'… and freckles that change all the time. Which is where I come in. I didn't always do this, you understand. Once, a while back, I messed around with engineering, and other tricks with the sun, though that's a story for another time. Right now I try to figure out which way the freckles are going to go, whether they're getting bigger, whether they might be getting smaller.'
'Do they change an awful lot?' Annie asked.
'You bet,' he said, and he was on home territory now, heading straight for the finish line. 'They come and go, a little like the tide. Not twice a day, like the sea does, but once every eleven years or so.'
'Is that important?' Annie asked.
'Depends what you mean by important.'
'I mean, does it matter? To us?'
'Well, the sun is a very long way away. Ninety-three million miles, to be exact. Seems crazy to think something that far away could be important.'
The girl grinned at him and he wanted to laugh: She really wasn't going to let go.
'You're going to say "but". I always know when grown-ups are going to say "but".'
'Smart kid,' said Lieberman, and she was, it was so clear. 'But…'
He kicked at the gravel with his toe and wondered how you crammed all this into a few minutes of idle conversation.
'But things sometimes do affect each other in ways you'd never guess. By now we know sunspots affect all sorts of things. Some are obvious, like the big spurts of flame that emanate from the sun, called solar flares. Others are just plain invisible, like magnetism and X-rays, that come shooting through space. Then there's the weather. You cut open a tree that's a couple of hundred years old and you can see that eleven-year sunspot cycle in the rings inside. When the cycle hits a peak, the weather gets warmer, everywhere, and if you get rain too, which we haven't recently, things grow. You can see it inside the trunk. When the cycles were pretty much dead, which was what happened back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a while — don't ask me why — the world got colder. Europe had some of its coldest winters anyone had ever known.'
Mo was the one with the question now.
'Is that why the weather has been so hot these last few years? I thought that was supposed to be global warming.'
'Hey' — he threw up his hands — 'we're all making this up as we go along. Some of it is global warming, for sure. No one disputes that these days, unless they get bribed by the oil companies. But the climate change seems to be equally linked to sunspots. There's no single reason behind it, just a cocktail of factors.'
'And what we're in now is the eleventh year of the cycle?'
That was a tricky one, and Lieberman seriously wondered, for a moment, whether to try to bluff his way through.
'No,' he said, opting for honesty. 'We're in the ninth. All things being equal, we shouldn't be seeing sunspots Like this for a good two years. Something happened, late in 1995, and from that point on we started to see some upsurge in the cycle, real steady, just like you'd expect, only early. And really marked too, recently, as if it was all coming to a head.'
'I read about that,' Mo said. 'And all the awful predictions. Are they true?'
'I do astronomy, not astrology. Yeah, it's true that the peak of a solar storm has an effect on the earth. A cycle hot spot back in the seventies knocked out entire power grids across the whole of Canada. It messes with telecommunications systems too, and we all know how much we rely on those. I guess we can expect some short-term effects but nothing apocalyptic, not unless you think losing TV reception for a couple of hours is a matter of life and death.'
'Oh.'
He couldn't shake the idea that somehow she was frightened by all this but not willing to admit to it.
'A line of thinking some people are following — and Simon Bennett is your man for this one — is that one factor is tidal. By that I mean that the activity on the surface of the sun depends, to some extent, on the position of the planets to one another. We know that the tides on earth are due mainly to the pull of the moon as it spins around us. Well, the larger planets in our system exert an even bigger force. It makes theoretical sense to think we feel something from them too.'
He wasn't really talking for them now, he was talking it out to himself. Mo understood this and encouraged him to continue.
'You're ahead of us?' she asked.
'Yeah?' Lieberman wasn't even thinking of them. He was out in the burning heat and not even noticing it, walking around the courtyard, picking up some pine cones that had fallen from the trees, then placing them carefully on the gravel.
'See, you've got to understand what the solstice is.'
He went over to the perimeter wall overlooking the town, grabbed a stray rock, put it on the ground in front of them. Then he held one of the pine cones above his head.
'Imagine the cone is a ball like the earth and the top part of it is the northern hemisphere. Where we are now. We move around the sun, of course, so what I'm showing you is bad science. But it's how we see it from the ground. Each day the sun sweeps across our horizon and when it's there, we've got daylight; when it's on the other side of the earth, we've got night. But the earth isn't really sitting bolt upright like that. It's declined. And that means the height of the sun changes during the year. During the summer solstice it is, at midday, as high in the sky as it ever gets. So we get more sunshine, more daylight, than at any other time of the year, not because we're closer but because we see more of it. Equally, during the winter solstice the same thing happens but for the southern hemisphere. Which is why our winter is their summer. You with me?'
They nodded. They always nodded in these situations, but he was pretty happy with it. He'd explained it more poorly in the past.
'Now, the point is that maybe the heightened effect of spots and flares and all the rest at the solstice isn't just due to the fact that the sun is brighter in the sky and around longer than usual. Maybe there's some tidal effect on us too, messing us about with gravitational pull. And all this accentuates what happens with the weather, and anything else that gets shifted around by spot activity as well.'
'Why would that explain how the cycle has shortened from eleven to nine years?' Mo asked. 'These are annual events.'
'Yeah,' he said, and was so engrossed in himself, so buried in the pictures inside his head, that he didn't even realize until later how smart a question it was.
"The point is that if these guys are right, it's not just the tidal influence from the sun we've got to take into account. It's everything. Every other major hunk of rock in the universe.'
She was shaking her head. She wasn't smiling any more.
'I still don't see it. That's always been the case.'
'Up to a point.'
He reached down for the computer, picked it up, took it over to them, let them look at the bright colour screen, and pulled out the sequence, one he was so familiar with, one he'd played over and over again until he didn't need to see it any more, it lived inside his head.
'Everything moves in the universe, everything is always orbiting everything else, okay? But we know how they move. This is all just mathematics — complex mathematics, for sure, but not beyond us. With this little machine I can show you how the stars looked in Bethlehem on the night Jesus was born. I can fly you past the surface of Mars and look back to see what the earth and our moon are like from there, today, five hundred years from now. It doesn't matter. These things are just some big clockwork mechanism in the sky and they'll stay like that until the big red giant comes along and gobbles them all up.'
They didn't say anything. Just looked at him with the word 'So?' in their eyes.
'So it's like the old saying about monkeys in a room writing Shakespeare. You keep them running like that forever and once in a while you get something weird. Take a look at this and you'll see what I mean.'