Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

Mikhail nodded. “Another idea of Tsiolkovski’s.”

Toby said, “Actually, I think it was Bernal.”

Siobhan said, “How many people could we save that way?”

Mikhail shrugged. “A few hundred, maybe?”

“A few hundred is better than none,” Toby said grimly. “A gene pool of that size is enough to start again.”

Mikhail said, “The Adam and Eve option?”

“It’s not good enough,” Siobhan said. “We are not about to give up on saving the billions who are to be put to the torch. We have to do better, guys.”

Mikhail sighed sadly. Toby averted his eyes.

As the silence lengthened, she realized that they had nothing more to offer. She felt despair settle inside her, suffocating—despair and guilt, as if this huge catastrophe, and their inability to think their way out of it, were somehow her fault.

There was a modest cough.

Surprised, she looked up into the empty air. “Aristotle?”

“I’m sorry to break in, Siobhan. I’ve been taking the liberty of running supplementary searches of my own based on your conversation. There is an option you may have missed.”

“There is?”

Mikhail, in his softscreen image, leaned forward. “Get to the point. What do you suggest?”

“A shield,” Aristotle said.

A shield? …

Data began to download to their displays.

The President of the United States took her seat behind her desk in the Oval Office.

The place was calm, for once. Just a single camera faced her, a single microphone loomed over her, and a single technician watched her. The office was equipped with only simple props: a Stars and Stripes, and a Christmas tree to mark this month of December 2037. As the tech counted her down on his fingers in the time-honored way, the President touched the simple necklace at her throat, but she resisted the temptation to adjust the black hair, now threaded with silver, that her makeup artist had spent so long sculpting.

Juanita Alvarez was the first Hispanic woman to become President of what remained overwhelmingly the most powerful single nation on the planet. With her compassion, her blunt common sense, and her obvious gut instinct for the health of a democracy, the people who had voted for her, and many who hadn’t, had taken her to their hearts.

But today she was speaking to more than just the citizens of America. Today her message, simultaneously translated by Aristotle and Thales into all the spoken, written, and gestural languages of humanity, would be broadcast by TV, radio, and webcast to three planets. Later her words and their implications would be analyzed and parsed, praised and criticized, until the last bit of sense had been wrung out of them, as none of her words had ever been examined before—and almost immediately, of course, based as much on what she had not said as on the words themselves, a legion of conspiracy theories would spring up.

That was to be expected. It was hard to imagine that any President, even the great wartime leaders, had ever had a more important message for her people and the world. And if Alvarez fouled up, her words themselves, through creating panic, disorder, and economic instability, could cause more damage than some small wars.

But if she was nervous, it showed only in the slightly uncertain motions of her hands.

The tech’s fingers folded down. Three, two, one.

“My fellow Americans. My fellow citizens of planet Earth, and beyond. Thank you for listening to me today. I think many of you will anticipate what I have to say to you. It’s probably the sign of a healthy democracy that not even the Oval Office is leakproof.” A small smile, expertly delivered. “I have to tell you that we all face a grave danger. And yet if we work together, with courage and generosity, I assure you there is hope.”

Siobhan sat with her daughter Perdita in her mother’s small flat in Hammersmith.

Because of her increasing deafness Maria had her softwall’s sound turned up so high it was sometimes painful. The din didn’t seem to bother twenty-year-old Perdita, though. Even as the President was talking, she let a competing show from another channel run on the small softscreen implant on her wrist. It was nice to know, Siobhan thought wryly, that the world’s media outlets provided choice, even at a time like this.

Maria came bustling through from the kitchen with three glasses of a cream liqueur—small glasses, Siobhan noticed a bit sourly, and no sign of the bottle for replenishment.

“Well, this is nice,” Maria said, handing out the glasses. She smiled, and the small facial scars of her surgery puckered. “It must be a long time since all three of us got together, aside from an occasional Christmas. It’s a shame it took the end of the world to make it happen.”

Perdita laughed around a salted cracker. “There’s always an edge to you, Grandma! We do have lives of our own, you know.”

Siobhan glared at her daughter. Since Perdita herself had reached age twelve Siobhan had sympathized with her own mother’s occasional clinginess. “Let’s not argue,” Siobhan said. “And it isn’t the end of the world, Mother. You shouldn’t go around saying that. Especially not if people think it’s me that’s saying it. You could start a panic.”

Maria sniffed, as always unreasonably miffed at being told off.

Perdita said now, “Of course a lot of what Alvarez is going to say is guff. Isn’t it, Mum?”

“Guff?”

“Do you think anybody’s going to believe it? Saving the world is so 1990s disaster movie! I heard a guy on the TV the other day saying it’s all a form of denial, a displacement activity. And of course it’s such a fascistic dream!”

There could be something in that, Siobhan thought uneasily. It wouldn’t be the first time the sun had been co-opted as a source of authority.

As it happened, sun cults were quite rare in history. They tended to arise in organized, heavily centralized states—the Romans, the Egyptians, the Aztecs—the central power of the sun serving as a source of authority for the one ruler. Maybe in this situation the sudden malevolence of the sun might similarly be utilized by those who sought power on Earth. That sort of suspicion fueled conspiracy theories among those who, despite the memory of June 9, suspected the whole business of the storm on the sun was a scam, a power grab by some cabal of businessmen or hidden government, a coup arising out of a new center fueled by fear and ignorance.

“Nobody believes it,” Perdita said. “Nobody believes in heroes anymore, Mum—certainly not chisel-jawed astronauts and public-spirited politicians. Life just doesn’t work that way.”

“Well, maybe so,” Siobhan said, irritated. “But what can you do but try? And, Perdita—if we can’t save the planet after all—how will it make you feel?”

Perdita shrugged. “I’ll get on with things, until—” She mimed an explosion with her hands. “ Blammo, I guess. What else can you do?”

Maria touched Siobhan’s shoulder. “Perdita’s young. When you’re twenty you think you’re immortal. All this is probably beyond her imagination.”

“And mine,” Siobhan said. She looked at Perdita, distracted. “At least until I had a kid. After that the future got personal … You know, I’m relieved it’s out in the open. I’ve felt guilty walking around London, mixing with people going about their lives, knowing I had a devastating secret locked up in my head like an unexploded bomb. It didn’t seem right. Who was I to keep back a truth like that? Even if we do cause some panic.”