Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

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.

  I told Rosa all this in fragments, but she listened patiently. That skill was the result of forty years as a priest, no doubt, but it was effective nonetheless.

  I felt uncomfortable, though, when I talked of Tom and Morag. I knew how unhappy he was that I had come here; I felt I could sense his hostility all the way across the Atlantic.

  “And now she’s come back to you,” Rosa said.

  “So it seems.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  “I don’t know! I wish I did.”

  “And do you want it to stop?”

  I could answer neither yes or no; either would have been true, either a lie. “I want to understand,” I said at last.

  She reached out. When her dry fingers touched the back of my hand I felt a jolt, almost like the static shock I felt earlier. “Try to be calm,” she said. “I just needed to be sure you were sincere.”

  “Of course I’m sincere.”

  “Well, now we both know that, don’t we?”

  While she learned about me, I found out about her. Uncle George had told me something of Rosa’s story. During that meal I began to learn a little more.

  She had been born in Manchester, England, as George had been, nearly ninety years ago. But when very small she had been sent to Rome, and given into the care of a Catholic fringe group called the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins—the Order, as George referred to it. George himself had been so young he had forgotten he even had this second sister, until by chance he came across a photograph in the effects of his deceased father.

  The Order was a teaching group. Among other things. Rosa had been raised by them, and when she grew up had gone to work for the Order.

  When he was in his forties, George had discovered Rosa’s existence, and he went to Rome to loo
k for her. This had coincided with some kind of crisis in the Order. The sequence of events had resulted in Rosa being expelled from the group, and for a time she faded from George’s life again.

  It turned out that after her expulsion from the Order Rosa had stayed within Catholicism. She had gone to a seminary and eventually taken holy orders to become a priest. Now, I learned, she served a scattered parish that covered much of the northern suburbs of Seville, and poorer communities outside the city boundaries. She had been here for three decades, and she was still working, with no intention of retiring as long as her strength held out.

  Her story struck me as strange, in those first tellings. The Order had been prepared to take her in because, it seemed, there was some deep and old family connection between the Pooles, my mother’s little nuclear family in Manchester, and the Order in Rome. But for a family to send away a child, for good, was a bafflingly painful thing to do. And then for the parents to lie about it to George, their son, to keep secret the very existence of a sister, seemed a terribly cold and calculating deception.

  And then my own mother, that bit older than George, probably remembered it all. Had she never thought to tell George about Rosa, before he stumbled across the secret for himself? But my mother had never discussed any of this with me either. Generations are like that, I suspect; even though I was in my fifties my mother still kept her problems from me, as if I were a child.

  Still, Rosa’s account of herself was a hollow story, I thought, a listing of events without real heart. I wondered how much more of it I would have to learn before I was done—and how much I really wanted to know.

  “Are you a believer, Michael?”

  “In the Christian God? I guess not. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m not sure if I am, despite this.” She flicked her collar. “But I’m convinced that everything we humans do has some evolutionary purpose, or else we wouldn’t do it. And I believe that priests, and the witch doctors and shamans that came before them, have a crucial role to play, regardless of their theological justification.

  “When I first came out of the seminary, and accepted my first post at a parish here in Seville, I imagined I would be strong enough to cope with what the job threw at me. After all I had been through some grueling experiences myself.” Her face worked briefly, but she didn’t elaborate. “I was wrong. I was shocked.

  “I found I was a conduit, Michael. That was my role. A conduit into which people were able to flush their pain and their fear. And, believe me, there is plenty of that, even in this place where there are hardly any people left. I was nearly overwhelmed, a mote in a dust storm. But my seniors counseled me, and I came to understand my duty, which was to stand firm in the face of that great flooding of misery.”

  I said cautiously, “And—experiences like mine? You’ve come across such things before?”

  “My faith teaches us that the world is a subtler place than is revealed by our blunt senses, Michael. You have to believe that much, whether or not you buy the Christian explanation. And, yes, sometimes I have been exposed to experiences that you would describe as beyond the natural. You’re an engineer, aren’t you? You are probably uncomfortable that something so irrational is happening to you.”

  I never liked being pigeonholed. “I like to think I’m broader-minded than that,” I said.

  “Well, perhaps you are. You’re here, after all. And now that I’ve met you I’m quite prepared to believe that you aren’t mad, or delusional, or a liar; something really is happening to you. What we must work out is what it means.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Why, nothing. You say that Morag comes to you, without your choosing it. Then let her come to you again, and we will see what we will see.”

  “And if she doesn’t come?”

  She smiled; I thought I detected a trace of contempt in her expression. “Then you’ve nothing to worry about, have you?”

  We had been drinking wine. It was fortified, a kind of sherry, but light and very dry, with a strange salty tang. Rosa took hers with a little water. She said the wine was called manzanilla, and was matured only in a town to the southwest, where the Guadalquivir met the Atlantic Ocean, which perhaps explained the subtle saltiness.

  Rosa opened the glass doors to her balcony, and we walked out. We were looking west, where the sky was still stained by the dusty sunset, but at the zenith bone-white stars were starting to appear. The air was cooling, but it was still so dry it burned my throat. There were few lights to be seen in the darkened landscape of buildings, homes and shops, restaurants and bars, and a kind of dense silence settled over the town, a silence so rich it seemed to roar, dully, like the blood in my ears.

  Rosa had brought a little jug of water with her, and now and again she tipped some into her wine. “You are sure you don’t want any of this? . . . Customs are changing, you know. In some houses these days good fresh water is presented as the finer drink. You wine your water rather than the other way around!” She held up the jug to the sky, peering into the water; it was slightly cloudy. “But this wouldn’t pass muster in the best households. Desalinated ocean water, pumped up here from Almunecar on the coast.”

  “Water’s scarce here.”

  “Of course. It’s the same all around the planet. A midlatitude, midcentury blight,” she said. “Spain is a big square box of land and mountains, and for twenty years, I suppose more, it has been drying out, desiccating. Luckily for the Spanish they already had extensive experience of water conservation, desalination, all the other disciplines of drought. I remember when I first came here there was a vast scheme to water the Almeria, the desert region to the east. It would be the world’s greatest tourist resort, greater than Florida, with golf courses and holiday homes by the tens of thousands. And they promised to make plants and grasses so salt-resistant you could irrigate them with untreated seawater. Ha! Now it is all gone, and we are plagued by dust.”

  “I noticed it today.”

  She ran her finger over the balcony rail; the pad of her finger came away pink with grime. “The cleaning machines polished this only this morning.” She rubbed her fingers together, and the dry dust trickled to the floor. “There it is,” she said. “All those golf courses and holiday homes, and the salt-resistant rice and alfalfa and corn, all blown up into the air . . . Hush.” She raised a finger and peered into the dark.

  I heard a rustling, coming from the alley below me. “What is it? A mouse, a rat?”

  “Possibly. Though there isn’t much for them to eat anymore. It may be a robot, another of our guardian-angel machines, earnestly keeping the streets safe for old folk like me. I sometimes wonder—I’m told that the machines are as smart as dogs, or even some cats. When they have run out of vermin to eliminate, what will they do for sport? Will they turn on each other? . . .”

  “Why is Spain so empty? What caused this depopulation?” I was faintly ashamed of my ignorance.

  “The drought hasn’t helped,” Rosa said. “But the change has come from humanity, Michael, from inside us.”

  Some time around the turn of the century, people all over the world just stopped having so many children. For a while the effect was masked; the end of the last century saw the biggest population bulge in human history, and as that vast cadre grew to childbearing age they flooded the world with yet more kids. But the bulge soon worked its way through the demographics, and the decline cut in.

  Rosa said, “In Spain, the government became alarmed. It was thought at first that it was simply a choice of women taking control of their own bodies, on a mass scale perhaps for the first time in history. Spain, along with other countries, put in place more civilized child-care facilities—robots helped with that. More subtly, they tried to renegotiate gender roles, the unspoken contract between men and women. I watched all this from outside, of course. Quite a spectacle! Some of this social engineering worked, for example in the United States. But not in Spain, Italy, Greece, the more conservative, patriarchal countr
ies. There, traditions are too deeply rooted to be shifted, even in the face of population collapse.

  “But I think it’s all a lot deeper than a simple matter of stay-at-home fathers and day-care nurseries—don’t you? After all profound instincts are being defied here: the instinct to propagate the tribe, to fill the world with your brood, all the antique Iron Age drives that have enabled us to cover the planet. But now some other, more mysterious motivation is taking hold. Once people came here in great waves, the Romans and the Visigoths, the Moors and the Christians. And now they are leaving again—not going anywhere, just disappearing into lost potentialities. And when they’ve gone, there will be nothing but this aching emptiness. But it feels right. Don’t you think? It suits the times.”

  “I’m surprised you’re happy to live alone like this.”

  “At my age, you mean? Oh, I’m safe enough. I’m surrounded by machines, as we all are. Pointlessly intelligent, all of them. Machine sentience is now omniscient and omnipresent, just as we once imagined God to be—ha! I am sure they would not let me come to any harm.”

  “What about crime?”

  “I have no fear of that. Criminals prefer crowds, too. If I ever really feel I need people, I go to the more popular parts of town—El Arenal by the river, where the Plaza de Toros still stages fights between men and robot bulls, or Santa Cruz, the old Jewish quarter. And that is where the criminals go, too. And the crows and the rats . . .”

  “But you prefer to stay here,” I said. “Away from the lights, the people.”

  “I go where they need me,” she said. “But, yes, I prefer the silence. Sometimes you can feel it rise up around you, the emptiness, coming out of a thousand abandoned buildings, a million rooms empty of everything but garbage. I feel as if I’m in a tiny lifeboat, adrift in emptiness.”

  “And you like to feel that way?”

  “Where I grew up was rather different,” she said. “Somewhat crowded. Perhaps, late in life, I am enjoying the contrast.”

  “Aunt Rosa, I think you spend too much time on your own.”