‘It’s easy to paint us as the bad guys,’ I say quietly. Like I’m not trying to make a great big point. To make it clear I am talking more personally to the chaffinch journalist beside me.

‘There’s a lot of grumbling,’ I say. ‘But look.’

The rooftops, bright with colour.

‘People get on with it. People have always got on with it. Dystopia is as ridiculous a concept as Utopia. Ultimately, we’re animals,’ I say, thinking of the nature discs. ‘And animals find ways.’

The light snaps along the drained riverbed. A bolt of silver ribbon.

I am always astonished from this height, to see how fast new buildings come up. To either side, of course, of the great space of the Dock.

I breathe in. Feel something of the settlement the nature programmes bring. Watch the faint shift of the vapournets on the aircon units.

A slight flutter, like the barest movement inside a chrysalis, as it nears its time to hatch.

The march is underway. Penguins on the move. The chants the walkers call out reach us incoherent and delayed, so the mouths of the walkers, opening and closing, look more to gasp than shout.

‘Once you change the idea of what constitutes the ground, we have so much space. You just can’t see it from below.’

The journalist beside me traces the drops of condensation beaded on her glass.

‘I’ve never heard that word, stillicide, before,’ she says.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Nor had I.’

DRAGONFLY

The professor left the failed hive until last.

The bees were dead around it, curled like dropped alder catkins.

He put the samples into the case. At least the majority of the colonies were healthy. Drawing the honey from them he was reassured by the tight pats on his suit as the returners knocked busily into him.

The fiddly work of fitting tracking wires to the bees was paying off. They could analyse the pollen in the honey in each hive and work out what was growing where. The results had been surprising. All very well, the doom and gloom. But the array of flowering species was astonishing. The city might be grey at ground level, but its rooftops were spectacular with bursts of life and colour. Mostly, the bees weren’t even travelling very far.

The failed hive, though, was quiet. The professor took off his hood.

He fingered the dead bees.

The Urbee project was a great success, but there were these troubling random failures.

He knocked the water condensers fitted round the air duct units to check they were working. Watched the bright water work its way along into the vegetable beds.

The courgette plants were celebrant with shameless yellow flowers. He smiled to see the minute pollen beetles in amongst them.

Below, on the streets, he could see the growing crowd gathering to march against the increased scale of the Ice Dock.