Bisesa said, How do you think people are going to take this, when they are finally told?
Siobhan explored her own feelings. The implications are immensepolitical, social, philosophical. Everything changes. Even if we discover nothing else about these creatures you call the Firstborn, Bisesa, and no matter how the sunstorm turns out, just the fact that we know they exist proves that we are not unique in the universe. Any future we care to imagine now contains the possibility of others.
I think people have a right to know, Bisesa said.
Siobhan nodded; it was an old point of disagreement between them.
Bisesa said, We reached the Moon, and Mars. Here we are building a structure as big as a planet. And yet all our achievements count for nothingnot against a power that can do this. But I dont believe people will be overawed. I think people will feel angry.
I still dont understand, Siobhan said. Why would these Firstborn of yours want to put us under threat of extinction?
Bisesa shook her head. I know the Firstborn better than anybody else, I guess. But I cant answer that. One thing Im sure about, though. They watch.
Watch?
I think thats what Mir was all about. Mir was a montage of all our history, right up to the moment of thisour possible destruction. Mir wasnt about us but about the Firstborn. They forced themselves to look at what they were destroying, to face what they had done.
She spoke hesitantly, obviously unsure of her thinking. Siobhan imagined her sitting alone for long hours, obsessively exploring her memories and her own uncertain feelings.
Bisesa went on, They dont want anything we know, or can make. They arent interested in our science or our artotherwise they would be saving our books, our paintings, even some of us. Our stuff is far beneath them. What they do wantI thinkis to know how it feels to be us, to be human. And how it feels even as were put to the fire.
So they value consciousness, Siobhan mused. I can see why an advanced civilization would prize mind above all other things. Perhaps it is rare in this universe of ours. They prize it, even as they destroy it. So they have ethics. Maybe they are guilty about what theyre doing.
Bisesa laughed bitterly. But theyre doing it even so. Which doesnt make sense, does it? Can gods be insane?
Siobhan glanced out at the gaunt shadows of the Dome. Perhaps theres a logic, even in all this destruction.
Do you believe that?
Siobhan grinned. Even if I did, Id reject it. The hell with them.
Bisesa answered with a fierce grin of her own. Yes, she said. The hell with them.
29: Impact
The rogue planet flew out of the skys equator.
While light flashed from Altair to Sol in sixteen years, the wandering planet had taken a millennium to complete its interstellar journey. Even so it approached the sun at some five thousand kilometers per second, many times the suns own escape velocity: it was the fastest major object ever to have crossed the solar system. As it fell toward the suns warmth, the Jovians atmosphere was battered by immense storms, and trillions of tonnes of air were stripped away, to trail behind the falling world like the tail of an immense comet.
On Earth, it was the year 4
If the rogue had come in the twenty-first century, humanitys Spaceguard program would have spotted it. Spaceguard had its origins in a twentieth-century NASA program designed to survey all the major comets and asteroids following orbits that might bring them into a collision with the Earth. The organizations scientists had debated many ways to deflect an incoming threat, including solar sails or nuclear weapons. But while such methods might have worked on a flying-mountain asteroid, there would have been nothing to be done about a mass this size.
In 4 , of course, there was no Spaceguard. The ancient world had known lenses since the great days of the Greeks, but it had not yet occurred to anybody to put two of them together into a telescope. But there were those who watched the sky, for in its intricate weavings of light they thought they glimpsed the thoughts of God.
In April of that year, across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, a great new light approached the sun. To the astrologers and astronomers, who knew every naked-eye object in the sky far better than most of their descendants of the twenty-first century, the Jovian was a glaring anomaly, and a source of fascination and fear.
Three scholars in particular watched it in awe. They called themselves magi, or magoi, which means astrologersstargazers. And in the Jovians final days, as it neared the sun and became a morning star of ever more brilliant beauty, they followed it.
The planet battered its way through the suns wispy outer atmosphere, the corona. Now the star itself lay before it, unprotected.
The Jovian was a planet a fifth the diameter of the sun itself. Even at such speeds, a collision between two such immense bodies was stately. It took a full minute for the whole planet to sink into the body of the star.
In normal times the suns surface is a delicate tapestry of granules, the upper surfaces of huge convection cells with roots in the suns deep interior. When the Jovian hit, that complex hierarchical structure was disturbed, as if a baseball had been thrown into a pan of boiling water. Immense waves washed away from the point of impact and rolled around the curvature of the star.
Meanwhile the planet itself was immersed in a bath of intense heat. Through direct collisions between the suns plasma and the planets atmosphere, the suns energy poured into this outrageous invader. In response, the planet desperately tried to shed heat by losing its own substance. The upper layers of its air, mostly hydrogen and helium, were soon stripped off, exposing the inner layers, exotic high-pressure liquid and solid forms of hydrogen, which in turn boiled away. It was exactly as Apollo capsules had once entered Earths atmosphere behind ablative shields, allowing bits of the disintegrating spacecraft to carry away the heat of friction. For the Jovian the strategy worked for a while. The planet had entered the sun with the mass of fifteen Jupiters, and had the capacity to soak up a lot of heat before it was done.
Deeper and deeper the Jovian sank, through the suns roiling convective layer, and then into the denser, static radiative layer beneath. It was like a driving fist, and it left behind a tunnel drilled brutally through the suns strata, a flaw that would take millennia to heal.
By the time the Jovian reached the edge of the suns fusing core, it was reduced to a knot of its densest, hardest stuffand yet it still retained a mass many times that of Jupiter. Here the last of the Jovians mass was broken up and dispersedbut not before it struck the core of the sun a mighty blow. There was a vast fusion surge, like an immense bomb going off at the edge of this natural reactor. That great impulse sent shock fronts pushing deep into the fusing core.
As Eugene Mangles would understand, the core was temperamental, its rate of fusion highly sensitive to changes in temperature. The Jovian was gone, but its impact had created a pattern of energetic oscillations in the core that would persist for millennia.
Meanwhile on the surface, though the planet had disappeared into the suns maw, the point of impact was a place of roiling turmoil.
On its way into the heart of the star, the Jovian had torn through a sensitive boundary called the tacholine: the boundary between convective and radiative zones. The dull sea of the radiative zone rotates with the suns core, almost as a rigid body. But the convective zones motion is much more complex; different parts of the suns surface can actually be seen to rotate at different speeds. So, at the tacholine, there is friction: the convective material moves over the radiative like a tremendous wind.