The Great Wheel (49 page)

He went into his brother’s room, wondering without looking down at the new screen of his watch what time of night it was—somewhere in the uncertain middle hours, when it was too late for sleep, too early to get up, the time when sperm met egg and life began and dreams were formed, when the sky was at its darkest, hope ended, and hearts stopped beating. Hal’s room remained as they’d left it on the night when Eliot Farrar and Father Leon came to take his life. A temple, abandoned, smelling for the first time in years simply of empty air. The breathers and monitors were gone, leaving their indentations on the special floor, and the bed had been powered down. It looked just like a bed now. The sheets sagged and slumped when John touched them.

Neither he nor his father had thought to reprogram the cleaner to come and do its usual tasks in here. The bowls and trophies on the shelves by the door had become tarnished. He took down the biggest cup, pewter and long-handled. It rattled as he did so, and he unscrewed the lid. Inside, there was a smooth stone—no, a piece of glass. Red, sea-corroded driftglass. He wet it with saliva and held it up to his eye, seeing how his brother’s room changed, how the shadows grayed and the ceiling softened and swelled. The night sky outside the window lightened to mottled red-pink, glowing, forever strange.

He put on his father’s old coat and went out, gazing at the houses and through the railings of the park. Everything was newly revealed, yet everything was the same. He walked by the shockwire of the compound where the snow still lay in patches beyond. He went up High Street, where a machine whizzed by in a clicking of blue lights. He walked along the road to the field that had once contained the carnival. He looked up at the hills as dawn whiteness began to appear at the edge of the sky. Finally, on his way back into the village, he stooped by a gutter and took Kassi’s vial from his pocket. He crushed it through the grating with the heel of his shoe. Then he walked home, and found his father arriving from Ley, still half asleep as he climbed from his car but excited with the prospect of change and carrying with him the scent, John was sure, of sea and sand and far away.

Father and son stood watching on the pavement as the house at Hemhill was finally cleared. Machines scuttled in and out, singly and in twos and threes, carrying things into the spring morning, chairs and tables and ornaments that waited on the pavement, looking naked and out of place before they were put into the vans. The cottage with the yellow windows at Ley was too small to take more than a little of this furniture. John’s father had even come to accept that he’d have to change his loudspeakers for something smaller. But that was just another challenge.

A few days before, the Youngsons had switched on their pool. John could see the top of its steaming bubble over the edge of the fence. He’d watched earlier from a back window as a granddaughter, her hair slicked along the scar of her spine, splashed about in the shallow end. And the tennis players were back out practicing in the park, swiping at balls and bemoaning their lack of timing.
Pock. Fuckit.
Life went on.

“You know, Annie called when you were out one day,” his father said. He was dressed in his best suit. His shoes shone. His hair was parted. “We sat and talked about some of the old times. She said I should get a dog for myself when I move to Ley.”

“It’s not such a bad idea, Dad.”

“I don’t fancy those collars, though. Snap your fingers, and the creature whines. She says they get used to it, but what kind of life is that?”

A chair went by, then a mirror, then a rolled carpet. John remembered how after Hal’s accident he’d sometimes look out of his bedroom window as the local kids, in an elaborate mime, put their fingers to their lips as they tiptoed by on the street.

“I’ve got happy memories of here, Son. Me and your mother and Hal used to sit and play cards a lot when you were younger. The three of us eating crackers and drinking fizz after you went upstairs. I’d sometimes look in on you, sit by your bed. You liked to have the screen from whatever story you were watching left running. Have the bubble images float around you. You seemed to be able to tell if I turned it off, even when you were sleeping.”

John nodded. They studied the cracked skirt at the rear of the big van they were standing by. In the gutter, bright as tinsel, a thin last thread of frost still lingered in its shadow. The machines were spinning a protective web of shockwire around the house, now that its shell was almost empty and the major work could begin. One of the bigger machines had already climbed up on the roof and was starting to pull away the jelt. The cable-entwined ribs of the joists emerged. Then they, too, disappeared.

As the task continued, John and his father went and had lunch in the village. They sat at the bar of the café that had once been Tilly’s. By the time they got back, the vans were fully loaded and the site was empty. Even most of the garden had been stripped: his father had decided to take only the codes of a few of the most precious plants with him for the windowbox he’d keep at Ley.

“You know it’ll be different, don’t you, Dad?” John said. “We only went to Ley for a few months in the summer.”

“Different.” His father nodded. “You
will
come and visit, won’t you, Son? When you’ve seen the bishop, in a few days. I mean, that room at the back is small, but—”

“It’s okay, Dad. It’ll be good to see Ley again.”

But they looked at each other, suddenly aware that this was more than the temporary parting they’d planned. John opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment one of the brown-eyed Borderer workers who’d supervised the removal came over and handed his father the house’s last screen. There, glowing in the warm spring air, were all the rooms and all the history, all the changes and adjustments they’d made. His father moved his hand to erase the house forever, then paused and held it out towards John.

“I can’t.”

John took it without looking, feeling the quaternary pressure on his fingertips.

“And you’ll know what to do about Hal, Son? Something that’s right?”

John nodded.

“I’d better be going. It’s a long way.”

They embraced.

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

His father opened the doors of his car, half-lifted the cleaner into the front passenger seat, then got in himself. John heard the plangent trumpets of Mahler’s Fifth fading as his father drove off. He stood watching the car until it vanished down the familiar street where the lime trees were starting to bud. Then he realized that he still held the house’s last screen in his hand. As he raised it and prepared to bring an end, he saw that one final message had come through.

T
HE SHUTTLE WAS QUITE
different from the ones he’d taken before in his life. The floor was tilted even before takeoff, and the seats were crammed close together, up against the thick and tiny portholes. The food, as he juggled elbows with the other passengers during the wait of some technical delay, was clearly expensive, as was the wine, and the screen in front of him offered to take him far away. He supposed it was all an effort to justify the cost of the tickets, although when the engines finally thundered and flames flickered at the edge of the porthole and his flesh seemed to slide from his bones, it was obvious where the money was actually going.

He’d dressed as a priest today, and as a result the other passengers seemed more inclined to talk to him when the bellow of the engines finally settled down, and to smile nervously and nod. Most were like him, on their first orbital flight.

The Earth still looked beautiful from high in the blackness: blue, brown, and green marbled with white—there was barely any red or gray—and surrounded by a loose necklace of satellites that turned and flashed in the light of a rising moon. There were glimpses in the distance of dark wings that trapped the sun, and of something else large and closer, distorted to a glowing oval at the edge of the porthole as the shuttle turned to dock with the barrel-bodied silver insect to which several other similar craft already clung.

The chair released John, and he drifted with the other passengers through the irised doorway into a concourse that, despite all he’d expected, had walls, a floor, a ceiling: an up and a down. He guessed it was for the benefit of novices like himself who feared that they would bob up like corks if they let go of the handholds or kicked wrongly with their adhesive shoes. It was easy enough, as long as he kept his eyes ahead of him and concentrated on moving his legs and arms and stilling the airy balloon that floated in his belly. Then he was occupied in a dispute with a Halcycon-logoed screen about the small cargo he’d brought with him. Yes, the screen said, not deigning, here, to give itself a human face, yes, it had dealt with such requests before. But it was customary to apply some time in advance. You must understand, Father John, it added, that more is involved than simply opening an airlock and pushing out your brother’s remains. Special canisters are required. Machine, human, and online time must be set aside. John nodded, waited. Arguing with a screen wasn’t like arguing with a human. If it was going to say no, it would have said no already. Yet it was with a sense of vague anger, diffuse regret, that he lowered the weightless wooden box into the drawer that finally presented itself. Once more, his last moments with Hal had been snatched away.

He drifted along the handrails into a moving tunnel and through the surprisingly strong wall of a molecular barrier. I’m here, he thought, and yet, even when he saw her waiting, her dark midlength hair fanning out around her like seaweed in clear water, he still didn’t believe. But there she was. Her green eyes. Smiling. He drifted to her. His heart, he realized, was hammering. His throat ached.

Laurie said, “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

He lifted his shoulders in a shrug and felt his whole body start to sink with the motion. “I had another thing to do here.”

She placed a hand on his arm. “Hal’s dead, isn’t he? And your mother? I heard, John. I’m so sorry…” Her hair billowed, and her eyes glinted in the sourceless light. Her hands, he saw, were gloved.

“We call this docking satellite the Median,” she said, leading him into a large sphere where people floated, talked, drank, and ate on the walls, floor, ceiling. “It’s the place where down there and up here meet.”

Down There. Up Here. He nodded, watching her fingers unseal a tube. She snatched at the wrapping as it started to twist away. Her gloves had colorless spines along their backs. It was hard to tell in this light whether they were glowing. She chuckled. “I’m really not used to pure free fall,” she said. “The Median is pretty strange to me, too. Out there, it’s different.”

“You look great.”

Unself-consciously, she nodded. But it was true. She was wearing the kind of unfussy coverall that he’d always imagined people wore in places like this. It was pale green and blue, silver-buttoned, clean and new and neat. He caught a waft of the gas from her tube, and her Laurie-scent as she turned her head and her hair swayed around him. The memories tumbled in. “And you look better, John,” she said, studying him. “Healthier.”

“It’s sometimes that way, after you’ve been ill.” He chuckled. “I’d never expected to be ill.”

“How bad was it?”

“I don’t know. Ask me in twenty years. If I’m still here.”

“But I thought…” She stopped and narrowed her eyes.

“I really don’t know how long it’ll be, Laurie. They had to rip the old recombinant out, put a new one in.”

She nodded, unsure whether this new uncertainty was good or bad. But how could she know, when he didn’t know himself?

He looked around again. All he could hear was the murmur of voices. “It’s so quiet here. I’d imagined…”

“We regulate the sounds and vibrations. Tune them to the right pitch and recycle them through the oxygen vats as heat. Nothing’s wasted. In space, a lot of things are more straightforward, once you get used to the difficulties.”

He nodded.

“It’s a small self-contained environment,” she said. “That’s where my own experience came in. The net, the kelpbeds, recycling. If you’re going to live up here, it all has to be done.”

“It’s funny,” he said, “that the technology of the Endless City should—”

“John, are you going to stay a priest?”

“It’s what I always was, wasn’t it? We found that out. And the mystery, the loss, the whiteness…”

“Whiteness?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you? It was as though I was looking through into emptiness—blazing white. Seeing that beyond everything there was nothing.”

“Do you feel the same way now?”

“I’m still looking,” he said. “I’ve realized that that’s what I’m here for. To look.” He gazed at her. Even the gas from her tube behaved differently here, spread and tugged into ripples by the silent air. “So I’ve stopped pretending that I was owed some great insight. It’s just a journey, isn’t it? A journey for all of us, no matter what we think. And I have to go where my heart leads, which is still towards God, even if I may never find Him. I’m not giving up.”

“You’ll never give up, John. That isn’t how you are.”

“I learned that too. What’s—”

“John, I…”

They looked at each other, feeling the barriers falling momentarily, opening into other worlds, other times, other ways. Places where they might never have met, or might have stayed apart, or remained together and in love.

She lowered the stub of her tube. A receptacle opened like a mouth to take it.

“I’d like to show you something.”

He followed her as she swam and tumbled across the sphere. Here was Laurie upside down—or was it him? And here was a vertiginous glimpse, as if of a great wellshaft, all the way down through the Median’s main central tunnel. A plump machine fluttered by them, flapping silver wings in pursuit of a stray glob of litter.

She caught his hand and pulled him through a doorway; out, it seemed, into the bright darkness of space itself.

“Over there,” she said, hovering by him inside the huge transparent dome, pointing across Earth’s nightside curve towards the great space station that turned nearby. “That’s where I live.”