1855 (London Time)
The slam on the door was urgent. Get out! Get out! Then running footsteps, and the visitor was gone.
Bisesa forced herself to sit up. Was it a little cooler? But the air, even half a meter above the floor, was stifling and moist.
Bisesa had long lost track of time, even though the old carriage clock had kept ticking patiently all through the crisis. It had been about five oclock when she had felt the first tremor. How long ago was that? An hour, two? The heat had turned her thinking to mush.
But now the floor shuddered again. They had to get out of here: that thought forced itself into her heat-addled brain. At a time like this, if somebody had risked his life to come tell them to move, she ought to pay attention.
Myra still lay on her back, but she was breathing steadily. Rather than near comatose, as she had appeared before, now she seemed to be just asleep. Bisesa shook her. Come on, love. You have to wake up. Myra stirred, grumbling querulously.
Bisesa pushed herself to her knees, then to her feet. She stumbled to the kitchen and found an unopened bottle of water. She cracked it and drank; it was hot as hell, but it seemed to revive her. She brought the water back to the living room for Myra, and then went in search of clothes.
They made for the stairs. In pitch-dark broken only by Bisesas precariously carried candle they stumbled down the several flights to ground level. The stairwell was empty, but there was scattered rubbish on the steps: toys, bits of clothing, a smashed torch, stuff dropped by overloaded people in a hurry.
They emerged at street level, into a murky red glow. Under the Dome, after hours of the sunstorm, the air was thick and full of smoke. People pushed past, all heading west down the road. They were making for the Fulham Gate, Bisesa realized dimly, a way out of the Dome.
And the Dome itself was cracked. A stupendous fiery scar reached from its top all the way to ground level, off somewhere to the north. Huge chunks of the structure, burning, broke off and fell in a steady rain. It was this curtain of fire that illuminated the scene around Bisesa.
The ground shuddered again. Much more of this and the whole Dome might come down around them. The crowds wisdom was right: better to take their chances outside the Dome. Bisesa pulled Myra along the road, heading for the Gate.
Myra, still half asleep, mewled at being dragged along. Whats with the earthquake? Do you think its bombs?
Bombs? No. Bisesa was sure the refugees and protesters who had gathered for their minor war outside the Gates of London would have been driven away by the storms by nowor more probably, she admitted to herself grimly, they were dead. I think it really is a quake.
But London doesnt get earthquakes.
Its a strange day, sweetheart. The whole city is built on a bed of clay, remember. If thats dried out there will be subsidence, cracking.
Myra snorted. That will play hell with property values.
Bisesa laughed. Come on. Just a bit farther. Look, theres the Gate
The Gate had been flung wide open to reveal a red sky beyond. A shuffling crowd, converging from different directions, was forming into a queue to get through it. Bisesa and Myra stepped forward cautiously.
It was a typical London crowd, with faces reflecting origins in every racial group on the planet: London had been a melting pot for centuries before New York. And in the crowd there were young and old, kids in their parents arms, elderly being helped along. Crumpled-up old women or wide-eyed children rode in wheelchairs and wheelbarrows and supermarket carts. When one old man fell, exhausted, two young women bent to help him up, and then propped him up between them to get him the rest of the way.
Everybody looked as bad as Bisesa felt. Most wore nothing but flimsy clothes, soaked through with sweat; mens hair was plastered to their heads, and women walked on painfully swollen feet. But there was no panic, no shoving, no fighting, even though there was no sign of police or military, nobody in authority. People were enduring, Bisesa thought. They were helping each other through.
Myra said, Its like the Blitz.
I think so. Bisesa felt a peculiar surge of affection for these battered, dogged, resilient, polyglot Londoners. And for the first time that day she began to believe that they might actually live through this.
The crowd pushed through the Gate, and fanned out into the open area beyond. And Bisesa, with Myras hand clutched in her own, walked into a transformed world, a world of water and fire.
Above the smoke fat clouds sailed, some of them boiling visibly, and immense lightning bolts cracked. The sky beyond the clouds seemed to be on fire; it was covered by immense sheets of bright red, as if the Earth had been thrust into a vast oven. Perhaps it was another aurora.
And on the ground, London burned fitfully. The air was full of smoke, and whirling flecks of ash landed on Bisesas sweat-slick skin. She smelled the dirt and the dust and the ashand something less definable, something like burned meat. But the rains, which had mercifully subsided, had left water standing on every lawn and in every gutter, and the light from the burning sky was mirrored on the roads and the roofs of the houses. It was an oddly beautiful scene, unearthly, rich with crimson light in the sky and pooled on the ground.
Myra pointed to the west. Mum. Look. Theres the sun.
Bisesa turned. But it was not the sun she saw, of course, but the shield, still holding its place after all these hours, still protecting the Earth. It was a dish-shaped rainbow, actually brighter away from the center, blue-violet at the bulls-eye heart and an angry burnt orange at the rim. Beyond the edge of the shield itself a bright corona flared, laced with threads and sparks, prominences easily visible to the naked eye.
But that terrible sun was sinking toward the western horizon, and the smoke of Englands fires rose up to obscure it.
Nearly sunset, somebody said. Another twenty minutes and thats the last well see of that bastard.
There was motion at the edge of Bisesas vision. She saw small shapes squirming past the legs of the people. There were dogs, foxes, cats, even what looked like rats, swarming silently out of the failing Dome and dispersing into the scorched streets beyond.
A warm, salty rain began to fall, heavy enough to sting Bisesas bare head. She wrapped her arm around Myra. Come on. We need to find shelter.
They hurried forward, with a thousand others, through the ruins of London.
45: Martian Spring
2105 (London Time)
Helena Umfraville stumbled across an ocher plain.
She came to a slight rise. She climbed it, but it led to nothing but more broken, rock-littered ground. Resentfully she made her way forward.
She was dog-tired, and her EVA suit had never felt so heavy. She had no real idea how long she had been walkinghours, anyhow. And yet she walked on. There was nothing else to do.
Now she found herself on the lip of a canyon. She stopped, breathing hard. It was a complex of ravines and cliffs, their slopes pocked with small craters. In the thin air of the Martian afternoon the spectacle was clear all the way to the horizon. That diminished its scale, of course; there was none of the mist-softening that gave Earths Grand Canyon its sense of three-dimensional immensity. She might as well have been looking at a beautiful painting, done in Marss constrained palette of ocher and red and burnt orange.
It wasnt interesting. Mars was full of canyons. In fact Helena felt pissed at the canyon. It was quite unreasonable of her. After all, none of it was its fault. She sucked at the last of her suits water supply.
During the worst of the storm she had hidden in the Beagle, huddling under rock overhangs. It was the only shelter she had. The rovers hull had screened her, and her suit had labored to keep her cool. So she had survivedalthough for all she knew she had shipped a radiation dose enough to kill her.