Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

“I know. But not this. ”

“For now I can soldier on. Besides I have contingency plans, as you know. Siobhan, I have a call for you. I think it may be important. It is from overseas.”

“Overseas?”

“To be precise, Sri Lanka. It is from your daughter—”

“Perdita? Sri Lanka ? That’s impossible. I put her down a salt mine in Cheshire!”

“Evidently she didn’t stay there,” Aristotle said gently. “I’ll put you through.”

Siobhan looked around wildly until she found a whole-Earth image, beamed down from the shield. The subsolar point was now tracking its way across eastern Asia. This point, where at any moment the maximum energy flux was being dumped into the atmosphere, was the center of a vicious spiral of tortured cloud. And all across the daylit hemisphere of the planet, as water evaporated from ocean and land, huge storm banks were gathering.

In Sri Lanka it would soon be high noon.

0710 (London Time)

Beside a wall of Sigiriya, Perdita crouched in the sodden dirt. This “palace in the sky” had stood for thirteen centuries, even though it had been abandoned and forgotten for most of that time. But it was affording her no shelter now.

The sky was a dark lid, covered with boiling clouds, with only a pale glow to show the position of the treacherous sun, almost directly overhead. The wind swirled around the ancient stones, slamming her in the face and chest. The air carried warm rain that lashed into her eyes, and it was hot, hot as hell, despite its speed. “It’s like an explosion in a sauna”—that was what Harry had said, her Australian boyfriend, who had suggested coming out here in the first place. But she hadn’t seen Harry or anybody else for long minutes.

The wind shifted again, and she got a mouthful of rain. It tasted of salt, seawater dragged straight up from the oceans.

Her phone was a heavy milspec number her mother had insisted she carry with her at all times over the last two months. She was amazed it still worked. But she had to scream into it to make herself heard over the wind. “Mother?”

“Perdita, what the hell are you doing in Sri Lanka? I put you down that mine to be safe. You stupid, selfish—”

“I know, I know,” Perdita said miserably. But to sneak away had seemed a good idea at the time.

She had first visited Sri Lanka three years ago. She had immediately fallen in love with the island. Though still sometimes torn by the conflicts of the past, it seemed to her a remarkably peaceful place, with none of the litter and crowds and awful gulf between rich and poor that marred India. Even the prison in Colombo—where she had spent one night when, fueled by too much palm toddy, she had joined Harry in an overvigorous protest outside the Indonesian embassy over logging contracts—had seemed remarkably civilized, with a large sign over its entrance saying PRISONERS ARE HUMAN BEINGS.

Like many visitors she had been drawn to the ‘Cultural Triangle’ at the heart of the island, between Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, and Dambulla. It was a plain littered with huge boulders and carpeted by a jungle of teak, ebony, and mahogany. Here amid the wildlife and the beautiful villages lurked astounding cultural relics, such as this palace, which had been occupied for only a couple of decades before being lost in the jungle for centuries.

Perdita had never felt happy just to hide out in a hole in the ground in Cheshire. As the sunstorm date had approached, and the authorities worldwide labored to protect cities, oil wells, and power plants, a movement had gathered among the young to try to save some of the rest: the peripheral, unfashionable, ruined, ignored. So when Harry had suggested coming to Sri Lanka to try to save some of the Cultural Triangle, she had jumped at the chance, and slipped away. For weeks the young volunteers had gamely collected seeds from the trees and plants, and chased after the wildlife. Perdita’s biggest project had been to clamber over Sigiriya in an attempt to wrap it up in reflective foil—like a huge Christmas turkey, as Harry had said.

She supposed she hadn’t really believed the dire predictions of what would happen when the sunstorm hit—if she had, she probably would have stayed down that mine in Cheshire after all, and pulled Harry in after her. Well, she had been wrong. Her mother had told her the shield’s goal was to cut the incoming solar heat to a thousandth of what might otherwise have hit the planet. It was unbelievable: if this was just a thousandth, what would the full force of the storm have been like?

“The wrapping blew off Sigiriya in a minute,” Perdita yelled miserably into the phone. “And half the trees have blown down, and—”

“How did you get out of that damn mine? Do you have any idea of the strings I had to pull to get you in there?”

“Mother, this isn’t doing any good. I’m here now.”

She could sense Siobhan trying to be calm. “Okay. Okay. Find shelter. Stay there. Keep your phone on. I’ll make some calls. Some of the GPS is down, but they may be able to locate you—”

The wind picked up even more, punching her like a great damp fist. “Mother—”

“I’ll contact the military on the island—the British consulate—”

“Mum, I love you!”

“Oh, Perdita—”

But then the phone sparked in her hand, she dropped it, and it was gone.

And the wind lifted her clean off the ground.

It picked her up the way her father used to when she was very small. The air was hot, wet, and full of debris, and the wind tore so fast she could barely breathe. But, oddly, it was almost relaxing, to be blown like a leaf. She never even saw the great teak trunk, a bit of debris flung into the air as she was, which ended her life.

1023 (London Time)

On the Moon, Mikhail Martynov sat with Eugene Mangles.

Its walls plastered with softscreens and comms links, and now populated by patient workers murmuring into microphones, this had been Bud Tooke’s office when he was in command here at Clavius—but now, of course, Bud was up there at L1 risking his life, while Mikhail sipped coffee and watched pretty pictures.

“There is absolutely nothing we can do now,” Mikhail said. “Nothing but watch, and record, and learn for the future.”

“You said that before,” Eugene groused. With an impulsive movement he pushed back his chair and stalked around the office.

Mikhail considered calling him back, but thought better of it. He had spoken more for himself than for Eugene. Besides, he had no real idea what Eugene was feeling. The boy remained enigmatic to him, even now, after they had worked together so closely and so long. As so often, Mikhail was consumed with a desire to hold Eugene, to comfort him. But that, of course, was impossible.

As for Mikhail himself, his dominant emotion was guilt.

He turned to the big softscreen at the head of the room, with its portrait of the full Earth. Assembled from more than a hundred data feeds, this was an immense and detailed image of a planet, even better than Bud’s imagery on the shield, and really quite beautiful, Mikhail thought sadly. But it was a portrait of a planet in torment.

As the Earth helplessly rotated, the subsolar point had been tracking west. It was as if the planet were turning into a blowtorch. Right now the dry face of Africa was turned toward him, the continent’s familiar outline clearly recognizable. But an immense storm system thousands of kilometers across lay sprawled over the Sahara, and the continent’s green heart was streaked by vast black plumes of smoke: the last of the rain forests will die today, Mikhail thought desolately. And as the vegetation burned off the land, the oceans gave up huge volumes of moisture to the clouds.