Sunstorm (23 page)

The Dome was still incomplete, of course; the final enclosing panels would not be installed until the very last hours, so that the city would not have to survive without light for too long. But still, even now, its immense skeletal form was startling. Siobhan couldn’t actually make out much of it, for she was too close to the horizon of this huge spherical cap. It was an odd shame that this greatest of all of Britain’s architectural achievements should be all but invisible from the ground: as the
Aurora 1
crew had remarked ruefully of many Martian features, from close up it was simply too big to take in.

But if you viewed it from the air, you could see what a magnificent structure the Dome was. Based on a near-perfect circle about nine kilometers in diameter, the Dome was centered on Trafalgar Square, but it covered the Tower of London at the eastern end of the old Roman city wall, and in the west it enveloped the West End, slicing through Hyde Park and just extending to include the Albert Memorial and the great South Kensington museums. In the north the Dome would shelter King’s Cross and Regent’s Park, where Siobhan was headed now, and to the south it reached across the river to the Elephant and Castle and beyond. Siobhan thought it was rather appropriate that the Dome would protect a stretch of the Thames itself, the river that had always been the city’s lifeblood.

Every Londoner, with characteristically cheerful disrespect, called this great architectural triumph “the Tin Lid.”

At last Siobhan was allowed to pass through the Gate. Signs admonished her to turn on her headlights.

The view in the sudden twilight beneath the Dome’s roof was astounding. Supporting pillars rose up from the ground, like slim rainforest-canopy trees incongruously rising out of London’s mulch of town houses and flats, offices and cathedrals, ministries and palaces. Above, the sky was darkened by scaffolding and struts, made misty by distance. Helicopters and blimps flew just beneath the roof’s low curve. All this was lit by shafts of watery sunlight that passed through the breaks in the roof. The prospect had something of the feel of an immense antique ruin, perhaps, a place of pillars and graceful curves, the remnant of a vanished empire. But everywhere cranes rose up like skeletal dinosaurs, building, building. This was a glimpse, not of the past, but of the future.

The projections of how well the shield would work, even in the most optimistic scenarios, were still uncertain, and it wasn’t at all clear how much good even such mighty defenses as this Dome would do. But projects like this were as much an expression of popular will as of serious civic defense. Siobhan rather hoped that if the world survived the sunstorm the Tin Lid, or at least its skeleton, would be left intact, as a memorial to what people could do when they worked together.

She drove on into the artificial twilight, ignoring the built-over sky and concentrating on the traffic.

28: The Ark

The London Ark was all but empty today. Goats climbed their concrete mountains, penguins flapped in blue-painted shallows, and multicolored birds sang for no audience but their keepers, and Siobhan. It wasn’t a time for zoos.

But Bisesa was here. Siobhan found her at the Ark’s primate house, alone, cradling a coffee. In a broad, covered pit, a handful of chimpanzees were going about their rather languid business. The old-fashioned scene contrasted sharply with the new animated information plate that proudly pronounced these creatures as
Homo troglodytes troglodytes,
humankind’s nearest cousins.

“Thanks for coming,” Bisesa said. “And I’m sorry for dragging you here.” She looked tired, pale.

“Not at all. I haven’t been to this zoo—umm, the
Ark—
since I was a kid.”

“It’s just I wanted to come here, one last time. It’s the last day these guys will be on show.”

“I didn’t realize their move was so soon.”

Bisesa said, “Now that they are recognized as Legal Persons, the chimps have full human rights—in particular the right to privacy when they pick their noses and scratch their backsides. So they’re to be moved to their own little refugee center, fully equipped with tire swings and bananas.”

Bisesa’s voice was weary, rather flat, and Siobhan couldn’t decode her mood. “You don’t approve?”

“Oh, of course I do. Though there are plenty who don’t.” Bisesa nodded at a soldier, heavily armed and very young looking, who patrolled on the other side of the pit.

The debate about sheltering nonhuman life-forms from the sunstorm extended beyond the chimps, where the law was reasonably clear. As the sunstorm neared, a vast worldwide effort had been initiated to save at least a sample of the world’s major kingdoms of life. Much of it was necessarily crude: beneath the London Ark huge hibernacula had been installed to preserve the zygotes of animals, insects, birds, and fish, and the seeds of plants from grasses to pine trees. As for the animals, the Arks had been doing this sort of thing for decades already; since the turn of the century the western zoos had hosted reserve populations of animals that had long died out in the wild—all the elephants, the tigers, even one species of chimp.

Of course it was essentially futile, said some ecologists. Though the diversity of life in cool, cloudy Britain, say, was nothing like as rich as in an equatorial rain forest, there were probably more species to be found in a single handful of soil from a London garden, most of them unidentified, than had been known to all the naturalists in the world a century ago. You couldn’t save it all—but the alternative was to do nothing, and most people seemed to agree you had to try.

But some resented as much as a finger being lifted to save anything other than a human being.

“It’s a time of hard choices.” Siobhan sighed. “You know, the other day I spoke to an ecologist who said we should just accept what’s going on. This is just another extinction event, in a long string of such disasters. It’s like a forest fire, she said, a necessary cleansing. And each time the biosphere bounces back, eventually becoming richer than before.”

“But this isn’t natural,” Bisesa said grimly. “Not even the way an asteroid impact is. Somebody
did
this, intentionally. Maybe this is why intelligence evolved in the first place. Because there are times—when the sun goes off, when the dinosaur killer strikes—when the mechanisms of natural selection aren’t enough. Times when you need consciousness to save the world.”

“A biologist would say there is no intention behind natural selection, Bisesa. And evolution can’t prepare you for the future.”

“Yes,” she smiled. “But I’m no biologist, so I can say it . . .”

Such conversations were why Siobhan valued Bisesa’s company so much.

Seven months before sunstorm day, the world worked frantically to prepare itself. But much of what was being done, however vital, was mundane. For instance, London’s latest Mayor had got herself elected on the basic but undeniably effective pledge that come what may she would ensure the city’s water supply, and since coming to office she had made good on that promise. A vast new pipeline laid the length of the country from the great Kielder reservoir in the north to the capital—though many in the northeast had grumbled loudly about the “southern softies” who were stealing “their” water. Such work was obviously essential—Siobhan herself was involved in many such projects—but it was banal.

Sometimes the volume of chatter overwhelmed her ability to see things clearly. It was Bisesa, sitting alone in her flat and just thinking, who was one of her touchstones, her viewpoints of the bigger picture. It was Bisesa, thinking out of the box, who had come up with the essential notion of community support for smartskin manufacture. And, after all, it was Bisesa who had given Siobhan an insight into the deepest mystery of all.

Ever since that crucial videoconference, and Eugene Mangles’s proof that there was indeed an element of intention about the disturbance of the sun, Bisesa’s claims about the Firstborn and Mir had been taken seriously, and were being investigated in a slow-burning kind of way. Nobody believed the full story—not even Siobhan, she admitted to herself. But most of her ad hoc brains trust accepted that, yes, the disturbance of the sun so clearly reconstructed by Eugene could have been caused only by the intervention of some intelligent agency. That alone, even if you didn’t speculate about the intent of that intelligence, was a staggering conclusion to draw.

Bisesa’s insights had helped guide Eugene and others to a fuller understanding of the physical mechanism behind the sunstorm, and had, conceivably, helped humankind to survive it. But the trouble was, as Siobhan had immediately understood, the meddling of the Firstborn just didn’t matter for now. Whatever the cause, it was the sunstorm itself that had to be dealt with. The news couldn’t even be made public: releasing rumors about alien intention would surely only cause panic, and to no effect. So the whole thing remained a secret, known only at the highest levels of government, and to a select few others. The Firstborn, Siobhan promised herself, if they existed, could be dealt with later.

But that meant there was nothing Bisesa could do about the greatest issue in her life. She couldn’t even talk about it. She was still on “compassionate leave” from the Army, and would have been discharged altogether if not for some string pulling by Siobhan. But she had no meaningful work to do. In a fragile state, she was thrown back on her own resources. She had become reclusive, Siobhan thought, spending too much time alone in her flat, or wandering around London, coming to places like the Ark; she seemed to want no company save Myra.

“Come on,” Siobhan said, and they linked arms. “Let’s go see the elephants. Then I’ll give you a lift home. I’d like to see Myra again . . .”

Bisesa’s flat, just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, was actually lucky to find itself under the Tin Lid. Half a kilometer farther west and it would have been outside the Dome altogether. As it was it nestled under the looming shadow of the wall, and when you drove along you could look up between the rooftops and see the Dome soar into the air, like the hull of some vast spaceship.

It was a while since Siobhan had visited, and things had changed. There were heavy new security locks on the doors to the apartment building. And when she opened the door a rust-red blur ran out of the building, shooting between Bisesa’s legs, to vanish around the corner. Bisesa flinched, but laughed.

Siobhan’s heart was hammering. “What was
that
? A dog?”

“No, just a fox. Not really a pest if you take care of your garbage—although I’d like to know who let that one in the building. People haven’t the heart to get rid of them, not at a time like this. There are more of them around, I’m sure. Maybe they’re coming into the Dome.”

“Perhaps they sense something is coming.”

Bisesa led her upstairs to the flat itself. In the corridors and the stairwell Siobhan saw many strange faces. “Lodgers,” Bisesa said, pulling a face. “Government regulations. Every domicile within the Dome has to shelter at least so many adults per such-and-such square meters of floor space. They’re packing us in.” She opened her door to reveal a hallway piled high with bottled water and canned food, a typical family emergency store. “One reason why I keep Linda here. Better a cousin than a stranger . . .”

In the flat Siobhan made for the window. South facing, it caught a lot of light. The great shadows of the Dome’s skeleton striped across the sky, but there was still a good view of the city to the east. And Siobhan could see that from every south-facing window and balcony, and on every rooftop, silvery blankets were draped. The blankets were smartskin, bits of the space shield being grown all across the city by ordinary Londoners.

Bisesa joined her with a glass of fruit juice, and smiled. “Quite a sight, isn’t it?”

“It’s magnificent,” Siobhan said sincerely.

Bisesa’s inspiration had worked out remarkably well. To grow a bit of the shield that would save the world, all you needed was patience, sunlight, a kit no more complicated than a home darkroom, and basic nutrients: household waste would do nicely, appropriately pulped up. Raw material for the smart components had been a problem for a while, before turn-of-the-century landfill sites packed high with obsolete mobile phones, computers, games, and other wasteful toys had been turned into mines of silicon, germanium, silver, copper, and even gold. In London there had been only one possible slogan for the program, even if it was terminologically inexact:
Dig for Victory.

Siobhan said, “It’s so damn inspirational: people all over the world, working to save themselves and each other.”

“Yeah. But try telling that to Myra.”

“How is she?”

“Scared,” Bisesa said. “No, deeper than that. Traumatized, maybe.” Her face was composed, but she looked tired again, laden with guilt. “I try to see things from her point of view. She’s only twelve. When she was little her mother disappeared for months on end—and then turned up from nowhere, swivel-eyed. And now you have the threat of the sunstorm. She’s a bright kid, Siobhan. She understands the news. She knows that on April 20 all of this, the whole fabric of her life, all her stuff, the softwall, the synth-stars, her screens and books and toys, is just going to dissolve. It was bad enough I kept going away. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me for letting the world end.”

Siobhan thought of Perdita, who seemed not to grasp what was to come at all—or anyhow chose not to. “It’s better than denying it, maybe. But there is no source of comfort.”

“No. Not even religion, for me. I never was much of a God botherer. Though I did catch Myra watching the election of the new Pope.” After the destruction of Rome, the latest pontiff had taken up residence in Boston; the big American dioceses had long been far richer than the Vatican anyhow. “All the religiosity around worries me—doesn’t it you? These sun-cultists coming out of the closet.”

Siobhan shrugged. “I accept it. You know, even up on the shield itself, a lot of praying goes on. Religions can serve a social purpose, in uniting us around a common goal. Maybe that’s why they evolved in the first place. I don’t think there’s any harm in people thinking of the shield as, umm, like building a cathedral in the sky, if it helps them get through the day.” She smiled. “Whether God is watching or not.”