The Great Wheel (25 page)

“More?” The vendor smiled. He had a crescent-shaped mark on his cheek that could have been either cosmetic or a birthmark. There had to be at least fifty more leaves in the trays. “More this?” He gestured. Above them, shutters swung back from the houses in the street. A caroni bird settled on a gutter to preen itself.

“Yes, I want to take more with me, back across the water…” John was talking with a lisp. A scrap of koiyl seemed to have wedged in the roof of his mouth. It was about this time, he supposed, that you were supposed to spit out the remains.

“I get you more, Fatoo. How many? Hundred?”

“Could you show me where you get them from? Your supply?” he asked, thinking,
clumsy, clumsy
—this isn’t the way.

“Supply?” The man gestured amazement. “This is my…” He looked up and around, searching for a word that was probably livelihood. John swallowed the lump of koiyl, waved
tak,
and, feeling suddenly cooler and light-headed, went back to the waiting taxi.

He told the driver to go to Rani Avenue, where Kassi Moss lived. She hadn’t been to church for weeks, and he’d missed her twice now at the Cresta Motel; he was starting to worry. He’d never been to Kassi’s home before, although he’d discovered that she lived only up the hill from the presbytery. She must have seen him cycle by, must have walked the same streets beyond the steps leading to the little covered market, yet she had never mentioned it to him or thought to invite him in.

He rang a prosaic-sounding doorbell on the ground floor, where mold hung from the ceiling and the discords of animal cries and argument and music came from the rooms around and the floors above. Outside, he’d seen patched and empty windows, cracked masonry, stains from broken outflows. A typical Borderer tenement, in fact, but it all seemed so chaotic and unlike Kassi, that he was convinced by the time the door opened that it wouldn’t be she and he’d have to apologize to some shocked Borderer and say it was a mistake. He heard the shuffle of footsteps, coughing, a voice, the sound of something being knocked over. It was Kassi.

Unsmiling but unsurprised, she invited him in and bumbled around her home, trying to offer him something, not sure what he might want—what it was safe to offer a European. And yes, she’d missed a few days at the motel. She’d been
sumfo.
The translat was off, but he knew the word well enough from the clinic. It meant a mild chill—nothing. Then Kassi looked at him, her face half fearful, half challenging. He realized she thought he’d come here to remonstrate with her for missing Mass, and he found himself looking around at the plates and pictures she had hung on the walls; searching for a crucifix although there didn’t seem to be one, or a bible or a rosary or any of the other religious impedimenta that filled the Cresta Motel. He thought it was unchristian of him to suddenly doubt her motives. And he wondered, for the first time, where the half of the funding that Halcycon didn’t supply for the Cresta Motel came from.

Leaving Kassi, taking the taxi to the presbytery, he backed in through the door with his supply of koiyl in his arms and climbed the stairs past patches of mold and fallen plaster. At the turn where the mirror was, he dropped several of the leaves. As they tumbled over the hallway tiles, the fall activated the cheap cards he’d stuck on each, and a chorus of his own voices began describing vendors, impressions, locations. Bella emerged from one of the barely used ground-floor rooms. She stood watching with her arms folded for a moment, then nodded to herself and came over to help him pick them up.

She followed him up the stairs into the greater heat of the occupied floors with her share of the leaves cupped in her hands. In his room, John dumped his burden on the bed, and Bella followed suit before backing off, pinching her facemask higher with her gloved hands.

“Bella,” he asked, “do you know where these leaves are stored? Who sells them to the vendors?”

She shook her head. “But my mother.” She nodded at the leaves. “She have that smell.
Judia ee madre
…It make me think of her.”

Bella was an orphan; her parents must have died—when? When she was young, left with memories of the koiyl smell her mother gave off. And her mother had died of what—
bludrut,
leukemia? Should he ask? Did he really need more proof? Was he starting to doubt the link? He sat down on the bed with the leaves scattered around him. Even though the windows were open, it was unbearably hot in here. A rich, soapy, sweet-sharp smell was rising from the leaves. He gazed at them, thinking of the cold gray of the Northern Mountains, the shimmer of the flowers, Hettie pressing ahead, Laurie beside him. He peeled off his gloves to touch them, and a chilly, ill-smelling wave rose off his skin. Bella stepped back into the doorway. He’d showered only a few hours ago at Laurie’s bungalow, yet already he felt soiled.

“Fatoo want anything else?”

“Yes, can you run me a bath?”

She hesitated for a moment, then nodded and went away. A few minutes later, the pipes that threaded the house began to clang and rattle.

The hiss of the tank. The smell of dysol and damp wood. John inhaled deeply and pushed his head back under the water. His ears boomed. He could feel the rough, age-corroded enamel of the bath, but otherwise he could have been anywhere now, anyone…

He sat up, feeling the slide of water and the Magulf wind that came in through the window. The wind pushed away the steam, threw a film of silken dust over the tall mirror and the cracked marble washstand, which Bella had doubtless just wiped, and popped the bubbles on the water. He heard the cry of voices, pumps hammering, vanes creaking, and the tapping of the pipes. Louder than ever. Thump, pause, thump. Not the pipes at all, but Felipe’s footsteps.

“There you are.” The door swung open. “You’re never where I expect you to be these days.” Felipe hobbled to the middle of the room, glanced around, then reached to drag out the wicker chair that had been pushed beneath the wash-stand. “You’re back, anyway. You had a good night in the Zone?”

“Yes.” John sat up. “Let me—”

“No, no. You think I can’t manage? After all the practice I’ve had?” With a cripple’s way of making simple tasks appear alien, Felipe dragged the chair over to the window and slumped down. With the aid of his walking stick he pulled his feet up to rest on the ledge.

“There…” He sighed.

The tap dripped. Down Gran Vía in the west, shrouded by clouds yet shining crimson on Felipe’s face, the Magulf sun was setting.

“This is always an odd time of year,” the old priest said, gazing out. “And a little sad to me. I mean now, before the weather breaks…By autumn, it’s always too late, isn’t it?” He looked over at John, his face glowing. “But then, you and I, we’re victims of the term-culture, aren’t we? The academic and ecclesiastical year…”

John nodded. Felipe hadn’t made the effort to come up these stairs to talk about the time of year. But he knew it was best to keep quiet and wait.

“Do you remember,” Felipe was saying, chuckling, his stained teeth glinting between the red folds of his lips, “the orders and the rituals of spring?”

As the water cooled, the room darkened, and the hissing of the tank and the pipes finally stilled. Felipe spoke of the passing of the night vigil, the forty-hours’ devotion, white smocks and candlelight, the sun coming up over the hills and the sharing of warm new bread, the greening land reborn…

“It all seems so distant now,” he said, “and clearer with the distance.”

“Do you think you’ll ever leave the Endless City?” John asked.

“No, my son.” By now, Felipe was just a shape against a window. “I imagine, anyway, that there would be problems with all these fancy wires inside me. I’m too old—and I’ve stayed too long. You can’t just chop and change. Besides, I love to sit at these windows and look out. To listen. My eyes, I think, are failing me. But these ears…I wouldn’t be without these ears. Listen, what do you hear?”

John shrugged. The chill water lapped. The wind, of course. The creak of a cart. The hiccuping generator that served the flats opposite and always sounded as if it was about to fail.

“Somewhere over there, across the street and down that way…” Felipe pointed his stick out at the dusk. “…towards Alcala, a woman is cooing to her child. And closer, an old man sits talking, ignored by his family as they chatter and eat dinner. And music is playing, of course. Music is always playing. And I can hear the bats now, wheeling and clicking. I can hear the crunch as their jaws meet their prey. I can hear the creak of bedsprings, John, and the sounds of love…The marvelous thing about these ears is that they filter, they analyze, they separate, yet for all that, they never judge. I love them for that, John. They take life as it is, they do not judge.” He slowly shifted his legs off the window ledge. “You must be cold in there by now, my son. Bella tells me that you’ve been collecting leaves.”

“The koiyl.”

“Ah, yes. I remember now.” Felipe lifted himself up from the chair. His breath became ragged for a moment. “The reason you went up to the mountains with that girl.”

“Laurie.”

“Laurie. You know,” Felipe said, hobbling across the room, standing before him, “I almost forgot why I came up here.” Leaning with one hand on his walking stick, he began to pat and feel his pockets with the other. Blisterpacks crackled. A flask clinked. “This arrived…Oh, when you were out this afternoon. Came through on the airwave, from Paris.”

John took the card, his fingers dribbling. “From Paris,” it whispered in confirmation. It was embossed with the bishop’s gold seal, which already seemed to tell him all that he needed to know. But he touched the seal anyway and watched as it dissolved into the bishop’s gray and kindly features.

“John,” the bishop said, looking out at him from beneath a tree in a garden with the sigh of traffic in the distance, “I’d like you to come back here for a few days. Just for a word, you understand…”

L
AURIE CAME TO THE
presbytery in her van to take John to catch the morning shuttle, and Felipe managed—as he always did when he actually wanted to—to get himself down the final flight of stairs unaided. He smiled and nodded, asking her what part of the city she was from, if she knew so-and-so, who used to work the net. He seemed genuinely pleased to see her. Standing in the hallway, dressed in boots and a smock, with a silver bracelet jingling at her wrist as she played with the vancard, Laurie smiled at Felipe and tilted her head and said yes, no, she might have heard…They would probably have stood around and talked for longer, but John already had his bag in his hand and was in too much of a hurry. He sat beside Laurie as she drove him towards the Zone through the morning-crowded streets, unsuccessfully willing himself and everything else to slow down.

They passed through the shockwire and on to the great gray buildings along the shore, where the van was taken over by the net and guided towards the concourse along with all the rest. He realized, when they were walking inside, that he’d be unable to kiss her good-bye in this public place.

She asked, “You
will
come back?”

“Yes—of course I’ll come back. The bishop’s not…” The air at the Bab Mensor shuttleport hummed with music and announcements. This was suddenly too much like a rehearsal for a more permanent parting. “I don’t even know…”

“No.”

A couple beside them were embracing, arms and bodies entwined, mouths crushed together. John looked away, down at the shining tiles of the concourse, then up again at Laurie. The wind had got to her hair when they crossed from the carpark, and a strand of it still clung to the corner of her mouth. He wanted to reach and brush it away.

“I’ll call,” he said.

“No, don’t call. Just think.”

“Anyway. I’ll be back soon enough. A few days.”

“Yes.”

She stood watching him as he walked off amid the steel walkways and scurrying trolleys, holding up her hand to wave as he looked back a last time.

Just think.
There was a party atmosphere on board the shuttle; most of the other passengers were expat workers leaving the Magulf for good. Cheers filled the long wide cabin as soon as the
Halcycon Phoenix
lifted from the Breathless Ocean. Hipflasks and tubes were passed along the aisles.

The shuttle climbed. Even the clouds faded. The sky deepened, and the moon and stars came out. For a timeless moment the cabin quieted as a marbled curve of sea and land and sky rolled far beneath them, then the
Halcycon Phoenix
began to dip. The thin air outside brightened. Glasses clinked, smoke drifted; you could get high just by breathing. The screen in front of John said the weather was good in Paris. By noon, the temperature was expected to rise to 27°, but with a refreshing easterly breeze. Just touch the middle cursor to get a fuller flavor…

“Going home, Father?”

John smiled at his neighbor and shook his head.

The Seine shuttleport was much like all European shuttleports. The foline tugs were automated, the moving walkways were covered over with views of the wide river, and the rolling countryside was dimmed behind layers of glass. It was only when he was outside, climbing into a taxi waiting under plane trees in the bright air, that the overwhelming strangeness of being back in Europe began to hit home. It was eleven o’clock, and his appointment with the bishop at St. Georges wasn’t until two. He told the taxi to take him north along the river.

With the windows down, the breeze in his face was moist, smelling of clean wet soil, the river, vegetation. This close to the city, most of the countryside was semirecreational, with ornamentally small fields, brownstone farmhouses that had scattered hencoops and white geese, patches of woodland, gray-green rows of asparagus, market-garden strawberries, and dwarfish sheep and cattle.

The taxi crossed the Seine and passed into the ruined outer suburbs. The vehicles on this new road scurried along between acres of fallen roofs and gables teetering under vine. The air smelled green. After the uncontrolled ravages of the weather, it had been easier to start anew rather than attempt to make the old roads and buildings fit the new demands of life. Many towns and cities were left to crumble back into the arms of nature; most Europeans now lived in the new villages such as Hemhill, servicing the various green industries that had replaced the gray ones. But London and Brussels and Paris—their centers, anyway—had been restored and saved.