So it was now. The Jovian’s crashing through the tacholine caused the stretched and tangled field lines to writhe like snakes. Flux tubes surged up through the body of the sun, broke the surface, and thrashed above the enormous scar left by the Jovian. Energy was dumped into space in a great flare of light, as high-frequency radiation, and in a fountain of charged particles that gushed out across the solar system.
A huge solar storm battered at the Earth. With the planet’s own magnetic field flapping like a loose sail, immense auroras were visible all across the world. The Jovian’s most severe effects lay far in the future. But right here, right now, it announced its arrival in uncompromising fashion.
On Earth in 4 there was no high technology to be harmed—but millions of natural computers, running on biomolecules and electricity, were subtly affected by the magnetic turbulence. People suffered blackouts, fits, seizures; some unlucky souls died of no cause anybody could detect. As Miriam Grec would learn to her supreme cost, magnetic disturbances can stimulate religious impulses in human brains: there was a plague of prophets and doomsayers, miracles and visions.
And in a shabby room in Bethlehem, a newborn child, lying on dirty hay, stirred and gasped, tormented by images He could not comprehend.
30: Telescope
Ever since President Alvarez’s devastating announcement in December 2037, the sunstorm crisis had been oddly bound up with Christmas. The last Christmas before the sunstorm, in 2041, with only four months left before the storm was due to break, was a frenzy of forced gaiety. Bisesa suspected that everybody was secretly glad when it was over.
As for herself, she bought a telescope. And one bright morning in January 2042, with the help of Myra and Linda, she hauled it up to the roof of her apartment block. On this January day, bright and clear, the sun was low in the eastern sky, and the view from this Chelsea rooftop was spectacular. The Dome’s buttresses gleamed like sunbeams, and the smartskin blankets draped over every exposed surface shone like so many huge flowers.
The telescope was a ten-centimeter refractor, secondhand, a big clunky thing more than twenty years old, and it was cheap. But it was smart enough that it could determine its own position and attitude by consulting the Global Positioning System. And then, if you told it what you wanted to look at, with a hum and a whir it would point itself that way and immediately begin tracking, compensating for the Earth’s rotation. Linda had laughed at the gadget’s antiquated user interface—it actually featured that comical horror, a menu system—but it worked well enough.
In central London, with an increasing fraction of the sky blocked out by the Dome, telescopes were of little use, unless you wanted to spy on the gangs of workers who crawled over the inside of the Dome’s roof day and night. But what Bisesa wanted to look at was the sun.
When Bisesa told it what she wanted to see, the telescope’s nanny software immediately started bleating warnings about safe usage. Bisesa already knew all about the dangers. You couldn’t look directly at the sun through a telescope, unless you wanted your eye burned out, but you could project an image. So Bisesa brought up a folding chair and set up a broad sheet of white cartridge paper behind the telescope’s eyepiece. The final positioning of the paper in the telescope’s shadow, and the focusing of the instrument, was a little tricky. But at last, in the middle of the telescope’s complicated shadow, a disk of milky white appeared.
Bisesa was surprised by the clarity of the image, and its size, maybe a third of a meter across. Toward the rim of the disk the brightness faded a little, so she had a clear sense that she was looking at a sphere, a three-dimensional object. Sunspot groups were speckled around the sun’s midlatitudes, easily visible, looking like motes of dust in a shining bowl. It was galling to think that each of those dwarfed dust-speck anomalies was larger than the whole Earth, and, glowing at temperatures of thousands of degrees, they showed as shadows only because they were cooler than the rest of the sun’s surface.
But it was not sunspots that Bisesa had bought her telescope to see.
A line crossed the face of the sun, a stripe of watery gray that traversed from northeast to southwest. It was, of course, the shield. Hanging up there at its station at L1, it was still turned almost edge-on to the sun. But already it cast a shadow on the Earth.
Bisesa hugged Myra. “You see? There it is. It’s real. Now do you believe?”
Myra stared at the shadow. Now thirteen years old, she was a bit too quiet for her age. Bisesa had meant this display to comfort Myra, who was not alone in having trouble believing in the reality of the great project in space.
But her reaction wasn’t what Bisesa had anticipated. She seemed afraid. This was a human-made object, four times as remote as the Moon, and yet visible from Earth. Standing here in the watery sunlight of a London morning, the cosmic vision was astonishing, awe inspiring—crushing.
This is why the Greeks coined the word hubris, Bisesa thought.
31: Perspectives
For lovers, zero G was a lot trickier than the low gravity of the Moon.
That was despite decades of experience, Siobhan had learned. In the days of low Earth orbit flights there had been something called the “Dolphin Club,” so named because in the analogous conditions of floating in the ocean, a dolphin couple would sometimes be helped in their intimacy by the bracing support of a third … Siobhan was the Astronomer Royal; she wasn’t about to put up with any of that.
So Bud had improvised equipment to enable her to retain her privacy. With its cuffs, ropes, and restraints his cabin now looked like a bondage parlor, but in giving you something to grip and push against, this stuff supported the ancient arts surprisingly well. But in the isolated little zero-G township of the shield Bud had clearly had help figuring all this out. She made him take down the little plaque above his bed:
U.S. ASTRONAUTICAL ENGINEERING CORPS
!
Still, the sex was as deep and rich and satisfying and, damn it, comforting as ever; she was old enough to admit she needed consolation as much as passion.
Afterward, though, as they lay under a thick blanket, with Bud a silent warm mass beside her, her thoughts turned to the reasons she had come here.
This cabin had once been a storeroom; you could still see the marks where shelving and cupboards had been ripped off the walls. Over the years Aurorahad been cannibalized, and now it was a husk containing nothing but life support systems, comms centers, and hastily improvised living quarters. But to Bud, she knew, this battered old ship was home. Even when the project was over, no doubt he would always miss it.
It was going to break his heart if she had to bring him home before the job was done. But that was one possible outcome of her visit, and they both knew it.
Bud said at last, “You know, at times like this I still miss a cigarette.”
“At heart you’re just an unreconstructed high school jock, aren’t you?”
“Salt of the earth.” He stared at the ceiling. “But this trip is business, not pleasure, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Don’t be. But look—as far as everybody else is concerned, you’re here for the AI switch-on. Nobody but my PA knows about the other stuff.”
Faintly irritated she said, “I’m not here to hurt morale, Bud. I’m supposed to be strengthening the project, not weakening it. That’s the whole point. But—”