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been one of the early centres of the space movement which was the common
ancestor of the Outwarders and ourselves; there were people alive today whose journey into space had begun in its crowded concourses, waiting for the airship connection to the launch sites of Guiné and Khazakhstan. Its mooring masts were their Statue of Liberty, their Ellis Island.
    Or their Botany Bay. My fingernails were digging into my palms. I turned away and prepared to disembark.
     
     
    The airship settled, its motors humming as they steadied its position, just above the terminal’s flat roof. A wheeled stairway rolled up to the exit and we all trooped down. Two or three people working on maintenance boarded the dirigible and began checking it over; although its automated systems were more than adequate to the task, there’s something about aviation which keeps the habit of human supervision alive.
    From the terminal’s roof we could see an almost panoramic view of London, its rolling hills hazy with woodsmoke. The trees were interrupted here and there by towers whose steel and concrete had survived two centuries of neglect, and by broad corridors around ancient roadways. To the east the Lee Water broadened out to the Hackney marshes and the distant gleam of the Thames. On the nearby hills to the west the ruins of the old brick buildings and streets were still, barely, visible as crumbling walls and cracked slabs among the trees.
    It was a common misconception—one which, to be honest, none of us had ever found it politic to publicly correct, though the facts were there for anyone who cared to look—that the Green Death was a single plague, the result of a virus genetically engineered by some Green faction in a fit of Malthusian overkill. More sober epidemiology has revealed that it was several diseases, probably natural, all of which hit at the same time and which were spread by soldiers, refugees and settlers. The disorder, and the weakening of the social immune-systems of medicine and science, were indeed partly the responsibility of the Green gangs and their many allies and precursors, going back through a century or more of irrationalism and antihumanism. Indeed, the panicky abandonment of the cities as plague-centres was itself, in part, the outcome of that way of thinking, and it probably led to more deaths than the diseases ever did. So, while the Greens weren’t quite as responsible as folk once thought for the billions of deaths, I find it hard to reproach anyone for the so-called ‘excesses’ after the liberation. (The execution figures were inflated by over-enthusiastic local committees, anyway. It wasn’t more than a hundred thousand, worldwide. Tops. Honestly.)
    The long-term effect of the Green Death wasn’t on the size of the population—which bounced back sharply after the social revolution, and was now coming along very nicely, thank you—but on its distribution. Most
of the old metropoles remained empty, long after they became perfectly safe to live in. They were happily left, quite appropriately, to those who rejected the new society and preferred some version of the old.
    The countryside, too, was reverting to the wild, as agriculture was replaced by aquaculture, hydroponics, and artificial photosynthesis. It was less frequently ceded to the non-cos than the old cities, however, because of its recreational value to people from the dense arcologies of the Union.
    Alexandra Port itself had changed little, because it had never been abandoned to the ravages of nature or man. In the Green Death it had been a conduit for refugees going out and relief flowing in, and even in the West’s century of collapse it had been maintained by the earthbound remnant of the Space Movement, its boundaries guarded, its personnel supplied from outside, a garrison in the midst of desolation.
    It was all just like in the old pictures, I thought as we descended to the concourse: the People’s Palace, retro-styled even when it was new,