The Great Wheel (33 page)

Up onto the main highway, where the vehicles were larger although still mostly dwarfed by this one. The little driver was talking now—saying something about
fatoo muu;
John’s mouth. Then cackling again. John wiped his lips on the back of his hand and saw the wet red stain from the koiyl.

They trundled on. Over, he guessed by the sag in his stomach and the splintering creaks, the loose bridge that he and Laurie had crossed on their way to Chott. The tiny driver leaped up in his seat to peer over the rusty plain of the truck’s hood, pulling down screens on knotted ribbons. He hardly seemed in control. John could see where an access panel had flipped open on the seat between them, and could smell the semeny smell of hot nerve tissue.

The long fuselage creaked and snapped as they veered west, where mudflats and the Breathless Ocean shone, mirroring the clouds, and they headed downhill, picking up speed. The tiny man stroked the nerve tissue, grinning at John, and gave it a sexual squeeze. The sound of the engines, John was almost sure, grew more agonized, louder. Glittering ribbons and screens scythed pendulum arcs, and on the far side of the cab Felipe began to recede like a tunnel in a dream. The whole long body of the truck seemed to rise and buck as the little man’s thin hands dug deeper and harder into a nerve’s mucus-thick sheaf…

Finally they slowed and stopped in a wide parking area by the shore. John climbed shakily down the ladder and walked around the truck’s long hot maw to help Felipe out of his cradle, slotting his right arm under his back and easing him to the ground. By now it was past midnight, and the parking area gleamed with flanks of cooling metal. The tiny driver watched from a few paces off, twitching his head and shoulders.

“You should have put on your leghelpers,” John said.

“Why, my son? I’ve got you.” But already Felipe was panting, and the breath in John’s face consisted more of whisky than air. “But don’t worry. It’s not far. Not unless…”

They were at Seagates, which lay east of Mokifa and Kushiel. Ahead were the great cranes and gantries John had seen in the distance when he sat by the kelpbeds at Chott and Laurie told him about her father and mother. Close up, rearing towards the clouds, the cranes were truly impressive, far bigger than anything that served the automated warehouses in the Zone. Felipe leaned against a brick wall, gasping. He mopped his face with his red-tinged gloves, then began to fumble in his pockets. John found the flask for him within the folds. He looked around for the driver, but the driver was gone.

He linked an arm once more under Felipe’s shoulder, and they started to walk. They passed through iron gates where water glinted up ahead and an engine chattered into life as a boat’s white beam nodded across rotted moorings and breakwaters. Looking down while he hauled Felipe’s weight, he saw a tangle of keels bobbing in the water. A questioning lantern was held up towards them. There was a hiss of surprise as it caught the gleam of John’s eyes. Then things took a predictable path: confusion at the presence of Outers was followed by a shrug, and glee at the thought of
cassan
—their money.

Felipe pulled himself away from John and stood swaying at the edge of the dock, waving his arms, barking at the boat holders in his own version of their dialect. Somehow, an agreement was reached without the help of a translat, and a small boat was hauled close to the steps.

“How much did you pay to use it tonight?” John asked.

“I bought it, my son. But perhaps we should also try to hire a guide.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Roughly, but—”

“Then come on.”

The steps were slippery, and the boat rocked wildly, but somehow John managed to get Felipe down and seated at the prow. Scrambling to the stern, he sparked up the lantern and traced the outboard’s flywheel, smoothing out the kinks in the rope and looping the end twice around his palm, pulling it out and through. A puff of exhaust stung his eyes once, twice, and the motor started. He turned the throttle and threw off the mooring rope.

“Where did you learn to do that?” asked Felipe.

John simply shrugged.

Many other craft were emerging from the wharves. Some with lights strung along their spars like Christmas trees, others frothing by on skirts or bobbing with only the creak of an oar. Rounding the last thrust of the pier, John saw the lights of the Seagates market stretching far along the coast.

He shouted to Felipe, “Which way do we go?”

The old priest waved his hands in a vague sweep. Farther east, John saw the funnels of the bulk carriers that plied the shores of the Breathless Ocean, but the smaller craft seemed to be heading straight inshore towards lights and rooftops. He tillered the boat that way, twisting up the throttle. The boat creaked and bucked on the soupy water where irregular lines of wharves, warehouses, and narrowing channels loomed. The gathering flotilla bobbed closer. Faces and prow lights flickered their way. Sitting on the loose plank that served as a seat, John steered under a low footbridge into a canal.

Afloat on either side were platforms seething with lobsters. He watched as one big creature flopped into the canal, its pincers flailed, drowning in water after a lifetime of wading in nutrient sludge. Some of the boats were already pulling in at the low piers. Deals were being haggled. The clamor grew louder. Lights dangled from a long, beamed roof. On other wharves there were heaps of brightly colored bowls, boxes of tubes, the inevitable tins of Quicklunch. Garish and incredible clothes hung on pulleys over the water, and cooking boats nudged around with their stoves blazing, streaming the smell of caramelized kelp and onion. The priests were passing now through stripes of lavender light that caught in the steam billowing from the water. Brass pots swayed and clanged. Here, every new turn and angle was a surprise. John slowed the engines, looking around him.

He smiled and watched as a child swung rope to chain from one section of roof to another, taking long, elaborate detours, whooping, agile as a monkey. They passed, it seemed, the same stall selling miniglaciers of pink-tainted sugar crystals that they’d seen earlier. There was no sign of the koiyl, but this whole night seemed to have developed an arcane logic of its own. He could see it as a kind of board game played through the long afternoons of a European winter. The latest craze—find the secret of the leaf. He could even see the screen, swirling and gilded as you entered it. The outboard stalled, and the boat touched a low bank of sand. He wound the motor, started it up again, and pushed off, steering towards the mouth of another tunnel.

“John!” Felipe pointed. “Over there…”

A soft scent broke over the water. There, piled on matting, heaped in baskets and buckets, lined out on patterned silks, were the koiyl leaves. Extracts and pickles too, and dried bunches of the flowers.

About a dozen merchants. John caught the flatter accents of the mountains in their voices. The leaves, he saw, were fresh, as yet undried: this season’s crop. He nudged the boat closer in. The market was open to the sky here but darker than many of the various lit tunnels, and it was some time before the few bobbing lanterns caught the glow of their gloves and watches, the silver of their eyes. The disturbance then was predictable, but the merchants did their best to answer the questions that John shouted across to them. Yes, they knew Lall. Good leaves.
Bona.
Leaves were tentatively held across the water, more for him to see than to touch and thus cheapen. But this year, not many. Not this year, and not last year either, although they knew of no problem with the crop. Maybe someone else…But with each merchant it was the same, and John realized then just how good he’d become at identifying the Lall leaves. He didn’t even need to ask. There were far fewer than he’d expected, and they were all of poor quality. The ratio he’d found recently on the streets was something like one in ten, but here the leaf from Lall seemed to be even scarcer. Which was odd, considering that Lall was on the main route through the mountains to this part of the Magulf. Perhaps, he asked, there was some other market that sold leaves, or some other section of this one? No; not within fifty kilometers, anyway. And up at Al-Fhican, they slept with beasts and had tails like animals—those people wouldn’t deal with Lall. Or another day? But no, also. No. And so it went.

John eventually poled the boat back from the crowd towards a small and empty island, and sat watching as the koiyl merchants got on with the business of the night. An absurd thought, but it almost seemed as if, now that he knew they were dangerous, the Lall leaves were disappearing of their own accord.

At the prow, Felipe popped out more tablets from his blisterpack. They were the last, and he seemed drowsy. For some time now he’d given up trying to keep his split shoes and bandaged feet out of the bilgewater.

“Can you think,” John asked, “of anywhere else?”

“For what?” Felipe folded his arms over his chest. His eyelids trembled.

“Other than here, for the leaf.”

“Ah…” Felipe chuckled. “You were hoping for a single dealer, weren’t you? Someone who could have simply waved his hands and…What you’re trying to do here is very difficult.”

“I understand, Felipe.”

“I know what you think of me, my son, and of the little gifts that arrive at the presbytery. Old Felipe with a finger in every imaginable pie…” He paused a moment, his fingers tracing the empty depressions of his blisterpack. “You think I have—all these deals and arrangements. It’s not like that. The reason people bring me things, the reason I’m tolerated and possibly occasionally even liked and respected here, is that I keep my distance. I leave the Borderers to live their own lives. I leave them. As they wish. You see…And because I don’t…” The old priest’s eyes were closed now. After this brief animation, his voice had become a mumble. “Because I don’t…”

He grunted, nodded, was asleep. John restarted the outboard and steered the boat back past the koiyl vendors into the first of the chambered tunnels. The night had gone quickly, and the crowds and the boats around the stalls were already thinning. Scaffolding was being dismantled, barges were being towed away. The piles of unsold wares had a disappointed look.

In the open air again, where the sky was lightening, John shifted and looked around. His bladder was starting to ache, and pissing was always a tricky operation in the Endless City; because of the viruses, you needed somewhere away from habitation. The boat puttered on. Rusting iron bars blocked the wide mouth of a tunnel, so he reversed the throttle and turned back. Felipe began to snore. John took a side canal, which threatened a dead end but then opened to a long, newish concrete wharf. There was no one about as he leaned over to grab a mooring post, threw the rope over, and killed the engine. Keeping his balance, remastering an old trick, he stood urinating into the water. Sparks erupted before his eyes. The air was clear and almost cold here. There was little wind. They were surrounded by the silence of large, dark buildings. He closed himself up and looked around again.

“Felipe?”

The old priest remained slumped in the prow. Now that John had stood up, his back ached terribly. It was probably just from sitting half the night with his hand on the tiller of the boat, but he couldn’t ever remember a pain quite like this one, and he wondered briefly if the crystal rigidity of his recombinant wasn’t starting, even this early in his life, to damage his spine. He clambered onto the wharf and secured the rope. He stretched and rubbed himself, thinking of the faces at Southlands and the metal jutting from flesh in those Yorkshire backrooms. But already the ache was starting to ease…

He walked beside the wall away from the water’s edge. Beyond were the empty frames of stalls, a few caroni birds, a great deal of litter. He glanced back at the boat, then wandered on up through the empty shore market, where his feet slipped and skidded on a mush of discarded food, loose wet packaging, the perennial soggy balls of chewed koiyl. A green light twinkling in the mud caught his eye, and he bent cautiously—waiting for the pain to come back into his spine, using his knees to stoop as he’d seen his mother do on that misty Hemhill morning in her garden not long ago—and peeled the flattened carton from the stones. The emerald pinprick was one of the signal shades Halcycon used to indicate when medicines had passed their use-by date. In another place he saw a misty starfield glinting in the mud. Not just
reinventory
greens, but
potency retarded
blues,
immediate discard
reds. In fact, more than he’d ever seen, even on the shelves at the clinic. Some, now that the moisture had corrupted their circuitry, were giving out muffled versions of the final beep-barp danger signal that he’d often had to ignore. The safety parameters were excessive anyway, and there was the trick Tim Purdoe had shown him—how to bring the lights on or shut them off with the simple passing of a magnet.

He looked again at the sodden carton in his hand—it had contained a mild immune-suppressant, something he’d asked for many times at the clinic—then, hearing voices approaching, he threw it back into the mud. A small cluster of Borderers came into view. The one with the most audible voice was much taller than the rest. As John stood and waited, he caught the flash of metallic hands. When the tall man saw him, he dismissed the others and walked up to him alone.

“Father John.” Ryat smiled. “You should have told me that you were coming here.”

John pointed back at the wharf. “I arrived in a boat with my partner-priest, Felipe.”

Ryat waved an arm. John felt the breeze from his fingers. “Most everything comes through here…But you already know that? From what you have seen?”

“Actually, I was looking for something specific.”

“And could not find it?”

John opened his mouth.

“Come.” Ryat was turning, walking away. “My office is near. We can talk there.”

As the sky brightened and the wind picked up, they left the empty aisles and crossed the iron ridge of an old railtrack towards an ancient building that stood alone. It had tall windows and a portico, and beneath the crusted dirt seemed to have been made from blocks of real stone. John gazed up at the entrance. The inspiring scenes and scrolled cod-Latin inscriptions had weathered away, but a tarnished plate riveted to a pillar still read
CONTROLE DE PASSPORTS.
A beggar sat in a hollow of the worn steps, her face a black mass of flies. Ryat paused to give her some money, and John noticed the little ritual they went through with their hands to avoid the touch of flesh to metal.