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stars
noisy
?”
    But we had lost something more subtle than a few lights in the sky. We had lost a reliable sense of place. The Earth is round, the moon circles the Earth, the Earth circles the sun: that was as much cosmology as most people owned or wanted, and I doubt one in a hundred thought more about it after high school. But they were baffled when it was stolen from them.
    We didn’t get an official announcement about the sun until the second week of the October Event.
    The sun appeared to move in its predictable and eternal manner. It rose and set according to the standard ephemeris, the days grew shorter in their natural precession; there was nothing to suggest a solar emergency. Much on Earth, including life itself, depends on the nature and amount of solar radiation reaching the planet’s surface, and in most respects that hadn’t changed. Everything about the sun we could see with the naked eye suggested the same yellow class-G star we’d been blinking at all our lives.
    What it lacked, however, were sunspots, prominences, or flares.
    The sun is a violent, turbulent object. It seethes, it boils, it rings like a bell with vast energies; it bathes the solar system in a stream of charged particles that would kill us if we weren’t protected from it by the Earth’s magnetic field. But since the October Event, astronomers announced, the sun had become a geometrically perfect orb of unwaveringly uniform and unblemished brightness. And news came from the north that the aurora borealis, product of the interaction of our magnetic field with all those charged solar particles, had shut down like a bad Broadway play.
    Other lapses in the new night sky: no shooting stars. The Earth used to accrete eighty million pounds of spaceborne dust annually, the vast majority of it incinerated by atmospheric friction. But no more: no detectable meteorites entered the atmosphere during the first weeks of the October Event, not even the microscopic ones called Brownlee particles. It was, in astrophysical terms, a deafening silence.
    Not even Jason could offer an explanation for that.
     
     
    So the sun wasn’t the sun; but it went on shining, counterfeit or not, and as the days passed, days layered and stacked on days, the bewilderment deepened but the sense of public urgency ebbed. (The water wasn’t boiling, it was only warm.)
    But what a rich source of
talk
it all was. Not just the celestial mystery but the immediate consequences of it: the telecom crash; the foreign wars no longer monitored and narrated by satellite; the GPS-guided smart bombs rendered irremediably stupid; the fiber-optic goldrush. Pronouncements were issued with depressing regularity from Washington:
We have as yet no evidence of hostile intent on the part of any nation or agency
and
The best minds of our generation are working to understand, explain, and ultimately reverse the potential negative effects of this shroud that has obscured our view of the universe
. Soothing word salad from an administration still hoping to identify an enemy, terrestrial or otherwise, capable of such an act. But the enemy was stubbornly elusive. People began to speak of “a hypothetical controlling intelligence.” Unable to see past the walls of our prison, we were reduced to mapping its edges and corners.
    Jason retreated to his room for most of a month after the Event. During this time I didn’t speak to him directly, only caught glimpses of him when the twins were picked up by the Rice Academy minibus. But Diane called me on my cell almost every evening, usually around ten or eleven, when we could both count on a little privacy. And I treasured her calls, for reasons I wasn’t quite ready to admit to myself.
    “Jason’s in a pissy mood,” she told me one night. “He says if we don’t know for sure if the sun is the sun, we don’t really know anything at all.”
    “Maybe he’s right.”
    “But it’s almost a religious thing for Jase. He’s always loved maps—did