The Great Wheel (26 page)

A huge circle of parkland had been cleared around the inner-city area. There were gravel paths, bridges and streams, distant green hills. The lawns gave way to streets, tall elegant houses with dormer windows raised like questioning eyebrows. Rejoining the course of the Seine, passing fruitmarkets and hotels, John reached the Left Bank. In the absence of any further instructions, the taxi stopped on the wide avenue of the Boulevard St. Michel. He made to get out, but the door stayed shut and the taxi bleeped at him for the fare. He remembered to produce his personal card instead of cash, then searched his pockets for a dysol cloth to wipe it with.

As John sat and drank coffee at a pavement café, breathing the warm fresh air, time seemed to hang on one moment, then jump forward by an hour. He drummed his fingers on the tin table, still hardly able to believe he was here. Checking his watch again, he paid the European waitress the huge sum she’d asked for the coffee, quickly jerking back his hand as the tips of her fingers brushed his palm. Then he wandered amid the strutting pigeons, past the buildings, the striped awnings, the wrought-iron balconies adorned with potted plants and draped with washing. The silver-eyed people here were busy, happy, chatting, making the most of this predictably glorious summer day. Hurrying elbows brushed his own. It was strange, the way no one made way for him.

In the Luxembourg Gardens children played amid statues and fountains, and couples wandered hand in hand, flaunting their togetherness. Many nodded and smiled at John; showing the respect due to that familiar figure, the priest. From across the Rue de Vaugirard, church bells began to shiver the air. There were other spires and domes in the farther distance, rising over the trees at the soft edge of the sky.

Don’t call—just think.

John sat down on a bench and covered his eyes.

St. Georges was a large seminary on the northern outskirts of Paris, built of brown brick in the heavy Gothic style that characterized the Second Empire. Climbing the tiled steps from the road at precisely ten to two, he was instantly struck by the smell of polish and incense, and by the same undertow of priestly aromas that even the Pandera presbytery harbored. Stone figures of saints and industrialists stared down from the echoing walls of the vestibule. He’d never been here before—his previous meetings with the bishop had always taken place in Rome or at the Millbrooke Seminary—but crossing the wide half-lit space towards the nun seated by the stairway, and despite everything, he found that he felt at home.

The nun smiled and slid across the counter a finger-smeared screen to show him the way to the bishop’s office. He nodded thanks. Left down the gleaming corridor, past the refectory door, the clatter of cutlery, the rumble of voices, the floury smell of communal food. The bishop’s door was half open, and she looked up from her desk before John had a chance to knock, was instantly up and taking his bag, urging him to sit down. She was dressed in a formal white gown, with a gold cross over her heart and a gold band in her graying hair.

“You look well, John. A little tired, if I may say so. But well.”

“I’m fine.”

“And Felipe?”

“He’s bearing up.”

She smiled. “Bearing up. I think that’s how he likes it…” She was still standing beside her desk. Her hands clasped, unclasped. The white robe sighed and shifted. “Would you like something to drink? Tea, coffee?” She nodded towards the crystal decanter and glasses on the sidetable by the fireplace. “Anything weaker, stronger?”

“Thanks. I’m fine.”

“Well…”

She drew in a breath. They looked at each other. John realized how little thought he’d given to this meeting.

“I read something this morning, John, and it set me thinking, knowing that you were coming. About the religious impulse being tied to the sky. The stars, the sun, the moon. Had we remained cavedwellers, we might never have found God.”

John nodded, remembering the silence that had filled the shuttle as it rose into the troposphere. A breeze blew through the mullioned window into the bishop’s office, lifting the edges of the cards and papers that were weighted by a sea-smoothed granite rock on her desk. He said, “I miss the stars.”

“And I still miss the clouds,” she said, alluding to her own missionary years in the Endless City, far east from the Magulf, in Mizraim, at the rim of the black mires where the Nile once flowed. “In my dreams, John, I’m always back in those tight, winding streets.” The bishop clasped her hands again and shivered slightly. “But look outside, John. It’s a lovely day. Even here, the sun is precious, something we should never take for granted.” She held out a hand. He took hold of it. It felt light and hot, like a bird’s. “Come. Let’s walk in the gardens.”

They went out and along the corridor, through a doorway into the rose-scented cloisters, where sunlight poured through the archways and the shadows between were deep and intense.

“And how are things at the clinic?”

“I manage well enough, Mother. I have the usual problems. An out-of-date doctor. Lack of supplies. Fortunately, I get some help from the Zone’s CMO. He bends the rules a little, gives me advice and the few medicines he can slip through the system.”

“I see.” The bishop nodded, her hands now behind her, bony shoulders arched, fingers twining, untwining. She asked John about Bella; about the state, physical and spiritual, of the church. He walked beside her, answering each question, giving out nothing more. He admired this woman. He felt that she deserved his honesty. Still, he knew he was involved in some kind of negotiation—and as yet he wasn’t sure of the terms. Was this summons really about Laurie? Perhaps he’d got it all wrong. Was it about the koiyl? She’d read, it seemed, his reports on the net…

“John, do you know how the leaf is dried once it reaches the Magulf?”

“There’s talk of a place a few kilometers down Gran Vía, but the people are very secretive. The koiyl seems to disappear at the end of the growing season after it’s taken from Tiir. Then it reappears on the streets. I suppose that’s a way of controlling availability.”

“A leaf probably won’t keep unless it’s properly cured, John. And that’s not likely to be an easy process. More than just a question of hanging the things in the sun—if there were any sun. It will probably need moist conditions, or else it will powder and crack…”

“Was koiyl grown in Mizraim, so far east?”

“Not exactly, but there were parallels. The growing and smoking of the leaf of the tobacco plant—you’ve heard of tobacco? A venerable tradition. It was a habit, in fact, that I acquired while I was in Mizraim and then found hard to shake off. Like koiyl, it can be chewed as well as smoked. Do people smoke the koiyl leaf?”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Tobacco is also a dangerous substance, like koiyl. Cancer-causing, in fact, although for different reasons.”

John nodded. He knew that tobacco was a kind of low-tech predecessor to the tubes that Laurie used. Though it was only mildly addictive, it had remained popular long after the harm it caused was established.

From the cloisters they passed into the gardens of stately trees and wide lawns. Walled in from the streets around it, St. Georges was much bigger than the map John had called up in the taxi suggested. There was a small lake with tame carp nosing the surface as they walked by. The bishop stooped to stroke a scaled golden head. The fish’s wise, unblinking eyes gazed at them.

“I could walk around these gardens all day,” she said. “I keep them as my direct responsibility. This green loveliness—I admit it’s become an obsession. New flowerbeds, new arrangements, little changes I’ve made. But, then, I suppose I need the escape. I have to spend hours,
days
pleading at meetings and on the net to raise money and awareness for projects in the Endless City. What to you, John, seems so sparse and grudging out there in the Magulf becomes a huge effort here. A rock that I must continually roll uphill if the work of places like your church and clinic are to continue.”

They walked on across a circular lawn surrounded by trellises of nodding sweet pea.

“I look in eyes of the people I have to meet, John, and I often see the same conflict. They know that they should do, give, feel, more. But they try to shift, to look away, to find an excuse, an escape. Yes—I hear it said and I see it unsaid—we should help them, these godless Gogs. But shouldn’t they also help themselves? Why must
we
always contribute and organize? Aren’t we doing more harm than good? It’s an ancient and inherently feeble argument, of course, and those of us who work to bring healing must try not to condemn, but we must also make sure that we do nothing that fosters that attitude. If we who bring aid seem compromised, if people can point at us and shake their heads, my task of generating money and interest becomes that much more difficult…”

They had stopped walking and now stood at the edge of a copse of trees. The bishop was right, of course. Any excuse: a design fault in a kelpbed, a priest who proclaimed one thing but did another. It offered people a way out.

“You’ve heard,” John said, “that I’m sleeping with a Borderer woman?”

“Not quite that much,” the bishop said, “but enough to feel and pray of you. And to care and wonder.” Like ripples trapped on green water, the sun danced through the branches overhead. She was tearing, John saw, at a leaf. “How is it, John? What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

They walked on in the shade of the trees.

“Do you love her? Tell me about her. She must be special.”

He told her about Chott, Drezzar, about Laurie’s mother working in Europe. He told her about Laurie’s bungalow and the net, about how she had to eat out at lunchtime because people where she worked spat in her coffee. The bishop was smiling at him now. For her, the moment of crisis was over, and her hands were calm again, clasped across her golden cross and white robe. The breeze caught a strand of silver hair, pushing it over her cheek.

She turned and began to walk. The trees shifted and played behind them. “God really does work in mysterious ways, John. Even now. Perhaps more now.”

“I still have doubts about God, Mother, if that’s what you mean.”

“But perhaps the priesthood really isn’t for you, John. I suppose you’ve thought of that…? Of course. Stupid of me. The breaking of a vow is sometimes just the way that leads out from the vocation to another role in life. At the end of the day, whether you continue within or outside the priesthood isn’t important. You shouldn’t turn your back on what’s true to you.”

“I just wish I knew what that was.”

“You want to return to your work in the Magulf, yes? To see Laurie? Felipe? To do something about this leaf?”

“Yes.”

She stopped again and turned to him. “Did you think I might refuse you that?”

“It had crossed my mind, Mother. Laurie and I will have to—”

“At the very least, be more discreet,” she said. She took his arm and drew him on. Their feet sunk into the turf. “But you know my position. Hateful though it is, I do have to pay attention to appearances. You have—what?—less than three months left in the Magulf now, John. I’ll give you that time. And trust you to use your own faith and judgment.”

“Yes. I understand.”

Her hand squeezed his arm. “
Don’t
tell me you understand, John.” The hand kept its grip on him. The bishop was bent over now, and her breathing was audible. The short walk had tired her. “Remember Bunyan’s Pilgrim, called to return home by his wife and children but stuffing his fingers in his ears and running on and away, shouting about Salvation? I always thought how foolish that was, yet I imagined that one day I’d understand what Bunyan meant. I still don’t, and I don’t know if I’d live again this life I’ve chosen, John. God can wait for us—He has all eternity.”

They turned back along a lavender-edged gravel border towards the sun-warmed brick expanse of St. Georges.

“You’ll stay the night?”

“If that’s possible.”

“And then tomorrow I’d like you to do something else for me?” He looked at her. The hand clasped tighter. “John, it’s not a demand or a favor, it’s something you should do for the sake of yourself. Will you go and see your parents? Will you go to your brother?”

“Time is—”

“Just a day or two. I think you owe yourself that. Do you know how your brother is?”

“I spoke to my parents.” When? Longer ago than he’d realized. “He’s okay. He’s still alive.”

“How old is he now?”

A gardener was busy weeding a bed of pinks. It looked like a small cleaner, except that there was dirt on its pincers and it smelled of manure. Someone had painted roses on its dome.

“Hal’s thirty-nine.”

“Go and see him, John. Go and see your parents. Then return to Laurie, and tell me after the autumn rains who you are and where you want to be.”

He had to smile. “I can’t promise to answer all that, Mother.”

She chuckled too. Her side was pressed against him, and he could feel the weak flutter of her breathing. He helped her as they walked thorough the sunshine back along the path to her office.

It was odd to take dinner at a communal table. The high-beamed ceiling of the refectory was held up by wooden angels. Bare hands served him vegetable soup and pork and potatoes, fresh bread and cheese. He was asked how long he was staying; if, for real or on the net, he played golf or bridge; if he could sing baritone. There were one or two faces that he knew. Silver eyes everywhere. Overpowered, he chose to sit alone for evening Mass as light flooded the stained-glass apostles and the air was filled with the rumble of the organ, the singing of the choir. It was all sweetly nostalgic, distant, unreal.

Next morning at St. Georges, John was woken by sparrows twittering on his window ledge. Looking out across prim lawns still dewy and hazed with mist, he decided to leave before breakfast. He shaved, opened drawers, packed away his cassock, pocketed the fresh card that, at the bishop’s request, Brother Charles in Accounts had given him. He walked along the empty corridors, past the paintings of Christ and Our Lady, past the rails of coat hooks and the chapels and the dorms and the frosted windows of the classrooms. He let himself out through the main doors and headed down the street.