41: The Palace in the Sky
0704 (London Time)
Siobhan had spent the two hours since dawn in the big operations center that had been set up on a middle floor of the Euro-needle. The walls were plastered with giant softscreens, and people worked at rows of desks, their own flickering screens in front of them. Here the Prime Minister of Eurasia tried to keep tabs on what was going on across his vast domains, and around the rest of the planet. There was an air of frantic energy, almost of panic.
Right now the big problem was not the sunstorm’s heat but its electrical energy. It was the EMP, of course: the electromagnetic pulse.
The shield’s design had been optimized to handle the worst threat facing Earth, the storm’s big peak of energy in the visible spectrum. But along with that visible light had come flooding at lightspeed a dose of high-frequency radiation, gamma rays and X-rays, against which the shield could offer no protection. The invisible crud from space was hazardous for an unprotected astronaut; Siobhan knew that Bud and his shield crews were taking shelter where they could. Earth’s atmosphere was opaque to the radiation, and would save the planet’s population from the direct effects. But it was secondary consequences that were causing the problems.
The radiation itself might not reach the ground, but the energy carried by all those vicious little photons had to be dumped somewhere. Each photon smashed into an atom of the Earth’s high atmosphere, knocking free an electron. The electrons, electrically charged, were trapped by Earth’s magnetic field, soaking up more and more energy from the radiation falling from space, and they moved ever faster—and at last gave up their energy as pulses of electromagnetic radiation. So, as the Earth relentlessly turned into the sunstorm’s blast, a thin, high cloud of tortured electrons migrated across the planet, raining energy down onto the land and sea.
The secondary radiation would pass through human flesh as if it weren’t there. But it induced surges of current in long conductors like power lines, or even long aerials. Appliances suffered surges of power that could be enough to destroy them or even make them explode: power failed in every building across London, every stove or electric heater became a potential bomb. It was like June 9, 2037 all over again, even if the root physical cause was subtly different.
The authorities had had years’ warning of this. They had even dug out a set of dusty old military studies. The EMP effect had been discovered by accident, when an atmospheric bomb test had unintentionally knocked over the telephone system in Honolulu, more than a thousand kilometers away. Once it had been seriously suggested that by detonating a massive enough nuclear bomb high above the atmosphere over a likely battlefield, the enemy’s electronics could be fried even before the fighting started. So there were decades of experience of military-hardening equipment to withstand this sort of jolt.
In London, government gear had, where possible, been toughened to military specifications, and had been augmented by backups: optical cables, for instance, were supposedly unaffected. Those Green Goddess fire engines were back in action tonight, and London’s police were out patrolling in very quaint-looking vehicles, some of which had been brought out of retirement in museums. It was easy to fuse modern integrated circuits, full of tiny gaps ready to be breached by sparks, but older, more robust gear, such as antique cars built before about 1980, could handle the worst of it. The final precaution in London had been the “blackout order.” If people just switched their equipment off, there was a better chance it might survive.
But there wasn’t time to fix or replace everything, and not everybody was going to sit at home in the dark. There had already been vehicle collisions all over London, and beyond the Dome there were reports of planes, which shouldn’t have been flying anyhow, dropping out of the sky like flies. Modern planes depended on active electronic control of their aerosurfaces to keep them in the air; when their chips failed, they couldn’t even glide home.
Meanwhile, only one in a hundred phones was going to live through this, as were few exchanges and transmission stations, and far above, satellites were popping out of the electronic sky. Soon the great electronic interconnection on which much of humankind’s business depended was going to fail—in the end the disruption would be far worse than June 9—and just when they needed it most.
“Siobhan, I’m sorry to interrupt—”
Siobhan knew that as an entity emergent from the web of global interconnection, Aristotle was peculiarly vulnerable tonight. “Aristotle. How are you feeling?”
“Thank you for asking,” he said. “I do feel a little odd. But the networks on which I am based are robust. They were designed in the first place to withstand attacks.”
“I know. But not this.”
“For now I can soldier on. Besides I have contingency plans, as you know. Siobhan, I have a call for you. I think it may be important. It is from overseas.”
“Overseas?”
“To be precise, Sri Lanka. It is from your daughter—”
“Perdita? Sri Lanka? That’s impossible. I put her down a salt mine in Cheshire!”
“Evidently she didn’t stay there,” Aristotle said gently. “I’ll put you through.”
Siobhan looked around wildly until she found a whole-Earth image, beamed down from the shield. The subsolar point was now tracking its way across eastern Asia. This point, where at any moment the maximum energy flux was being dumped into the atmosphere, was the center of a vicious spiral of tortured cloud. And all across the daylit hemisphere of the planet, as water evaporated from ocean and land, huge storm banks were gathering.
In Sri Lanka it would soon be high noon.
0710 (London Time)
Beside a wall of Sigiriya, Perdita crouched in the sodden dirt. This “palace in the sky” had stood for thirteen centuries, even though it had been abandoned and forgotten for most of that time. But it was affording her no shelter now.
The sky was a dark lid, covered with boiling clouds, with only a pale glow to show the position of the treacherous sun, almost directly overhead. The wind swirled around the ancient stones, slamming her in the face and chest. The air carried warm rain that lashed into her eyes, and it was hot, hot as hell, despite its speed. “It’s like an explosion in a sauna”—that was what Harry had said, her Australian boyfriend, who had suggested coming out here in the first place. But she hadn’t seen Harry or anybody else for long minutes.
The wind shifted again, and she got a mouthful of rain. It tasted of salt, seawater dragged straight up from the oceans.
Her phone was a heavy milspec number her mother had insisted she carry with her at all times over the last two months. She was amazed it still worked. But she had to scream into it to make herself heard over the wind. “Mother?”
“Perdita, what the hell are you doing in Sri Lanka? I put you down that mine to be safe. You stupid, selfish—”
“I know, I know,” Perdita said miserably. But to sneak away had seemed a good idea at the time.
She had first visited Sri Lanka three years ago. She had immediately fallen in love with the island. Though still sometimes torn by the conflicts of the past, it seemed to her a remarkably peaceful place, with none of the litter and crowds and awful gulf between rich and poor that marred India. Even the prison in Colombo—where she had spent one night when, fueled by too much palm toddy, she had joined Harry in an overvigorous protest outside the Indonesian embassy over logging contracts—had seemed remarkably civilized, with a large sign over its entrance saying PRISONERS ARE HUMAN BEINGS.
Like many visitors she had been drawn to the ‘Cultural Triangle’ at the heart of the island, between Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, and Dambulla. It was a plain littered with huge boulders and carpeted by a jungle of teak, ebony, and mahogany. Here amid the wildlife and the beautiful villages lurked astounding cultural relics, such as this palace, which had been occupied for only a couple of decades before being lost in the jungle for centuries.
Perdita had never felt happy just to hide out in a hole i
n the ground in Cheshire. As the sunstorm date had approached, and the authorities worldwide labored to protect cities, oil wells, and power plants, a movement had gathered among the young to try to save some of the rest: the peripheral, unfashionable, ruined, ignored. So when Harry had suggested coming to Sri Lanka to try to save some of the Cultural Triangle, she had jumped at the chance, and slipped away. For weeks the young volunteers had gamely collected seeds from the trees and plants, and chased after the wildlife. Perdita’s biggest project had been to clamber over Sigiriya in an attempt to wrap it up in reflective foil—like a huge Christmas turkey, as Harry had said.
She supposed she hadn’t really believed the dire predictions of what would happen when the sunstorm hit—if she had, she probably would have stayed down that mine in Cheshire after all, and pulled Harry in after her. Well, she had been wrong. Her mother had told her the shield’s goal was to cut the incoming solar heat to a thousandth of what might otherwise have hit the planet. It was unbelievable: if this was just a thousandth, what would the full force of the storm have been like?
“The wrapping blew off Sigiriya in a minute,” Perdita yelled miserably into the phone. “And half the trees have blown down, and—”
“How did you get out of that damn mine? Do you have any idea of the strings I had to pull to get you in there?”
“Mother, this isn’t doing any good. I’m here now.”
She could sense Siobhan trying to be calm. “Okay. Okay. Find shelter. Stay there. Keep your phone on. I’ll make some calls. Some of the GPS is down, but they may be able to locate you—”
The wind picked up even more, punching her like a great damp fist. “Mother—”
“I’ll contact the military on the island—the British consulate—”
“Mum, I love you!”
“Oh, Perdita—”
But then the phone sparked in her hand, she dropped it, and it was gone.
And the wind lifted her clean off the ground.
It picked her up the way her father used to when she was very small. The air was hot, wet, and full of debris, and the wind tore so fast she could barely breathe. But, oddly, it was almost relaxing, to be blown like a leaf. She never even saw the great teak trunk, a bit of debris flung into the air as she was, which ended her life.
42: Noon
1023 (London Time)
On the Moon, Mikhail Martynov sat with Eugene Mangles.
Its walls plastered with softscreens and comms links, and now populated by patient workers murmuring into microphones, this had been Bud Tooke’s office when he was in command here at Clavius—but now, of course, Bud was up there at L1 risking his life, while Mikhail sipped coffee and watched pretty pictures.
“There is absolutely nothing we can do now,” Mikhail said. “Nothing but watch, and record, and learn for the future.”
“You said that before,” Eugene groused. With an impulsive movement he pushed back his chair and stalked around the office.
Mikhail considered calling him back, but thought better of it. He had spoken more for himself than for Eugene. Besides, he had no real idea what Eugene was feeling. The boy remained enigmatic to him, even now, after they had worked together so closely and so long. As so often, Mikhail was consumed with a desire to hold Eugene, to comfort him. But that, of course, was impossible.
As for Mikhail himself, his dominant emotion was guilt.
He turned to the big softscreen at the head of the room, with its portrait of the full Earth. Assembled from more than a hundred data feeds, this was an immense and detailed image of a planet, even better than Bud’s imagery on the shield, and really quite beautiful, Mikhail thought sadly. But it was a portrait of a planet in torment.
As the Earth helplessly rotated, the subsolar point had been tracking west. It was as if the planet were turning into a blowtorch. Right now the dry face of Africa was turned toward him, the continent’s familiar outline clearly recognizable. But an immense storm system thousands of kilometers across lay sprawled over the Sahara, and the continent’s green heart was streaked by vast black plumes of smoke: the last of the rain forests will die today, Mikhail thought desolately. And as the vegetation burned off the land, the oceans gave up huge volumes of moisture to the clouds.
By now no part of the world, even those regions still in the shelter of night, had been spared the effects of the sunstorm. Clouds boiled all across the visible face of the Earth, and as they streamed away from the equator and hit the cooler air over higher latitudes they dumped their water in ferocious rainstorms, and as snow at the poles. Meanwhile, as solar energy poured into Earth’s brimming heat reservoirs, the ocean currents, huge saltwater Amazons, were stirring and churning, and even while an unprecedented load of snow landed on Antarctica, all around the edge of the southern continent billions of tonnes of ice were breaking away from ice sheets.
And over the poles aurorae crackled, an eerie fire visible even from the Moon.
Seven hours into this horror, Mikhail thought. And many more hours to go, if Eugene’s final models proved accurate. There had been some modeling of the long-term effects of all this on Earth’s climate, but unlike Eugene’s models of the sun, no precision was possible. Nobody knew what would come of this—or even if anybody could survive on Earth to see it.
But no matter what became of Earth, Mikhail could confidently predict that he would live through the day—and that was the source of his guilt.
At this moment the Moon, new as seen from Earth, had its backside squarely positioned toward the treacherous sun. So there was a wall of inert rock three thousand kilometers thick between the storm and Mikhail’s own precious skin, here on the Moon’s Earth-facing side. Not only that but the Moon, close enough to the Earth–sun line to have cast its own shadow on the homeworld today, was fortuitously protected by the shield that had been built to save Earth. So Clavius was about as safe a place as it was possible to be today, anywhere in the inner solar system.
Almost all of the Moon’s inhabitants lived on the near side anyhow, but today those few who inhabited Farside bases, at Tsiolkovski and elsewhere, had been brought to the safety of Clavius and Armstrong. Even Mikhail’s customary eyrie at the Moon’s South Pole had been abandoned, although the patient electronic monitors there continued to study the sun’s extraordinary behavior, as they would with unvarying efficiency until they melted.
And so while Earth roiled and thrashed, while heroes strove to maintain the shield, here Mikhail lurked. How strange that his career, a lifetime dedicated to the study of the sun, should come to this, to cowering in a pit as the sun raged.
But then, perhaps, his destiny had been shaped long before he was born.
As he had once tried to explain to Eugene, there had always been a deep heliophilic strand in Russian astronautics. When Orthodox Christianity had split from Rome, it had reached back to more ancient pagan elements—especially the cult of Mithras, a mystery cult exported from Persia across the Roman Empire, in which the sun had been the dominant cosmic force. Over the centuries elements of these pagan roots had been preserved, for example in the painting of sun-like haloes in Russian iconography. It had been revived more explicitly by the “neo-pagans” of the nineteenth century. These holy fools might have been forgotten—had it not been for the fact that Tsiolkovski, father of Russian astronautics, had studied under heliophilic philosophers.
No wonder that Tsiolkovski’s vision of humanity’s future in space had been full of sunlight; indeed, he had dreamed that ultimately humankind in space would evolve into a closed, photosynthesizing metabolic unit, needing nothing but sunlight to live. Some philosophers even regarded the whole of the Russian space program as nothing but a modern version of a solar-worshiping ritual.
Mikhail himself was no mystic, no theologian. But surely it wasn’t a coincidence that he had been so drawn to the study of the sun. How strange it was, though, that now the sun should repay such devotion with this lethal storm.
And how strange it was too, he reflect
ed, that the name given by Bisesa Dutt’s companions to their parallel world, Mir, meant not just “peace” or “world,” but was also the root of the name Mithras—for mir meant, in ancient Persian, “sun” . . .
He kept such thoughts to himself. On this terrible day he must focus not on theology but on the needs of his suffering world, of his family and friends—and of Eugene.
Eugene’s big college-athlete body was too powerful for the Moon’s feeble gravity, and as he paced he bounded over the polished floor. Fitfully he studied the graphs displayed on the softscreens, which showed how the sun’s actual behavior was tracking Eugene’s predictions. “Almost everything’s still nominal,” he said.
“Only the gammas are drifting upward,” Mikhail murmured.
“Yes. Only that. The perturbation analysis must have gone wrong somewhere. I wish I had time to go over it again . . .” He continued to worry aloud at the problem, talking of higher-order derivatives and asymptotic convergence.
In common with most real-world mathematical applications, Eugene’s model of the sun was like a math equation too complex to solve. So Eugene had applied approximation techniques to squeeze useful information out of it. You took some little bit of it you could understand, and tried to push away from that point in solution space step by step. Or you tried to take various parts of the model to extremes, where they either dwindled to zero or converged to some limit.
All these were standard techniques, and they had yielded useful and precise predictions for the way the sun was going to behave today. But they were only approximations. And the slow, steady divergence of the gamma ray and X-ray flux away from the predicted curve was a sign that Eugene had neglected some higher-order effect.
If Mikhail had been peer-reviewing Eugene’s work, the boy would certainly have come in for no criticism. This was only a marginal error, something overlooked in the residuals. In fact a divergence of fact from prediction was a necessary part of the feedback process that improved all scientific understanding.