Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke Read Free Book Online

These days family habits had changed; most groceries were remote-ordered and delivered. But days after June 9 the transport and distribution services were still clogged up, and everybody had had to return to the stores in person to go through the rituals of carts and checkouts.
    This was a new experience to Linda, and she was complaining briskly. “You wouldn’t believe the queues. They actually have bouncers on the meat counters. The checkout registers are operating now, so that’s a blessing; no more hand-calculated bills. But a lot of people still won’t swipe through.” A sight you often saw since June 9 was the telltale forearm scar of somebody who’d had to have her implanted ident chip replaced, the original having been wiped and fried by the solar frenzy of that day.
    “Still no bottled water,” Bisesa said.
    “Not yet, no,” Linda said. She reflexively turned on the taps at the kitchen sink, to no effect. The solar storm had induced corrosive currents in London’s hundreds of kilometers of aging pipe work. So even when they got the pumps working, no water could be delivered to many parts of the city until the engineers and their smart little mole-shaped robots had fixed up the network once more. Linda sighed. “Looks like it’ll be the standpipe again.”
    Right now a corner of the softwall was showing an aerial view of London, overlaid by an outline map of the continuing power-outs, with a few sparks that marked riots, lootings, and other instances of disorder. Blue asterisks showed the positions of standpipes, most of them along the banks of the Thames. Bisesa found this evidence of the resilience of the old city oddly moving. Long before the Romans came to found London in the first place, Celts had fished the Thames in their wicker boats, and now in this twenty-first-century crisis Londoners were drawn back to their river once again.
    Linda looked at her callused palms. “You know, Bis, I can manage the shopping. But I could sure do with some help with the water.”
    “No,” Bisesa said immediately. Then, more considered, she shook her head. “I’m sorry.” Reflexively she glanced across at Myra, who was engrossed once more in the endlessly elaborating luridness of her softwall soap. “I’m not ready to go out yet.”
    Linda, still packing food away, said in a deliberately casual tone, “I’ve been asking Aristotle for advice.”
    “About what?”
    “Agoraphobia. It’s more common than you’d think. I mean, how would you
know
if somebody was a prisoner in her home? You’d never meet her! But there are treatments. Support groups—”
    “Lin, I appreciate your concern. But I’m not agoraphobic. And I’m not crazy.”
    “Then what—”
    Bisesa said lamely, “I just need more time.”
    “I’m here if you need me.”
    “I know . . .”
    Bisesa returned to her vigil with Myra, and the softwall.
             
    Maybe she wasn’t crazy. But she couldn’t explain to Linda any of her strange circumstances.
    She couldn’t explain how she had been on patrol with her Army unit on its peacekeeping duties in Afghanistan, how she had suddenly found herself hurled beyond the walls of space and time, how she had learned to construct a new life for herself on a strange patchwork other-Earth they had called Mir—and how she had somehow been brought home, through a kaleidoscope of even stranger visions.
    And she couldn’t explain to her cousin the strangest detail of all: how she had been serving in Afghanistan on June 8, 2037, but had found herself here in London the very next day, June 9, the day of the storm—but in her memories, more than
five years
had passed between those two events.
    At least she was restored to Myra, the daughter she thought she had lost. But this was a Myra who had grown older only by a
day,
while years had passed for Bisesa. And Myra, who studied her mother with the searching gaze of a neglected child, could surely see the sudden strands of gray hair, the