Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Reath said gently, “It was a superhuman experience. Literally.”

  Or it was like being drugged, Alia thought uneasily.

  “You have fulfilled the three Implications. You’re one of the Elect now, Alia. You have entered the outer circle of the Transcendence itself.” Reath’s expression was complex, full of pride and longing. “I envy you.”

  “Then why don’t you join me?”

  He smiled sadly. “Ah, but that’s impossible. There are some of us who can never join the Transcendence, no matter how we try—or how much we might long to.” He tapped his skull with his forefinger. “Something missing in here, you see. The defect occurs on worlds scattered across the Galaxy, following patterns we can’t make out. Is it genetic? Or perhaps there are more subtle determinants of human destiny than genes.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “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.”

  Chapter 28

  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 h
ere. 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.

  Our road cut through all this, following its own dead straight line like a Roman road passing through medieval clutter. But a kilometer or so ahead of us the road came to a dead end. A ridge pushed up out of the plain, terminating the road and blocking our way, stretching to left and right as far as I could see. It glittered and sparkled, as if the land was covered in broken glass.

  Rosa was watching my reaction. “That is the Reef,” she said. She leaned forward and tapped the pod’s windscreen. “I think this jalopy has some imaging facilities. . . .” A disc of the screen showed us a magnified image of what lay ahead.

  I saw that the Reef wasn’t natural at all. It was man-made. It was a heap of automobiles.

  Cars upon cars upon cars, piled up, crushed down on each other, glittering with bits of smashed windscreen and gaudy paintwork, the whole thing laced together by a patina of orange rust: there were so many cars they were beyond counting. It was like a vast heaping of dead beetles. And as I learned to work the controls of our pod’s imaging system and turned my gaze, godlike, I saw people crawling, digging, climbing, working at the Reef, everywhere I looked.

  The pod rolled to a stop. Its blister popped open, and the Reef rushed in on me. Suddenly the pod was full of a clamor of voices. You could hear individual shouts close by, and beyond that massed voices like the cries of gulls—and then a wider roar, like waves breaking, the sound of a million voices merging into one.

  Then there were the smells. It smelled like a road. I smelled tar and asphalt and rubber and carbon monoxide, and a sharper stink that might have been tires burning somewhere. I felt immediately nauseous, but I tried to hide it.

  Rosa sniffed up this toxic mix with a look of pleasure. “Ah, bliss. Once the whole world smelled like this, of car. A few hours of it won’t do you any harm.” She was watching me. “I know it’s all somewhat overwhelming.”

  I felt uncomfortable to be under the protective wing of a bent old woman close to ninety. I insisted, “I’m fine.”

  “Just remember, I have masks.” She clambered out of the car, and I had no choice but to follow.

  Away from the smart road surface the ground was just dirt. But it gave slightly as I stepped out onto it, and beetles and spiders and even a few brown-skinned rodents fled from my feet. And the ground was warm, warm beneath my feet. I was standing on the crust of a vast midden, I realized. It was profoundly uncomfortable to walk over that soft, moist, warm surface.

  Now we were out of the pod, some of those vendor types crowded closely, yelling, competing for our attention. Most of them bore sticks and skewers with bits of broiled meat. I didn’t like to think about where that meat had come from, but its smell wasn’t as bad as the general old-car stink. I was taller than almost everybody here, even the adults. The people were dressed in rags, but looked healthy enough, well-fed. But the crowding people brought a secondary smell of sweat and body odor that washed over me. I could hear that some of the vendors’ cries were yells of greeting for my aunt. “Mama Rosa!” She replied in a guttural Spanish; I wondered if this place had its own dialect.

  And over this swarm of human activity the Reef rose up. We were only in its foothills here, and the constituent cars, crushed, mangled, and stripped, were pressed into the dirt, but its shoulder rose mountainously above us all.

  Rosa glanced back at me, grinning, and pushed on into the crowd. There was a danger I would lose her, even in this diminutive mob. I hurried through the sweat and the waving sticks of meat.

  We came to a kind of staircase cut, astoundingly, into the heaping of dead cars. Rosa started to climb. I tried to copy Rosa’s brisk strides, but I stepped gingerly on beaten-flat wings and doors and hoods, and crunched over patinas of broken glass.

  Above my head I heard a confident cawing. A line of big, black, powerful-looking birds peered down at my slow toil with silent menace.

  “Crows,” Rosa said. “They’re a hazard here. They’ll mostly leave an adult alone, but if they see a child they will sometimes try to cut it off. They fly at your head. They herd you.”

  “I never heard of crows behaving that way.”

  “This is a novel landscape, Michael,” Rosa said. “You adapt or die. Keep an eye on the birds.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  Maybe a hundred steps above the ground we arrived at a kind of cave, walled by bits of car, cut into the steepening face of the Reef. There were chairs, tables, and a rough-cut doorway leading through to more chambers within.

  Rosa entered the cave and, with relief, threw herself down on a chair. I followed suit. My legs were stiff from the climb; I thought Rosa had done remarkably well.

  Even the chairs here were old automobile seats, heavily patched with duct tape.

  A woman came bustling from the back chambers. She was dressed in an ancient, shapeless smock, and she was healthily fat, though her face was streaked with grime. When she saw Rosa she fussed over her immediately. “Mama Rosa! Mama Rosa!” They exchanged a few words, and then the woman receded to her back room, to come bustling out with a tray of glasses and a bottle.

  As she poured, Rosa said to me, “I took the liberty of ordering ahead. The dish of the day, so to speak. The water’s local stuff but don’t worry, it’s clean; engineered bugs see to that.” She held up a glass. “Look, it even sparkles.”

  “Rosa, I don’t believe it. Is this is a restaurant?”

  “I don’t think I’d give it as grand a description as that. But they serve good food. The best on the Reef! . . .”

  As we waited for the food to arrive, me nervously, Rosa with anticipation, we talked about the Reef, and its strange history.

  In the late 2020s, as the Americans had ended their long love affair with the car, the Spaniards had followed suit.

  In those pre-Stewardship days Seville had already reached a garbage crisis, and had dumped millions of tons of the stuff in vast overflowing landfills. So for the people of Seville there was only one logical place to get rid of their suddenly useless cars, and that was in the foul-smelling, rat-swarming trash city just over the horizon. The dumping had caught on, and soon cities in the rest of Spain were paying Seville to take on their own refuse, too. “An early example of negotiating for ecological credits,” Rosa said dryly.

  Eventually the detritus of the automobile industry of a modern nation had drained here, gathered up by the mechanical muscles of grinders, diggers, and crushers into this great ridge of dead cars. And all the time garbage had continued to pile up around it.

  “So the Reef was born. People were already here, picking over the garbage, trying to make a living out of it. But then there was a flood of newcomers. In the 2020s southern Spain was wide open to refugees, especially from Africa. At the Gibraltar Straits you only have to cross a few kilometers of water. . . .”

  The final days before the Stewardship had been a time of increasing panic, of a sense of helplessness as problems spiraled out of control. Among the worst was the spread of infectious diseases out of the tropics, like dengue fever, encephalitis, and yellow fever. Uncle George used to say it had been bound to happen. We were tropical animals, he said, who had found a way to live out of the places where we had evolved, all the way to the poles, so it was no surprise that the diseases that had evolved with us should eventually follow. He was right. As the world warmed up and mosquitoes and ticks were able t
o survive at higher latitudes, the diseases spread out of their traditional ranges, driving human populations before them.

  Floods of refugees had broken into Spain and headed for the cities of the south, seeking work, succor, help. “And of course the refugees brought with them the diseases they had been trying to flee,” Rosa said grimly. “The authorities couldn’t keep these plague-ridden undesirables out of the country. But they could keep them out of the towns.”

  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.”