The Great Wheel (8 page)

Nuru returned, then left. There were no more patients to see today; the veetol had scared them away. John tidied up, set the vermin traps, locked the clinic. Outside, the Plaza Princesa was busy again. People were still pointing towards the sky, making sweeping, expansive gestures. Many of them glanced at John as he mounted his bicycle, but he couldn’t tell from their expressions whether the veetol’s arrival had increased their fear of him, or their contempt.

He cycled up the street. It was late afternoon, and the sun was in decline behind the clouds, already breeding hints of darkness, deepening the browns and reds and blues around him, mingling the black shapes of the widow women with terra-cotta shadows, open doorways, glimpses of flesh, the bickering flocks of caroni birds. In Europe, evening came first out of the sky; in the Magulf, it always seemed to well up from the ground.

He went through the archway in the old medina wall, turned, and crossed the Plaza El-Halili. The wide square was barely recognizable from the last time he’d been here, on the night of the carnival. The scaffolding of the stage had been removed, and the few stalls that remained were selling recycled chemlights and rusty tins of Quicklunch: an old product that had been banned in Europe after an additives scare. People drifted here and there amid swirls of dust and queerly shaped bundles of litter that had caught and aggregated in the wind. They watched him go by.

He crossed the slope of ancient paving and turned right where the high, windowless, wire-strewn outer walls of the wealthy Borderer enclave of Mokifa turned its back on the Endless City. He cycled on beside the walls. Along Corpus Vali, parts of the ancient drybrick medina had been incorporated into gleaming stretches of modern shockwire. There were glimpses of stepped, neatly cobbled streets beyond the curving walls of the old Moorish fort, lit by unwavering light. Here, a modern gateway had been constructed from ornate, vine-encrusted pillars of jelt. A man toting a large-snouted subsound pistol stood guard. His expression was quite impossible to read.

John turned left down an alley he thought he recognized. Then right. But, as still often happened, he found that he’d gone a different way from the one he’d intended. He’d kept Mokifa to his right, but instead of reaching the square that led back into Corpus Vali he was driving down a series of stagnant alleys. Thick, moss-strewn cables reached overhead or, broken, lay coiled like nests of snakes. There was no sound other than the whirring of the bicycle motor, the hiss of tires over wet rubble, the rattle and sigh of the Magulf wind. He realized how unused he had become to emptiness and silence. It was almost like the vast squares and blind untenanted houses of his childhood dreams.

The sunken passage widened. The claws of a huge pylon hung over him, still crowned with white ceramics. Ahead in the fading light lay only ruined warehouses, stalking pylons, fallen cranes, shattered concrete. He realized that he was within the remains of the Kushiel geothermal project. By tapping the radioactive heat below the earth’s crust, Kushiel had been intended to provide low-maintenance power—and, by implication, health, education, enlightenment—to a fifty-kilometer stretch of the Endless City. Before the funding ran out, only a single geothermal root had been sunk, and that had failed to generate sufficient power to supply even the needs of those who lived in the wealthy enclave of Mokifa. Now, nearly a century later, Kushiel was just a ruin.

He stopped and dismounted, looking up between the jagged buildings where the moon shone faintly through the clouds, roped by the veins of a ripple effect that was spreading rapidly across the sky. As he watched, the sky slowly boiled and unraveled. He walked on, wheeling the bicycle towards what he took to be the jeweled lights of Mokifa or Corpus Vali ahead.

A hole of large but uncertain dimensions lay off in the gloom to his left. He knew it wasn’t possible for a geothermal pit to have been excavated and then left unplugged, but still the hole seemed to shift and extend towards him, and there was a prickling of his skin, a bluish density to the night air—a weird sense of outpouring. He turned back into a space between two warehouses. Above him, a loose cable clanged repeatedly in the wind against a corroded metal dome. He paused, rubbing at the pounding in his head.

A tingling electrical wash gave him goose bumps. Feeling a twinge of pain in his right armpit, he slid his hand beneath his cassock, then pulled it out sharply as he felt the jolt of a shock. Holding his hand up, he was sure he could detect a faint luminescence on it. Turning his bicycle, checking the power—it was low—he remounted. He followed the swaying powerlines through a short tunnel, past a hut and a barrier that still, impotently, guarded Kushiel’s entrance, then went across a wide strip of wasteground to where the tumble of the Endless City resumed. Soon there were streets, houses, tenements, sounds of life. In a square filled with the smell of frying onion and fresh sweat, people twirled and swayed to the blare of music from a café.

He stood for a moment, watching from the shadows. There were grinning faces. Beautiful women. Spinning children. Men laughing and handsome, like pirates with their earrings and bandannas. Mothers, ignored, shouted and waved from windows for their children to come to bed while old ladies knitted and nodded their heads to the beat, and men at sidetables turned worry beads and smiled secret smiles, their eyes filmed with memories of other nights.

The people stopped dancing when John entered the light. Hands darted over chests in the sign of protection against the evil eye as he wheeled his bicycle beneath the colored lanterns strung across the square.

Several streets later, finally back along the way he’d intended, he dismounted outside the crumbling concrete facade of the old Cresta Motel and picked his way around the rubbish sacks and the clouds of flies that filled the open courtyard. He reached the beaded curtain beyond which Kassi Moss kept her office.

“Ah, Fatoo…” Even before he had fully parted the curtain, she was up and around her desk, throwing heaps of soiled linen off a chair, turning it and placing it just so for him. “
Gunafana.
So good you’ve come.”

He sat down and waited for Kassi to return to her side of her desk. As always, the room was lit by a painfully bright portable halogen lamp. He realized that he was drenched with sweat.

Smiling, Kassi rocked back and forth in her chair. She was a round, gray-haired woman with brown, deeply lined skin. On the wall behind her, emphasized and enlarged by the white light, hung a large crucifix.

“I listened to you church Sunday, Fatoo,” she said, perhaps noticing the direction of his gaze. “About Jesus knowing death when he entered the city gates. Was he such brave man?”

“Yes, he was a brave man.”

Kassi nodded, wrinkling her eyes. Was she doubting Christ’s bravery? Asking whether it was truly possible for God to be a man?

“Fatoo want coffee?”

“No. I just thought I’d look in, Kassi. And bring you this.” Wiping down with dysol the antibiotic box that Tim Purdoe had given him in the Zone, John placed it within her reach on the desk. “I thought you’d probably make better use of this than I could. You have far more cases of septicemia…”

Kassi picked the box up, cocked her head to listen to the card on the side, and whistled. “This is…”—she looked at the box again, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe—“the best.
Bona.
Yes? The very?”

“That’s right,” he said. “The very.”

His gaze drifted back to the wall behind Kassi, where the agony of Christ’s delicately carved flesh was thrown into sharp relief by the halogen blaze.

“Would you like to see?” she asked.

“See?”

“My people.”

“Yes. Of course.”

Kassi led him back across the courtyard and up the creaking steps into the Cresta Motel. It was a hospital of sorts, although hospitals were uncommon in the Endless City, where illness wasn’t anticipated by internal defenses but diagnosed only when symptoms showed and treated by the age-old remedies of tablet and injection, where even the practice of invasive surgery still sometimes occurred. The sick were generally looked after at home by their families. Money could still buy a reasonable degree of health with the drugs and treatments provided by healers, quacks, witchwomen, locally built doctors, and market stalls, but those Borderers who grew ill and had no one to see to them risked dying in the street. Kassi picked up a few of these, laid them on a mattress along one of the corridors of the Cresta Motel, pumped them up with what food and drugs a largely forgotten joint Magulf-Halcycon initiative still provided, and occasionally helped John with the cases he discovered. She had just four assistants.

There was an odd, whispering silence along the arched stone hallways that could never have belonged to any kind of motel. It came from the breathing of the patients; the exhalation of a sluggish sea, broken occasionally by coughs, grunts, cries of pain.

Kassi’s lantern danced over the posters and screens that she had put up to disguise the wet gray walls; it arched shadows across the figures that lay curled on their pallets, it glistened on the faces that turned towards Kassi and John. Some were pale, sweat-sheened. Some were like skulls. In contrast, a young man sat smiling and nodding his head to the beat of whatever music he’d wired into his ear, the ulcer in his gut sealed by the miracle of a recombinant drug. He wanted, Kassi said, patting and squeezing his shoulder, to stay on and learn how to become a healer. But as they walked off, she added, in European, that her patients often said that when they were in the first rush of recovery. It was usually a different matter when the time actually came to leave. Not, of course, that she blamed them. She shrugged, waving her hands. Fatoo knew how it was—
fornu…

As usual, deferring to a knowledge that she surely knew he didn’t possess, Kassi stooped and pulled back the blankets of some of the more difficult or troubling cases to seek his advice. Here were the butchered legs of a young lad who had somehow managed to step on a landmine that must have lain buried beneath a wastepit for at least two centuries. And here was the pustulating flesh of a woman in the last phases of smallpox VII. She was still conscious enough to attempt to pull away when John leaned over her.

“Is right?” Kassi whispered, drawing him away, “that I give an ending? Is that the way of God?”

Every time he came, Kassi would take him to some hopeless case and ask if it was right to give an ending, if that was the way of God.

“You know what she has, Kassi,” he said. “She’ll be dead soon anyway.”

“So I give an ending?”

Kassi gazed up at him.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s the way of God.”

Her face relaxed a little. Later, she’d return to this bed with one of the tiny hand-blown glass vials he’d seen her secretly fingering. She’d break it and dribble the sticky poison onto the woman’s lips or, if the woman was still conscious, Kassi would let her crush it with her own teeth and swallow. That, anyway, was what he supposed. Kassi led him farther along the stinking passageway where little rivers of blood, sweat-fever, and urine snaked across the floor. John spoke the last rites over an elderly woman, trying to ignore the bones, moonrocks, and bowls that lined the foot of her bed. Kassi had no choice but to allow the witchwomen to bring their own brand of madness into the Cresta Motel, but she grew flustered if he gave any indication of noticing.

Finally, he followed her back towards the courtyard, rubbing at the bands of pain in his head and the swimming blotches that were forming before his eyes. There were no obvious cases of leukemia here, and he’d asked about
bludrut
before. Yet the people Kassi Moss tended at the Cresta Motel were generally the poorest, the weakest, the most exposed to infection. He filed the fact away. It was meaningless as yet—but surely formed the part of some pattern.

E
IGHT PEOPLE WERE SEATED
around the table in conference room G in the main admin block of the European Zone at Bab Mensor. For various reasons, they were all paid to be here this morning. Otherwise, none of them would have attended—although, at the same time, these discussions, part of the complex fantail of Zone committees, had an addictive quality. There was always the sense that someday something might actually happen.

John propped his head in his hand to cover the muscle in his cheek that had started to judder. Surreptitiously he kneaded it with his fingers, looking along the conference table. Only the telepresences seemed attentive, leaning out from their screens—but he doubted if those postures were true of the people they represented. He glanced at his own screen and drew a squiggle with his finger. They were at item 3a. The agenda items went up to 10, and each was a signpost along a long road—like the times in Hemhill when he was young and every schoolday had a special quality dictated by its proximity to the weekend. Item 1 was like Monday morning, a gray shock. Item 3a was the depths of a dreary Tuesday. Item 10, of course, would be Friday afternoon. As the clock on his schoolscreen had blinked through the minutes of art and history, he could already feel the breeze of freedom blowing through the school gates. But the best of all Fridays were the Fridays at the ends of term, and the best of all ends of term was the end of summer term. In the clear eternal past of childhood, in the days when the world truly had been filled with giants, Hal was already finished at seniors and leaning against the railing under the oak tree as John ran out through the gates. The two brothers would walk home together, and the shops and cars and houses and rainbowed sprinklers circling the lawns had a brilliance that only holidays could bring. And at home the rooms would be in chaos, filled with the straining cases and endless piles of shoes that they would take with them next day to the summerhouse at Ley…

“I think we should move on to item 4,” said Bevis Headley, the chairman, who represented Halcycon S.A.

The small globe-shaped secretary sitting in the middle of the table and feeding each member’s display gave a discreet bleep and intoned: “Zone subcommittee on Magulf education. Meeting 28, item 4. Sat broadcasts.”