The Great Wheel (30 page)

From the hallway, louder this time, came the sound of Wagner.

“Come on,” his mother said. “Dinner’s probably ready. I leave a lot of it to the kitchen and the cleaner now. I keep out of the way, although I sometimes feel like a guest in my own house.” Hal’s door closed behind them. Explosions of string and brass crashed up the stairwell, and she smiled and rolled her eyes. “And it all happens so
quickly
if I leave it to the house. I end up racing to keep up. But time really seems to be running faster now, don’t you think? Just these last couple of years, and the summers more than the winters. Everyone else I’ve asked says so. The clocks are all running faster too, even the particles around the atoms…” Her grip tightened on John as they descended the stairs. “Everything’s speeding up. But there’s some part of us that runs to a different time, that still knows.”

The music grew even louder at the foot of the stairs, but to John it sounded oddly sterile and fractured. Perhaps his father was right and something did slip out between the samples.

He asked, “Does Dad really feed this racket into Hal’s console all day?”

“He thinks he does, dear.” His mother patted his hand. They shared one of their old conspiratorial smiles. “He thinks he does. And it keeps him happy.”

After dinner, heavy with the weight of more food than he’d wanted, John announced that he was going out. His father stood outside on the drive watching him as he climbed into his rented Zephyr. The sun was bright now. John took a left down the road, away from the compound and towards the center of Hemhill. He studied the screens. Annie, he thought. He’d been at her wedding—already a novitiate and a target for smirks and the confidences of elderly relatives, but content with his lot because he was still looking into the fire beneath. He found her address easily enough; and he remembered it now anyway. Annie lived at Radway Farm. Near the ruins.

The farmhouse was centuries old, even if it was now surrounded by cleverly landscaped areas of warehousing, storage, silaging, and stocks. Looking down into the sunny bowl at the squared-off jumbles of flowering meadowgrass that covered the acres of flat roofs with their colors, angles, and heights all at slight variance, he was reminded of expressionist paintings where everything was rendered as a series of overlapping blocks, created in a time when artists were trying to take apart the world rather than keep it whole.

He had to announce his name into the gate, and there was a pause as it paged for human advice. Getting out of the car as he waited, taking deep breaths of this deep country air, he looked up at the sky, which was an incredible blue. He hadn’t been here since—when?

The gate swung open, and there was Annie in dungarees and Wellingtons, walking towards him through the bright afternoon.

“John,” she said, offhand and smiling. “You’re back?”

“Just today.”

They left the car to park itself and walked down the springy track and into the brown of the yards. Chickens scattered around them. His shoes quickly became heavy with mud. He felt clumsy and earthbound here, but Annie took his hand to steer him onto a sterile blue walkway and found him boots in an old barn.

“I don’t get rid of anything,” she said. “I did once, but I lived to regret it.”

“I should have come to see you before, Annie,” he said. “You haven’t changed.”

She turned her head away from him. Of course, she had changed. The skin around her eyes had lines. There were lank strands of gray in her hair. But that wasn’t what he meant. In his own way, he’d always loved Annie. Adored her when she and Hal were courting and they used to take him with them when they visited places. Even now, he couldn’t really understand why they’d wanted to bring this gooseberry kid along with them. But they had, and by doing so left him with eternal memories of a boat amid swans on a river in some town whose shining cobbled streets he saw as vividly as daylight. And the giant golden walls of Gloucester Cathedral. Annie, with her boyish hands, bare freckled arms, thin shoulders, strong lips, and short dark-brown hair, had always been the kind of girl he liked. But not wanted for himself, not in any real sense.

Annie was proud of her farm. A tenant, but she said by now she felt it was as much hers as it was Halcycon’s. She seemed immersed in the present, in the particular warm minute of this particular warm afternoon. The smell of bovine feed and excrement was leaking from the pipes that led to the stocks. That smell, too, he associated with Annie. With coming here with Hal to see her after her parents had moved from Brimfield to run the place.

She showed him a tiled room, once a dairy, where the new calves were checked and encoded. ATGCTA unraveling on the screens. As they walked on towards the open fields, a black-and-white dog ran up and sniffed at John’s crotch. He reached to stroke its silver-collared head, but it growled. Annie aimed a kick at it, sending it away. She said that farm dogs were never any good with people, even when they were linked into the net.

Pipes and lines stretched overhead. It was as if an industrial plant had been dumped lopsidedly into this fecund country mud. They passed under the sentinel figures of the pickers and diggers and harvesters, most as high as a house and with years of mud encrusted on their tracks and claws. There wasn’t much going on today, Annie said. Nowadays the workers were all on contract, and moved from farm to farm. You had to wait. Things changed, but it remained one of the essentials of farming that you always had to wait.

“Do you ever go and see Hal?” John asked as they walked between the barns.

“I used to,” she said, “when I thought it would do any good.” She grabbed a blade of grass and began to shred it. “And of course I tried to keep going after you left. But I’d already mourned for him. I lost him, John. Long ago…Before that stunt of his, to be honest.”

John nodded, glad at least that someone else was still angry.

“Come on.” She tossed the grass away. “I’ll show you the milkers.”

They took an open lift up the side of the largest of the stocks. This is new, she said, pointing to something in the jumble of slurry tanks, silage processors, and silos. But it was still the same farm, the same organized mess. And her cheeks were flushed, and the same sweet air that rose from the woodlands still ruffled her hair.

The lift stopped. The upper door irised open. There were pipes everywhere inside, even in the control room, where a young man sat with his feet up on the console eating a sandwich. Beyond, in the main pens, there was a stinging intensification of the smell that pervaded the whole of Radway Farm. John remembered getting lost in the stocks once when he wandered off on his own. He remembered the moist sound of so many creatures breathing, the sourceless lighting, the animal warmth.

Each milker was encased in a rack. Wires, pipes, and monitors drooped above and below it, crossing in great knitted sheaves over the walkways along which Annie led John. He traced the line of a red tube, quivering and warm to the touch, to where it passed through bars and entered a grayish wall of flesh. A tight ring of muscle pulsed and relaxed to receive it, and a pink bovine eye that was pushed against the racking of the pen blinked and seemed to regard him, although he doubted that the nerves reached the brain. It was a great brick of an animal. Tiny stumps for legs, mottled and almost hairless. In the rack above, he could see the pendulous udder of her neighbor. No teats as such, just two long fleshy tubes that faded at some indeterminate point into the plumbing of the machinery.

“What do they think about?”

“They don’t think,” she said. “Not these ones, anyway. But I’ve heard that people are getting an extra twenty-percent yield down in Montgomery from reconstructing their sense receptors and inputting VR.”

“You mean they think they’re grazing out on a meadow?”

She chuckled. “Imagine, having this place filled with cow dreams! Come on. I’ll take you to the house. You should meet the kids and Bill.”

The old redbrick farmhouse. Stone-capped windows, and the gate into the garden that still needed a good hard push. The cats sleeping on the sunny porch, and the smell of damp tiling.

“Wear these,” she said, kicking some slippers across to him. He put them on, wiggling his right toe from the hole in the front as Annie peeled off her socks and rolled her dungarees up above her knees. She picked up a rag from where a cat had been sitting, frowned at the rag, then used it to wipe the stripes of mud that had adhered to her calves. Her legs were still shapely and pale, and a fine down covered the shins. She’d shared a cabin room with him during the one summer that she came to Ley, and he remembered her bending over in the bluish sea-thrown moonlight to fold her clothes, dressed only in panties and a bra. He was used to seeing her in a considerably skimpier swimsuit on the beach, but the intimacy of that moment gave the sight of her a new charge. It was easily the most erotic thing he’d ever seen, and became his secret masturbatory icon in many teenage nights to come.

She looked up, and caught his gaze.

In the kitchen, straggles of laundry hung from beams on the ceiling. John sat on a stool, and a little girl with long blond hair falling from a crimson ribbon immediately started to use him as a climbing frame. As she slid down his legs, all sweaty absorption, another blond child came to stand beside him. She placed a frank hand on his shoulder and said, “Would you like to play?” It was only when he looked into her impossibly silver eyes and saw the emptiness in her mouth that he realized she was a doll.

“That’s my friend Samantha,” the climbing girl said, “and she wets the bed.”

Annie was doing something on the counter that involved oddly shaped implements of a kind that John had never seen before. The room filled with the smell of raw meat and garlic.

Annie’s husband, Bill, came in, dressed only in y-fronts and a crumpled blue shirt.

“This is John Alston. Remember? Hal’s brother? He’s a priest now.”

Bill shook John’s hand and shooed the doll and the girl away. Then he yawned, scratched his head, and looked around.

“You haven’t seen my trousers?”

“They’re wherever you put them.”

Bill turned to John. His face was mostly hidden beneath a whitening beard, eyebrows, and bushy hair. “It’s a permanent rubbish tip around here.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Anyway, John. You must be…where?”

“The Endless City.”

“Ahh. You people.”

Bill waved a hand, then lifted it to his mouth as he yawned again.

“He does the nights,” Annie said, still attending to the meat.

From a previously quiet and undisturbed corner of the kitchen, from what John had thought was a box containing more laundry, noises began to emanate and sheets to stir. A pink arm emerged and waved as if drowning. There was a moment of stillness, then the baby began to squall.

“He’ll be wanting milk,” Bill said.

“Yeah, but—can’t you see?—in a moment. Let John have him.”

The baby was lifted up and placed, struggling amid a caul-like trail of blankets, into John’s arms. Surprised at this big new human, it stopped crying, and John instantly felt more relaxed. It smelled so sweet. And no one ever really expected you to say or do much when you were holding a baby. It nuzzled towards his thumb. He let it suck.

“You must be a big hit at Borderer christenings,” Bill said, taking a bowl of uneaten breakfast cereal from a stool across the kitchen and sitting down.

“They don’t have them,” John said.

Bill nodded, crossed his legs, took the spoon from the breakfast bowl, and began to eat.

The baby still sucked John’s thumb. The sensation was warm and strong; it actually felt as though something nourishing were being drawn out of him. Then the baby pulled away and looked up. In the growing lattice of silver in its irises, there was still a hint of brown.

“He came a bit late,” Annie said. “A surprise gift. Isn’t that right?”

Bill grinned, milky oatflakes on his beard.

Annie gestured with bloody fingers around the kitchen. “We thought we’d finished with all this.”

Accidental pregnancies didn’t happen, but here John could almost believe in them. Annie coming down one morning with her breasts already swollen to give Bill the news with a sour-breathed kiss, a big hug. He envied the chaos of their happy, busy life.

“Here.” She took the baby from John. Her hands made red smears as she unbuttoned her blouse and offered a nipple.

“I’ll have to stop this soon,” she said as the baby began to suck. Her chin bulged as she looked down. “He’s five months already. They planted the crystals, oh, early summer, wasn’t it, Bill?”

Gazing absently at his wife’s breast, Bill nodded.

“There’s inflammation there still,” she said, “and they expect him to be ready in the autumn for his first format.” The baby’s mouth went
tick, tick
. “You read preliminary medicine, didn’t you, John? Don’t you work in some kind of clinic?”

“Well. Yes.”

“I’ve been using Calcymix in bottles, too. But the screen says I have to stop breastfeeding soon. It’s so bloody stupid. I’m sure I did it later with Jennie. It’s the only way in the middle of the night when he won’t stop crying.”

“He looks very healthy,” John said, wondering what he could possibly tell these people about babies. “It’s just there’s a danger of your natural antibodies conflicting with the recombinants his implant will be producing. They start that even before formatting, and those antibodies are far more powerful than the intravenous ones you’ll have been giving him. But there would be a rash first if there was a problem…”

“Oh, right.”

There was silence in the room now. The baby had stopped sucking.

Before he left, Annie insisted on showing John the baby’s back. She peeled off his vest and rompersuit, performed whatever trick was necessary to unseal and remove the diaper, and wiped the baby down. He lay there, legs and arms slightly curled in this warm room on a toweling sheet flecked with cat hairs. John turned him over, wishing he’d asked the name. But the baby didn’t cry. And of course there was some inflammation around the scabbed indentation in the baby’s spine. John glanced at Annie as she leaned intently over. He inhaled the soft milky smell of her and the baby. Didn’t she remember her other children? Didn’t she at least remember the last main implant she’d had herself when she was a teenager?