Siobhan said, “It’s so damn inspirational: people all over the world, working to save themselves and each other.”

“Yeah. But try telling that to Myra.”

“How is she?”

“Scared,” Bisesa said. “No, deeper than that. Traumatized, maybe.” Her face was composed, but she looked tired again, laden with guilt. “I try to see things from her point of view. She’s only twelve. When she was little her mother disappeared for months on end—and then turned up from nowhere, swivel-eyed. And now you have the threat of the sunstorm. She’s a bright kid, Siobhan. She understands the news. She knows that on April 20 all of this, the whole fabric of her life, all her stuff, the softwall, the synth-stars, her screens and books and toys, is just going to dissolve. It was bad enough I kept going away. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me for letting the world end.”

Siobhan thought of Perdita, who seemed not to grasp what was to come at all—or anyhow chose not to. “It’s better than denying it, maybe. But there is no source of comfort.”

“No. Not even religion, for me. I never was much of a God botherer. Though I did catch Myra watching the election of the new Pope.” After the destruction of Rome, the latest pontiff had taken up residence in Boston; the big American dioceses had long been far richer than the Vatican anyhow. “All the religiosity around worries me—doesn’t it you? These sun-cultists coming out of the closet.”

Siobhan shrugged. “I accept it. You know, even up on the shield itself, a lot of praying goes on. Religions can serve a social purpose, in uniting us around a common goal. Maybe that’s why they evolved in the first place. I don’t think there’s any harm in people thinking of the shield as, umm, like building a cathedral in the sky, if it helps them get through the day.” She smiled. “Whether God is watching or not.”

But Bisesa’s face was dark. “I don’t know about God. But others are watching us, I’m sure of that.”

Siobhan said carefully, “You’re still thinking about the Firstborn.”

“How can I not?” Bisesa said, drawn.

With fresh coffee, they huddled together on Bisesa’s overstuffed furniture. It was an incongruously domestic setting, Siobhan thought, to be discussing one of the most philosophically profound discoveries ever made. “I suppose it is the dream of ages,” she said. “We’ve been speculating on intelligence beyond the Earth since the Greeks.”

Bisesa looked distant. “Even now I can’t get used to the idea.”

“It’s tough for any scientist,” Siobhan said. “ ‘Arguments by design’—that is, to build your theories about the universe on the assumption that it was designed for some conscious purpose—went out of fashion three hundred years ago. Darwin hammered the last nail in that particular coffin. Of course it was God who was the fashionable designer back then, not ET. For a scientist it goes against all training to think in such terms. Which is why it was my instinct to put you in touch with Eugene, Bisesa. I wondered what would happen if you jolted him into thinking differently. I guess that instinct was right. But it still feels unnatural.” She sighed. “A guilty pleasure.”

Bisesa said, “How do you think people are going to take this, when they are finally told?”

Siobhan explored her own feelings. “The implications are immense—political, social, philosophical. Everything changes. Even if we discover nothing else about these creatures you call the Firstborn, Bisesa, and no matter how the sunstorm turns out, just the fact that we know they exist proves that we are not unique in the universe. Any future we care to imagine now contains the possibility of others.”

“I think people have a right to know,” Bisesa said.

Siobhan nodded; it was an old point of disagreement between them.

Bisesa said, “We reached the Moon, and Mars. Here we are building a structure as big as a planet. And yet all our achievements count for nothing—not against a power that can do this. But I don’t believe people will be overawed. I think people will feel angry.”

“I still don’t understand,” Siobhan said. “Why would these Firstborn of yours want to put us under threat of extinction?”

Bisesa shook her head. “I know the Firstborn better than anybody else, I guess. But I can’t answer that. One thing I’m sure about, though. They watch.”

“Watch?”

“I think that’s what Mir was all about. Mir was a montage of all our history, right up to the moment of this—our possible destruction. Mir wasn’t about us but about the Firstborn. They forced themselves to look at what they were destroying, to face what they had done.”

She spoke hesitantly, obviously unsure of her thinking. Siobhan imagined her sitting alone for long hours, obsessively exploring her memories and her own uncertain feelings.

Bisesa went on, “They don’t want anything we know, or can make. They aren’t interested in our science or our art—otherwise they would be saving our books, our paintings, even some of us. Our stuff is far beneath them. What they do want—I think—is to know how it feels to be us, to be human. And how it feels even as we’re put to the fire.”

“So they value consciousness,” Siobhan mused. “I can see why an advanced civilization would prize mind above all other things. Perhaps it is rare in this universe of ours. They prize it, even as they destroy it. So they have ethics. Maybe they are guilty about what they’re doing.”

Bisesa laughed bitterly. “But they’re doing it even so. Which doesn’t make sense, does it? Can gods be insane?”

Siobhan glanced out at the gaunt shadows of the Dome. “Perhaps 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 wandering planet had taken a millennium to complete its interstellar journey. Even so it approached the sun at some five thousand kilometers 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

If the rogue had come in the twenty-first century, humanity’s Spaceguard program would have spotted it. Spaceguard had its origins 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 nothing to be done about a mass this size.

In 4 , 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 telescope. But there were those who watched the sky, for in its intricate 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 astrologers 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 fascination 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.