In the Seville area the refugees had gathered here on the Reef, for there was no other place for them to go in the desiccating countryside, nowhere they were welcome. They slept in the warmth of the vast rotting heaps of garbage, and they had begun to burrow into it, alongside the rats and gulls and the crows and the beetles, a whole community of scavengers who had got there before them.
“And, of course, the scavengers began to eat other scavengers,” Rosa said. “Before long a kind of food chain established itself.”
“With the people at the top?”
“Not necessarily,” Rosa said. “Remember the crows.”
They survived, or some of them. People bred young and died early in such a situation. Soon there were children running around, whole generations of them who had known nothing but this garbage-world.
But the city had kept on dumping its trash here regardless. It was a vast denial of reality, that the citizens of a still-prosperous city like Seville could simply ignore the gigantic heaps of rot they continued to create, and the hapless people who now lived there. And this wasn’t the only garbage-dump city on the planet; there were others near Lagos and Manila, Beijing and Vladivostok — even a few, Rosa told me to my surprise, in the U.S.A.
Rosa had been one of the first local priests to try to make contact with the inhabitants of the Reef. “In those days it was like a circle of hell,” she said. “There was famine and disease, and no government, no control, no policing. The police and army just fenced the place off, and left whoever and whatever was inside the perimeter to consume themselves, and rot. So crime was rife. The bad guys from Seville used this place as a mine of human flesh to do what they wanted with — even just target practice, sometimes. Imagine that.”
Things had changed in the late 2030s when the Stewardship money had started to flow. Suddenly people discovered they had a conscience after all.
Seville turned its attention to the vast blister on its doorstep. But those early do-gooders, following in the steps of Rosa and others, found their efforts were not welcome. “The Reef had become a home,” Rosa said, “a way of life.” After that the authorities had taken a more subtle approach. The police had worked more carefully to establish a presence, and Stewardship money was used to establish a basic human infrastructure, schools and hospitals and the like.
“But the local economy is still the same,” Rosa said, almost proudly. “And the ecology. People live off the garbage — and not just by barbecuing rats, either.”
She said that gen-enged bacteria had been loosed on the Reef. Bugs that could eat oil were working their way through the contents of the leaking engine blocks and fuel tanks in the mound beneath me, cracking waste oil and gasoline into more useful hydrocarbons and other chemicals. Other bugs devoured polyurethane plastics and other “non-biodegradable” components of the car corpses. Even hydrogen could be harvested, she said. Collection plants had been set up around the base of the Reef, at the outlet of systems of drainage pipes through which all this reclaimed treasure was collected. “All very modern, don’t you think? We live in an age of margins, where there is money to be made from reprocessing the garbage of richer times.”
As the population of Spain continued its precipitous decline there had been an obvious motive to open up this community: the families of the Reef were unusually fecund for the time and there were lots of kids running around, kids who might be employed usefully to keep the nation functioning.
By now, Rosa said, the Reef was integrated into Spanish society. It even had zip codes. After a vast citizenship program, some Reef babies had grown up to become lawyers and doctors and engineers and politicians. Many had gone to live and work in more salubrious parts of the country, or even abroad — but not all; some had stayed to work for the strange community that had fostered them.
Something scuttled over my foot, startling me. It was an insect. I bent down and grabbed it between my thumb and forefinger. It looked like a beetle, but it had an unfamiliar blue-green sheen to its carapace; I’d never seen anything like it. I showed it to Rosa.
“Keep it. It might be a new species.”
“Really?”
“Garbage tips are the modern crucibles of evolution. And we created them.” She clenched a fist over her heart, ironic. “It gets you right here, doesn’t it?”
I tried to make out Rosa’s fascination with this place. “You keep talking about the Reef — ecology, evolution, food chains — as if it’s one big ecosystem. And you talk as if the humans here are just part of the ecosystem themselves, just another kind of scavenger.”
For a moment, as she peered out over the metallic slopes of the Reef, she was silent. I had time to smell the food cooking, an aroma of hot butter and seafood.
Rosa said slowly, “An ecosystem. So it is. In a way, now that the government has moved in, the place has lost some of its fascination for me. It’s safer, yes, and life expectancy has shot up. But not so interesting…”
Even when she had first come here, she said, the place hadn’t been as lawless as she had feared.
“I imagined either simple chaos, or gangsters and warlords, chieftains wielding crude power based on threats and intimidation. There was some of that, of course. But from the beginning the Reef was simply too big to be governed in such a way. And the refugees were not a homogenous mass; they trickled here from all over. Chances were you could talk to your neighbor, but not to somebody on the other side of the mound. Without communication centralized power was impossible. Nobody knew what was going on; nobody was in overall charge.”
Instead, she said, the nascent community had organized itself.
If you worked on the Reef, struggling to survive, your best bet was to do what your neighbor was doing. If you saw her digging, you dug; if you saw her fleeing, you fled. “And that way,” Rosa said, “through local interaction and feedback, a community emerged, evolving bottom-up.
“When the government first began to open up the place, they sent in sociologists and complexity specialists to study what was going on. They found a collective organization that made almost maximally efficient use of the resources of the Reef as a whole. And this was achieved by groups who shared no common language. They just worked it out as they went along.”
“Like an ant colony,” I said, with faint disquiet.
“And it worked almost perfectly. A perfect human machine.” She actually sounded wistful.
It was a tone of voice I had heard from her before, when she had hinted at aspects of the Order in Rome that had taken her in. I put together the little I had gathered about it: Crowding. Underground. Swarming with people. I wondered what the Order truly was — and why it had expelled Rosa. Whatever the truth, it was evident to me that she had spent her life since seeking its reflection in other things, even in this extraordinary place, the Reef: she had spent her life longing to go back.
Our lunch arrived, heaps of steaming food served on clean hot plates by our grubby-faced landlady. Rosa told me it was a local variant of paella, called fideos a la malaguena, peppers and shellfish, with spaghetti rather than rice. The pasta and peppers were fine. But the shellfish, mussels and clams, were dark and gritty. I wondered from what dark ocean they had come, and pushed them aside.
Our lunch was cut short by an alarm. It was a mournful siren that sounded from far away, like the cry of some immense beast raising its head from the sea of garbage. The landlady came out of her kitchen, wiping her hands. She peered up at the sky and muttered.
Rosa and I stepped outside the cavelike restaurant. The cause of the alarm was obvious. Coming from the north was a murky red cloud that towered high above the glinting shoulder of the Reef; its upper levels thrashed and writhed, purple. The light was already failing.