Usurper of the Sun (3 page)
- Duly confirm the existence of the extraterrestrial civilization.
- Inform the relevant organizations and agencies, starting with the U.N., followed by the mass media.
- Share observational results.
- Protect the communication frequencies being used to make contact.
- Do not respond to any incoming messages without the proper authorization.
Replies were to be sent only after thorough discussion among the U.N. Peaceful Use of Space Committee, national governments, and certain non-governmental organizations. Based on the consensus reached, the U.N. would adopt a resolution finalizing the response to the communication. There was doubt that the PDP could pass a vote because the planet had so many political, religious, and personal differences about how to handle communication with other people on Earth that it seemed unlikely they could agree on how to talk to an alien species.
Finally, the U.N. hammered out an addendum to the PDP that said, simply, “Communication will be restricted until there is confirmation that the other party is an intelligent form of life.” In other words, the sanctioned dialogue with the extrasolars was limited to, “Greetings. We are intelligent beings. Are you?”
Nevertheless, scientists began devising means of communication, since there was no point in deciding what to say otherwise. The first message composed at the SETI Institute at the University of California at Berkeley was a pulse that transmitted a series of prime numbers, followed by symbols indicating that the message was coming from the third planet from the sun. Inspired by the message that was included with the Pioneer plaques, the first human-made objects that ever left the solar system, the communiqué also included a schematic of the spin-flip transition of hydrogen. Prime numbers do not occur randomly in nature. A communication composed of them would be
prima facie
evidence of intelligence. The transmission used the Arecibo radio-telescope observatory and NASA’s global deep-space network. The transmission points were synchronized with the earth’s rotation. The message was always sent from the side of Earth facing Mercury. To avoid interference, global restrictions were placed on using radio waves and the signal was broadcast on every possible frequency. Given the size of the construction project the extrasolars were conducting on Mercury, it seemed logical that the extrasolars would have at least one communications receiver in place. Still, Mercury remained silent.
MATERIAL CONTINUED TO
seep from the planet’s surface. Before long it was visible even with consumer telescopes. Scientists observed particles entering a circular orbit around the sun with a radius of forty million kilometers. The behavior of the mass could not be explained by gravity or orbital dynamics. Scientists speculated that the floating particles were acting as planar mirrors, using light pressure to correct their orbit. That would require the production of eighty thousand tons of miniature space machines per second, a preposterous amount to Aki, but she knew that such a level of production was the only possible answer.
Eighty-eight days of head-scratching passed on Earth—and a year passed on Mercury—before the shape became clear: a ring eighty million kilometers in diameter encircled the sun.
News outlets scrambled to explain:
“This light bulb, with a diameter of 16.5 inches, is the sun,” explained one newscaster, the camera following as he walked. Then, panning out, there was a circle twenty-six feet wide with the light bulb at its center, slightly tilted and not quite parallel to the floor.
“This circle represents the enigmatic Ring that extrasolars on Mercury seem to have built, though perhaps this could
still
simply be a natural phenomenon never before seen by humanity. Our artists have made it thicker so you can see it, but if it were drawn to scale it would be as thin as a piece of dental floss. Magnified observations show that it’s about three kilometers tall and shaped like a ribbon standing on its side and wrapped around the sun like a wall. There are also reports of some kind of gas cloud, or particulate cloud, surrounding the Ring.”
The anchorman jogged past the ring. A table placed near the edge of the large room had a small blue pellet resting on a white china plate.
“I’m fifteen meters from the light bulb; the relative position of Earth. This little ball is our home planet.”
Over time, the Ring became more and more pronounced until it was visible to the naked eye. When the sun set each evening, people gathered on rooftops, hillsides—any spot with a clear view of the horizon—and stared at the western sky, chanting, weeping, and sometimes just sitting in lawn chairs drinking beer or barbecuing. For an hour after sunset and an hour before sunrise, the Ring could be seen in the dim sky, looming diagonally above the horizon like a glowing silk thread.
At first glance, it looked like the fibrous rings of Saturn or Uranus. Closer observation revealed that it had no orbital movement and was stationary relative to the sun. People wondered what kept it from getting sucked into the sun’s gravity well, and the best theory was that the Ring was composed of solar sails, giving it the power to stay in orbit. The inner side of the Ring was black. By absorbing sunlight across the inner vertical face, one square meter of surface could hold 0.7 grams of material in position. By Aki’s calculation, the Ring was as thin as a sheet of aluminum foil.
Then, a newly discovered fact shook the world. The height of the wall formed by the Ring was growing at the rate of fifty kilometers per day.
There was no visible form of construction observed. At the current rate of expansion, most experts calculated that it would take fifty years for the height of the Ring to cause total solar eclipses twice a year in May and November, when the plane of the earth’s orbit intersected the plane of the Ring. Meteorologists and planetologists predicted a crisis; though the total eclipses would only last a day, the eclipses would be preceded and followed by partial eclipses that would last more than two months, thereby blocking 10 percent of the earth’s annual sunlight.
“We don’t need to wait the fifty years,” a famous astrophysicist, Harrison Godwin, explained. “Reducing the amount of sunlight will increase the ice and snow enough to raise the earth’s total reflectance ratio, and we will be robbed of even more sunlight. This will start a chain reaction of cold spells around the world. In three to five years, we will have entered a new ice age.”
“WOW, AKI. NOTHING
is stopping you these days,” said Hiromi with some bitterness, looking at the results of their exams.
“Yeah, I guess. The grades are not why I do it.”
“You have been a different person since 5/9.”
“I found my heart’s deepest desire, something that drives me…”
“Really? My parents said it was fine to skip college and stay with them since the world is coming to an end.”
“You do not want to end up one of those girls that live with their parents well into their thirties, Hiromi,” Aki said.
“Maybe I do. Thirty sounds far enough away that it will never happen.”
“I cannot believe you would waste your life at a time like this.”
“Nobody cares anymore,” Hiromi said. She clenched her teeth. “It’s easier.” Aki shook her head as Hiromi stalked out of the room.
The astronomy club observed the Ring through the school’s new telescopes as often as they could. Aki had trained some juniors to watch for her and call her if there were new developments. She left school and walked to the subway. A man standing on top of a van parked near the entrance to the station shouted doomsday rants into a megaphone. Aki tried to tune him out. There was always someone talking about the destruction the Ring was bringing; if you tuned one rant out, another arrived within fifteen minutes:
“Glaciers are coming back! Glaciers are going to crush us all!”
“Do not let the government put you on a starvation diet! Rationing is coming! Horde food now!”
“Extraterrestrials are going to enslave the strong and use the weak for food!”
“Everyone is wrong and will regret their negativity when humanity is invited to join the Intergalactic Age. Bliss will be delivered upon us all!”
As hard as Aki tried, the level of concern among everyone she knew was as frightening as the wall around the sun. The ignorance and fear were inescapable. She could not help but notice. People stockpiled food and fuel. New nuclear power plants were built rapidly. New Age cults and doomsday religions flourished. People who could afford it moved to warmer climates or built underground bomb shelters. For a while, the stock markets fluctuated violently, then the markets flatlined. Nobody knew how to prepare for a tomorrow of unknowns that might never even come. Aki, on the other hand, never considered resigning from life. She was frustrated by how most people gave up easily. Through it all, her focus remained on astronomy.
In astronomical time, human society consists of a ten thousand– year blip on a 4.5 billion-year history. Aki knew that human civilization was not special in the grand scheme of astronomical time. From her perspective, the blooming of the human race and all its grand civilizations, from the perspective of the universe as a whole, was the light from a beat-up flashlight with a cracked bulb and dead batteries that only work for a few seconds if you shake the flashlight really hard before pressing the button, even at the bottom of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night. To Aki Shiraishi, the insignificance of humans in the eyes of the universe meant that she, as a human, was responsible for her species’ fate no matter how bad the situation became.
If Mercury and the Ring were the work of intelligent life, it was startling to ponder a civilization advanced enough to cross the nearly infinite gap between their sun and Earth’s and then change the surface of an entire planet. Aki could not get over it and thought of the extrasolars all the time. What other people saw as terrifying only tantalized her. She wanted to solve the mysteries of the Ring, of its builders. The Builders—that was what media outlets had started calling them. It became the popular descriptor, replacing extrasolars. The Builders might soon be the only ones left alive in the solar system. The fact that everyone she knew might die did not bother Aki. They would all be dead in a hundred years, and even that was merely a sunspot or a solar flare in terms of astronomical time. Her only fear was dying before her questions got answered. Responsibility and answering questions were the fire that drove her.
Graduation came and went, and Aki was offered full scholarships to colleges and universities that she had never even heard of, let alone applied to. She was more interested in the space probe—
Ikaros
—that had been launched toward the Ring and the astronomical developments of the past year and a half. To many, her discovery seemed like the end of everything, but to Aki, it still looked like just the beginning.
Sending a space probe close to the sun was a historical first and an amazing feat of engineering in its own right. The distance from Earth to the Ring was farther than the distance from Earth to Mars. The solar radiation around Mercury was hot enough to melt lead. There was no atmosphere on Mercury that could be used to decelerate the probe upon arrival. The stakes were too high to fail though, and the combined scientific and economic might of the world came together to build
Ikaros. Compared to the Ring though, it is nothing,
Aki thought on more than one occasion.
The mission of the first probe was a high-speed flyby past the Ring’s outer surface, which appeared smooth and metallic. The only surefire method to get detailed observations was to launch a probe that could maneuver itself into a static position relative to the Ring. The spacecraft would need the ability to accelerate and decelerate quickly. Engines fueled with chemical propellants would lack the fine control necessary for such maneuverability. An ultralightweight probe with solar sails, like the collectors on the Ring, was designed and deployed.
The first images, taken from less than two meters from the earthside face of the Ring, were finally obtained the year Aki entered graduate school. All she had done during the interim was study. She could have graduated early, but there was too much to do in the lab, and precious little that interested her outside of it. Other than the Ring there was little else. People frayed and developed haunted looks, jails grew overcrowded, and people would just leave their life one day without a moment’s notice, but she followed her love of astronomy, knowing that it would lead her where she wanted to go.