The Great Wheel (40 page)

“I suppose Tim’s right,” he said. “And you’re the net, aren’t you? If you don’t know these things, who does?”

“I’m just a small portion, John. Something Laurie’s taken and partially controlled. But Tim Purdoe was also right, earlier, when he said that you needed a doctor to examine you. I, too, find that your signal is weak.”

“We can’t be the only Borderer and European,” he said, “ever to be…”

“No. Of course.”

“Does it ever work?”

“There’s sometimes talk,” the answerer said, “of a way of making the recombinants entirely safe so there will be no fear of touching, no need for dysol or lydrin or the gloves. But then something else comes in from the deserts, one of the new viral predators that attack your recombinants directly. It never seems to end, Father John, and I doubt if it ever will. Every time you get close to touching the Borderers, the world will push you back.”

“You accept that only because your priorities are the same as ours,” he said, turning in the booth to look for Laurie’s answerer. She seemed real beside him now, with blue eyes and standing in a blouse and skirt that needed pressing. “Do you think anyone in Europe really wants the barriers to come down?”

Spreading her hands, the answerer shrugged. “I suppose not. The shockwire, the cheap labor, the hand-painted trinkets…”

He looked at her eyes, her face, her hair. She held out her hand. “Would you like to touch me, Father John? There’s enough processing space available to go up to five-sense on this partition. We could even make love.”

“I can’t.”

She smiled and nodded, and his fingers reached and found the quaternary lines and dug in, pulling down the cursor and fading the screen, bringing back Main Avenue, the warmly lit booth.

He walked all the way back to the presbytery, out of the Zone and through the flooded streets of the Endless City. Gran Vía was shining and empty, but he stopped at the twisted crossroads on Cruz de Marcenado when he saw the headlights of one of the low-backed funeral vans that plied to and from the incinerator at El Teuf, beating white tracks through the rain. It stopped at a place where people stood outside in black oilskins, holding chemlights, their shoulders sloping like the wet roofs of the houses from which they had emerged. As John, hidden by the night and the rain, watched, the long box bearing Martínez’s body was carried out of the house, and the women began to wail.

H
E WAS WORKING MOST
evenings at the clinic now, updating and reordering the doctor’s data. He doubted whether his successor would continue the task, but he persisted in drawing links and lines, surprising himself repeatedly by his own absorption and persistence, his speed and decisiveness. The leaf helped. Chewing it regularly, he was coming to understand its true function: although it worked superficially as an anesthetic, in the longer term it gave an ability to shut off areas of thought. It was more than just forgetting. With the leaf, it sometimes seemed that he could reorder the whole rambling house of his mind, redecorate and close off wings, demolish stairways, brick up unwanted doors, throw out old furniture, repaint the walls in clean whites and then wander the pale and empty rooms at will, always turning exactly where he wanted to turn, seeing only the views that he wished to see through the gleaming windows, hearing only the clean clear music of silence. There were blissful periods working late and alone in the clinic’s backroom when he was filled with nothing but the pure and intense energy of this orderly task. No Laurie or Hal at his shoulder. No worries about quitting the priesthood. Just the sound of his breath, the beating of the rain, the creak of the doctor’s mandibles, and the tumbling figures on the screen. He paged back through the years of anonymous entries, calling up the varied graphs of disease and fatality rates. Overlaid, they formed a pattern even more jagged and complex than the rooflines of the Endless City, or of Paris or London at dawn. There were soaring towers and yawning canyons. Here were the Monuments of Smallpox II, the Steeples of Leukemia. The vast spire, too, of stomach complaints, if you combined ulcers and lesions in a single category. Could there be some external cause for this as well? But the question had come too late. It was an edifice he could not begin to scale. This city was truly terrible and grand, with its jeweled streets and blazing foundations. A place beyond this earth entirely.

One night, there came a persistent tap that seemed to signify more than the endless drip-knocking of the rain. He paused the screen and went through the outer office to check the door, where two children were standing. Between them, backlit by the fires that burned in the towerblock opposite, was a horned goat.

The girl and boy came inside when he beckoned. He recognized them as Sarai and Mo, and knew that their parents lived in a tenement not far from the church. The parents were intermittent regulars, and worked at one of the big food processors—their hands and arms stained a permanent blue from the catalysts they stirred in to solidify the blocks. When the doctor raised a creaking sensor to sniff the air as the children dragged the goat into the backroom, the girl Sarai turned and stuck her tongue out at it.

The goat was a male, a well-hung breeder of the kind that supposedly gave good milkers for offspring, with long unbudded horns curving from a dense white coat. It reeked, of course. Competition for servicing was fierce, and in the absence of any ability to pick and choose genetic traits, the creatures had to be an advertisement in themselves. Over the years, attempts to breed placidity into goats had given way to the expedient of routinely sprinkling suppressant powders on their feed. In the summers goats were mostly tethered outside in courtyards or in patches of wasteground, and often could be seen grazing with their backs to the wind. Now, John supposed, ways had to be found of keeping them indoors out of the rain.

He crouched and looked at the legs, which were puffy and scabbed to the hooves. In Borderer, interrupting each other, Sarai and Mo told him that it wasn’t like the usual foot rot. John turned on the translat to keep track as their explanation became more and more complicated. For several weeks now, they said, since the rains had started, they’d tried giving the normal injections and creams. He took a sample from one of the flaking red scabs and kidded the doctor into doing an analysis. After several outraged pronouncements about nonhuman tissue, he got what he wanted from the screen.

“It’s caused by a fungus,” he said, “like the stuff that grows on the walls.” He selected a syringe. The goat, either too ill or too drugged to notice, barely moved as he jabbed its rump.

Uncomfortable, the boy was shredding the end of the tether with his fingers. He and Sarai were avoiding John’s eyes. Weren’t penicillin and antifungal systemics sold in the souks?

They’d have heard, anyway, that he normally refused to treat animals. Nuru, he knew, would see it as a lowering of standards and be quietly outraged. Then Sarai said something the translat didn’t catch, and they led the goat out through the surgery. He called, “You’ll bring it back, won’t you?” The translat echoed
unt oo?
as the children vanished into the rain.

He was at the clinic again next evening, still working on correlating the doctor’s data. Time was short now, but he didn’t know how short, having blanked out the screen’s calendar a while ago. He was surprised at how easy it had been to forget the actual date his term in the Magulf ended. He knew that he’d come here after the rains, and he knew that the streets had been dry and windy and cold, that there had been an almost Ley-like tang of salt on the waters of the Breathless Ocean, but he’d given up counting the days.

He began to search his pockets for a new leaf of koiyl, patting and squeezing each pocket in turn, wondering as he did so why it felt odd, until he realized that he was mimicking Felipe’s regular search for blisterpacks. There. His gloved fingers closed on the familiar rounded shape and traced the notched and indented spine, the little stub of the cut-off stalk. He took the leaf out and looked at it, feeling his mouth stretch into a smile. Not a Lall leaf. He put it whole between his lips, his cheeks bulging, his tongue tracing the sharp underridge, and felt his saliva sweeten and thicken as the surface oils were released. The leaf swelled and grew more pliant, inviting his teeth to sink in. His heart began to skip. Dee-dah, dee-dah, like one of Felipe’s stupid half-remembered tunes, drowning out the sound of the rain on the roof. There. He bit, and felt the leaf open up, break, separate. The rush of his senses, the ease of his pain, the stars that always floated momentarily before his eyes.

When a tap at the door came, he swallowed the fibers, paused the screen, and went out to where Sarai, Mo, and the goat were standing, again backlit by the bonfire lights in the towerblock. The echo from the day before was so complete that he had to stop for a moment, his back stiffly arched and his hand on the doorframe.

We keep him in our room now, they told him as they shuffled in. We don’t mind the smell—but he tries to eat our beds. The goat looked no worse, perhaps even a little better, but Sarai and Mo seemed disappointed: they must have expected more than this gradual remission. The creature butted John when he crouched down to examine the legs. Sarai and Mo cheered up a little at that.

John asked, “Doesn’t he have a name?”

No name. They shook their heads.

“Who does he belong to?”

They waved their hands, and said the Borderer word that meant both no one and everyone.

He jabbed in more penicillin. “He’s for the carnival, isn’t he? The sacrifice?”

They nodded, and the goat blinked drugged brown eyes. John took a tin of zinc oxide off the shelf.

“So when is it? The carnival?”

They shrugged, and waved their fingers. Two, three days—or even tomorrow.

“Why did you come to me?”

They said nothing and shuffled closer together. Their brown eyes were as impenetrable as the goat’s. Then Sarai nudged Mo, and John guessed that they had noticed his red koiyl-stained teeth.

“Okay.” He disengaged the doctor. “The goat should be fine soon anyway.”

“Fatoo pray no rain?”

“Yes. But I want you to show me something.”

He closed the clinic and followed Sarai and Mo up the hill. The climb was steep this way, and he had to stop as a hot chill ran over him. He spat out a series of stringy lumps. Then a gout of reddish fluid followed. He coughed and blinked back stars as the mess washed into the gutter, then hurried up the street and stood waiting, leaning on the bottom rail as Sarai and Mo took the goat up the steps of their tenement. When they returned, he followed them across the square to a lighted doorway that gleamed over the cobbles. The inside was filled with a drumming and tapping that came only partly from the rain. Faces turned towards him as people paused in their work on the carnival floats, but no one seemed that surprised to see him here.

He wandered the aisles, where arc lights sparkled, hammers hammered, drills and saws howled. A huge glittering dragon that clawed the air of the warehouse ceiling was almost lost in misty, methane-lit space, its jaws roaring out the smell of glue. Children were scolded when they climbed scaffolding or tried to use one of the great skeins of new material for a slide. He found Sarai and Mo with their parents, painting an ornate sash around the flatbed that would carry the goat.
Fatoo,
they said, and blinked slowly at him as their brushes dripped red pools onto the floor.

Where the darkness was deeper, a giant screen-demon reared up towards the roof. Its head was a vague triangular lump, with slotted irises that reminded John of the sheep he’d used to talk to on his way across the Yorkshire moors to some deathbed; the eyes had the same bland and unquestioning gaze. Beyond that was an antique float, nothing more than a half-collapsed frame, a squashed spider. John ran a gloved hand along one of the rusty poles and saw a flicker of light that came from an old man who sat working almost hidden in a corner. The man pulled whispering transparent material through a machine. Without using his translat, John tried asking what the float was going to be. He got nowhere. The man only gestured at the sky, saying something about the
Scuro Rey
—the gods, the Dark King.

There was no Mass this evening, and John felt more than usually empty as he wandered out into the rain. He checked his watch, running his finger over the slight inflammation that had appeared in the ridged flesh around it. Walking back up Gran Vía to the presbytery, stopping to spit into the running gutter, watching as the red froth was swept away, he saw snatches of life through windows that the weeks of rain had washed almost invisibly clean. Pans steamed on stoves. Cats preened by fires. A man stood buttoning his shirt. John stopped outside a window set almost level with the street. It was dry and warm inside, and children crouched in the light, painting each other’s faces. Powdery white first, then black for the eyes and nose, hair drawn back and lips clenched for them to draw skull-grinning teeth. One of the children caught sight of the figure outside the window, and their fluttering hands streaked their faces as, silently through the glass and the rain, they began to scream.

He walked quickly on. Dripping power cables stretched uselessly overhead, segmenting the disordered sky. On Gran Vía, he saw that the presbytery lights were still shining, and that a van had parked outside. Laurie’s van.

He pushed the door aside and climbed the stairs and halted halfway, breathless, to inspect his face in the mirror. Corpse-white skin, straggling rivulets of hair, bloody mouth, and silver eyes—but it was too late to do anything about the way he looked, and he could hear voices, female Borderer voices conversing, warm and engaged, along the corridor at the top of the stairs.

“Ah!” he said, standing at the edge of the light that opened into the smoky fragrance of Bella’s kitchen, thinking he might as well dramatize his newly awful appearance.

Bella sat on a stool, the light from the stove gleaming on her bare knees. She had a cup in her hand. The other woman seemed so different that for a moment, as she turned, John thought she wasn’t Laurie.