Arthur Clarke - Sunstorm

“Well, you made it.” Bisesa let Linda in and carefully double-locked the door.

They hauled the groceries to the flat’s small kitchen. Most of what Linda had bought were staples—milk, bread, quorn products, some limp-looking vegetables, and mottled apples. Linda apologized for the meagerness of her haul, but it could have been worse; Bisesa, who followed the news assiduously, knew that London had come close to a strict rationing system.

For Bisesa, unpacking groceries was oddly nostalgic, something she used to do every Friday evening with her mother, who would do her “big shop” at the end of the family farm’s long week. These days family habits had changed; most groceries were remote-ordered and delivered. But days after June 9 the transport and distribution services were still clogged up, and everybody had had to return to the stores in person to go through the rituals of carts and checkouts.

This was a new experience to Linda, and she was complaining briskly. “You wouldn’t believe the queues. They actually have bouncers on the meat counters. The checkout registers are operating now, so that’s a blessing; no more hand-calculated bills. But a lot of people still won’t swipe through.” A sight you often saw since June 9 was the telltale forearm scar of somebody who’d had to have her implanted ident chip replaced, the original having been wiped and fried by the solar frenzy of that day.

“Still no bottled water,” Bisesa said.

“Not yet, no,” Linda said. She reflexively turned on the taps at the kitchen sink, to no effect. The solar storm had induced corrosive currents in London’s hundreds of kilometers of aging pipe work. So even when they got the pumps working, no water could be delivered to many parts of the city until the engineers and their smart little mole-shaped robots had fixed up the network once more. Linda sighed. “Looks like it’ll be the standpipe again.”

Right now a corner of the softwall was showing an aerial view of London, overlaid by an outline map of the continuing power-outs, with a few sparks that marked riots, lootings, and other instances of disorder. Blue asterisks showed the positions of standpipes, most of them along the banks of the Thames. Bisesa found this evidence of the resilience of the old city oddly moving. Long before the Romans came to found London in the first place, Celts had fished the Thames in their wicker boats, and now in this twenty-first-century crisis Londoners were drawn back to their river once again.

Linda looked at her callused palms. “You know, Bis, I can manage the shopping. But I could sure do with some help with the water.”

“No,” Bisesa said immediately. Then, more considered, she shook her head. “I’m sorry.” Reflexively she glanced across at Myra, who was engrossed once more in the endlessly elaborating luridness of her softwall soap. “I’m not ready to go out yet.”

Linda, still packing food away, said in a deliberately casual tone, “I’ve been asking Aristotle for advice.”

“About what?”

“Agoraphobia. It’s more common than you’d think. I mean, how would you know if somebody was a prisoner in her home? You’d never meet her! But there are treatments. Support groups—”

“Lin, I appreciate your concern. But I’m not agoraphobic. And I’m not crazy.”

“Then what—”

Bisesa said lamely, “I just need more time.”

“I’m here if you need me.”

“I know …”

Bisesa returned to her vigil with Myra, and the softwall.

Maybe she wasn’t crazy. But she couldn’t explain to Linda any of her strange circumstances.

She couldn’t explain how she had been on patrol with her Army unit on its peacekeeping duties in Afghanistan, how she had suddenly found herself hurled beyond the walls of space and time, how she had learned to construct a new life for herself on a strange patchwork other-Earth they had called Mir—and how she had somehow been brought home, through a kaleidoscope of even stranger visions.

And she couldn’t explain to her cousin the strangest detail of all: how she had been serving in Afghanistan on June 8, 2037, but had found herself here in London the very next day, June 9, the day of the storm—but in her memories, more than five years had passed between those two events.

At least she was restored to Myra, the daughter she thought she had lost. But this was a Myra who had grown older only by a day, while years had passed for Bisesa. And Myra, who studied her mother with the searching gaze of a neglected child, could surely see the sudden strands of gray hair, the deeper wrinkles around Bisesa’s eyes. There was a distance between them that might never heal.

So arbitrary had been the way she had been ripped out of her life before that she couldn’t get over the fear that it might, somehow, happen all over again. And that was why she couldn’t leave the flat. It wasn’t a fear of the open; it was a fear of losing Myra.

After a few minutes she whispered a command to Aristotle. He resumed the compulsive search of the world’s news outlets and databases she had ordered.

June 9 had been a worldwide catastrophe, by orders of magnitude the worst solar storm ever experienced, and days later it absorbed even Aristotle’s mighty energies to keep up with the flood of words and images. But try as he might, Aristotle couldn’t find a single mention of the silver sphere Bisesa had spotted hovering over London on that difficult morning, the thing her companions on Mir would have called an Eye. Even on a day like June 9, a thing like that hovering over London should have been a remarkable sight, the ultimate UFO, the subject of a thousand news items. But nobody else had reported it.

It terrified Bisesa to the root of her soul that only she had seen the Eye. Because that must mean they, the Firstborn, the powers behind the Eye and everything else that was happening to her and the world, wanted something of her.

By the third day of the journey the Moon was huge in the black sky.

Siobhan had to bend her neck to peer through the Komarov ’s poky little windows of tough, micrometeorite-starred glass. But when she found the Moon’s bony crescent she felt a shiver of wonder. How strange this was, she thought. Amid the mundanity of the flight—the usual horrors of airline food, the space sickness, the dismal engineering of zero-gravity toilets—the Moon itself had come swimming out of the dark to greet her, forcing its way into her consciousness with a cold, massive grace.

And yet the most marvelous thing of all was that even here, in the passenger cabin of Earth—Moon shuttle Komarov, her mobile phone worked.

“Perdita, please ask Professor Graf to cover my supervisions with Bill Carel.” Bill was one of her graduate students, working on spectral analyses of structures in dark energy. Troublesome but able, Bill was worth the effort; she would have to trust old Joe Graf to figure that out for himself. “Oh, and please ask Joe if he will handle the proofs of my latest paper in the Astrophysical Journal. He’ll know how. What else? My car was still acting up, last time I tried it.” The great shock of June 9 had been traumatic for humankind’s semi-sentient machines as well as for people; even months later many were still struggling to recover. “It probably needs a bit more time with the therapist … What else?”

“You have a dentist appointment,” her daughter said.

“So I do. Damn. Well, please cancel it.” She probed with her tongue at the tooth that was giving her trouble, and wondered what the standard of dentistry was like on the Moon.

Her students, her car, her teeth. These fragments of her life from Milton Keynes, where she held a seat at the Open University, seemed incongruous, even absurd, out here between planets. And yet once this immense flap was over things would go on; she must focus some of her energy on holding things together, so there was a life for her to go back to.