Derek wanted to ask more but I spirited him away.

When we returned to our home in the tower, we talked frankly with one another for the first time. We took wine from our refrigeration compartments and shared it in the translucent drinking vessels that had come with our apartment, and we sat down on the couches of the gathering room, with no real light needed as we could see lighted towers all around us.

Garekyn who has always been more aggressive than the rest of us, more prone to sharp questions as well as solutions, spoke up immediately.

“If there are truly no stores of energy on this island,” he asked, “if there are only places for using water and places for using the light of sun, how are we to make an explosion big enough to set off the fatal chain of explosions?”

But Derek didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “What is so evil about the people of this city,” he asked, “that the Parents want all of them dead, all of them and the Wilderness people who have been sheltering us and helping us for the last three months—all to be reduced to primal dust or soup! How can the Parents believe this is right?”

“Maybe we are not seeing deeply,” Welf suggested. “We need to give ourselves time.”

We talked over everything that night, and then went back to simply living in Atalantaya and witnessing everything the city had to offer. Within days we realized that erotic coupling was free and easy in Atalantaya with none of the rules that had prevailed in the villages of the Wilderness lands. And that people were in the main highly protective of and friendly to little children even though these children were not their own. People formed families both large and small, and respect for the very elderly was what we call today the norm. Elderly people, in fact, had the greatest freedom to do just about anything they wanted to do. People rose and bowed to the elderly, offered them tables in crowded restaurants, fell silent when the elderly spoke, and stepped aside for them on the street.

Life was busy in Atalantaya. People had places to go and things to do.

Within a matter of days we witnessed the creation or growth of a tower, an experience none of us was ever to forget. Whatever the damage done to our memories, and our perspective, each of us has remembered the planting of that building and the spectacle of watching it grow.

It was Amel himself who arrived at the garden site as everybody called it and stepped out of a large smooth traveling pod with the “seed” of the building in his hands. It looked like an egg. The time was dawn, just before sunrise, and musicians surrounded the garden with drums, cymbals, and horns. A huge crowd had gathered for this, and we’d been hearing about it for days. Now we saw that people were coming from everywhere to witness this, and that they crowded the windows and the balconies of the towers around us.