The Sun calmed afterward and smiled benignly once again on a blackened, barren, smoking rock called Earth.Ī younger man was on his feet, back in the last row of couches. Even as he did so, the other hemisphere of his brain was picturing Earth’s daystar seething, writhing in a fury of pent-up nuclear agony, then erupting into giant flares. Within milliseconds he reviewed the equations and found no flaw in them. The integrator woven into the molecules of his cerebral cortex linked the Emperor’s mind with the continent-spanning computer complex that was the Imperial memory.
The Emperor inclined his head to the man, curtly, a gesture that meant both “Thank you” and “Be seated.” The scientist waited mutely for the gesture to reach him. Sometime over the next three to five hundred years, the Sun will erupt and destroy all life on Earth and the inner planets of its system. For several centuries neutrino counts have consistently shown that the core of Earth’s Sun has become stagnant. “The shielding,” the bald man said at last, “will not be sufficient.
He was accustomed to standing before multitudes and commanding. He was older than most of them in the conference chamber, but they were accustomed to sitting at desks and lecturing to students. He pulled his own white robe closer around his iron-hard body. The scientist stood dumb, patiently waiting for his Emperor’s response to span the light-minutes between them. And, of course, the oceans will be drastically damaged the food chain of the oceans will be totally disrupted.” Good-bye to Earth, then, thought the Emperor.īut aloud he asked, “The power satellites, and the shielding we have provided the planet-they will not protect it?” But the eruptions that it will suffer will be of sufficient severity to heat Earth’s atmosphere to incandescence. “Properly speaking, Sire, the Sun will not explode. Some things cannot be conquered, the Emperor thought to himself as one of the men in the third rank of couches, a roundish, balding, slightly pompous little man, got to his feet. The delay was an indication of their rank within the scientific order, and they had even arranged their seating in the conference chamber the same way: the farther away from the Emperor, the lower in the hierarchy. Most of the others had been brought to the Imperial solar system from their homeworlds, and were housed on the three other planets of the system.Īlthough the holographic projections made them look as solid and real as Emperor Nicholas himself, there was always a slight lag in their responses to him. A few of them, the oldest and best-trusted, were actually on Corinth, the Imperial planet itself, only an ocean away from the palace. They shifted uneasily in their sculptured couches under his steady gaze. The scientists had come from all ends of the Empire to reveal their findings to the Emperor. “Then it is certain?” he asked, his voice grave but strong despite the news they had given him. Although there were forty other men and women seated in the chamber, the Emperor knew he was alone. The Emperor of the Hundred Worlds stood at the head of the conference chamber, tall, gray, grim-faced. And for Gordy, with our deepest thanks for his unfailing kindness and generosity. For Sally, who makes everything possible, and for Courtney, who makes everything fun.- A.J.A.
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