Eidon Mountain rose up suddenly as we came around a bend, and the orange cliffs fell away and became a wide valley plain ringed by red mountains, steep and abrupt and obscured by a haze in the distance, small low clouds clinging around their bases.
Through the middle of the red floodplain ran a river, a slim line in the sun. It showed black on the valley floor and the city sprawled around its length, winking with small shards of light reflecting off the glass of apartment buildings which sat oddly shrunken beneath the mountains.
Out to the west beyond the edges of the city were flat slabbed rows of solar panels, enormous, blunt, bright.
These solar panels were famous for being the largest in the country.
Power lines ran back from them and powered all of the city, and other lines ran underground and went out through the mountains and farther, to other cities and other towns. So this place sat out in the dry heat, a big shiny plate collecting sunlight, all this sunlight pooling in and spilling in on those plates, and then those plates and their atoms soaked up more and more of that sun and the little electrons buzzing around those atoms got more and more of that energy and as they got more and more of that energy they spun faster and eventually careened off on their own little paths, zipped off, little bundles of negative charge, and all sped in one great enthusiastic wave in search of something positive and thus made an electric current. And that electric current went speeding along tubes that branched and branched and ultimately became the movement of a hairdryer fan or the chatter of a TV screen.
We wound down toward the city.
The lower we got into the valley the hotter it got in the little car.
Wade Potts rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioning, and cold air which smelled of plastic began to move about.
The hula girl on the dashboard swung violently.
Cal said, “Jesus. This place holds the heat.”
And Wade Potts laughed and said, “You should come here in the middle of summer.”
The road widened into a six-lane highway and filled up with cars and became a choked-up tide of slow-moving traffic. Horns blared and Wade blared his. It was very loud.
He said, “When in Rome.”
I looked out of the window.
Around us cars crawled on toward the city.