The Great Wheel (31 page)

“Do you think I should try applying more cream?”

“Best to just let the air get to it for a while each day. Find him a warm place to lie and dry off after his bath. The inflammation’s not coming from outside, Annie, its coming from him. His own immune system is starting to work for the first time, and he’s reacting against this alien presence.”

“
Alien?
”

“Well, it is when you think about it, isn’t it?” he said, thinking, You must see this, Annie, every day outside in the stocks. “I’m sure they’d give him a suppressant if they thought there was any real problem, but it’s generally best to let these things work themselves out on their own.”

The baby was clothed, powdered, put away. John shook hands with Bill and walked with Annie back across the yard.

He said, “I’ll be going back tomorrow.”

“Oh? Right.”

“That baby boy…”

“He’s sweet, isn’t he? I’m so glad we had him.” Annie was looking away. One of her contractors had arrived and was doing something with an odd dome-shaped machine that squatted in the mud, giving off puffs of steam from a curved funnel that projected like the spout of a kettle. “
He
shouldn’t be here today,” she muttered. “Look, I’ll save you the walk and call your car.”

John stood on the worn brick lip of a doorway as Annie went to the nearest screen. By the time his car arrived, she was on the other side of the yard arguing with the kettle contractor. Waving her arms. They were too far away for their words to reach John, but he could catch the sharp European accents of their voices, and the sun, low and golden now, brimmed over the grassy rooftops like a fluid into his eyes. A cock crowed. The Zephyr waited humming beside him. He was tempted just to climb in and drive off.

Then Annie saw him and hurried back over. “You must come again,” she said, pecking his cheek. “When I have more—”

“I still think about you, Annie. The good times. With Hal.”

This time, Hal’s name seemed to pass through her without touching. “I have to dash now. This idiot’s come a day early. He needs someone in the screehopper and that’s muggins here. Bye.”

“Bye.”

John watched her go, then got into his car and drove up the hill. Stopping by the gate, looking back, he saw the kettle rattling across the livid brown-and-green expanse of the early fields of superkale, trailing a scarf of steam. Behind it strode a larger two-legged machine. The machine paused for a moment, turned at an angle, and raised a claw in John’s direction, then strode on.

He drove up the valley, through the woods, and past one of the golf courses where his parents now played. Shadowed by the hills, the figures moved in pairs across a landscape of undulating grass. He saw the lighted balls twirling through the air into the deepening blue sky, then settling into the grass. He didn’t want to go home yet. He turned left, right, waited as a giant machine lumbered past him up the road, walking in a corn-dust haze towards farm buildings and the sunset beyond. He remembered Annie, the flow of moonlight on her body as she undressed when they shared the cabin room at Ley. She and Hal hadn’t been prepared to admit then that they were sleeping together. Thinking back, John really wasn’t sure if they’d ever made love.

The gates at Southlands opened for him. The trees at the far reach of the gardens stretched their shadows across the lawns. Water clattered softly over ornamental rocks. A piano somewhere played a nursery tune. The main doors up the steps of the pale building also opened immediately on John’s approach. The security was good here, this deep into the net. Simplicity of access was just a sign that you had already been monitored and recognized.

The great hall was scattered with chairs, lined with huge paintings of extinct animals, filled with the smells of stone and lavender. A door swung open quicker than John had expected, and he held out his hand, trying not to look surprised. Eliot Farrar had dark hair, a square face, slightly strained and studious eyes.

“This way, Father.”

Here, no one would be surprised to see a priest. John was led along corridors and through open wards. There were voices in the dim air, although they shifted and changed, so that it was hard to locate their source among the shrouded, silver-wired, and screen-surrounded shapes. An eye gleamed. From several beds, the fall of hair; a frozen waterfall. A knobbled foot, the ball of its big toe like polished wood, poked incongruously. This was much the same technology that kept Hal alive, although here it fought a losing battle. What was it now? John wondered. How many years were likely? Fifty-eight? Fifty-nine? Sixty? Now that his parents were close to it, he didn’t want to know. Halcycon would reconfigure the implants, of course, and an extra year or two of life might be gained. But the huge invasion of recombinant technology started an unstoppable clock in the human body; the strain was killing. Your days were numbered. Here were the late-mobile wards. Nowadays, the wheelchairs had no wheels and didn’t possess chairs. They looked more like miniature versions of the great farm implements that many of the ward patients had operated all their lives.

“Virtual reality’s a great bonus when you get to this stage,” Farrar said. An old lady, her eyes fed by wires, hissed and clicked by them. “Sometimes I think you could extend it all indefinitely. Like, ah…” He wiped a hand across his face. “We call in the priest, of course, before we make that final decision. Father Hardimann. You’ve met?”

John pictured the two of them shaking their heads over some helpless case. Then Kassi Moss at the Cresta Motel. “Don’t you find it depressing?”

“Of course.” Farrar shot him a look. “But it’s a necessity, it’s a job. And we consult the family. It’s really up to them. I’m sure you understand that, Father.”

The better cases, still able-bodied, were gathered in a big anteroom with a domed glass ceiling filled with the intense blue of the evening sky and pricked by the first stars. Many came here after a fall at home or some other crisis, only to recover and check out again. Or perhaps they would move for a while into one of the sheltered machine-served chalets that dotted the grounds. For others, for most, this was the beginning of the progression along the wards through which John had already passed. One group, drawn in a corral of high-backed chairs, were laughing and nudging one another at the antics of the actors in a comedy show who argued at cross-purposes and paced, semireal, in the lighted space before them. There was, on the surface, a holiday atmosphere in this big room.

Through illusory gardens scented with pollen, a quavering voice shouted after him. “Look. Isn’t it…?”

John turned. Even without the cassock, he was recognized. But then he heard the hiss and mutter of disappointment, the careful rearranging of limbs, the turning away of eyes. Shaken heads. Not Hal. Hal’s brother. And don’t you remember? Sad. How sad. People, John imagined, who’d taught them both at school. Or served them in the shops. And wasn’t the face over there a strange age-distorted version of Tilly? He didn’t want to ask.

John sat down in Farrar’s office, and the door slid shut behind them, clicking some kind of lock. There was a sudden formality about the occasion as the two men faced each other across the wooden table.

“How often,” John asked, “do you see Hal?”

“Once or twice a week.” Farrar gazed just over the top of John’s head. A tiny nerve in the corner of his right eye was twitching. “But really I go to see your parents, John. I mean, to check their state of mind. I can monitor how they and Hal are doing physically just as easily from here.”

A big screen filled a corner, of a grade even higher than the one Laurie had in the Zone. Spinning stars drifted deep within it.

“What’s that?” John asked.

“That’s how I keep track of the people here. See those two over there?” Farrar clicked his fingers, and the screen scrolled up towards two circling nebulae. The nebulae sailed across the room. “That’s us, sitting here.”

Hovering over the desk, like tiny glowing balls of wire or wool. Each strand, John saw, was alive with swarming lines of AGTC.

“And you can tell where we are?”

“It’s a simple matter of triangulation.” Farrar frowned at the stars. Obediently, they disappeared. “You did say you saw Father Leon?”

“This morning.”

“Did he tell you anything about Hal? I mean, specifically?”

“He said he admired my parents. Most people say that.”

“This, ah…This can’t go on forever.”

“No. Of course. Hal will probably decline and die. We’ve known that for years. My mother still—”

“What I mean, Father John, is that that time may have come already. Is, in fact, overdue.”

John stared back, wondering if Farrar was going to have the nerve to talk about resources to someone who worked at a clinic in the Endless City.

“Hal is hopeless, John. There’s nothing left there to save. You’re an educated man—you know about medicine—you don’t need me to tell you that no matter how close we get to understanding the mind and body, we still can’t isolate consciousness. But there’s no mystery to that. Consciousness is everywhere, it’s a function of life. Look for it in a specific place, and it disappears. But I’d say with certainty that Hal has no consciousness left. Or that, if he somehow does, he’s suffering.”

“Those are two separate possibilities.”

“What?”

But John was grateful to this man for defining the issue, for pushing him into a corner. “I don’t,” he said, “want Hal to stop being alive.”

“Look, I walked you through the wards. You must know by now what it’s like. Your own mother and father—I know, I’ve spoken to them—have been faced with similar decisions about their own parents and relatives.”

“That’s different. People who are aging know that they’ve lived their lives. Hal hasn’t. Not yet. It’s unfinished business. I know
that
”—John heard himself saying—“with a greater certainty than I can probably convey to you. I know it with more certainty than I know anything else in my life.”

“Okay.” Farrar sat back from his desk. “Have it your way, Father John.” From his expression, from the Laurie-like emphasis on the word Father, John didn’t doubt that all the usual battles between medics and priests took place across this table. “But the decision still remains to be taken, I’m afraid. Your parents—and I hate to have to put it this way,” he said, unblinking, “are what? Now?”

“Whatever,” John said. “It’s a responsibility I’m prepared to shoulder.”

The two men regarded each other. The window at Farrar’s back was open. Faintly, John could hear the chatter of water, the sound of a piano playing, could feel the pull of the night. The silence in the room seemed to lapse, and the tension was lost. It became apparent to both of them that, for now, there was no more to be said.

He drove out into the summer dark. All the gates opened for him. He kept the windows down to blow away the heat that had risen to his face. He felt tired, confused, hungry.

The little car hurried along the main road to Hemhill. The occasional lights of other cars flashed by him, but the houses he passed were mostly dark, seemingly deserted. He stopped when he saw the lights of a roadside café. His parents would probably have something waiting for him, cooked hours before and now congealing on the plate. It seemed easier not to bother them.

He took a seat in the café, and the table asked him what he wanted. He shrugged, which would normally have been taken as a signal to recite Today’s Specials, but his body language was too compromised by the ways of the Magulf. The table repeated the question. He chose a green salad and pepper steak.

He looked around. There were a few other people here in the yellow-lit gloom. Solitary diners like himself. People in transit from one place to another. He jumped when the plate arrived, rising through an opening in the table. This kind of arrangement had been a fad of his youth, but now people preferred more traditional ways of ordering and serving. Unless in his absence all this trickery had come back in fashion.

He pecked at the food, which was rich and ornate on his tongue.

“Mind if I sit with you?” It was a woman with close-cropped blond hair, stripes of sunburn across her cheeks.

“Sure.”

She straddled the chair. She wore a sleeveless shirt, and the muscles in her arms and shoulders were sharply defined. Nobody needed to be that fit and strong these days. No European, anyway. He guessed that she used one of the reconfiguring recombinants that Halcycon, amid a maze of warnings, permitted.

“I’m passing through now,” he said. “But this place used to be my home. I mean, Hemhill.”

She nodded, a gold crucifix dangling between her breasts, called up a dry wine from the table, and asked, “Where do you work now?”

“The Endless City.”

“Yes.”

“You can tell? Most people seem surprised.”

“It’s your coloring, and the way you look around. I nearly took a contract there myself.”

They talked. Her breasts, outlined beneath the shirt, were more like a man’s pectorals. A few months ago, he probably wouldn’t have consciously registered the fact. He realized she’d seen that he was staring. He looked up into her eyes, then away.

“I have a bunk in my truck outside,” she said. “Sometimes I find that having company’s a more natural way to end the day.”

“I’ve got to go home soon,” he said.

“I thought you said you didn’t live here now.”

“My parents do. They’re still alive. They used to talk about moving to this place they had by the sea. But it never quite came off. They ended up selling it.”

“I know what you mean. It’s all talk, isn’t it?” She told him about her own parents, who were dead, and he sat and listened. Then she told him about her work. Like most people of this age of quick and easy travel, she was from the same part of the country. She’d been born in Ross on Wye, had trained for one of the low fliers that captured the purple blooms that lay through the summer like a knobbly carpet over the flat-lands from Cambridge to Norwich. With the first cool days, they snapped their stalks and rose into the air. “It used to be a real skill to capture them,” she said, “a trick you never thought you’d master. And then you did…” She had another drink. “But Halcycon thought of a way of polarizing the plants as they grow. Some new twist in the genes, positive to negative charge. Now it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. They come hissing and cracking after you even if you try to turn your scoop away.”