The Great Wheel (19 page)

John wondered what the house would be like afterwards, half-emptied without Hal. He pictured it as a person he’d once seen with a limp: keeling over slightly, still trying hard to smile and adjust. He closed his eyes. And heard the rush of wheels approaching on the road outside. Yes. The sound gathering like a wind. Opening his eyes, he saw the play of headlights on the wall, catching in the mirror, redoubled, spraying golden wings across the ceiling, shifting through the black bars of the roadside trees. The sound of big wheels. Why did no other vehicle that passed through Hemhill ever sound like this? And why did they always have to come at night? But they did. They did. And now, as the headlights brightened and passed and faded and were gone like the flick of a switch, there was that other sound, a sound as autumnal as the crackle of leaves and the whoosh of fireworks and the wind-carried cry of crows. The hum of the compound in the valley.

“Come on, Skiddle,” Hal said, standing over him, holding out a hand. “I have something to show you.”

John took his brother’s warm hand. Swinging on its leverage to lift himself up and out of bed, he felt the air of the house on his flesh, though his nightshirt, cooler now, though the controller was set to an even temperature. Another sign that autumn was nearly here, that winter was coming, that Hal would soon be gone.

“It’s in my room…”

Barefoot in the darkness, John followed. The house was quiet. The lights were off. The doors were all closed. What time w
as
it? Did time exist on a charmed and changing night such as this? And Hal, anyway, was breaking an unwritten rule by getting him out of bed. Not that their slumbering parents would really have minded if Hal occasionally let his younger brother wander the house late at night. But it had never been done; it wasn’t part of the ritual.

John followed Hal along the landing, then turned and froze as something big and silvery nudged up the stairs. It bobbed and floated, squealing with big eyes, a leering face. Then he saw the trailing red string, and the face resolved into that of a storybook pirate, and he knew that it was only the balloon he’d bought that day at the carnival.
Today.
And that was why his teeth were sticky with toffee apple and candy floss. That was why his head ached from the beer he’d drunk for the first time in the gray-lit tent, and later from the beat of the carnival band. That was, underneath, why he felt so sick, so tired.

“Come on, Skiddle.”

Hal turned on the light in his room. Now that he was this near to leaving, John half-expected to find it cleared and emptied, posters off the walls and rolled up, the bed piled with neat stacks of screens and clothes. But the room was the way it had always been: filled with all the stuff of Hal’s life. If anything, messier. Being untidy, John sometimes thought, was Hal’s single excuse for a vice, something he had to work hard at because he didn’t have a real one. John could see his big brother forcing himself to take out and scatter stuff that he’d already put away. He could see him secretly sneaking back up the stairs to redistribute scraps of underbed dust he’d stolen from the bag inside the cleaner.

“I’ve been going through my things,” Hal said. “Clearing out.” He chuckled, waved his hands at the mess. “I started anyway. But you know how it is. You find things you haven’t touched in years. And instead of clearing up, you spend hours remembering, messing around…”

John nodded. Squatting on the pillow of the bed beside the shining eyes of an old action doll, he saw a robot they’d once made together from scraps of other things that had fallen apart. Or, rather, Hal had allowed him to stand at his shoulder and ask questions and generally get in the way while he made it. They called it Lilith, and it was programmed to wander about the lawn collecting beetles for the insect project John was then working on at school. It soon disappeared, and after a thorough search of their and the neighboring gardens, they found it in the study, turning the pages of an antique wildlife book, busily snipping out all the insect pictures with its scissor hands.

Strewn around the floor were tennis shoes, laptop games, faceless piles of book palettes, a box filled with the twitching spidery angles of a self-construction kit, model cloudpickers, radio-controlled boats, shuttles, vans, and planes. Much of the stuff John was familiar with; Hal had never minded him playing with his old toys, although John knew his older brother well enough to make sure he gave them all back even if (
especially
if) they got broken. Hal never exactly minded lending things, but he could never let go of them either. He liked to know where everything was—even the presents he gave. John remembered how once Hal questioned their mother for what seemed like hours about how she’d managed to lose an umbrella he gave her.

“There’s so much of it,” Hal said, picking up a dodger ball that had fallen into a box by the bed. It rattled; the gyrostat was broken. John remembered years before: a November evening, looking out through the back window and seeing Hal still in the yard, Hal tossing the flashing ball against the garage wall. The fan of tiny spangled lights. The way he always seemed to catch it.

“And this.” Hal picked something else up. Looked at it. Put it down. “And this…” As he wandered the room, he seemed to forget about John. Which, John reflected, was so unlike him. John glanced out the window, which had been cleared now like his own, and saw the lime trees standing sentry-still over the road and the unlit tennis courts beyond, and saw that the stars had ceased their odd spiraling and were hovering motionless in distant space. But perhaps, John thought, I’m not really in this room with Hal—otherwise he wouldn’t be wandering around like this and muttering to himself. Otherwise he wouldn’t be ignoring me. Perhaps, inside whatever dream this is, I’m actually asleep and dreaming…

But then Hal turned, and his eyes were clear and focused. “And see this.” He pointed towards the tangle of wires, screens, links, and cannibalized nerve boxes that lay on the desk where he worked. “This was my big project of a year or two back. It had promise!” He let his hands drop, a little amazed. “I don’t know why I gave it up. Really. Do you want to see?”

John nodded. He always wanted to see.

They sat down, Hal on a box, John on the swivel deskchair because he was smaller. Staring at the weird entanglements on the desk, he felt a tingle of the old anticipation. This was more like it—Hal about to wave his hands over junk and turn it into something magical. He’d rigged up connections to a three-sense screen that once belonged to a game of battle chess and run a wire to the low-level terminal in the wall, then spliced the connections and inserted a nerve cube. John had heard that this was a way of tricking the net into granting access to the next level up, although that was illegal. The scene was intensely familiar: Hal dicking around with nervestuff and electronics. Hal showing him something strange and wonderful and new. John smiled as he watched the soldering crab pick its way across a big old circuitboard, squatting and dropping its little globules of silver at regular intervals. This was going to be good…

He remembered how they’d once reprogrammed the cleaner to fall over and say
fuckit
at regular intervals as it trundled through the house. For a whole hilarious week, their parents had been too embarrassed to call out the repairman, or even say anything. Then, of course, Hal took pity on them and fixed it secretly and better than ever. In those days, Hal had an elaborate, wild streak in him. His eyes shone with a light that John saw less often now.

Hal powered up the screen. There was the usual electronic humming, a clean dark smell like seashores and armpits and whisky. He tapped at the keyboard that had its guts spilling out of it like a squashed beetle.

“If I just…”

The bedroom filled with ruddy light.

“This is a bit…Yes.”

The light settled, began to pulse. The room was a deep shifting red, almost like a picture John had seen once of a foreign sky. But then he realized that the flowing all around them was blood, that the shuddering curtains that overlaid the walls were the insides of a body.

“And this here…”

The speaker membrane that used to be inside the big screen in the lounge began to give out a solid thu-thump underlaid by a gurgling, liquid hiss. A heartbeat.

“Right! We’re in!”

It was obvious, but still John didn’t understand. He gazed at Hal’s bed, which was now red-lit, adrift like a boat on the pulsing tide.

Thu-thump. A heartbeat. But
in
where?

“Great!” Hal balled his fist, would have banged the desk in triumph if there had been space for him to do so.

The beat was quicker now. And beneath it, the sigh of breath and a rumble like thunder.

“You know where this is, don’t you?”

’t you?

Hal’s voice, tumbling like rocks down a mountain. A deep, deep echo. Thu-thump. Sigh.

“Your heart?”

“Yeah, Skiddle. Incredible, isn’t it?
My
heart.”

John nodded, feeling a little disappointed. This was weird, but hardly in the same league as accessing a cloudpicker the way they’d done last spring. Or even simply climbing over the rocks at Ley and finding a lump of colored glass. Thu-thump, thu-thump. Hardly what you would call fun. Blood flowing red all around him as if driven by an invisible wind. The valve opening and closing like an undersea mouth. There it all was, too, represented on the monitor. Little blips like they showed you from the doctor when they gave you reformats at school. Hal’s face was glistening crimson. He looked like he’d been cut. He touched John’s hand and smiled. Now, listen…

It’s not the walls of a real heart around us anyway, Skiddle; it isn’t as though there’s a tiny camera and microphone down there, but if you fiddle with the net in just the right way—if you tickle the electrons, if you trick the airwaves—you can access the implants that thread into your spine, input all the data from the tiny molecular messengers and viruses that go voyaging on the seas of your circulatory and lymphatic systems, and create an analogue of what it’s like. Real enough, but ultimately unreal.

Hal touched the screen, and the shuddering red walls faded. The air in the room darkened again. There were darts and arrows now on the monitor—falling back, organized yet too quick to grasp, like a magnetized snowstorm. Another touch of the screen, and Hal and John were surrounded by a thousand white lines crisscrossing the room like dustmotes in winter sunlight.

This, Skiddle. This is data from my powerpack monitor. Hal moved the cursor, and the room seemed to tilt as the shimmering matrix turned. The strings ran close to John’s face now, and looking down, he saw that he was pierced through his chest, his belly, his hand. Hal touched the screen again, and the strings all froze.

“See, Skiddle.”

John looked, and saw

GGGGGCCATGTAAGTCCTATGCCTGTCATGTGCAA GAATTGCAATTTCTACCGATGTGCAAGAACCGCAA

“That’s the code for the supply monitor of my powerpack. If you break it down, it tells you that it’s about two-thirds viable at the moment, which means I’ll probably have to replace it next year, although there’s no hurry…”

The letters dissolved into snow again. Then refroze. “And this, here—let me pull it in. That’s the identifier from the cpu. That’s not all of it, of course, but effectively an analogue of my own immune system’s T-cell response.”

Snow. Freeze. And this. And this. Incredible, isn’t it? Touching the keys; Hal’s voice and hands trembling a little. Snow. Freeze. This. This

TTGCATGCCGTAATATTATGCGTGCTAGGTAGCTCG TCGTAGATCAATGTCGTAGTTCCTCTGCTCGTCGCT

Hal was going deeper now into the operating system that monitored his body, somehow accessing it on an unrestricted bandwidth, leaning over the terminal plug to fiddle with a stray wire, taking a pipette to squeeze fresh nutrients into the silver-crosshatched nervebox that he was keeping warm, from the heat generated by a small transmitter that John had last seen put to use when they were out on the high meadows chasing rabbits with the gyrfalcon. And where was the gyrfalcon now anyway? Those red eyes and silver clattering wings? He squinted around the blurred and fizzing room

ATAGTCGCTCGCTCGCTCGATAGCCGCTCGTAGAT TATCAGGTCACCCCTTTTAAATGCTATGATCAATGA

and the litter of unstrung tennis rackets and worn-out clothing. Nowhere. Hal had probably cannibalized that, too.

TAGTACGCTAGATAGCTCGCTCAGATAGGATCAAT GATCAATATATCGCAAACCTAGCTTAATTGCCGCC

“Now look, Skiddle. Bingo! Right into the main operating system!”

The letters were slower now, scrolling around them at an almost readable rate.

“Watch…”

Hal’s quick fingers on the screen. The letters froze.

“Look…”

Close by their faces, as Hal typed, the letters began to tumble over and change. A became T and T became G as he changed the codes in his own recombinant. “We’re in…”

AGCGCATCCGAATGCCTTGGGAAATAGTCGCTCGC GCTAGGGATCGCGCTCGATAGCCGCTCGTAGATAT

“Will you look at this? Would you believe….” The lattice turned and blurred. Bright points against the darkness. Where was he? The room tilted, dissolved, and John was falling up towards the whirling carousel of stars. And a voice somewhere was still saying, Will you look? Would you believe?

But John was losing his brother. He was falling through darkness towards the scent of cold sweat and old smoke and damp stone, and the gray of morning.

L
IGHT FILTERED INTO THE
cave from a window set high in the rock. Streamers of smoke from the dead fire still hung in the air. John sat up, rubbing the cramp in his legs, his head and back aching. He’d been curled in a corner away from the chimney, and he felt cold and old and numb.

Laurie was busy repacking her backpack. She looked over at him.

“Hettie says she’ll show us the way for another couple of kilometers. Then it’s up to us.”

He nodded, and winced as the pain in his head bit deeper.

“She says there’s a climb. Are you up to it?”

“I’ll be fine.”

She smiled. “You don’t look it.”

“I’ll take a paintab.”

She shrugged, glanced at him once more, then continued packing.