Bisesa Dutt gasped, and staggered.
She was standing. She didn't know where she was.
Music was playing.
She stared at a wall, which showed the magnified image of an impossibly beautiful young man crooning into an old-fashioned microphone. Impossible, yes; he was a synth-star, a distillation of the inchoate longings of subteen girls. "My God, he looks like Alexander the Great."
Bisesa could barely take her eyes off the wall's moving colors, its brightness. She had forgotten how drab and dun-colored Mir had been. But then, Mir had been another world altogether.
Aristotle said, "Good morning, Bisesa. This is your regular alarm call. Breakfast is waiting downstairs. The news headlines today are--"
"Shut up." Her voice was a dusty desert croak.
"Of course." The synthetic boy sang on softly.
She glanced around. This was her bedroom, in her London apartment. It seemed small, cluttered. The bed was big, soft, not slept in.
She walked to the window. Her military-issue boots were heavy on the carpet and left footprints of crimson dust. The sky was gray, on the cusp of sunrise, and the skyline of London was emerging from the flatness of silhouette.
"Aristotle."
"Bisesa?"
"What's the date?"
"Tuesday."
"The date."
"Ah. The ninth of June, 2037."
"I should be in Afghanistan."
Aristotle coughed. "I've grown used to your sudden changes of plans, Bisesa. I remember once--"
"Mum?"
The voice was small, sleepy. Bisesa turned.
Myra was barefoot, her tummy stuck out, fist rubbing at one eye, hair tousled, a barely awake eight-year-old. She was wearing her favorite pajamas, the ones across which cartoon characters gamboled, even though they were now about two sizes too small for her. "You didn't say you were coming home."
Something broke inside Bisesa. She reached out. "Oh, Myra--"
Her daughter recoiled. "You smell funny."
Shocked, Bisesa glanced down at herself. In her jumpsuit, scuffed and torn and coated with sweat-soaked sand, she was as out of place in this twenty-first-century London flat as if she had been wearing a spacesuit.
She forced a smile. "I guess I need a shower. Then we'll have breakfast, and I'll tell you all about it..."
The light changed, subtly. She turned to the window.
There was an Eye over the city, a silver sphere, floating like a barrage balloon. She couldn't tell how far away it was, or how big. But she knew it was an instrument of the Firstborn, who had transported her to Mir, another world, and brought her home.
And over the rooftops of London, a baleful sun was rising.
Mikhail Martynov had devoted his life to the study of Earth's star. And from the first moment he saw the sun, at the beginning of that fateful day, he knew, deep in his bones, that something was wrong.
"Good morning, Mikhail. The time on the Moon is two o'clock in the morning. Good morning, Mikhail. The time is two o'clock and fifteen seconds. Good morning..."
"Thank you, Thales." But he was already up and moving. As always he had woken to within a minute of his personal schedule, without need of Thales's softly spoken electronic wake-up call, a schedule he kept independently of the Houston time to which the rest of the Moon was enslaved.
Mikhail was a man of routine. And he would begin the day, as he began every day of his long solitary watches in this Space Weather Service Station, with a walk into the sunlight.
He took a quick breakfast of fruit concentrate and water. He always drank the water pure, never polluted with coffee granules or tea leaves, for it was water from the Moon, the result of billions of years of slow cometary accretion and now mined and processed for his benefit by million-dollar robots; he believed it deserved to be savored.
He clambered briskly into his EVA suit. Comfortable and easy to use, the suit was the result of six decades' development from the clumsy armor worn by the Apollo astronauts. And it was smart, too; some said so smart it could go out Moonwalking by itself.
But smart suit or not, Mikhail worked cautiously through a series of manual checks of the suit's vital systems. He lived alone here at the Moon's South Pole, save for the electronic omnipresence of Thales, and everybody knew that low gravity made you dumb--the "space stupids," they called it. Mikhail was well aware of the importance of concentrating on the chores necessary to keep himself alive.
Still, it was only minutes before he was locked tight into the warm enclosure of the suit. Through the slight distortion of his wedge-shaped visor he peered out at his small living quarters. He was a man equipped for interplanetary space, standing incongruously in a clutter of laundry and unwashed dishes.
Then, with a grace born of long practice, he pushed his way out through the airlock, and then the small dustlock beyond, and emerged onto the surface of the Moon.
Standing on the slope of a crater rim mountain, Mikhail was in shadow broken only by sparse artificial lighting. Above him stars crowded a silent sky. When he looked up--he had to lean back in his stiff suit--he could make out dazzling splashes of light high on the crater wall, places the low polar sunlight could reach. Solar-cell arrays and an antenna farm had been placed up there in the light, as well as the sun sensors that were the Station's main purpose.
This Space Weather Service Station, dug into the wall of a crater called Shackleton, was one of the Moon's smaller habitats, just a few inflatable domes linked by low tunnels and heaped over by a layer of charcoal-gray Moon dust.
Unprepossessing the hab itself may have been, but it was situated in one of the Moon's more remarkable locations. Unlike the Earth, the Moon's axis has no significant tilt; there are no lunar seasons. And at the Moon's South Pole the sun never rises high in the sky. There the shadows are always long--and, in some places, permanent. Thus the pool of darkness in which Mikhail stood had been unbroken for billions of years, save by humans.
Mikhail looked down the slope, beyond the low bulges of the Station domes. On Shackleton's floor floodlights revealed a complex tangle of quarries and lumbering machines. Down there robots toiled over the real treasure of this place: water.
When the Apollo astronauts had brought home their first dusty Moon rocks, the geologists had been dumbfounded that the samples contained not a trace of water, not even bound chemically into the mineral structures. It took some decades to unravel the truth. The Moon was no sister world of Earth but a daughter, created in the early days of the solar system when a collision with another infant world had smashed apart a proto-Earth. The debris that had eventually coalesced into the Moon had been superheated until it glowed blue-white, in the process driving off every trace of water. Later, comets had splashed on the Moon's surface. Out of the billions of tonnes of water delivered by these lesser impacts, most had been lost immediately. But a trace, just a trace, had found its way to the permanently shadowed floors of the polar craters, a gift of water to the Moon as if in recompense for the circumstances of its birth.
By Earth's standards the Moon's water was little enough--not much more than a respectably sized lake--but for human colonists it was a treasure beyond price, literally worth far more than its weight in gold. It was invaluable for the scientists too, as it bore a record of eons of cometary formation, and offered indirect clues to the formation of Earth's oceans, which had also been bequeathed by cometary impacts.
Mikhail's interest in this place was not lunar ice, however, but solar fire.
He turned away from the shadows and began to toil up the steepening slope of the rim mountain toward the light. The path was just a trail, beaten flat by human footprints. It was marked by streetlights, as everybody called them, small globe lamps hung from poles, so he could see what he was doing.
The slope was steep, each step an effort even in the Moon's gentle one-sixth gravity. His suit helped, with a subtle hum from exoskeletal servos and a high-pitched whir of the fans and pumps that labored to keep his faceplate clear of condensed sweat. He was soon breathing hard, and his muscles ached pleasantly: this walk was his daily constitutional.
At last he reached the summit of the mountain and emerged into flat sunlight. A small collection of robot sensors huddled here, peering with unending electronic patience at the sun. But the light was too brilliant for Mikhail's eyes, and his visor quickly opaqued.
The view around him was still more dramatic, and complex. He was standing on the rim of Shackleton, itself a comparatively minor crater, but here at its western rim Shackleton intersected the circles of two other craters. The landscape was jumbled on a superhuman scale: even the craters' far rims were hidden by the Moon's horizon. But with long practice Mikhail had trained himself to make out the chains of mountains, slowly curving, that marked the perimeters of these overlapping scars. And all this was thrown into stark relief by the low light of the sun as it rolled endlessly around the horizon, the long shadows it cast turning like clock hands.
The South Pole, shaped when the Moon was young by an immense impact that had bequeathed it the deepest crater in all the solar system, was the most contorted landscape on the Moon. A greater contrast to the flat basalt plain of Tranquillity where Armstrong and Aldrin had first landed, far to the north close to the Moon's equator, would be hard to imagine.
And this peak was a special place. Even here among the mountains of the Pole, most places knew some night, as the passing shadows of one crater wall or another blocked out the light. But the peak on which Mikhail stood was different. Geological chance had left it steeper and a little taller than its cousins to either side, and so no shadow ever reached its summit. While the Station, only footsteps away, was in perpetual darkness, this place was in permanent sunlight; it was the Peak of Eternal Light. There was nowhere like this on tipped-over Earth, and only a handful of locations like it on the Moon.
There was no morning here, no true night; it was no wonder that Mikhail's personal clock drifted away from the consensus of the rest of the Moon's inhabitants. But it was a strange, still landscape that he had grown to love. And there was no better place in the Earth–Moon system to study the sun, which never set from this airless sky.
But today, as he stood here, something troubled him.
Of course he was alone; it was inconceivable that anybody could sneak up on the Station without a hundred automatic systems alerting him. The silent sentinels of the solar monitors showed no signs of disturbance or change, either--not that a cursory eyeball inspection of their casings, wrapped in thick meteorite shielding and Kevlar, would have told him anything. So what was troubling him? The stillness of the Moon was an uncomfortable place to be having such feelings, and Mikhail shivered, despite the comfortable warmth of his suit.
Then he understood. "Thales. Show me the sun."
Closing his eyes, he lifted his face toward the glare.
When he opened his eyes Mikhail inspected a strange sun.
The center of his faceplate had blocked much of the light of the main disk. But he could make out the sun's atmosphere, the corona, a diffuse glow spreading over many times the sun's diameter. The corona had a smooth texture that always reminded him of mother-of-pearl. But he knew that that smoothness masked an electromagnetic violence that dwarfed any human technology--indeed, a violence that was a principal cause of the damaging space weather he had devoted his own life to monitoring.
At the center of the corona he made out the disk of the sun itself, reduced by the visor's filters to a sullen, coal-like glow. He called for magnification and could make out a speckling that might be granules, the huge convection cells that tiled the sun's surface. And just visible near the very center of the disk, he made out a darker patch--obviously not a granule, but much more extensive.
"An active region," he murmured.
"And a big one," Thales replied.
"I don't have my log to hand... Am I looking at 12687?" For decades humans had been numbering the active regions they observed on the sun, the sources of flares and other irritations.
"No," Thales said smoothly. "Active Region 12687 is subsiding, and is a little farther west."
"Then what--"
"This region has no number. It is too new."
Mikhail whistled. Active regions usually took days to develop. By studying the resonances of the sun, immense slow sound waves that passed through its structure, you could usually spot major regions on the far side, even before the star's stately rotation brought them into view. But this beast, it seemed, was different.
"The sun is restless today," Mikhail murmured.
"Mikhail, your tone of voice is unusual. Did you suspect the active region was there before you asked for the display?"
Mikhail had spent a lot of time alone with Thales, and he thought nothing of this show of curiosity. "One gets an instinct for these things."
"The human sensorium remains a mystery, doesn't it, Mikhail?"
"Yes, it does."
Out of the corner of his eye Mikhail spotted movement. He turned away from the sun. When his faceplate cleared he made out a light, crawling toward him through the lunar shadows. It was a sight almost as unusual, for Mikhail, as the face of the troubled sun.
"It seems I have a visitor. Thales, you'd better make sure we have enough hot water for the shower." He began to pick his way back down the trail, taking care to plan every step in advance despite his mounting excitement. "This looks like it's going to be quite a day," he said.
Siobhan McGorran sat alone in a deep armchair. She had her personal softscreen unrolled on her lap, a cup of rather bitter coffee on the occasional table at her side, and her phone clamped to her ear. She was rehearsing the lecture she was to give to an audience of her most distinguished peers in less than half an hour.
She read aloud, " '2037 promises to be the most significant year for cosmology since 2003, when the basic components of the universe--the proportions of baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy--were first correctly determined. I was eleven years old in 2003, and I remember how excited I was when the results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe came in. I suppose I wasn't a very cool teenager! But to me, MAP was a robot Columbus. That intrepid cosmology probe was sent off in the hope of finding a dark-matter China, but en route it stumbled over a dark-energy America. And just as Columbus's discoveries fixed the geography of Earth forever in human minds, so we learned the geography of the universe in 2003. Now, in 2037, thanks to the results we anticipate from the latest Quintessence Anisotropy Probe, we--' "
The room lights blinked, making her stumble in her reading.
She heard her mother tut. "And so on and so forth," Maria said, her soft Irish lilt exaggerated by the phone's tiny speaker. "In time, after a lot of technical guff about this old spaceship nobody remembers, I suppose you'll grope your way back to the point."
Siobhan suppressed a sigh. "Mother, I'm the Astronomer Royal, and this is the Royal Society. I'm making the keynote speech! 'Technical guff' is expected."
"And you never were very good at analogies, dear."
"You could be a bit supportive." She sipped her coffee, taking care not to spill a drop on her best suit. "I mean, look where your little girl is today." She flicked on her phone's vision options so her mother could see.
These were the City of London Rooms in the Royal Society's offices in Carlton Terrace. She was immersed in rich antiquity, with chandeliers overhead and a marble fireplace at her side.
"What a lovely room," Maria murmured. "You know, we have a lot to thank the Victorians for."
"The Royal Society is a lot older than the Victorians--"
"There are no chandeliers here, I can tell you," Maria said. "Nothing but smelly old people, myself included."
"That's demographics for you."
Maria was in Guy's Hospital, close to London Bridge, only a few hundred meters from Carlton Terrace. She was waiting for an appointment concerning her skin cancers. For people who had grown old under a porous sky it was a common complaint, and Maria was having to queue.
Siobhan heard raised voices in the background. "Is there a problem?"
"A ruckus at the drinks machine," Maria said. "Somebody's credit-chip implant has been rejected. People are a bit excitable generally. It's a funny sort of day, isn't it? Something to do with the odd sky, maybe."
Siobhan glanced around. "It's not much calmer here." As the start of the conference had approached, she had been grateful to be left alone with her coffee and a chance to run through her notes, even if she had felt duty-bound to call her mother at Guy's. But now everybody seemed to be crowding at the window, peering out at the odd sky. It was an amusing sight, she supposed, a clutch of internationally renowned scientists jostling like little kids trying to glimpse a pop star. But what were they looking at?
"Mother--what 'odd sky'?"
Maria replied caustically, "Maybe you should go take a look yourself. You are the Astronomer Royal, and--" The phone connection fizzed and cut out.
Siobhan was briefly baffled; that never happened. "Aristotle, re-dial, please."
"Yes, Siobhan."
Her mother's voice returned after a couple of seconds. "Hello?..."
"I'm here," Siobhan said. "Mother, professional astronomers don't do much stargazing nowadays." Especially not a cosmologist like Siobhan, whose concern was with the universe on the vastest scales of space and time, not the handful of dull objects that could be seen with the naked eye.
"But even you must have noticed the aurora this morning."
Of course she had. In midsummer Siobhan always rose about six, to get in her daily quota of jogging around Hyde Park before the heat of the day became unbearable. This morning, even though the sun had long been above the horizon, she had seen that subtle wash of crimson and green in the northern sky--clearly three-dimensional, bright curtains and streamers of it, an immense structure of magnetism and plasma towering above the Earth.
Maria said, "An aurora is something to do with the sun, isn't it?"
"Yes. Flares, the solar wind." To her shame, Siobhan found she wasn't even sure if the sun was near the maximum of its cycle right now. Some Astronomer Royal she was proving to be.
Anyhow, though the aurora was undeniably a spectacular sight, and it was very unusual to be so bright as far south as London, Siobhan knew it was nothing but a second-order effect of the interaction of solar plasma with the Earth's magnetic field, and therefore not particularly interesting. She had continued her jogging, not at all motivated to join the rows of slack-jawed dog walkers staring at the sky. And she certainly wasn't sorry she missed the brief panic as people had assailed the emergency services with pointless calls, imagining London was on fire.
Everybody was still at the window. It was all a bit strange, she conceded.
She set aside her coffee and, phone in hand, walked up to the window. She couldn't see much past the shoulders of jostling cosmologists: a glimpse of green from the park, a washed-out blue sky. The window was sealed shut to allow the air-conditioning to work, but she thought she could hear a lot of traffic noise: the blaring of horns, sirens.
Toby Pitt spotted her at the back of the pack. A big, affable bear of a man with a strangulated Home Counties accent, Toby worked for the Royal Society; he was the manager of the conference today. "Siobhan! I won't make jokes about the Astronomer Royal being the last to show any interest in the sky."
She showed him her phone. "No need. My mother's already been there."
"It's quite a view, though. Come and see." He extended his massive arm around her shoulders and, with a skillful combination of physical presence and smiling tact, managed to shepherd her through the crowd to the window.
The City of London Rooms had a fine view of the Mall, and of St. James' Park beyond. The grass of the park glowed lurid green, no longer a native specimen but a tough, thick-leaved drought-resistant breed imported from southern Texas, and the relentless sprinklers sent sprays of water shimmering into the air.
But the traffic in the Mall was jammed. The smart cars had calmly packed themselves up in an optimal queuing pattern, but their frustrated drivers were pounding at their horns, and heat haze rose in a shimmer in the humid air. Looking up the road Siobhan saw that the traffic control lights and lane guides were blinking, apparently at random: no wonder the traffic was snarled.
She looked up. The sun, riding high, flooded the cloudless air with light. Even so, when she shielded her eyes she could still make out a tracery of auroral bands in the sky. She became aware of a noise beyond the blare of the traffic in the Mall, a softer din, muffled by the thick sealed window. It was a growl of frustrated driving that seemed to be rising from across the city. This snarl-up wasn't local, then.
For the first time that day she felt a flicker of unease. She thought of her daughter, Perdita, at college today. Perdita, twenty years old, was a sensible young adult. But still...
There was a new silence, a shift in the light. People stirred, perturbed. Glancing over her shoulder Siobhan saw that the room lights had failed. That subtle change in the ambient noise must mean the air-conditioning had packed up, too.
Toby Pitt spoke quickly into a phone. Then he held up his hands and announced, "Nothing to worry about, ladies and gentlemen. It isn't just us; the whole of this part of London seems to be suffering something of a brownout. But we have a backup generator that should be coming online soon." He winked at Siobhan and said softly, "If we can persuade the ratty old thing to start up in the first place." But he raised his phone to his ear again, and concern creased his face.
In the heat of the June day, thirty-plus degrees Celsius, the room was already warming up, and Siobhan's trouser suit was starting to feel heavy and uncomfortable.
From beyond the window there was a crumpling noise, a series of pops, like small fireworks, and a din of wailing car alarms. The cosmologists gasped, a collective impulse. Siobhan pushed forward to see.
That queue of traffic on the Mall was just as stationary as before. But the cars had lurched forward, each smashing into the one in front like a gruesome Newton's cradle. People were getting out of their vehicles; some of them looked hurt. Suddenly the jam had turned from an orderly inconvenience into a minor disaster of crumpled metal, leaking lubricants, and scattered injuries. There was no sign of police or ambulances.
Siobhan was baffled. She had literally never seen anything like it. All cars nowadays were individually smart. They took data and instructions from traffic control systems and navigational satellites, and were able to avoid cars, pedestrians, and other obstacles in their immediate surroundings. Crashes were virtually unheard of, and traffic deaths had dwindled to a minimum. But the scene below was reminiscent of the motorway pileups that had still blighted Britain during her childhood in the 1990s. Was it possible that all the cars' electronic guidance systems had failed at once?
Light flared, dazzling her. She flinched, raising her hand. When she could see again, she made out a pall of black smoke, rising from somewhere to the south of the river, its origin lost in murky smog. Then a shock wave reached the Society building. The tough old structure shuddered, and the window creaked. She heard a more remote tinkle of glass, the blaring of alarms, and screams.
It had been an explosion, a big one. The cosmologists murmured, grave and apprehensive.
Toby Pitt touched her shoulder. His face had lost all its humor now. "Siobhan. We've had a call from the Mayor's office. They're asking for you."
"Me?..." She glanced around, feeling lost. She had no idea what was happening. "The conference--"
"I think everybody will accept a postponement, in the circumstances."
"How can I get there? If that mess outside is typical--"
He shook his head. "We can videoconference from here. Follow me."
As she followed his broad-shouldered form out of the City Rooms, she raised her own phone. "Mother?"
"You're still there? All I heard was chattering."
"That's cosmologists for you. I'm fine, Mother. And you--"
"So am I. That bang was nowhere near me."
"Good," Siobhan said fervently.
"I phoned Perdita. The line was bad, but she's all right. They're keeping them at college until things settle down."
Siobhan felt huge, unreasonable relief. "Thank you."
Maria said, "The doctors are running everywhere. Their pagers seem to be on the blink. You'd think casualties would be coming in but I've seen nobody yet... Do you think it was terrorists?"
"I don't know." Toby Pitt had reached the door and was beckoning her. "I'll try to keep the connection open." She hurried from the room.
The rover reached the Station long before Mikhail had clambered his way back down the trail. The visitor waited at the hab entrance with an impatience the surface suit couldn't disguise.
Mikhail thought he recognized the figure just by his stance. Though its population was scattered around its globe, on the human scale the Moon was a very small town, where everybody knew everybody else.
Thales confirmed it in a whisper. "That is Doctor Eugene Mangles, the notorious neutrino hunter. How exciting."
That cursed computer-brain is teasing me, Mikhail thought irritably; Thales knows my feelings too well. But it was true that his heart beat a little faster with anticipation.
Encased in their suits, Mikhail and Eugene faced each other awkwardly. Eugene's face, a sculpture of planed shadows, was barely visible through his visor. He looked very young, Mikhail thought. Despite his senior position Eugene was just twenty-six--a maverick boy genius.
For a moment Mikhail was stuck for something to say. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't get too many visitors out here."
Eugene's social skills seemed even more underdeveloped. "Have you seen it yet?"
Mikhail knew what he meant. "The sun?"
...
allforjesus2001