Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

The only way to turn the shield was to apply a turning force gently, and carefully, and to distribute it across the disk’s surface so no one area came under too much pressure. The whole thing was dynamic, with the disk’s moments of inertia subtly changing at each moment; computationally it was an immense problem.

The only way to solve it, of course, was to give the job to Athena, the artificially-sentient soul of the shield. To her the shield was her body, its sensors and comms links her nervous system, its tiny motors her muscles. And she was so smart that the complicated task of tipping the disk was nothing but a vigorous mental workout.

So the months-long task had been carried out. By day and night constellations of tiny thrusters sparkled and fired in waves across the face of the disk, their patterns entrancing. Their tiny impulses gently but persistently nudged the disk.

And gradually, just as the simulations had predicted, the shield had tipped up to face the sun.

Bud knew he shouldn’t have worried so much. Everything had been planned out and simulated over and over; there was really very little room for failure. But he had worried even so. It wasn’t just the inherent risk of the maneuver, and not even an astronaut’s usual pious hope that if a screwup occurred, it wouldn’t be down to him.

There was something else that troubled him, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something about Athena.

This third cybernetic Legal Person (Nonhuman) seemed to Bud to be quite unlike Aristotle and Thales, her older brothers. Oh, she was just as smart, efficient, and competent as either of them, maybe even smarter. But where Aristotle was always rather grave, and Thales a bit blunt and obvious, Athena was—different. She could be playful. Crack jokes. Sometimes she almost seemed skittish. Flirtatious! And at other times she seemed needy, as if her mental state depended on every word of praise he gave her.

He’d tried to discuss this with Siobhan. She just said he was an unreconstructed old sexist: Athena had a female name and voice, and so he had attached to her all his erroneous images of femaleness.

Well, maybe so. But he worked more closely with Athena than anybody else. And even though nobody else recognized it, and even though all the diagnostic routines showed she was clear, there was something about her that troubled him.

Once he even had the distinct impression Athena was lying to him. He challenged her directly—it went against all her programming—and of course she had denied it. And what could she possibly have to lie about? But the seed of doubt remained.

Athena’s “mind” was a logical structure every bit as complex as the physical engineering that comprised her, with nested layers of control reaching all the way from one-line subroutines that controlled her pinprick rocket thrusters to the grand cognitive centers at the surface of her artificial consciousness. The check routines didn’t pick anything up, but that might just indicate there was some deep and subtle flaw buried deep in that vast new mind, a flaw he didn’t understand, and whose cause he couldn’t diagnose. If there was something wrong he was stumped to know what he could do about it.

Anyhow Athena had performed this tilting maneuver, her first big challenge, perfectly, despite all Bud’s fretting. She could be as nutty as a fruitcake as long as she did her job just as well tomorrow. But he knew he wouldn’t relax until the work was done, one way or another.

On Bud’s softscreen the artificial eclipse was almost perfect now. Earth was almost entirely darkened, the shapes of its continents illuminated by strings of city lights along the coasts and the great river valleys. Only the thinnest crescent of daylight still shone at the planet’s limb. The Moon was in the image too, swimming into the shield’s Olympian shadow. As it happened, right now the Moon’s orbit had brought it close to the Earth—sun line, in anticipation of the total eclipse it would cast tomorrow.

“My God.” Mikhail spoke from Clavius. “What have we done?”

Bud knew what he meant. The surge of pride he had expected at this moment, as the shield was finally completed and positioned, the culmination of years of heroic labor, was quickly dissipated by the meaning of this vast celestial choreography. “It really is going to happen, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so,” Mikhail said sadly. “And we few are stuck out here.”

“But at least we have each other,” Helena said, on Mars, some minutes later. “It’s a time to pray, don’t you think? Or sing, maybe. It’s a shame no decent hymns have been written for spacegoers.”

“Don’t ask me,” Mikhail said. “I’m an Orthodox.”

But Bud said quietly, “I can think of one.”

His words could not have reached Helena before her reply. But the hymn she began to sing, rather tunelessly, was exactly the one he’d had in mind.

Eternal Father, strong to save,

Whose arm doth bind the restless wave …

Bud joined in, frowning as he tried to remember the words. Then he heard the voices of Rose Delea and others on the shield. At last even Mikhail, presumably prompted by Thales, was singing too. Only Eugene Mangles looked puzzled, and stayed silent.

Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep …

Of course this interplanetary choir was absurd if you thought about it. Professor Einstein and his lightspeed delays saw to that: by the time Helena heard the others follow her lead she would have finished the last verse. But somehow that didn’t matter, and Bud sang lustily, joining with a handful of voices scattered over tens of millions of kilometers:

O hear us when we cry to thee

For those in peril on the sea.

But even as he sang he was aware of the silent presence of Athena all around him, a presence betrayed by not a single breath.

On this last evening, Siobhan McGorran was in her small Euro-needle office. Pacing around the room restlessly, she peered out at a darkened London.

Across the city, under its closed Dome, a multiple night had fallen. But the streets were bright. She wondered what she might hear if not for the heavily soundproofed window: laughter, screams, car horns, sirens, the tinkle of broken glass? It was a feverish night, that was for sure; few people were going to get any sleep.

Toby Pitt came bustling in. He bore a small cardboard tray with two big polystyrene mugs of coffee and a handful of biscuits.

Siobhan took the coffee gratefully. “Toby, you’re an unsung hero.”

He sat down and took a biscuit. “If my sole contribution to Earth’s crisis has been to fetch biccies for the Astronomer Royal, then I’m going to carry on doing it to the bitter end—even if I have to smuggle in my own digestives to do it. Stingy shower, these Eurocrats. Cheers!”

Toby seemed as bland and unflappable as ever. He was displaying a peculiarly British strength of character, she thought: coffee and biscuits, even while the world ended. But it struck her that he’d never told her anything about his private life.

“Isn’t there anywhere you’d rather be, Toby? Somebody you want to be with …”

He shrugged. “My partner is in Birmingham, with his family. He’s as safe as I am here, or not.”

Siobhan did a double take: he ? Something else she hadn’t known about Toby. “You have no family?”

“A sister in Australia. She’s under the Perth Dome, with her kids. There’s nothing I could do to make them any safer. Other than that, we’re orphans, I’m afraid. Actually you might be interested in my sister’s work. She’s a space engineer. She’s been developing designs for a space elevator. You know, a cable car up to geosynchronous orbit— the way to travel into space. All paper studies for the time being, of course. But she assures me it’s entirely technically feasible.” He pulled a face. “Shame we don’t have one now; it would have saved a lot of rocket launches. What about your family? Your mother and daughter—are they here in London?”