The Great Wheel (11 page)

“Do you have a mirror?”

She shook her head, winding down her window to pay the toll. The boy who took the money said
Ossar? skay
—hardly glancing at them.

A kilometer beyond the bridge, Laurie turned off the old highway towards Chott. Many of the sixteen-wheelers were also heading that way, and the buildings were scarred by their collisions. Chott was the site of some of the largest and most productive kelpbeds, and big effluent pipes ran downhill beside them. She turned again beneath a broken arch and killed the engine in a small square.

She opened the van’s doors. “We can walk from here.”

“What about my accent? What happens if someone tries to talk to me?”

“Act dumb—I’m sure you can manage that.” She studied him. “It’s good that you dress so poorly. You really don’t look like a European.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Keep your hands in your pockets and keep your watch out of sight. Act sensibly.”

“This
is acting sensibly?”

He followed as she left the square. There was a small stall in the first street they came to. It sold chimes, dried gourds, and an assortment of ornamental mirrors. She held one up, tilting it towards his face, and laughed at his reaction.

“Brown,” she said. “Is that right?”

“What do you mean, right?”

“Is that the color you were born with?”

“I don’t know. Somehow, I always thought blue…”

As he walked on with Laurie, John could feel the faint breeze on his face from the passage of other bodies, the changes in the air as the street narrowed, widened, as they passed dank alleyways, noisy doorways, the swarming heat that issued from raked-up piles of dung, the drafts of koiyl and cinnamon from the spice souk, the white flutter of the tiers of washing hung overhead. The sounds seemed stronger too. Everything was more intense. Eyes that were green or brown or blue studied him—he was taller than most Borderers, and his fair skin was uncommon—but only in vague curiosity, and no one came close. He recalled something that he’d noticed many times before, but only as an observer: how the Borderers were able to move swiftly in a confined space without ever bumping into one another. It was a complex dance he was incapable of performing, but as long as he stuck close to Laurie, he felt safe.

Already it was late afternoon and the streets downhill were getting grimmer and darker, the reek of the kelpbeds was growing stronger. Laurie and John ended up picking their way across a slippery maze of piers and duckboards close to the shore. The mud here was topped by the sluggish tide of the Breathless Ocean, which seeped in past the protective pontoons and sluices. To the west, the thickening sky was netted with the lights and cranes of Chott’s main depots and processing plants, where refined kelp was collected in anything from huge barge skips to wheelbarrows. From there the proteins, starches, and edible oils were taken to be boiled and flavored in the vats of cookshops, homes, and factories; the bulk fiber was pressed for a cheap kind of jelt; the flammable vapors and oils were refined into foline.

Laurie sat down on a smooth-topped rock, and John sat beside her. Oddly enough, there was something contemplative about this place.

“What are you thinking?” she asked eventually.

“How the old fathers in the seminary explained the kelpbeds. How anything can seem neat and elegant if you look at it from a wide enough distance…”

The nearest pontoons were gently rising, falling, slopping in and out of the mud. In the gloom beyond, he could just make out figures moving along the walkways. Kelp workers dragging nets, or poling canoes across the thick lagoons. As a rule, an individual worker owned and was responsible for his own kelpbed, maintaining it, buying in quotas from the inflows, selling the product to the operators of the dryingpans, who in turn sold to the bigger bulk processors. A whole food chain based on market forces. It wasn’t unknown for kelp workers, operating alone and in competition with the owners of the pens around them, to fall from the walkways or out of their canoes into the thick unswimmable soup, and for their cries for help to go unheard. A drowned body could easily get tangled and hidden, lost into the process, and end up as food.

“I once tried to feed kelpbread to the ducks in Trinity Gardens,” Laurie said. “But they wouldn’t eat it.”

“Before I came here, I imagined that I’d be eating nothing else,” he said, “but Felipe has his friends and contacts. Still, Bella uses the stuff to bulk things up. I can always taste it…”

Behind them lay a scatter of huts and houses clinging to small islands of mud or raised on drunken stilts. There was an incredible stench, a smell so strong that it flowed into the other senses; it thickened the already dim light and muffled every sound.

“The place I was born is somewhere near,” she said. “I can’t be quite sure. There was a bad tide a few years back, and things collapse and change.” She pointed out over the pontoons. “See the markerbuoy and the big pipe? I think my father’s kelpbeds were in front and to the left. But it’s easy to get lost.”

“What was it like?”

“It was a long time ago. You invent things according to how other people tell you they were. I mean this
smell
—I don’t remember that—but I do remember the way the kids whose parents weren’t kelp workers used to fight us and say we stank. But the money wasn’t bad, and kelp workers are used to doing things their own way. My father was very much like that—he was stubborn—and the tradition goes back in the family. The big upheaval was when my grandparents moved from the older beds at Tabia to the ones here. I remember how they used to talk about it…”

John gazed at her, wondering why she was telling him this.

“On my mother’s side,” she continued, staring out at the grainy horizon, “I know even less. I think her father used to repair old trucks, but she would never quite say. To be honest, she’s what you Europeans call a snob, although there really isn’t a Borderer word for it, and she never got over working with lydrin in her blood in Europe. And I never did understand why she married my father. It couldn’t have been his looks. It couldn’t have been his money. It certainly couldn’t have been the way he smelled…”

Laurie shook her head in puzzlement. Perhaps, John thought, they’d been in love.

“My mother worked in Europe before they met,” she continued, “but she buckled down to being a kelp worker even though she hated it. Helping my father, having kids—she probably hated that too. There were me and two brothers, and another brother who died. We all used to share this big cot up in the roof, and at night she would lie beside us and watch the lantern lights move across the ceiling as the workers walked up from the shore. The funny thing was, she never told us stories about Zazu or Peter Rabbit or Growling George. Night after night, she told us about her year in Europe.

“She was in personal service with a family in the Lowlands. The main house was huge—at least the way she told it. And outside there were mazes and lakes and pergolas. On one of the children’s birthdays they put up this big carousel with bright wooden horses
inside
the house. Imagine…” Laurie smiled, far away. “…a carousel turning under the chandeliers in this big hall. And the woman, the lady of the house, for some reason, she singled my mother out. She made her a…” She paused, searching for the word. “Confidante. Is that right?”

John nodded.

“She used to have my mother sit beside her each afternoon in a white bedroom with a balcony and the sound of doves outside. And they would talk and drink iced coffee and tell each other stories of their different lives. And those stories would get tangled up with the ones our mother told us until it got so, when I was nearly asleep, I felt as though I had actually become that woman in that white bedroom with the doves and the balcony and the lakes and the lawns…

“Once in the winter, my mother took a flight with the rich family to London. And she had this wonderful night on her own with no responsibilities and everyone out at some show. It was foggy and dark outside, so she put on a coat and a scarf over her head so no one would see her eyes. And she just walked out. Just looking, staring. Seeing the big terraced houses and gardens and the lights of the cars and the trees and the shiny machines sweeping the leaves, and the glow of the roses, and the sweet green smell of the river. The people were out walking their dogs, and smiling hello because they thought she was a European. There was nothing but clear glass in the windows of the houses, and the curtains were open so she could see into all these happy, wealthy scenes. My mother kept telling us about that night in London as we lay in the big cot. About the time she went out pretending she was European…

“Then my father died, and my two brothers. The anchors to one of the outer pontoons gave way. Floated out. Sank. They tried to swim back through the Breathless Ocean, but of course they were poisoned and drowned. Anyway, that was the story. But it turned out that one of the big kelp processors had got hold of some European
cassan
—that’s aid money—and needed some of our plots for bypass drainage, and that my father had been holding out without telling any of us. He was always groaning on about quotas and prices. His being stubborn over this drainage thing probably meant that he and Kerr and Tony were killed so that we’d sell out. But I don’t know. Just my mother and I were left, and the joke was, we were paid a good price for the beds and pens. All those years of work—and we got more by simply giving up. Or maybe it was money for what had been done—guilt, compensation. It was enough for me and my mother to go Mokifa. You know Mokifa?”

“Yes.”

“And she did her best to forget about life and get on with her dreams—which by now revolved entirely around me.” Gazing out, elbows on knees, hands clasped, Laurie shrugged. “It gets boring after that, really. My mother put me on treatments of tetje. She didn’t even say at first, but I remember the taste and how she tried to hide the taste in the food with curry and kelp sugar. I’d always been the bright one anyway, the clever prickly kid. I got through the entrance scans for Drezzar. It’s intensive there. You spend five or six hours a day with a hood on your head, and the rest with screens. All day they make you speak European. By then I was taking the tetje myself, and the phenothate you need afterwards to keep you calm. My little secret. Huddled in the toilets with a syringe because the hit was quicker. I was always worried that if I didn’t have the tetje, I’d fail the next scan. I’d be out…”

“Do you still take it?”

“No. And I probably would have done fine at Drezzar without it—most of the kids were there because of money instead of their brains. I quit the phenothate too. Anyway, the aptitude scans at Drezzar kept saying I was abstract/numerate, so they let me work on a screen that had an airwave link with the Zone. There was this routing problem with some of the processing drains at Chott that I sorted out. It was easy enough—I was just doing it as a student project—but it worked and I saved someone a whole lot of money. I was probably the first person looking at the program who’d ever actually got her hands filthy with the kelp…I was a whiz then, a minor celebrity. Word got out.”

Laurie sat on the rock above the mud, hugging her knees.

“And from that,” John prompted her, “you were selected to work with the net?”

“The net selected me. Or maybe it was politics—you know how they like to have the odd Gog in apparently trustworthy positions. So they can point and say
look
…”

“Laurie, how old are you?”

“Twenty-six. I don’t know,” she continued, answering an internal question. “I’ll maybe stay on at the Zone for another two years. The money is good. Then…
Then
I’ll decide. I feel like I’ve been on this ride all my life. Pushed along on these rails. You don’t like the way you’re going, but at least it isn’t your fault, you can blame others for what’s been decided. But it’s not always easy to step off…”

It was fully dark now, although people were still working on the kelpbeds. John could see the bobbing yellow lanterns, hear the ticking of a hand-pulled winch.

“Come on,” Laurie said, “I’ll take you back.”

She stood up, rubbing at her legs. Her pale outline shimmered. Chill fingers of mist began to rise as the two of them walked towards the ramshackle nests of houses. They reached lights. Voices. The smoke of cooking. The streets up the hill were swarming, even more crowded than they had been that afternoon. But the people parted for Laurie, and John followed in her wake. A witchwoman sat at a narrow crossroads on an ornate rug, wreathed in smoking incense and surrounded by enamel bowls, tin rockets, chunks of moonrock, star charts, and the polished skulls of rats, goats, humans. John slowed, and saw a small green snake slide out from a candlelit eyesocket. The witchwoman scooped the snake up and held it out to him with a gap-toothed smile.

What had Tim said—that the witchwomen were infected by madness? This odd uniformity of behavior had to be based on something, and the tolerance, too, of the generally atheistic Borderers towards them. And why the obsession with the other planets? All that had been learned in the brief years of the exploration of Venus and Mars was that cycles of devastation were routinely at play. On the cinderblocks and the great gas giants as well. Planets routinely fostered and then shrugged off life.

But now that the world expended its resources exclusively on the great, orbital, winged solar deflectors and thermonuclear toruses that battled to sustain warmth and safe skies, he supposed it was better that the rocks and sand that men and women had journeyed across space for should end up being revered rather than stored and forgotten in some net-maintained warehouse.

Laurie drove back towards Gran Vía on the lower roads through the oldtowns and the gray-walled new housing projects, where even she was forced to stick to the sluggish pace dictated by the lumbering open buses, wandering cattle, scurrying flocks of children, aimless drunks.

“I never came this far,” he said.

“When?”

“This way—when I was gathering data.”

“Ah yes.” She nodded. “I remember. There’s a kind of disease, and you said you thought something could be done…”