“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.”