The Great Wheel (15 page)

One of the middle-rankers, she lived on a street half a kilometer from the governor’s house. There was no birdsong as he walked down the sloping drive through the gardens of the Governor’s Residence, which seemed odd amid the scent of damp earth and the flowers. He looked up at the sky, which was a bright early-morning Magulf pink, but circling caroni birds were absent, somehow discouraged from the Zone.

Blackberry Avenue. Hazel Oak Road. Whoever had christened these tight little grids of interchangeable bungalows, alien and gray-white under the seething Magulf sky, must have been exercising a dry humor. And All Saints Drive, with the spire of the similarly named Zone church showing at the end. Number 28—but for Laurie’s battered van sticking out among the parked lines of clean and barely driven Elysians—was like all the rest, with a narrow facade fronted by the same square of tough low-maintenance grass.

The door clicked open when he spoke his name. He stepped into a hall that was the size of a cupboard. The air smelled of tubes and dust and breadcrumbs. Faintly, too, of Borderer.

“I’ll be there in a minute…” A refrigerator door banged, and Laurie stood barefoot in a faded red dressing gown. “You stayed on? I saw you talking to the governor. You got what you wanted last night?”

“Not at all, really.” He followed her into the kitchen. It was also tiny, and had obviously been designed by someone with a tidy mind. He unstuck a half-drunk mug from a stool to sit down. “But Tim’s done all the tests for me on the leaves now. I’m a great deal wiser.”

Laurie sneezed, rummaged in the pocket of her dressing gown, and blew her nose. She sneezed again. “I’m sorry.” She sniffed and waved her handkerchief. “I get like this if I’ve been near someone who’s just come over from Europe, like…” She thought about sneezing again, changed her mind. “Like Montrel. Didn’t he seem pathetic?”

John shrugged. “Isn’t lydrin supposed to stop any reaction?”

“I wish it did.” She pocketed her handkerchief. “Do you want some coffee?” She turned on the grinder. Dirty plates jingled and rattled. She gave him a cup, and he touched the handle and watched as the brownish fluid began to heat and swirl.

“So…” She cleared a space and sat down across the cluttered counter from him. “Tell me what happened.”

She watched and listened as he talked, and blew grayish tubesmoke through her slightly red-tipped nose.

“I don’t think I’ll get much more out of Tim for a while,” John said finally. “And the governor seems to regard the leaf as just some extra problem—another way of rocking the boat. He said I should obtain more information about where the contaminated leaf is grown. And exactly what the source of radioactivity is. Which makes sense. I mean, how much do you know about this, Laurie?”

She waved her hands. “Koiyl wasn’t commonly used where I came from. If you were old, in pain, you might…But my mother said it was a bad, disgusting habit.”

“You’ve never tried it?”

“Is that why you came here? Because you thought—”

“Laurie.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think anything. I knew you were interested. I just wanted to talk.”

She gazed at him for a moment over the empty mugs, her chin cupped in her hand. “I suppose I could help you look in the net. Do you have the card Tim gave you?”

While she went to change, he cleared a space on the sofa in the lounge and sat down. Amid all the mess, the only thing in the room that seemed actively used was the screen by the window, which had several of what looked like gauzy stars drifting inside it. He could sometimes admire the chaos that other people created around them—all that life—but the scattered tube stubs and empty glasses and mugs gleaming dully in the reddish light here were too impersonal. It looked and smelled a little like the morning after someone else’s party. He stood up and went over to the window. Across next door’s wire fence, the stained sun-awning that some hopeful expat had erected over the patio flapped uselessly in the breeze.

Laurie reemerged. She seemed to have an infinite supply of unironed skirts of faded navy, with cream and white blouses to go with them. Outside, the Zone was at last showing signs of wakefulness. Vans and cars and cyclists swished past. Yawning, morning-robotic people ambled along the pavements. Laurie and John joined them. She walked quickly, chewing at her lip, not noticing anyone she passed. She worked at one of the big annexes bridge-linked to the main admin block where John attended his dreary subcommittees, a large white cube with sunken black windows like the pips on a die. Inside, through the tickling barrier that kept out the Magulf air, silver-eyed people yawned at desks, scratched, gazed absently, or chatted into screens. Laurie headed between the desks and down some steps, along a windowless corridor. No one said hello.

He asked, “Do many other Borderers work here?”

“A few,” she said, opening a door into an office, “if you count the maintenance staff.”

The office was as neat inside as her bungalow was messy, although just as tiny. Hardly an office at all, more a box with one wall occupied by the shimmering neutral standby gray of a very large screen. Otherwise, there was only a desk and two chairs; no notepads or calendars or cabinets or scraps of paper. Unlike the rest of the world, people who worked the net really had got used to doing everything on computer.

Laurie fed the card he’d given her, the one with Tim’s analysis of the leaf, into the port in the desk. Humming to herself, she began to issue one-fingered instructions. The big screen blackened. Bars of glittering white light shot across the room, each bar filled with tiny specks that fizzed and danced like hyperactive dust motes.

“These strings are up at the main entry level,” she said, still humming. “Look…” She said something else, and the bars across the room all froze. Each was entwined with an endless procession of the initials of the quaternary code of adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine nucleotides—A, G, T, C—the same code that, though in different ways, John and Laurie’s bodies still shared.

She began to hum again. It was an odd sound, modulated into phrases, neither quite rhythmic nor musical. As the strings began to flow again, ATCGATGATGCCCTAGATC spreading and opening around them like a silver net, he understood that humming was her way of issuing commands.

“Can you actually read all of this?”

“You get used to it. Everything looks the same for a while, but…” She popped her lips and smiled, looking up at the lines that revolved through the ceiling above them, pulling down the lines, tunneling deeper. Spears of light threaded around Laurie and John. “You learn to find your way.”

“And you sing to it?”

She chuckled. “Is that what it sounds like?”

More intersecting lines. Level after level. Slashing, blurring, dropping. Then a complex knot of intersections, a ball of jagged shining wool turning before them. The ball rolled at them, then Laurie clicked her tongue, and the lines snapped back. They were suddenly looking down over the Magulf from a stratospheric height. And falling. The view reminded John of the one he’d seen from the shuttle window as he approached Bab Mensor from Europe. First, the gray Breathless Ocean, with Spain reaching down towards the mottled land that had once been North Africa—mountain peaks and red gashes of desert dissolving into cloud. But everything was impossibly far, impossibly clear.

“See those lights over there?”

He nodded as the Northern Mountains, still vague with distance, tilted up. Specks of red flickered like cannonfire amid the lower slopes.

“The red indicates the main areas where the net thinks the koiyl leaf is grown.” She muttered something. “But the data can get pretty thin. The net really isn’t that interested in what happens in the Magulf, apart from the impact the Magulf has on sustaining the European climate.” The horizon tilted back, and the Northern Mountains receded. Laurie nodded and began to hum again. The image shrunk, dissolved. They were back within the silver web.

As she sang a scatter of mid-pitch notes, the two of them veered up, down, left, and right through the matrix, hovering over gaps where the lines receded to a glimmering mesh, then diving in again, level through level, down towards a brittle rose, right into the tightly bound heart that widened back out into a space of darkness. She was obviously on the track of something and too involved to say what. John just sat beside her, wishing and waiting for the ride to stop.

Laurie glanced over at him. Light flaring across her face. Briefly, she stopped humming. “Are you all right? You look…”

“I’m fine.”

They came to a massive cube, slowly revolving.

“This is the Zone’s main scientific database.”

“Why is it so isolated?”

She shrugged. “We’ve come at it a funny way.” She made a soft whistling sound, and they lunged down to the cube where the silver bars loomed thicker and larger than those at any of the other levels. He looked at her. She was smiling as they hovered in the twirling pit, her green eyes twinkling with flecks of reflected silver. The detail of the network all around them here was incredible, like woven silk.

Laurie was clicking her tongue, humming in a tuneless, rambling way. Freezing, sometimes, the trembling strings, scrolling up and down silver lines dripping with ATGCGTATAGGAC like dew-laden wires. Then on and in, until she found the right sector, a tiny bundle of strings that grew and grew as she pulled.

“There is it. A couple of days old, but see that extra string up there, where it enters the subnetwork? It’s been reentered. That must have been when Tim took the copy for your card. But…”

“What?”

“The code’s wrong. It’s been reentered since, and it wasn’t Tim.”

“Who, then?”

“I’m not sure. The code’s odd. Old. From somewhere…Maybe it’s just me.”

They gazed at the intricate silver tapestry of AGTC letters. She popped her lips. “Here’s the analysis of the leaves that Tim made. See that bigger cluster off to the right? That will be the tissue samples. Anyway, you gave him five leaves to analyze, and it turned out that only two were contaminated. Now, it also turns out that those two have the same blip in a no-read area of their DNA.”

He nodded.

“In other words,” she said, “the two contaminated leaves are from plants that are close relatives, probably from the same valley. Makes sense, doesn’t it? And, see…” She pointed at another tangle of silver. “The balance of trace elements in those two leaves is very similar, too. As is the growth pattern, if you run it back. Again, a shared location. So we can ask the net to try to filter out those factors until it finds the climate in a koiyl-growing northern valley with the closest match. It’ll still be guesswork, of course…”

She smiled over at John as the lines swirled around her. She looked pleased with herself.

“The net might get it wrong?”

“It wouldn’t be truly intelligent,” she said, “if it always got everything right, now would it? Anyway.” She whistled, and the silver strings snapped away, the big screen grayed, and the tiny office fell back into shape around them. “Let’s eat.”

They went to a bar on Main Avenue, where the tables on one side had already been pushed together for a semidrunken leaving party. Laurie took a corner booth and picked over their shared order of salad and paella.

“Seafood…” she said. “Why did we order seafood?” She pushed away her plate and took out a tube. “I’m not hungry anyway. Never am when I’m working. You look pale—would you like wine?”

He shook his head.

She drew at her tube and exhaled. She looked a little shaky, and exalted. “When I started my job,” she said, “I just used to take food tabs and coffee in my office from the machine that went past. It was less trouble. But I kept getting these sore throats.” She inhaled. The leaving party opposite erupted into laughter. “Then someone told me that people were spitting in the coffee before it got to me. Trying to make me ill…”

He shook his head. “You deserve better than this.”

“I got the biggest break a Gog could imagine. No, really.” She looked at him, then down at her uneaten plate. “I like a lot of it. The work. The net. The Zone. Last night…”

They fell into silence. At the row of tables, the people were trying to decide if there was anything about the Zone they would miss.
The money,
it was unanimously decided. They would miss the money. And each other, someone else said. Sure, they said, their voices more muted now as they shared glances and agreed.
Each other
…

“And what will you do, Father John?” she said. “What will you do if the net tells you where the bad koiyl is coming from? Will you try to ban the whole trade? Put up posters? Send in the veetols to destroy some village up in the hills?”

He shook his head. “The governor was right about one thing—I don’t know enough yet. I’ll have to go up to the Northern Mountains to confirm this.”

“You, personally?”

“Why? Is that a problem?”

Coffee was brought to them. It was unusual for the Zone, but in this bar they were served by a long-armed chromium machine that hissed around the room on magnetized tracks.
Makes a change from all these fucking Gogs,
someone muttered on the other side. John glanced over, but he couldn’t see who it was, couldn’t tell for sure if they’d even noticed Laurie.

“How,” she asked, blowing the steam from her cup, watching the machine depart, “are you planning to get there?”

“I’ll manage. I see people at the clinic who’ve walked from the mountains barefoot.”

“But you’ll go?”

“I can’t give up.”

“Okay,” she said, putting down her cup, grinding out her tube.

“Okay what?”

She looked at him. “I’ll come with you.”

He took a breath.

“Or perhaps you would rather be alone…”

“No,” he said, finding that he was smiling. “I don’t want to be alone.”

T
HIS WAY, HEADING SOUTH
into the wind, they could already see the Northern Mountains. A fine red dust blew into the cabin, sticking to their skin, settling into their clothes, gathering somehow even beneath the fingers of John’s gloved hands. On the van’s backseat, along with their bags and clothing, were water purifiers, transmitters, security buffers, protective suits, and masks, a radiation counter. Outside, amid the tarpools, the wreckage of prehistoric trucks, and the wind-picked bones of mules, there were other travelers along the broken concrete slabs of the twentieth-century Sadiir Highway. Foline-powered twenty-wheelers lumbering between the phosphate mines and the chemical plants on the coast. Vans like their own. Panniered mules ambling beside stooped figures with djellabas drawn tight across their faces. Individuals and families stumbling in from the mountains and the desert beyond, drawn by the promise of the coast.