The Great Wheel (10 page)

He gazed at the screen. Why, even now, was he still trying to justify himself to Hal? He let the cursor blink and let the silence extend. He could almost hear the humming of pumps, the pop, sigh, pop of the breather, smell the sour tang of antiseptic and bed-ridden flesh. He was wasting money on long-distance silence, but he didn’t imagine that when the net finally edited and input this message into Hal’s skull at some appropriate pause in his endless dream, the monitor would bother to relay any obvious gaps. And what did it matter, anyway, if the monitor did? John thought of the two thin silver wires that curled out from the terminal beside Hal’s bed, snaking across the pillow that his mother changed every day, taped to the side of his cheek at the point where, in a tiny crust of blood, they entered his nose.

“One thing of interest, Hal, is that I’m getting further on the trail of a possible environmental factor in cancer rates in this section of the Endless City. But I don’t know. It’s early yet…

“People in Europe always seem to think that the Endless City is some kind of ungovernable chaos, but in fact, with people living this close to one another, the rules of society are probably more complex than the kind of thing we get at home. It’s just that no one’s ever bothered to write them down. As for belief, religion…”

He gazed at the blank screen.

“As for that, I really don’t know where to begin. I just wish you could answer back sometimes, Hal. I just wish that we could talk the way we used to. I know you’ll have changed, whatever there is of you that’s in there. But I don’t know how. I just sometimes wonder who it is I’m supposed to be talking to. You, or the net…”

He took a breath. So much, anyway, for his priestly bedside manner. He wondered whether he shouldn’t delete the last part of the message, but as it had already been stored at his parents’ house, that would involve resummoning his mother or father to obtain the necessary authority, which in turn would give them the opportunity to listen for themselves to what he had just said.

“Anyway, Hal. Dad’s sending me some powdered asparagus soup, and Mum insists she’s been asking me for some pictures of where I’m staying so she can input them to you. She hasn’t asked before, of course, but it’s a good idea and I’ll get some done as soon as I can. Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking of you. I love you, Hal.”

He touched Exit. His parents’ address faded. He sat in the booth with his eyes on empty screen until the smell of carpets and cooking and new-mown lawns had faded. Then he called a car to take him to the edge of the Zone. A new Fury, Halcycon-logoed, as smoothly anonymous as a beach pebble, it bore him through the orderly wasteland of warehouses.

He climbed out by the shockwire. Here, the stale hot wind was always stronger, and night already seemed to be gathering in the hollow-eyed sockets of the buildings beyond. Pulling on his gloves, nodding to the guard as the gates swept open, John walked towards the weeping lights of the taxis that were always waiting at this time of day to pick up any stray European trade.

The house of Martínez glowed an ethereal cream and pastel in the dimming reddish light. In this heat, the smoke that swirled from the crooked chimney was a sign that someone was unwell: of the burning of soiled paper and linen. The doors and all but one of the shutters hung open, and the two younger children were squatting outside. They hesitated for a moment as John climbed out of the taxi, then they scuttled inside, shouting
Madre!

Martínez was feverish today, and his wife Kailu was plainly angry when John offered the same drugs that she’d already bought herself at the souk. Still, she led John up the narrow stairs and pulled a chair away from the bed for him to sit on. The room had a pleasantly medicinal smell that came from the koiyl leaves that were heaped in a glass bowl on the table beneath the window. Left alone, John sat listening as Martínez muttered and tossed and turned, coughing mucus in a rust-red spray. His big arms were shrunken, and the skin of his fat cheeks was flaccid now. He seemed only half aware of John’s presence, yet he still spoke more in European than Borderer as he talked ramblingly of blue skies, of the time he’d been to Europe on contract. The sun hot on his back. The green ruins of a city. How the tree-tappers flitted like silver birds. Gazing around at the yellow flower-patterned walls, hearing voices booming from a screen downstairs and the children shouting
danna-do,
smelling the kelp odor of cooking from the kitchen, John briefly wondered if it was possible that the work Martínez had done in Europe had been the cause of his disease. But he dismissed the idea. He’d learned long ago that Halcycon wouldn’t permit dangerous processes in their complexes. The harvest work was simply hard and repetitive—and seasonal, migratory. That was why the Borderers did it.

When Martínez seemed to be sleeping, John wiped the chair with dysol and went back down the stairs.

“Comma mal?”
Kailu asked, looking up at him, almost blocking his way in the hall, her gray eyes bloodshot with worry and lack of sleep.

“Fornu…”
His hands a red-green blur, John made a Borderer shrug.

Perhaps he’d used the wrong word, but for a moment, as she let him by and pushed open the door into the street, Kailu’s face seemed to lighten. There’s always hope, he’d meant to imply—although with the translat on, or even in European, hope wasn’t something he found easy to convey. There’s always hope, until all hope has gone.

“Goodnight.”

“Gonenanh.
”

The door closed. Running his fingers around the raised flesh where the white quaternary lines flickered, he checked the time on his watch. Then he walked back up the hill along the Cruz de Marcenado.

A
BARELY TEENAGE BOY AND
girl were camped outside the clinic’s doors. Their woolen djellabas, stiff with sweat and dust, indicated that they came from the Northern Mountains. Whatever they had been wearing on their feet had given out along the way. The girl held a small bundle close to her chest. John realized it was a baby.

He turned on his translat.

“What can I do?”

Ee do hep?

They cringed away from him. They’d probably never seen a European before.

The girl said something that the translat rendered as “Help my baby.”

“Come in.”

Cum ha…

He unlocked the clinic, disabled the alarms, and gestured at the open doorway, trying to smile. There was likely to be little else he could do: anyone who came from beyond the Endless City would be seeking him as a last resort. The family remained huddled at the doorway. Deciding to wait for Nuru, he checked the rodent and insect traps for occupants, then packaged more samples to add to the box in the refrigerator he’d send by taxi to Tim in the Zone. It was grisly job, even with the neatly sealed tubes and cartons that the doctor, a couple of local healers, and workers at the incinerator plant at El Teuf had provided him with. Fishing a blank card from the desk, he activated it and said:

“Tim, I know I’m probably sending you far more than you need. Here’s another card with copies of most of my case files on it. I took it as a backup a few weeks ago. And this card I got from Kassi Moss, the woman who runs the Cresta Motel. I tried playing it here but came up with nothing. So I suspect it’s in binary…”

He fired up the small incinerator and placed the spare tissue samples inside, making the sign of the cross as the fats sizzled. A few minutes later, Nuru arrived and persuaded the family from the Northern Mountains to enter. Eventually, he also succeeded in prizing the baby from the girl’s fear-rigid arms for the doctor to examine, but the tiny body was cold and stiff, with leathery skin and cavernous eyes: it had been dead for at least two days.

When John attempted to say a prayer, the girl bared her teeth in fear and made a sign against the evil eye. Snatching the corpse back from Nuru, she and the boy ran from the surgery. John blinked and rubbed his eyes, breathing the fecal stink of decay that they had left behind them. Surely they’d realized their baby was dead. So had they come all this way to the Plaza Princesa expecting a miracle?

“Peasants,” Nuru said.

“Everyone is someone else’s peasant,” John said. “Have you ever been in the Northern Mountains? Do you know what it’s like there?”

Nuru shook his head, amazed at the suggestion.

“But they’re supposed to grow their own food, aren’t they? They have some independence, they don’t rely on the kelp-beds.”

“They eat pig shit, grow koiyl.”

“Is that where the koiyl leaf comes from? The Northern Mountains?”

“Yep. But don’t Fatoo try the stuff. Nuru’s
gramadre
say it rot your blood.”

John stared at Nuru.
Bludrut.

“Fatoo wanna see next?”

“Yes. But will you do me a favor?”

Nuru smiled and held out his hand.

John took out a coin, wiped it with dysol, and placed it on the surgery desk. Nuru picked it up.

John said, “I want you to buy me some koiyl.”

Later, when Nuru and the last of the patients had gone, John was in the frontroom preparing to lock up when the main door creaked open again, letting in a roseate gust of Magulf wind and light.

Turning, he saw that it was Laurie Kalmar, and automatically took a step back before he remembered her lydrin implant.

“I got your message from my answerer,” she said, picking up from the desk the broken card of one of the old cartons that John had been trying to decipher. She turned it over in her hands. The leaking card trailed a few pinkish-gray nerves. Today, her eyes were green. “So I thought I’d have a look…”

“Did you really get the engineer to come here?”

“It was simple enough.” She wiped her fingers and put the card down.

“No—I’m really curious. How did you do it? It usually takes so long to make anything happen.”

“I had to access some maintenance systems.” She fanned her hands in a shrug. “And I remembered what you’d said. It was easy to break through the right partition. Requests from your clinic will have a much higher priority from now on. I won’t say what priority you were given before…” She smiled.

“I can imagine.”

Dressed in a loose khaki suit and scuffed flat-heeled boots, she made an odd blend of the strange and the ordinary. And what happens, he wondered, when someone finds out that you’ve illegally tweaked the net? And how, anyway, does a young Borderer get trusted enough, and wanted enough, to work on it in the first place?

He showed her around the clinic, finding himself stupidly apologizing for the mess, the litter of books and cards, the empty boxes of drugs that he kept for fear of losing the dosage instructions. She looked at the doctor in the backroom for some time, standing closer than most people did. Sensing her presence, it clicked open its wide middle hip-grasping mandibles in a half-hopeful offer of embrace.

“How
old
is this?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Is it mobile? Do you take it out with you?”

He shook his head, smiling as he tried to imagine walking around the Endless City with this great red-armored knight clanking behind him.

“Do you have any plans this afternoon, Father John?” she asked.

He shrugged. “But I—”

“Then I’ll show you where I used to live.”

Here at last, he thought as he locked up the clinic and followed Laurie out into the Plaza Princesa in the shadow of the bombed-out towerblock, where she’d parked a rusty van, was a Borderer he could talk to—even if she did come from the Zone. Someone who was, but for the color of her eyes, really like him. She brushed away the litter of tube wrappers and tissues from the van’s passenger seat for him, then inserted the card and started the engine. As the van rose and began to slide towards the nearest houses, gathering speed, zooming through a gap and down the narrow street, he decided that if Laurie stopped working on the net, she could always earn her living as a Magulf taxi driver.

She drove him fifteen kilometers west out through the Mella and along the coast to Chott. On the wide concrete ruin of the old highway they overtook vans, donkeys, wagons, big foline-powered twenty-wheelers, sheep, goats, and plodding Borderer families. This was farther out than he’d been before. Here where the road dipped close to the Breathless Ocean, the remains of ancient towerblocks stuck out from slate-colored slime. Laurie explained that they had once been part of a coastal resort, back in the time before the sea rose. Farther on were more kelpbeds, a much earlier project than the ones around Bab Mensor, divided by pipes and narrow concrete piers into a checkerboard that stretched halfway to the horizon across the sea, glossy in the afternoon light.

The old highway climbed where the coastline rose into cliffs. It veered, breaking perilously near the edge before giving out entirely where there had once been an ambitious suspension bridge. In the bridge’s place, situated along a much used track a little more inland, a rickety span had been built out of wood, jelt, and scaffolding. On each side of the drop, children with guns and leaf tattoos on both cheeks were collecting the toll from the queuing vehicles, signaling across the gap to make sure that only one twenty-wheeler occupied the central span at a time.

“Take off your gloves,” Laurie said as they waited in a fog of foline. “And keep your sleeve down over your watch. They’ll charge ten times as much if they see you’re a European.”

He wound down the window, pulled at the threads, and quickly tossed his gloves out before the catalysts began to burn. “Okay now?”

She fumbled amid the old food wrappers beneath the dashboard and passed him a vial. “And drop this into your eyes.”

She laughed when he hesitated. “What’s the problem?”

“This isn’t like you in Trinity Gardens. Out here, I can’t play games with my identity.”

She looked at him, no longer laughing, and he caught the faint seashore Borderer smell that, he realized, didn’t come from the eating of kelp, as he’d always imagined. “Why come to the Endless City if you don’t want to be involved? What is the point…?”

He opened the vial and tilted back his head. As the fluid spilled over his cheeks, Laurie turned up the fans and followed the sixteen-wheeler ahead of them to the lip of the bridge. He touched his eyelids.