Firstborn

of the great ribs and pillars had been allowed to stand; weather-streaked and tarnished they cast shadows kilometers long over the city the Dome had preserved. It was only a glimpse. And in a way it was mundane; twenty-seven years on, you still saw the scars of the sunstorm wherever you traveled, all over the world.

The city fled beneath her, and the plane swept down over anonymous, hunkered suburbs toward its landing at Heathrow.

6: Myra

Myra sat with Bisesa before the bubble window, sipping iced tea. It was early in the morning, and the low light seemed to catch the wrinkles in Myra’s face.

“You’re staring,” Myra said.

“I’m sorry, love. Can you blame me? For me, you’ve aged nineteen years in a week.”

“At least I’m still younger than you.” Myra sounded resentful; she had a right to be.

Myra was wearing a comfortable-looking blouse and pants of some smart material that looked as if it kept her cool. Her hair was swept back from her face, a style that was a bit severe to Bisesa’s out-of-date eyes, but which suited Myra’s bones, her fine forehead.

She had no ring on her finger. Her movements were small, contained, almost formal, and she rarely looked at her mother.

She didn’t look happy. She looked restless.

Bisesa didn’t know what was wrong. “I should have been here for you,” she said.

Myra looked up. “Well, you weren’t.”

“Right now, I don’t even know—”

“You know I married Eugene, not long before you went into the tank.” Eugene Mangles, whiz-kid scientist, all but autistic, and after his heroic computations during the sunstorm the nearest thing to a savior the world had recently seen. “Everybody was marrying young in those days,” Myra said. The post-sunstorm years had been a time of a rapid population boom. “We broke up after five years.”

“Well, I’m sorry. Has there been nobody else?”

“Not serious.”

“So where are you working now?”

“I went back to London, oh, ten years ago. I’m back in our old flat in Chelsea.”

“Under the skeleton of the Dome.”

“What’s left of it. That old ruin is good for property prices, you know. Snob value, to be under the Dome. I guess we’re rich, Mum.

Whenever I’m short of money I just release a bit more equity; the prices are climbing so fast it soon gets wiped out.”

“So you’re back in the city. Doing what?”

“I retrained as a social worker. I deal in PTSD.”

“Post-traumatic stress.”

“Mostly it’s your generation, Mum. They’ll carry the stress with them to their graves.”

“But they saved the world,” Bisesa said softly.

“They did that.”

“I never saw you as a social worker. You always wanted to be an astronaut!”

Myra scowled, as if she was being reminded of some indiscre-tion. “I grew out of that when I found out what was really going on.”

Apparently unconsciously, she touched the tattoo on her cheek.

It was in fact an ident tattoo, a compulsory registration introduced a few years after Bisesa went into the tank. Not a symptom of a no-tably free society.

“Wasn’t Eugene working on weather modification systems?”

“Yes, he was. But he pretty quickly got sidelined into weaponiza-tion. Weather modification as an instrument of political control. It’s never been used, but it’s there. We had long arguments about the mo-rality of what he was doing. I never lost the argument, but I never won, either. Eugene just didn’t get it.”

Bisesa sighed. “I remember that about him.”

“In the end his work was more important than I was.”

Bisesa was profoundly sorry to see this disappointment in a daughter who, from her point of view, had been a bright twenty-one-year-old only weeks ago.

She looked out of her window. Something was moving on the far side of the canyon. Camels, this time. “Not everything about this new world seems so bad to me,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.

“I quite like the idea of camels and elephants wandering around North America — though I’m not quite sure why they’re here.”

“We’re in the middle of a Jefferson,” Myra said.

“Named for Jefferson the president?”

“I learned a lot more about the American presidents when I lived with Eugene’s family in Massachusetts,” Myra said dryly. The purposeful re-wilding of the world was an impulse that had come out of the aftermath of the sunstorm. “In fact Linda had something to do with devising the global program. She wrote me about it.”

“My cousin Linda?”

“She’s Dame Linda now.” A student of bioethics, Linda had shared a flat with Bisesa and Myra during the period before the sunstorm. “The point is, long before Columbus the first Stone Age immigrants knocked over most of the large mammals. So you had an ecology that was full of gaps evolution hadn’t had time to fill. ‘A concert in which so many parts are wanting.’ Thoreau said that, I think. Linda used to quote him. When the Spanish brought horses here, their population just exploded. Why? Because modern horses evolved here…”

In the new “Jefferson Parks” there had been a conscious effort to reconstruct the ecology as it had been at the end of the last Ice Age, by importing species that were close equivalents of those that had been lost.

Bisesa nodded. “African and Asian elephants for mammoths and mastodons.”

“Camels for the extinct camelids. More species of horses to flesh out the diversity. Even zebras, I think. For the ground sloths they brought in rhinos, herbivores of a similar mass and diet.”

“And lions as the capstone, I suppose.”

“Yes. There are more parks overseas. In Britain, half of Scot-land is being given over to native oak forest.”

Bisesa looked at the haughty camels. “I suppose it’s therapeutic.

But these are aftermath activities. Healing. I’ve woken up to find we still live in an aftermath world, after all this time.”

“Yes,” Myra said grimly. “And not every post-sunstorm response is as positive as building a Pleistocene park.

“Mum, people found out about the sunstorm. The truth. At first it was classified. Even the name ‘Firstborn’ was never made public.

There was no hint at the time that the sunstorm was an intentional act.”

Caused by the driving of a Jovian planet into the core of Earth’s sun.

“But the truth leaked out. Whistle-blowers. It became a torrent when the generation who had fought the storm headed for retirement, and had nothing to lose, and began to speak of what they knew.”

“I’m shocked there was a cover-up that lasted so long.”

“Even now there are plenty of people who don’t believe it, I think. But people are scared. And there are those in government, and in industry and other establishments, who are using that fear.

They are militarizing the whole of the Earth, indeed the solar system. They call it the War with the