Beyond St. Albans, she worked her way through more roadblocks. At last, after some tricky inner-city driving, Siobhan reached the final barrier. This was the Camden Gate, one of ten great entrances set around the circumference of the Dome itself.
As she queued she peered ahead curiously; she hadnt come into the Dome from this direction before. The Gate, bright orange and peppered with searchlights and armed observation posts, rose like a Roman ruin above the mundanity of houses and shopping parades. And the smooth skin of the London Dome itself arced away into the washed-out blue of the sky beyond.
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 couldnt 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 Britains architectural achievements should be all but invisible from the ground: as the Aurora1 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 Kings Cross and Regents 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 citys 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 Domes roof was astounding. Supporting pillars rose up from the ground, like slim rainforest-canopy trees incongruously rising out of Londons 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 roofs 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 wasnt 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 wasnt a time for zoos.
But Bisesa was here. Siobhan found her at the Arks 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, humankinds nearest cousins.
Thanks for coming, Bisesa said. And Im sorry for dragging you here. She looked tired, pale.
Not at all. I havent been to this zooumm, the Arksince I was a kid.
Its just I wanted to come here, one last time. Its the last day these guys will be on show.
I didnt realize their move was so soon.
Bisesa said, Now that they are recognized as Legal Persons, the chimps have full human rightsin particular the right to privacy when they pick their noses and scratch their backsides. So theyre to be moved to their own little refugee center, fully equipped with tire swings and bananas.
Bisesas voice was weary, rather flat, and Siobhan couldnt decode her mood. You dont approve?
Oh, of course I do. Though there are plenty who dont. 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 worlds 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 wildall 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 couldnt save it allbut 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.
Its a time of hard choices. Siobhan sighed. You know, the other day I spoke to an ecologist who said we should just accept whats going on. This is just another extinction event, in a long string of such disasters. Its like a forest fire, she said, a necessary cleansing. And each time the biosphere bounces back, eventually becoming richer than before.
But this isnt 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 timeswhen the sun goes off, when the dinosaur killer strikeswhen the mechanisms of natural selection arent enough. Times when you need consciousness to save the world.
A biologist would say there is no intention behind natural selection, Bisesa. And evolution cant prepare you for the future.
Yes, she smiled. But Im no biologist, so I can say it
Such conversations were why Siobhan valued Bisesas 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, Londons latest Mayor had got herself elected on the basic but undeniably effective pledge that come what may she would ensure the citys 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 capitalthough many in the northeast had grumbled loudly about the southern softies who were stealing their water. Such work was obviously essentialSiobhan herself was involved in many such projectsbut it was banal.