Pubs and tony restaurants crowded the riverbank here, and in summer you could drink cold beer, and watch pleasure boats and rowers in their eights sliding along the water. Now the pubs were boarded up or burned out, but in their riverside gardens a crude tent city had been set up, and the flag of the Red Cross hung limply on a pole. Bisesa was impressed by even this much organization.
It was deepest night now. To the west, outer London still burned, and plumes of smoke and sparks towered into the air. And to the east, flames licked fitfully at the great shoulder of the London Dome. Even the river wasnt immune. Its surface was a carpet of debris, some of it glowing. Perhaps there were bodies in there, slowly drifting toward the final graveyard of the sea; Bisesa didnt want to look too closely.
She was vaguely amazed that she was still alive. But mostly she felt nothing at all. It was a wrung-out sensation that she recognized from her military training: delayed shock.
Oh, Myra said. Thank you.
Bisesa turned. A woman laden with a tray of polystyrene mugs was working her way through the listless crowd.
Myra took a sip and pulled a face. Chicken soup. Made from powder too. Yuck.
Bisesa drank some of the soup. Its a miracle theyre this organized so quickly. Butyes, yuck.
She turned back to the battered city. She wasnt really used to cities, and had never much liked London life. She had grown up on that Cheshire farm. Her military training had taken her to the wastes of Afghanistanand then her jaunt to Mir had dumped her in an all-but-empty world. Her Chelsea flat had been a legacy from a fond aunt, too valuable to turn down, too convenient a home for herself and Myra; shed always meant to sell it someday.
But since returning home she had rarely left London. After the emptiness of Mir she had enjoyed the sense of people around her, the millions of them comfortingly arrayed in their offices and flats, in the parks and the roads, and crammed into Underground tunnels. And when the threat of the sunstorm had been raised, she had become even more deeply attached to London, for suddenly the city and the human civilization it represented was under threat.
But this was a deep-rooted place, where the bones of the dead lay crowded a hundred generations deep in the ground. Against that perspective, even the sunstorms wrath was nothing. Londoners would rebuild, as they always had before. And archaeologists of the future, digging into the ground, would find a band of ash and flood debris, pressed between centuries-thick layers of history, like the bands of ash left by Boudicca and the Great Fire and the Blitz, others who had tried and failed to burn London down.
She was distracted by a faint blue glow in the air above the Dome. It was so faint it was difficult to see through all the smoke, and she wasnt even sure it was real. She said to Myra, Do you see that? Therethere it is again. That blue shining. Can you see?
Myra looked up and squinted. I think so.
What do you think it is?
A Cerenkov glow, probably, Myra said.
After years of public education about the sunstorm, everybody was an expert on this kind of thing. Youd encounter Cerenkov radiation around a nuclear reactor. The visible light was a secondary effect, a kind of optical shock wave given off by charged particles forcing their way through a medium such as air, faster than the local speed of light.
But in the sunstorms elaborate physical sequence, this wasnt supposed to happen, not now.
Bisesa said, What do you think it means?
Myra shrugged. The suns up to something, I suppose. But theres nothing we can do about it, is there? I think Im all worried out, Mum.
Bisesa took her daughters hand. Myra was right. There was nothing they could do but wait, under the unnatural sky, in air glowing faintly blue, to see what happened next.
Myra drained her mug. I wonder if they have any more soup.
***************************
Part 6
49: Pacific
The platform in the sea, some two hundred kilometers west of Perth, was unprepossessing. To Bisesa, looking down from the chopper, it looked like an oil rig, and a small one at that.
It was impossible to believe that if all went well today, this place would become Earths first true spaceport.
The chopper landed, a bit bumpily, and Bisesa and Myra clambered out. Bisesa flinched as the full force of the Pacific sun hit her, despite the broad hat strapped to her head. Five years after the sunstorm, though fleets of aircraft day and night patrolled the skies towing electrically charged grids and pumping out chemicals, the ozone layer had still not fully recovered.
None of this seemed to bother Myra, though. Eighteen years old, she was as sun-creamed as her mother, but somehow she wore it elegantly. She was actually wearing a skirt today, uncharacteristically for her, a long billowy creation that didnt impede her at all as she clambered out of the chopper.
A red carpet striped across the rigs steel surface to a cluster of buildings and unidentifiable machinery. Side by side, mother and daughter walked along this path. Press reporters lined the carpet, cameras hovering at their shoulders.
Waiting to greet them at the end of the carpet was a small, round woman: the Prime Minister of Australia, and the first Aborigine to hold that position. An aide murmured in the Prime Ministers ear, evidently informing her who these peculiar-looking people were, and her greeting was generous.
Bisesa didnt know what to say, but Myra chatted confidently, charming everybody in sight. Myra had her heart set on becoming an astronautand there was every chance she would make it; astronautics was one of the worlds biggest growth areas. And so Im fascinated by the Space Elevator, she said. I hope Ill be riding up it someday soon!
Nobody paid Bisesa much attention. She was here today as the guest of Siobhan Tooke, nйe McGorran, but nobody knew who she was or what her connection was with Siobhan, which was the way she preferred it. The cameras loved Myra, though, and Myra, a bit mockingly, made the most of it. Myra was quite unrecognizable as the bedraggled thirteen-year-old refugee of that terrible night after the sunstorm. She had become a very intelligent and confident young womannot to mention acquiring a willowy beauty that Bisesa had never enjoyed.
Bisesa was proud of Myra, but she herself felt stranded on the wrong side of some intangible barrier of age. After the multiple shocks she had enduredher experience on Mir, the sunstorm itself, and the years of slow and painful recovery that had followedshe had done her best to rebuild her life, and to provide a stable platform for Myras future. But she still felt like a mess inside, and probably always would.
Somehow the storm had been good for the worlds young people, however. This new breed seemed energized by the challenges that faced humankind. Which was not entirely a comfortable thought.
More guests were clattering in on more choppers, and the Prime Minister moved on.
Aides guided Bisesa and Myra toward a marquee full of drinks-laden tables and flower settings, incongruous on this island of engineering.
There was quite a crowd here, including notable figures from around the globe, such as former President Alvarez of the United States, the heir to the British throneand, Bisesa suspected, plenty of that cowardly overfed crew who had spent the sunstorm skulking in the shadows of L2 while everybody else took the heat.
Children squirmed between the legs of the adults, plenty of them under five; after the dip in the birthrate before the sunstorm there had been a plethora of pregnancies since. As ever these little people were only interested in each other, and Bisesa was charmed that below the adults eye level an entirely separate social event was happening.
Bisesa!
Siobhan came shoving through the crowd. Her husband Bud was at her side, resplendent in the uniform of a general of the U.S. Air and Space Force, and beaming from ear to ear. With them came Mikhail Martynov and Eugene Mangles. Mikhail was walking with a stick; he smiled fondly at Bisesa.