Galaxias

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Space Opera; Space Exploration

Synopsis

What would happen to the world if the sun went out?

New epic sci-fi from Stephen Baxter, the award-winning author whose credits include co-authorship of the Long Earth series with Terry Pratchett.

By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has managed to overcome a series of catastrophic events and maintain some sense of stability. Space exploration has begun again. Science has led the way.

But then one day, the sun goes out. Solar panels are useless, and the world begins to freeze

Earth begins to fall out of its orbit.

The end is nigh.

Someone has sent us a sign.

Release date: October 21, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

On 3 December 1973, a small spacecraft passed Jupiter.

The craft, American-built, was called Pioneer 10.

As its makers had intended, the close approach to Jupiter caused the giant planet’s gravity field to hurl the craft further and faster than on arrival. And by the time it left Jupiter, Pioneer was moving too fast to fall back into the Sun’s gravity well.

Pioneer 10 thus became the first human-made artefact destined to reach interstellar space.

A breakout had been made.

The Sinus Medii, the ‘Central Bay’, a sea of dry dust, had a striking location: right at the centre of the Moon’s permanently Earth-turned face.

Before the events of 2057, however, no human had come here, even though a permanent human outpost orbited the Moon, and descents to places of interest had become commonplace. No human footprints marked the dust of the Central Bay.

By then, however, the Bay had been carefully watched by human eyes for nearly a century.

Two automated probes had come here.

In November 1967 a spidery craft called Surveyor 6 had landed here, clumsily – and then fired its rocket engine and hopped a few metres over the surface. The purpose had been to test the restarting of engines on the Moon’s surface, an essential engineering requirement if astronauts were to be landed on the Moon and sent safely home. The little craft, having achieved its makers’ goals, quickly died – but not before it had made an accidental discovery.

This was a chance encounter. The next was intentional, and covert.

In December 1972 the Moon suffered a large impact. This was caused by the guided fall onto the Moon of a discarded, spent rocket, the third stage of the Saturn V booster that had propelled Apollo 17 and its crew to the Moon. During the Apollo programme there had been many such impacts of abandoned vehicle components, the purpose to make the Moon ring with seismic waves, and so afford glimpses of its interior structure.

This was not the purpose of this impact.

No impact before had come so close to the Sinus Medii, to within a few hundred kilometres. This landfall was by design.

And even as the jolt of impact reverberated through the body of the Moon, another small craft, not unlike Surveyor 6 but never publicly named, landed close to its defunct predecessor.

This particular Saturn impact had been an act of concealment. A concealment of the second probe’s landing, by one group of humans from others.

This time there was no engine test, no short-lived experiments and observations.

Only watchfulness.

Peace returned to the Moon.

That, and watchfulness. Mutual watchfulness.

Until December 1973, as Pioneer 10 passed Jupiter.

On the Moon, in the Sinus Medii, an eye opened.

An observation was made.

A message was sent.

No reply could be expected for years. There was patience. The patience of aeons.

An eye closed.

After that, again, mutual watchfulness returned.

In 1985 an acknowledgement of the 1973 message was received from the third-level node.

In 2008 an acknowledgement was received from the second-level node.

In 2056 an acknowledgment was received from the first-level node. And a notification of what was to come.

In 2057, on 5 January, it began. In the Sinus Medii, an eye opened once more.

And, in England, a hard rain fell across the face of Tash Brand.

1

0940 GMT

On Friday, 5 January 2057, in the morning of that day as experienced near the Greenwich meridian, many eyes happened to be turned to the Moon and the Sun: human and artificial eyes, on Earth and beyond. For that morning the Moon, following its own orbit, was sliding into a position precisely between Earth and Sun, so that the Moon’s shadow would pass over a swathe of Earth’s surface – in the southern hemisphere, across the ocean south of Africa – neatly and precisely hiding the Sun’s disc from human eyes across that swathe.

It was a solar eclipse, with the moment of greatest eclipse, the midpoint of totality, due at 0948 Greenwich Mean Time.

A chain of events began at 0940 GMT.

The timing was deliberate, of course. Anticipating the eclipse.

But the primary event occurred at the location of the Sun itself.

The very first human instruments to detect the event were a fleet of solar science probes, launched by many nations, which followed fast, swooping orbits around the Sun, even over its poles, or diving perilously deep into its corona, its outer atmosphere.

This day they recorded baffling, anomalous data, before losing their orbital moorings in space, and scattering like startled birds.

It took eight minutes at lightspeed for the first observable effects – primarily gravitational and electromagnetic, light – to reach the orbit of Moon and Earth. So, as had been intended, the effects arrived precisely at the moment of greatest eclipse.

And, given the line-up of Earth, Moon, Sun, at this moment of eclipse, these effects were first detectable on the Moon’s far side – the side closest to the Sun, closer than anywhere on Earth.

The first technology in the Earth-Moon system to record the event, it was later established, was at the Maccone Observatory, an automated deep-space telescope complex near the centre of that averted face, in a crater called Daedalus. For some years the lunar far side, shielded from the Earth’s visual brightness and radio noise, had been maintained as a park for astronomy. The Maccone instrument suite watched the sky constantly, in many wavelengths – visible light, radio, infra-red, even gravity waves. And it was equipped to raise automatic alarms if unexpected events were observed.

Such an event was now observed.

The signal set, rich in anomalous data, was immediately flagged as extraordinary. Records were made, summary reports hastily compiled, alerts tagged. This took nanoseconds.

Then it took a fiftieth of a second to transmit the information around the Moon, through the fibre-optic communications network that, in the year 2057, lay draped across the dusty lunar hills like a sparse nervous system.

At much the same moment, visible evidence of the event reached human eyes: in lunar space, the eyes of a dozen multinational crew observing the events of the solar eclipse from the unique perspective of their orbital habitat, Lunar Gateway III.

It was less than two seconds more before visible evidence of the event reached the Earth itself.

And consequences unfolded.

As, in the Sinus Medii, an eye opened to watch the reaction.

2

0948 GMT

At twelve minutes to ten this Friday morning, under an overcast winter sky, Tash Brand was crossing the River Tyne, heading north, on her way home from work at Government House.

The Gateshead Millennium Bridge, built to commemorate a calendar transition that had happened twenty-seven years before thirty-year-old Tash was even born, was showing its age, she often thought. It was pedestrians only, a tilting bridge long since rusted into immobility, and the walkway surface, heavily remodelled, could sometimes be roughed up so you had to watch your step, even in the daylight, at least on a gloomy, overcast, winter morning like this one.

But Tash liked to walk. She took her time.

In fact – this was a few minutes before 0948, as she would remember later – she had already slowed up, feeling calmer the further she got from House with its endless adrenaline-pumping culture of urgency. It was like that even on relatively quiet days, and there were few quiet days. This morning she was emerging from yet another unscheduled all-nighter, this one caused by another attempted landing of French boat people, disgruntled citizens of federal Europe, in the Wash.

She came to a halt halfway across the river, took a breath, leaned against a handrail, and just looked. The light was poor, which wasn’t unusual for the time of year – she had grown up in Surrey and had yet to get used to the shorter midwinter days up here, with sunrise only an hour and a half ago. Her father often reminded her of how her mother, Nigerian-born, had never got used to English winter days, even in the south.

But still the view was rich. Behind her the big box of Government House on the Gateshead bank: a monument of smartwood, a righteous carbon sink from its wood pile foundations all the way to its grass-covered roof. You couldn’t get more modern than that – or much newer. It was only a year since the English federal government, long decamped from a flooded London and eager to establish its credentials as a uniter of a new England of quasi-independent regions, had moved here after a five-year stay in Birmingham. There had been some controversy about the functions of government being carried out so far north; the comms links made it irrelevant where Parliament sat, of course, but this was felt to be undiplomatically close to the surly English-Scottish international border.

What the hell, Tash thought, looking back. House itself was a spectacular sight, and the views it offered from within could be even more spectacular, when the Sun rose over the North Sea – on a good day, some swore, you could see the turning blades of the huge Dogger Island wind farm, far out to sea. In fact it looked as if it might eventually turn out to be one such good day today; looking back at that eastern horizon now she saw the clouds growing ragged, revealing the deep blue of a winter morning sky.

Meanwhile, to her left, old Newcastle sprawled across its own hilly bank, connected to the Gateshead side by multiple bridges thrown across the Tyne, some centuries old, all of them echoes of originals constructed back when this place had been one terminus of Hadrian’s Wall. And the city itself offered a very modern view with its grassed-over roofs, tree-crowded avenues, white-painted buildings – nowadays it had the look of a theme park, so her father often said sourly, when the Sun caught it right.

Not many of her colleagues made this walk, though it was a reasonably short trek to the Manors district, to the east of the city centre, where accommodation for junior workers like Tash had been commandeered when the government had come to town. Most used the traffic tunnel that had been cut beneath the river, for speed and security. Tash, though, actually preferred being forced to take a little more time than the minimum, when she got the chance.

And, she was slowly learning, she liked being close to the river too. Like all British rivers, the Tyne was well controlled, from drainage schemes across the flood plain further west, to the barrier at its mouth on the east coast protecting it from North Sea storm surges. Looking down at the waters, grey in the cloud-choked light, she always had the sense of something bigger than herself, processes shaping the world on a scale far larger than she was ever likely to affect. Even if she was now a worm in the core of the apple of government, as Mel had once called her.

She smiled at that thought. That was Mel Kapur for you – always ready for a smartass put-down in case she ever got pretentious – not to mention Zhi, similarly acidic. Though Tash gave as good as she got. These were her closest friends, since college days, a decade back: herself, Wu Zhi, Mel Kapur. Always in her thoughts, it seemed.

Maybe, standing here, dawdling before going home, her subconscious was prompting her to give them a call. It was an unusual day after all.

She knew that Mel was eclipse-watching over the southern ocean – aboard Skythrust Two, lucky fiend – and Zhi, luckier yet, was actually up in space, aboard the Lodestone station, ready to make his own observations. Waiting for an eclipse that was due about now, she vaguely remembered. What an experience for them.

The In-Jokes, as they had called themselves ever since a gloomy virus-lockdown term they had shared at Yale. They were all studious, thoughtful. Kind of serious, she supposed now, looking back. They had drifted together as other groups had formed around them – groups often self-identifying around in-jokes of some kind, relics of parties, or through the frat houses which were nothing but extended in-jokes themselves. It was Zhi who, as the three of them had sat gloomily in the corner of some bar one night, had come up with the name. ‘We are the In-Jokes. And for us the in-joke is: there is no In-Joke.’

Well, it seemed funny at the time.

Although it had been the Pacific Incident that had caused them to bond for life, she supposed. When the three of them had nearly died in a botched survival exercise, one of Zhi’s astronaut-cadet tests: a chopper drop into the water. They worked together, and had got out of there, and had never been out of touch since. Even though their careers had diverged, with Zhi heading for research in space, Mel for astronomy, and Tash, always less academic – her degree subject had been the sociology of science – went into government work. Still they stayed together.

Later, she would remember that was what she was thinking of. Her friends.

What she was thinking of when the Blink came.

And the light went away.

Suddenly, standing there on the bridge, she was plunged into pitch darkness.

And a hard rain fell across the face of Tash Brand.

It was a short, sharp burst out of nowhere, from a sky thick with cloud. Tash, shocked, bewildered, in sudden darkness, turned her head away, fumbled for her hood.

But she staggered, losing her orientation, and stumbled off a kerb, into the central walkway, nearly turning an ankle.

Pitch dark. What the hell? The light had just gone, with maybe a few seconds of fade-out – and she couldn’t be sure about that.

It was as if she were deep in the bowels of House, and the power supply had failed. Not that it ever would. But she was outdoors.

Somebody screamed, along the bridge. She heard distant car horns.

Pitch dark.

Out in the open, under the sky, for God’s sake. You didn’t get power-failure blackouts outdoors. Standing there, unwilling to move, to take a step, she realised she was thinking like a child, slowly, utterly bewildered, not logically. But she felt helpless as a child, all the control she thought she had had over her world stripped away.

She took a step, stumbled again, nearly tripping on that kerb again.

A rail – she had been leaning on a handrail, that must be just ahead. She reached out, flailing. Found the rail. Clung to it with her gloved hands. Then, with more confidence, she stepped back up to the raised kerb.

She tried to take stock. She was standing on the bridge still, she could feel the rough surface under her feet, she had been looking out over the water. Right here. She thought she heard the lap, now. So that was still here.

She felt a deep, visceral, almost superstitious fear. You didn’t get power failures out of doors. So, what else could have happened?

Her sight was gone.

No.

She heard herself sob.

But she had heard that scream, from somebody else on the bridge. Now more voices were calling. Think, Tash. Why would other people be calling out if you had gone blind? Why sound their horns?

She clung to her rail and cast about – there. A spark of light, like a phone. A way off down the bridge – back the way she had come, towards the south. Was there a vague patch of light in the sky beyond that? Maybe her eyes were dark-adapting—

A phone. The spark of light was a phone. Stupid, stupid. She scrambled in her pocket for her own phone – don’t drop it, for God’s sake – and flipped it open.

A little rectangle of light, dazzling, the usual mundane menu.

‘Shit, shit. Thank you, thank you.’

She waved the phone about, like a torch. It shed a glow around her, a few metres in any direction. She was still on the bridge. There was the river, even, returning the faintest of reflections from the glow of her phone.

She felt as if her bubble of perception, her awareness of the world around her, was opening out slowly, slowly. She took a step back from the rail – her rail – though she held on to it for comfort, and looked around properly.

Dark everywhere. A sudden night. Below her, the river, now looking a deep, oily black. But above her head one stray light, hanging from the bridge structure somewhere like a forgotten Christmas decoration.

To her left, the city on the north bank was visible, just, with a few lights showing, lit windows, a few ad hoardings. Maybe her eyes were adapting to the dark. To her right the big pile of House on the south bank became more clearly visible too, patches of it shining with the glow of artificial lights, the big clearwood window panels vivid rectangles – but much dimmer than daylight, she realised now.

And there were those people on the bridge with her. She hadn’t really even registered their existence before the dark came. More and more glowing pinpoints in the dark, people digging out their phones and watches and headbands. The speckles of light glittered and bobbed, like a swarm of fireflies along the bridge. Everybody seemed to have stopped still, their faces pale masks in the scraps of light.

She no longer felt so existentially scared. I’m not blind, at least. But utterly bewildered. She realised that nobody on this bridge, across the city, could know what the hell was happening in these first seconds, minutes. Nobody. They all had to work it out, one way or another. Millions of sudden nightmares. And maybe it went much further, too.

And she felt colder, suddenly, and gripped her lapels to close her overcoat tighter – but that was surely just a reflex, imagination. Or maybe not. Had some weather system rushed over? That was possible. Her father had always told her she was of a generation that had grown up blasé, used to freak climate events, of a frequency and severity that his own parents had never known.

But the sky above looked deep black. Not the grey of a regular, thickly overcast morning. Like an overcast night.

A streetlight came on, not far away from her on the bridge. Only one – some kind of emergency response? Somebody cheered raggedly. It dazzled her; she turned away.

And more lights were coming on now, she saw, across either bank, across the twin conurbations: more streetlights, more lit-up doorways, and she imagined people fumbling in the sudden dark for switches. On the bridge itself, people were moving now, released from the stasis of shock, going one way or another. Some came running past her, some staring into phones, speaking into them. As if led by the phones’ light.

But Tash stayed still, casting around, still trying to figure this out. The sky was what counted, not the ground, the people. Something wrong with the sky. The cloud cover had been breaking up to the south and east, she remembered; there had been clear blue sky before. Again she looked that way, beyond House, and to the horizon, the direction of the ocean. She saw no blue sky now. Her eyes, increasingly adapting, saw only a swathe of darker sky where the clouds had broken up.

And she saw stars, scattered above that oceanic horizon.

Stars? At this time in the morning?

She still wasn’t scared. Not since that first shock had worn off. Just bewildered. Or – awed. Somehow it was all too big to be scary. Bigger than the river, she thought, as the river is bigger than me. You can’t hope to control it.

But then, thinking about the sky and the stars, she had a really stupid idea about what was causing this, or at least a connection. Really stupid. But it was the only lead she had. And she knew who to call.

She lifted her phone. Her father was calling, she saw. ‘Phone. Hold Dad,’ she said. ‘Get me Melissa . . .’

A smiling face, a shock of strawberry-blond hair. This is Mel Kapur. If you need—

‘Hey, Mel. When you get this. I’m in Newcastle . . . Just out of the office. Look, it’s dark here. And – well, where the cloud is broken up I see stars. Stars! And it’s not yet ten in the morning, I think. Look – could it be something to do with the eclipse?’

She had never seen a total solar eclipse herself. But she knew that one was in progress now. When the Sun’s light was blocked out by the Moon, if you were standing in the shadow cast by Moon on Earth, yes, there could be stars to be seen in a daytime sky, the planets. But she also knew that during any eclipse the shadow was confined to a narrow track across the Earth, depending on the relative positions of Sun, Moon, Earth. And today that narrow track was where Mel was, in the ocean somewhere south of Africa. Half a world away. Not over Newcastle.

But she persisted. ‘I know this is really dumb. But this seems to have cut in just when the eclipse was due. Could something – shit, I don’t know how to frame the question – we shouldn’t even have a partial eclipse up here. Has something, well – gone wrong with the eclipse?’

Mel Kapur’s face showed up on her phone now, just a two-dimensional image, but live. Red hair, blue eyes, against a dark background. That is really dumb. Hey, Tash. But, listen, I’m with the Astronomer Royal. If anybody can figure it out, she will.

Tash tried to take this in. ‘So it’s – umm, it’s happening down there too.’

Right. Well, if somebody turns the Sun off, it’s going to be a kind of widespread phenomenon.

‘Turned the Sun off? Do you think—’

I don’t think anything just now, Tash. Not enough data. We’re only minutes into this – well, whatever this is. And, Tash. We ought to try to call Zhi.

Just like Tash’s first impulse, to think of friends. ‘Yeah. In-Jokes together. He’s on the Lodestone. In space . . .’ She paged through her phone, hit a link that went through the international space agency, the NHSA, waited without much hope for a connection on a line meant for emergencies only.

Which this was. She supposed.

Now Tash heard, from the Newcastle bank, what sounded like a crumpling crash, a wailing car alarm, a scream. And, elsewhere, laughter. A police siren howling.

Still the darkness lingered.

‘I think I should go back to House,’ she said. ‘Whatever this is, I think the governments are going to be headless chickens for a while.’

Mel smiled. So go find your flock. I have to call Jane. Mel’s daughter.

‘Tell her Auntie Tash says hi.’

I’ll try Zhi as well. And if I find out more here, I’ll get back to you. Keep your phone on.

Tash pushed a bud into her right ear. ‘Will do. And I should call my dad. Phone, do that now.’

She hurried back over the bridge, watching her step, towards the still brightly illuminated Government House. Every step she took, she hoped the clouds would clear. That the Sun would turn back on. That this would just go away. It didn’t.

‘Mel. You still there?’

Yeah. Mel sounded breathless, as if she was hurrying too.

‘This is going to change all our lives, isn’t it?’

More than that, honey. More than that.

Somewhere an ambulance wailed.

And another burst of rain splashed over her face and hair. It felt as if it were getting colder, by the minute. The rain felt like sleet, in fact.

She hurried on, through the disconcerting dark.

3

0948 GMT

Melissa Kapur had had her own grandstand view of the event, in the minutes before she took Tash’s call.

Although – even a professional astronomer, and though she was surrounded by other professional and celebrity eclipse-watchers – she had been distracted by the earthly view.

What a view, though.

Skythrust Two was a human-made island in the sky. And high in the sky too, twenty kilometres above the Southern Ocean: above the troposphere, with its clouds and murk. In fact the lower air itself looked like an ocean from this vantage, a deep blue ocean of the sky. Not a shred of cloud above to spoil her view of the Sun, as seen from inside this airtight bubble – a clear-walled observation lounge which sat on a sprawling, open deck – even as the shadow of the Moon had eaten its way across the disc, heading for that magic moment of totality, even as the overall light level subtly dropped, moment by moment.

Nothing to distract her save the astounding bulk of Skythrust itself, an observing platform steady as a rock.

This island in the sky was suspended between two hulls: equally immense cylinders each containing a power plant, the jet engines that controlled the craft’s positioning, and other infrastructure. And from everywhere fine carbon-fibre cables snaked further up into the sky to the craft’s upper level, the buoyancy farm. This wasn’t a sphere like a hot-air balloon, or a torpedo-shape like the old airships; it was a kind of translucent quilt that shone in the strange, dimming light cast by the partially eclipsed Sun – but its upper surface was a solar energy plant that captured some of that light.

And the immense tanks of the farm were entirely empty.

Skythrust was an airship held aloft, not by hot air, helium, or hydrogen – like the old Hindenburg, with which she had much in common in terms of fittings and expense – but by vacuum, the ultimate lighter-than-air buoyancy agent. A couple of days back, as the ship had travelled from Johannesburg to this eclipse-watching station, Mel had been taken for a theme-park tour around and inside the buoyancy farm, a cathedral built of ultra-light, ultra-strong materials strapped over struts set in octagonal arrays. Two of the ship’s designers had bragged their way through the tour, gleefully pointing out that the buoyancy farm was all of an English mile long, and you could have fit hundreds of Hindenburgs, whole, inside that mighty volume . . .

Skythrust was an Anglo-Australian design, in fact, developed from immense aerial tankers designed to export hydrogen fuel: a principal product for Australia now, manufactured from water electrolysed by huge, sprawling solar energy farms. She knew that the Aussies liked to say they were exporting sunshine; what better way to carry that sunshine than in a craft built around nothing at all?

But today the spectacular Skythrust was merely a platform from which to observe a greater vision yet. Mel’s observation blister was one of several set around the deck, each hosting more passengers, observers protected from an external atmosphere too thin to breathe. And, dominating the centre of the deck space, an array of instruments had been set up to study the unfolding event in the sky, all of them mutely tilted up at the same angle, facing the Sun – just like the faces of the people, Mel thought whimsically.

All the passengers shared a sound system with an optional if enthusiastic commentary. Mel had tuned that out, but she had heard the passengers’ gasps as the Moon’s leading limb had first slid across the Sun’s face – and more as the magic moment of totality approached. And even before totality, the dimming had got to the point where she thought she saw a first star low in the deep blue sky – no, that must be a planet, Venus. A magical sight.

Now she tried to focus on her job. She had to make the most of the observing opportunities of the next few minutes, she knew.

For her to be up here at all, to see the event with her naked eyes, was a kind of treat. Her nominal boss, Charlie Marlowe, England’s Astronomer Royal, was buried down in the bulk of the ship, in a big dining area called the Games Room. She would be watching the data feeds as they clattered in, measurements from a bank of instruments ranging from infra-red to X-ray – and, in parallel, providing a commentary for a number of global feeds. Another privileged position, but shut up in a basement, effectively, and hidden from the glorious sky itself. Unlike Mel.

Concentrate, Mel, she told herself. Be here now, as her yoga teachers taught her. Such a moment might never come again.

The light dimmed further. Now she was distracted by the unveiling of the corona, the bright, extended outer atmosphere of the Sun – a shining cloud with smooth gradations of brilliance spreading around that central, shocking darkness – a sculpture in the sky normally rendered invisible by sunlight. And then—

Then, the final, perfect alignment of the discs of Sun and Moon. The moment of totality.

And the intensity of the daylight itself dropped, suddenly, dramatically, an effect that extended to the horizon, where an eerie greenish twilight gathered. It was a huge, integrated phenomenon that seemed to shock her, viscerally, a global-scale change, leaving her feeling utterly dwarfed – and, she saw now, a phenomenon beyond the ability of any single instrument to capture.

People gasped, whooped, even applauded. This was beyond her, beyond humanity, for all they tried to capture its fleeting scientific symptoms with eyes, brains, instruments. This was why people chased eclipses. And this, she thought, was why people were still sent into space, despite the sophistication of the robots. To see stuff like this. You had to be here.

But that moment, as she would later remember it, was when everything changed. For now there was a sudden, shocking deepening of the darkness, all across the cloudless, eclipse-morning sky.

It was as if somebody had turned down a dial on some mixing desk, the brilliant blue fading towards black, all the way to that greenish light on the horizon.

For Mel – unlike Tash, it turned out – there was no sudden moment of pitch dark. Skythrust itself still glowed subtly, even in the daylight, even in the midst of a solar eclipse, a glare leaking from the windows of the cabins and halls. Venus shone as bright, just where it had been, she noticed, bewildered.

And, around the position of the eclipsed Sun itself, that corona still shone – looking brighter than before, it seemed, against the darken