. And if He chooses to save us, so be it. For us to question His authority over us with this monstrous gesture—”

  “Oh, can it,” she said irritably. “I’ve heard it all before. A Tower of Babel in space, eh? And you’re the one to bring it down. How disappointing, how banal!”

  “Miriam, your mockery can’t hurt me anymore. I have found faith,” he said.

  And there was the real problem, she realized.

  In his conversion Nicolaus wasn’t alone. All the major faiths, sects, and cults worldwide had recorded a marked rise in conversions since June 9. You might expect a flight to God in the face of impending catastrophe—but there was a theory, still controversial and revealed to her only in confidential briefings, that increased solar activity was correlated with religious impulses in humans. The great electromagnetic energies that had washed over the planet since June 9 were, it seemed, able to work subtle changes in the complicated bioelectrical fields of a human brain, just as in power cables and computer chips.

  If that was true—if the agitation of the sun had somehow led, by a long and complicated causal chain, to a lethal ideological determination in the mind of Miriam’s closest colleague to kill her—well, what an irony it would be. She said black
ly, “If God exists, He must be laughing right now.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Never mind.” A thought struck her. “Nicolaus—where will we come down?”

  He smiled coldly. “Rome,” he said.

  Siobhan asked, “Can we say where this rogue planet came from?”

  Not from the solar system, of course; it had been moving too fast to have been captured by the sun. Eugene displayed more of his “patched solutions,” projecting the path of his Jovian back to the distant stars. He rattled off celestial coordinates, but Siobhan stopped him and turned to Mikhail. “Can you put that into English?”

  “Aquila,” Mikhail said. “It came to us out of the constellation of the eagle.” This was a constellation close to the sky’s equator; from Earth the plane of the Galaxy appeared to run through it. Mikhail said, “In fact, Professor McGorran, we know that this object must have came from the star Altair.” Altair was the brightest star in Aquila. It was some sixteen light-years from Earth.

  Eugene cautioned, “Mikhail, I’m not sure we should talk about this. The projection gets fuzzy if you push it back that far. The error bars—”

  Mikhail said grimly, “My boy, this is not a time for timidity. Professor, it appears that Eugene’s rogue Jovian originated in orbit around Altair. It was flung out after a series of close encounters with other planets in the system, which are visible with our planet-finder telescopes. The details are understandably sketchy, but we hope to pin them down further.”

  “And,” Siobhan said, “it was hurled our way.”

  Toby pulled his nose. “It seems fantastic.”

  Mikhail said quickly, “The reconstruction is very reliable. It has been verified from multiple data sources using a variety of independent methods. I have checked over Eugene’s calculations myself. This is all quite authoritative.”

  Bisesa listened to all this quietly, without reacting.

  “Okay,” Toby said. “So a rogue planet fell into the sun. It’s an astonishing thing to happen, but not unprecedented. Remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy colliding with Jupiter in the 1990s? And—with respect—what does it have to do with Lieutenant Dutt and her theories about extraterrestrial intervention?”