Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke Read Free Book Online Page A

deeper wrinkles around Bisesa’s eyes. There was a distance between them that might never heal.
    So arbitrary had been the way she had been ripped out of her life before that she couldn’t get over the fear that it might, somehow, happen all over again. And that was why she couldn’t leave the flat. It wasn’t a fear of the open; it was a fear of losing Myra.
    After a few minutes she whispered a command to Aristotle. He resumed the compulsive search of the world’s news outlets and databases she had ordered.
    June 9 had been a worldwide catastrophe, by orders of magnitude the worst solar storm ever experienced, and days later it absorbed even Aristotle’s mighty energies to keep up with the flood of words and images. But try as he might, Aristotle couldn’t find a single mention of the silver sphere Bisesa had spotted hovering over London on that difficult morning, the thing her companions on Mir would have called an Eye. Even on a day like June 9, a thing like that hovering over London should have been a remarkable sight, the ultimate UFO, the subject of a thousand news items. But nobody else had reported it.
    It terrified Bisesa to the root of her soul that only she had seen the Eye. Because that must mean
they,
the Firstborn, the powers behind the Eye and everything else that was happening to her and the world, wanted something of her.
    9: Lunar Descent
    By the third day of the journey the Moon was huge in the black sky.
    Siobhan had to bend her neck to peer through the
Komarov
’s poky little windows of tough, micrometeorite-starred glass. But when she found the Moon’s bony crescent she felt a shiver of wonder. How strange this was, she thought. Amid the mundanity of the flight—the usual horrors of airline food, the space sickness, the dismal engineering of zero-gravity toilets—the Moon itself had come swimming out of the dark to greet her, forcing its way into her consciousness with a cold, massive grace.
    And yet the most marvelous thing of all was that even here, in the passenger cabin of Earth–Moon shuttle
Komarov,
her mobile phone worked.
             
    “Perdita, please ask Professor Graf to cover my supervisions with Bill Carel.” Bill was one of her graduate students, working on spectral analyses of structures in dark energy. Troublesome but able, Bill was worth the effort; she would have to trust old Joe Graf to figure that out for himself. “Oh, and please ask Joe if he will handle the proofs of my latest paper in the
Astrophysical Journal.
He’ll know how. What else? My car was still acting up, last time I tried it.” The great shock of June 9 had been traumatic for humankind’s semi-sentient machines as well as for people; even months later many were still struggling to recover. “It probably needs a bit more time with the therapist . . . What else?”
    “You have a dentist appointment,” her daughter said.
    “So I do. Damn. Well, please cancel it.” She probed with her tongue at the tooth that was giving her trouble, and wondered what the standard of dentistry was like on the Moon.
    Her students, her car, her teeth. These fragments of her life from Milton Keynes, where she held a seat at the Open University, seemed incongruous, even absurd, out here between planets. And yet once this immense flap was over things would go on; she must focus some of her energy on holding things together, so there was a life for her to go back to.
    But of course routine business was not what Perdita was interested in.
    The image of her daughter’s face in her phone’s tiny screen was fuzzed by static, but good enough. Siobhan wasn’t about to complain at such slight imperfections in a telecommunications system that now linked every human being to every other on two worlds—and, the systems providers boasted, would soon be reaching out to Mars as well. But the delay was eerie, a reminder that she had traveled so far from home that even light took a perceptible time to connect her to her