The Great Wheel (36 page)

“And you have both been,” Laurie’s mother said, “to the mountains? So I hear?”

He tried to tell Laurie’s mother about the koiyl and Ifri Gotal. He hoped that his newly decided policy about the koiyl—the idea of being open, telling everyone—might suggest new leads and possibilities. But he sensed that her attention was as poorly focused as his own. No doubt she was more concerned about the company her daughter was keeping with this alien holy man.

The conversation faltered. Laurie stood up and said to John that she’d like to show him her old room. Moving carefully around ornaments and the low table, he followed her through the wall. The illusion was thin; as they passed through, it gave no sensation at all.

“My money keeps this place going now,” Laurie said as they stood in a bare jelt-walled room with a narrow mattress. “My mother’s ran out some time ago.”

The room was blank, like a cell. “Were you really
here?
”

“Try it like this.”

She touched a screen on the wall. Now there were pictures, a glittering starfield for a ceiling. “This is mostly how I used to have it. It seems smaller to me now.”

“None of it is real.”

“Everything is real, John—or as unreal as you make it.”

He looked around. Compared to the sort of thing Laurie could achieve on the net, the projections here lacked definition. The shelf of analogue books that had appeared by the bed would probably require some kind of physical amplification. It was like a hotel room; offhand, impersonal. And so neat.

“What do you do, Laurie,” he said, “turn it off at night to save power?” Then he realized, from the look on her face, that that was exactly what you did here in Mokifa.

“I need to check the kitchen appliances,” she said, turning to go. Then she stopped. “Think of your own life, John, before you criticize and judge others. At least I’m not forcing someone to have pretentious ancient European music churning around in their head all day.”

She went out through the door without bothering to open it. He caught the leap of static as the frilled edge of her skirt brushed against him. Dulled, confused, expecting no response from the room, he leaned over to the bookcase and tried to take out one of the volumes. To his surprise, it moved—if jerkily—and his fingers received a vague impression of size and weight. The book split open in his hands, and there were words inside it—the shimmering print of a language even stranger than Borderer. It was English-American.

The door,
he read,
irised open.
Looking up and around Laurie’s room, he saw that the night-sky ceiling now encompassed the floor and walls. Unlike the stars at the Red Heat bar, these looked real enough, but there were also golden arrow-shaped spacerockets whooshing by between pretty, many-ringed planets. The book was telling, he guessed, some long-forgotten tale of the never-to-be future.

Laurie came back into the room. She clicked her fingers, and the book, with the rocket-threaded stars and planets, faded and vanished. She said, “We’ll have to go soon. Arra comes at four, and anyone else being here gets in her way.”

“Arra?”

“She cleans for my mother. I don’t suppose,” Laurie said, “that you feel that you know me any better now.”

“I keep thinking how much I take for granted.”

They left the room, and said goodbye to Laurie’s mother. The chair lifted her up, and she studied John gravely. Her face was broader than Laurie’s, reminding him of the distortion that came into his parents’ features when they leaned too close to the console. Touch another screen, he thought, and Laurie and her mother, or this whole place, might disappear. Laurie was good, after all—a quaternary wizard. And now she hung close to the exit, fiddling with the brocade of her sleeve, suddenly anxious to go.

“Goodbye.”

“
Gonenanh.
”

A deep crackling sound came from the sky as they stood waiting for the lift.

“Laurie,” he said, holding the railing, which quivered in his hand. “What you said about the music…It was about Hal, wasn’t it?”

“
Music?
”

Something wheezed and snapped somewhere, and he felt the railing shudder. “How did you know about the music my father plays to Hal?”

“How do you think?”

He said nothing. Laurie looked around at the webbing and the racked clusters of houses, the wind furrowing her hair, then frowned and waved her hands.

“I used the net.”

“You used the net?”

“Of course I used the net.”

They stared at each other. The lift arrived. The door squeaked open.

“If you want to know about my life, Laurie, why don’t you just ask?”

“I do ask—I just don’t get a great many answers.”

He was breathing hard. The sky tore at the rooftops. The wind roared. Grit pattered his face. He wished that he could shut it all off for a moment, that the two of them could stand together in some empty place where there was no Europe, no Magulf, no sex, no God, no viruses, no preconceptions.

The lift peeped to remind them of its presence. Laurie stepped in, and he stood beside her as the door closed, shutting them off.

“So you already knew,” he said, “that I’d been to Hemhill? Back at that bar, there was no need for you even to ask.”

“No. Actually, I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t—”

“I accessed Hal some time ago, John. I’m sorry if you think I was curious.”

Sorry. Curious. Some time ago.
These words, he supposed, should be helping. That was what they were for. But Laurie—he knew so much about her, her flesh at every soft and rainy shade and flavor and angle—he could even sense the precise moment when she would reach into her bag for a tube. There—she was doing it now, and the lift was creaking, turning, taking them down.

“Curious?” he said.

“Yes.” The space grayed with smoke. “I was curious.”

“And the koiyl? You were curious about that too?”

“What?”

“Is that why you copied the cards? Because you thought Ryat should know? Was it to satisfy his or your curiosity?”

She raised her head and nodded quickly, as though getting the final twist of an elaborate joke. Then the door slid open, and she walked to the van.

“You did tell him, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t tell anyone.”

The palazzo opposite glowed and fluttered. Something was screaming in the wind. Looking up, he saw lines, electric cables. One was snapping and swaying; another had broken loose, twisting like a snake. There was no sense of power in them.

She fumbled for the card, nearly losing it to the wind. He was standing on the van’s passenger side, as though he might actually get back in with her.

“What…” she muttered, her head down, words lost. Then she faced him with her green eyes across the dented and dusty roof. “You think I went all the way to Ifri Gotal with you…? Fucked you…? For the sake of some stupid…” She gestured, searching for the word. “Conspiracy.”

He pointed at Mokifa, at the tenements. “Then where do you get all the money?”

Her face went a little blank. Ah! he thought, weirdly triumphant.

“Yes.” She nodded. “I do sometimes copy cards and let things out. Sometimes, for money that I need for here and for myself. But not you, John.” Her eyes narrowed. “What do you think I am?” Everything seemed to be slowing down, growing more gray and solid. “It’s just stuff about the kelpbed contracts…I…” She thumped the roof of the van. “Why should I tell you this?”

“Because we’re supposed to trust each other. And Hal!” he shouted in a sudden red burst, disbelieving. “Why did you have to pry?”

“Pry.” She nodded again, as if that explained something, and he wondered for a moment if she’d misheard and thought he’d said
pray.

“…if you could just see how you are now,” she was shouting, “the way you’re standing there. The way you never really seem to move. The way you never really left Europe. Just what are you, John? A priest, and you don’t even believe in God—do you? You don’t believe in love either…” She shook her head. Her hair obscured her face. She pushed it back from her mouth and eyes. “I’m sick of these discussions with you.”

The street was empty. The air was truly foul with grit now, and even the spectacle of a Borderer and a European having an argument wouldn’t have been enough to draw people out. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. They were dry and ached in the wind. He was sick of life, sick of memories.

“And please will you tell me some time,” Laurie said, “what it is that you’re planning to do when you stay in the Endless City? What skill do you have? What is it that makes you think any of us would ever want you here?”

The doors clunked as she pushed the card into the van. He stepped back as the fans roared. There was a brief warm rush around his feet as the van pulled up and away, rattling down the street, taking the corner so fast that the skirts screeched, and disappearing.

There was no trace of red left now in the sky above the pipe-threaded buildings. Just black, gray, and the flicker of colorless light. He let the wind push him as it chose; it had the weight and presence of the whole angry earth. It couldn’t just have been satellite-made. A metal shutter flapped off its hinges and twirled not that far from his head, on through the fractured images of the houses until it buried itself into something solid. The child-guard had gone from Mokifa’s scalloped archway. Even the beggars had taken shelter.

Outside, in the real Endless City, the cables swayed uselessly down the lanes towards Kushiel. There was even a junction box on the wall above a boarded-up shop, still intact and bearing an ancient version of the Halcycon logo. John wandered for hours, unthinking and at random, through alleys and wide, empty squares, across dry bridges, past buildings of gaunt brick and concrete, or between shuddering clusters of shanty dwellings that threatened to detonate in the wind. The few people who were out made the sign against the evil eye when they saw him, pausing as they hurried home or hammered back loosened flaps of sheeting.

The sky had a dimensionless texture. The air seemed to be growing darker. He walked on. Cars and vans occasionally sped by, their bodies tilted half-sideways to counteract the force of the wind. He had to turn away from them as the dirt swirled in his face. When he finally looked around to see where he was, he saw that there were lights and signs along the street here, a grainy fog of reds and yellows. He sensed movement and heard voices—figures were sheltering in doorways and crowded at the windows nearby. A woman stepped out, smiling against the billowing grit, opening her robe to display the roped scars that crisscrossed her breasts. A boy, sitting on a ledge, grinned and made a lewd motion. Shaking his head, walking on, John saw that many of what he’d taken for brightly lit windows were in fact screens designed to entice customers. As he watched—it was quite impossible not to—and the twisting naked figures threw out funnels of flickering pink light into the dust, it was hard to imagine that the flesh ever ended, that the spirit ever truly began. But this evening he seemed to be the only pedestrian in Agouna, and most of the cars were going by too fast to consider stopping. Cries, suggestions, and shouts followed him as he pushed against the wind, but no one bothered to come close. This odd change in the climate was like a cold bath—a good sexual anesthetic.

Another car came down the street now, its wide lights blazing through the haze. It stopped before reaching him, and the doors of the nearest buildings flew open. Discords of light and music blew by as several adolescent boys, all elbows and yells, clustered around it. It was a long car, too clean and ornate to be from anywhere other than the Zone, but it was only when John saw the doors rise like beetle wings that he could be sure that it really was Tim Purdoe’s red Corona.

After the brakelights had vanished and the boys who’d been left standing had gone back inside, John walked on. Out of Agouna. The day’s incipient darkness had finally given way to near-night. He pressed into it, pushing through the stabbing pain in his back, filled with a sense of urgency that, by its very suddenness, made him stop, turn into the lee of an abandoned truck, and look at his watch.

Hovering above the shimmering quaternary lines, the numerical time display read 6:30. He leaned against the truck’s rusted metal surface, clanging his head. He’d missed Mass. It was hard to imagine more than a handful of his usual two or three dozen worshipers turning out for church on a night like this, but that wasn’t the point. He walked on, the wind tearing at his clothing, bowing his back, furrowing his hair. He looked again at his watch, deciding that he should try to work out where exactly he was, find and climb the right hill, go to Santa Cristina. See, at the very least, how the roof was faring…

The night was deceptive; he was nearer Santa Cristina than he’d imagined. He soon saw it rising over the rooftops, black, wintry, and solid, backlit by an opalescence that was either the moon or an electromagnetic effect from the racing clouds. The roof was holding, although even the caroni birds had left it tonight to find better shelter, and he could tell from the screech of the swinging door that his congregation had gone. Whirlpools of leaves and discarded cards hovered over the graffiti-corroded pews. Glittering with lights, little bells, and the call of many tiny misactivated voices, the Inmaculada stretched out her arms towards him. Tonight, shamed by missing Mass and by the pettiness and finality of his argument with Laurie, John found it harder than ever to meet her brown eyes.

He heard something flapping. Unmistakably separate from a sudden booming increase in the wind outside, it seemed to be coming from the sleeping stone crusader. John began to walk around the pews towards it, imagining at first that a piece of jelt had fallen, then that it was perhaps a rat or trapped sparrow or pigeon; even, as the sound began to heave and scrape like the claws of something bigger, a caroni bird.

He rounded the last pew and saw the thing squatting by the ancient pediment that supported the dead knight. Not a bird, but a human, clothed in ragged black and flashing stripes of gold and silver. It began to hiss and chatter, waving long hands, shrinking away from him. John surprised himself by taking a step forward. The dimly golden light from the Inmaculada and the altar fell on the witchwoman’s face, showing her bulging eyes, the shifting slit of her mouth. Her hands danced again, a white blur as she drew herself up and away from him. Something black dripped on the floor between them. Then she turned and ran.