The Great Wheel (45 page)

The small screen on his lap was specially configured to respond to the wildly approximate movements of the glossy cocoons that still swathed his hands. He’d spent some time scrolling through the net’s great multilayered dictionary, from which his own translat’s data had come. There were so many words in so many languages for the word
blue,
and the word
sky,
but the best word—the nearest to the soft, short sound that he was almost sure the witchwoman who’d taken him to the Cresta Motel had uttered—came from the old English-American language that once dominated the world, the language from which much of both the Borderer and European languages were derived.
Blue.
A good word.

He pulled back from the database and paged down through the communications field of the local area of net, calling up the full address—28 All Saints Drive—now that he could get no response to the simple instruction to find Laurie Kalmar.

“Yeah?”

Broad cheeks and dark hair, a fleshy but handsome face. From the man’s expression, John guessed that even though the silver iris pigment had almost fully returned, and his eyes were no longer blue, he still looked iller and stranger than he thought. Or perhaps it was just the background that he hadn’t bothered to blank out. The humming sheets, the hospital smell.

“Have you been here long?”

“Here?” The man’s eyes darted up to the cursor to check who John was, then back again.

“I mean in the Zone.”

The man raised his shoulders in a lopsided shrug. “Just a few days, Father. I’m settling in. Why?”

“Do you know anything about the previous tenant? Where she went? Whether there’s still a port to access her anywhere?”

“Wait…” The man looked down, his hands rippling the screen. “No. I don’t think so. Not at this end.”

“Did you see her?”

The man shook his head.

“But I suppose the place must have needed a lot of clearing up,” John said. “All that dust, mess…Life…”

“Someone said she was a Borderer, so I guess. But look, Father, if there’s a problem, if you want to—”

“No. It’s okay,” John said, feeling white waves of tiredness begin to descend on him again. “It’s okay. And I hope you enjoy your time here.”

He faded the screen. When he looked up, he saw that Tim Purdoe was standing in the doorway.

The barrier flickered as Tim walked in and leaned down to inspect the monitor screens, hands on his knees, the sleeves riding up on his old tweed jacket and that ridiculous fringe of his thinning hair in need of a trim once more.

John said, “I couldn’t get Laurie.”

Tim sat down on the bed, his shoulders stiff and the steepled tips of his fingers whitening as he pressed them together.

“And you know, Tim, I really did think you were responsible for copying the cards about the leaf. I thought at first that it was Laurie, then I thought it was you. I never imagined that there was a port into the net at Kushiel.”

“Whoever closed up the plant probably thought they’d be coming back in a few weeks. Anyway, someone sent a veetol over. It’s been closed now.”

“What about the geothermal root? All that power in the ground?”

“There’s hardly any power in the ground, John.” Tim was looking down at the sheets now, holding himself oddly.

“I thought—”

“It wasn’t Kushiel that damaged you, John. Don’t you think they make you strong enough to stand a few electric shocks, a magnetic field? It was just some virus you picked up.” Tim glanced up at him, then down again. “Actually, it’s not quite like anything we’ve seen before, otherwise your recombinants would have dealt with it. But I did a search on the net, and there it was, not in the medical sectors at all but in the Magulf environmental stuff. A suggested code for the infection that might cause the, ah…disturbance of the witchwomen. I don’t suppose that their and our paths cross that often, which would explain…” Tim smiled briefly. “So it’s really a bit of a discovery, John. A new virus that could hurt us Europeans. But then that’s one of the main reasons we’re here, to catch anything bad before it reaches Europe. So we could both be minor celebrities for this, although I guess that’s not either of our styles.” Tim clenched and unclenched his hands. “Look, I—”

“And the leaf. You know, Tim, the leaf from Lall. I found out where the year’s crop went. It was Kassi Moss.”

Tim nodded. Even now, John thought, he’s not interested. But then his recollection of the times they talked before in this room was hazed by the drugs the doctor had pushed into him. Perhaps he’d said all this before.

“…and she uses the refined leaf on her patients, Tim, to kill them when there’s nothing else left that she can do. To bring an end. I remember how you said that if you distilled it and strung the molecules up, it would become a poison. And that’s what she was doing. She says she bought the Lall leaf because a witchwoman once told her it was close to a place of death. I guess Kassi’s a little mad herself, a little that way. But then, who isn’t?”

“Yes,” Tim said.

“But it’s not an answer.”

“Maybe not. But what is?”

“Kassi doesn’t need that much of the leaf. It’s become an obsession with her. But it’ll stop. And people are still dying, Tim. Even now, some of the polluted leaf is still reaching the streets. And there will be more of it in a few years, unless something is done.”

Tim nodded. “You know that place—the Cresta Motel. I should really call in there. See what I can…” As Tim looked out through the window at the green lawns, the racing skies, the ducks on the chilly, wind-ripped lake, John studied his profile, the way he was holding his mouth, wondering what was bothering him.

“About Agouna, Tim. I have no right to—”

“Look, John.” Tim turned back to him and placed his bare hands over the shiny lumps of John’s own. “I have some bad news about your family. It happened three days ago, but I’ve been holding it until I was sure you were mending. I hope you’ll forgive me. It had to happen soon anyway, and there was nothing you could have done.”

John stared at him, waiting.

“Your mother’s dead, John,” Tim said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

T
HIS TIME, HE PAID
extra and hired a personal veetol for the flight back to Hemhill from the shuttleport on the Thames. It was a cloudy day, but for a while the craft stayed low, and he could make out the glassy walls and pipelines that kept the more precious architectural relics safe from the tides. But the Tower of London, he saw, was now a crumbling island. The riverside gardens were flooded. The great dome of Wren’s Abbey was moated by greenish scum. Looking down at a stretch of jagged ruins in the moment before the net routed him higher and the clouds closed in, he was reminded of the Endless City. The stubby-winged machine rose into sunlight. He was alone with blue skies and the passing leviathan of a freighter before the veetol dived back down and the clouds parted for him over the valley of Hemhill. From the Magulf to Bab Mensor, from the rim of space to London, from blue skies to here, all in a few hours. He saw the neat line of High Street, the toy squares and the toy people, the spreading ordered grid of houses, and the wide acres of the processing compound and the fields beyond, mostly fallow at this late season: blank, resting, unwritten. And there, whorled and ravaged as if by subterranean heat, was the carnival field. The screen made no objection when he steered the veetol towards it. It was common land, a throwback to the time when his ancestors grazed their cattle there and feared the uncertain sky.

The veetol settled. John stepped out and felt the unfamiliar give of soil beneath his feet. As the craft rose again, he stood and watched, shading his face from the hot oily wind when the veetol pitched sideways, skimming the rim of the trees, then climbed almost vertically. He saw it swoop, spin, flip over, and disappear into the clouds—free to do as it liked now that it no longer held vulnerable human cargo.

John walked across the field, at first making for the gap in the fence through which he used to climb. But his bag was heavy, and he was conscious of the freshly knitted wheal that ran like a double tramline parallel to the scar of his recombinant, then veered left across his shoulderblade towards the new powerpack in his armpit. The gap in the fence would have been fixed long ago anyway.

The gate swung open at his approach, and he walked the smooth gray road past the last of the fields and into the first of the houses. He felt hot and breathless even in this fresh autumnal air, but still he was glad that he’d arranged to walk the last mile of his return. This gave him a final moment to believe what lay ahead.

The trees were shedding. Dry leaves tumbled in flocks along the gutters. The shops and the houses looked the same. Everything came back to him—like going through old photographs—people and places fitting in with memories he didn’t even know he had. He was conscious that he was being stared at, and was sure that an old man—familiar but unplaceable, with a face that had once been young—crossed to the other side of the road when he saw him.

John turned away from the shops and went past the gateway to the park with the public toilets by it. He heard the familiar stutter of his breath as he went along the railings, and, looking through, he saw the spinning machines and the brown-limbed figures still playing on the tennis courts in the specially warmed air. The season for competitions was over, but you had to keep your hand in if you ever wanted to win anything. Tennis was a game where the body and instinct counted for more than the mind, and in the middle of all that sweaty effort was this magical area that Hal once described—walking, back along this same street, exuding new sweat and joy at a local quarter-final victory. For most of that last set, Skiddle, he’d said, I wasn’t actually there. I was just reactions and muscles. This, John knew, was what all the serious players strove to achieve. The place that was known, oddly enough, as the zone, where everything clicked and body and mind and emotion became one. The place that had to be endlessly worked towards, that could never be taken for granted even by players at the highest level, that was always beckoning at the start of every match, waiting out there somewhere to be attained. There…

The house seemed the same, even to the cat-and-mint smell of the biannually flowering bush by the front doorstep and to the waft of air as the door opened for him. His father was sitting in the lounge, poised, it seemed, from the rigid set of his body, between finishing one thing and starting another. But the room was clear and overtidy. And there was no music.

They said each other’s names. The chair helped his father up, and the two men regarded each other for a moment. Then there was a rough, ill-arranged embrace, and they sat down facing each other.

John felt weak, dried out, dry-eyed.

“Dad, I missed the funeral,” he said. “I wish I’d—”

“It couldn’t be helped, Son. Your being ill. When I heard, I…” His father shook his head at the thought of some impossible eventuality, and the wattles beneath his cheeks creased and uncreased. “But you look okay.”

“There was never any real danger. I just wish I’d been here with you, Dad.”

“To be honest, Son, this place has been like a hotel, and I was glad to send them all away this morning when I knew you were coming. Glad to be alone. And when it happened, I didn’t know how I was going to tell you. It’s something you worry about when it happens. Who to call, what to do, whether there’s enough food in the kitchen. It’s never anything big…”

The room became quiet and still. John blinked as it seemed to fill with a gas, with the clouds that he’d ascended through and looked down on. He realized that he was listening for the sound of his mother’s voice, for the clatter in the kitchen as she and the cleaner competed to get things done, for those singsong, semi-internal conversations where questions unraveled into answers that became questions again. He took a breath and looked down at the scarred palms of his hands. His father sat rigid. The smell of his tubes, John realized, was also missing.

“I kept thinking,” John said, “when I was stuck in the Zone, about how you’d be managing with Hal.”

“
That’s
been no problem.” His father looked affronted. “I can manage with Hal. After all, there’s very little to it, and anyway I could have got in a doctor. Remember that machine we took with us once to Ley?” He smiled as if at some fond memory—and John supposed that in a sense it was.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I guess I’m just feeling guilty for not being here.”

“And you’ll be wanting to see him now?”

See him?
John nodded, feeling as though he was drifting again, breaking through an endless series of paper-thin walls.

He stood up.

“But he hasn’t changed,” his father called through the doorway as John began to climb the stairs. “Everything’s the same.”

Later, the two men ate dinner together in the brightly lit kitchen. John picked at the geometrically presented food, wondering if he should add salt to make it come alive, wondering exactly what flavor it was he was missing. He could see his own pale face and his father’s hunched, birdlike shoulders reflected in the blackened window.

“I don’t,” he said, “have any immediate commitments.”

“No, Son. I’m glad.”

“I’m not even sure if I…”

His father looked up at him, the tip of his fork trembling in his hand. There were many decisions for them to make about life, about the future, about Hal. But the silver of his father’s eyes seemed detached now, like separate lenses, nothing to do with the bloodshot and whitish-brown orbs that surrounded them. He said, “You do what you want to do, Son.”

“I thought I’d stay here with you for a while. The bishop’s given me permission to…take a break.”

“It’ll be good to have you around. As long as you know that you don’t have to. That I can manage.”

After the cleaner removed and destroyed the uneaten remains of their meal, they sat and drank whisky between the silent loudspeakers in the lounge. His father went up to see Hal once, when a screen bleeped, and came down again within a few minutes. His mother, John remembered, had never gone up there for less than an hour.