The Great Wheel (35 page)

“We both stand out, Laurie. I don’t know what I was bothering to hide from anyway. I’m not ashamed.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“It’s true.”

“From the bishop, did you get a telling off?”

“It’s not like that. When all is said and done, my vows are between me and God. She—”

“She?”

“It does happen. She was sympathetic, really, Laurie. She asked about you. She knows about the problems I’ve had with my faith. She wanted to know how I felt. She wanted to know if I was in love.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know. I’m still not sure…” He blinked. This was all coming out too quickly. Laurie was watching him, and part of him wanted to shout yes, to hug her and hold her. “Anyway,” he said, “the ache’s in my throat again, and even my back is now aching—”

“That’s lust,” Laurie said, “not love.”

Seeing the change in his expression, she sat back a little.

“You don’t know either, do you?” he said. “Where this is taking us?”

He picked at his food. He asked Laurie what she’d been doing. She shifted her second or third tube between her fingers.

“Nothing much,” she said. “Just working.”

The two phosphate engineers left. Someone else came in, but this place was so dark, it was impossible to tell the person’s sex or even whether the person was Borderer or European. The door swung forward, back. Outside, some kind of procession was going on—a funeral, to judge by the witchwoman wails and the jangling music. It was headed straight for the incinerator at El Teuf. Nothing that he would be involved in.

“How are your parents?” Laurie asked. “How’s Hal?”

“Hemhill’s the same. Nothing seems to have changed.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll give the three or so months I have left here to the priesthood,” he said, feeling suddenly breathless, his heart racing. “Then I’ll quit. Laurie, I’m going to leave.”

She made to say something, then stopped, gazing over his shoulder as her hands fiddled with the tube. “This is for me? You can’t throw away…”

“No, Laurie, it isn’t for you, it’s for me. Nothing else is clear to me at the moment, but I do know that it’s for me. I don’t feel free. I don’t understand myself. I can’t even come to terms with God…”

Laurie ground out her tube in the saucer between them. As she leaned forward, a soft hollow formed at the base of her throat.

He asked, “Why do they call this place Red Heat?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s because it’s so big and cold.”

They paid the bill and left. Outside, she walked away from him, moving quickly. He shouted after her. The street was overfull. There were women carrying great swaying bundles of kelp-sausage on their heads. A screaming child was snatched into a doorway. Someone muttered
something-outer
—and from somewhere there was a deep, growling rumble. It was early afternoon, but the lights were on in the rooms above the shops, and it could almost have been twilight. He looked at a passing koiyl vendor, trying to see if he remembered the face. The displays on a stall that sold Magulf lace were flapping madly. The chemical smoke from the hot pans of a dye maker whipped around them. A Halcycon-logoed Elysian whispered by, its windows blanked.

“Come on.” She pulled him around the corner, where her van sat in the dust between the windowless sides of two tenements. The rumbling came again, and the wind was suddenly stronger. Up ahead, supported by a post between the two buildings, a child’s swing rocked wildly.

They tumbled into the van, and the wind banged the doors shut behind them as Laurie leaned over and began to kiss him. He placed his arms gently around her shoulders, feeling the intricate stitching of the collar, the press of her tongue into his mouth. He could smell the perfume she wore, the way the chemicals had reacted with and almost drowned out the Laurie scent of sea and mist and rain and her skin. He opened his eyes and saw her closed lids and the delicate whorl of her ear, the lobe pierced by a gold stud. The wind boomed. Her stockings sighed as she shifted her legs. The van creaked and rocked slightly. He felt the nub of an old tube pressing into his right thigh. When Laurie kissed, there was always a faint grunt in the back of her throat. She was making it now. Then suddenly she pulled back.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really not here.”

“Where are you, then?” She fished in her bag.

“No.” He took her hand. “Wait a minute. Look…” He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry. This whole thing needs explaining.”

“You mean kissing? I thought it was a straightforward process for two people.”

“It’s…” He shook his head. Laurie looked crumpled now, with her makeup smudged and her skirt no longer straight. “I don’t think it’s something that I’m ready for yet. I mean, sex,” he said. “I’d like to call a truce.”

“Truce?”

“I know it’s the wrong word—a stupid word.” He laughed. The wind rattled over the van. “I want to see you, Laurie. I
long
to see you—you know that. But can’t we just keep it the way it is for now, Laurie? Just being together until I’ve finished here, as a priest?”

“People will still talk if we are seen with each other.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“I suppose you gave your word to your bishop not to fuck me?”

“Yes.
No.
This is all happening so quickly, Laurie. Can’t we just give ourselves time to breathe?”

“All right.” She pushed the card into the slot, and the engine started, the van began to rise. “It’s a kind of relief for me also. I hate hiding. I’m sick of eating lunches I don’t want at places no one goes to.”

“I won’t go back to Europe at the end of my term,” he said.

“I’ll stay on and find work in the Endless City. That isn’t long. And you, Laurie—you always said you wanted to leave the Zone.”

She took the wheel of the van and gave him a kind of smile.

“…and when you asked if I loved you, Laurie, I wish I hadn’t said I wasn’t sure. That’s not true, I…”

Her hand came down on his knee to silence him. Then she touched the grubby dashboard screen. Dust swirled.

“We couldn’t have made it more difficult,” she said, “could we? Not if we’d worked at it. Not just Borderer and European—but you a priest.”

He laughed and stretched his hand along the back of the seat, touching her padded, embroidered shoulder, his sleeve riding up, the pale light from his watch glinting on the colored beads.

“But, then, you could have been a homosexual too, John. Isn’t that what most priests are?”

She pulled into the darkening, crowded street. There’s not much point after this, he thought, in our going back to the bungalow the way we used to most afternoons. But Laurie had turned the other way in any case—west and away from the Zone.

“It’s not far to Mokifa,” she said, peering up through the windshield at the low sky.

“Mokifa?”

“It’s where my mother lives.”

As she drove on, he glimpsed a hitherto unseen variant of Santa Cristina’s blackened silhouette over the shanty roofs.

“I went to Seagates last night,” he said, “with Felipe.”

“Oh?” She nodded. “The market.”

“I was looking for the Lall koiyl.”

“Did you find it?” She slowed for a flock of children. One of them waved and banged the hood of the van. John watched her eyes crinkle with a smile.

“And I met Ryat. Remember Ryat? He was at the Governor’s Residence that night.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“Do you think I should trust him?”

“Trust him for what?”

“He seemed…Well, not unhelpful, but evasive. And he already knew about the leaf being contaminated. Somehow, the news of that must have got out to him.”

“I’m not surprised,” Laurie said.

“Then he went on about Quicklunch, about how there were so many other kinds of wrongs…”

“And he’s right, really,” Laurie said. “The Endless City is bound to have things like the Lall leaf, by its nature.”

“What do you mean, by its nature?”

“No one is in control to say—this is, that will be, you must. You’re from a structured society, you expect simple answers.”

“You’re starting to sound like Ryat now.”

“Is that surprising?”

They slowed at a scalloped archway leading into Mokifa. Even before she cranked down the window to show her face to the tattooed child-guard, Laurie was waved on.

“People know you here?”

“This was my home.”

“What about Chott?”

“Chott was when I was young.”

He said nothing, irritated that anyone should cordon off a part of the Endless City. The roads were paved here, and there were more taxis and vans than he was used to—their headlights, today, blazing through the gloom—but otherwise Mokifa wasn’t that different. There were even beggars (perhaps they were the beggar gentry). He did notice fewer animals—and fewer children. Many of the houses and tenements were more modern—uglier, disfigured by external pipes and wires.

Laurie stopped the van. “We are here.”

He climbed out and looked around. Even with the wind howling, the air was filled with the discordant throb and rattle of generators. A building opposite had been configured to look something like a Roman palazzo, but the ornate golden arches fizzed and brightened unevenly. Through them he could see ghost outlines of corrugated jelt. The people walking by seemed the same here as everywhere else—although there were perhaps fewer obvious oddities and deformities among them, and they stared a little less obviously at him. Were they better dressed? It was hard to tell, wrapped up and hunched as they were against this stormy afternoon.

“I didn’t think you’d approve,” Laurie muttered.

The tenement where her mother lived consisted of various boxlike levels of individual dwellings linked and cocooned by a loose network of cables and scaffolding. The steel gate of a lift slid open when Laurie spoke to it. Creaking, it drew them slowly up through the lattice of girders. There was a green scent in the air that could have been polish or a mood change in Laurie’s perfume. She gave him a look, standing by him, then gazed back at the door. The steel caught the reflection of two figures; faceless outlines and colors. Laurie’s pale red legs. Her squared shoulders. Her frilled skirt. He thought
dancing ladies,
then the lift turned right, juddered, and stopped. The door slid open, and the scented air escaped into the wind.

“Your mother knows about me?” he shouted, following her on the open walkway.

“Oh yes,” she said, pulling at her cuffs in the shelter of a doorway, straightening the bands in her hair. “She knows.”

The apartment was windowless, strung high amid the girders. There was a screen on the sealed door. It greeted them as the door hissed open, and they stepped into a sudden hush and warmly lit gloom. Laurie’s mother had the bustle of someone who was expecting guests—but not quite yet.

The décor was all very complicated and neat. Furred red wallpaper, the brassy glow of many small electric lanterns, chairs with lacy edges, mobile and unsubtle pictures of scenery; waterfalls and seascapes. A half-meter-tall clown stood atop an implausibly ugly chest of drawers, hopping from foot to foot and juggling tiny balls. The carpet was lumpy from all the cabling.

Laurie seemed relaxed, and her mother sat facing John in the kind of advanced interactive chair that no elderly European would have sat in—it proclaimed too conspicuously the need for help. Yet she’d moved around easily enough when she saw them in, and she didn’t even look that old. He guessed she was in her late fifties, like his own parents, yet her dark hair was thick and full, her jaw was strong, and the flesh on her hands and face, if slightly crimped, was still plump.

“I used to go to Santa Cristina,” she told him. “Once. But I did not really go for Christ, for the religion. The priest…”

“Father Felipe?”

She thought, then shook her head. “It was many years ago.”

Did you take Laurie there with you, too? he wondered. Did she sit at the back swinging her legs—and why has she never told me about it?

“It would be good,” he said, “if you could come to the church again. I see so few people from here, from Mokifa.”

She smiled and said, “Yes, I will see if I can.” But she looked and sounded so much like Laurie that he knew that that meant no.

“You worked in Europe, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Laurie told you about that.” It was a statement rather than a question. They gazed at each other for a moment, then looked over as the trolley came rattling in through the wall.

“Didn’t you say you were going to get the wheel fixed on that thing?” Laurie asked.

“You know how it is…” Her mother spread her arms. “
Fornu.
”

Fornu
…That one Borderer word hung in this rich, dark room. John wondered whether it was his imagination, or whether this whole tenement really was rocking in the wind.

The cups were filled and passed around. The biscuits on the plate that had been reserved for him were warm and tasted of sugar, butter, and flour in the fractional moment before they dissolved into nothing. John couldn’t remember when he’d sat in a Borderer room and eaten food before—yet it all felt eerily normal, almost boring. Tea with the priest; as though Laurie and her mother were acting out some kind of play.

“You are good friends, I hear.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “We’ve got to know each other very well. Even these days, I suppose, that’s uncommon. Ah…” He realized he didn’t know what to call her.
Mrs. Kalmar, I’d like to marry your lovely daughter.
How did that sound? Like one of those stupid tunes Felipe was always humming.

“You have not many months here?”

“A couple—two—in this posting. But then I think I’ll try to find work that will keep me in the Endless City.”

“You miss Europe?”

“No, I don’t miss Europe. I was just there.”

“Yes. Laurie told me.”

Behind her, on a shelf above the juggling clown, was propped a smaller picture, less elaborate than the heaving landscapes on the walls. A younger version of this primly dressed woman looked down on him. The man standing with her, grinning and with his long hair tied back, also managed to look like Laurie, although he could not have been more different from his wife. A stubborn man, Laurie had told John, and her father looked it, although he was relaxed with his two sons beside him, one already fuller and broader than he was, unmistakably self-possessed and handsome, the other thinner, like a poorer and wrongly sexed shadow of Laurie. A girl in a print dress stood in front of them, holding herself still with a tension that suggested she wanted to squirm away from the proprietary hand that her father was trying to place on her shoulder. She had a mischievous face. The background had been blanked to gray—no pens and ramshackle houses and black pillars, none of the stench and gleam of the old kelpbeds. But for the color of their eyes, he thought, the photograph could have been taken at any time, anywhere.