She found that Abdi and Casey were still out there in Afghanistan. After June 9 they had been pulled off their peacekeeping duties to help out with civil emergencies in the nearby town of Peshawar, Pakistan. They were still there now, quietly doing their duties. There was no sign that they had gone through anything resembling Bisesas experience.
She tried to make sense of all this. Abdi and Casey had undoubtedly followed her to Mirbut it seemed that those versions of Abdi and Casey on Mir had been extrapolated from a slice of time, the moment of Discontinuity as they had called it on Mir, while the originals, oblivious, lived out their lives here on Earth.
She didnt speak to either of them directly. She had grown very close to them in the course of their shared experiences on Mir. It would be hard to bear if they were distant now.
She began to dig into the characters she remembered from 1885.
Kiplings life of course had been covered by many biographers. As a young journalist, he had indeed been in the area of Jamrud in 1885, and had gone on, apparently unperturbed by his passage through the Discontinuity, to international fame later. She couldnt trace any of the Empire-period British officers she had encountered, but that was no surprise; time and subsequent wars had taken a heavy toll on such records. Of the more remarkable historical figures whose paths had crossed hers she could learn little new; they were so remote in time that she could only confirm that nothing in their accepted biographies was contradicted by her experience.
There was another, less famous name for her to check, though. It took her some digging: most of the worlds genealogical databases were now online, but after June 9 many electronic memory stores were still more or less scrambled.
There had indeed been a Joshua White, she found. Born in 1862 in Boston, his father had been a journalist who had covered the War Between the States, just as Josh had told her, and Josh himself had become a war correspondent in his fathers footsteps. It gave her quite a start when she found a grainy photograph of Josh, aged just a few years older than when she had known him, proudly displaying a book based on his reportage of the British Empires military escapades on the NorthWest Frontier, and later in South Africa.
It was eerie to page forward through the sparse accounts of a life lived on to ages much older than when she had known him. He had fallen in love, she saw with a pang of loss: aged thirty-five, he married a Boston Catholic, who gave him two sons. But he was cut down in his fifties, dying in the blood-sodden mud of Passchendaele, as he sought to cover yet another war.
This was a man who, on a different world, had fallen in love with heran unconditional love she had clung to, but sadly had been unable to return. And yet this Joshua was the original, and the lost boy who loved her had been a mere copy. His had been a love she had never even wantedand that had never, in some real sense, even happened at all. But the historical existence of Josh was surely proof that all this was real; there was no plausible way she could have heard of this obscure nineteenth-century journalist and built a delusion around him.
Of course there was one more record to check. Deeply uneasy, she went back to the military service records and extended her search.
She discovered that unlike Abdi and Casey, no original of herself was to be found in Afghanistan, serving the Army, living on oblivious. Of course she hadnt expected to find herself out there, for otherwise the Army wouldnt have been looking for her. It was still an eerie confirmation, however.
She tried to absorb this. If she was the only one who had vanished altogether from this version of Earth, then she had somehow, and for some reason, been treated differently by the Firstborn, who had been responsible for all this in the first place. That was disturbing enough.
But how much stranger it might have been if she had discovered a version of herself living on in Afghanistan
15: Bottleneck
Miriam Grec tried to focus on what Siobhan McGorran was telling her.
It wasnt easy. This briefing room was on the fortieth floor of the Livingstone Toweror the Euro-needle as every Londoner called it, including Miriam when off camera. The windows were broad sheets of toughened glass, and the October sky was a shade of blue that reminded her of childhood visits to Provence with her French-born father. What color would Papa have called that sky? Cerulean? Powder blue?
On such a day, under such a sky, with London spread out like a shining tapestry before her, it was hard for Miriam to remember that she was no longer a small child but Prime Minister of all Eurasia, with grave responsibilities. And it was hard to accept such bad news as Siobhans.
Siobhan sat calmly, waiting for her words to sink in.
Nicolaus Korombel, Miriams press secretary, was the only other person in the room for this sensitive meeting. Polish-born, he had a habit of wearing shirts a couple of sizes too small for his spreading desk-job girth, and Miriam could actually see belly hair curl past its straining buttons. But he was the inner-circle advisor on whom she relied most heavily, and his assessment of Siobhan would be important in her final judgment of what she had to say.
Now Nicolaus sat back, locked his fingers behind his head, and blew out his cheeks. So were looking at the mother of all solar storms.
You could put it that way, Siobhan said dryly.
But we survived June 9, and everybody said that was the worst storm in recorded history. What can we expect this time? To lose the satellites, the ozone layer
Siobhan said, Were talking about an energy injection many orders of magnitude greater than June 9.
Miriam held her hands up. Professor McGorran, I was a lawyer in the days when I had a real job. Im afraid such phrases mean little to me.
Siobhan allowed herself a smile. I apologize. Prime Minister
Oh, call me Miriam. I have a feeling were going to be working together rather closely.
Miriam, then. I do understand. Astronomer Royal I may be, but this isnt my specialty. Im struggling with it too. Siobhan brought up a summary slide, a table of numbers that filled the big wall softscreen. Let me go through the bottom line again. In April 2042, just four and a half years from now, we anticipate a major solar event. There will be an equatorial brightening of the sun, essentially, an outflux of energy that will bathe the orbital plane of Earth, and the other planets. We anticipate that Earth will intercept some ten to power twenty-four joules of energy. Thats a central figure; we have a ninety-nine percent confidence limit of an order of magnitude up or down.
There was that term again. Order of magnitude?
A power of ten.
Nicolaus rubbed his face. I hate to admit my ignorance. I know a joule is a measure of energy, but I have no idea how large it is. And all those exponentsI understand that ten to power twenty-four means, umm, a trillion trillion, but
Siobhan said patiently, The detonation of a one-megaton nuclear weapon releases around ten to power fifteen joulesthats a thousand trillion. The worlds nuclear arsenal at its Cold War peak was around ten thousand megatons; were probably down to some ten percent of that today.
Nicolaus was doing arithmetic in his head. So your injection of ten to power twenty-four joules from the sun
It amounts to a billion megatons, pouring over Earth. Or a hundred thousand times the energy that would have been released in a worst-case nuclear conflagration. She said the words coolly, meeting their eyes. She was trying to make them understand, step by step, Miriam saw; she was trying to make them believe.