And as the plane dipped further she saw the Dome itself. The paneling had long been dismantled, but some 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 Her hair was swept back from her face, a style that was a bit severe to Bisesa’s out-of-date eyes, but which suited Myra’s bones, her fine forehead.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.”