Sunstorm Read Free

a
bit
supportive.” She sipped her coffee, taking care not to spill a drop on her best suit. “I mean, look where your little girl is today.” She flicked on her phone’s vision options so her mother could see.
    These were the City of London Rooms in the Royal Society’s offices in Carlton Terrace. She was immersed in rich antiquity, with chandeliers overhead and a marble fireplace at her side.
    “What a lovely room,” Maria murmured. “You know, we have a lot to thank the Victorians for.”
    “The Royal Society is a lot older than the Victorians—”
    “There are no chandeliers
here,
I can tell you,” Maria said. “Nothing but smelly old people, myself included.”
    “That’s demographics for you.”
    Maria was in Guy’s Hospital, close to London Bridge, only a few hundred meters from Carlton Terrace. She was waiting for an appointment concerning her skin cancers. For people who had grown old under a porous sky it was a common complaint, and Maria was having to queue.
    Siobhan heard raised voices in the background. “Is there a problem?”
    “A ruckus at the drinks machine,” Maria said. “Somebody’s credit-chip implant has been rejected. People are a bit excitable generally. It’s a funny sort of day, isn’t it? Something to do with the odd sky, maybe.”
    Siobhan glanced around. “It’s not much calmer here.” As the start of the conference had approached, she had been grateful to be left alone with her coffee and a chance to run through her notes, even if she had felt duty-bound to call her mother at Guy’s. But now everybody seemed to be crowding at the window, peering out at the odd sky. It was an amusing sight, she supposed, a clutch of internationally renowned scientists jostling like little kids trying to glimpse a pop star. But what were they looking at?
    “Mother—what ‘odd sky’?”
    Maria replied caustically, “Maybe you should go take a look yourself. You are the Astronomer Royal, and—” The phone connection fizzed and cut out.
    Siobhan was briefly baffled; that
never
happened. “Aristotle, redial, please.”
    “Yes, Siobhan.”
    Her mother’s voice returned after a couple of seconds. “Hello? . . .”
    “I’m here,” Siobhan said. “Mother, professional astronomers don’t do much stargazing nowadays.” Especially not a cosmologist like Siobhan, whose concern was with the universe on the vastest scales of space and time, not the handful of dull objects that could be seen with the naked eye.
    “But even you must have noticed the aurora this morning.”
    Of course she had. In midsummer Siobhan always rose about six, to get in her daily quota of jogging around Hyde Park before the heat of the day became unbearable. This morning, even though the sun had long been above the horizon, she had seen that subtle wash of crimson and green in the northern sky—clearly three-dimensional, bright curtains and streamers of it, an immense structure of magnetism and plasma towering above the Earth.
    Maria said, “An aurora is something to do with the sun, isn’t it?”
    “Yes. Flares, the solar wind.” To her shame, Siobhan found she wasn’t even sure if the sun was near the maximum of its cycle right now. Some Astronomer Royal she was proving to be.
    Anyhow, though the aurora was undeniably a spectacular sight, and it was very unusual to be so bright as far south as London, Siobhan knew it was nothing but a second-order effect of the interaction of solar plasma with the Earth’s magnetic field, and therefore not particularly interesting. She had continued her jogging, not at all motivated to join the rows of slack-jawed dog walkers staring at the sky. And she certainly wasn’t sorry she missed the brief panic as people had assailed the emergency services with pointless calls, imagining London was on fire.
    Everybody was still at the window. It
was
all a bit strange, she conceded.
             
    She set aside her coffee and, phone in hand, walked up to the window. She