Solstice Read online

  Twenty miles away, in the control tower of the military base of Bratsk, the two small green marks that Dragon 92 and Air Force One had painted on the ancient radar screen merged. Then, without warning, disappeared altogether.

  Five thousand feet above ground, something glimmered briefly, a vast, fiery, elongated shape, bright and gold against the sky.

  Like a halo.

  Like a parhelion.

  Like a sundog.

  CHAPTER 8

  Toast

  Pollensa, 1141 UTC

  'You want the good news or you want the bad?'

  "The bad,' Annie said immediately.

  'Okay, you asked for it,' Lieberman growled. 'You see the sun — no,' he interrupted himself so quickly, aghast he could have been that stupid, did his best to interpose his body between them sitting in the shade and the big yellow furnace burning into his back, 'no, I don't mean look at it. You must never do that. Never. Later, with my little toy here, I'll show you how you can look at the sun. Until I do that, don't even think about it. You understand why? It's too hot and it's so bright.'

  'All right,' Annie said, a little disappointed that Lieberman had a serious side to him too.

  'Okay, so… the bad news is,' he said, staring at the screen of the computer to remind him how this was supposed to go, 'the sun is a star.'

  He watched the girl's hand go straight up and thought: This could take a long time.

  'Stars come out at night,' Annie said. 'Everybody knows that.'

  'Annie,' Mo Sinclair interrupted, smiling at him with, he recognized, the sort of conspiratorial self-indulgence you got in adults. 'Michael here is a professor.'

  Lieberman wasn't going to let this pass.

  'Hey! No problem, Annie. You got a point there. Stars don't come out at night, of course. They're always right there. It's just that the sky's so bright — or they're so dull, whichever way you want to look at it — that we don't see them. The point is the sun is a star too and we get to see that during the day. Now, why do you think that is?'

  Two hands went up straightaway (so the grown-up wanted to play this game too; he could handle that). Lieberman picked Mo's.

  'It's bigger and brighter than the rest,' she said, her smile curling down at the corners of her mouth as if to say: Two can play this game.

  'Yeah? That could be one explanation. Not the right one, but it could have been. Maybe when you were nine years old you believed that.'

  'Me.' Annie was scratching at the sky with her hand as if she wanted to hook her hand into the bright blue firmament.

  'Okay?'

  'It's closer than the rest.'

  All the way there in under a minute and she didn't look as if it made her sweat. Mo smiled. Not bad. He could think of a couple of schools back home where it might take you half a day to get half that far with a bunch of fifteen-year-olds.

  'It's closer than the rest. And one day that will be a bad thing. You see, stars are just like us. They grow. They change over time. Right now the sun is a nice, happy young little star — little and young in star terms, of course, not ours. But one day, when it gets older, it will wake up and decide to do what Main Sequence folk like it have to do, and that's transform. Like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. One day it will run out of fuel, all the stuff it burns to be a star, and then it will start to change into what stars grow up to be, which is what we call red giants.'

  'I've heard of those,' Annie said.

  'Great. So you know what happens then?'

  She shook her head. Mo was silent. And he had them, he knew. They'd passed the point of even guessing the answer, were just itching to get on with the tale.

  'What happens is the whole thing changes. What we think of as the core, the stuff at its heart, collapses right down into itself, and all the stuff on the outside, what we see in the sky, does the opposite, just races out, goes all kind of red and vaporous, gets really hot, and ends up being this new kind of star, this red giant thing, and that's going to be huge. So big it will be right here, right where we're standing now. On this very spot. Everywhere else on the world too. And you can guess what's going to happen to anything in its way.'

  There was a pause while they took this in.

  'Toast!' Annie said happily.

  'Toast,' Lieberman replied.

  'Cool!'

  Mo watched all this, and, right out of the blue, he realized what it was she liked. Someone was giving Annie some attention, someone other than her mother. And why that should be unusual was a question that could have distracted his attention there and then, even with the narrative of this celestial dance starting to run inside his head.

  'So what's the good news?' Mo asked.

  'Hey. The good news is… we're all dead anyway! I'm talking a hundred million years away now. Why worry?'

  'We could invent the secret of immortality,' Annie said slowly, stretching each word out one by one. 'Then there'd be a problem.'

  'Sure. I thought of that. You know, if we get clever — or dumb — enough to invent the secret of everlasting life, don't you think someone might also figure out a way to hightail it out of here? Find a star in another galaxy that's more hospitable?'

  'So if the sun is not going to be a worry for a while,' asked Mo, 'why are we here?'

  'I'm here because I got paid,' Lieberman said quickly, realizing straight away that this was a question he maybe ought to have asked himself more rigorously. 'Hey, we all got to eat. And I already told you, if I had any secrets to share they'd be yours. But if you want the long answer, well, sometimes you have to get off your butt and go observe things to learn about them. And when you're a scientist — '

  'A professor!' said Annie.

  'Yeah… yeah!'

  He was enjoying the show too.

  'When you're a professor, you just have to be ready to up and go when the call comes through. Kind of like Superman, I guess.'

  A single young face stared at him in silence, eyebrows arching toward the sky, and Lieberman just didn't even dare look at Mo, just knew her shoulders were shaking up and down and couldn't work out whether this was good or bad.

  'Don't believe me, huh?'

  A man had his pride. These were, as far as he could tell, a nice pair. They didn't believe in kicking a man when he was down, but that didn't put them past nudging him with their toes a little when the occasion arose. It gave you the right to respond.

  'Take a look at this.'

  Then he beckoned them into the light, into the scorching, dry brightness of the day, so hot it burned your skin the moment you stepped into it, and positioned them around the telescope, which was pointing straight up into the blazing yellow eye of the sun.

  The projector screen, with its open white panel fixed to the bottom end of the scope, offered an image of the solar disc that wouldn't be harmful to look at. Of all the projections Lieberman had set up for his 'students', this one was, as he might have expected, the most spectacular of all.

  The freckles on the solar orb were huge now, the biggest he'd ever seen. They were like living amorphous blotches on the burning yellow skin, dark and ugly, and so big they covered maybe a third of the entire surface. What he and Mo and Annie were observing was not the usual single spots, but ones that ran into each other, like they were mating, the dark umbras spawning many lighter penumbras until the picture looked like a blown-up slide under a microscope, the image of some deadly slumbering spore waiting to come alive.

  The threesome were quiet; he could feel the sudden chill that ran between Annie and her mother. Without speaking they'd moved closer to each other. He chided himself for doing it this way, wished he'd devised a way to break it to them more gently.

  Then, as they watched, one of the spots shifted. The umbra, a region of burning gas a hundred thousand miles or so across, moved. Merged with some other cell-like structure, sat together with it, feeling content, feeling whole, mated, and then multiplied again.

  Someone gasped and he thought it just might have been Mo
, nice, pained, distant Mo, whose life he'd just invaded, whose world he'd just thrown open with this simple astronomy lesson.

  He tried to smile again, said, 'Hey! This is just fireworks. Nothing to worry about. Trust me.'

  But it was futile. Somehow the joy had gone out of the day, and left nothing in its place but the blinding light that beat down on them from the sky, beat down with a relentless, burning ferocity that seared through the skin, seared right into the heart and touched it with the fiery furnace of creation.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Demonstration

  Pollensa, 1201 UTC

  'Are they alive?'

  Annie looked scared.

  'No, no, no, no…'

  Lieberman liked talking to kids now and again, but sometimes the sheer, naive dumbness got to him.

  He pointed to the yellow orb on the scope projector screen, trying to make Annie and Mo feel familiar with it, see it for what it was: just an image from outer space, nothing more, nothing less.

  'This isn't magic. All you're looking at here is something like a giant light bulb. Lots and lots of burning gases a real long way away. This is a big thing, and it's mysterious too, for sure. But that's only because we don't understand it that well right now. You know what they used to think in ancient times? All sorts of stuff. About how this was a god or something, flying across the sky in his chariot. Hey, people used to think the earth was the centre of the universe, and the sun travelled around us, until a few centuries ago. But you don't believe that, do you?'

  The girl shook her head.

  'Why not?'

  'Because teachers tell us it isn't true?'

  'Because we all know it isn't true,' Mo intervened. 'It's in books. You're a little young for them now, but later you'll see.'

  'When I get to school,' Annie said a little sourly.

  'I'm sure that will happen, Annie,' Lieberman said. 'Once you and your mom are settled. And you're a bright kid. You won't have any problems picking these things up.'

  Mo smiled at him, some new warmth there, melting a little.

  'What Michael is saying is that what seems mysterious one moment isn't a little later, when we understand it more.'

  'Which is science,' Lieberman added. 'Discovering. You know that word?'

  Annie nodded her head.

  'Course you do. But it's easy to forget what it really means. It's like ticking off something on a list. Once you're sure. And what we're sure of already is that these sunspots are just natural things. Like freckles or something, except in the sun's case they're huge freckles, maybe as big as sixty thousand miles across or more — that is, eight times the diameter of the earth…'

  And actually, he thought, this particular group was bigger, bigger than any he'd ever seen.

  '… and freckles that change all the time. Which is where I come in. I didn't always do this, you understand. Once, a while back, I messed around with engineering, and other tricks with the sun, though that's a story for another time. Right now I try to figure out which way the freckles are going to go, whether they're getting bigger, whether they might be getting smaller.'

  'Do they change an awful lot?' Annie asked.

  'You bet,' he said, and he was on home territory now, heading straight for the finish line. 'They come and go, a little like the tide. Not twice a day, like the sea does, but once every eleven years or so.'

  'Is that important?' Annie asked.

  'Depends what you mean by important.'

  'I mean, does it matter? To us?'

  'Well, the sun is a very long way away. Ninety-three million miles, to be exact. Seems crazy to think something that far away could be important.'

  The girl grinned at him and he wanted to laugh: She really wasn't going to let go.

  'You're going to say "but". I always know when grown-ups are going to say "but".'

  'Smart kid,' said Lieberman, and she was, it was so clear. 'But…'

  He kicked at the gravel with his toe and wondered how you crammed all this into a few minutes of idle conversation.

  'But things sometimes do affect each other in ways you'd never guess. By now we know sunspots affect all sorts of things. Some are obvious, like the big spurts of flame that emanate from the sun, called solar flares. Others are just plain invisible, like magnetism and X-rays, that come shooting through space. Then there's the weather. You cut open a tree that's a couple of hundred years old and you can see that eleven-year sunspot cycle in the rings inside. When the cycle hits a peak, the weather gets warmer, everywhere, and if you get rain too, which we haven't recently, things grow. You can see it inside the trunk. When the cycles were pretty much dead, which was what happened back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a while — don't ask me why — the world got colder. Europe had some of its coldest winters anyone had ever known.'

  Mo was the one with the question now.

  'Is that why the weather has been so hot these last few years? I thought that was supposed to be global warming.'

  'Hey' — he threw up his hands — 'we're all making this up as we go along. Some of it is global warming, for sure. No one disputes that these days, unless they get bribed by the oil companies. But the climate change seems to be equally linked to sunspots. There's no single reason behind it, just a cocktail of factors.'

  'And what we're in now is the eleventh year of the cycle?'

  That was a tricky one, and Lieberman seriously wondered, for a moment, whether to try to bluff his way through.

  'No,' he said, opting for honesty. 'We're in the ninth. All things being equal, we shouldn't be seeing sunspots Like this for a good two years. Something happened, late in 1995, and from that point on we started to see some upsurge in the cycle, real steady, just like you'd expect, only early. And really marked too, recently, as if it was all coming to a head.'

  'I read about that,' Mo said. 'And all the awful predictions. Are they true?'

  'I do astronomy, not astrology. Yeah, it's true that the peak of a solar storm has an effect on the earth. A cycle hot spot back in the seventies knocked out entire power grids across the whole of Canada. It messes with telecommunications systems too, and we all know how much we rely on those. I guess we can expect some short-term effects but nothing apocalyptic, not unless you think losing TV reception for a couple of hours is a matter of life and death.'

  'Oh.'

  He couldn't shake the idea that somehow she was frightened by all this but not willing to admit to it.

  'A line of thinking some people are following — and Simon Bennett is your man for this one — is that one factor is tidal. By that I mean that the activity on the surface of the sun depends, to some extent, on the position of the planets to one another. We know that the tides on earth are due mainly to the pull of the moon as it spins around us. Well, the larger planets in our system exert an even bigger force. It makes theoretical sense to think we feel something from them too.'

  He wasn't really talking for them now, he was talking it out to himself. Mo understood this and encouraged him to continue.

  'You're ahead of us?' she asked.

  'Yeah?' Lieberman wasn't even thinking of them. He was out in the burning heat and not even noticing it, walking around the courtyard, picking up some pine cones that had fallen from the trees, then placing them carefully on the gravel.

  'See, you've got to understand what the solstice is.'

  He went over to the perimeter wall overlooking the town, grabbed a stray rock, put it on the ground in front of them. Then he held one of the pine cones above his head.

  'Imagine the cone is a ball like the earth and the top part of it is the northern hemisphere. Where we are now. We move around the sun, of course, so what I'm showing you is bad science. But it's how we see it from the ground. Each day the sun sweeps across our horizon and when it's there, we've got daylight; when it's on the other side of the earth, we've got night. But the earth isn't really sitting bolt upright like that. It's declined. And that means the height of the sun changes
during the year. During the summer solstice it is, at midday, as high in the sky as it ever gets. So we get more sunshine, more daylight, than at any other time of the year, not because we're closer but because we see more of it. Equally, during the winter solstice the same thing happens but for the southern hemisphere. Which is why our winter is their summer. You with me?'

  They nodded. They always nodded in these situations, but he was pretty happy with it. He'd explained it more poorly in the past.

  'Now, the point is that maybe the heightened effect of spots and flares and all the rest at the solstice isn't just due to the fact that the sun is brighter in the sky and around longer than usual. Maybe there's some tidal effect on us too, messing us about with gravitational pull. And all this accentuates what happens with the weather, and anything else that gets shifted around by spot activity as well.'

  'Why would that explain how the cycle has shortened from eleven to nine years?' Mo asked. 'These are annual events.'

  'Yeah,' he said, and was so engrossed in himself, so buried in the pictures inside his head, that he didn't even realize until later how smart a question it was.

  "The point is that if these guys are right, it's not just the tidal influence from the sun we've got to take into account. It's everything. Every other major hunk of rock in the universe.'

  She was shaking her head. She wasn't smiling any more.

  'I still don't see it. That's always been the case.'

  'Up to a point.'

  He reached down for the computer, picked it up, took it over to them, let them look at the bright colour screen, and pulled out the sequence, one he was so familiar with, one he'd played over and over again until he didn't need to see it any more, it lived inside his head.

  'Everything moves in the universe, everything is always orbiting everything else, okay? But we know how they move. This is all just mathematics — complex mathematics, for sure, but not beyond us. With this little machine I can show you how the stars looked in Bethlehem on the night Jesus was born. I can fly you past the surface of Mars and look back to see what the earth and our moon are like from there, today, five hundred years from now. It doesn't matter. These things are just some big clockwork mechanism in the sky and they'll stay like that until the big red giant comes along and gobbles them all up.'