Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Many times each second, hundreds of thousands of times each day, a bit of extraterrestrial grit fell into the Earth's upper atmosphere at altitudes between eighty and one hundred and twenty kilometers. Moving at about forty-two kilometers per second, these fragments of old comets and asteroids almost always burned up, trailing a broad, bright green spark and leaving an ephemeral column of high-density ions hanging in the air.

  Since the turn of the century, humans had made use of these ion trails, bouncing stacked bursts of radio frequencies off them. Cheaper than copper cables or glass fibers, more numerous than slots in a geosynchronous orbit, able to bend signals around the Earth's horizon more sharply than a bounce off the ionosphere, meteor trails had revolutionized the telecommunications industry.

  The trick was simple: aim a radio horn at the sky, code a variable lag into the signal, and program a photocell to look for the flash. When the system locates one, send like hell. Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection in an ever-widening cone. The resulting downlink footprint was just immense.

  All right, Sommerstein told himself, this was old stuff, all known. His gift of imagination, however, reasoned that if the principle worked on Earth, why not in outer space as well?

  True, the problems of sending signals around the globe dealt basically with obstructions to line of sight. That is, below the horizon and around inconvenient mountain ranges. Or, why had the commtechs looked to the sky in the first place?

  But in outer space, this was generally not a problem. From one satellite in orbit to another, or from Earth to the Moon or other colonial bodies, straight-line radio communication was the norm rather than the exception.

  … Except for those awkward little corners. like the backside of the Moon. Or the nightside of Mars. Or any of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn during the occluded phase of their orbits. Or any body passing on the far side of the Sun's corona. Then it would be nice to have a way of bouncing signals at right angles, or obtuse angles, around the solar system without having to depend on expensive mechanical repeaters which, placed in all their eccentric orbits, were the modern-day equivalent of a million miles of copper wire.

  In Earth's atmosphere, a meteor's ion-rich trail would do the trick. But deep interplanetary space offered no similar phenomena. Sommerstein had already tried bouncing signals off the asteroids, but the predominating chondrites—bodies whose outer layers are composed of siliceous and carbonaceous material—made poor radio reflectors. And their facets tumbled in unreliable patterns, too.

  Still, there must be something else out there he could use.

  Sommerstein watched the needles flick and tried to imagine what it could be.

  Part 3

  Time Zero to Eight Minutes

  Setting at the world's edge, the west,

  the Earth beneath you comes into the darkness of the dead,

  who sleep in their chambers, heads wrapped,

  unbreathing, unable to look upon each other;

  their possessions are stolen from beneath their heads

  and they know it not.

  The lion comes forth from his den,

  the serpent stings, the world is silence.

  He that made all things goes to rest

  beyond his horizon. He restores himself.

  —From Ikhnaton's "Hymn to the Sun”

  Chapter 8

  Blaze of Glory

  Roar!

  Roar!

  Roar!

  Roar!

  Like a cataract in one of the great rivers on the green world, plasma from the surface of the solar atmosphere flies upward, arches over, and cascades down. The plasmote, trapped in this bridge of suspended gases, must cling to its magnetic eddies. He fights the turbulence of the ever-passing flow to keep from being spun outward into the thin, hot nothingness of the corona that surrounds this tube of gas. And, with none to hear him now, the plasmote screams into the crescendo of sound, adding his voice to the supersonic roar.

  Twist!

  Turn!

  Rave!

  Roar!

  As the plasma tube rolls and bends itself about its anchor point down in the photosphere, the magnetic flux inside creates huge energies. like a snake suspended on invisible leaf springs, the gas tube lies on a field far above the sun's surface. And there, like a dynamo of hot gas spinning effortlessly in the socket of its grounded convection cell, the prominence packs and stores billions of volts of potential along its million-kilometer length.

  The plasmote feels each added terawatt of electric potential as a fever heat that tears at his fabric and erodes his mind. The intense flux threatens to destroy the sequence of coded ionic charges, yes-and-no, on-and-off, that he contains within his innermost structure. As the tension builds, he becomes slower and stupider. His grip on the eddies of gas grows weaker. His substance becomes thinner and hotter, like the plasma flowing everywhere in this maelstrom of energy. He fades…

  Tick!

  Groan!

  Creak!

  Hum!

  Aboard Hyperion, March 21, 2081, 18:34 UT

  In the depth of his amazement, Dr. Hannibal Freede sat frozen at his console. Only the workaday sounds of Hyperion's cooling system existed in that enclosed space, reminding him that the ship's life trundled on around him.

  On the monitor screen before his staring eyes, the light of hydrogen-alpha emissions recorded the solar disk as a golden coin with a ragged hole blown through it, somewhat off center. When Freede adjusted the bandwidth of his sensors, the anomaly was revealed as a pair of bullet holes, gaping exit wounds, whose edges were bounded by an expanse of swollen, diseased tissue, black overlapping gray. The dominant spot pair lined up east to west and spanned twenty-two degrees across the disk, just below the equator.

  Freede closed his eyes. The image remained on his retinas, reversed now, glaring red-gold on black, despite the low contrast of the monitor screen he was using for these observations. The sunspot group was huge! The blemish should be big enough to see on Earth using no equipment more sophisticated than a welder's glass.

  As the sunset terminator rushed around the world there, and the reddened sun appeared to sink into the planet's dust-laden atmosphere so that people could chance to look upon it with the unaided eye, then millions would be able to see what Freede was seeing now. An irregular gash in the surface of the star, as large and distinct as the lunar maria. A pair of holes whose sides would have both depth and dimension, even to the naked eye. Raw scoops of sun-stuff, plucked out of that smooth face as by a great, clawed fist.

  Freede remembered that when Hyperion had rounded the sun's south pole, fourteen days ago, he had peered back along her orbit, searching for the smallest signs of his "smudge." Back then, he had not been at all sure if the anomaly was even real or not.

  What a joke!

  All the time, up there beyond his line of sight, a full-fledged spot pair had been brewing. And not puny, elusive spots from early in the solar cycle, either, but huge and hungry specimens from the fifth- or sixth-year peak of the old eleven-year cadence. More than that. This spot pair was larger, to Freede's eye, than even the Great Sunspot Group of 1947, the largest complex of spots ever recorded.

  He had mounted this expedition on the theory that the sun's long period of quiescence was coming to an end sooner than the scientific community was ready to believe. To prove that, he would have been happy with finding a few pinholes or just marking a magnetically active region. This spot pair was beyond his most hopeful expectations. It was even a bit humiliating: he might as well have stayed home and studied this group from Earth.

  As Freede was ruminating on these thoughts and fiddling with his sensor controls, watching his spot group rise on his screens as Hyperion lifted above the anomaly's horizon while making her slow way toward the sun's equator, he discovered the second heart-stopper of this survey mission.

  The pair was linked by a prominence!

  He could just make out the curve of it, etched against the limb of the solar g
lobe. The prominence was a wispy structure of pale gases, arising from the vicinity of one spot and sinking away in the region of the other. As Freede studied the altered-light image, he saw a sheet of ruddy flame sluggishly pull away from the photosphere. It stretched itself against the background of fiery spicules, drawing itself into a thin and glassy skein, like hot, yellow taffy. Suddenly, the sheet leapt, springing upward to join the arch of the prominence.

  The bridge of flowing gas looked top-heavy to Freede's unaccustomed eye. Studying it, the astrophysicist could read folds and wrinkles and snares into its structure. Flows and counterflows surged inside the ragged tube, while spurts and eddies of loose gas escaped from the hanging fringes, evaporating completely in the superheated atmosphere of the corona.

  "Gyeli!" Freede thumbed the intercom. "Come here a minute!"

  "What is it?" his wife answered, with a cross edge to her voice. "I'm up to my elbows in suds."

  "I've found a prominence!"

  "Well… didn't you expect to find one? I mean, with a spot pair and all?"

  "But it's a big one!" he insisted.

  "Yes, but then, it's a big spot, isn't it?"

  "My dear, you have no romance!"

  "No, dear, of course not. I have a dozen sieve layers from the hydroponics processor flying around the cabin right now."

  "So you don't want to see it, then?”

  "You gawk at your prominence, dear. That's what you're good at. I've got to keep us eating." Her intercom clicked off.

  "Your loss, then," he said under his breath.

  What would the phenomenon look like in pan-spectrum emissions? Freede wondered if he could even see his spot—he now thought of it as his own property—against the glare of full sunlight.

  He loosened the straps holding his legs against the chair beneath his console and, buoyed by the microgravity of the ship's orbital freefall, floated up toward the top of his observation bubble. Hyperion's, orientation was face-on to the solar disk, he knew, so that when he dropped the dome's polarizing filters, he would be looking at the full force of the sun's energy.

  Of course, the sun would not be looking back at him—not with its complete strength, for that would kill him. The dark curve just beyond Freede's nose was a double thickness of thermal-tolerant glass, with the same freon gel passing between its panes as circulated through the rest of the ship. So the sun's heat would not charbroil him. The control for the dome's polarization, which was actually a sophisticated structure of interlocking liquid crystals, operated under its own expert system, not unlike the iris of the human eye. Photometers sampled the ambient visible spectrum, and the crystals closed ranks to screen out excess light that might be damaging to human skin and retinas. So the sun's glare would not burn out his eyes. But, those details aside, Freede would be looking at the sun from as close to naked-eye in the orbit of Mercury as he could safely arrange.

  He turned the knob.

  Twirl!

  Twist!

  Wrap!

  Writhe!

  The gaseous tube that held the plasmote now packs many terawatts of electric potential into its howling channel. So great is the flux that he becomes dizzy with the excess kinetic energy that is building up in his ionized fabric.

  Other than that—his gradual structural deterioration—the plasmote is also becoming bored. He has no place to go. He has no one to talk with. And he has no hope of improving his situation. He will simply hang here, suspended far above the solar landscape, until something happens.

  Once he thought of releasing his magnetic grip on the tube's internal eddies and letting himself slide along it. Then he might ride the flow down, back into the photosphere.

  But he senses this would be his death. The ends of the tube are swallowed in the blackness of the magnetic storm he had been crying, which still pushes its way through the solar atmosphere. The plasmote, falling free, would be injecting himself into the center of a great, cold pool, a columnar downdraft, which was an anomaly among the upwelling hot cells of the photosphere. Its weight of relatively cool gas would suck him down to the bottom of the convection layer, halfway to the core, where no plasmote has ever been and lived to report the experience. There, at the flooring-out of the draft, he would be subjected to thermal energies that would snuff his life in an instant.

  Still, he might chance it, if he thought he could swim to the side of the down-pitching cell and there find a countering updraft. That might be a possibility—if the cell were no wider than the rising columns that make up the bulk of his experience in the photosphere. But this dark pool is easily a hundred times wider than any of those. It would numb him and drag him down and devour him.

  So the plasmote has nothing to hope for and nothing to do, except count the twists of his tubular prison and try to appreciate the mammoth energies building around him.

  After an unknowable passage of time, the plasmote feels a change. The roaring cataract of gas goes suddenly still. The howling velocity through the tube ceases for an instant. Something is happening.

  Before he can decide what, the gas bridge collapses.

  It does not fall, sucking back downward into the dark storm-pools that anchor it. It contains too much energy for that. Instead, it blows outward, flinging sheets and knots of superheated plasma—the eddies he was clinging to—farther up into the tenuous corona.

  The plasmote curls himself around a point-rupture of exploding gas and expects finally to die.

  Blaze!

  Beat!

  Pulse!

  Rush!

  Aboard Hyperion, March 21, 18:49 UT

  The full-spectrum glare of the sun's face throbbed at Dr. Hannibal Freede. Its power seemed diminished not at all by the dome's latent grid of liquid-lattices. He squinted his eyes and looked off to the east and just below the equator, searching for the spot pair that the hydrogen-alpha light had revealed so spectacularly. The double bullet hole had almost disappeared in the blaze of pure light.

  No, wait! As his eyes adjusted to the glare, Freede saw something there now. In the uniform golden glow of the solar disk, the area over the spot pair's coordinates seemed to fade toward silvery-white. It was not less bright, but less colorful, less saturated with the light of the total spectrum, and somehow less intense. It was as if, given enough time, that patch of the solar atmosphere would gradually tarnish and darken, like a blemish forming on a golden apple, becoming a brown bruise, then blackening into a fullblown chancre.

  Freede turned his head to one side, trying to match that area of the solar disk with the hydrogen-alpha image still showing on the monitor screen down on his console. While he was thus distracted, the sun pulsed at him.

  Once.

  Hard.

  What was that? Freede quickly looked back at the natural-light face, exposed beyond the glass of the dome. He thought his eyes had adjusted to the brightness, so they should have stopped playing tricks with dazzles on his optic nerve.

  The pulse, whatever it was, had gone by him now. The sun showed him the same golden face with the same silvery patch. Maybe that area was even a little paler now, whiter, more faded.

  He checked the monitoring equipment, swimming toward the console and studying the image there, to see if it showed a change. The gas prominence was slowly falling, fading… finally gone.

  Freede grabbed the arms of his chair and swung his legs down into it. Instead of taking the time to strap himself in, he merely hooked his calves under the seat. He put his face close to the screen and cranked up the resolution. Yes, definitely, the arc of glowing gas connecting the two sunspots had disappeared.

  What did that mean?

  Well, of course. According to the observation records and sunspot theories piled up during the twentieth century, the gas prominence had flared. It had exploded and collapsed, returning most of its material to the photosphere, but flinging a goodly portion of it, as well as most of its kinetic energy, out into the corona and beyond, into clear space.

  How great an energy? Freede k
new that the astronomers of the last century—with their rudimentary measurements, taken from beneath Earth's thick atmosphere, at nearly three times Freede's current distance from the sun—believed that the potential latent in a large flare would have been sufficient to power the North American economy for at least 10,000 years. Freede had to remind himself, however, that they were expressing themselves in terms of the comparatively diverse energy needs of those times, which meant both driving an inefficient electric utility grid and furnishing an equivalent energy quota in wasteful, carbon-fueled transportation. In more general and useful terms, then, a large solar flare might deliver the energy equivalent of two to three billion hydrogen bombs in the megaton range.

  This flare, however, would be well beyond their scope and measure. The spot pair and the gas prominence Freede had seen were truly huge. So, he estimated the latent energy as five or six times a normal flare of the late twentieth century. That would put the output, conservatively, at something like twelve to fifteen billion H-bombs.

  But that one faint pulse of visible light he had experienced could only have contained a fraction of such an immense outpouring of energies. Where then, he wondered, had the rest of it gone?

  Freede's equipment had been designed to sample the sun's emissions at various wavelengths, even though in normal circumstances about half the star's output came as visible light. Under his observation protocols, Freede had started recording these various wavelengths as soon as Hyperion rose over the anomaly's horizon. Now, he could simply track back on all those disks and study the flare in the light of many different energy levels.

  Being a man of method and habit, Freede started with the highest frequencies, the gamma and x-ray spectra, which were normally invisible to human eyes. These were also the most energetic of the electromagnetic emissions; so that was a good place to begin his search.

  He bumped the first disk, recording from wavelengths of 10-3 Angstroms, back before the time marker that he estimated for the instant of the flare, then played it. The sun showed as a faint gray roundel, reminding Freede of a new moon seen at dusk through a backyard telescope. But up on the eastern face and just below the equator, coinciding with that silvery patch, he could see a filament of molten metal stitched into the gray cloth. That would be the gas prominence.