But Myra, as Bisesa should have guessed, only had eyes for Eugene. Wow. Who ordered that?
Eugene was now in his late twenties or maybe thirty, Bisesa calculated, probably more than a decade older than Myra. He was still as good-looking as hell; in fact age, which had hardened the planes of his face a little, had improved him even more. But he looked frankly ridiculous in a suit. And as Myra closed in on him he looked terrified.
Hi. Im Myra Dutt, Bisesas daughter. We met a few years ago.
He stammered, Did we?
Oh, yes. One of those medal ceremonies. You know, the gongs and the Presidents. They all blur together, dont they?
I suppose
Im eighteen, I just started university, and Im planning to go into astronautics. Youre the one who figured out the sunstorm, didnt you? What are you doing now?
Well, in fact, Im working on the application of chaos theory to weather control.
So from space weather to Earth weather?
Actually the two arent as disconnected as you might think
Myra took his arm and led him away toward a drinks table.
Bisesa approached Siobhan and the others a bit gingerly; it had been a long time. But they all smiled, swapped kisses, and embraced.
Siobhan said, Myras relentless, isnt she?
She gets what she wants, Bisesa said ruefully. But thats what kids are like nowadays.
Mikhail nodded. Good for them. And if it turns out to be what Eugene wants toowell, lets hope it all works out.
Even now Bisesa could hear the regret and loss in his voice. On impulse she hugged him againbut carefully. He felt shockingly frail; the word was that during the buildup to the sunstorm he had spent too long on the Moon and had neglected his health. She said, Lets not marry them off just yet.
He smiled, his face crumpling. He knows how I feel about him, you know.
He does?
He always has. Hes kind, in his way. Its just theres not much room in that head of his for anything but work.
Siobhan snorted. I have a feeling Myra will make room, if anybody can.
Bisesa and Siobhan had remained close e-mail buddies, but hadnt met in person for years. Now in her fifties, Siobhans hair was laced with a handsome gray, and she was dressed in a colorful but formal suit. She looked every inch what she was, Bisesa thought, still the Astronomer Royal, a popular media figure and a favorite of the British, Eurasian, and American establishments. But she still had that sharp look in her eye, that bright intelligenceand the humorous open-minded skepticism that had enabled her to consider Bisesas odd story of aliens and other worlds, all those years ago.
You look terrific, Bisesa said honestly.
Siobhan waved that away. Terrifically older.
Time passes, Bud said, a bit stiffly. Myra was right, wasnt she? The last time we were all together was at the time of the medals-and-flags stuff after the storm.
I enjoyed all that, Mikhail said. I always loved disaster movies! And every good disaster movie should end with a medal ceremony, or a wedding, or preferably both, ideally in the ruins of the White House. In fact, if you recall, the very last occasion we all met was the Nobel Prize ceremony. That had nearly been a disaster in itself. Eugene had had to be pressured to go up and accept his award for his work on the sunstorm: he had insisted that nobody who had got it so badly wrong had any right to recognition, but Mikhail had talked him around. I think hell thank me someday, he had said.
Bisesa turned to Bud. Now in his late fifties, a head shorter than his wife, Bud had matured into the kind of tanned, lean, unreasonably handsome senior officer that the American armed forces seemed to turn out by the dozen. But Bisesa thought she saw a strain about his smile, a tension in his posture.
Bud, Im glad youre here, she said. Did you hear Myra say shes going into astronautics? I was hoping you might have a word with her.
To encourage her?
To talk her out of it! I worry enough as it is, without seeing her sent up there.
Bud touched her arm with his massive scarred hand. I think shes going to do what she wants to do, whatever we say. But Ill keep an eye on her.
Mikhail leaned forward on his stick. But tell her never to neglect her exerciseslook what happened to me!
Siobhan caught Bisesas eye warningly. Bisesa understood: Mikhail clearly knew nothing about Buds cancer, the sunstorms final bitter legacy. Bisesa thought it was a viciously cruel fate for Siobhan and Bud to have been granted so little time togethereven if, as she suspected, the illness had actually brought about their reconciliation, after their sad falling-out during the pressures of the storm itself.
Myra came fluttering back, by now towing Eugene by the hand. Mum, you know whatEugene really is working on how to control the weather!
Bisesa actually knew a little about the project. It was the latest in a whole spectrum of recovery initiatives since the sunstormand not even the most ambitious. But it was a time when ambition was precisely what humankind needed most.
Ninety percent of the human population had come through the sunstorm alive. Ninety percent: that meant a billion had died, a billion souls. It could, of course, have been far worse.
But planet Earth had been struck a devastating blow. The oceans were empty, the lands desiccated, and the works of humanity burned to ruins. Food chains had been severed on land and in the seas, and while frantic early efforts had ensured that there had been few actual species extinctions, the sheer number of living things on the planet had crashed.
The first priority in those early days had been just to shelter and feed people. The authorities had been prepared to some extent, and heroic efforts to sustain adequate water supplies and sanitation had mostly fended off disease. But food stocks, set aside before the storm, had quickly run down.
The months after the storm, spent trying to secure the first harvests, had been a terrifying, wearying time. Lingering radioactive products in the soil and their working their way into the food chain hadnt helped. And with all the energy that had been poured into the planets natural systems, leaving the atmosphere and oceans sloshing like water in a bathtub, the climate during that first year had been all over the place. In battered London there had been a momentous evacuation from the floodplain of a relentlessly widening Thames into tent cities hastily erected on the South Downs and in the Chilterns.
Because the sunstorm had occurred in the northern hemispheres spring, northern continents had suffered most severely; North America, Europe, and Asia had all had their agricultural economies almost wiped out. The continents of the south, recovering more rapidly in the strange season that followed, had led the revival. Africa especially had turned itself into the breadbasket of the worldand those with a sense of history noted the justness that Africa, the continent where humankind was born, was now reaching out to support the younger lands in this time of need.
As hunger cut in, there had been some tense standoffsbut the darkest prestorm fears, of opportunistic wars over lebensraum, or even simple grudge settling, hadnt come to pass. Instead there had been a generous globewide sharing. Harder heads had begun to speculate, though, about longer-term shifts in geopolitical power.
Once the crisis of the first year was passed, more ambitious recovery programs were initiated. Active measures were taken to promote the recovery of the ozone layer, and to cleanse the air of the worst of the post-sunstorm crud. On land fast-growing trees and topsoil-fixing grasses were planted, and in the oceans iron compounds were injected to stimulate the growth of plankton, the little creatures at the base of the oceanic food chains, and so to accelerate biomass recovery in the seas. Earth was suddenly a planet crawling with engineers.