“She gets what she wants,” Bisesa said ruefully. “But that’s what kids are like nowadays.”

Mikhail nodded. “Good for them. And if it turns out to be what Eugene wants too—well, let’s hope it all works out.”

Even now Bisesa could hear the regret and loss in his voice. On impulse she hugged him again—but carefully. He felt shockingly frail; the word was that during the buildup to the sunstorm he had spent too long on the Moon and had neglected his health. She said, “Let’s not marry them off just yet.”

He smiled, his face crumpling. “He knows how I feel about him, you know.”

“He does?”

“He always has. He’s kind, in his way. It’s just there’s not much room in that head of his for anything but work.”

Siobhan snorted. “I have a feeling Myra will make room, if anybody can.”

Bisesa and Siobhan had remained close e-mail buddies, but hadn’t met in person for years. Now in her fifties, Siobhan’s hair was laced with a handsome gray, and she was dressed in a colorful but formal suit. She looked every inch what she was, Bisesa thought, still the Astronomer Royal, a popular media figure and a favorite of the British, Eurasian, and American establishments. But she still had that sharp look in her eye, that bright intelligence—and the humorous open-minded skepticism that had enabled her to consider Bisesa’s odd story of aliens and other worlds, all those years ago.

“You look terrific,” Bisesa said honestly.

Siobhan waved that away. “Terrifically older.”

“Time passes,” Bud said, a bit stiffly. “Myra was right, wasn’t she? The last time we were all together was at the time of the medals-and-flags stuff after the storm.”

“I enjoyed all that,” Mikhail said. “I always loved disaster movies! And every good disaster movie should end with a medal ceremony, or a wedding, or preferably both, ideally in the ruins of the White House. In fact, if you recall, the very last occasion we all met was the Nobel Prize ceremony.” That had nearly been a disaster in itself. Eugene had had to be pressured to go up and accept his award for his work on the sunstorm: he had insisted that nobody who had got it so badly wrong had any right to recognition, but Mikhail had talked him around. “I think he’ll thank me someday,” he had said.

Bisesa turned to Bud. Now in his late fifties, a head shorter than his wife, Bud had matured into the kind of tanned, lean, unreasonably handsome senior officer that the American armed forces seemed to turn out by the dozen. But Bisesa thought she saw a strain about his smile, a tension in his posture.

“Bud, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “Did you hear Myra say she’s going into astronautics? I was hoping you might have a word with her.”

“To encourage her?”

“To talk her out of it! I worry enough as it is, without seeing her sent up there.”

Bud touched her arm with his massive scarred hand. “I think she’s going to do what she wants to do, whatever we say. But I’ll keep an eye on her.”

Mikhail leaned forward on his stick. “But tell her never to neglect her exercises—look what happened to me!”

Siobhan caught Bisesa’s eye warningly. Bisesa understood: Mikhail clearly knew nothing about Bud’s cancer, the sunstorm’s final bitter legacy. Bisesa thought it was a viciously cruel fate for Siobhan and Bud to have been granted so little time together—even if, as she suspected, the illness had actually brought about their reconciliation, after their sad falling-out during the pressures of the storm itself.

Myra came fluttering back, by now towing Eugene by the hand. “Mum, you know what—Eugene really is working on how to control the weather! …”

Bisesa actually knew a little about the project. It was the latest in a whole spectrum of recovery initiatives since the sunstorm—and not even the most ambitious. But it was a time when ambition was precisely what humankind needed most.

Ninety percent of the human population had come through the sunstorm alive. Ninety percent: that meant a billion had died, a billion souls. It could, of course, have been far worse.

But planet Earth had been struck a devastating blow. The oceans were empty, the lands desiccated, and the works of humanity burned to ruins. Food chains had been severed on land and in the seas, and while frantic early efforts had ensured that there had been few actual species extinctions, the sheer number of living things on the planet had crashed.

The first priority in those early days had been just to shelter and feed people. The authorities had been prepared to some extent, and heroic efforts to sustain adequate water supplies and sanitation had mostly fended off disease. But food stocks, set aside before the storm, had quickly run down.

The months after the storm, spent trying to secure the first harvests, had been a terrifying, wearying time. Lingering radioactive products in the soil and their working their way into the food chain hadn’t helped. And with all the energy that had been poured into the planet’s natural systems, leaving the atmosphere and oceans sloshing like water in a bathtub, the climate during that first year had been all over the place. In battered London there had been a momentous evacuation from the floodplain of a relentlessly widening Thames into tent cities hastily erected on the South Downs and in the Chilterns.

Because the sunstorm had occurred in the northern hemisphere’s spring, northern continents had suffered most severely; North America, Europe, and Asia had all had their agricultural economies almost wiped out. The continents of the south, recovering more rapidly in the strange season that followed, had led the revival. Africa especially had turned itself into the breadbasket of the world—and those with a sense of history noted the justness that Africa, the continent where humankind was born, was now reaching out to support the younger lands in this time of need.

As hunger cut in, there had been some tense standoffs—but the darkest prestorm fears, of opportunistic wars over lebensraum, or even simple grudge settling, hadn’t come to pass. Instead there had been a generous globewide sharing. Harder heads had begun to speculate, though, about longer-term shifts in geopolitical power.

Once the crisis of the first year was passed, more ambitious recovery programs were initiated. Active measures were taken to promote the recovery of the ozone layer, and to cleanse the air of the worst of the post-sunstorm crud. On land fast-growing trees and topsoil-fixing grasses were planted, and in the oceans iron compounds were injected to stimulate the growth of plankton, the little creatures at the base of the oceanic food chains, and so to accelerate biomass recovery in the seas. Earth was suddenly a planet crawling with engineers.

Bisesa was old enough to remember anguished turn-of-the-century debates about this kind of “geo-engineering,” long before anybody had heard of the sunstorm. Was it moral to apply such massive engineering initiatives to the environment? On a planet of intricately interconnected systems of life and air, water and rock, could we even predict the consequences of what we were doing?

Now the situation had changed. In the wake of the sunstorm, if there was to be a hope of keeping the planet’s still-massive human population alive, there was really little choice but to try to rebuild the living Earth—and now, happily, there was a great deal more wisdom available about how to do it.

Decades of intensive research had paid off in a deep understanding of the working of ecologies. Even a small, limited, and contained ecosystem turned out to be extraordinarily complex, with webs of energy flows and interdependence—networks of who ate whom—complicated enough to baffle the most mathematical mind. Not only that, ecologies were intrinsically chaotic systems. They were prone to crash and bloom of their own accord, even without any outside interference. Fortunately, however, human ingenuity, supplemented by electronic support, had accelerated to the point where it could riddle out even the complexities of nature. You could manage chaos: it just took a lot of processing.