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There had been more than a hundred people on the ship. They
were all young men and women all breeding age, including the
pilots. Their cargo had included inflatable shelters, mechanical
diggers, hydroponic seed beds. The intention was clear. This was
what the Chinese had been planning for the last five years: this
was what had used up all their heavy-lift capacity, instead of con-
tributing to the shield. And this was how the Chinese had planned
to ensure that something of their culture would survive the sun-
storm.
But the Chinese invasion of Mars failed . . . They came so
close. I wonder what kind of neighbors they would have been?
Helena suspected everybody would have got along. From here,
China was very far away, just as far as Eurasia and America. Here,
you were just a human or rather, a Martian.
She looked up at the sun. Close to setting, it was smeared out in
a ragged ellipse by air laden with dust and unaccustomed rain
clouds. She knew the predicted schedule; the sunstorm should be
abating by now and yet something about that setting sun trou-
bled her, as if there was still a nasty surprise to come.
The dust at her feet stirred. She looked down.
Amid the pattering raindrops, something was pushing out of
the soil. No bigger than her thumb, it was like a leather-skinned
cactus. It had translucent sections, windows to catch the sunlight,
she thought, without losing a precious drop of moisture. And it was
green: the first native green she had seen on Mars.
Her heart hammered.
The Aurora crew, during their long exile, had searched in vain
for life on Mars. They had even risked a hazardous journey to the
South Pole, where they had sought out the oldest, coldest, undis-
turbed permafrost on all of Mars, hoping to find Martian micro-
S U N S T O R M " 2 9 1
organisms trapped and preserved. Even there they d found zilch.
That epochal discovery would surely have made their years away
from home worthwhile; it had been a crashing disappointment to
find nothing.
And now here it was, just bubbling up out of the ground before
her.
She felt a painful pull at her chest. She didn t need to check her
monitors to know her suit was failing. To hell with her suit; she was
going to report her discovery. Hastily she turned on her helmet
camera, and bent over the little plant. Aurora, Helena. You won t
believe this . . .
Its roots were buried deep in the cold rock of Mars. It didn t
need oxygen, but fueled its glacial metabolism with hydrogen re-
leased by the slow reaction of the volcanic rocks with traces of
water ice. Thus it had survived a billion years. Like a spore waiting
under a desert on Earth for the brief rains of spring, this patient lit-
tle plant had waited out an eon for the Martian rains to return, so it
could live again.
46: Aftershock
A chain of events stretching back millennia was almost complete.
The sunstorm had been wasteful of energy, of course but not
nearly so wasteful as humankind might one day have become, if al-
lowed to infect the stars.
The sunstorm was ending. Though the sun s relatively orderly
cycles of activity would be disturbed for decades to come, the great
release of energy had been cathartic, and the destabilization of the
core was resolved. All this was just as Eugene Mangles s remark-
ably successful mathematical models of the sun s behavior had pre-
dicted.
But those models had not been, could never be, perfect. And
before this long day was done, the sun had one more surprise for its
weary children.
The sun s tremendously strong magnetic field shapes the star s at-
mosphere, in a way that has no analogies on Earth. The corona, the
outer atmosphere, is full of long sheets of gas, like the petals of a
flower, that can extend many radii from the sun. The elegant curves
of these streamers are sculpted by the magnetic fields that control
them. The streamers are bright it is these plasma sheets that are
visible around the blocked-out sun during a solar eclipse but they
are so hot, pumped full of energy by the magnetic field, that their
spectral peak is not in visible light but in X-rays.
S U N S T O R M " 2 9 3
All this in normal times.
As the sunstorm subsided, one such streamer formed over the
active region that had been the epicenter of the storm. In keeping
with the giant instability that had spawned it, the streamer was an
immense structure, its base spreading over thousands of kilometers,
and extending so far out in space that its feathery outer edge reached
the orbit of Mercury.
At the base of the streamer, flux tubes rooted in the sun s deep
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