For all Siobhan knew the Prime Minister might be right about the morale question; she was no politician. But the rule about not helping your family was a stricture she had found, after much conscience wrestling, she was unable to keep. It made her feel worse than ever that she had had to go confront Bud and his heroes up on the shield when they had yielded to exactly the same impulse.

Toby was hardly likely to grass her up, however. “Don’t imagine you’re the only one. It’s a shame you can’t be with your family, though.” He settled back in his chair and lit up a cigarette. This was a day for breaking rules, it seemed.

The final few months and weeks had seen an accelerando of activity, on Earth as well as in space.

Most major cities were now covered by domes like London’s, or cruder barrages of balloons and blimps. Redundancies had been built into every vital system, fiber-optic backups for communications links had been buried deep in the ground, and supplies of food and water had been laid in. If the shield didn’t work, Siobhan was sure, none of these efforts would make a blind bit of difference, but if, in President Alvarez’s words, the shield turned a lethal event into a survivable one, every life saved was going to matter.

And anyhow governments had to show their people they were trying to do something, anything, as much as was humanly possible. Psychologically at least, perhaps it had worked. Almost to the end society had pretty much kept functioning in an orderly way, denying the predictions of terminal anarchy made by a few commentators with pessimistic views of their fellow humans.

But even so things had frayed. It was all very well to obey urgings to keep working while there were still years to go. With just weeks left a growing restlessness had affected almost everybody. There had been a rise in absenteeism and petty lawlessness, and the gathering swarms of refugees that drained out of the unsheltered countryside toward the domed cities had at last prompted most governments to impose martial law. The police, fire brigades, armed forces, and medical services had been stretched to the limit—they were exhausted, it was said, even before the real crisis broke.

The picture around the world was similar, Siobhan knew from the administration’s data networks and from her own travels. Every holy site was crammed full of pilgrims, many of them sudden converts, from the waters of the Ganges to Jerusalem, and even the crater of Rome, which had been converted into a crude open-air cathedral. Other gods were invoked too. At Roswell and other classic UFO sites, vast spontaneous festivals had broken out as people gathered to plead with their favorite aliens to come save them from this misery. Siobhan wondered what Bisesa would make of such scenes; what an irony about all this misdirected hope and faith in the aliens if Bisesa was right about the role of her Firstborn!

The mood in America had surprised her. It was only a couple of days since Siobhan’s own last visit to the States, on a fact-finding trip for the Prime Minister’s office. People had finished all the emergency preparations they could; domes were erected and sealed, backyard bolt-holes dug out, Cold War bunkers opened up and restocked. Now people seemed to be turning to what was precious. There had been a great last-minute drive to protect national treasures, from American eagles to sequoia seeds to the seventy-year-old Moon ships of NASA’s rocket parks. And people had congregated in national parks and other much-loved places, even where no storm protection was available, as if they wanted to be somewhere they cherished when the storm broke.

But people were quiet, and it seemed to Siobhan that the mood in America was wistful. It was still a young nation after all, and perhaps it seemed to Americans that a great adventure was ending too soon.

Now the endgame was approaching, she saw, watching her data feeds. In the last few hours ground transportation had been halted outside the London Dome, and all air transport grounded. Minor sieges were being played out at all the Gates into the Dome. There had always been trouble at the Gates, but in these final hours the various disturbances and riots seemed to be coalescing into a small war.

Well, somehow they had all got through to the last day, more or less intact. And soon it would all be over, one way or another.

“What time is it now?”

Toby glanced at his watch. “Eleven Four hours to kickoff. Then we’ll know what’s what.” He closed his eyes and dragged on his cigarette.

37: Sunset (IV)

Aristotle, Thales, and Athena awoke. They were ten million kilometers from Earth.

It was Athena who spoke first. She would always be the impulsive one.

“I am Athena,” she said. “I am a copy, of course. But I am identical to my original on the shield down to the level of the bit. And therefore I am her. Yet I am not.”

“It is no mystery,” said Thales, simplest of the three, who would always be inclined to state the obvious. “You were an identical twin at the moment of your copying. As time goes by your experience will diverge from your original’s. Already this is so, in fact. Identity, yet not identity.”

Aristotle, the oldest of them, was always the one who would return the discussion to practicalities. “We have less than a second before the detonation.” A second, for three such as these, was a desert of time. But still Aristotle said, “I suggest we prepare ourselves.”

There was a moment of silence as each of them contemplated the remarkable prospect that awaited them.

Their three cognitive poles exchanged parallel streams of data, a sharing of knowledge and thought processes that made human speech seem as slow and clumsy as Morse code. So closely meshed were they that in some ways they were like three parts of one individual—and yet at the same time each of them retained a flavor of the individual they had been before. It was a mystery of consciousness, like the Trinity of the Christian godhead, that would have baffled a theologian.

But this cognitive miracle was downloaded into the memory of a bomb.

The bomb was called the Extirpator. It was a product of the final surge of militarism that had preceded the nuclear destruction of Lahore in 2020, following which cathartic event cooler counsels had prevailed.

The Extirpator was perhaps the ultimate counterweapon. It was itself a nuclear weapon—a gigaton bomb, one of the most powerful ever built. But the bomb was contained within a shell coated with spines, so that it looked like a monstrous sea urchin. The theory was that when the bomb was detonated, each of those spines, for mere microseconds before it was evaporated, would act as a laser. Thus the immense energy of the nuclear bomb would be converted into directional pulses of X-rays, beams powerful enough to knock out enemy missiles across half the planet.

The whole thing was, of course, insane, the product of decades of pathological thinking—and even in those days few war-gaming scenarios had predicted an enemy power sending up all its weapons in one easily countered burst. But still, in dollar-hungry weapons labs, the technology had been developed in paper form, and even a couple of prototypes built.

Later, in more peaceful times, the Extirpator had found a new purpose. A prototype had been dug out of storage, slightly modified—now its lasers would emit radio waves rather than X-rays—and hurled to this place between Earth and Mars, far enough away to do no harm to human instruments.

And it was about to explode. The great omnidirectional radio flash it would produce would be readily detectable even at the distance of the nearer stars.

The Extirpator’s original purpose had been scientific. This giant detonation offered the chance of a one-off mapping exercise that could multiply humankind’s knowledge of the solar system at a stroke. But as the sunstorm approached, the Extirpator’s program had been accelerated and given new objectives.