The Great Wheel (14 page)

“Even when it was built,” John said, “it must have been too ambitious. A waste of money and land.”

Ryat inspected himself in the mirror. Glancing over his shoulder, his face crinkled around a grin. “But there’s a pattern, isn’t there?” He straightened his tie. “The way things proceed here in the Endless City. It’s not the ungoverned chaos that some people imagine…”

They walked back around the pool towards the lights of the house. From the patio, carried on the wind, came the tinkle of glasses, the hum of voices.

Laurie approached, wearing a long blue dress. She nodded at Ryat and drew John away.

“You know who that is?”

“Ryat. We met at the tennis courts.”

Her eyes were their natural green tonight, but they still seemed closed off, covered by a layer. A gritty wind was picking up. The guests retired inside. They sat for dinner at a long table in a high room where the windows looked out across the Dustbowl towards the Northern Mountains, jagged and distant against a crimson sky. There was Jacques Montrel, a visitor from mainland Halcycon S.A. There was the deputy manager of the Bab Mensor shuttleport; John recalled the face. And Tim Purdoe, looking oddly lumpy in a suit instead of his usual tweed jacket, as if he had the thing on underneath. And Cal Edmead, Price’s deputy, who had introduced Mister Mero at Trinity Gardens what now seemed a long time ago.

“As soon as I saw the skies here, I thought—late Turner!” the governor said when the main course was finished and dessert came. He swooped around the table to pass out the dishes with his own big hands. “Swirling reds, oranges, golds. Laurie, would you see to the light over there?”

Laurie folded her napkin and stood up. She touched the room controls, and a big canvas loomed out from a paneled wall, showing a ship on a blood-red sea awash with bodies. The cream jug was passed.

Jacques Montrel, who sat opposite the governor, was obviously very senior in the Halcycon hierarchy—and made politely sure that everyone knew it—but he was also gray-haired, thin-faced, tired, and stooped as the bones hardened around his implants, a gaunt presence near the end of his time. “Tell me, Father John,” he said in a near-whisper. “How do you manage with the Sacrament?”

“The packs are presealed, so I never actually touch the wafers.”

“And there’s no risk? Your parishioners don’t object?”

“No.”

A brief silence followed. Mozart played faintly in the background.

“The days,” Tim Purdoe said, “when people had to go around wearing hoods and special suits are long gone.”

“I suppose,” Montrel said, “that that is progress. But don’t you think we should aim to provide recombinant viral implants for all Borderers as well?” Slowly, he raised his trembling glass and sipped. His eyes were red-rimmed, and moisture had made trails down the furrows of his cheeks. He glanced up the table. “Mister Ryat, you must have a different understanding of this. I mean, living in the Endless City…”

Ryat smiled. “What you are really asking me is whether I’d like to become a European.”

“Would you? No”—Montrel smiled and corrected himself, the wattles of his neck sucking in—“of course not. That isn’t what I mean, even if it really were possible. And you, Miss Kalmar?”

Laurie shook her head. “The reasons implant technology came about,” she said, “had more to do with keeping out the great migrations than combating the spread of new disease.”

Montrel gave a gray nod. His breath whistled. “And now?”

“Nothing’s changed really, has it?” she said. “The only surprise is that we Borderers have survived and adapted, that the weather and the new diseases haven’t killed us all.”

The governor leaned forward briskly in his chair. “Of course Laurie’s right,” he said. He smiled, gazing upon his Turner. “There was a time when people feared that humanity would be taken over by machines. What they didn’t expect was that machines would grow and expand inside us…”

The guests left the table. The music shifted to Chopin, rumbling from the keys of a piano, and doors opened, leading to a castellated terrace. White awnings flapped overhead. From here you could see north across most of the Zone, the lights of an orderly checkerboard. A few veetols were hovering at the shuttlebase: for a moment, they looked like twinkling stars. Beyond the Endless City was a well of darkness.

Montrel had been helped into a silver frame—a sleeker version of Felipe’s leghelpers, but with support for the arms and back as well. He was talking to a few listeners about a trip across the globe to FarEast and Australasia where, as in Europe, the climate still held. Strange customs, strange people—his voice amplified now by the machine he was in—and, beyond in the dusty fringes, even stranger versions of the Endless City.

As John walked past Montrel to where Tim was leaning on the parapet, he caught the same stale papery smell of death that had filled the backrooms he’d once visited in Yorkshire.

“I know, John.” Tim waved a hand. “You’re going to ask me about all those tests.”

John nodded, looking out, resting his elbows on the stone, breathing in the rich, living air of the Magulf.

“I’ve done the lot,” Tim said.

John turned to him. “You
have
?”

“You could look a little less surprised.”

“And?”

“You were right about the koiyl. Two of the five leaves you gave me contain significant levels of strontium 90, and traces of cesium 137 and plutonium 239. I found the isotopes in some of those tissue samples you sent me, too—although you didn’t really give me the right kind, or tell me enough about the donors. But I imagine they’re the ones who have the koiyl-chewing habit, or who absorbed the isotopes from their mothers. There was one case with a high concentration in the gut. Not a sample—I think it was on a pink card.”

“That wasn’t from the clinic,” John said. “It was from the incinerator at El Teuf…” Looking out across the lights of the Zone, he was thinking of Daudi, comatose. And of the woman he’d tried to treat with cytotoxic drugs, her lush, jet-black skin paling under the bloom of a parasitic growth. And of Martínez, and the way Kailu had looked at him in that hallway off the Cruz de Marcenado.

The other guests were going back inside now to escape the rising wind.

“Of course,” Tim added, squinting against a billow of dust, “this isn’t proof. And there are bound to be other factors involved—a genetic predisposition to the disease, perhaps a chemical or viral trigger.” He shrugged. “We could simply be witnessing some kind of random cluster…”

“There’s nothing damaging about the leaf itself?”

“It does have a clever mix of neuropeptides, so I suppose you could make a nerve poison from it if you wanted. But that’s not what’s happening. The problem is definitely the strontium 90.”

“What do we do? Put in more work to prove what we already know? Publish something on the net?”

Tim laughed and shook his head. “John, I remember asking you what you were going to do with the truth when you had it. Well, now you do. And you know what they’ll say back in Europe: Why don’t you just tell the Gogs to stop chewing that beastly koiyl?”

“It’s not that easy. The whole point about the leaf is that it’s simple and safe. The alternatives are alcohol, opiates, expensive tubes, even encephaline, and there have been cases of mass poisoning—”

“I
know,
John. I analyzed it. Your average Gog wouldn’t believe there’s a danger anyway. It’s not like those two here…” Tim nodded over to where Laurie and Ryat still stood outside, talking. John could tell from the quick way they shrugged and gestured that they were speaking Borderer. “But what do the rest of them out there know about myeloid leukemia, John? The ones who work the phosphate plants and pour our drinks and hand-paint our Christmas baubles?”

“They have this generalized word.
Bludrut
—but that covers anemia, hepatitis D.”

“It would be just another Zone-based campaign. More un-watched satellite time, the bloody
Outers
telling them what to do again. You try explaining how the remnants of some forgotten war could affect the Magulf now.”

“Is that what you think the source is? A bomb? A weapon?”

“Here.” Tim reached into the breastpocket of his lumpy suit. “I brought the main card you gave me from your doctor. I’ve updated it as best I can. You can read it yourself.”

John stared at it. One little wedge of plastic.

Tim flicked the card with his thumb. Waiting.

John took it. “Okay,” he sighed. “I’ll speak to Price. And I’ll play down how helpful you’ve been, Tim. That’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it?”

“You never know what turn these things’ll take. I’m not supposed to use my facilities for private research.”

“Tim, you’re the Chief Medical Officer.”

“Yeah, and I’m CMO because I’ve learned how to keep my nose clean.” He managed a smile. “And I’ll still be here after you’ve gone. But fuck it, John. You go for it…” He gestured through the open doors at the room where the guests mingled, the lights glowed, a piano played. “I mean, what are we doing here otherwise? What’s it about, eh?”

“That’s right, Tim.”

John turned and went inside. Conveniently, the governor was standing alone. John walked over to him.

“Mister Price.”

“Call me Owen.”

“I’d like to speak to you.”

The governor steered John to a sofa in an alcove, and they sat down. The man leaned forward, broad shoulders hunched, elbows on knees, nodding, listening, swirling a big balloon glass of brandy and asking brief clarifying questions as John explained about the leukemia, the koiyl, the tests that indicated radioactive isotopes. And, yes, Owen Price did know about the koiyl leaf, its popularity…

“It’s not often,” he said finally when John had finished, “that there’s a simple answer to a problem in the Magulf.”

John studied him. Every day, he supposed, he was presented with problems, solutions, conflicts of priority, disasters posing as triumphs. If you rose high enough in Halcycon S.A. to get to be governor of a zone, you probably learned to forget that there were simple answers to anything.

“I’ll tell you what it’s like, Father,” the governor continued, with the air of confiding a great secret. “People come here, and they look around at what happens in the Zone and what goes on outside it, and they generally reach some conclusion. We all think that we’re getting it wrong in one way or another. A lot say we should pull out of the Magulf entirely. Just trade with the Borderers for what we need and leave them to get on with it. It’s mostly phosphates, ores—raw materials that we could find new ways to recycle or create if the pressure in Europe got tight enough…”

He downed the last of his brandy and leaned back. Around them, music played, voices rose and fell.

“That’s supposed to be the whole basis of our society, isn’t it?” he said. “Don’t exploit, don’t mine, don’t hack, don’t fell. Grow, nurture, reuse, make the best of what’s left of the world…And then we trickle money and aid and investment into the Endless City. Just enough to unbalance things, never enough to really bring about a change. If we left. Left them to get on with their lives…” He shook his head. “But we’re afraid to do that, too. That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? We’re afraid of the Borderers. And we envy them. Like Jacques over there. Such a waste.”

John nodded, and said nothing.

“How sure are you of this blood-cancer link, Father?” he asked. “Where’s the koiyl grown? Do you know where the radiation is coming from?”

“I understand it’s harvested in sheltered valleys up in the Northern Mountains. I would expect—”

The governor raised a hand. “Let’s not speculate, Father. So you’re saying we could save lives by stopping the trade of koiyl—or at least by stopping the supply from the contaminated area?”

“Exactly.”

“Still, you’ve admitted that big gaps remain in what you know…” He gazed sadly at his empty brandy glass. “And I can tell you from bitter personal experience that common sense and reasonable evidence are never enough.” He sighed and raised his handsome, wide-set silver eyes to John.

“You’re telling me I should give this up?”

The governor shook his head. “I simply want you to be aware of what you’re up against, Father. You really do need to find out more about the trade routes, the local supply—above all, what exactly the source of this contamination is. If you can point to that, I think we may be starting to get somewhere…” He levered himself up from the sofa. “You can of course continue to use my people to pursue your researches. But please be discreet. You must understand that a lot of Borderer goodwill can be lost if we meddle thoughtlessly in these areas. And do keep me informed. It would be counterproductive for any of this to get out in the wrong way. Have a quiet word with Cal Edmead over there when you feel the need…”

The governor turned, raised his hand, and headed off.

The voices were louder now. The air felt tired, talked-out. John stopped a drinks trolley as it tinkled by and grabbed a brandy. He had to admire the way that the governor had dealt with him. Even living in the Endless City, John realized that he still kept looking towards the Zone, hypnotized by its aura of power.

He got up and wandered around the room, looking to speak to Laurie Kalmar. But she’d already left.

It was too late to go back to the presbytery that night. Lying on the bed in the guestroom that he was given, he breathed the intrusively clean air and waited, even here, for the pleading white figures to emerge, the trailing hands and faces. But tonight, for the first time in many weeks, they didn’t come.

He awoke just as the windows were letting in the first light of morning. He lay for a while watching the sky redden. The carpets were soundlessly thick as he went out along the empty corridors, and he startled a Borderer maid who was leading a linen-stacked trolley. Rubbing nervously at her implant, she directed him around a corner, through a doorway, and down a narrow flight of stairs.

He opened cupboards in the kitchen below, peered under the lids of tureens and jars, and wandered amid the hanging meats and cheeses in the coldroom until he found soft wheaten bread on the marble shelves, a knife, a plate, a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice, salted and unsalted butter, numberless varieties of marmalade and jam. He ate breakfast at the scrubbed wooden table, then set about finding Laurie Kalmar’s address on the kitchen screen.