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doesn t make sense, does it? Can gods be insane?
Siobhan glanced out at the gaunt shadows of the Dome.  Per-
haps there s a logic, even in all this destruction.
 Do you believe that?
Siobhan grinned.  Even if I did, I d reject it. The hell with
them.
Bisesa answered with a fierce grin of her own.  Yes, she said.
 The hell with them.
29: Impact
The rogue planet flew out of the sky s equator.
While light flashed from Altair to Sol in sixteen years, the wan-
dering planet had taken a millennium to complete its interstellar
journey. Even so it approached the sun at some five thousand kilo-
meters per second, many times the sun s own escape velocity: it was
the fastest major object ever to have crossed the solar system. As it
fell toward the sun s warmth, the Jovian s atmosphere was battered
by immense storms, and trillions of tonnes of air were stripped away,
to trail behind the falling world like the tail of an immense comet.
On Earth, it was the year 4 b.c.
If the rogue had come in the twenty-first century, humanity s
Spaceguard program would have spotted it. Spaceguard had its ori-
gins in a twentieth-century NASA program designed to survey all
the major comets and asteroids following orbits that might bring
them into a collision with the Earth. The organization s scientists
had debated many ways to deflect an incoming threat, including
solar sails or nuclear weapons. But while such methods might have
worked on a flying-mountain asteroid, there would have been noth-
ing to be done about a mass this size.
In 4 b.c., of course, there was no Spaceguard. The ancient
world had known lenses since the great days of the Greeks, but it
had not yet occurred to anybody to put two of them together into a
S U N S T O R M " 2 0 1
telescope. But there were those who watched the sky, for in its in-
tricate weavings of light they thought they glimpsed the thoughts
of God.
In April of that year, across Europe, North Africa, and the
Middle East, a great new light approached the sun. To the as-
trologers and astronomers, who knew every naked-eye object in
the sky far better than most of their descendants of the twenty-first
century, the Jovian was a glaring anomaly, and a source of fascina-
tion and fear.
Three scholars in particular watched it in awe. They called
themselves magi, or magoi, which means  astrologers  stargazers.
And in the Jovian s final days, as it neared the sun and became a
morning star of ever more brilliant beauty, they followed it.
The planet battered its way through the sun s wispy outer atmo-
sphere, the corona. Now the star itself lay before it, unprotected.
The Jovian was a planet a fifth the diameter of the sun itself.
Even at such speeds, a collision between two such immense bodies
was stately. It took a full minute for the whole planet to sink into
the body of the star.
In normal times the sun s surface is a delicate tapestry of gran-
ules, the upper surfaces of huge convection cells with roots in the
sun s deep interior. When the Jovian hit, that complex hierarchical
structure was disturbed, as if a baseball had been thrown into a pan
of boiling water. Immense waves washed away from the point of
impact and rolled around the curvature of the star.
Meanwhile the planet itself was immersed in a bath of intense
heat. Through direct collisions between the sun s plasma and the
planet s atmosphere, the sun s energy poured into this outrageous
invader. In response, the planet desperately tried to shed heat by
losing its own substance. The upper layers of its air, mostly hydro-
gen and helium, were soon stripped off, exposing the inner layers,
exotic high-pressure liquid and solid forms of hydrogen, which in
turn boiled away. It was exactly as Apollo capsules had once entered
Earth s atmosphere behind ablative shields, allowing bits of the dis-
integrating spacecraft to carry away the heat of friction. For the
2 0 2 " C L A R K E & B A X T E R
Jovian the strategy worked for a while. The planet had entered the
sun with the mass of fifteen Jupiters, and had the capacity to soak
up a lot of heat before it was done.
Deeper and deeper the Jovian sank, through the sun s roiling
convective layer, and then into the denser, static radiative layer be-
neath. It was like a driving fist, and it left behind a tunnel drilled
brutally through the sun s strata, a flaw that would take millennia
to heal.
By the time the Jovian reached the edge of the sun s fusing core,
it was reduced to a knot of its densest, hardest stuff and yet it still [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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