The Great Wheel (44 page)

“Skiddle…”

Hal turned to him and beckoned. “Come on, Skiddle,” he said, holding out his hand. “I have something to show you.”

John hesitated, then reached for the room, the doorway. As he touched, interference lines crackled

GATAGGCGCTTGCTCCCTCGATAACCGCTTTACG

running through this ancient and abandoned screen somewhere in Kushiel. And the image of Hal froze, flattened, then gained depth again.

Hal beckoned. “Come on, Skiddle.” He held out his hand. “I have something to show you.”

This time John pushed straight through. White fire shot around him and he felt something hard, then soft and giving. He hovered for a moment in black, open space. The darkness where the net was unwritten and lacy nebulae hung far above and below him.

“Skiddle…”

Floating, spinning, he looked.

The sound came through the blackness. And other voices, too. The endless babble of lives. People talking, exchanging. The music of cloud formations and crop codes, of bodies embraced by machines, of a Borderer couple in their room saying
anything, whatever,
and the scent of the koiyl leaves was there too, and the wind in the Northern Mountains, and even, faintly, the voice of Laurie’s answerer, the smell of antiseptic and flowers, the far-off click-sigh of mechanical breathing.

John began to fall, swimming towards a growing cluster of quaternary light. There was Hal’s voice again.

“Skiddle. Come on, Skiddle. I’ve been going through my things before I go…”

He saw the shadowy figure in the bedroom, explaining through a snow of lines of how he’d done this, how he’d done that, how he’d found some long-forgotten high-level port into the net, routed through it and accessed the codes to his own implants, his own cpu.

AACGCATAGTCCCTCGGTAGAAATCGGGGTCGATT

“See, Skiddle. We’re in.”

John looked and saw the pulse of blood, the whole turbulent angry river of life.

“Will you look at that? Would you believe?”

The voice faded as lines shot out and through, as the white lattice became a cage and fell away into bright points. And there was Hal again. Real and living for once and surrounded by the whole mess of a life he couldn’t find it in him to discard. He was holding out his hands.

“It’s all ready now, Skiddle. The virus that I’ve made. All it takes is a final link to make it combine. Just a seed, a ripple in the ether…”

The palms of Hal’s outstretched hands, John saw, were hollow, pooled with spinning white.

“Touch me, Skiddle. Here—take my hands. I’m full of the charge. Just touch me—make it happen…”

He could smell Hal’s body, hear him breathing, and see his eyes shining, his hair sticking up at the crown, feel him radiating into that moment all his love and life and hope and energy. Wanting to hold, to touch, to share and understand, John reached out for his brother, and fell endlessly through into whiteness.

B
LACK LINES SLID BY
when he looked up. Jagged branches scrawled against a clear and open sky, the branches of a forest emptied by winter or burnt out by the sun. A breathless voice was muttering, pausing, muttering, as he was dragged over bumps of fallen shockwire in a handcart. By lifting his head a little and pushing against the sharp line of pain that held him down, John could just see the witchwoman’s bobbing shoulders and the beaded snakes of her hair, and the warm reddish brick of the empty warehouses.

He knew where he was, even if he couldn’t find a name or a reason for his knowledge. His hands seemed to have swollen into useless clubs. And that sky. When the last of the powerlines slid away, he looked up, and the sun flooded over the tenement rooftops beyond. That sky, warm and open as far as the stars, which were still spinning somewhere in the heart of the pure black-blue.

The cart stopped. He blinked and shivered as the witch-woman’s tinkling, pebble-eyed face leaned over him, and he felt the heat of her skin, the rank sweetness of her breath. Her face was tilted and watchful. She said something in a rain of spittle that he didn’t understand, although he guessed that he’d been talking too, rambling feverishly about the color of the sky while she hauled him along in this cart. He chuckled—he and she must make an odd sight even in this city of odd sights. The witchwoman chuckled too, and from over her shoulders the sky poured blue. She looked down into his eyes and reached in a clatter of bracelets and rings, and he glimpsed the pale-mouthed sores in her palms before her hands dipped from focus and her fingertips probed his face, his mouth, nostrils, eyes.

“What is that?” he croaked. The witchwoman frowned, pushing back a rope of hair and holding a pointed ear close to his mouth. “That sky, that color…There has to be a word…”

The witchwoman pursed her lips and nodded. She stepped back, and once again the cart began to jolt and rumble, and he looked up, falling into the sky.

This was a shadowed place with a curved, cracked ceiling. The darkness flowed with coughing and laughter, snores and moans. A shape loomed over him. A hand raised his head, and something hot was pressed to his lips. He gagged at the dense aroma. It was drawn away for a moment, then tipped back, the liquid sliding over his swollen tongue, down his throat. The taste was familiar, savory. Soup. Asparagus soup. He fell back, feeling the heat spread through him.

“Skiddle…”

His gummed eyes were closed. He could hear only the scuffle of feet, the drip of water, the breathing of rank air.

But Hal wasn’t here. He knew that now. The sound was just the clang of a bucket. The echo of footsteps on stone. Hal wasn’t anywhere. What John had seen on that old screen in Kushiel were only ripples from the past, caught in the net from an abandoned project to bring light and heat to the Endless City. Kushiel was probably the lost port that Hal had accessed, a forgotten backdoor into the net’s higher levels—but he and it were both history. Gone.

“Skiddle…”

Drip, tap. The rasp of his own breath. The bang of a door.

He remembered bursting into his parents’ room in the clarity of that long-ago autumn morning when the birds were singing in the browning trees and carnival litter blew across the park, and the compound in the valley was humming. Bursting in and yelling something. Hal. His brother’s name. Something about Hal. And his mother, already frail as she clutched the sleeves of her nightdress and her pale bare feet pattered down the landing. And his father, who yawned and stumbled behind. They pushed open the door to Hal’s room, and he was there. Slumped over the desk and half off his chair, the cases empty and open on the bed and his mouth slack and his breath coming in long slow rasps. The wires and screens were all around him, and the soldering crab still moved, clawing pointlessly across Hal’s face, squatting to lay another tiny silver egg above his flaccid eyes. The smell in the room was of hot nerve tissue and electricity, of armpits, socks, and semen.

The men and women who came later that day from the big torus at Leominster put on gloves and prodded amid the clever tangle on the desk, which the medical people had so carefully left undisturbed when they took Hal away to Southlands. And they sat and questioned John in the lounge, although it was already obvious that this was some sad and stupid prank. Or an accident. The house’s own screens gave proof of that, and there was the evidence of the room, and what had been gathered from the few ravaged clues that Hal left in the net. Sitting with John in the pale light of the lounge with his father’s big loudspeakers like sentinels around them, the men and women who came from some branch of Halcycon S.A. told him over and over that Hal had been alone all night. John, you weren’t responsible. John. You just walked into his room when it was morning. You saw him slumped there when it was already too late. And of course you ran and told your parents. All the rest has to be a bad dream. Truly understandable, but you mustn’t blame yourself. When the pretty silver-eyed woman leaned over and smiled and reached to touch him, he shrank away. The screens and the tests cannot lie, John. There’s still a great deal we’d like to know about how Hal created the virus that destroyed him, how and from where he managed to get so deep into the net, but even he wouldn’t have been able to change the record of everything around him. Not even your big brother Hal could make you disappear from his room all night if you’d really been there. The evidence is plain, John. Hal was alone when it happened. The woman smiled. The silence settled in white folds.

John opened his eyes and managed to turn his head. Bright, then gone, a lantern bobbed by with a rounded figure shuffling behind it. He looked at the ceiling, feeling tacky wetness along his back, pain in his hands, the heat and the cold that surrounded him. He tried to persuade his mind to produce the commands that would tell his body to sit up. Suddenly, he managed it, and saw this tunnel-like room. The man on the pallet beside him was coughing and muttering, plucking feverishly at his vest. A few of the other patients, John saw, were sitting up, inspecting themselves, counting limbs and bruises, rubbing heads, covering torn or exposed parts of their bodies. A bald man with a swollen eye and a luminous snake tattooed on his arm looked over, spat, then shook his head.

“Vi mal aboara, eh? Ice fa nah judia
…”

John nodded. Somewhere to the right, a door banged open, shut again. Bang. And a silver balloon with a demonic, leering face bobbed out from beneath his pallet. The witchwoman had dumped him, he guessed, among the rest of the human detritus washed up at the Cresta Motel after the carnival. People mostly injured through fights, falls, one kind of overindulgence or another. The door in the corridor banged again, and the balloon, caught on a pleasant and oddly fragrant breeze, floated away. It was, he now saw, plain silver, although he couldn’t quite believe that the face reflected in it had been his own. Using his teeth and the crusted claws of his hands, he pulled the rags off his sleeve. The screen of his watch was entirely blank.

As the door banged, posters and blinds fluttered along the stained walls. Breathing in the rich cool scent that flowed around him, John felt a sudden strength come into his limbs. Bang. He found that he was standing up almost without willing it. He hobbled between the pallets. The heavy iron door—rusted, apart from the shine of the drawn bolts—was swinging open, banging shut. The soft wind blew through him again. He felt pain as he held the door and limped down the worn stone steps. The door closed behind him. A cold, healing wind pushed at his face. Bang. Sigh. A hissing in his ears, prolonged by some trick of this building. He smelled a fresh and delicious breeze, which brought memories of clouds racing over a high valley and white-flowered bushes trembling where a stream ran clear. The scent of koiyl.

The steps straightened and leveled into a domed subterranean room. It was lit by one halogen lamp and half obscured by a ribboned forest of oddly assorted rocks. Gray clinker, he supposed, from the moon. Crumbling red dirt from Mars. And between, in shadows and swathes, were darker piles of leaves. They were shriveled and uncured, but he could tell simply from the look of them that they were mostly from Lall. Here, at last, was this year’s crop. He swayed, feeling sweat beading through the grime of his skin. It was warm in here despite the breeze, and the sweet strong scent that had drawn him came not from these shriveled leaves but from drifts of steam, from a big-bellied pot that bubbled in a corner. Swallowing saliva, he peered over the rim. A black residue was plopping inside. It looked like glue or overdone jam, but on a lined shelf at the back he saw, neat and out of place in this primitive kitchen, tubes and wires, a monitoring screen and a retort, a small set of Halcycon-logoed scales. Some method, he guessed, of refining and distilling, of turning the residue of a harmless narcotic into a poison. Hal would have been at home here.

The pot bubbled, and the breeze blew up and around him. Bang. Then the slide of bolts. Footsteps and the sound of jingling. His heart kicked as he turned from the pot and gazed over the moonrocks through the steam-ribboned room at the figure that emerged at the base of the stairs. Though she was wearing gloves and a mask and struggling to carry a tray of empty vials, he saw at once that it was Kassi Moss. More shocked than he was, she dropped her tray in a silver shower when she saw him.

“
Nach Fatoo,
” she said, pulling back her mask, stumbling in one sentence from Borderer to European, “…your eyes.”

F
ROM HIGH ON THE
flat tiled roof of the Cresta Motel, the Endless City gleamed, and the sounds of life that the wind and rain had masked for so long rose with the steam from the sun-warmed streets. There were children shouting, pump engines coughing, people cursing, chickens clucking, dogs barking, couples arguing, music playing, shutters banging, brooms swishing, footsteps squelching in the mud.

As John looked up at the deep blue sky, another sound caught his ear, distant, perhaps only recognizable because his ears were still European, still attuned. The whine of fanjets. He saw a bright speck, then another. Two veetols like scratches of orange paint above the misty rooflines of the Endless City. He saw a third to the south, hovering over its reflection beyond the kelpbeds of the Breathless Ocean. They were still a long way off, but all were leaving the Zone. As he watched, the two inland veetols turned slowly, headed one way, then another. A tiny ballet. He decided they were working some kind of triangulated grid, methodically searching the Endless City for him, although they were still three or four kilometers off. It would be many hours before they got here. But there was no hurry. He could wait.

H
E WAS IN AN
airy suite at the Zone’s medical center, propped up and massaged by cooled shifting sheets and a powered mattress. A bright yellow spray of chrysanthemums sat on the console beside him, a gift Felipe had brought from one of the souks. The petals were already falling, but the scent was ripe, almost overpowering. The old priest had gone. But for the spectacle of the hopelessly optimistic spider that was attempting to draw its web between the serrated leaves, John would have called the machine that squatted in the corner and had the flowers removed.