Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

Of course there was one more record to check. Deeply uneasy, she went back to the military service records and extended her search.

She discovered that unlike Abdi and Casey, no “original” of herself was to be found in Afghanistan, serving the Army, living on oblivious. Of course she hadn’t expected to find “herself” out there, for otherwise the Army wouldn’t have been looking for her. It was still an eerie confirmation, however.

She tried to absorb this. If she was the only one who had vanished altogether from this version of Earth, then she had somehow, and for some reason, been treated differently by the Firstborn, who had been responsible for all this in the first place. That was disturbing enough.

But how much stranger it might have been if she had discovered a version of herself living on in Afghanistan …

Miriam Grec tried to focus on what Siobhan McGorran was telling her.

It wasn’t easy. This briefing room was on the fortieth floor of the Livingstone Tower—or the “Euro-needle” as every Londoner called it, including Miriam when off camera. The windows were broad sheets of toughened glass, and the October sky was a shade of blue that reminded her of childhood visits to Provence with her French-born father. What color would Papa have called that sky? Cerulean? Powder blue?

On such a day, under such a sky, with London spread out like a shining tapestry before her, it was hard for Miriam to remember that she was no longer a small child but Prime Minister of all Eurasia, with grave responsibilities. And it was hard to accept such bad news as Siobhan’s.

Siobhan sat calmly, waiting for her words to sink in.

Nicolaus Korombel, Miriam’s press secretary, was the only other person in the room for this sensitive meeting. Polish-born, he had a habit of wearing shirts a couple of sizes too small for his spreading desk-job girth, and Miriam could actually see belly hair curl past its straining buttons. But he was the inner-circle advisor on whom she relied most heavily, and his assessment of Siobhan would be important in her final judgment of what she had to say.

Now Nicolaus sat back, locked his fingers behind his head, and blew out his cheeks. “So we’re looking at the mother of all solar storms.”

“You could put it that way,” Siobhan said dryly.

“But we survived June 9, and everybody said that was the worst storm in recorded history. What can we expect this time? To lose the satellites, the ozone layer …”

Siobhan said, “We’re talking about an energy injection many orders of magnitude greater than June 9.”

Miriam held her hands up. “Professor McGorran, I was a lawyer in the days when I had a real job. I’m afraid such phrases mean little to me.”

Siobhan allowed herself a smile. “I apologize. Prime Minister—”

“Oh, call me Miriam. I have a feeling we’re going to be working together rather closely.”

“Miriam, then. I do understand. Astronomer Royal I may be, but this isn’t my specialty. I’m struggling with it too.” Siobhan brought up a summary slide, a table of numbers that filled the big wall softscreen. “Let me go through the bottom line again. In April 2042, just four and a half years from now, we anticipate a major solar event. There will be an equatorial brightening of the sun, essentially, an outflux of energy that will bathe the orbital plane of Earth, and the other planets. We anticipate that Earth will intercept some ten to power twenty-four joules of energy. That’s a central figure; we have a ninety-nine percent confidence limit of an order of magnitude up or down.”

There was that term again. “Order of magnitude?”

“A power of ten.”

Nicolaus rubbed his face. “I hate to admit my ignorance. I know a joule is a measure of energy, but I have no idea how large it is. And all those exponents—I understand that ten to power twenty-four means, umm, a trillion trillion, but—”

Siobhan said patiently, “The detonation of a one-megaton nuclear weapon releases around ten to power fifteen joules—that’s a thousand trillion. The world’s nuclear arsenal at its Cold War peak was around ten thousand megatons; we’re probably down to some ten percent of that today.”

Nicolaus was doing arithmetic in his head. “So your injection of ten to power twenty-four joules from the sun—”

“It amounts to a billion megatons, pouring over Earth. Or a hundred thousand times the energy that would have been released in a worst-case nuclear conflagration.” She said the words coolly, meeting their eyes. She was trying to make them understand, step by step, Miriam saw; she was trying to make them believe.

Nicolaus said grimly, “Why did nobody alert us to this before? Why did it take you to dig this out? What’s going on up there on the Moon?”

But it wasn’t the Moon that was the problem, it seemed; it was the muddled head of the young scientist who had figured all this out.

“Eugene Mangles,” Miriam said.

“Yes,” Siobhan said. “He’s brilliant, but not quite connected to the rest of us. We need him. But we have to dig the bad news out of his head.”

Nicolaus snapped, “And what else isn’t he telling us?”

Miriam held up a hand. “Siobhan—just give me a headline. How bad will this be?”

“The modeling is still uncertain,” Siobhan said. “But that much energy—it would strip away the atmosphere altogether.” She shrugged. “The oceans will boil, vaporize. The Earth itself will survive: the rocky planet. Life in the deep rocks, kilometers down, might live through it. Extremophile bacteria, heat lovers.”

“But not us,” Nicolaus said.

“Not us. And nothing of the surface biosphere, on the land, in the air, or the seas.” In the silence that followed, Siobhan said, “I’m sorry. This is a terrible thing to have brought home from the Moon. I don’t know any way to soften this.”

They fell silent again, trying to digest what she had said.

Nicolaus brought Miriam a cup of tea on a monogrammed saucer. It was Earl Grey, the way she preferred it. The old myth that the British were addicted to their watery, milky cuppas was at least half a century out of date, but Miriam, a Prime Minister of Europe and with a French father, always took great pains not to offend the sensibilities of anybody on this still residually Euro-skeptic island. So she took her Earl Grey hot and without milk, out of sight of the cameras.

In this silent pause for thought, with her teacup cradled in her hands, Miriam was drawn to the window, and the city.

The silver stripe of the Thames cut through London’s geography, as it always had. To the east the City, still second only to Moscow as a Eurasian financial center, was a clutter of skyscrapers. The City occupied much of what had once been Roman London, and in her time as a student here Miriam had once walked the line of the wall of that primal settlement, a trail that ran a few kilometers from the Tower to Blackfriars Bridge. When the Romans had gone the Saxons had developed a new town to the west of the old walls, the area now known as the West End. With the great expansion of the cities that had followed the Industrial Revolution, those complicated knots of multilayered history had been drowned by new suburban development, until London was the heart of a vast conurbation that today reached out as far as Brighton in the south and Milton Keynes to the north.

The basic geography of London hadn’t changed much since the 1950s, perhaps. But a witness from that receding age would have been astonished by the glimmering width of the Thames, and the massive flanks of the new flood barriers that could be dimly glimpsed past the shoulders of buildings. The Thames had been tamed over the centuries, pushed into a deepening, narrowing channel, its tributaries bricked over, its floodplain built on. Until the turn of the century, London had got away with it. But the world’s climate shifts had brought an inexorable rise in sea levels, and humans had been forced to retreat before the Thames’s determined retaking of its ancient territories.