We had breakfast, watching the storm. I sat beside the closed window, with cups of coffee made of desalinated ocean water, and watched the dust roll in. It was coming on a wind from the north, from out of the peninsula’s desiccated interior, blowing the last of the country’s topsoil into the sea. When it hit us we were sunk in darkness.

The day after that, the dust still lingered. Holed up in Rosa’s apartment, we heard the buzzing of planes. They were seeding clouds over the reservoirs, Rosa said, spraying liquid nitrogen and silver iodide, trying to magic up some rain. Rosa was cynical. She said the planes were just a stunt, designed to reassure the populace that the government was doing something. There was a regional election coming, she said; that was why they were seeding the clouds.

At times it got so dark it was like being under the sea. I looked up at waves gathering and breaking on top of the layer of dust that overwhelmed the city, vast waves towering between earth and sky.

There was no true night on this world of Transcendents.

Enclosed within the opaqued walls of her cabin, with her sister sleeping soundly nearby, Alia was restless. In the silent dark, with no distractions, it was even harder to shut out that unending roar outside the shuttle, and outside her own head.

But as she drifted between sleeping and waking, she found at last what she had been brought here to discover.

It was like a dream. She was aware of herself, lying comfortably on her pallet. She even knew that her sister lay still in the corner of the room, her body a warm mass, her mind folded over on itself.

But the nugget of consciousness that always lodged behind Alia’s eyes seemed to have dislodged, to float freely through the rooms of her mind. And the walls of those rooms were porous — flimsy, translucent — so that a brighter light shone through them, and she heard voices, many of them. It wasn’t the formless clamor that had upset her before, but like distant singing, a massed choir perhaps, the merged voices sweet but scattered by the winds. The glow out there was warm and welcoming, the voices gentle and harmonious.

With an effort of will she pushed her way out through the walls of her head.

Her mind threw up analogies for what she experienced.

She was floating over a landscape. It was dark, but over that velvet ground lay patterns of light, like a system of roads, a glowing threadwork in multiple colors that connected a multitude of brilliant points.

She wanted to see more. She rose up effortlessly.

The floor below was like a starry sky, but inverted, with a vast constellation map written over it. Here and there the links gathered more closely around tightly connected clusters of nodes, which glowed like cities. She saw that the map was not infinite. It closed on itself — not like a sphere, that would be much too literal for this dreamy vision, but with every point connected to every other. The map was dynamic, the links sparking, twisting, reconnecting, and changing constantly. The constant flux was part of the pattern, too; this was a map in time as well as space.

And though the topology of the network changed constantly, none of those shining points was ever left isolated. Each was always joined by two, three, four links to its neighbors, and through them to the totality.

This was the Transcendence,the shining nodes human minds, the links that joined them channels of shared thought and memory. This visual map was a crude analogy, and incomplete, for the merged mind was greater than a simple aggregate of individuals. And yet it helped her to begin to see. Reath had been right: location in space or even time was irrelevant to the Transcendence. This abstract realm was where the Transcendence existed, this no-place, and it was governed not by time or distance but merely by an effort of will.

She saw nothing threatening in this warm interconnectedness. Suddenly she longed to be one of those nodes, to be joined forever in the tremendous friendliness of that topology. She sank down, out of the invisible sky. She passed into the netting, through layers of it, until she was surrounded by glowing mind-nodes. Tendrils of interconnection reached out, probing at her from all sides.

She felt unexpected fear, and for a moment she was back in her body, which turned and twisted on her pallet.

But then the metaphor changed.

There were no more stars and laser-beam threads. Faces turned to her. They were all smiling. And they all looked like Drea, her sister, she thought — or even like Alia herself. As those familiar eyes shone, hands clasped hers, or rubbed her back, her neck, her arms. They moved in closer, until she was surrounded by a comfortable warmth. It was briefly suffocating, and she thrashed again, but the pressure eased. And that slow, reassuring approach began again.

Different metaphors now: hallways opened up all around her, as if doors were flung open to reveal them receding into the distance. Every way she chose to go was open, and every way looked inviting.

She picked a direction. She went that way — not walking, not even Skimming, simply traveling.

Now she was in a kind of library, a place where shelving and stacks receded in every direction as far as she could see, side to side, up and down. People worked here patiently, consulting records, moving them from one corner of this vast archive to another. The librarians’ forms were undefined, their attention devoted to their work. She couldn’t see how they moved about, as there was no floor to walk on — but that was irrelevant; it was only a dream. And though the archive stretched off to infinity in every direction, she could somehow see other archives beyond its remote walls, other centers of knowledge, remembrance, wisdom.

This was another obvious metaphor, constructed by her mind as it struggled to interpret the flood of new information it was receiving. This was memory, the pooled memory of the Transcendence. And all of it would be accessible to her, as accessible as her own memories always had been, whenever she willed it.

Now there was a change in the way the patient librarians were working, she saw. Some were making a space in one block of shelves, and others were bringing in a new stack of material, its details too remote to make out. She knew what they were doing. That was her own pitiful heap of memories, her whole life of a mere few decades dwarfed by the great banks of knowledge here. And yet she would be given a place here; she would be cherished. Others would be able to access her memories as easily as she could, just as she could reach the memories of others — and even the greater collective experiences of the Transcendence itself, which she perceived now as shadowy mountains of information looming beyond the bounds of the archive.

And, constantly remembered, the memories that defined her need not die with her — and so she need not die, not ever. She had no need of Reath’s “immortality pill”; in this chill, remembered sense, she was already an undying.

She rose again, lifting up through some impossible dimension, so that the whole of the Transcendence opened up around her. Now in her metaphoric perception it was as if she was in a starship, in a hold so vast she could barely make out its walls. Huge, dimly seen masses drifted through the receding gloom. But even this space was not the full extent of the ship, for corridors and walkways led away, receding in every direction, all around her, leading to hollow, silent spaces she could never reach, not if she explored for many lifetimes. This was the mind of the Transcendence. But all she saw was merely a fraction of the vastly complex infrastructure of this place, this mind.

Even now she was still outside the Transcendence, in a sense. She was still herself, still small and closed-over and complete. But there was a place for her here in this immense cathedral of mind. All she had to do was take one last step.