“But,” Siobhan said slowly, “what if Bisesa’s right?” That was the slim, disturbing possibility that had guided her actions since the day Bisesa had first bluffed her way into the Royal Society, already more than a year ago, and why she had diverted a small percentage of the energies at her command to looking into Bisesa’s ideas. “If this is the truth, Toby, there’s no hiding away, whatever it costs.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “You have my full support. You know that. It’s just that I’ve always felt that putting Bisesa I-was-abducted-by-aliens-and-fell-in-love-with-Alexander-the-Great Dutt in touch with Eugene the-greatest-mind-since-Einstein-if-only-you-would-listen Mangles was asking for trouble.”
She forced a smile. “Yes, but what fun!”
Bisesa returned with a tray of coffees, and a pot for refills.
“There’s nothing you can do about it, Miriam,” Nicolaus said, his voice thickened by stress. “The plane’s communications are cut off, and anyhow we will soon be isolated by reentry plasma. Even Aristotle is out of touch. The fact that the plane is automated actually made it easier. The device is on a tamperproof timer, which, even if we could get to it—”
She held up her hands. “I really don’t want to know.” She glanced at the wall softscreens, which now showed a broadening glow, escalating through pink to white. It was like being inside a vast lightbulb, she thought. Must her life really end amid such beauty?
She searched for anger, but found only emptiness, a kind of pity. After years of strain she was fundamentally exhausted, she thought, too tired to be angry, even about this. And maybe she had thought that something like this was inevitable, in the end. But she did want to understand.
“What’s the point, Nicolaus? You know the polls better than I do. In six months I would be out of the way anyhow. And this really won’t make any difference to the project. If anything it’s likely to strengthen everybody’s resolve to get it done.”
“Are you sure?” His grin was tight. “This is quite a stunt, you know. You are Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy. And nobody has taken down a spaceplane before. If confidence in flying into space is dented, even just a bit—if people on the shield start looking over their shoulders when they ought to be getting on with their work—I’ll have achieved what I set out to do.”
“But you won’t live to see it, will you?” And neither will I … “You’re just another in a long line of suicide bombers, as careless of the lives of others as you are of your own.”
He said coldly, “You don’t know me well enough to insult me. Even though I’ve worked at your side for ten years.”
Of course that was true, she thought with a stab of guilt. She remembered her resolution on the way out to try to get Nicolaus to open up a little—but on the shield she had been too entranced by her surroundings even to notice him. Would it have made any difference even if she had? Perhaps it was just as well, she thought morbidly, that she would not live long enough to be plagued by such questions.
“Tell me why, Nicolaus. I think you owe me that.”
His voice tight with tension, he said, “I sacrifice my life for El, the One True God.”
And that was enough to tell her everything.
*********
______
Siobhan glanced at the faces on Bisesa’s softwall. “Everybody online? Can you see us?”
With the usual disconcerting lightspeed delays, the others responded.
“No introductions needed, no ceremony. Who wants to start—Eugene?”
When her words reached the Moon, Eugene visibly jumped, as if his attention had been fixed on something else. “Okay,” he said. “First some background. You’re aware of my work on the sun, of course.” The middle of the softwall filled up with an image of the sun, which then turned transparent to reveal onion-skin layers within. The heart of the sun, the fusing core—a star within a star—glowed a sullen red. It was laced by a crisscross pattern of dark and bright stripes, dynamic, elusive, ever shifting. There was a date stamp in the corner, showing today’s date, in March 2040. Eugene said, “These oscillations will lead in the near future to a catastrophic outpouring of energy into the external environment.”
Casually he ran the model forward in time, until the image suddenly flared.
Siobhan felt Toby flinch. He murmured, “He really doesn’t see the impact he has on the rest of us, does he? Sometimes that boy scares me more than the sun itself.”
“But he’s useful,” Siobhan whispered back.
Eugene said, “So the future projection is stable, reliable. But I have had more difficulty with projections into the past. Nothing in the standard models of stellar interior behavior served as a guide. I began to suspect a single impulsive event lay behind this anomalous condition—an anomaly behind the anomaly. But I had trouble converging on a model. My discussions with Lieutenant Dutt, after Professor McGorran put us in touch, gave me a new paradigm to work with.”
Siobhan murmured to Toby, “Told you so.”
Mikhail interceded, “I think you’d better just show us, son.”
Eugene nodded curtly and tapped at an out-of-shot softscreen.
The date stamp began to count down, and the reconstructed events ran backward. As wave modes fluttered across the surface of the core, detail appeared in sidebars: frequencies, phases, amplitudes, lists of the energy shares of the principal vibration modes. As interference, nonlinearity, and other effects worked on the three-dimensional waves, the core’s output peaked and dipped.
Mikhail commented, “Eugene’s model is remarkably good. We have been able to map many of these resonant-peak anomalies onto some of the notable solar weather incidents in our history: the Little Ice Age, the 1859 storm …”
Siobhan had studied wave propagation as applied to the early universe, and she could see the quality of the work here. She said to Toby, “If he gets this anywhere near right, it will be one of the keenest bits of analysis I’ve ever seen.”
“Finest mind since Einstein,” Toby said dryly.
Now things changed on the screen. The oscillations grew wilder. And it seemed to Siobhan that a concentration of energy was gathering in one place.
Unexpectedly a brilliant knot of light rose out of the core, like a gruesome dawn inside the body of the sun itself. And as soon as the knot had left the core, those central oscillations all but ceased.
Eugene paused his projection, leaving the point of light poised on the edge of the core but beneath the blanketing layers of sun above. “At this point my modeling of the core anomaly is smoothly patched to a new routine to project the behavior of the inert radiative zone that lies around the core, and—”
Siobhan leaned forward. “Hold it, Eugene. What is that thing?”
Eugene blinked. “A concentration of mass,” he said, as if it were obvious. He displayed graphs of density. “At this point the mass contained within three standard deviations of the center of gravity is ten to power twenty-eight kilograms.”
She did some quick mental arithmetic. “That’s about five Jupiters.”
Eugene glanced at her, as if surprised she would need a translation into such baby talk. “About that, yes.” He resumed his animation.
That glowing fist of matter rose out of the sun’s heart, up through its layers. As it rose Siobhan saw disturbances like ripples flowing into the mass knot, a glowing tail almost like a comet’s, preceding it on its way to the surface. But she was watching this projection in reverse, she reminded herself. In reality this lump of matter had slammed its way down into the sun, leaving a turbulent wake behind, dumping energy and mass into the sun’s tortured bulk through those mighty waves.
She said, “So that’s how the radiative zone was cut through.”