That was a common pattern, Siobhan knew. Anyhow, today the softwall was now hooked up to a government comms channel, and was showing the flickering images of Mikhail, Eugene, and others, images relayed from the Moon and Earth orbit to this living room in a flat in Chelsea.
Bisesa bustled away to make coffee.
Toby leaned toward Siobhan and said quietly, I still think this is a mistake. To be pursuing theories of alien intention behind the sunstormpeople are becoming too disengaged as it is.
Siobhan knew he had a point.
The impending sunstorm itself was bad enough for the public mood. Now the preparations for it were starting to bite significantly into peoples lives. Immense construction projects like the Dome were causing monumental traffic problems. Across the city routine work was being rushed or neglected, and that was starting to show; just the lack of fresh paintwork on Londons major buildings was making the place look shabby. Aside from the huge diversion of resources to the Dome, everybody was stockpiling, it seemed, and there was a continual plague of shortages in the stores. A recent upsurge of global terrorism and the subsequent wave of paranoia and security clampdowns had made things worse yet. It was a time of fretfulness and anxiety, a time from which people increasingly wanted to escape.
All the major news organizations reported catastrophic slumps in ratingswhile sales of synth soap operas, which allowed you to pretend the outside world didnt exist at all, had boomed. The worlds leaders were becoming concerned that if there was more bad news of any kind, everybody would just hide away at home until the dreadful dawn of April 20, 2042 finally put an end to all their stories.
But, Siobhan said slowly, what if Bisesas right? That was the slim, disturbing possibility that had guided her actions since the day Bisesa had first bluffed her way into the Royal Society, already more than a year ago, and why she had diverted a small percentage of the energies at her command to looking into Bisesas ideas. If this is the truth, Toby, theres no hiding away, whatever it costs.
Im sorry, he said quickly. You have my full support. You know that. Its just that Ive always felt that putting Bisesa I-was-abducted-by-aliens-and-fell-in-love-with-Alexander-the-Great Dutt in touch with Eugene the-greatest-mind-since-Einstein-if-only-you-would-listen Mangles was asking for trouble.
She forced a smile. Yes, but what fun!
Bisesa returned with a tray of coffees, and a pot for refills.
Theres nothing you can do about it, Miriam, Nicolaus said, his voice thickened by stress. The planes communications are cut off, and anyhow we will soon be isolated by reentry plasma. Even Aristotle is out of touch. The fact that the plane is automated actually made it easier. The device is on a tamperproof timer, which, even if we could get to it
She held up her hands. I really dont want to know. She glanced at the wall softscreens, which now showed a broadening glow, escalating through pink to white. It was like being inside a vast lightbulb, she thought. Must her life really end amid such beauty?
She searched for anger, but found only emptiness, a kind of pity. After years of strain she was fundamentally exhausted, she thought, too tired to be angry, even about this. And maybe she had thought that something like this was inevitable, in the end. But she did want to understand.
Whats the point, Nicolaus? You know the polls better than I do. In six months I would be out of the way anyhow. And this really wont make any difference to the project. If anything its likely to strengthen everybodys resolve to get it done.
Are you sure? His grin was tight. This is quite a stunt, you know. You are Prime Minister of the worlds largest democracy. And nobody has taken down a spaceplane before. If confidence in flying into space is dented, even just a bitif people on the shield start looking over their shoulders when they ought to be getting on with their workIll have achieved what I set out to do.
But you wont live to see it, will you? And neither will I Youre just another in a long line of suicide bombers, as careless of the lives of others as you are of your own.
He said coldly, You dont know me well enough to insult me. Even though Ive worked at your side for ten years.
Of course that was true, she thought with a stab of guilt. She remembered her resolution on the way out to try to get Nicolaus to open up a littlebut on the shield she had been too entranced by her surroundings even to notice him. Would it have made any difference even if she had? Perhaps it was just as well, she thought morbidly, that she would not live long enough to be plagued by such questions.
Tell me why, Nicolaus. I think you owe me that.
His voice tight with tension, he said, I sacrifice my life for El, the One True God.
And that was enough to tell her everything.
*********
______
Siobhan glanced at the faces on Bisesas softwall. Everybody online? Can you see us?
With the usual disconcerting lightspeed delays, the others responded.
No introductions needed, no ceremony. Who wants to startEugene?
When her words reached the Moon, Eugene visibly jumped, as if his attention had been fixed on something else. Okay, he said. First some background. Youre aware of my work on the sun, of course. The middle of the softwall filled up with an image of the sun, which then turned transparent to reveal onion-skin layers within. The heart of the sun, the fusing corea star within a starglowed a sullen red. It was laced by a crisscross pattern of dark and bright stripes, dynamic, elusive, ever shifting. There was a date stamp in the corner, showing todays date, in March 2040. Eugene said, These oscillations will lead in the near future to a catastrophic outpouring of energy into the external environment.
Casually he ran the model forward in time, until the image suddenly flared.
Siobhan felt Toby flinch. He murmured, He really doesnt see the impact he has on the rest of us, does he? Sometimes that boy scares me more than the sun itself.
But hes useful, Siobhan whispered back.
Eugene said, So the future projection is stable, reliable. But I have had more difficulty with projections into the past. Nothing in the standard models of stellar interior behavior served as a guide. I began to suspect a single impulsive event lay behind this anomalous conditionan anomaly behind the anomaly. But I had trouble converging on a model. My discussions with Lieutenant Dutt, after Professor McGorran put us in touch, gave me a new paradigm to work with.
Siobhan murmured to Toby, Told you so.
Mikhail interceded, I think youd better just show us, son.
Eugene nodded curtly and tapped at an out-of-shot softscreen.
The date stamp began to count down, and the reconstructed events ran backward. As wave modes fluttered across the surface of the core, detail appeared in sidebars: frequencies, phases, amplitudes, lists of the energy shares of the principal vibration modes. As interference, nonlinearity, and other effects worked on the three-dimensional waves, the cores output peaked and dipped.
Mikhail commented, Eugenes model is remarkably good. We have been able to map many of these resonant-peak anomalies onto some of the notable solar weather incidents in our history: the Little Ice Age, the 1859 storm
Siobhan had studied wave propagation as applied to the early universe, and she could see the quality of the work here. She said to Toby, If he gets this anywhere near right, it will be one of the keenest bits of analysis Ive ever seen.
Finest mind since Einstein, Toby said dryly.
Now things changed on the screen. The oscillations grew wilder. And it seemed to Siobhan that a concentration of energy was gathering in one place.