Unexpectedly a brilliant knot of light rose out of the core, like a gruesome dawn inside the body of the sun itself. And as soon as the knot had left the core, those central oscillations all but ceased.
Eugene paused his projection, leaving the point of light poised on the edge of the core but beneath the blanketing layers of sun above. At this point my modeling of the core anomaly is smoothly patched to a new routine to project the behavior of the inert radiative zone that lies around the core, and
Siobhan leaned forward. Hold it, Eugene. What is that thing?
Eugene blinked. A concentration of mass, he said, as if it were obvious. He displayed graphs of density. At this point the mass contained within three standard deviations of the center of gravity is ten to power twenty-eight kilograms.
She did some quick mental arithmetic. Thats about five Jupiters.
Eugene glanced at her, as if surprised she would need a translation into such baby talk. About that, yes. He resumed his animation.
That glowing fist of matter rose out of the suns heart, up through its layers. As it rose Siobhan saw disturbances like ripples flowing into the mass knot, a glowing tail almost like a comets, preceding it on its way to the surface. But she was watching this projection in reverse, she reminded herself. In reality this lump of matter had slammed its way down into the sun, leaving a turbulent wake behind, dumping energy and mass into the suns tortured bulk through those mighty waves.
She said, So thats how the radiative zone was cut through.
Precisely, Mikhail said. Eugenes model is elegant: a single cause to explain many effects.
The knot of mass, backing out of the sun, now reached the surface and popped out through the photosphere. Again Eugene froze his animation. Siobhan saw that the emergence was close to the suns equator.
The date stamp, she noted, showed 4
Eugene said, Here is the moment of impact. The mass at this point was some ten to power He glanced at Siobhan. About fifteen Jupiters. As it descended into the suns interior, the outer layers of the object were of course ablated away, but five Jupiters made it to the core.
Toby Pitt said, Fifteen Jupiters. It was a planeta Jovian, a big one. And, two thousand years agoit fell into the sun. Is that what youre saying?
Not quite, Eugene said. He tapped at his softscreen again, and the view abruptly changed. Now the sun was a bright pinpoint at the center of a darkened screen, and the planets orbits were traced out as shining circles. From this point I made another patch, to a simple Newtonian gravity trajectory solution. Corrections for relativity arent significant until the impactor passed the orbit of Mercury, and even then they are small
Knowing where and how fast his mighty Jovian had splashed into the sun, Eugene had projected back, using Newtons gravity law, to figure out the path it must have followed to get there. A glowing line, starting in the sun and crossing all the planets orbits, swept out of the solar system and off the screen. It curved subtly but was remarkably straight, Siobhan saw.
Toby said, I dont understand. Why do you say it didnt fall into the sun?
Siobhan said immediately, Because that trajectory is hyperbolic. Toby, the Jovian was moving faster than solar escape velocity.
Mikhail said somberly, It didnt fall into the sun. It was fired in.
Tobys mouth opened, and closed.
Bisesa didnt seem surprised at all.
The One-Godders had emerged as a kind of reaction to the benevolent Oikumen movement. Fundamentalists of three of the worlds great faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had appealed to their own shared roots. They united under the banner of the Old Testament God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: Yahweh, who was thought to have derived from a still older deity called El, a god of the Canaanites.
And El was a meddling god, a brutish, partial, and murderous tribal god. In the late 2020s His first act, through His modern adherents, had been the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, when fanatics, in a self-destructive spasm, had used a nuclear grenade to take out a site of unique significance to at least two of their three intertwined creeds. Miriam remembered that Bud Tooke had been involved in the cleanup.
Nicolaus, why would you want to impede the work on the shield? Youve been at my side throughout. Cant you see how important it is?
If God wishes us to be put to the fire of the sunstorm, so be it. And if He chooses to save us, so be it. For us to question His authority over us with this monstrous gesture
Oh, can it, she said irritably. Ive heard it all before. A Tower of Babel in space, eh? And youre the one to bring it down. How disappointing, how banal!
Miriam, your mockery cant hurt me anymore. I have found faith, he said.
And there was the real problem, she realized.
In his conversion Nicolaus wasnt alone. All the major faiths, sects, and cults worldwide had recorded a marked rise in conversions since June 9. You might expect a flight to God in the face of impending catastrophebut there was a theory, still controversial and revealed to her only in confidential briefings, that increased solar activity was correlated with religious impulses in humans. The great electromagnetic energies that had washed over the planet since June 9 were, it seemed, able to work subtle changes in the complicated bioelectrical fields of a human brain, just as in power cables and computer chips.
If that was trueif the agitation of the sun had somehow led, by a long and complicated causal chain, to a lethal ideological determination in the mind of Miriams closest colleague to kill herwell, what an irony it would be. She said blackly, If God exists, He must be laughing right now.
What did you say?
Never mind. A thought struck her. Nicolauswhere will we come down?
He smiled coldly. Rome, he said.
Siobhan asked, Can we say where this rogue planet came from?
Not from the solar system, of course; it had been moving too fast to have been captured by the sun. Eugene displayed more of his patched solutions, projecting the path of his Jovian back to the distant stars. He rattled off celestial coordinates, but Siobhan stopped him and turned to Mikhail. Can you put that into English?
Aquila, Mikhail said. It came to us out of the constellation of the eagle. This was a constellation close to the skys equator; from Earth the plane of the Galaxy appeared to run through it. Mikhail said, In fact, Professor McGorran, we know that this object must have came from the star Altair. Altair was the brightest star in Aquila. It was some sixteen light-years from Earth.
Eugene cautioned, Mikhail, Im not sure we should talk about this. The projection gets fuzzy if you push it back that far. The error bars
Mikhail said grimly, My boy, this is not a time for timidity. Professor, it appears that Eugenes rogue Jovian originated in orbit around Altair. It was flung out after a series of close encounters with other planets in the system, which are visible with our planet-finder telescopes. The details are understandably sketchy, but we hope to pin them down further.
And, Siobhan said, it was hurled our way.
Toby pulled his nose. It seems fantastic.
Mikhail said quickly, The reconstruction is very reliable. It has been verified from multiple data sources using a variety of independent methods. I have checked over Eugenes calculations myself. This is all quite authoritative.
Bisesa listened to all this quietly, without reacting.
Okay, Toby said. So a rogue planet fell into the sun. Its an astonishing thing to happen, but not unprecedented. Remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy colliding with Jupiter in the 1990s? Andwith respectwhat does it have to do with Lieutenant Dutt and her theories about extraterrestrial intervention?