Free Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke Page A

the bard of the British tommies, miraculously restored from the dead. But these romantic Victorians were themselves castaways in time.
    Bisesa had tried to piece together the story. They had all been projected into another world, a world of scraps and patches torn from the fabric of time. They called this new world Mir, a Russian word for both “world” and “peace.” In places you could
see
the stitching, as ground levels suddenly changed by a meter or more, or where a slab of ancient greenery had been dumped into the middle of a desert.
    Nobody knew how this had happened, and still less why—and soon, as the patchwork world knitted together and a turbulent new history swept over them all, they had all been caught up in a battle for personal survival, and such questions had become irrelevant.
    But the questions remained. The new world had been peppered by “Eyes”—silvery spheres with elusive geometries, silent and watchful and utterly immobile, scattered over the landscape like so many closed-circuit television cameras. What could these Eyes be but artificial? Did they represent the aloof agency that had taken the world apart, then so roughly reassembled it?
    And then there was the question of the span of time. Mir seemed to be constructed as a kind of sampling of humankind and its development, all the way from chimp-like australopithecines from two million years deep, up through variants of prehuman hominids, and all the ages of human history. But this great collating ended, as far as anybody could tell, on June 8, 2037, in the time slice that had carried Bisesa and her colleagues there. Why was there nothing from the farther future? Bisesa had wondered if that was because that date marked some kind of ending to human history—because there
was
no future to sample.
    And then she, and she alone, had been brought home by the Eyes, or perhaps by the remote minds behind them—and found herself on the very next day, June 9, watching a lethal sun rise over London.
    Bisesa was convinced that the construction of Mir hadn’t been some stupendous natural accident, but
deliberate,
the act of some terrible intelligence for its own purposes. But why had Earth’s history been taken apart? Why were the Eyes there to watch and listen? Was it all, as she feared, connected to the misbehavior of the sun?
    And why had she been brought back home? To be returned to Myra had been what she had wanted, of course. On Mir, in the depths of her loneliness and despair she had even begged an Eye to save her. But she was sure her desires were irrelevant. The correct question was: what purpose did her return serve
them
?
    Bisesa, stuck in her flat, toiled over her account, sifted through the news, obsessed over her memories and her fragmentary understanding, and tried to decide what to do.
    12: Briefing
    At Clavius Base, after a couple of hours’ sleep, Siobhan still felt mildly jet-lagged, or Moon-lagged, she thought, by a time difference from London equivalent to an Atlantic crossing.
    To freshen up, she showered. She was entranced by the shimmering globules that came crowding out of her shower nozzle. She tried to be a good visitor to the Moon; she kept her shower curtain Velcroed up until the suction system had recovered every last precious molecule of the ancient water.
    Liaising en route from the
Komarov,
she had asked Bud to set up a full briefing. As far as she could tell the Moon’s top solar scientists would all be in attendance, from helio-seismologists to students of electromagnetic emissions from radio wavelengths to X-rays—and, of course, the neutrino-astronomy prodigy who had tried to blow the whistle before June 9. Until they got to Clavius, none of the scientists was to be told what her mission was. Security remained tight.
    There were few conference rooms on the Moon: evidently this wasn’t Carlton Terrace. Bud had tried to persuade her to use Clavius’s amphitheater for the session, but the very public space of the