Domes

The domes are full of lizards. Mostly they’re fairly small: when you consider that 10,000 people can be crammed into a sculpted termite mound not much taller than me, fitting a person into a 15 cm lizard isn’t hard. So the 12 km Big Dome of Copernicus is home to well over a billion people, and most of them look something like this:

Carys was with me, and we met up with Rick and Darina. I noticed straight away that Rick was different: he was less tense, and he came up and shook my hand.

‘I hear Naomi has fixed your body issues,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘I feel much better. Stronger.’ The heat in the dome was less than the outside, the sunlight was diffracted and dimmed by two skies and a roof, but it was still hot, and I felt perfectly OK with it. ‘I didn’t realise how weak I was before.’

‘Good. We’ve claimed some compensation on that one for you.’ He paused, glanced at Darina.

‘Rick’s had some work too,’ she said. ‘Brain work. We shaved off some of the aggression and added some empathy. What they used to call a personality transplant, back in the 1st millennium.’

Rick made a face. ‘I could have gone for a complete restart but I decided I’d prefer to keep my Moon memories so far. Just like you did. Only trouble is – I now realise what a prat I was. About your problem.’ He grinned. ‘I’m really sorry about that.’

‘It’s OK.’ That seemed inadequate as a response to someone who’d changed who he was so he wouldn’t hurt me any more, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Within the domes, there were more domes. Like most of the rest of the stuff on Copernicus the whole complex had been built for the celebrations, but it was a fair imitation of what had once been here, when people first started living on the surface around the end of the 1st millennium. There were orange domes, green domes, red domes, yellow domes. Most were the geodesic reinforced glass type that would have been used when there was damaging radiation around and a risk of exposure to vacuum, but some were different, extravagant pinnacles, tumbled pillow structures, even little floating bubbles that carried their inhabitants and a small uncollapsed-symmetry world around inside them.

We got chatting to Twy, seen here inside his bubbleverse. ‘It’s much bigger on the inside than on the outside,’ he explained. ‘There are thousands of us in here.’

‘Can you get out?’

‘If I want to,’ he piped. ‘But I haven’t been out for years. We’ve got everything in here. Quite a nice climate, too. It’s dry and sunny most of the time. And the energy colourfeeds are good for emotional culturing.’

I had a sense of the old language breaking down again. Whatever he had really said was quite probably beyond my comprehension.

‘Where’s Ava?’ Darina asked suddenly.

Carys answered quickly. ‘She’s stayed down in New Copernicus. With Naomi.’

‘I think she’s doing some stuff for me,’ I said. For some reason I felt guilty about it. ‘She didn’t want to tell me what, in case it doesn’t work out.’ I remembered her solemn face over breakfast, and the sense that she was worried, though she wouldn’t admit it.

‘Well I’m sure that whatever it is, Ava can fix it,’ said Darina, smiling.

I wondered if I would have to go into a bubbleverse, like Twy, and find out what colourfeeds were. At the edge of my consciousness I had a vague image of waves, wriggling ridges of light… something I had done.

Something we had done.

‘Did we – do we – make bubbleverses?’ I asked.

‘Sort of,’ said Carys.

‘It’s more like – cluster work,’ said Rick.

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Darina. ‘I have trouble making sense of it myself in this limited mindspace.’ She took my hand. Hers seemed warm and dry. Lizard like.

I had a sudden sense of dizzying depth. The whole world I could see, with its dormitories, artworks, trees, cities, domes, humans, talking lizards – it was all just a thin skin, an illusion, stretched over something vast and complex, something that had taken a billion days to build itself and would go on building for billions of years.

Perhaps I had been wrong to ask Ava to find a way to make me stay here. Perhaps my staying meant nothing, perhaps the whole concept of ‘I’ meant nothing. Perhaps I should rejoin the others, re-understand whatever it was we did, become again what a tiny part of me had once been.

‘I’m envious,’ said Rick.

I stared at him. His face looked softer than it had been in the diffuse green light of the dome. I could hear the soft, slow splashes of a waterfall behind the shadowed trees.

‘Envious of you, Rick went on. ‘Having a sense of wonder. Being new. That’s what made me so angry. I am sorry, Paolo.’

A coloured bird looked down from the trees. I was fairly sure it was listening.

‘I might be staying here,’ I told him. ‘If I can.’

Rick nodded. ‘That’s the right thing for you?’

‘I think so.’

‘You should do it, then. I’ll help in any way I can.’