Galaxias, page 8
‘Oh, that’s not fair. Fred Bowles is trying to get his head around a phenomenon that is even more bewildering to him than to you and me. And, bureaucracy, OK, but how else do you get stuff done? Some politicians probably are crooks; more are fools. But I suspect most are like Fred. Doing their best. Even if he fears he’s not up to the job, deep down. And he has to expect his career to end with the sack, some day. That’s if he doesn’t get voted out first.’
Well, maybe. I think Jane’s generation is growing up to be even more cynical than ours. But also more resilient, given the battered old world we have bequeathed them. But they seem to accept it.
‘Is she OK?’
They’re keeping her in the school, in Yorkshire. Anybody who would have trouble getting home. They say they’ll keep her overnight if necessary.
‘My dad asked after her. Said he could have looked in on her if she was anywhere near Newcastle.’ She knew Mel had a share in a flat in Newcastle for when she needed to be here with Charlie on government business – before this crisis, mostly grant applications and other funding issues.
That’s kind. She’ll be fine.
‘I think the company would have done Dad some good too . . . So have you spoken to Zhi recently?’
I keep an open channel, Mel said. Of course all the spacecraft we have up there are vulnerable. Zhi says they are preparing evacuation protocols – meaning, evacuation to some place where they don’t rely on solar power. The Moon Gateway astronauts may evacuate to the lunar surface. And there’s no change on the Al-miriykh. Maybe we’re lucky we only had one human-carrying craft operating in deep space today – but one is bad enough, if your fiancé is aboard. There’s no obvious solution there. You know how those missions are pared down to the bone. There is very little margin in fuel for unexpected course corrections.
Which reminds me – a heads-up for you. There is a longer-term aspect to all this which Charlie Marlowe is already flagging up. You may have heard Jim Boyd himself blurt it out in a broadcast to the world from the Al-miriykh.
Look, the loss of the Sun’s gravity is universal. And it’s solar gravity that keeps Earth and the other planets in their orbits, just as it constrains the trajectory of the Al-miriykh. So, when the gravity switches off, it’s not just a handful of spacecraft that will drift off course. And even if the gravity comes back, there will be long-term effects . . .
Tash thought that through. ‘I did hear that but paid no attention. I suppose I was focusing on the fact that we’re all going to freeze to death by Easter. So if the Earth’s orbit around the Sun becomes . . . distorted? What difference will that make? Nothing good, I’m guessing.’
Nothing good. But it all depends on how long this crisis lasts. If the Sun comes back, as mysteriously as it went away, I guess, and when. Different seasons, basically.
Tash muttered, ‘And if the Sun doesn’t come back at all?’
Mel hesitated. Well, all the planets will just drift away. Off into the dark, at their old orbital speeds, heading in whatever direction they happened to be going when the Sun went away. But we will freeze long before that makes any difference.
A silence.
Tash said, ‘One thing I’ve learned being attached to government is to take one thing at a time. To deal with only what you can control, today.’
Right. So we have to work on the assumption that this isn’t an extinction event, until it is.
‘I don’t think Fred Bowles will put it like that—’
I’d better go. The Captain is monopolising Charlie again, and she looks like she’s going to blow.
‘I’ll keep my phone open.’
Oh, by the way. Uranus went out. Fifteen hundred. Right on cue.
After that, Tash, accompanied by Grace Butterworth, had to dash through House once more to another situation room – F, this time. Well, everybody was rushing today.
They found the room split virtually in two, with the English contingent facing a smart wall which displayed a projection of their American opposite numbers. This had been hastily set up; the conference tables pushed up against one smart wall didn’t quite match up with their virtual counterparts.
Still, the two principals were here: Fred Bowles, UK science minister on one side of the virtual partition, and a severe-looking person on the American side.
Tash recognised her from news coverage, as well as the vividly colourful shirt she wore – evidently something of a signature. She was Lee Yamanaka, the President’s science adviser, formally Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Tash knew little about Yamanaka save that she was from Hawaii.
She made a quick look-up on her secure phone. According to the English government data, Lee Yamanaka had begun her career in the high-altitude observatories at Hawaii itself, and later went back home to run them. Another astronomer, then. Useful, lucky to have her in place. But it all depended on how she got on with Marlowe. Tash had seen enough horn-locking among senior scientists before.
Among the juniors and officials cluttering up the space behind the principals – including Tash herself – other main players stood out, some projecting in from other locations. Sitting behind Fred Bowles’s chair, she picked out a virtual representation of Charlie Marlowe, projected from Skythrust, with, no doubt, a slight signal delay as a result.
Then, on the American side, Tash recognised a small, slim woman staring into an old-fashioned-looking phone.
‘Wow,’ Tash blurted. ‘That’s Serena Jones.’
Jones looked around vaguely. The use of her name had distracted her; she was able to pick out Tash in the noisy virtual environment around her. ‘Was that you, my dear?’
Tash felt herself blush. ‘Sorry – didn’t mean to be fannish.’ She did know Zhi hero-worshipped this woman – indeed, he had formally studied her career for a semester in college.
Jones made virtual eye contact now, and smiled. ‘Oh, not at all. Here I am, if not in the flesh. In fact, I guess you’re all wondering why I invited you here today.’
A ripple of polite laughter, including the pols.
Tash felt herself helplessly charmed.
Lee Yamanaka smiled. ‘Thank you for that, Ms Jones. I suspect this will be a grim enough meeting; breaking the ice is never a bad thing. For the benefit of the record, Ms Jones is here as an unofficial representative of the New Californian Republic and the AFS – the American Free States – and for her technological expertise.’
Jones was around seventy, Tash thought. Her colour was deep, her short-cut black hair flecked with grey. She looked like somebody’s grandmother. Well, maybe she was. Not what you’d expect from the founder of Jones, Inc. And Jones had also been a leading figure in the New Secession movement in the United States in the early 2040s, after the chaos of the Greenland Melt and other disasters, and following her own leading contributions to the mitigation of such disasters. No wonder her charisma was so evident, her political contacts so senior. And no wonder she was here, now, in this crisis.
Fred Bowles leaned forward. ‘I think you know why we asked you to contribute, Ms Jones. You’re the entrepreneur who bought space – that’s what they call you, isn’t it?’
Amid the stately manoeuvring of egos, Tash knew, he had to remind everybody he was here too, hosting the meeting – if not chairing it, an honour he deferred to Yamanaka.
Jones shook her head. ‘Much too immodest. I just waited until the other guys had made all the mistakes, and started from there. But – as for “buying space”, talk about schadenfreude. When the New York stock exchange opened a while ago it fell twenty per cent before they locked it down. I’m getting poorer, just sitting here.’
Yamanaka nodded, grinning. ‘We’ll bear that in mind. Thank you, Ms Jones.’
Grace Butterworth murmured in Tash’s ear, ‘Well, that’s the chimp pack hierarchy established. Now we can get on with talking about the end of the world . . .’
Yamanaka opened the meeting formally.
‘Thank you all for attending. Usual recording protocols in place.’ Yamanaka glanced at the human stenographers, a pair of them on either side of the virtual wall.
‘Now, let’s just get a sense of our significance here. Or insignificance. We, in this meeting, are part of a worldwide, multi-level communications network, hastily being assembled. For me, a meeting following on from several others already today, mostly domestic, as for most of you, I guess.’ Self-deprecating grin. ‘If only we could blow the Sun back on with all the hot air, like a birthday candle in reverse, right?’
Polite laughter, led by Fred Bowles. Even, dutifully, from the stenographers, Tash noticed.
Yamanaka went on, ‘This particular level is minister to minister, adviser to adviser, between closely allied governments. OK? I should emphasise that I myself am only an adviser to my government, with no political allegiance, power or responsibility. Well, aside from my own quadrennial walk to the ballot box. To remind you, the US and the American Free States have retained for now a common defence infrastructure and command hierarchy. In this emergency I report to the President of the United States – who right now is in the bunker at Raven Rock, by the way. Quite a trial for President-Elect Cox; you’d think this damn thing could have waited for her inauguration at least.
‘Later our heads of government will talk formally, and possibly press statements will come out of that. Then there will be contacts across the regions, and with other allies. Ourselves with Canada and the rest of the Americas. You guys in Europe. Similar convocations in Asia, China, Russia and the rest, the Pacific nations . . . All of which is designed to feed into a meeting of the FIS Security Council at . . . I believe at around 2200 GMT, around twelve hours after the, umm, the eclipse, the event.’
She glanced around again, commandingly. ‘I don’t need to say that the more open we are the better these sessions will work. And I should say that there is much alarm in government circles back home. Alarm and confusion. I mean, as far as we can see, we are facing a threat to all humanity. Do I have that right, at least?’
Nods on either side of the virtual wall.
‘Meanwhile our space agencies – including Space Command and Spaceguard, which checks for asteroid threats, for instance – saw nothing of this situation coming, and are at a loss as to how to respond. I know that the Secretary of Defence has spoken of raising the defcon level, or terrorist threat alert levels – but what is there to shoot at?’
Marlowe said languidly, ‘I suppose such questions do need asking.’
Yamanaka glanced at her rival suspiciously. Wary, Tash thought, of being mocked. Marlowe had that way with people; Tash wondered if it had helped her further her life goals, or not.
Yamanaka moved on, glancing down at her own smart table. ‘So let me suggest a rough agenda. We have little time, of course . . . First item. Background. What is the Sun? I mean, how does it work? A thirty-second briefing, please. Second. What can have happened to it? Has it gone out? Forgive the apparent naivety of such questions. We will be asked these questions, and we need straightforward, non-technical, unambiguous answers. Third. How did this happen? Fourth. If this goes on – the lack of a Sun in the sky – well, what then? Fifth. What should we do now? Have I missed anything?’
‘Only the point,’ muttered the Astronomer Royal. She got a glare from Bowles, and shrugged. ‘Oh, don’t mind me. Very well. How does the Sun work? Well, that’s simple enough once you know the answer, although it took us until only about a century ago to work it out.
‘The Sun is a mass of, mostly, hydrogen and helium. The primordial stuff of the universe. About a hundred times the diameter of Earth, about three hundred thousand times the mass.
‘These days we have a whole slew of ways to monitor the Sun, and we have good reason to. For one thing we have learned to be wary of solar storms – Earth can be battered by charged-particle gusts that knock out satellites, even ground-based networks. So you have the Lodestone station watching the corona. Sun-watchers at locations like Mauna Kea in Hawaii—’
Yamanaka grinned, graciously enough. ‘My home observatory.’
‘There are other observatories in space and on the ground, watching the Sun at visible, ultra-violet, X-ray, infra-red, radio wavelengths – even gravity waves. The Chinese have a very large solar telescope, recently placed in orbit . . . And it’s only a few years back that the Benson Sun Probe skirted the photosphere, the surface, closely enough to take a direct sample. Today a lot of these satellites have drifted out of position, by the way, like the Mars spacecraft, the Al-miriykh.’
Fred Bowles raised a finger. ‘I presume the Chinese will be taking part in the FIS sessions later.’
Yamanaka nodded. ‘We hope so.’
Marlowe went on, ‘So we understand the Sun’s dimensions pretty well. Or we thought we did.
‘And we know how the Sun shines.
‘It is fuelled by nuclear fusion. You take four protons, hydrogen nuclei, under enormous pressure, and in a complicated chain of events they ultimately fuse to make one helium nucleus. But that nucleus has a little less mass than those four protons. And we know that mass is equivalent to energy, thanks to Einstein, and that lost energy is what makes the Sun shine.
‘As for your other questions – I can’t remember the bloody order – has the Sun gone out? Doubt it.
‘Because, you see, the Sun is a pretty big, dense mass and traps a lot of the energy it creates, deep down in its core. That energy is mostly carried off by neutrinos, to which almost everything is transparent and which just zip away. But the sunlight energy that sustains us is carried from the core by gamma ray photons, which get absorbed by the dense stuff of the Sun, and then get re-emitted and reabsorbed, over and over. For a single packet of fusion energy, that means it can take a random walk of a million years – or more – before most of it reaches the Sun’s outer layers, where you have convection, huge fountains of hot gas, helping the heat loss on its way—’
‘A million years,’ Fred Bowles said, picking out that number. ‘And so even if the fusion process in the Sun’s core were somehow shut down, it would still – umm, shine, for a million years or more.’
‘To an order of magnitude, yes. So we know you can’t just put the Sun out. Then what has happened? Now, you could block its heat and light. Put some kind of mega-engineering shell in the way, all around it. Made from the stuff of Jupiter, no doubt.’
Mel whispered in Tash’s ear, through her bud. Remember Yale? Zhi always talks about this stuff when he gets going.
‘Yes. Dyson spheres . . .’
Marlowe was glaring at her through an unreal wall. ‘Dyson spheres, did you mutter, Ms Brand? Quite right.’
‘So,’ Bowles asked cautiously, ‘could that be what we’re dealing with here? Some kind of – container?’
‘No,’ Serena Jones said. ‘Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. I say simple – we’re talking about erecting a container around a star. I mean, even if we didn’t see it being put in place, we would see it now, wouldn’t we? A big black mass. What we actually see is a star field where the Sun should be. And even if there was a container, the Sun’s gravity field would not be affected. Correct, Astronomer Royal?’
‘Correct, Ms Jones. Consider our deflected spaceships and habitats – the Al-miriykh, the Lodestone. The Sun’s gravity is no longer pulling on them; they are drifting out of their orbits. And,’ she said grimly, ‘similarly the planets must be drifting off course. Including Earth. As the astronauts have already reminded the world. And that’s something we will have to deal with in the future.’
‘So I get the immediate point,’ Bowles said. ‘I think. A simple shell around the Sun is not enough to explain it all. Even cloaked, we would feel its gravity. Therefore, are you saying that the whole Sun could have been – destroyed? All its huge mass. In an instant?’
‘Not at all,’ Marlowe said, visibly irritated. ‘How could that possibly be so, man? Sorry – Minister. If the whole damn Sun had blown up in our faces it would have taken the Earth with it – after eight minutes of lightspeed delay. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?’
Bowles kept his cool, and Tash knew he was used to getting what he wanted from temperamental scientists like Marlowe. ‘Very well, Professor. I apologise for my naivety. Then if you’re saying the Sun was not destroyed, but it has evidently gone, then as you have said to me before—’
‘It must have been moved.’
Tash, even as she absorbed this still-incredible suggestion herself, carefully watched the other participants. She saw shock, awe, and sheer disbelief – even if many of them must already have heard this.
Serena Jones, though, seemed to be calculating, tapping away at the smart-table surface before her. It was all just an engineering problem for her, perhaps.
After a few breaths Bowles took the bait. ‘Moved, then.’
Moved,’ Marlowe said. ‘We can be sure. We observed it, and not just with seven billion pairs of human eyes. We have other evidence.’
She tapped her phone, and images of ungainly, unlikely spaceborne machinery scrolled in the air of this composite room: a skeletal thing, it seemed to Tash, with long girder-like trusses from which blocky components were hanging.
‘I mentioned gravity waves. These are emitted when large masses move, or collide, or explode, or collapse. And this is the Southampton University inertial gravity-wave detector – the SIG – out in the asteroid belt. Huge thing, as you can see.
‘And this baby, it turns out, along with other such probes, picked up a tremendous ripple of gravity waves just as the Sun was – umm, deleted – or rather, after the few minutes it took the resulting lightspeed-limited gravity waves to travel out to the detectors. It was a sharp peak, a plucking – with spherical symmetry. As if a mass had been ripped out of spacetime. Deleted. Neat ripples washed out from the Sun’s location. Clearly the Sun has been moved. We have measured the gravitational consequences of that removal—’
