Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

“That’s not the point, Bud. You have to think about the psychology. You say your people here are making sacrifices. Well, so we are on Earth too, just as hard, to fund this thing. And if any of it has been stolen—”

“Stolen.” He snorted and turned away from her. “Siobhan, you’ve no idea how it is to work up here. Two million kilometers from your home, your family. Yes, here I am saving the planet. But I also want to save my own son.”

She felt cold. He’d never told her he had a son.

And she thought it through further. “ You’re in on this, too. You’re doing your share of skimming, aren’t you?”

He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Look,” he said at last. “There’s a firm in Montana. They bought up old nuclear weapon silos from the USASF, long ago decommissioned. Those things were designed to survive a nuclear strike, and to support their crews for weeks afterward. I’ve seen the specs. It’s possible that if you were stuck down there, you might survive the sunstorm.”

“Even if the shield failed?”

“It’s a chance,” he said defiantly. “But you can imagine the cost of a ticket. Can’t you see? Up here I can’t do a thing for Todd and his kids; I can’t so much as dig a hole in the ground. But this way, just by diverting a tiny fraction of one percent of one percent of the shield budget—”

“And everybody else up here is doing it too?”

“Not everybody.” He was watching her. “So now you know. When we go back to Aurora I’ll give you all the records you want, of every last damn cent that went astray … I know you could have me recalled to Earth over this.”

“That would be suicidal when we’re just months from the goal.”

His relief was obvious.

“But the graft can’t go on,” she said. “The idea that you are using shield funds to preserve your own families is corrosive of trust—and trust is fragile enough right now.” She thought it over. “We have to bring this out in the open. But your people up here are away from their families in a time of unprecedented crisis, and most of you will stay here right through the storm itself. You ought to be reassured that everything possible will be done to protect your families on your behalf. I’ll see to it. Call it an advance on your salaries. And I’ll try to persuade them not to prosecute until after you’ve finished saving the Earth.”

He grinned. “I’ll settle for that.” He pushed forward on the stick to take them home.

She said carefully, “Bud, you never told me you had a son.”

“Long story. A messy divorce, long ago.” He shrugged. “He isn’t part of my life, and never would have been part of yours.”

In that moment Siobhan knew she had lost him—if she’d ever had him at all. But her affair with Bud wouldn’t be the only relationship to have cracked under the strain of these strange times.

She turned to watch the vast landscape of the shield as it prepared to swallow her up.

Back on the shield, with relief, Siobhan made ready for the formal purpose of her visit.

The shield might have been big enough to wrap up the Moon like a Christmas present, but the people who had built it had given themselves precious little space, and there was no room for ceremonial. For this special moment, the quickening of the shield’s AI, Bud had decided that only the bridge of the grand old Aurora would do. It was a shame that it had long since been converted to a shower room, but a hasty reconversion took only a few hours, leaving just a faint lingering smell of soap and sweat.

Siobhan drifted at the front of the room, clinging with one hand to a strut. Bud was here, with a handful of his co-workers. Other shield workers were linked to this place electronically, as were friends on the Moon and on the Earth, including representatives of the governments of Eurasia and the United States.

“And,” Siobhan said as she began her speech, “the most important person today is here too—not in this room, but all around us, like God—”

“And the tax man,” somebody called to rather tense laughter.

“I’m honored to be present at this birth,” Siobhan said. “Yes, it is a birth in a real sense. When I close the switch before me a computer will be booted up—but more than that, a new person will arrive in the universe. Unlike Aristotle and Thales before her, who had to demonstrate their personhood to us, from the very moment of her awakening she will be a Legal Person (Nonhuman), with rights every bit as full and rich as those I enjoy.

“It’s marvelous to think that the mind who will begin her existence today will emerge from a network of the billions of components created in the gardens and farms, rooftops and window boxes of human beings across the planet. She owes her existence to all of us, in a sense—but it is a debt she must pay back. She will begin work immediately, on the great task of turning the shield to face the sun. From the moment of her awakening she will bear a grave responsibility.”

She glanced at Bud. “As for her name, it’s Colonel Tooke’s idea. As a child I grew up knowing the old Greek myth of Perseus, son of Zeus. Perseus faced the Medusa, whose gaze would have turned him to stone. So he held up a shield of solid bronze. He could see Medusa by her reflection, and he slew her. Bud informs me that, according to some versions of the myth, the shield actually belonged to Perseus’s sister, a goddess in her own right. And so the name Bud has suggested, the name of that warrior-goddess, seems entirely appropriate to me.”

She held her hand over the touch pad before her. “Welcome to the world—and to a vital place in our future.” She pressed down her palm.

Nothing obvious changed. The people crammed in the room glanced at each other. But it seemed to Siobhan that there was something different in the air: an expectancy, an energy.

Then somebody called, “Look! The shield!”

Bud hastily brought up a softscreen image of the shield’s whole disk, taken from a monitoring platform high above the central axis. The sun’s long shadows streaked across its plane—but now ripples of rocket sparks spiraled out across the face of the disk.

Bud said, “ Look at that. She’s already started work.” He glanced up. “Can you hear me?”

The voice came out of the air. A little unsteady in tone, smooth and free of accent, it was like a female version of Aristotle.

“Good morning, Colonel Tooke. This is Athena. I am ready for my first lesson.”

The damaged sun grew quiet. To a casual observer, it might have looked as if nothing had happened, as if the rogue Jovian had never come this way.

But that, of course, was the design. The complex waves washing through the sun’s core would take centuries before they reached their resonant peak. All of it followed logically from the moment that metaphorical pebble had been thrown just so, in a solar system sixteen light-years away.

As the anticipated sequence of events played itself out, on Earth, empires rose and fell.

When one young civilization rediscovered the thinking of a long-vanished ancestor, a profound revolution began. For the first time since antiquity European minds turned to the sun, not with awe, but with curiosity and analytical skills. In 1670 Isaac Newton split sunlight with a prism, creating a captive rainbow. A little later John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, used Newton’s laws to map the movements of the planets, and determined the size and distance of the sun. In 1837 William Herschel let sunlight warm a bowl of water, and so measured the star’s power. By the twentieth century astronomers were using neutrinos to study the workings of its deepest interior.