The Great Wheel (43 page)

Hal nodded, a half-moon of foam drying on his upper lip and a popped blisterpack of soberups lying by his elbow. He wasn’t even bothering to get drunk. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“I mean, I don’t expect you to pay, Hal. Not after wasting your money last year.”

Hal looked mournful and bilious in this greenish light. Music began to crunch outside, then stopped as suddenly as it had started.

“Did you hear the truck last night, Skiddle?”

“Truck? No.”

“I thought…” Hal looked pained. “I went down there this morning, before I came here. There was dew on the shockwire, and the compound was alive. They were everywhere.”

John nodded, wondering what the point was in staring at people you couldn’t understand or even touch.

“Oh, there are stories,” Hal said, gazing down into his glass. “But I expect you know that.”

“Well, Hal, I…”

“A few years back, you know, one of them went missing. One of the Gogs. A girl—she was kidnapped. It never really came out what had happened, but I heard it was some Hemhill lads. You know—my age. Or yours…Or only a little older. They tied her up in the back of an agripede and took her down to the ruins around the old cathedral. There’s an old building that’s kept its roof. It was once a pub called the Orange Tree, and the sign still sticks out into the street. They dragged her into a room with wet plaster falling off the walls. Ripped the lydrin implant out of her arm, raped her, held her, pissed on her, spat on her. Made her eat…” Hal squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed them hard with his fist. “You know, for the viruses. Just to see what would happen. Of course, she died.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yeah.” Hal took his blisterpack and popped another soberup tablet. “So why do I keep thinking about it?”

“These things are—”

“Thinking about it even when I’m with Annie. Pretending in my head that I’m…That she’s…”

John stared at him, feeling an odd, disconnected anger, something that blazed and passed through without finding a focus. You, my brother, he thought, waiting for something else to come into his head. But he was simply glad that Hal would be going to London tomorrow, that Hal wouldn’t be coming into his bedroom again as he’d done on recent nights, overwrought with the world and the prospect of things to come and the souring of his once golden relationship with the sweet and lovely Annie. John was sick of Hal opening the door and breaking through the clean silence just as John was falling into sleep.

“Well…” Too quickly, John finished his beer. He stood up, feeling his gut clench and ache. “See you later, Hal.” He walked out of the tent into the light of the carnival, and stood looking up at the great wheel. The sun was glinting through the spokes, spilling the warmth of what would be—what always was, for the carnival—a hot day. He no longer felt afraid, but the cost of the ride was exorbitant and the queue was slow and long. You wasted a small fortune and half your afternoon simply waiting to get on. He already knew that with or without Hal, this year or any other year, he wouldn’t be going on the great wheel. It wasn’t a question of fear. It was simply a matter of giving up…

“
Skiddle?
”

John started and turned, looking up the enclosed Magulf alley behind him, then down through the steam and smoke across the stalls and the dancing, shifting people. But the sound had come only from his own head. Wincing, he clambered to his feet and wandered back through and into the carnival. He saw a woman’s face as she turned and laughed—looking startlingly like Laurie for a moment. It was getting late, and the crowds were both thinner and more frantic, the competing lights, attractions, sounds, and the generators that powered them had all been turned up. He watched a carousel spin, a dragon roar, and a shooting gallery where the targets burst and spouted blood; the split wreckage of what might have been a cloudpicker or the wings of a dead insect blown in on a counterwind from Europe; and a wrestling machine oiled with the sweat of a hundred competitors—it now lay slumped in a corner, in flickering light, its screen blind and its mandibles dislocated. Gazing down at its smeared and dented golden dome, John thought it was familiar. But everything was familiar in this place.

Crowing laughter and fistfights. A stale, hot wind. The snap and clatter of empty cans and tubes, snakes of vomit and urine and the weak fizzing of chemlights trapped in puddles. The half-laughing, half-protesting cries of a woman, as a man, his voice thick with all the pressures of the night, leaned against her. Everything was lost and waiting on a still wind. Everything banged and clanged. His gloves were red from fingertip to wrist now, and the color had even spread inside, with the angry burning of his palms. There were nights, he thought, looking up at the glinting white lace of interference lines in the sky, and the turning, beckoning wheel of the stars. There were nights…

Shadows flickered from a fire over the pink Kasbah wall. Voices crackled, rags of clothing swept back like ash from the flames, throwing furrows across the silently gathering crowd. Walking the tightrope line of space that opened around him, John pushed on towards the front, looking for faces he knew, for Sarai and Mo, Juanita, Nuru, Kassi, for Martínez, for Father Gulvenny, looking even for Hettie and the witchwoman he’d seen on the night of the spring carnival at Banori’s tenement. But the faces all drew back into the shadows that flowed and opened towards the space where the figures flew upward, caught on the sweep of this wild and hallucinogenic wind.

The goat was tethered to a post now in the middle of a madly dancing circle that thinned like smoke as John reached to join hands. He looked at its wise white head, pulling off his gloves as he did so and seeing the red fluid that dribbled out from them and the deep gashes that had somehow appeared in his palms. His fingers left streaks on the goat’s coat, drawing the fur into beaded clumps. He felt a gasp ripple through the crowd like the wind that tousled the green cloud-racing hills where once he had stopped to talk to creatures almost like this, looking up at the mystery of their slotted eyes, feeling the waiting melancholy of the backrooms to which—
here, Father, and he seemed so bright and chipper in the summer
—he was later taken. And the goat’s eyes, he saw, were each a different color. One was brown and the other silver.

The crowd gasped again. A thrilling tension ran through him—that he should be here where the flames danced on the walls, with the cold emerald light of the fire and the drip-tap of drums and the swaying, scurrying witchwomen who were fingering their honeycombed moonrock and drinking their Venusian vials, and that the crowd should be with him, touching without touching, sighing with the wind, pushing him on. A black shape scuttled up to him. Something silver flashed from the sky. It touched his hand, and his fingers slipped, almost dropping the metal. The knife handle was cold and smooth, and he watched a red line dribble out along the curved and shining blade from his hand, watched the droplet that formed at the tip and grew and hung there. A white wind poured around him. This, he thought, as the bead of blood finally broke from the knife and dropped slowly towards the paving, as the goat tried to raise its tethered head and clattered its hooves, this is my blood, my covenant, my rainbow, my promise to a ravaged world. His raised his hand, and brought the knife down in a red blur. Once, and then again, feeling something break, feeling something crumple, feeling the gasp of life and a hot spray like the salt of the ocean and the pull of the tide washing over him.

He dropped the knife, looked down at the still-kicking, half-butchered animal, then turned, dazed, his feet sticking in the spreading pool, his eyelids glued with blood, and stumbled back through the parting crowd. There were faces he recognized now, people he had seen, and they were more afraid of him than ever, the
fatoo baraka
who was madder than the witch-women, than
chicahta.
At least the witchwomen believed only in the whirl of this planet through the stars…

“Skiddle?”

John spun around. But he saw only Borderer faces and carnival light. He stumbled on, kicking over brimming chemical buckets and clattering through a stall, staggering up the slope and away to the dark and hidden streets, falling against doors and walls beneath the churning sky, leaving a bloody trail behind him, smearing hieroglyphs and symbols, swirls and crosses. He had no idea where to go.

He began to slow as he ran from the carnival, lost in these empty ways, his breath rasping, hearing the beat of music echoing far off. He stumbled through a courtyard and along an unlit corridor past the communal wastebarrels and water butts, up the creaking steps to a landing and a door that rocked back with the swaying imprint of his hands. But there was no one inside—this was the wrong room. He looked around and saw fresh white walls, screens and bowls of flowers and cheap but newly gleaming furniture, and he smelled kelpbread and Borderer flesh. It wasn’t Banori’s room. Not any longer. A cheap, decently placed apartment, it would have been taken and rearranged within a few days of his death. John wandered, bumping into things, his fingers sticking and skidding. He worked a drawer out along its glides. Inside were a few cracked disks, a large dead beetle, some dried-out tubes—and a postcard. It glowed up through the smears of his fingers as he lifted it out, and it formed the image of a wide, empty shore where the waves were white-tipped, rolling high, breaking green over blue, freezing to ice, then breaking again. He heard the hissing of shingle; smelled, too, the clear tang of the River Ocean; saw the grass that covered the dunes at his back bowing in the wind, and the pantiled roofs along the sandy road where graceful birds circled like flecks of foam. Then the sound of the sea ended, and he heard—

“Skiddle?”

Dropping the postcard, he turned and saw, as the light flashed and faded over the smeared walls, that a figure stood in the doorway.

She blinked at him with pebble eyes and beckoned amid the sway and glitter of her beads, jingling a forest of silver.

“Come with me, Skiddle,” she said. “Come this way…”

Almost immediately, the witchwoman retreated into the dark. He stumbled from the room to follow her. She was shifting and indeterminate now along the corridor and down the stairs, past the black mouth of the courtyard then out into the streets, where she seemed to scuttle and slide over the wet roads, splashing through puddles, her black image thrown back at him and across the mottled walls. On this night, when even the carnival now lay silent, he could hear her muttering, the tinkle of the ribboned clothing that would suddenly flash scatters of sparks. She was in no hurry—humming, picking things up from the gutter, tasting them, even, spitting them out—yet he felt slow, thick, clumsy as he followed her past the loneliness of black windows, along turns and alleys that unfolded into wide, vacant squares. These streets were unfamiliar to him now, and the silence was huge and strange, amplified, it seemed, by a deep humming. But he recognized the lines of shockwire and the empty warehouses and the wide sweeps of concrete, shot through now, as his breath grew ragged, by white lines and shimmers of pain.

There. She was fluttering across Kushiel’s gleaming concrete, pausing, hopping, tumbling beneath the pylons and gantries that leaned and bowed. Dark whiteness seemed to be flooding up from the earth, enclosing him as he struggled to follow. Something clattered, and a spray of sparks scattered around him, raising the matted hair of his head and neck.

“Skiddle.”

There was a rusted ladder before him now. On it, the shape of rags was crawling towards the sky. Feeling the earth crackle with static at his feet, he began to climb after her. Metal swayed and clanged. Dust rained down on him. His hands glowed. He could see the wires that were threaded beneath the flesh, the stuff that made him. He was weary as he climbed, but he willed another part of him to take over, those strong silver threads, and clambered finally over the sharp edge of a girder and stood swaying as stars and sparks fell around him on the wide slope of a long, high roof.

Far ahead, the large black bird-thing leaped and flapped. He skidded down and across the mossy tiles. The stickiness of his hands and body were a help now, giving him adhesion, and even the gashes in his palms were useful. When he slipped over into space, a wound in his flailing hand caught on the bracket of a broken gutter and stopped his fall. He hauled himself back up towards the sky. I’m climbing, he thought, crawling on his knees now, shaking his head in a wet spray, even though the power here in Kushiel surely lay below, in the earth. But beyond the last flock of scattering tiles there was a doorway. And the humming was louder. And with it came the promise of light. He pushed through a frost of glass and crawled inside.

“Skiddle…”

There was a long corridor, and the stiff crackling of an electric wind. Filaments and cables curled out from shattered housings, twisting in sparks and flashes of quaternary lines.

His feet crunched over a snowfall of cards. They were bigger and thicker, he saw as they stuck to his face and hands, than cards were now, fountaining out from cabinets and drawers and billowing around him. Probably at least fifty years old. And many were broken, trailing a wet lace of nerve tissue, corrupted and yet reactivated in this wild storm, muttering the garbled syllables of voices long dead.

“Skiddle…”

Hal’s voice was still there on the crackling wind as John saw a stairwell on his left and a bobbing, leering face that could have been real or a trick of the spinning light, or a carnival balloon.

A last turn, and he saw the doorway that he knew. Half open already, with the light fanning out over the familiar landing. And Hal sitting there amid the disorder of his life with the cases that he was supposed to be packing open and empty, the palettes and books and games on the bed and the floor all around him. And on the desk, in a weird geometry, there were lights, wires, screens, the tiny, humming city of whatever strange and new project he was currently working on. And the semeny hot smell of nerve tissue, the humming and the charged scent of electricity, of armpits and whisky, of the bright cruel sea.