“Precisely,” Mikhail said. “Eugene’s model is elegant: a single cause to explain many effects.”
The knot of mass, backing out of the sun, now reached the surface and popped out through the photosphere. Again Eugene froze his animation. Siobhan saw that the emergence was close to the sun’s equator.
The date stamp, she noted, showed 4
Eugene said, “Here is the moment of impact. The mass at this point was some ten to power—” He glanced at Siobhan. “About fifteen Jupiters. As it descended into the sun’s interior, the outer layers of the object were of course ablated away, but five Jupiters made it to the core.”
Toby Pitt said, “Fifteen Jupiters. It was a planet—a Jovian, a big one. And, two thousand years ago—it fell into the sun. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Not quite,” Eugene said. He tapped at his softscreen again, and the view abruptly changed. Now the sun was a bright pinpoint at the center of a darkened screen, and the planets’ orbits were traced out as shining circles. “From this point I made another patch, to a simple Newtonian gravity trajectory solution. Corrections for relativity aren’t significant until the impactor passed the orbit of Mercury, and even then they are small …”
Knowing where and how fast his mighty Jovian had splashed into the sun, Eugene had projected back, using Newton’s gravity law, to figure out the path it must have followed to get there. A glowing line, starting in the sun and crossing all the planets’ orbits, swept out of the solar system and off the screen. It curved subtly but was remarkably straight, Siobhan saw.
Toby said, “I don’t understand. Why do you say it didn’t fall into the sun?”
Siobhan said immediately, “Because that trajectory is hyperbolic. Toby, the Jovian was moving faster than solar escape velocity.”
Mikhail said somberly, “It didn’t fall into the sun. It was fired in.”
Toby’s mouth opened, and closed.
Bisesa didn’t seem surprised at all.
The One-Godders had emerged as a kind of reaction to the benevolent Oikumen movement. Fundamentalists of three of the world’s great faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had appealed to their own shared roots. They united under the banner of the Old Testament God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: Yahweh, who was thought to have derived from a still older deity called El, a god of the Canaanites.
And El was a meddling god, a brutish, partial, and murderous tribal god. In the late 2020s His first act, through His modern adherents, had been the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, when fanatics, in a self-destructive spasm, had used a nuclear grenade to take out a site of unique significance to at least two of their three intertwined creeds. Miriam remembered that Bud Tooke had been involved in the cleanup.
“Nicolaus, why would you want to impede the work on the shield? You’ve been at my side throughout. Can’t you see how important it is?”
“If God wishes us to be put to the fire of the sunstorm, so be it. And if He chooses to save us, so be it. For us to question His authority over us with this monstrous gesture—”
“Oh, can it,” she said irritably. “I’ve heard it all before. A Tower of Babel in space, eh? And you’re the one to bring it down. How disappointing, how banal!”
“Miriam, your mockery can’t hurt me anymore. I have found faith,” he said.
And there was the real problem, she realized.
In his conversion Nicolaus wasn’t alone. All the major faiths, sects, and cults worldwide had recorded a marked rise in conversions since June 9. You might expect a flight to God in the face of impending catastrophe—but there was a theory, still controversial and revealed to her only in confidential briefings, that increased solar activity was correlated with religious impulses in humans. The great electromagnetic energies that had washed over the planet since June 9 were, it seemed, able to work subtle changes in the complicated bioelectrical fields of a human brain, just as in power cables and computer chips.
If that was true—if the agitation of the sun had somehow led, by a long and complicated causal chain, to a lethal ideological determination in the mind of Miriam’s closest colleague to kill her—well, what an irony it would be. She said blackly, “If God exists, He must be laughing right now.”
“What did you say?”
“Never mind.” A thought struck her. “Nicolaus—where will we come down?”
He smiled coldly. “Rome,” he said.
Siobhan asked, “Can we say where this rogue planet came from?”
Not from the solar system, of course; it had been moving too fast to have been captured by the sun. Eugene displayed more of his “patched solutions,” projecting the path of his Jovian back to the distant stars. He rattled off celestial coordinates, but Siobhan stopped him and turned to Mikhail. “Can you put that into English?”
“Aquila,” Mikhail said. “It came to us out of the constellation of the eagle.” This was a constellation close to the sky’s equator; from Earth the plane of the Galaxy appeared to run through it. Mikhail said, “In fact, Professor McGorran, we know that this object must have came from the star Altair.” Altair was the brightest star in Aquila. It was some sixteen light-years from Earth.
Eugene cautioned, “Mikhail, I’m not sure we should talk about this. The projection gets fuzzy if you push it back that far. The error bars—”
Mikhail said grimly, “My boy, this is not a time for timidity. Professor, it appears that Eugene’s rogue Jovian originated in orbit around Altair. It was flung out after a series of close encounters with other planets in the system, which are visible with our planet-finder telescopes. The details are understandably sketchy, but we hope to pin them down further.”
“And,” Siobhan said, “it was hurled our way.”
Toby pulled his nose. “It seems fantastic.”
Mikhail said quickly, “The reconstruction is very reliable. It has been verified from multiple data sources using a variety of independent methods. I have checked over Eugene’s calculations myself. This is all quite authoritative.”
Bisesa listened to all this quietly, without reacting.
“Okay,” Toby said. “So a rogue planet fell into the sun. It’s an astonishing thing to happen, but not unprecedented. Remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy colliding with Jupiter in the 1990s? And—with respect—what does it have to do with Lieutenant Dutt and her theories about extraterrestrial intervention?”
Eugene snapped, “Are you such a fool that you can’t see it?”
Toby bit back, “Now look here—”
Siobhan grabbed his arm. “Just take us through it, Eugene. Step by step.”
Eugene visibly fought for patience. “Have you really no idea how unlikely this scenario is? Yes, there are rogue planets, formed independently of stars, or flung out of stellar systems. Yes, it may happen that such a planet could cross from one system to another. But it’s highly unlikely. The Galaxy is empty. To scale, the stars are like grains of sand, separated by kilometers. I estimate the chance of a planet like this coming anywhere near our solar system as being one in a hundred thousand.
“And this Jovian didn’t just approach us—it didn’t just fall near the sun—it fell directly into the sun, on a trajectory that would take it directly toward the sun’s center of mass.” He laughed, disbelieving at their incomprehension. “The odds against such a thing are absurd. No naturalistic explanation is plausible.”
Mikhail nodded. “Circumstantial, perhaps, but still … I’ve always thought Sherlock Holmes put it well. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”
“Somebody did this,” Toby said slowly. “That’s what you’re saying. Somebody deliberately fired a planet, a big fat Jovian, straight at our sun. We’ve been hit by a bullet from God.”