The Great Wheel (46 page)

“I don’t know how much you’ve heard,” his father said, sitting and studying the planes of his glass and the golden fluid that glittered in his eyes. “People expected me to be shocked—but of course I knew. Sarah and I used to talk about it, when we could still make a joke of it, when we were young. How she was older, how she’d be the first to go. And I knew that she’d always hated Southlands, We used to talk about that, too. Until…” He shook his head. “But she’d seen too much of it with Hal. She’d had her fill. So when that new implant they fitted above her watch started acting up, I knew it was a sign. A bad sign. I didn’t
think
it, Son,” he said, gazing levelly at John, “I knew it. So when it happened, it was like feeling something snap that was already pretty much broken. It was no surprise.”

“She didn’t say anything?”

“It was me really. Son. It was what I said. We were sitting at the breakfast table eating—I don’t know why, but she always gave me cold cereal after we retired, even though I like something cooked—and I saw this red spot on her wrist, and I pointed and said, That’ll be Hal. And she looked down at it and tutted, and I saw that it was actually a spot of blood soaking up through the sleeve of her cardigan. She said something—I think it was just, Oh dear—and put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed as she went out to the stairs, which wasn’t like her, not at breakfast anyway. I just sat there and waited. Stared at the table and my bowl of flakes. And everything went quiet and I could hear this humming and then I remembered that yesterday had been the day of the carnival. Not that we’d gone, but you could see the litter blowing over the park, and that big Ferris wheel had been up in the afternoon sky while I was listening to
Turandot.
It made me think that, well, this is really a kind of anniversary. Not the precise date that Hal’s accident happened—that was the week before—but still, with the carnival, a kind of anniversary. And that humming from the compound where the Gogs work seemed to get louder and part of me started thinking, This is it, the end, while the rest of me was saying, Oh, this is silly, Sarah’s dabbing the wound and changing her cardigan, or she probably went to see Hal. That would explain it—you know how long she spends in there. But after a while, when she still didn’t come down, I started to cry. It’s the first time I cried in years, apart from when I’m listening to music. And that doesn’t really count, does it?”

“I don’t know, Dad.” John closed his eyes and opened them again, trying to block the image of his mother lying on the bed with the implant trailing from her wrist and blood on the bed-sheets, blood in wild sweeps and scrawls across the walls. But his mother was a neat and orderly woman. It wouldn’t have been like that. “You don’t think it was some change in Hal that finally made it happen?”

“What happened, Son, was that nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. That was what happened.

A little later, John and his father both went to bed. John lay all night, his head fizzy with the whisky. Staring at the closed door that led to the landing. Listening to the sound of humming.

The rooks were circling the hill, and the long churchyard grass had turned a greenish gray that swept down into the valley below, softening to ember blacks and reddish browns in the wooded hills.

“I always thought this would be her last place,” his father said, holding the brass-plated box in his hands. “She never said, of course. But we used to come up here, long ago, in the summer dusk.”

John nodded. He knew that his father was telling him that this was where he wanted his own dust to be cast when the time came.

“They ask you about the extra stuff,” his father said. “All the bumps and the wires. They don’t burn in the furnace like we do, but there’s another machine afterward, and they’ll grind them up and give them back to you in much the same kind of powder. But you know that, Son, don’t you? I said no anyway, keep them, you can reuse the metal—it’s made in space, isn’t it? Expensive.” He nodded at the box, then looked at John. “And the Gog—the Borderers. What do they…?”

“It isn’t that much different, Dad.”

“Couldn’t be really, could it?” His father looked around at the huddle of gravestones: cracked and weathered, nameless. “Not like this lot. No room left under there now—they’ve crowded us out. But it’s a nice thought. To think that so many are waiting for us.”

From the valley a wind was pouring across the brown rooftops of Hemhill, the tall trees in the park, the scarred field of the carnival. John watched as his father, ever practical, licked his finger and held it up to determine the direction.

“I’m glad it’s just us here, Son,” he said, taking a few steps down the slope towards the ha-ha. “We don’t need Father Leon, that priest. I mean, I know you’re a priest too. But you’re my son. All the rest—it’s just badges we put on, isn’t it? Things we try to do.”

They stood together, each holding the open box with one hand where the soft lip of the land fell away. In the moment that the ash fell, the air seemed to rise and take it all from them, lifting it across the valley, bearing it high into the gauzy light, carrying it on some stray thermal. A little more grit in the wind.

Later that afternoon, John got around to emptying the bag he brought with him from the Endless City. Bella had cleaned everything in it before he left, but the bag still smelled of dust, smoke, and dysol, and his clothes felt pleasantly damp when he held them to his skin. At the bottom were scattered the few ancient music disks he’d noticed in the souks and bought occasionally for his father. Leaning over the bed to pick them out from the koiyl that was there also, feeling the scar along his back tighten, he wondered what he had planned to bring back home for his mother. He took the leaves out individually, turning them over, running a finger along the indented stems. In all, he’d brought a dozen home with him, and every one of them was from Lall. But when he scratched their oily surfaces and held them close to his face, the scent was surprisingly weak, drowned out, really, by this Hemhill room. They just looked like shriveled leaves. The physical longing he once felt for them was gone too. There, he thought, another lesson: they’re not truly addictive—unless Tim and his doctor switched off the relevant synapses when they opened me in the Zone. And here, last of all, tucked beneath a sealed flap, was the tiny vial of the leaf-based poison that Kassi Moss had given him. He lifted it to the light and turned it over, gazing at the sticky fluid, wondering if he was ready to open it yet.

Next morning, he borrowed his father’s car. It took him to Southlands along a well-remembered route. He stepped out in front of the big facade where the wind rattled the trees across the lawns, pulling at the clouds, a reminder that he would have to buy warmer clothes if he stayed here for the winter. Up the steps and inside the echoing entrance hall, he sent a machine off to find Eliot Farrar and stood and waited.

Farrar arrived soon enough. John had made an appointment, after all. They shook hands and went to Farrar’s office, going by corridors and across a courtyard that avoided the wards and recreation rooms, the whispering voices, the sad clutching hands. Farrar probably felt he’d made the point he’d wanted to make to John, last time.

When the office door closed, John took a seat in the leather-backed chair facing Farrar’s desk. “Well, here I am,” he said.

“This has all been very sad,” Farrar began. “I had a strong affection, a great respect…”

As Farrar spoke, John’s eyes were drawn to the pale dots that drifted on the screen behind him. All this talk of sadness, regret: as if things could be different. But he knew from experience the replies you were supposed to give, the slow dance you had to do in times of bereavement. He waited. In due course, Farrar would steer things back to the specifics of the situation. How his father was coping—and Hal. But John wasn’t ready to talk about Hal yet.

John took a card from his top pocket and placed it on the desk in front of Farrar. He hadn’t brought any of the koiyl leaves with him today, but the card contained all the necessary information. It would be a start, a way forward. That, at least, was what he was allowing himself to hope. Farrar’s eyebrows went up, and his silver eyes turned blanker than ever when he took the card in his hands. Tapping it with his well-manicured fingers, he promised with a trace of weariness that yes, of course, he would take a look at the possibilities.

He spent the days mostly walking, dutifully exercising as Tim Purdoe had said he should, climbing the hills and looking out over the familiar countryside. He walked the high-hedged lanes that briefly dripped with birdsong and wild fruits before the flashing galleons once more threaded the skies, spiraling a pale wake that frosted the rucked earth to iron. And in the days after, when the weather grew warm again and a pale sun shone over the bare trees, the big machines moved into the fields, automated hippos that wallowed in mud and churned and exposed the soil. The air stank of clay, and the roads were lumped with the clods. The mist that filled the hollows was torn away when the wind came up with the stars. He stood gazing through the shockwire where the lights of the compound shone and the Borderers shouted in strange accents and scurried, working their last few days to make targets and meet deadlines. He walked into the village past the railings where the white figures on the tennis courts were still playing. Even as the door of the house closed and he went up the stairs, he could hear the pock of balls and the faint humming.

He often sat at Hal’s bedside in the evenings, the way Hal had once sat at his. John sat in silence, unwilling to break the antiseptic air with the sound of his voice. What, anyway, could he say? Mother’s dead, Hal. Ma. Mum.
Madre.
And I found that port in Kushiel you accessed. And I killed a goat. And the sky is
blue.

Late autumn hardened to winter. The freshly turned fields grew livid green with late high-nitrogen clover and gave off a strange acid tang. Then something seemed to lift from the air one morning, and as he walked by the shockwire of the compound, he saw empty spaces and that the warehouse doors were closed. Though he hadn’t heard them going, the Borderers had left. He turned and walked back through the streets and up a hardened track at the far side of the valley, through a swing gate leading into the forest. The cold air was still filled with the sharp oily smell of chloroethane sap, but the tree-tappers had settled in the branches, curled until spring into hard silver lumps like ice. Sitting on a fallen log on a hilltop to catch his breath, he could see the green ruins of the city that had been Hereford jutting from the trees below.

The streets, when he walked down into them, were pitted, caved in, distorted by rearing sewerpipes or blocked by the rusty deadfalls of what was once traffic. He remembered someone saying you could still find corpses in some of the roofless houses. Yet he felt at home in the wrecked, ivied buildings, in the snap of his footsteps in the tumbling empty squares around the fallen cathedral, in the brown and furtive animals that lived and died here—excluded from Hemhill’s fertile valley by bitter saps, predatory insects, and shockwire. Although he looked, he couldn’t find the pub with the sign
THE ORANGE TREE
sticking out into the street, where an atrocity was once committed by Hemhill lads on a Borderer girl.

There were cars parked outside the house when he returned from the woodland that evening, and people filled the hallway and the lounge, taking drinks from the hired machines and the cleaner, propping themselves against the table in the kitchen. Music was playing for the first time since he’d come home, although it wasn’t the sort his father would have chosen. It had a beat, da-de-da de-de-de dum-dum. Felipe would have loved it.

John, the people said,
Father
John, you must meet…Laying hands on his shoulder, steering him this way and that. His father, now red-faced, seemed genuinely cheerful amid these neighbors, relatives, and cronies. This, he said, seeing John standing alone in a corner in the moment before someone else came over to ask him about the Gogs, is the life. John smiled. He’d noticed how rarely anyone went upstairs, except quickly and furtively when the downstairs toilet was occupied, with glances along the darkened landing. Later, as he stood wedged in a corner while one of the junior Youngsons told him about his plans to marry a girl he’d met on a training course in Cardington, Bedfordshire, John found himself thinking of Hal lying upstairs with the sound of the party and the smell of European bodies and buffet food seeping through the molecular barrier. He understood now why his mother had put that extra monitor into her wrist. Perhaps he should have the same thing done himself.

It was snowing when the people finally left—the first proper flakes of the year—and they all looked up with their hands held out to the darkly spiraling sky. The snow continued all night, and in the morning the whole world was transformed. Even the tennis courts beyond the white-shouldered trees and the railings in the park were finally empty.

John went down to the lounge through the mess that the cleaner had vainly attempted to clear. He powered a chair over to the house’s main screen and called up Tim Purdoe in the Zone. He saw from the image that Tim’s bungalow was much like Laurie’s, although he’d never visited it, and he realized from the crumpled look of Tim’s face that Tim had probably been asleep. Here or there it was still early, but John was touched to think that Tim had arranged for his answerer to awaken him if John happened to call.

They talked for a while about John’s health, then about news from the Zone, although half the names Tim mentioned were unfamiliar.

“How’s Felipe?”

“Oh, he’s fine. He came to a big performance of Mozart’s
Requiem
that Father Orteau put on at All Saints—snored and farted all the way through.”

John smiled. “And the new priest?”

“I don’t see as much of him as I did of you. But he’s doing okay.”

“I used to think it was terrible—the way posts change hands without people having a chance to meet.”

Tim nodded.

“I was determined that I’d get in touch with whoever replaced me at the presbytery. Maybe even go back for a few days, or at least speak to the person on a decent-sized screen. But I think I understand now why the Church does things this way. All I could give would be preconceptions.”