Creation node, p.27
Creation Node, page 27
All eyes turned to Feathers. Salma gripped the tip of one bony wing-hand tight. Feathers stayed placid, amid all this strangeness.
‘It’s OK,’ Hild said. ‘She’s used to scrutiny. Salma keeps her calm.’
President Mason nodded. ‘You’re doing a fine job, Salma. It won’t be forgotten. I mean it. Somebody had to be the first human ever to befriend an alien, and it turned out to be you, and you did it very well. You’ll go down in history.’
Salma had never thought of that. And she wasn’t sure she liked it. She had the sudden sense of billions, trillions of people watching every move she made, now and in the future. She wished she could hide away, just her and Feathers …
Vasta coughed, an artificial sound. ‘Madam President, perhaps we can hand out the medals later, when we’ve fixed the problem of the Earth being roasted by quasar fire?’
Mason smiled. ‘Advise on, Science Adviser.’
‘To answer your question, we don’t believe Feathers has any, umm, control, over the mechanisms in which we seem to be enmeshed here. Or anything to do directly with the quasar, come to that. Our best guess – and here I endorse the preliminary conclusions of the Shadow crew, who have been here a lot longer than I have – is that she herself, her presence, is all part of the message. She’s not a courier in that sense. She embodies information – or paradoxes. You see, the sheer unlikelihood of her nature – her likeness to a humanoid form – implies we are dealing with an origin in some other realm, another cosmos, which, compared to ours, must be either very old, or very large, or both … Large or old enough for such coincidences to occur. She herself is a message transmitted without words.’
‘So you theorise,’ Mason said.
Vasta shrugged. ‘So we theorise. It’s all we can do without more data.’
‘But we must prioritise. Back to the quasar. What do we know about the damn thing?’
Vasta and Hild shared a look, Salma saw.
Then Vasta, the senior figure, sat back. ‘You’ve been on the spot, Hild, you and your crew …’ She smiled. ‘It’s your quasar. You tell us about it.’
Hild nodded. ‘OK. But, remember, Conservers don’t own anything. Not even intellectual property. We share it all …’
‘I wish you weren’t sharing that damn thing,’ Mason said.
Hild shrugged. ‘Also we aren’t specialists on stellar phenomena. We came out here thinking we were going to be exploring a rogue planet. We weren’t properly equipped for this—’
‘But you’ve been on the spot.’
‘True. We did our best. And naturally, from the beginning we’ve observed, recorded, speculated. It’s difficult to be definitive about any aspect of this phenomenon. Partly because what we see doesn’t quite fit the theories we have developed from observing other quasars, features in other galaxies …
‘We think that quasars are basically by-products of black holes – supermassive black holes, in the hearts of galaxies. We’re talking millions of solar masses. Such things have strong gravitational fields, magnetic fields. And if such a hole spins, it drags a mass of galaxy-centre gas around with it. This is thrown outwards by centrifugal force, but the hole’s magnetic field shapes the flow, so that you get plumes of material coming out of the rotation poles of the black hole – the north and south magnetic poles – along with immense lodes of electromagnetic energy. And it is a hugely energetic event; typically you have the hole consuming the mass-energy of several stars per year to fuel it.’
‘Hmm,’ Mason said. ‘And you think this is the mechanism we’re seeing now at the heart of our galaxy?’
‘Well—’
Mason pressed, ‘Why should it start up now? And also, you said these … plumes … of energy get shot out from the hole’s rotation poles, because that’s how the magnetic field shapes the flow. But doesn’t the central black hole spin in the same plane as the Galaxy itself? So shouldn’t these beams be firing perpendicular to the plane of the Galaxy, up and out, not along a radius – not straight for us, in the Galaxy’s plane? As this one is?’
Vasta said, ‘All good points, Madam President. We can only describe a typical quasar. This evidently is something like a quasar, but isn’t a natural quasar. We think this is a kind of – engine – a technology based on the manipulation of a quasar-like phenomenon. And because this instance doesn’t fit any known pattern, it’s difficult to make predictions about its future behaviour.’
Mason grunted. ‘Try anyhow.’
Salma thought Mason was formidable. Totally in command of the room. And this was just a virtual copy of the real person, she reflected.
Vasta, a tough person herself, hesitated before replying.
Hild cut in, ‘Well, what we do know is that its luminosity has grown, steadily – some believe exponentially – over the last eleven years, since its first detection.’
‘Which was exactly when you opened the box on Planet Nine,’ Mason said.
‘Correct,’ Vasta said. She consulted a handheld screen. ‘And it’s still growing. It’s actually following the theoretical models we drew up in the beginning, pretty well. How much luminosity – right now it’s delivering, across the Solar System, an extra half a per cent of the Sun’s output, as it’s received at Earth. So Earth is getting half a per cent more daily energy input than before. And the other planets are being hit also, of course.
‘We learned all about the stability of Earth’s natural systems, or the lack of it, during the climate collapse years, didn’t we? The climate is a complex mess of flows of mass and energy and feedback effects … And so, just with that small nudge of that half of one per cent after a decade, the consequences – well, I guess we’ve all seen the news.’
Mason’s expression was grim. ‘As you implied, just as the climate is fragile, human society is still fragile. The memories are too fresh, the history too raw. Now people, nations, are reluctantly – but too readily in some cases – preparing for a return to the days of shortage and drought, famine, even war … As one example – Elizabeth will know this well – take the latest development in Africa: the Sahel is migrating south again, significantly.’ She glanced at Salma. ‘I imagine you know little of this. That’s the boundary between the Sahara desert to the north and the savannah to the south, where the people and the animals are … Millions on the move, again. Just as our grandparents witnessed.’
Doria Bohm spoke up forcefully.
‘This isn’t just about Earth, you know. The Moon too. Every planet, every asteroid and moon, every last rock floating around this Solar System will be affected by this heating. Including the Moon and its colonies.’
‘Even the Sun, I suppose,’ Vasta said, musing. ‘If this goes on. The thermodynamic balance of the Sun could be disturbed.’
Mason frowned. ‘What would be the consequences of that?’
‘I’m sure somebody’s modelled it. If the Sun’s heat flow is perturbed, I suppose you could be looking at mass eruptions, magnetic storms—’
‘Saturn,’ Caspar said, forcefully. ‘Think about that. Where I used to work, where we rebuilt the Cronus. Ten times as far as the Earth is from the Sun, so it only receives one per cent of the luminosity per unit area that Earth gets in sunlight. So if you increase that—’
‘Correct,’ Hild said. ‘The proportionate effects differ. For the Saturn system, that’s a fifty per cent increase in Saturn’s natural energy input already, right there.’ She thought. ‘The Saturn system is itself a big place. I can’t imagine that such a small amount of energy in relative terms could do that much harm in the short term. The rings, though, are nothing but ice fragments. This quasar could make a mess of that, and soon.’
President Mason was frowning. ‘A gruesome little spectacle in the sky, then, as we start to suffer down on Earth. How long is this going to last? That’s the single most significant question I get asked. If it’s short term, it’s the climate crash again – ghastly, but finite in space and time, in resources, and we could put ourselves back together once again. More or less. If longer – what? We go the way of the dinosaurs?’
Vasta spread her hands. ‘The truth is, we don’t know. We can barely make a sensible guess—’
‘Guess away.’
Vasta’s smile was bleak. ‘Is an avatar able to accept my resignation?’
‘Sure, but my principal will just rescind it.’
‘OK.’ She glanced around at the others. ‘Help me, here. We have enough data now to know that the quasar is increasing in intensity, in terms of energy delivered to the Solar System. As an extreme case, suppose the quasar illumination grew to match the luminosity of the Sun? At Earth’s orbit, I mean. We might get there in a few thousand years. Or it might be faster. Most analysts think the growth is exponential, not linear. Perhaps fourteen hundred years—’
Mason cut in, ‘And the consequences? Of a doubling of the sunlight?’
Vasta held up her hand. ‘The warmth of the Sun you feel on your palm, your face – doubling that mightn’t seem so much, but it would be enough to finish us off.
‘We actually have a test case. Venus already gets about twice Earth’s insolation, because it’s that much closer to the Sun. That is, the solar energy that hits the cloud tops per square metre is twice what Earth gets. And look at the result. No water to speak of. Clouds of acid and cardon dioxide, covering a rocky landscape so arid and hot it glows in the dark …’
A brief silence.
‘OK,’ Mason said, abruptly. ‘That sounds like a useful cue for a break.’
And Salma, for one, was relieved to be released.
31
People stood to get drinks and food, or just to stretch their legs. And there were side conversations. Vasta, Smith, Hild huddled over a console, murmuring about heat flows and ‘illuminated interstellar sectors’ …
Salma got some water for herself and Feathers – and seedcake for Feathers alone, one of Meriel’s many minor biological miracles, created over the years.
Feathers herself wasn’t scared, exactly, Salma knew, just wary. If something alarmed her she would sit still, preferably in the shadows or on the periphery of a group but not outside it, as if seeking not to be seen, and with somewhere to escape to if she needed it. Meriel said it was the typical behaviour of a creature in the middle of a food chain, adapted to being both predator and prey. Another small clue to Feathers’ background.
The avatar of the President sat silent and still during the break. Salma wondered if she, it, were even activated. How strange, Salma thought, to have the most significant human being on all the planets represented this way, and shut down, an outsider to the conversations. But it was probably good for those present to be able to relax a little without that scrutiny.
At last, after about thirty minutes, the avatar leaned forward in her unreal chair, froze again.
That was evidently enough of a command to draw the group together again. People started to drift back into their places, some carrying drinks, others portable data consoles over which arguments continued.
Emmanuel Caspar came over to Salma with his drink. He asked softly, ‘So what do you think of the President? I mean, I’m a mere captain of an interplanetary liner – and I ran a tiny colony at Saturn. That was tough enough. This is what I’d call command. And, listen, do you think Feathers is OK with all this talk-talk? I know she can’t understand a word – can she? If she’s distressed in any way, you don’t have to leave; I could get Fabio to come take her away, look after her. They get on well, don’t they?’
‘Sure.’ Salma thought it over. ‘It’s a kind offer. Thoughtful. Yes, I know Fabio is good with her. But—’
‘What?’
She looked around at the group. ‘This is such a big meeting. The President of Earth! Or her avatar anyhow. And it’s about the strange situation that brought Feathers here in the first place. I have this feeling that she ought to be here – even if she doesn’t follow any of it. In fact she could clearly never understand any of this.’
He nodded. Quite a situation, isn’t it? But, yes, I guess you’re right, she should be here if only for what she stands for …’
‘I think we’ve come to believe that that’s why she was sent here. Because she is a walking, living symbol of something else. She stands for something bigger. And what we have to do is to work out what that is …’
Hild coughed, politely.
They saw they were the last standing. They exchanged hasty smiles, joined the circle, and took their seats facing the virtual President.
Who suddenly seemed to spring to life again, as if a switch had been thrown.
‘OK,’ Mason began. ‘I think we’re nearly done for now.’
‘Not a long meeting,’ Salma whispered to Caspar.
‘Presidents are busy people. Even their avatars are busy, I guess …’
Mason was saying, ‘but I do still have some specific questions.
‘I would like you to confirm something for me. Right at the beginning of all this, eleven years ago – when this quasar first lit up – the warming effects on the Earth were immediately apparent. But what about the question of how long we will be in the eye of this heat storm – how long before we might be free of it? I was shown some numbers back then, at the beginning. I’d like to know if the logic behind that prediction has changed, or not.’
Vasta took the lead. ‘OK, Madam President. You want to know how long the Earth, and the wider Solar System, might be threatened by this phenomenon, this – custom quasar.’
Mason smiled. ‘The Custom Quasar. You can use that as the title of your book some day.’
‘Let’s hope there is such a day. But in the meantime – all we have is order of magnitude arguments, I’m afraid. Still.
‘So, look, we can take the Earth’s insolation, the sunlight energy it receives, as a starting point. A basis for scaling. And we know the quasar intensity is increasing, still. So suppose the ultimate purpose of the quasar is indeed to deliver an extra amount of energy to Earth equivalent to that solar energy density, per unit area. At least that’s an order of magnitude to play with.’
Mason shrugged. ‘Like Venus again? That seems a reasonable benchmark – and lethal enough, from what you say.’
‘OK. But we know that the quasar beam doesn’t just target Earth. That’s probably impossible, given the smallness of the target, the distance. So we are passing through the spot, a wider beam.
‘Now, the energy flow has been measured, by spacecraft across the Solar System – out to here, the most remote crewed station, and further by the robot probes. And it appears to have the same energy density right across the Solar System. No fall-off. Presumably the total spot is much wider still. How much wider is the question. And what does it take to produce that much energy, projected right out here, far from the Galaxy’s centre?’
She looked down at her console. ‘So, look – the most powerful quasar we know of – in nature that is, before the Milky Way quasar showed up – produces as much energy as you could get from extracting the mass-energy of the Moon, every second. Suppose the core quasar is as energetic as that.’
She got some gasps at that, but smiled and pushed on.
‘Now, with all that energy output pouring out towards the Solar System – and if the, the spotlight beam spreads out so far that it’s down to Earth-sunlight intensity across that whole range … well, you find that the area saturated with such energy, given such a source, is somewhere around seventy light-years in radius. Which is, what, nearly twenty times further than the nearest star? If we’re somewhere near the centre of the beam, it should in fact be covering a few thousand other stars and stellar systems in our neighbourhood. That may sound a lot but it’s actually a pretty tight beam, given that it crosses a galactic radius.’
Mason said, ‘So many stars … I know this is all guesswork, but doesn’t it seem kind of hubristic that all this energy, all those star systems, are being perturbed just because of us? … And how do we know it is us who’s the target? Why just us?’
This time Salma spoke up, sitting with Feathers. ‘But we do know it is just because of us. Don’t we? We have Feathers. It started when we opened the box …’
Mason nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
Vasta said, ‘So, the question of how long we might have this quasar light inflicted on us? The Sun orbits the Galaxy core – the stars swim around the centre like shoals of fish, as I read once … So we are swimming through the quasar spot. That’s a big spot, and, given the Sun’s rate of motion, if we have to sail across the whole of the beam we won’t get out for two hundred thousand years. Give or take.’
Mason nodded. ‘The same estimates as a decade ago, when all this started. So you’ve only firmed up the case. I suppose there’s a still worse possibility – that the beam might be redirected to follow the Sun as it moves across the background.’
Vasta shrugged. ‘Perhaps. That could be. I suppose I’m conditioned to think in terms of natural phenomena, not a directed – weapon. But that’s clearly not impossible. They would know the Sun’s path … If so there’s not necessarily any upper boundary on how long we might suffer this. But hundreds of thousands of years is bad enough.’
‘All right. So that’s far longer than is needed to reach the Venus state you described – twice the intensity in a thousand years or more, you said?
‘Next question – what happens before that? Given it’s a gradually increasing heat intensity, can you give me more milestones?’
Vasta consulted a screen. ‘In fact we have some data, or at least projections, to build on from other studies. Most of you probably know about this – and you may well have seen this before, Madam President. We know that the Sun was gradually warming already – I mean, even before the quasar – through its own internal evolution, the depletion of its core fuel … If we wait long enough, the Earth will be scorched anyhow, quasar or not.
‘But this increasing quasar input will do huge damage much faster than that.’ She looked again at the screen on her lap. ‘Venus-Earth is perhaps thirteen centuries away. But, after just a hundred years, the total insolation hitting Earth – solar and quasar – will be up by five per cent on today’s figure. In nature, because of the Sun’s own slowly increasing heating – its natural heating – we’d have reached that threshold anyhow – but not until five hundred million years in the future. And we’ll get consequences surely similar to the projections we have for that far date.
