“Don’t be. We have our place, we eunuchs. Do you know that term? We can serve the Transcendence in a unique way. We are useful — for we are no threat to it, you see.”
She frowned. “The Campocs were right.”
“About what?”
“It’s full of regret. The Transcendence. That’s why it’s driving the Redemption. It’s as if it is tortured… But I had thought all that regret arose from the Transcendence itself.”
“It doesn’t?”
Alia remembered now, a bit of her dreamlike experience becoming more lucid. She had glimpsed those deep dark knots of folded-over awareness, like pellets buried in a loaf of bread. And from those pellets, poison leaked. “Not from all of it. From the undying. ”
Reath said, “Remember the undying initiated the joining in the first place. They are the foundation stones of the edifice of the Transcendence. And so, of course, they are shaping it. The Campocs are afraid of the impulse to Redemption. But you’ve seen it now. Are you afraid?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know enough to be afraid. The Transcendence may be like a god. But even as it is being born, it is a wounded god. Isn’t it rational to be afraid of that?” And maybe, she speculated now, somewhere in its deepest, secret heart the Transcendence was developing its obsessive Redemption in new and strange ways she had yet to understand.
Reath said, “Will you go back? You must, you know. It must be difficult — I can’t even imagine! But the only way to cope with it is to try, to grow—”
“I want to know more about the Redemption,” she said briskly. “Perhaps that way lies a deeper truth.” Perhaps, she thought, a truth not even known to the Transcendence itself. In which case, it was surely her duty as a good Transcendent-Elect to increase its own self-awareness.
Reath nodded gravely. “Then,” he said, “if that is your feeling, we must take you to the engine of the Redemption.”
The dust storm cleared, and the forecasters said we could expect a clear twenty-four hours. At least I thought they said that; the forecasts were littered with unfamiliar symbols and novel dust-storm jargon. In a Spain slowly turning into a bit of Mars, the weather forecasters had to learn new tricks.
In that clear slot, Rosa offered to take me on a jaunt out of the city, to “a kind of outer suburb,” she said. “It’s become the heart of my mission here. Even though you won’t find it on any map.”
“What’s it called?”
She treated me to a little Spanish. “The locals call it the Reef. ”
I was puzzled. “Sounds like a theme park.”
“Not quite,” she said dryly. “Oh — you’d better take this.” She handed me a pill.
I studied it dubiously. “What is it?”
“Protection. General-spectrum. Some gen-enged antibiotics, a little nanotinkering, that sort of thing. The U.S. Consulate insists you’re covered before you get within five kilometers of the Reef. Probably overcautious, but why take a chance?”
After three days with Rosa her ghoulish humor irritated me. And I was starting to feel nervous about this new leap into the dark. I took the damn pill.
A small cab pulled up outside Rosa’s apartment building. A sleek, silent bubble of plastic and ceramic, its hydrogen engine emitting the subtlest puffs of white water vapor, it was done out in papal yellow and adorned by a stylized Christian cross. We clambered inside. The air-conditioning was cool, crisp, and moist, the seats were soft and deep, and there was a fragrant new-carpet smell.
The pod slid silently away. The streets of Seville were empty as usual, and I was childishly disappointed; I don’t think I’d ever ridden in such luxury, and I would have been pleased to have an audience. This pod was actually a private vehicle, fabulously expensive, owned and run by a consortium of the local churches, to whom this Reef was evidently important.
As we moved out into the city’s hinterland I looked back. All but the grandest buildings were coated with Paint, silver or gold; in the harsh Spanish sunlight Seville shone like a gaudy movie set. Rosa told me that the photovoltaics attached to all those empty buildings garnered more energy from sunlight than the Sundial itself; even empty the city made a profit for the nation.
Traveling north, we left the city proper and headed into a landscape that opened up around us, bare and flat. Our road, modern, surfaced with silvertop, arrow-straight and quite empty, cut across the dirt.
We passed abandoned farms, where the dust had overwhelmed low walls or piled up in the lee of the buildings. There were signs of past dust storms, drifts like dunes that had been bulldozed from the road. In some places there had been attempts to stabilize the dunes with grass, but the grass looked yellow, sparse, dry. Along one stretch of road the dunes had been entirely coated with pitch. They looked very unearthly, like huge, oddly graceful black sculptures.
I saw a plume of smoke rising up from beyond the north horizon, where we were headed.
“Methane burn-off,” said Rosa simply. “Been burning for decades. Don’t worry about it. Your pill should protect you.” She tapped a small pack at her waist. “Or if not, I brought masks.”
We began to pass buildings. They were just shacks, boxy constructions with unglazed windows and chimneys, strung out beside the road. Spindly TV aerials poked at the sky. Some of the plots even had little gardens, where stunted olives or orange trees struggled for life. As we drove past children came running out of the houses to stare. Some waved, or made coarser gestures at us, sealed in our high-tech bubble.
When I looked more closely I saw that the shanties and shacks were made of ceramic and metal, sheets of it shaped and battered: material obviously sliced from the carcasses of automobiles. Those “windows” bulged, too; they were windscreens or side windows. One woman in her front yard ground some kind of corn on a metal bowl that had obviously once been a hubcap. A group of children ran by, playing with a kind of cart that ran on “wheels” made of sliced-up bits of an exhaust manifold.
The buildings were constructed almost entirely of bits of dead car.
As we drove on the shantytown shuffled closer to the edge of the road. Some of the shacks became shops and stalls with open fronts. I could see rows of bottles, and food cooking, meat turning on spits and skewers. There were still a few kids giving us the finger as we passed, but here they were crowded out by adults. Shopkeepers yelled at us and held out samples of their wares, unidentifiable bits of meat on sticks. They seemed to be of all races, as far as I could see, a real melting pot. And many of these people were young, it struck me now; there were plenty of teenagers, adolescents, young adults. Compared to the antique stillness of the traditional city, it was like being driven through a vast nursery.
Safe in our glass cocoon, we could touch, smell none of this. Even the voices were muffled. It didn’t seem real, like a VR theater arranged for our benefit.
“Don’t be afraid,” Rosa said. “Many of them know me. Anyhow surveillance here is pretty good these days.”
“I’m not afraid. Spooked, maybe.”
“Perhaps you haven’t been in Seville long enough. Even I feel disturbed sometimes by the crowding here. The children running around… Ah. We’ve nearly reached the center.”
We passed over a low ridge and began to descend into a broad, wide valley. From this elevation I could see how the shantytown spread out for kilometers around me, the rough shacks carpeting the earth. Smoke rose up in isolated threads, from fires or methane burn-off. Here and there, though, I saw a few better-constructed buildings, blocks of concrete studded among the rubble shacks. Perhaps they were clinics, schools, police stations, welfare offices. And overhead drones flew, like glittering insects hovering over this plain of garbage. I felt reassured by these signs of governance. I guess I’m really not terribly brave.