The Great Wheel (27 page)

He was surprised to find that even an air-conditioned Elysian was within reach of the funds that the bishop had authorized for him, but he chose a smaller and less-equipped Zephyr and in it called up Hemhill on the screen. The bubble-shaped car took some time to reply; it had probably never traveled beyond Paris. Still, there it was: an estimated ten hours’ journey along the main autoroutes.

By now, Paris was busy with the things of morning. The cobbled streets were filled with dog walkers, bike riders, buzzing cleaners, joggers. The cafés were opening, the markets and squares blossoming with purposeful life. His stomach ached for breakfast, but he instructed the car to hurry out of the city and through parkland dappled with the sailing shadows of clouds, past the ruins, into the wide green farmland beyond. Towards Hemhill.

I
T WAS EVENING BY
the time he drew close to Hemhill. As the sights grew more familiar, the last part of the journey seemed to slow and expand. The lights of one of the great agripedes sparkled like moonlight through the tall hedges, and he braked the car and buzzed down the window to let in the summer smells of ripening jelt and corn.

After the long journey, it was odd to make this switch to the real and the particular. He remembered how he’d once had dreams of what it would be like to return home from somewhere far off. The dreams were unspecific, but in them he’d always done something marvelous while he was away, and everyone he knew would be waiting. Hal was there at the front, shaking his head and smiling down at his little brother.
I’d never have believed it. Skiddle
…

He passed the big oak at the railinged edge of Hemhill’s small central park where, swift and exulting—at least until he looked down—he’d once climbed. The streets and the houses were variations on neatness, with names that changed occasionally to suit the whims of death, divorce, company moves, and the house market. Sixpenny House. Arden. Leaves flashed overhead, and the white gate of his parents’ house swung open at his approach. He stopped the car and stepped out, blinking as the lights came on.

“That is you…?”

His mother’s shadow stretched out from the doorstep. His father waited in silhouette behind.

“I was saying, wasn’t I? That you might be back. I had this feeling.”

She planted a dry kiss on his cheek and pulled him swiftly inside.

“Come. It’s…”

Their hands and words floated around him. He went into the lounge, where they had new chairs. He sat on one. And a new carpet; some kind of material that managed to be soft and smooth yet was dustless so as not to irritate their lungs. New wallpaper, too. And a new card in the picture in the wall, which displayed an almost white landscape clothed in either moonlight or snow. His mother had already shot off to the kitchen, and his father sat facing him, hands clasped, elbows on his knees, leaning forward in his chair. There were age mottles on his father’s face now, and the thinning gray hair was swept from a shining sweep of skin-covered bone. His cheeks sagged. He was nearly sixty.

“You look well.”

“Thanks. You too, Dad.”

“It’s…Hmmm.”

John smiled at the house cleaner as it swiveled into the room to pick up the tray of tea china that lay on a sidetable. He raised a hand to delay the command and draw it over. He placed his palm on the warm brass dome, stroking to the rough edge of the cpu plate that he and Hal had so often removed.

“Exactly how long,” his father was asking, “will you be staying, John?” He blinked. “What I mean is…”

“What he means,” his mother called from the kitchen, “is that you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

“Just two days,” John said. Squeaking slightly, the cleaner rattled out of the room. “I was in Paris,” he added. “The bishop agreed I should take a short rest before going back to the Magulf.”

His father regarded him. It had gone quiet in the kitchen. Rest. Bishop. By that quick statement, John had intended to forestall further questions, but he’d rehearsed it too often in the car, and it now implied all the things he’d meant not to say.

“Did you get the soup?”

“Soup?”

“The soup I sent you, Son. When you called us, you asked for powdered soup.”

“No,” John said. His father would have questioned him about the flavors and the brand if he’d lied and said yes. “These things take time, Dad. But I’m sure it’ll come through.”

“Time. Of course.” But his father looked pained.

John shifted in the new chair. It was huge. His fingers strayed to the screen on the arm. He touched it, and the cushions softened and his feet rose into the air.

His father, still unsmiling, said, “If you’d have known you were coming, John, you could have picked it up and taken it with you. I mean, the soup.”

“Yes. If I had known, that would have been simpler.”

His mother came in with dinner steaming on a tray. He’d already stopped and eaten in the late afternoon. Shaking the salt out over sausages, French toast, chips, and bacon—and with every possibility of pudding to follow—he realized that that had been a stupid thing to do.

“We thought you could go up and see Hal afterward,” his mother said. She perched on the edge of a chair, her hands pressed into her lap.

When he finished eating, he placed the tray on the floor and snapped his fingers, and the three of them watched as the cleaner came in and picked it up. When it left the room, his mother’s face relaxed a little into a smile. “Would you like to go up now?” She half-stood from the chair. “I mean, if you’re…”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“How
is
Hal?” he asked her in the glare of the hall.

“John, he’s the same. I have this now.” She raised her arm, tugged at her sleeve, and held her left wrist to him, as though inviting him to sample a new perfume. “It saves me having to worry and hang around him quite so much. Pricks at my nerves like a little needle.” He saw a silver implant entwined around the veins above her watch. A pulsing light. She made a face. “And
I
had to have it done, of course. Your father wouldn’t.”

“No.”

“Anyway, off you go.”

She watched him from the foot of the stairs, one hand resting on the banister, the tiny ruby light in her wrist still showing through the wool of her cardigan. The air was noticeably dimmer on the landing. Past the door into John’s own room, which was slightly ajar, Hal’s door along the landing was shut. John started when, as he reached for it, it swung open. Then came the tingle of the molecular barrier that had kept the outside air at bay ever since Hal’s minor fungal infection—something so odd that even his net-enhanced viruses hadn’t reacted—of a couple of years before. The lighting grew slowly from darkness to a dull glow. That and the soundproofing were innovations made in the years when there were still things to be done to this room that hadn’t yet been tried. Comatose patients, his mother once read in the ancient and esoteric medical books she buried herself in, could be precipitated into fatal crisis by sudden lights and noises.

John pushed through the wall of slightly warmer, moister air. Even the presence of his own body seemed to gather in slow increments inside this increasingly isolated box. He paused, took a breath. He crossed the soft and slightly sticky surface of the material that now covered the floor to the bed where Hal lay. So much about the room had changed, yet so much remained the same. The desk where Hal had worked, the books and cards and games on the shelves. Yet it was all so neat now, the way it would have been if he’d finished cleaning up the detritus of his childhood that night and gone to London to study—what was it called?—structural communication.

“Hello, Hal.”

Click, sigh. The faint pepperminty scent of whatever it was that was used to repurify the air.

Click, sigh.

“It’s me. John. I’m back. In the flesh this time.”

It was so quiet, he could hear his own heartbeat—and the subterranean hum of the transformer in the unit beside the bed that pulled the monitoring data through a direct link with the big thermonuclear torus at Leominster. Enough power, his father had once said, to run a bloody factory. And to light, John now thought, a fair portion of the Endless City. Still, they could afford it on their Halcycon pensions and the extra medical grants they’d been given. If his parents hadn’t had all this expense, they might not have put their summerhouse at Ley up for sale, but John doubted it. Even with Hal fully alive and working somewhere fabulous on things he couldn’t explain, this room would still have remained a shrine.

“I’m just back for a couple of days. I’ve been to see the bishop in Paris. She suggested…” There was a chair by the bed that he recognized from the old diningroom set. The backrest dug into his spine when he sat down. It couldn’t be comfortable to sit here for long hours, as his mother must do. “She suggested I come here. It’s just a day or two, Hal. Then I go back.”

Click, sigh. The peachy smell of the flowers on the other side of the bed washed over him in a sickly wave. Too-bright yellow chrysanthemums from the garden in a tall glass vase. He saw a spider climbing over the petals. Every movement seemed retarded, retracted, delayed.

“I haven’t told Mum and Dad, but this visit is supposed to be a time of regrouping. Coming to terms. She’s a decent woman, the bishop. The sort of thinking priest you always said you could just about come to terms with…”

Click, sigh. The warm starfield of bronzes, marbles, and cups on the far wall blazed and winked at him. Tennis, football, chess.

“…but the fact is, Hal, I’ve been sleeping with this girl, a Borderer woman, Laurie, and word’s got around the Zone. And the business about the contaminated leaf, that’s also gone a little awry. I don’t, anyway, seem to be getting very far.”

He realized that he was speaking more to the screen on the monitor box than to Hal. It was the instrument that sniffed at and sensed the room, monitored vital signs and brain activity for any traces of movement or pain, and fed data into the ravaged stump of Hal’s consciousness. John could see the wires that ran from the box and tunneled into the pitted flesh of Hal’s wrist where his watch had been—the final threads in the web—and the rainbow-thin but nevertheless slightly thicker cable that was taped to the side of his cheek and then entered his nose to mate with the internal implant that had been embedded through the bone amid the dead cells at the base of his skull.

“But apparently it doesn’t jeopardize my immediate position—my term with Felipe in the presbytery. I’m going back, Hal. Day after tomorrow. It seems that no matter what you do, even if you step out of line, break your vows, discover a way of saving lives…nothing changes. Things remain the same.”

Hal’s flesh had a healthy gloss. Healthier than John’s own. The bare arms and shoulders—lying above the special gray-green sheet that rippled constantly at some imperceptible molecular level to stimulate the skin and that could turn soft or rigid or liquid-smooth at the touch of a screen—had excellent tone and definition. They lay there, easy and relaxed as in an artist’s drawing. A life study. But Hal’s face, as always since the coma deepened, didn’t quite connect with the real, remembered Hal. Like the muscles, it was too relaxed, too smooth. John gazed at the square jaw, the faint dimple in the chin, the broad, slightly compressed lips, the chiseled nose. The closed eyes set wide apart. John remembered the faces of the kings carved in the rocks above Hettie’s cave, and how much, truly, Hal was like them—a king. That noble, unfurrowed brow. His mother kept his hair cut exactly as he used to have it cut. A little less fashionable now, and it still stuck up around the crown no matter what you did with it. That tuft would have always made him appear boyish as he grew older.

The cheeks were slightly hollower, the skin around the placid curve of his eyelids thinner and more stretched, but there was no real sign of age. Although…John leaned a little closer. Yes, his brother was graying at the temples. Quite a bit, once you noticed it. He wondered how his mother reacted when she saw that. Whether she had considered buying something to disguise it. At least Hal wasn’t going bald like Tim Purdoe.

“So anyway, Hal. I’m here because I’m here. I wanted to look around. See you and Mum and Dad. See Annie…” he paused.
Annie.
“If she’s still here. I haven’t seen her in years. And I have fond memories.” He stopped. “Fond memories, Hal, of the times when you both used to take me out to places with you. Remember Gloucester? Remember nights at the carnival?”

He reached out now, watching the slow, underwater movement of his arm as it stretched towards Hal, towards the hand that was resting, palm down and fingers loosely cupped, on the smooth sheet. Then his fingers touching, sliding beneath, closing on Hal’s own. Hand clasping hand. Flesh on flesh. Hal’s greater warmth, the slackness, and the slight dampness of sweat between them. John sniffed, and dabbed at his nose with the hand that wasn’t holding Hal’s. There was always this moment when, coming home and seeing Hal, he felt like crying. But the tears didn’t quite come today. He took a breath. It would pass.

“Anyway, Hal…” The hand lay cupped in his own. A warm sleeper’s hand, like the flesh of Laurie’s body when she lay against him. “I’ll look in again.” He squeezed, felt bone and cartilage shifting. Was that a slight pressure in return? He dismissed the thought. He’d spent too many years listening as his mother pointed to screens and specially-brought-in monitors and timecharts that supposedly detailed Hal’s responses to real-world events and input changes from the net. It was a blind alley, John decided long ago. If Hal ever recovered, there would be no doubting. The whole world would know.

Their flesh stuck slightly as John withdrew his hand. He stood up. Hal’s right arm now lay a little crooked, the fingers and palm tipped over, no longer a mirror image of the left. He decided to leave it like that. His mother would rearrange it soon enough anyway, have Hal back the way she wanted. There was no real point in his interfering.

Click, sigh.

The door swung open. The barrier passed over him.

He left the room.

“We have a happy enough life,” his mother said later as she prepared his room for him to sleep in. It was called the guestroom now, and few signs of his childhood remained beneath the freshly painted and papered surfaces. It seemed as if only the things that had never really been part of his room, like that vase, like that dreadful dampstained engraving of ancient Heidelberg, had been left as they were. “I wake up each morning,” his mother said, “and I think of the whole day ahead. How lucky I am. My time’s really my own. I embroider. And we play golf…”