The Great Wheel
Authors: Ian R. MacLeod
PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF IAN R. MacLEODThe Light Ages
“A meditative portrayal of an exotic society, fascinating in its unhealthy languor and seemingly imperturbable stasis … so powerfully recalls Dickens’s [
Great Expectations
] that this affinity animates the entire work.” —
The Washington Post Book World
“MacLeod brings a Dickensian life to the pounding factories of London in a style he calls ‘realistic fantasy.’ It’s a complete world brought to life with compassionate characters and lyrical writing.” —
The Denver Post
“Stands beside the achievements of China Miéville. A must-read.” —Jeff VanderMeer
“An outstanding smoke-and-sorcery saga to rival Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy and China Miéville’s
Perdido Street Station
.” —Michael Moorcock
The House of Storms
“Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic, or tragic … But it’s on the character front that MacLeod truly expends his best efforts and achieves the most.” —SF Signal
“One of the finest prose stylists around, and—borrowing as he does much of the melodrama of Victorian literature, along with the revisionist modernism of later authors like D. H. Lawrence—his writing is unfailingly elegant.” —
Locus
The Summer Isles
Winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History
“Projecting Nazi Germany onto the England of the [thirties] is a most effective counterfactual device; and in the opposition of the narrator, historian Geoffrey Brook, and Britain’s Fuehrer, John Arthur, MacLeod sums up very neatly the division in the British psyche at the time, between Churchillian grit and abject appeasement.” —
Locus
The Great Wheel
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“A serious, thoughtful work of futuristic fiction, this haunting novel is a bridge between Huxley’s
Brave New World
and Frank Herbert’s
Dune
.” —
Publishers Weekly
Song of Time
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award
“Confirms MacLeod as one of the country’s very best literary SF writers.” —
The Guardian
Wake Up and Dream
“Set in an anti-Semitic U.S. drifting towards collusion with Nazi Germany,
Wake Up and Dream
slowly picks at the artifice of Hollywood to reveal its morally rotten core.” —
The Guardian
Ian R. MacLeod
For Gillian
E
VERY YEAR AT THE
time of the harvest carnival, the Borderers came to Hemhill. They came in trucks with darkened windows, came fast down the highway through the ruins of the old city, past the low white houses and on into the big compound at the far end of the valley. For most of the year the warehouses behind the shockwire lay silent, the avenues and huts and wide concrete spaces were empty. But the Borderers rolled back the gates and powered up the shockwire. They filled the doors and windows with light. They fixed and they tested. They set to work.
On clear autumn nights after his bath and his storybook, John would lie in bed and listen as the hum of the compound carried across the fields. When his mother’s kiss and his father’s smile had faded, he liked to think of the Borderers down in the valley, those faceless people working shift upon shift through to morning.
Later, on the best nights, Hal would sometimes look in, sliding the door open to check for a wakeful glint in his little brother’s eyes. It was Hal, sitting at the edge of the bed with his broad figure outlined against the glimmering room, who first told John about the Borderers. He explained how the harvest—the reducing of the hoppers of jelt to fibrous bricks, winnowing the wheat, pressing the oilnuts, draining chloroethane from the tree-tappers netted in the late summer hills—created conditions that were too dirty and dangerous for machines or Europeans.
“I’ve seen the Borderers working,” he once said to John. “And I’ve been in the fields and watched them go by. They’re skilled in ways that we aren’t, Skiddle, and they work hard to earn the money they send back to their homes in the Endless City. Don’t ever believe anyone who says otherwise. Really, if it wasn’t for the color of their eyes, they’d be the same as you and I…”
Hal’s voice rose and then faded as he leaned down to kiss John goodnight. He stood up from the bed and the door closed and his footsteps passed into silence along the landing, and gravity shifted as once again the room filled with the hum of the compound riding on the darkness down the valley. John thought of the Borderers working and of the city from which they came, of the Endless City, dark and empty as he now saw it, abandoned like the compound in the times between the harvests, yet infinitely vast. In his dreams, he wandered those soundless streets alone, was swallowed in the loneliness of black windows and untenanted doors, of turns and alleys and avenues unfolding forever into vacant squares beneath a sky without moon or stars.
T
HE SACRIFICIAL GOAT, WITH
polished hooves, horns dyed red, coat washed pearly white, was tethered to the back of a ribbon-draped truck. The crowds along Gran Vía were cheering as it passed, shaking their fists, throwing scoops of mud and dung, spitting chewed reddish wads of the local leaf, shouting words of anger and encouragement.
Father John wiped the sweat from his face and pressed the cloth until it dissolved, then rested his gloved hands back on the sash frame of the top window at the Pandera presbytery, leaning out to watch the procession pass five stories below him. Behind the goat truck came witchwomen clattering teeth and beads, a gamboling clown, skull-faced conjurmen, jostling flags. Then the firefly glitter of excited children waving chemlights. Then the women, widow-black and keening like gulls. Here and there, he recognized the faces of some of his own parishioners.
A voice behind him said: “These people aren’t like us, John. Sit down, sit down. What’s the point in watching them if it bothers you so? Bella will be bringing the tea up in a minute…”
The procession flowed on between the houses. Colors ran like an oil-rainbowed river, red, silver, and gold from luminous fabrics; then came shimmering images from screens slung over donkeys trailing wires and powerpacks. Cartoon monsters and coupling bodies soared, half-solid, into the air. And what were the people singing? John strained his ears to catch the words accented with the guttural Magulf dialect. But even with the translat he always kept hooked to the belt of his cassock, he found the Borderers hard to understand, and the translat would be worthless now: the voices that drifted up with the seaweed smell of massed Borderer humanity ebbed and pulsed like static. The sound was formless, the yawning breath of a mouth surrounded by the clattering heartbeat of bells and drums.
He turned away from the window.
Amply seated, his feet propped on a soiled cushion, Father Felipe studied John though silver half-lidded eyes. “You’ve upset them,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? Upset them by refusing to get involved in their carnival. A lad came to the door here only the other day and asked—”
“It’s not my duty to please these people.”
“Ah, duty!” Felipe rumbled gently with laughter.
John pulled a chair across the gritty floor and sat down. Outside, he could still hear the rumble of the procession. “Animal sacrifice is pointless…wasteful. You think I should misrepresent the Church by seeming to approve of it?”
Felipe scratched absently at a food stain on his cassock. The room was half dark already, and the tiny glowing spines that ran along the fingers of his gloves made a reddish blur. John glanced down at his own gloves, which were still veined a leafy green; he had several more hours before he’d need to pull the thread along the cuff and incinerate them.
“I’ll tell you a little secret,” Felipe said. “I used to join in that procession—when these legs here would let me. Wave that big censer from the back cupboard in Santa Cristina’s chancelry.” He chuckled at the memory. “I’m sure the children used to put some sort of drug in it.”
It was no secret. The children had told John about it when they came up Santa Cristina’s hill in the smoky dusk one evening as he was closing the church and asked him to bless the goat. The old priest was just playing games—or perhaps even acknowledging in a roundabout way that his precedent had put the new and younger man in a difficult position.
“Ah!” Felipe cocked his head and beamed. “Here comes tea.” All John could hear was the sound of the procession drumming like rain, but Felipe had somehow got hold of an expensive ear implant to counter his deafness. He heard everything.
After a long moment, the door from the stairs creaked open and Bella backed into the room with a jingle of china.
“Bless you, my girl.
Gunafana…”
The presbytery maid lowered her head. She had on a thin blue housecoat stained with sweat across the back, arms, and shoulders, and long-sleeved gloves of cheap cotton. Now that winter had ended, she’d also taken to wearing the impregnated facemasks they sold down at the Alcalá souk.
“And spicecake, I see. I really don’t know how you do it. Bella, my dear, you’re a marvel.”
“Thank you, Fatoo.”
“And I suppose you’d rather be out there, eh, my child? Joining in the fun?”
“No, Fatoo. This is my work.”
“Of course! You see, John—here’s another one who understands duty…”
John saw the attentiveness that came into Felipe’s eyes as the young Borderer woman leaned to place the teatray on the low table. Every day those rheumy silver irises sparkled with sudden life as they studied the curves of her breasts.
Bella stepped quickly back. She crossed her arms. Her facemask sucked in, blew out. Framed by it and a fringe of black hair, her big chestnut eyes remained blank. Felipe liked her to wait here with them each afternoon as they took tea, but John hadn’t grown used to having human servants.
“
Tak,
” Felipe said. “You might as well get on with whatever it is you’re doing, Bella.”
Bella lowered her head again. “Yes, Fatoo.”
Felipe watched the sway of her rump as she turned and left the room. The door closed. Her footsteps faded down the stairs as, outside, the carnival procession was now also fading, giving way to the sigh of the hot, ever-present wind. The ceiling fan ticked slowly overhead, circling shadows across Felipe’s face, stirring the strands of hair that he smoothed across his bald pate.
“You’re not the first one, John,” he said, “to come here, to disapprove of these carnivals.”
“I can imagine.”
“I remember there was a blond-haired lad…” Felipe knotted his hands as he searched for and failed to find a name. His fingers squealed faintly, damp with condensation and sweat. “Anyway,
he
thought he could change things.”
“Didn’t you ever want to do that?” John asked. “Change things?”
“Of course.” Felipe took the teacup, blew at the steam, then propped the cup on his belly. “In my youth, I thought I could be anyone, do anything. Of course, I’ve lost that feeling now.”