'I've heard of those,' Annie said.
'Great. So you know what happens then?'
She shook her head. Mo was silent. And he had them, he knew. They'd passed the point of even guessing the answer, were just itching to get on with the tale.
'What happens is the whole thing changes. What we think of as the core, the stuff at its heart, collapses right down into itself, and all the stuff on the outside, what we see in the sky, does the opposite, just races out, goes all kind of red and vaporous, gets really hot, and ends up being this new kind of star, this red giant thing, and that's going to be huge. So big it will be right here, right where we're standing now. On this very spot. Everywhere else on the world too. And you can guess what's going to happen to anything in its way.'
There was a pause while they took this in.
'Toast!' Annie said happily.
'Toast,' Lieberman replied.
'Cool!'
Mo watched all this, and, right out of the blue, he realized what it was she liked. Someone was giving Annie some attention, someone other than her mother. And why that should be unusual was a question that could have distracted his attention there and then, even with the narrative of this celestial dance starting to run inside his head.
'So what's the good news?' Mo asked.
'Hey. The good news is… we're all dead anyway! I'm talking a hundred million years away now. Why worry?'
'We could invent the secret of immortality,' Annie said slowly, stretching each word out one by one. 'Then there'd be a problem.'
'Sure. I thought of that. You know, if we get clever — or dumb — enough to invent the secret of everlasting life, don't you think someone might also figure out a way to hightail it out of here? Find a star in another galaxy that's more hospitable?'
'So if the sun is not going to be a worry for a while,' asked Mo, 'why are we here?'
'I'm here because I got paid,' Lieberman said quickly, realizing straight away that this was a question he maybe ought to have asked himself more rigorously. 'Hey, we all got to eat. And I already told you, if I had any secrets to share they'd be yours. But if you want the long answer, well, sometimes you have to get off your butt and go observe things to learn about them. And when you're a scientist — '
'A professor!' said Annie.
'Yeah… yeah!'
He was enjoying the show too.
'When you're a professor, you just have to be ready to up and go when the call comes through. Kind of like Superman, I guess.'
A single young face stared at him in silence, eyebrows arching toward the sky, and Lieberman just didn't even dare look at Mo, just knew her shoulders were shaking up and down and couldn't work out whether this was good or bad.
'Don't believe me, huh?'
A man had his pride. These were, as far as he could tell, a nice pair. They didn't believe in kicking a man when he was down, but that didn't put them past nudging him with their toes a little when the occasion arose. It gave you the right to respond.
'Take a look at this.'
Then he beckoned them into the light, into the scorching, dry brightness of the day, so hot it burned your skin the moment you stepped into it, and positioned them around the telescope, which was pointing straight up into the blazing yellow eye of the sun.
The projector screen, with its open white panel fixed to the bottom end of the scope, offered an image of the solar disc that wouldn't be harmful to look at. Of all the projections Lieberman had set up for his 'students', this one was, as he might have expected, the most spectacular of all.
The freckles on the solar orb were huge now, the biggest he'd ever seen. They were like living amorphous blotches on the burning yellow skin, dark and ugly, and so big they covered maybe a third of the entire surface. What he and Mo and Annie were observing was not the usual single spots, but ones that ran into each other, like they were mating, the dark umbras spawning many lighter penumbras until the picture looked like a blown-up slide under a microscope, the image of some deadly slumbering spore waiting to come alive.
The threesome were quiet; he could feel the sudden chill that ran between Annie and her mother. Without speaking they'd moved closer to each other. He chided himself for doing it this way, wished he'd devised a way to break it to them more gently.
Then, as they watched, one of the spots shifted. The umbra, a region of burning gas a hundred thousand miles or so across, moved. Merged with some other cell-like structure, sat together with it, feeling content, feeling whole, mated, and then multiplied again.
Someone gasped and he thought it just might have been Mo, nice, pained, distant Mo, whose life he'd just invaded, whose world he'd just thrown open with this simple astronomy lesson.
He tried to smile again, said, 'Hey! This is just fireworks. Nothing to worry about. Trust me.'
But it was futile. Somehow the joy had gone out of the day, and left nothing in its place but the blinding light that beat down on them from the sky, beat down with a relentless, burning ferocity that seared through the skin, seared right into the heart and touched it with the fiery furnace of creation.
CHAPTER 9
A Demonstration
'Are they alive?'
Annie looked scared.
'No, no, no, no…'
Lieberman liked talking to kids now and again, but sometimes the sheer, naive dumbness got to him.
He pointed to the yellow orb on the scope projector screen, trying to make Annie and Mo feel familiar with it, see it for what it was: just an image from outer space, nothing more, nothing less.
'This isn't magic. All you're looking at here is something like a giant light bulb. Lots and lots of burning gases a real long way away. This is a big thing, and it's mysterious too, for sure. But that's only because we don't understand it that well right now. You know what they used to think in ancient times? All sorts of stuff. About how this was a god or something, flying across the sky in his chariot. Hey, people used to think the earth was the centre of the universe, and the sun travelled around us, until a few centuries ago. But you don't believe that, do you?'
The girl shook her head.
'Why not?'
'Because teachers tell us it isn't true?'
'Because we all know it isn't true,' Mo intervened. 'It's in books. You're a little young for them now, but later you'll see.'
'When I get to school,' Annie said a little sourly.
'I'm sure that will happen, Annie,' Lieberman said. 'Once you and your mom are settled. And you're a bright kid. You won't have any problems picking these things up.'
Mo smiled at him, some new warmth there, melting a little.
'What Michael is saying is that what seems mysterious one moment isn't a little later, when we understand it more.'
'Which is science,' Lieberman added. 'Discovering. You know that word?'
Annie nodded her head.
'Course you do. But it's easy to forget what it really means. It's like ticking off something on a list. Once you're sure. And what we're sure of already is that these sunspots are just natural things. Like freckles or something, except in the sun's case they're huge freckles, maybe as big as sixty thousand miles across or more — that is, eight times the diameter of the earth…'
And actually, he thought, this particular group was bigger, bigger than any he'd ever seen.