She looked me up and down, her gaze critical; after the long flight I felt murky, crumpled. “So you’re Michael. Gina’s boy.”
“I’m glad to meet you, Aunt Rosa.”
“Aunt.”She snickered. “Great heavens, you must be fifty years old. What kind of word is that to use?”
“Actually I’m fifty-two—”
“ ‘Rosa’ will do, I think.” Her accent was odd, British-tinged English rather than American, but with unfamiliar cadences.
We stood there facing each other. I felt awkward, uncertain. In the end I bent to kiss her. She didn’t flinch; she looked amused. I kissed her on her left cheek, and then her right, in the European style. Her skin was hot and very dry.
She stepped back. “So we got that over with. You have all your luggage? Good. Follow me…” She led me out of the terminal building.
When we stepped out of the air-conditioning it was like walking into a wall. I’d never felt anything quite like it, a dry, heavy heat that seemed to drag every bit of moisture out of my skin, and the air had a dusty, almost aromatic tang. It was almost like my jolting virtual-Permian experiences.
Rosa just stomped her way through the heat, oblivious. I struggled to follow.
She brought me to a rank where a cab waited for us, an empty white pod with tinted glass. I touched the metal handle of the trunk, and was zapped by a static shock that made my hand jerk backward.
Rosa raised almost invisible eyebrows. “It’s the dryness of the air,” she said. “Occupational hazard.
You’ll get used to it. Or not. Get in.”
Rosa lived in an area called La Macarena, in the north of Seville. It was a jumbled area, crowded with tiny, baroque churches and tapas bars. But even here, as our cab wormed its way through narrow streets, there was nobody around. Many of the bars and shops were boarded up, and the only signs of motion were insects and cleaning robots.
The place was clean, the streets free of litter and the walls scrubbed clean of graffiti. A few of the grander residences, behind high walls and railings, showed signs of life. Some of them had trees growing, olives or oranges, or even scraps of lawn; the heads of sprinklers showed everywhere. But there was a general feeling of decay. It was as if the city were populated only by machines, robots who mindlessly, pointlessly, scrubbed the streets and the walls, but all the while everything was rotting away, slumping back into the dry ground. And despite the obvious efforts of the cleaning bots, everything was covered with a fine patina of orange dust.
Spain was losing its people. Its population had halved since the beginning of the century, and by the end would halve again. I had known all this, that here was an extreme case of the general depopulation of the west. But I hadn’t expected it to be so obvious, the city to feel so empty.
We reached Rosa’s apartment. It was a small, rather poky place on the third floor of a tenement block, close to an avenue called the Calle del Torneo that followed the line of the river. The tight security was opened up by a sweep of Rosa’s palm and the sacrifice of a few cells from her fingertip to a DNA tester. Even within the building I saw nobody around, as if Rosa was Seville’s last resident left standing.
The apartment’s conditioned air was cool, moist, fresh. Rosa had a small kitchen with a dining area that opened onto a balcony with a view of the city, and a spare bedroom, where she allowed me to make camp. A couple of bots crawled around the place, equipped to cook, clean. Her support equipment seemed much simpler than George’s — but then, I could see, Rosa had aged better than George. And she seemed to have disengaged some of the higher sentience functions in her various machines. There was no backchat from this lot, and nothing like George’s faintly irritating toy robot companion.
The bathroom was tiny. I showered, in a trickle of water that got steadily more lukewarm. Orange-red dust washed out of my hair and skin, and pooled at my feet. Later I learned that water was inordinately expensive here — which was why those grander residences, the homes of the rich, made such a show of its conspicuous consumption.
With Rosa’s blessing I lay down for an hour and napped. My dreams were turbulent, and I woke unrefreshed.
Rosa prepared me a meal. We sat at her table, near the window that looked out over the city. A sunset towered into the sky, a smear of dusty light. The buildings before me were silhouetted by the setting sun, making a lumpy, cluttered skyline, but lights showed in only a handful of them.
Rosa’s food was surprisingly good. They were local dishes, she said. She served me a fish soup with bread and twists of bitter orange peel; she called it carrochenas. Then we ate bowls of broad beans with chunks of cured meat, habas de la rondena. But the meat was gen-enged ham, chunks hacked from some brainless, cubical, undying mass in a factory somewhere; I found it a little bland, watery.
We exchanged small talk about the family. Rosa didn’t seem very interested. In that she was more like my mother than George. But she knew about Tom, and his escapade in Siberia.
And she knew all about Morag. She raised the subject even before we’d finished the beans.
“Let’s get this out in the open before we go any further.” She tapped her dog collar with a bent finger. “Is this what you’re looking for, Michael? Bell, book, and candles?”
“I came because George thought it would be a good idea.”
“Ah, George, my dear long-lost brother. The ultimate family man. This is his instinct, you see; when faced by a problem, you should wrap it up in the clinging webs of family. Maybe if he’d had children of his own the antics of his siblings and nephews wouldn’t matter so much to him — not that I’m one to talk. Well, perhaps he’s right. If I take what you say at face value, we’re dealing with a haunting here. Who better to come to than a priest?
“And where better to come than such an old country as this?” Columbus himself had a tomb here, she told me, in Seville’s cathedral, which was itself built on the site of a mosque erected by the Muslims who had once occupied southern Spain. “We’re soaked in history, drenched in ghosts. Why, once Seville was known as a center for necromancy, which is the art of calling up ghosts deliberately, to gain information about the future. Queen Isabella put a stop to that! Now the crowds of history have receded, and we have new populations of ghosts to deal with. Millions of them.” She leaned toward me, staring, and a deeper silence seemed to seep into the room. “Can’t you feel it? The stillness of an empty city?”
I felt claustrophobic, resentful. I sat back and pushed my food away. “Look,” I said. “I’m grateful for your hospitality. The food. But—”
Her eyes glittered. “But you don’t feel I’m being respectful enough about your precious experience.”
“Precious?” I shook my head, my irritation growing. “Do you imagine I’m some neurotic old fool? Believe me, I don’t want this to be happening to me.”
“I think you’d better tell me about Morag,” Rosa said quietly.
I calmed down. “I met her, oh, twenty-seven years ago. She was a couple of years younger than me. She was actually a friend of John, my brother.”
Rosa raised an eyebrow at that.
“She was a bio-prospector then. She spent her time searching for new species of ascomycete fungi. Do you know the significance? The ascomycetes have yielded about ninety percent of our antibiotics, even though, up to then, we’d only identified around twenty percent of the species thought to exist…”
Rosa said, “A very modern vocation.”
Anyhow we’d married, and we were very happy, and we had Tom. After that my work had kept me away from home a lot, but Morag had got pregnant again even so. And then — well, Rosa knew the rest.