Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

He shrugged. “Haven’t seen him.”

“I know he has his own priorities.” The Space Weather Service, which had suddenly grown from an obscure near joke to one of the most high-profile agencies in the solar system, was almost as inundated as Eugene himself. But she had seen Mikhail work with Eugene; she had a sense the solar astronomer would be able to get the best out of the boy. And, given the way Mikhail looked at Eugene, it would be a task Mikhail would perform with competence and affection. “I’ll ask him to spend more time with you. Maybe he could move back here to Clavius; he doesn’t have to be physically at the pole station.”

Eugene showed no notable enthusiasm for the idea. But he didn’t reject it outright, so Siobhan decided she had made some progress.

“What else?” She bent forward so she could see his face more clearly. “How are you feeling, Eugene? Is there anything you need? You must know how important your welfare is, to all of us.”

“Nothing.” He sounded sullen, even sulky.

“What you found is so important, Eugene. You could save billions of lives. They’ll build statues to you. And believe me, your work, especially your classic paper on the solar core, is going to be read forever.”

That provoked a weak smile. “I miss the farm,” he said suddenly.

The non sequitur took her aback. “The farm?”

“Selene. I understand why they had to clear it all out. But I miss it.” He had grown up in a rural area in Massachusetts, she remembered now. “I used to go work in there,” he said. “The doctor said I needed exercise. It was that or the treadmill.”

“But now the farm’s been shut down. How typical that in trying to save the world we kill off the one bit of green on the Moon!”

And how psychologically damaging that might be. In trying to figure out these spacebound folk she had read stories of cosmonauts on the first, crude, tin-can space stations, patiently growing little pea plants in experimental pots. They had loved those plants, those small living things sharing their shelter in the desolation of space. Now Eugene had shown the same impulse. He was human after all.

“I’ll fix it,” she said. “A farm’s out of the question for now. But how about a garden? I’m sure there’s room here in Hecate. And if there isn’t we’ll make room. You lunar folk need reminding of what you’re fighting to save.”

He looked up and met her gaze for the first time. “Thank you.” He glanced at the softscreen before him. “But if you don’t mind—”

“I know, I know. The work.” She pushed back her chair and stood up.

That night she went to Bud’s room.

He whispered, “I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”

She snorted. “I knew for sure you wouldn’t walk down the corridor.”

“Am I so transparent?”

“As long as the journey got made by one of us,” she said.

“I told you we’d be a good team.”

She unzipped her jumpsuit. “Prove it, hero.”

Their lovemaking was wonderful. Bud was a lot more athletic than she was used to, but he was more focused on her than most of her lovers ever had been.

And he was ingenious in his use of the Moon’s gentle gravity. “One-sixth G is the gravity of choice,” he gasped at one point. “On Earth you’re crushed. In zero G you’re floundering around like a beached salmon. In one-sixth, you’ve enough weight to give you a little traction, and yet you’re still as light as a kid’s balloon. Why, I’m told that even on Mars—”

“Shut up and get on with it,” she whispered.

Afterward she stayed awake for a long time, just relishing the strong warmth of his arms around her. Here they were, two humans in this bubble of light and air and warmth on the lethal surface of the Moon. Like the cosmonauts and their pea plants, she thought: all they had, in the end, was each other.

Even when the sun betrayed them, they had each other.

“So there it is,” Rose Delea said flatly. “You have two problems you can’t get over. Without the Chinese heavy-lift capability, you can’t finish the shield infrastructure on time. And even if you could, you don’t have a way to manufacture all the smartskin you need.” She sat back and stared out of her softscreen at Siobhan. “You’re fucked.”

Siobhan pressed the balls of her thumbs to her eyes, and tried to keep her temper. It was January 2039—six months after she had seen those first shield components stacking up on the Moon, already eighteen months since the June 9 event. Another Christmas had come and gone, a bleak and joyless festival, and little more than three years remained before the sunstorm was due to hit.

Save for Toby Pitt and the talking heads from space on the softscreens, Siobhan was alone here in the Royal Society Council Rooms, the location that had come to serve as her communications base. Toby’s job as the Society’s events manager had gradually evolved into his becoming her PA, amanuensis, and shoulder-to-cry-on. And she certainly felt like crying now.

“ We’re fucked, Rose,” she said.

“What?”

“Rose, sometimes you sound like my plumber. You’re fucked is wrong. Language is crucial. It’s not my problem, it’s ours. We’re fucked.”

Bud Tooke, peering from another softscreen, laughed gently.

Rose glared. “Fucked is fucked, you stuck-up pom. I need a coffee.” And she pushed herself out of her chair and drifted out of shot.

“Here we go again,” Mikhail said grimly.

Despite her usual intrinsic anxiety about the schedule, before she had come into work this morning Siobhan had actually felt optimistic about the way things were going.

On the Moon, after months of stupendous effort by Bud and his people, the Sling was completed and operational. Even the construction of a second mass driver was under way. Not only that, but the glass manufacturing operations were proceeding apace: plants had been set up all over the bare soil of Clavius Crater, so that streams of components poured into the Sling’s launching bay by lunar day and night. Rose Delea, seconded from her helium-3 processing work, had proven a more than capable manager for that end of the project, despite her dour attitude.

Meanwhile Aurora 2 had been safely brought back from Mars and was lodged at L1, the crucial Lagrangian point suspended between Earth and sun. With the Sling fully operational the first loads of lunar-glass buttresses and struts had been fired up to the assembly site, and construction of the shield itself had started. Bud Tooke was now in nominal charge of all the subprojects at L1, and, as Siobhan had always known he would, he was delivering quietly and efficiently. Soon, it was said, the proto-shield would be big enough to see with the naked eye from Earth—or would have been, were it not forever lost in the glare of the sun.

Even Siobhan’s personal life had been looking up, to general astonishment among friends and family. She hadn’t expected that her affair with Bud would deepen so smoothly and so quickly, especially since they spent almost all their time on separate worlds. In the toughest days of her life, the relationship had been a source of comfort and strength to her.

But now, in what should have been a routine weekly progress meeting, two showstopper problems had come looming out of nowhere.

On her screen Rose Delea reappeared with coffee that sloshed in a languid low-G way. The conversation resumed, and Siobhan tried to focus on the issues.

Mathematically, the positioning of an object at a Lagrangian point was simple. If the shield had been a point mass, it could have been poised neatly on the sweeping line joining Earth to sun at L1. But this project was no longer mathematics; it was engineering.