A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  As the regular cycle of day and night had become less marked, Bisesa wasn’t the only one whose sleep pattern was disrupted, according to Aristotle; other sufferers ranged from the Mayor herself to the squirrels in London’s parks.

  On the roof, Myra was lying on her belly on an inflatable mat. She was working on what looked like homework, on a softscreen tiled with images.

  Bisesa sat beside her daughter, cross-legged. “I’m surprised you have work to do.” School had been out for a week.

  Myra shrugged. “We’re all supposed to blog.”

  Bisesa smiled. “That’s a very old-fashioned idea.”

  “If a teacher wasn’t old-fashioned you’d be worried. They even gave us pads of paper and pens for when the softscreens get fritzed. They said, when historians write about what happens tomorrow, they will have all our little viewpoints to put in.”

  If there are any historians after tomorrow, Bisesa thought. “So what are you writing?”

  “Whatever hits me. Look at this.” She tapped a corner of her softscreen and a small tile magnified. It showed a ring of monolithic stones, a gathering of white-robed people, a handful of heavily armed police.

  “Stonehenge?” Bisesa asked.

  “They’re there for the last sunset.”

  “Are they Druids?”

  “I don’t think so. They’re worshiping a god called Sol Invictus.”

  Everybody had become an expert on sun gods. Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, was one of the more interesting of his breed, Bisesa thought. He had been one of the last of the great pagan gods; his cult had flourished in the late Roman Empire just before Christianity had become the state religion. To Bisesa’s disappointment, however, there had been no trace of anybody reviving Marduk, the Babylonian god of the sun. “It would be nice to see the old guy again,” she had said to Aristotle, to his confusion.

  Myra said, “Of course there’s no Dome over Stonehenge. I wonder if the stones will be standing tomorrow. In the heat, they might crumble and crack. That’s a sad thought, isn’t it? After all these thousands of years.”

  “Yes.”

  “Those sun botherers say they will be there for sunrise too.”

  “That’s their privilege,” Bisesa said. Tonight the world had more than its fair share of crazies, preparing to use the storm to commit suicide in a variety of more or less ingenious ways.

  Bisesa was distracted by a distant crackle, what sounded like shouting. She stood up, walked to the edge of the roof, and looked out over London.

  As the daylight was fading, the usual orange-yellow glow of the streetlights gleamed, and Dome-mounted spotlights splashed a whiter illumination over the capital’s great buildings. There was plenty of traffic, rivers of lights flowing around the Dome’s support pillars. In the city in the last few days there had been a sense of nervous excitement. She knew that some people were planning to party all night long, as if this were some greater New Year’s Eve. In anticipation the police had kept Trafalgar Square, the very center of the Dome and the traditional focus of London’s festivities and demonstrations alike, cordoned off for days.

  All this activity was covered over by the Tin Lid. Immense strip lights, some as long as a hundred meters, were suspended from that vast ceiling. Their pearly glow caught the slim columns of the supporting pillars, which rose up out of the city like searchlight beams. Sparks swirled around the upper reaches of the pillars and settled in the huge rafters: London’s pigeons had discovered new ways to live under this astounding roof.

  And there was that crackling sound again.

  You couldn’t be sure what was going on anymore. News had been carefully censored since Valentine’s Day, when martial law had at last been imposed. Rather than factual reports, you were much more likely to find yourself watching some feel-good squib on the heroically huge fans, with names like “Brunel” and “Barnes Wallis,” that would clean London’s air during the period the Dome was shut, or on the Tower’s ravens, whose presence traditionally kept London safe, being carefully protected as the daylight was shut out.

  But Bisesa could guess the truth. In the last few days the shield had begun visibly to close over the sun. It was the first tangible, physical sign since June 9, 2037, that something really was going to happen—and it was a strange light in the sky, a darkening of the sun, a portent straight out of Revelation. There had been a huge rise in tension; the cultists, conspiracy theorists, and bad guys of all stripes had been stirred up as never before.

  And as well as the crazies there were the refugees, seeking somewhere safe to hide. On this last day London was packed to the rafters already—and Bisesa’s flat wasn’t far from the Fulham Gate. She heard another series of pops. Bisesa was a soldier; that sounded like gunfire to her. And now she thought she could smell smoke.

  She tapped Myra on the shoulder. “Come on. Time we went back down.”

  But Myra wouldn’t move. “I’ll just finish this.” Normally Myra lay as loose as a cat. But now she was tense, her shoulders hunched, and she was tapping with sharp pecking motions at her softscreen.

  She wants to make it go away, Bisesa thought. And she thinks if she keeps doing normal things, keeps on with her homework, she can somehow postpone it all, keep her little nest of normality. Bisesa felt a stab of protectiveness—and regret that she couldn’t spare her daughter from what was to come. But that smell of smoke grew stronger.

  Bisesa bent down and briskly folded up Myra’s softscreen. “We go down,” she said bluntly. “Now.”

  As she closed the roof door behind them, she glanced back one last time. Those final windows in the Dome were being shut over, blocking out the light, the last light of the last day. And somewhere, somebody was screaming.

  35: SUNSET (II)

  On the bridge of the Aurora 2, Bud Tooke sat loosely strapped to his seat.

  The walls around him were tiled with softscreens. Most of them showed data or images returned from various sectors of the shield, and from more remote monitors standing off in space. But there were faces too: Rose Delea sweating in her spacesuit somewhere out on the shield, Mikhail Martynov and Eugene Mangles on the Moon, both monitoring the sun’s final hours before the storm, and even Helena Umfraville, a highly capable British astronaut he had once trained with, her time-lagged image transmitted from distant Mars.

  There was no particular purpose in this conferencing. But somehow it was comforting at this time for Earth’s scattered children to keep in touch. And so the links were left open, and to hell with the bandwidth.

  Athena coughed softly, an attention-alerting tic she had picked up from Aristotle. “Excuse me, Bud.”

  “What is it, Athena?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s just that the shadowing is almost complete. I thought you might want to see the Earth…”

  On his biggest display softscreen she brought up an image of the home planet. But Earth’s face was dimmed. Bud looked into a tunnel of shadow millions of kilometers long, a shadow cast over both Earth and Moon—and cast by a human construction. Bud had seen simulations of this event a hundred times. But even so he was awed.

  The silence was broken by Athena. “Bud?”

  “Yes, Athena?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  He had learned to be cautious in his responses to her. “I’m overwhelmed,” he said. “I’m stunned by the scale of what we’ve done.” She didn’t reply, and he said at random, “I’m very proud.”

  “We did well, didn’t we, Bud?”

  He thought he detected a note of longing in her voice. He tried to figure out what she wanted him to say. “We did. And we couldn’t have done it without you, Athena.”

  “Are you proud of me, Bud?”

  “You know I am.”

  “But I like to hear you say it.”

  “I’m proud of you, Athena.”

  She fell silent, and he held his breath.

  The great task of turning the shield had taken months, and Bud was very glad it
was over.

  The shield had been purposefully built edge-on to the sun, so that during the years of construction only a fraction of Earth’s light would be occluded: after all, crops still had to be grown. But now the day of trial was approaching, and the shield had to be pivoted so that its face, seen from Earth, lay square across the sun. That trivial-sounding maneuver had been a challenge to compare with any they had faced during the construction process.

  The shield was thirteen thousand kilometers across, but it was a thing of glass splinters and spun-out foam, scarcely a solid object at all: you could put your fist through it without even noticing. The lightness had been necessary; otherwise the beast could never have been constructed at all. But that extraordinary lightness of structure made the shield almost impossible to maneuver.

  It wasn’t as if you could just burn the attitude thrusters on Aurora 2 and haul the whole thing around. If you tried that, the big old ship would just rip itself out of the gossamer web in which it was embedded. And so delicate was the structure that applying excessive pressure anywhere across the face of the disk could easily result in rips, not tilting. What made it still more difficult was that the shield was rotating. The gentle centrifugal force kept the spiderweb structure from falling in on itself. But now the spin was a pain in the butt, because if you tried to tilt the shield it would fight against you like a gyroscope.

  The only way to turn the shield was to apply a turning force gently, and carefully, and to distribute it across the disk’s surface so no one area came under too much pressure. The whole thing was dynamic, with the disk’s moments of inertia subtly changing at each moment; computationally it was an immense problem.

  The only way to solve it, of course, was to give the job to Athena, the artificially-sentient soul of the shield. To her the shield was her body, its sensors and comms links her nervous system, its tiny motors her muscles. And she was so smart that the complicated task of tipping the disk was nothing but a vigorous mental workout.

  So the months-long task had been carried out. By day and night constellations of tiny thrusters sparkled and fired in waves across the face of the disk, their patterns entrancing. Their tiny impulses gently but persistently nudged the disk.

  And gradually, just as the simulations had predicted, the shield had tipped up to face the sun.

  Bud knew he shouldn’t have worried so much. Everything had been planned out and simulated over and over; there was really very little room for failure. But he had worried even so. It wasn’t just the inherent risk of the maneuver, and not even an astronaut’s usual pious hope that if a screwup occurred, it wouldn’t be down to him.

  There was something else that troubled him, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something about Athena.

  This third cybernetic Legal Person (Nonhuman) seemed to Bud to be quite unlike Aristotle and Thales, her older brothers. Oh, she was just as smart, efficient, and competent as either of them, maybe even smarter. But where Aristotle was always rather grave, and Thales a bit blunt and obvious, Athena was—different. She could be playful. Crack jokes. Sometimes she almost seemed skittish. Flirtatious! And at other times she seemed needy, as if her mental state depended on every word of praise he gave her.

  He’d tried to discuss this with Siobhan. She just said he was an unreconstructed old sexist: Athena had a female name and voice, and so he had attached to her all his erroneous images of femaleness.

  Well, maybe so. But he worked more closely with Athena than anybody else. And even though nobody else recognized it, and even though all the diagnostic routines showed she was clear, there was something about her that troubled him.

  Once he even had the distinct impression Athena was lying to him. He challenged her directly—it went against all her programming—and of course she had denied it. And what could she possibly have to lie about? But the seed of doubt remained.

  Athena’s “mind” was a logical structure every bit as complex as the physical engineering that comprised her, with nested layers of control reaching all the way from one-line subroutines that controlled her pinprick rocket thrusters to the grand cognitive centers at the surface of her artificial consciousness. The check routines didn’t pick anything up, but that might just indicate there was some deep and subtle flaw buried deep in that vast new mind, a flaw he didn’t understand, and whose cause he couldn’t diagnose. If there was something wrong he was stumped to know what he could do about it.

  Anyhow Athena had performed this tilting maneuver, her first big challenge, perfectly, despite all Bud’s fretting. She could be as nutty as a fruitcake as long as she did her job just as well tomorrow. But he knew he wouldn’t relax until the work was done, one way or another.

  On Bud’s softscreen the artificial eclipse was almost perfect now. Earth was almost entirely darkened, the shapes of its continents illuminated by strings of city lights along the coasts and the great river valleys. Only the thinnest crescent of daylight still shone at the planet’s limb. The Moon was in the image too, swimming into the shield’s Olympian shadow. As it happened, right now the Moon’s orbit had brought it close to the Earth–sun line, in anticipation of the total eclipse it would cast tomorrow.

  “My God.” Mikhail spoke from Clavius. “What have we done?”

  Bud knew what he meant. The surge of pride he had expected at this moment, as the shield was finally completed and positioned, the culmination of years of heroic labor, was quickly dissipated by the meaning of this vast celestial choreography. “It really is going to happen, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Mikhail said sadly. “And we few are stuck out here.”

  “But at least we have each other,” Helena said, on Mars, some minutes later. “It’s a time to pray, don’t you think? Or sing, maybe. It’s a shame no decent hymns have been written for spacegoers.”

  “Don’t ask me,” Mikhail said. “I’m an Orthodox.”

  But Bud said quietly, “I can think of one.”

  His words could not have reached Helena before her reply. But the hymn she began to sing, rather tunelessly, was exactly the one he’d had in mind.

  Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm doth bind the restless wave…

  Bud joined in, frowning as he tried to remember the words. Then he heard the voices of Rose Delea and others on the shield. At last even Mikhail, presumably prompted by Thales, was singing too. Only Eugene Mangles looked puzzled, and stayed silent.

  Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

  Its own appointed limits keep…

  Of course this interplanetary choir was absurd if you thought about it. Professor Einstein and his lightspeed delays saw to that: by the time Helena heard the others follow her lead she would have finished the last verse. But somehow that didn’t matter, and Bud sang lustily, joining with a handful of voices scattered over tens of millions of kilometers:

  O hear us when we cry to thee

  For those in peril on the sea.

  But even as he sang he was aware of the silent presence of Athena all around him, a presence betrayed by not a single breath.

  36: SUNSET (III)

  On this last evening, Siobhan McGorran was in her small Euro-needle office. Pacing around the room restlessly, she peered out at a darkened London.

  Across the city, under its closed Dome, a multiple night had fallen. But the streets were bright. She wondered what she might hear if not for the heavily soundproofed window: laughter, screams, car horns, sirens, the tinkle of broken glass? It was a feverish night, that was for sure; few people were going to get any sleep.

  Toby Pitt came bustling in. He bore a small cardboard tray with two big polystyrene mugs of coffee and a handful of biscuits.

  Siobhan took the coffee gratefully. “Toby, you’re an unsung hero.”

  He sat down and took a biscuit. “If my sole contribution to Earth’s crisis has been to fetch biccies for the Astronomer Royal, then I’m going to carry on doing it to the bitter end—even if I have to sm
uggle in my own digestives to do it. Stingy shower, these Eurocrats. Cheers!”

  Toby seemed as bland and unflappable as ever. He was displaying a peculiarly British strength of character, she thought: coffee and biscuits, even while the world ended. But it struck her that he’d never told her anything about his private life.

  “Isn’t there anywhere you’d rather be, Toby? Somebody you want to be with…”

  He shrugged. “My partner is in Birmingham, with his family. He’s as safe as I am here, or not.”

  Siobhan did a double take: he? Something else she hadn’t known about Toby. “You have no family?”

  “A sister in Australia. She’s under the Perth Dome, with her kids. There’s nothing I could do to make them any safer. Other than that, we’re orphans, I’m afraid. Actually you might be interested in my sister’s work. She’s a space engineer. She’s been developing designs for a space elevator. You know, a cable car up to geosynchronous orbit—the way to travel into space. All paper studies for the time being, of course. But she assures me it’s entirely technically feasible.” He pulled a face. “Shame we don’t have one now; it would have saved a lot of rocket launches. What about your family? Your mother and daughter—are they here in London?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head. “I found them a place in a neutrino observatory.”

  “In a what?… Oh.”

  It was actually an abandoned salt mine in Cheshire. All neutrino observatories were buried deep underground. “I got a tip-off from Mikhail Martynov on the Moon. Of course I wasn’t the only one with the idea. I had to pull a few strings to get them both in there.”

  Which was strictly against the rules of the Eurocracy.

  The Prime Minister of Europe had allowed his deputy to be put into storage in the Liverpool Bunker, so there were at least two independent command points. But he had insisted that otherwise his whole administration, including such semi-detached figures as Siobhan, had to be here in the Euro-needle in London, aboveground. It was all a question of morale, he insisted; those in government on this fateful day must not be seen to be using their powers to find bolt-holes.