Solstice Page 3

  Then reached some kind of climax, some form of satisfaction, and stopped.

  Seabright listened to the sound of the aircraft dying, listened to the engines winding down, the fans and circuits growing cold, saw everything electrical on board cease to function, stared at the dead dull face of the display panels, and knew this was impossible, knew that no conjunction of events could kill every circuit in the machine, every backup with it.

  The aircraft now stayed aloft through momentum and the locked aerodynamic form of its ailerons and elevators alone, buoyed in the current of air 37,000 feet above central Asia, no noise in the cockpit, nothing but the slow, insistent rush of air past the fuselage. It would be different behind them, behind the closed door, back in the passenger section. The two men couldn't hear the screaming there. They didn't need to. It was bad enough in their imaginations.

  Even without power the cockpit was bright. The sun streamed in through the wide, clear windows, illuminated the electronic deadness that surrounded them, made plain their relentless, uncontrolled passage through the air.

  Seabright stared ahead, out the window, watched the way the horizon was now starting to slip imperceptibly upward as the aircraft settled into a slow descent, and tried to guess the rate they were falling, tried to work out how long it would take them to sink from the sky to the ground.

  CHAPTER 4

  Annie and Mo

  La Finca, 0649 UTC

  Michael Lieberman wandered downstairs for breakfast just before seven, drank the best part of a pint of fresh orange juice and three strong coffees, and wondered what he'd got himself into.

  In Lone Wolf, and many other little hubs around the world where the serious solar astronomers gathered, Lieberman was the 'sunspot man'. His early career as a designer of solar-powered satellite systems was largely forgotten, though not by him. Now he was the one they turned to when they needed a map of that big burning orb in the sky. Not the expert with the longest list of qualifications after his name. Not the one with more papers in the library than you could fit into a lifetime of reading. It went deeper than that; it relied as much on informed hunches and some subterranean intuitive guesswork even he felt hard-pressed to rationalize. He had a feel for this area, could look at the data, the flow of the solar tide, the jerky rhythm of the X-ray charts, and, most of all, that restless pattern of blemishes on the face of the sun that he'd made his own. He could read the way the umbras and penumbras shifted and moved constantly, then pretty much guess where they might go next. And just now, with the spot cycle coming unexpectedly to a peak two years before it should, when anyone could buy a filter to stop that big yellow ball of glass from burning out your retina, then just stare at the sun and see the spots with the naked eye, that was a talent to nurture.

  La Finca was like no science project he'd ever seen, not in two decades of professional research. There was no one else down for breakfast, no gossip and hopeful flirting across the tables. The place was occupied, however. He'd seen as much when he came in the previous evening, walked from the helipad, across the yellowing, lifeless grass in heat that was still unbearable, and met Simon Bennett, who'd politely, if distantly, shaken his hand on the doorstep before making an excuse and disappearing into a big, barnlike building set next to the main mansion where everyone seemed to be staying.

  Lieberman had eaten a solitary dinner, sinking a couple of beers until his head felt dull, and trying to stop from wondering where the next infusion of money would come from after this little enterprise ran its course. Academic tenure was something he'd learned to despise (particularly since he no longer had it). But there were times, when the bills came through the door of his small rented apartment in San Francisco like confetti, that it had its attractions. At least he and Sara never had kids in the three jumbled years they'd been married. That was one consolation, he thought, then cursed himself for his dumbness. If there had been kids the marriage never would have gone sour in the first place. The tough and delightful business of raising a family would have swallowed them up. But you couldn't control your genes, couldn't order up kids like a pizza from Domino's.

  He wasted time in the dining room counting off the long minutes to the eight am meeting Bennett had promised. Finally, with almost half an hour to go, the door opened and a woman walked in, hand in hand with a child who looked about nine years old. Lieberman smiled at them and got back a nice grin from the kid, something a little less warm from the woman. The mother was thin to the point of angularity, with a pretty, narrow face and long chestnut hair flowing down her back. She wore a loose cotton flowered shift, and her face and exposed arms were the colour of walnut, that overtanned look that was so unfashionable these days, when the dread phrase 'skin cancer' seemed to be on everyone's lips, all the more so now that the climate seemed to have turned so hot and wild. She looked like a hippie, he thought, one of the kids who populated Berkeley when he'd matriculated there at the end of the seventies. Like them, she looked a little lost.

  But not the daughter, who, in snatched glances, grinned curiously at him, full of life, bright blue eyes shining, fair hair, long like her mother's, dressed in jeans with a cheap cheesecloth top. Not much money there, he thought, and maybe that got to the mother, but it certainly didn't bother the kid.

  The girl went over to the buffet and picked up a huge circular pastry, like a snail shell, and started to unravel the end, tearing off chunks, stuffing it into her mouth, staring at him all the time.

  'They pay you to eat that stuff?' Lieberman asked finally.

  She gazed at him and Lieberman was aware of being judged, in that swift merciless way that he recognized as a particular childhood trait. Then the kid looked at her mother, saw the gap in her concentration, picked up another pastry off the table, put it on a plate, and brought it over to him.

  'You should try it, they're great,' she said. Lieberman heard the mother sigh — she didn't need this, or want it, he thought — and took a big bite. The kid was right. It was delicious.

  'These things have a name?' he said, staring at the girl, aware of the mother hovering behind him.

  'Ensaimadas. You only get them on Mallorca. They're made of flour and lard. That's pork fat. Do you say "lard" in America? I can't remember.'

  Lieberman put the ensaimada back on the plate and said, 'Lard will do, lard will do just fine. Sit down if you like. My name's Michael Lieberman.'

  The girl smiled, and her mother just looked, but with the kid in the lead they joined him.

  'Annie Sinclair,' she said. 'This is my mom. Mo.'

  Lieberman bent down, hooded his eyes, and whispered, 'Does she speak?'

  'When I get half the chance,' Mo Sinclair replied coldly, a trace of something that sounded faintly Scottish in her voice, then drew up a chair. 'Annie can talk the hind leg off a donkey. It sometimes makes me superfluous.'

  'Ah,' he said, and let his hands flutter in a small wave of surrender. No man in sight, except this failed one who'd picked them up at breakfast. It was so obvious. They had a compact closeness between them that didn't let much light through, even on a shining, golden day like this.

  'You work here?'

  Mo Sinclair smiled wanly, and he was aware of being examined for a second time, evaluated in a more clinical, icy way. 'I am tech support for the network. When your PC goes haywire, call for Mo. Most times I can fix it. It's a small talent but it gets me work.'

  'You two been here long?'

  'A few months. We were just travelling on the island and I saw an ad. It's just a temporary thing.'

  'And school?' he asked, looking at Annie, whose eyes went straight to the floor.

  'Like I said,' Mo Sinclair added quickly, a note of nervousness in her voice, 'we're just here temporarily. There's time for school later.'

  'Yeah,' he said. 'Sure.'

  And couldn't miss the way Annie darted a sly glance at him.

  'I wish I travelled more when I was a kid,' he said, nodding.

  'You do?'

  'Yeah. W
hen I was your age an outing to Woolworth's was a big thing. You don't know how lucky you are, Annie.'

  The mother was looking at him frankly and he felt vaguely offended. He was just trying to claw back a little of the situation, nothing more.

  'What do you do?' Annie asked.

  'Oh,' Lieberman replied in a flash, 'I'm a professor. Don't take that wrong — I mean, I'm not the pompous type. Some people paint. Some people fix computers. I professor. Professoring is a full-time thing with me.'

  Her eyebrows were halfway up her head.

  'But what kind of-'

  'Oh, I get it. Just being a professor isn't enough, huh? You want the grim details? Okay. Well, I used to design the things that turned sunlight into energy out in space. But that sort of fell out of fashion. Now I'm the sunspot guy. You know, those freckles on the face of the sun that everyone seems so excited about just now? If you want to know something about them — how big they are, what they're planning to do next — I'm the person to ask.'

  'Oh,' she said, looking a little disappointed.

  'I also launch my own personal space rockets and communicate with aliens in other galaxies. I'd love to tell you more about it, but then I'd have to kill you.'

  Annie Sinclair giggled and stuffed half a pastry in her mouth.

  'Bullshi-'

  'Annie!' Mo Sinclair interrupted quickly, stifling a laugh. 'Mind your manners.'

  Lieberman just grinned. Then looked at his watch. 'Well, it was cool meeting you but I have to transport out of this particular dimension. A meeting. Maybe someone's going to tell me why I'm here.'

  'You don't know?' Mo asked.

  'Nope. They send the contract, I do the job. Got any ideas?'

  She shrugged, in a half-hearted way that made him think there just had to be a little more to it than this.

  'Don't tell me,' he said. 'You just fix computers.'

  'That's right. I don't think it's a big secret, but there's no reason to clue us in.'

  'Right.'

  'But you can tell us later.'

  'I can?'

  'We can buy you lunch!' Annie broke in.

  'Oh, your mom's probably got things to do,' Lieberman said, offering Mo an out.

  'No… I'd — we'd like that,' the mother said. 'We'll show you around. Go into town. Pollensa's beautiful.'

  'I bet. But I have to run now. You know where this briefing room is?'

  'Outside. In the old stable block. That's where the offices are.'

  Lieberman smiled, felt a little uncomfortable with the weight of their stares, made his excuses, and went out the door.

  It was bright, the heat already building in the air. The layout of the site was pretty easy to grasp. The big mansion was used for accommodation. The work took place in a vast single-storey barn sprouting antennae on its roof, set a hundred yards from the house out toward the clifftop. It wasn't much of a walk but it stole the air from inside him, even this early in the morning. The weather was on some strange, vicious bent, a searing cycle of heat that seemed to be tightening on itself. The grass crackled underfoot, dead, dry, and yellow. The heat bore down from the cloudless sky. The only sound came from the waves roaring against rock below the cliffline just a couple of hundred yards ahead. He walked to the edge and leaned on the perimeter wall. A couple of helicopters were parked, silent, sleeping fifty yards away. Behind the mansion, a massive four-square shape of gleaming stone the colour of the dead grass, stood a line of bare mountains that stretched beyond his line of vision, harsh and inhospitable. At their foot was the bright blue Mediterranean running to a white line of foam where it met the impassable rock. When they said Mallorca, he thought he was coming to some holiday island. This felt more like being stranded in some reclusive millionaire's hideout in the Galapagos. It was hard to think of anywhere quite so isolated for a research facility. There was no sign of another house in any direction, nothing but the outline of a ruined castle on a headland a good mile away. Astronomy made its home in some odd, distant locations, he thought, but he'd never met one quite as strange as this.

  He walked into the big barn and was immediately grateful for the cool, dark interior. There were six people in the big open main room. It was full of PCs and wall charts, nice, classy wooden desks, high-backed executive chairs, and the buzz of people busying about their work. Three of the inhabitants were pushing papers around their desktops. The rest stared straight at him as he came through the door.

  'Michael,' Bennett said, smiling, and held out a hand. Simon Bennett was probably in his mid-fifties, stockily built with neatly cut grey hair, a round face, and half-moon glasses of the kind adopted by Oxbridge academics of a certain age. He peered at Lieberman with bright, curious eyes. Bennett was wearing grey slacks, a white shirt, and a red club tie. It seemed incongruous in the surroundings.

  The three paper-shufflers looked briefly at them, then left the room without saying anything, closing the door behind them as they went.

  'You got many people here, Simon?'

  'Thirty-two — not all on this single site, of course. We have another base in the mountains at Puig Roig. That's why we spend so much money on helicopters.'

  'And… um.'

  Bennett Looked puzzled for a moment. Academia didn't always teach you the niceties, Lieberman thought.

  'Oh. Good Lord. I do apologize. This is Ellis Bevan, our head of operations. And Irwin Schulz, who runs the computers here, and a lot more than that too. Ellis's work I can begin to understand. I do have to sign off the budget, after all. Irwin, I'm afraid, may as well be talking double Dutch as far as I am concerned but he is, I assure you, a genius.'

  Schulz blushed. He couldn't have been more than twenty- five or so, Lieberman guessed, a short, slightly overweight figure in a bulging T-shirt and jeans, and sporting round wire-rimmed glasses — all in all classic geek material. He held out a pudgy hand.

  'Hey,' he said, 'I'm just the average propeller head. Don't believe anything else. You worked at Lone Wolf?'

  'For a while.'

  'Some place. I was there a couple of weeks ago. You people ought to blow your trumpet some more. We got this woman on the case there, Jesus, so bright.'

  'Sara?'

  'You know her?'

  'I was married to her for a while.'

  'Oh.'

  Lieberman felt like kicking himself. Schulz was blushing all over his fleshy face.

  'Hey, that's no problem. We're still friends.'

  'Nice,' Schulz said. 'I never understood until recently how tiny the whole solar flare community really is. I guess you guys must know each other real well.'

  'If only by reputation.' Bennett smiled.

  Ellis Bevan peered at Lieberman and said, 'Good to meet you.'

  He was about thirty, Lieberman guessed, tall, straight, and muscular, with close-cropped hair and a slightly sour expression on his thin, sharp-featured face. Bevan had the word 'administration' written all over him, Lieberman thought, and cursed himself immediately. It was wrong to judge people so quickly, but Bevan had the look of someone you turned to when you wanted to do some firing, when the budget was overrunning, and when the plumbing didn't work.

  'Operations?' Lieberman said.

  'Yeah,' Bevan replied in a flat East Coast accent. 'Everything outside the academic part of the project is down to me. Telecommunications. Transportation. Finance.'

  'And a very good job he does too,' Bennett added. 'That's the last thing we want on our plates.'

  'I'm sure,' Lieberman said. 'So what exactly is on our plate?'

  The smile disappeared from Bennett's face. 'You mean you don't know?'

  'Hey. I just got a last-minute call from the Agency saying you people wanted some advice in my field and you were paying real money. That's as far as it got.'

  Bennett said nothing and Lieberman began to feel he'd lost a point. A real academic, someone who wasn't on the edge of burnout, would, at the very least, have asked.

  'I see,' Bennett said after a couple of ponderou
s moments. 'These are big issues, Michael, and I don't have the time to go into them all right now. This evening I want to run a full briefing session. Mainly for your benefit.'

  'I'll look forward to that,' Lieberman answered. 'You've got a lot of people here.'

  'Most of them are engineers,' Bevan said. 'We need a lot of support for the kind of telecommunications rig we're running. You don't need to bring every last academic to the experiment these days. We've got a virtual network running between here, Lone Wolf, and another base we have in Kyoto.'

  Thirty people to keep the network running? Lieberman still couldn't get a picture of it in his head.

  'But-'

  'Michael,' Bennett said with a thin smile on his face, 'we really are very busy. Can you leave your questions to this evening? I promise to talk a lot more then. And believe me, you'll find what I have to say… interesting. I just want you to know your role here is an important one.'

  'Crucial,' Schulz said. 'We really need it.'

  'I've followed your recent work,' Bennett continued. 'It's most encouraging. What we need from you is what you do best. An analysis of when and where the sunspot activity is shifting. We're trying to work out how much of the climatic and electromagnetic effects we're experiencing just now are due to the changes in the state of the solar disc. If you can give us an idea of where it's headed, we can tune the systems we have to make the most of the position.'

  Lieberman blinked, surprised to feel a certain wounded pride. 'You mean that's it?'

  Bennett nodded. 'Reports every hour. Irwin will set up a channel on the system later this afternoon. We're all pretty much on a war footing until the zenith has passed.'

  'Great. So I'm kind of the weatherman here and that's that.'

  'A very well-paid weatherman, Michael,' Bennett said quietly. 'And it's not exactly clerical work, trying to predict what happens on the face of a star ninety-three million miles away from us. Now, is it?'

  'No? You sure Ellis here doesn't want me sweeping up too?' As soon as the words escaped his lips, he wished he had them back. Why must you insist on being a pain in the ass? he chided himself.