Things would be different in the morning.
She shivered. “Even now it doesn’t seem real,” she said.
“I understand,” Aristotle said.
Bisesa made her way to the bathroom and splashed water on her face and neck. The flat was empty. Myra was evidently out somewhere, and Bisesa’s cousin Linda had moved back to Manchester to be with her immediate family during the storm.
She thought over Aristotle’s simple phrase: “I understand.” Aristotle was a being whose electronic senses were distributed over the whole planet and beyond, and everybody knew that his cognitive powers far exceeded any human’s. Surely his level of understanding of what was to come far outstripped hers—and in a sense Aristotle was in as much personal danger as she was. But she couldn’t think of a thing to say to him about it.
“So where’s Myra?”
“Up on the roof. Would you like me to call her down?”
She glanced out uneasily at the gathering dark. “No. I’ll go get her. Thanks, Aristotle.”
“My pleasure, Bisesa.”
She took the staircase to the roof. The Mayor’s office had made fulsome promises that disruption to power supplies would be kept to the minimum possible, but Bisesa already distrusted lifts and escalators. And besides, according to the emergency authority’s latest decree, all such gadgets were to be shut down at midnight anyhow, and all electronic locks fixed on open, to avoid people being trapped when the hammer blow fell.
She reached the roof. The Dome stretched over the rooftops of London, with deep blue rectangles of sky showing where the last panels had yet to be closed. As the Dome’s immense roof had been closed off, stage by stage, it had felt increasingly as if they were all living in a vast cathedral, she thought, a single huge building.
As the regular cycle of day and night had become less marked, Bisesa wasn’t the only one whose sleep pattern was disrupted, according to Aristotle; other sufferers ranged from the Mayor herself to the squirrels in London’s parks.
On the roof, Myra was lying on her belly on an inflatable mat. She was working on what looked like homework, on a softscreen tiled with images.
Bisesa sat beside her daughter, cross-legged. “I’m surprised you have work to do.” School had been out for a week.
Myra shrugged. “We’re all supposed to blog.”
Bisesa smiled. “That’s a very old-fashioned idea.”
“If a teacher wasn’t old-fashioned you’d be worried. They even gave us pads of paper and pens for when the softscreens get fritzed. They said, when historians write about what happens tomorrow, they will have all our little viewpoints to put in.”
If there are any historians after tomorrow, Bisesa thought. “So what are you writing?”
“Whatever hits me. Look at this.” She tapped a corner of her softscreen and a small tile magnified. It showed a ring of monolithic stones, a gathering of white-robed people, a handful of heavily armed police.
“Stonehenge?” Bisesa asked.
“They’re there for the last sunset.”
“Are they Druids?”
“I don’t think so. They’re worshiping a god called Sol Invictus.”
Everybody had become an expert on sun gods. Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, was one of the more interesting of his breed, Bisesa thought. He had been one of the last of the great pagan gods; his cult had flourished in the late Roman Empire just before Christianity had become the state religion. To Bisesa’s disappointment, however, there had been no trace of anybody reviving Marduk, the Babylonian god of the sun. “It would be nice to see the old guy again,” she had said to Aristotle, to his confusion.
Myra said, “Of course there’s no Dome over Stonehenge. I wonder if the stones will be standing tomorrow. In the heat, they might crumble and crack. That’s a sad thought, isn’t it? After all these thousands of years.”
“Yes.”
“Those sun botherers say they will be there for sunrise too.”
“That’s their privilege,” Bisesa said. Tonight the world had more than its fair share of crazies, preparing to use the storm to commit suicide in a variety of more or less ingenious ways.
Bisesa was distracted by a distant crackle, what sounded like shouting. She stood up, walked to the edge of the roof, and looked out over London.
As the daylight was fading, the usual orange-yellow glow of the streetlights gleamed, and Dome-mounted spotlights splashed a whiter illumination over the capital’s great buildings. There was plenty of traffic, rivers of lights flowing around the Dome’s support pillars. In the city in the last few days there had been a sense of nervous excitement. She knew that some people were planning to party all night long, as if this were some greater New Year’s Eve. In anticipation the police had kept Trafalgar Square, the very center of the Dome and the traditional focus of London’s festivities and demonstrations alike, cordoned off for days.
All this activity was covered over by the Tin Lid. Immense strip lights, some as long as a hundred meters, were suspended from that vast ceiling. Their pearly glow caught the slim columns of the supporting pillars, which rose up out of the city like searchlight beams. Sparks swirled around the upper reaches of the pillars and settled in the huge rafters: London’s pigeons had discovered new ways to live under this astounding roof.
And there was that crackling sound again.
You couldn’t be sure what was going on anymore. News had been carefully censored since Valentine’s Day, when martial law had at last been imposed. Rather than factual reports, you were much more likely to find yourself watching some feel-good squib on the heroically huge fans, with names like “Brunel” and “Barnes Wallis,” that would clean London’s air during the period the Dome was shut, or on the Tower’s ravens, whose presence traditionally kept London safe, being carefully protected as the daylight was shut out.
But Bisesa could guess the truth. In the last few days the shield had begun visibly to close over the sun. It was the first tangible, physical sign since June 9, 2037, that something really was going to happen—and it was a strange light in the sky, a darkening of the sun, a portent straight out of Revelation. There had been a huge rise in tension; the cultists, conspiracy theorists, and bad guys of all stripes had been stirred up as never before.
And as well as the crazies there were the refugees, seeking somewhere safe to hide. On this last day London was packed to the rafters already—and Bisesa’s flat wasn’t far from the Fulham Gate. She heard another series of pops. Bisesa was a soldier; that sounded like gunfire to her. And now she thought she could smell smoke.
She tapped Myra on the shoulder. “Come on. Time we went back down.”
But Myra wouldn’t move. “I’ll just finish this.” Normally Myra lay as loose as a cat. But now she was tense, her shoulders hunched, and she was tapping with sharp pecking motions at her softscreen.
She wants to make it go away, Bisesa thought. And she thinks if she keeps doing normal things, keeps on with her homework, she can somehow postpone it all, keep her little nest of normality. Bisesa felt a stab of protectiveness—and regret that she couldn’t spare her daughter from what was to come. But that smell of smoke grew stronger.
Bisesa bent down and briskly folded up Myra’s softscreen. “We go down,” she said bluntly. “Now.”
As she closed the roof door behind them, she glanced back one last time. Those final windows in the Dome were being shut over, blocking out the light, the last light of the last day. And somewhere, somebody was screaming.
35: Sunset (II)
On the bridge of the Aurora 2, Bud Tooke sat loosely strapped to his seat.
The walls around him were tiled with softscreens. Most of them showed data or images returned from various sectors of the shield, and from more remote monitors standing off in space. But there were faces too: Rose Delea sweating in her spacesuit somewhere out on the shield, Mikhail Martynov and Eugene Mangles on the Moon, both monitoring the sun’s final hours before the storm, and even Helena Umfraville, a highly capable British astronaut he had once trained with, her time-lagged image transmitted from distant Mars.