unconscious man.
All of them?sinon repeated gloomily. the prospect kindled a sensation of alarm, in itself a worrying development. He hadn’t configured himself to be waylaid by impulsive emotions. Do you know what that means?
Trouble,choma declared. Real bad trouble.
Chapter 08
The vac-trains were an excellent solution to Earth’s transport problem in the age of the arcologies. There were no aircraft any more. The armada storms had finished off air travel in the same way they made people abandon their cars. One of the late Twenty-first Century’s most enduring newscable images was of a farmer’s pick-up truck rammed through the nineteenth-floor window of the Sears Tower in the wake of a storm. As the planet’s population flowed into cities and began strengthening them against the weather, so they turned to trains as the only practical method of transport between urban conglomerations. Heavy and stolid, tornadoes couldn’t fling them about so easily. Of course, they still took a battering from the wind if they were caught out in the open. So the next logical stage was to protect the tracks in the same way the domes were going up to shield the city centres. The first real example was the channel tunnel, which was extended to cover the whole journey between London and Paris. Once that proved viable, the global rail network was rapidly expanded. As with any macro- infrastructure project awash with government money, the technology advanced swiftly.
By the time Louise and Genevieve arrived on Earth, the vac-trains were a highly mature system, travelling at considerable speed between stations. Common wisdom had the tunnels drilled kilometres deep in the safety of the bedrock. Not so; a lot of the time they didn’t even qualify as tunnels. Giant tubes were laid over the abandoned land, and buried just below the surface. It was much easier to maintain the vacuum inside that kind of factory- manufactured subway than in a rock tunnel. Tectonics played havoc with rigid lava walls that had been melted by a flame of fusion plasma; experience showed they fractured easily, and on a couple of occasions actually sheered. So tunnels were only used to thread the tubes through mountains and plunge deep under arcologies. Even trans- oceanic routes were laid in trenches and anchored in place.
With no air to create friction, the trains were free to accelerate hard; on the longer trans-Pacific runs they touched Mach fifteen. Powered by linear motors, they were quick, smooth, silent, and efficient. The trip from Mount Kenya station to London’s Kings Cross took Louise and Genevieve forty-five minutes, with one stop at Gibraltar. Airlocks at both ends of their carriage matched up with platform hatches, and popped open.
“All passengers for London please disembark,” the sparkling AV pillars on the carriage ceiling announced. “This train will depart for Oslo in four minutes.”
The girls collected their big shoulder bags and hurried out onto the platform. They emerged into a long rectangular chamber, its ornately sculpted walls harking back to long-distant imperial grandeur. The line of twenty hatches connecting to the train appeared to be made of black wrought iron, Victorian-era space technology. On the opposite side, three large archways led to broad wave escalators that spiralled upwards with impressive curves.
Genevieve stayed close behind her big sister as she negotiated their way across the platform. At least this time they managed to avoid barging in to people. Excitement was powering a smile that would not fade.
An Earth arcology. London! Where we all came from originally. Home—sort of. How utterly utterly stupendous. It was the complete opposite of the nightmare that had been Norfolk by the time they left. This world had massive defences, and its people could do whatever they wanted with lots of fabulous machines to help them. She held Louise’s hand tightly as they stepped onto the wave elevator. “Where next?”
“Don’t know,” Louise said. For some reason she was completely calm. “Let’s see what’s up there, shall we?”
The wave escalator brought them onto the floor of a huge hemispherical cavern. It was like the arrivals hall of Mount Kenya station, only larger. The base of the wall was pierced by tunnel entrances radiating out to lift shafts and platforms for the local train network, while the floor was broken by concentric rows of wave elevators to the vac-trains. Bright informational spheres formed tightly packed streamers five metres above the heads of the thronging passengers, weaving around each other with serpentine grace. Right in the centre was a single flared spire of rock that rose up to eventually merge into the roof’s apex.
“It’s just another station,” Genevieve said in mild disappointment. “We’re still underground.”
“Looks like it.” Louise squinted up. Black flecks were zipping through the strata of informationals, as if they were suffering from static. She smiled, pointing. “Birds, look.”
Genevieve twirled round, following their erratic flight. There were all sorts, from pert brown sparrows to emerald and turquoise parrots.
“We’d better find a hotel, I suppose,” Louise said. She pulled her shoulder bag round to take the processor block out.
Genevieve tugged at her arm. “Oh please, Louise. Can’t we go up to the surface first? I just want to look. I’ll be good, I promise. Please?”
Louise tucked the shoulder bag back. “I wouldn’t mind a peek myself.” She studied the informationals, catching sight of one that seemed promising. “Come on.” She caught Gen’s hand. “This way.”
They took a lift up to the surface. It brought them out in a mock-Hellenic temple at the middle of a wide plaza full of statues and fenced in by huge oaks. A small commemorative plaque on a worn pillar marked the passing of the station’s old surface structures and iron rail tracks. Louise walked out from the shade of the temple, wandering aimlessly for a few yards until she simply stopped. It was as if the arcology was appearing in segments before her. Slowly. As soon as her mind acknowledged one part, another would flip up behind that, demanding recognition.
Though she didn’t know it, Kings Cross was the geographical heart of the tremendous Westminster Dome, which at thirty kilometres in diameter enclosed most of the original city, from Ealing in the west to Woolwich in the east. Ever since the first small protective domes went up over London (a meagre four km wide to start with—the best Twenty-first Century materials technology could manage), preservation orders had been slapped on every building of historical or architectural significance, which the conservationists basically defined as anything not built from concrete. By the time the Westminster Dome was constructed over that initial cluster of ageing weather shields, the outlying districts had undergone significant changes, but any Londoner from the mid Nineteenth Century onwards would have been able to find their way around the central portion without too much trouble. It was essentially one of the largest lived-in museums on the planet.
The nine smaller domes circling round outside the Westminster, however, were a different matter. London didn’t have the megatowers of New York, but the arcology still housed a quarter of a billion people beneath its geodesic crystal roofs. The outer domes were purpose built, four hundred square kilometres apiece of thoroughly modern arcology, with only tiny little zones of original buildings left as curios amid the gleaming condos, skyscrapers, and malls.
Louise wasn’t aware of them at all. She could see on the other side of the oaks that the plaza was encircled by a wide road jammed with sleek vehicles, all driving so close together you couldn’t walk between them. The vehicles merged in and out of the giant roundabout from wide streets that radiated away between the beautiful ancient grey-stone buildings surrounding the plaza. When she raised her gaze above the blue-slate roofs and their elaborate chimney stacks, she could see even grander and taller buildings behind them. Then beyond those . . . It was as though she was standing at the bottom of a mighty crater whose walls were made entirely from buildings. Around the plaza they were elegant and unique, with each one somehow merging cleanly into its neighbours to form compact refined streets; but they grew from that to plainer, larger skyscrapers, spaced further apart. The towers’ artistry came from the overall shape rather than detailed embellishments, moulded to suggest Gothic, Roman, Art Deco, and Alpine Bavarian influences among others.
And gathering all those disparate architectural siblings within its sheltering embrace was the external wall. A single redoubtable cliff of windows, a mosaic of panes so dense it blended into a seamless band of glass, blazing gold under the noonday sun. Out of that, rose the dome itself, an artificial sky of crystal.
Louise sat down heavily on the plaza’s stone slabs, and let out a whoosh of breath. Gen sat beside her,
