Page 90 of Sparktopia
Again, I get the feeling that she’s not lying. This is not a show she’s putting on. This really is her very first time seeing such a magnificent city up close. And it’s confusing for me. Because if her storyisn’ttrue, then what could explain her jaw-dropped awe?
I don’t even prod her along. I don’t tell her to stop gaping like a tourist or anything like that. I just let her look so I can watch her reaction.
It’s real. She is genuinely surprised at what she is seeing.
“Do you like it?” I ask.
A breath comes out of her, like she was holding it in. Then she nods and smiles. “I have to admit, it’s… something else.”
“Good? Or bad?”
Her shoulders shrug up, practically to her ears. “Both? I’m not sure. My Tau City was much smaller.” She points to the water. “The canal was… natural. There were beaches on both sides with boulders and little waterfalls spilling over them.”
I look at the canal and picture this as she continues.
“And the bridges. They were not made of that hard-edged stuff.”
“Hard-edged stuff? You mean concrete?” I laugh these words out. Because how does she not know the word for concrete? It’s ridiculous.
“Yeah, OK. That.” But she’s moved on from the bridges and is pointing at the buildings now. “Are these made of glass?”
“Some of ’em. Some of ’em are made of steel. It’s just shiny, so it looks like glass when the sun hits it a certain way.”
“Well, our towers were tall too. But not this tall. And they were just made of plaster and stone, I think.” She looks up at me. “I don’t know how to make buildings. They just didn’t looklikethat.” She points to the skyscrapers. “They looked… natural. Like the canal. Like they fit in with it. All of my city was covered in muted shades of beige and blue. And most of the towers had domes. Sun-bleached blue domes. Almost gray, some of them, because they were so old.”
I picture her city, trying to overlay it across this one. There are a lot of traditional cities still out there, Zeta and Rho being two of the most famous. Both of those still have gods, of course. And no train system so hardly anyone ever goes there. I’ve never gone there. The image I have in my head comes from a textbook.
But Clara’s Tau City would be much the same, probably. If it had a god the way she says it does. Because gods don’t like change and gods don’t like progress. Gods like tradition. Gods like to control the power distribution. Both kinds—the political power and the actual energy grid. Transportation too. Both Zeta and Rho are walking cities. No cars, no bikes, even. Maybe they have horses, but who knows? So this is my next question for her. Just to see what she says. “Did you have a train system?”
Clara reluctantly pulls her gaze away from the skyscrapers and looks up at me. “What?”
“Did you have trains in your Tau City?”
She laughs and looks back at the buildings. “No. We had ruins of trains. And tunnels, mostly caved in though. All that was outside the wall.” She waves a hand in the air like whatever I’m going on about isn’t important to her.
“You had a wall?”
“Yes. It went around the entire city, even the farms.”
“What was beyond the wall?”
“Sand dunes. Mountains. Nothing.”
Tau City, where we are, has sand dunes and mountains outside the metropolitan area as well. But the metro area is so fucking big these days that if you stand on the viewing platform of the highest, southernmost skyscraper, you can actually seeUpsilon City through the public telescopes. So I test this detail out as well. “How far away was your closest city?”
“Closestcity?” She makes a face at me. “There are no other cities. Tau City is the last one standing after the Great Sweep.”
“Huh.” A twist in the mystery. But it’s not helping her far-fetched story in the least. “So you’re from the future?”
“No.” She glares at me. “I never said that. I never said anything like that, so don’t paint me as crazy. I’m just telling you how it was.”
“The simple fact remains, Clara, that your reality and this reality don’t match up.”
She shrugs. “I don’t care. I know what I know. And what I know is that I don’t come from here. I walked through the God’s Tower door and this is just the place I ended up.”
“You’re not even willing to consider that you might be ill?”
“I’m not ill.”
