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.
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.
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