Solstice

'No. Not at all. But maybe, looking back, I represented some kind of chance of normality for her. Bizarre as that seems. Being close to genius you're close to madness too. Maybe after that it all just went downhill, she retreated into herself, the work. And one day got hooked up with the cult, and the computer thing really took over. Maybe, and this does bother me, she just thought of this all along, and that was why she kept on working for them even when they came out into the light and said: Surprise! I keep trying to think what drives her now. And I just don't know.'

He stared back from the screen, serious, dark eyes peering at her. 'Does that help?'

She shrugged. 'I'll run it past our specialists here. I'm really grateful.'

'Say what you mean.'

'My God, I am a lousy liar, aren't I?' She smiled and stared at her notes. 'We can't reach her. She's beyond that. She's smart and she's absolutely determined in what she's trying to do. There's no room here for negotiation, talking her into some other path, because we don't have anything she wants. Either we take back Sundog or they're going to do what they say. It's as if we're some kind of beta version of what they believe the planet should be. They think they can throw away a lot of the code in the hope that whatever comes back in its place has to be better than anything that preceded it. Which seems a pretty shaky premise to me, by the way.'

He nodded. 'That was my feeling too. Charley came from all that European tradition, you know. She went to the Sorbonne. She knows what the prerequisites of revolution are.'

'Chaos. A word I'm getting to hear a lot.'

'It's a nice, pat, easy way out of things.'

'And there's no damn point in wasting any time contemplating it either,' she said. 'So you've looked at the new solar data?'

'Yeah.'

'How bad is it?'

‘“Bad" is a subjective word.'

'Not right now,' she said quickly. 'We don't have time for semantics. Maybe I didn't make myself clear, but we've got the makings of a world in crisis out there. This is filtering through to everything, the financial markets, the information infrastructure, everything. This has the potential for real natural disaster, if it deserves the word "natural". And one on a global scale we've never witnessed before.'

Lieberman peered quizzically at her. 'You're sure about that last point? No. Don't answer. Okay. The forecast is terrible. The way things look I expect that anyone with a piece of coloured glass will be able to see a lot of activity with the naked eye by midday today. After that, it gets hazy. It's easy to predict the trend, hard to say whether we get there slowly or in one big rush. The trend is that there will be some spot-merging, and that will produce one giant beauty. The biggest we've ever recorded, covering maybe half of the surface of the disc. Maybe more, when we get to zenith.'

'What does that mean for the strength of the emissions?'

'Not my field. You need to ask Bennett.'

'Come on.'

He shrugged. 'Take what you got in Langley and multiply it by ten, twenty, a hundred times. I don't know. And think what it is then, because I'm guessing it may be something different. There's all sorts of crap mixed up in this stuff. It could manifest itself as heat, radiation, high-level electromagnetic fields, pure plasma… hell, I don't know. It could be a heat wave that puts out the TV, it could be a firestorm that wipes out Manhattan. You tell me.'

'Jesus,' she sighed.

'And the truth is, I think we could be in trouble even without Charley and your little toy. This thing is so powerful, and the way we've been treating the atmosphere we're so vulnerable. Just out of interest, I looked up some of the times we've had some combination of spot cycle and syzygy to match it. That requires a lot of guesswork. But I'll tell you one thing. We did have something like this between 2600 and 2700 bc. Ring a bell?'

'I'm not a historian.'

'Me neither. I just remember it from some of my self-taught classes in atheism. That's thought to be the time of the biblical flood. Noah. The animals went in two by two. That kind of thing.'

'That's myth, surely, folklore.'

'Yeah. That's what I told myself too. The trouble is these old guys had learned to write by then. You don't just get the flood story in the Old Testament. It's in the Gilgamesh book as well. That's Sumerian. And there's hard evidence there was flooding in the region around that time. We also had some kind of conjunction around 1650 bc. That was the year the volcano erupted in Santorini, one of the largest eruptions in human times. It changed the face of the Mediterranean. The power structure. Everything.'

'I remember,' she said.

'And just one more. If you take things back too far, the dating gets a little ridiculous, of course. But we do have firm fossil evidence that whatever it was that brought the Cretaceous era to an end occurred at a time of intense sunspot activity. It's there in the rings of the cretaceous vegetation.'

'That was, what… sixty-five million years ago?' she said quietly.

'Yeah. Which is why I wouldn't rely on my computer alone. And, as I'm sure I don't need to remind you, the end of the Cretaceous marked the extinction of the dinosaurs too, in ways we still argue about. Suddenly. Instantly. Conventional wisdom is starting to say that it was a meteor impact that caused it, and the Yucatan Crater in Mexico is the proof. A ten-kilometre meteor, to be precise. And maybe that's right. Or maybe it was something pretty much like a meteor that the sun spat out, some big ball of plasma. I don't know. There aren't any dinosaurs left to ask.'

Helen Wagner caught her breath. 'You think Charley's made that calculation too?'.

'You bet. Hell, I'm amazed it's not all over the Web right now. And you can see how that knowledge would work on Charley too. It makes her feel part of something bigger. But it's disappointing in a way too. If we've really only had three major catastrophes through solar cycle and planetary syzygies over the last sixty-five million years, maybe we ought to come out of this one with little more than an extra suntan. If I can still hope to read Charley right these days, this data is saying to her that she probably needs to give the thing a little push if she wants to be sure the world really can start all over again. Maybe give the ants a chance this time. And don't kid yourself. She wants to do more than cause some stock market crash. She really does want to change things for good. This is cataclysm, nothing less.'

She was quiet. The office suddenly felt lonely and cold.

'There's a storm on the way,' he said, 'and it's coming whether we take back your little toy or not. Maybe it just scorches us a little. Maybe it passes us by altogether. And maybe we get the Yucatan all over again. I don't know. No one knows.'

'It's not my toy.'

'I know,' he said, shaking his head. 'I apologize. It belongs to all of us. We just got greedy. Thought we could tame that big golden ball of fire and make it run our TV sets for free.'

She looked at his face, half in shadow on the screen, and wondered at the amount of trust that seemed to exist between them. 'So do we have your pleasure for this event, Michael?'

'I guess, Helen,' he said, unsmiling.

'I'm glad about that.'

'Don't be. I mean, where the hell are you supposed to hide when the sun god comes to call?'

She nodded. Thought twice about this, and said, 'This is really useful. But I need more from you.'

'I haven't got any more.'

'But you have. We're working on every way we can to get Sundog back under our control from the ground. We've got any number of teams out there trying to track down Charley. I've got to cover every angle. We're putting up a Shuttle in a few hours. I need you to find us some way to take the power source away from that thing directly, in the sky if we have to.'