Chapter 10

Time: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:48 AM

At eighty-three minutes before impact, The Intruder’s distance to the sun was the same as Venus’s, slightly over 108 million kilometers. Further out in the solar wind, massive changes were already occurring, but at the sun’s surface and interior, the effects of the visitor were still quite subtle. A theoretical mass at the surface of the sun would experience a force almost 28 Earth gravities pulling down, balanced by a combined mass and radiation pressure gradient pushing outward. The pull of The Intruder was miniscule in comparison, 0.0017 Earth gravities. But the sun’s internal structure was in harmony with its gravity, while The Intruder’s gravity was a linear wave-front cutting across all the solar layers of radial symmetry. The sun began to grumble at the disturbance.

Under the urgings of the rest of the group, Mark had come from his shower directly to the lounge dressed in only a bathrobe from his bedroom linen supply. Fatima had showered just before him and was still in her dorm room. Everyone else was waiting, five young women in white bathrobes. Mark sat down on the floor and helped form a large circle, Jada on his left and Madison on his right. He grinned as he looked around at his friends.

“Looks as if we’re creating a new world religion, the Order of the White Robes.”

Madison lightly punched his right arm. “Oh come on, Mark. Do you really want to get back into yesterday’s clothes, considering what’s about to happen?”

Mark blinked and looked around the circle. This felt so incredibly unique. He thought that all their deaths were almost certainly approaching, and yet everyone around him seemed calm and at peace and even playful. He made a promise to himself that he would say nothing that would break the magic.

Hannah spoke up. “We were watching the news last night. WCAX was having quite a time of it. They lost power twice due to the rioting. We finally switched to WABC from New York. The scientists spent their time talking about what the long-term impact of The Intruder’s visit would be. The station kept stressing the scenario of a 1% loss of solar mass.”

Hannah’s eyes filled with desperate hope. “They kept showing plots of the sun’s structure. The Intruder might not even reach the convective zone. It’ll spend all its twenty seconds in the chromosphere layers, maybe a few seconds in the photosphere. That’s not so bad, is it Mark? They say the Intruder won’t get within a half million kilometers of the sun’s core. That’s more than the distance between the Earth and moon. That’s a huge distance to miss by, isn’t it Mark?”

Ashley spoke up before Mark could answer. She appeared eager to join in the conversation. “Net power output of the sun is going to stabilize at a value about 4% less than what it is now. And Earth was scheduled for solar perihelion at 10 AM our time, January 3^rd next year. That’ll happen later now. The Earth is keeping its angular momentum but getting a small radial kick inward from the brief presence of The Intruder. Perihelion will now occur later in the year, and Earth’s orbit will be slightly more elliptical, and a bit farther out on average due to the sun’s decreased mass. A radial kick at perihelion or aphelion, that what makes the orbit more elliptic. If The Intruder had come in early April or October, it might have made our orbit more circular.”

Hannah finished the summary. “And our orbital period should increase slightly. We might need leap years more often. Should be interesting, working out the new calendar, don’t you think? And the net effect will be a cooler Earth. There were a number of scientists saying The Intruder will undo all the effects of global warming over the last century, maybe even overshoot just a little bit beyond it. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it Mark? My parents have a vacation home in Florida, at Playalinda Beach. It’s so beautiful there, so nice and warm. We’re gonna be okay, aren’t we, Mark?”

Mark stared at her and gulped, desperate not to reveal his own near certainty that they were entering the last hour of their lives. “Uh, yeah. Sounds like we might be okay.”

Fatima showed up a minute later. It was just before 5 AM and she was carrying some notes. Mark blinked. She was wearing a big, fluffy bathrobe, just like the rest of them, bare lower calves and feet, thick chestnut hair falling to her shoulders. She glanced at Mark staring at her and grinned back as she sat down, tucking her legs underneath her.

“I knew you’d be surprised, Mark; but I’ve thought about this quite a bit last night. I thought that in this last hour before impact, it’s appropriate for me to accept you all as family. You are my brother and sisters. My lack of a headscarf is a symbol of this.”

She looked around the group. “Okay to begin?” Getting nods back, she turned to look at her notes but then changed her mind, putting them aside and beginning to speak from her heart. “During the night, I found my mind turning to thoughts of the world’s religions, all our different ways of building a relationship with our Creator. I got to thinking about our differences and our common ground, both in our doctrines and in our governance. Somehow ... Somehow the world seems to focus only on the differences. And I think that’s tragic.”

“I’d like to tell you about my religion. Islam comes from the Arabic root Salema. It’s a word combining the concepts of peace, purity, and obedience to God. I know that a lot of Westerners snicker at this definition, and given the wonton violence being done in the name of Islam, I think their ridicule has some validity. The lovers of death and brutality, they have lost the true meaning of their creed.”

“So, I start with Islam and see the principle of Salema. I look at Judaism and see the principle of justice, grounding our lives in goodness and law. I look at Christianity and see the principles of forgiveness and redemption, grounding our lives in love and appreciation of the value of and in ourselves and our neighbors. I have a close friend who is a Buddhist. There I see the principle of letting go, seeking spiritual freedom by renouncing our jealousies and our fixations on possessions.”

“My brother and sisters, aren’t we all seeking the same God? We have a different focus perhaps, and a different way of joining our beliefs to our social contract. But think! All the principles I’ve mentioned are at the cores of all of our faiths. We pick different perspectives and customs, and then we start fighting over our differences. How can we do this? Why do we give in to our base desires to form tribes? Think of all the joy we can share in our common ground.”

Fatima gave a sigh so deep it sounded almost like a mournful cry. “How can we be so petty? How can we be so cruel that we mock one another over our differences? We should be rejoicing in our diversity, and looking for the best our different creeds have to offer. But in reality we degrade the people outside of our religions, using words like Gentile or Heathen or Infidel. And even within our religions, we degrade people who try to critique our beliefs. We use words like heretic and apostate.”

Fatima looked around the circle and gulped. She realized she had everyone’s rapt attention. She took a second to glance out the windows at the pitch black night outside. “So, I thought in this hour of darkness, I would tell you of my faith journey, spend a few minutes and tell you as my dear brother and sisters about my relationship with my Creator and Lord. And then I’d like for us to go around the circle and for everyone to do the same. My prayer is that in the next hour, we will find our common ground. We will then face our Creator’s judgment as one family, at peace and united in the common ground of our purity and obedience.”

Fatima took a deep breath and began talking of her life as the young daughter of farmers, growing up in the town east of Idlib, Syria in the midst of multiple warring militias.

Time: 5:30 AM

As observed from Earth, The Intruder was 57 million kilometers from sun, the average radius of the orbit of Mercury. Its presence was felt by the sun as a gravitational pull of 0.6% Earth gravity, probably below the threshold of what most people would notice in a vertically upward force. But The Intruder’s gravitational pull was combining with its electromagnetic fields and triggering a feedback loop between the sun’s top layers and the much thicker convective zone beneath. The combined fields provided the tipping force needed to trigger a self-organizing plasma phenomenon.

Much earlier than the Earth scientists had anticipated, a massive solar flare erupted outward from the sun’s surface nearest The Intruder, driven not by gravity but by the clash of the two stars’ electromagnetic fields. An intense linear beam of x-rays was launched by the solar phenomenon, radiation destined to be focused into the Intruder’s gravity well three minutes later. The ionized particles of the solar flare were traveling much more slowly, a mere 2000 km/sec, and were still being driven by the eruption of electromagnetic forces. The domination of these forces would not last.

At the same moment, Jada finished her speech. She had been crying and holding hands tightly with Mark for the last several minutes, revealing things she had thought she had buried forever. Wiping the tears from her eyes on the sleeve of her bathrobe, she leaned on Mark and nodded to him that she was finished. He put his arm around her and began to talk.

Time: 5:53 PM

Twenty-five million kilometers above its impact point with the solar surface, The Intruder began to awaken from ageless slumber. The massive hard x-ray flux from the rupturing sun was being Doppler shifted towards gamma-ray energies by The Intruder’s gravitational well. Great resonance waves within the degenerate neutrons began to form. The quantum-coupled waves on the spherical surface were mountainous by neutron star standards. They were almost a millimeter high.

And above the surface of the sun, the leading tip of the solar flare was now almost three million kilometers above the surface of the sun. The flare had grown in unprecedented speed and size, and was driven by the electromagnetic polarity between the two stars. The particles within the flare were actually still accelerating, their equations of motion dominated by bi-stellar self-focusing magnetic flux. The lead particles at the front of the flare were still within the domain of the sun’s gravity well. They had 1.3 Earth gravities urging them to return to the sun, and 0.04 Earth gravities urging them upward.

Ashley was the last speaker, and she had just finished a very short speech. She was sitting motionless looking miserable. She had only said a few sentences and felt deeply distressed she had nothing more to say. Her parents had once told her the names of the denominations they were raised in, names she had long since forgotten. That was sum total of her religious training. She couldn’t remember her parents ever wanting to go to a worship service. For her speech she tried to say a few words about how she would make moral decisions when she had to.