The Great Wheel (9 page)

Buttocks shifted in seats. Eyes scanned the ceiling. John drew another squiggle on his screen. He disliked item 4 more than any of the others. It was a long way from the start, a long way from the finish. A drab plateau.

Last night, he’d barely slept. Nowadays, even when he was fully awake, his head often filled with the same gray figures that had once only populated his dreams. Thin or bloated, half comatose or feverish, inflamed or limping, peeling back untaken patches of artificial skin with agonizing care to show him the head of a worm, a spine of metal, or the flesh of ribs and shoulders stripped away by a lurid secretion. European and Borderer, they floated entwined together, smoky fingers reaching out from the clinic, and from the Cresta Motel, and from Southlands, and the backrooms that he’d once visited in Yorkshire. “Father, does the Church have a viewpoint on this?” Faces along the committee table turned towards him. At such moments, he always felt torn between screaming out and falling asleep. “The Church,” he said, “supports all positive measures to bring about enlightenment.”

“Enlightenment. Good. Now, moving on…” The air was stifling. Feeling faintly sick, the muscle in his cheek hammering faster than ever, John looked down again at his screen.

He had a late lunch with Tim Purdoe in the cozy fog of wood, brass, and firelight that was Thrials, the Zone’s best restaurant, and thanked him, as the food arrived, for his help in getting the clinic’s doctor fixed.

Tim impaled an asparagus tip with his fork. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot.”

“Seriously.”

“Look—” Tim dabbed butter from his chin. “I promise I’ll get around to it.”

“It’s been fixed. The engineer actually came to the clinic in a veetol, oh, a week back.”

“A
veetol?
” Tim speared another tip. “Much as I’d like to take the credit, John, it wasn’t me.”

“Well, it’s fixed anyway.”

“Good. That’s great.”

John was eating grilled steak; the cheapest item on the menu, although, as usual, Tim was paying for both of them. The food here was brought fresh on the shuttle in chilled containers. Meals cost a Borderer’s monthly wage.

“Another beer, I think.”

“Not for me.”

“Take a soberup.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Sometimes, John…” Tim put down his fork and reached over to touch John’s bare ungloved hand. Without thinking, John pulled away.

Tim shook his head. “You really do need to lighten up.”

“I have to go and visit someone later. He’s a family man called Martínez, and he’s dying.”

“He doesn’t know?”

“No.”

“Will you tell him?”

“I’ll try to play it by ear. I can’t just decide, can I—sitting here? I’ll have to wait and see. Isn’t that what you’d do?”

Tim shrugged. “Working here, I really can’t say I have that much…”

“Here, everything’s different, isn’t it? Here—and out there.”

“Isn’t that why you came?”

John pushed away his mostly untouched plate of food—the smell of freshly cooked meat was starting to disgust him, anyway—and saw, as he did so, that Tim was staring at the screen of his watch, the tiny flashing lines of AGTC, as if they contained some kind of message. He covered it with his sleeve.

“Tim—there’s a link between cancer and radiation?”

“Well, yes.”

“That would apply to cancers of the blood?”

“Which one?”

“Acute myeloid leukemia.”

“Like that woman? The one that died?” The brown-eyed waitress placed a fresh beer beside Tim. He sipped, trying not to frown. He really didn’t like giving specific advice on cases at the clinic. “Okay. Yes, leukemia could be caused by cell damage from radiation…Although there are viral, chemical, other factors.”

“I’ve come across several cases like it, Tim. In the clinic, and in the doctor’s records. I think there may be some specific and avoidable cause.”

“And so you thought about radiation?”

“The Borderers are so naturally tough and resistant…I can’t believe there isn’t some external factor. Is it likely that they could somehow be exposed to radiation levels high enough to cause cancer? I mean, just this one specific kind. You must have access to figures on the net. We Europeans would be at risk from cell damage, too.”

“We’re not
at risk,
John.” Tim raised his beer and drank, adding a line of foam to his lip. “Your viruses would easily recode a few precancerous cells.”

“It’s the Borderers I’m concerned about.”

“Of course. The Gogs.” Tim paused, gazing out the window, suppressing, John suspected, a professional’s irritation with the dabblings of amateurs in his field. Outside, along the covered brownstone paving of Main Avenue, it was May and the cherry trees were losing their blossoms, scattering pink and white.

“Ordinarily,” Tim continued, turning back towards John, “you’re talking about lowish levels of radiation, here or anywhere else. There are solar rays out beyond the Last Hammada, and the products of old power station meltdowns, but you know that most of the nuclear arsenals were never used, and a lot of early climate control was directed towards scrubbing the skies clean above Europe anyway. The climate got almost the same benefit here. That was why the Gogs came.”

“That’s history.”

The sweets arrived. Thrials specialized in architectural constructs of chocolate, toffee, and fudge to make up for the relative delicacy of their main courses. Tim had chosen a zero, calorie version, but to John that seemed a pointless final extravagance.

“So you’re saying that radiation levels in the Magulf aren’t exceptionally high?”

“There must be hot spots—I’m sure there were a few local conflicts and meltdowns—but many of the real nasties such as the iodine and thorium isotopes have a relatively short half-life. Others, like carbon 14, will be thinly distributed throughout the world. It’s nearly all long gone, or left in tiny quantities.”

“What do you mean? Nearly all?”

“I suppose a few could still be in the food chain around here. Something the Gogs are eating and we’re not. Something odd that hasn’t shown up.”

“And no one ever tested for it?”

“For what? You said yourself you don’t know.”

“I’d just like to get to the truth.”

“There’s a difference between facts and the truth, you know.” Tim lifted his spoon and excavated a syrupy lump from his dessert.

“About those radiation levels,” John said, “my doctor’s useless. If I provided you with tissue and food samples, could you do some tests?”

“For you,” Tim said, his spoon still poised, “I’ll do some tests. But I do have one question.”

“What’s that?”

“Just what do you expect to do with the truth if you find it?”

“The truth,” John said, “will lead the way to an answer.”

He parted with Tim after lunch and wandered along Main Avenue past the flashy clothiers and flowersellers to the nearest booth. He sat down inside and called up the Zone’s directory from the net, finding the listing for Laurie Kalmar.

Her face appeared on the screen.

“Hello,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting your call…”

She was smiling. Her eyes were silver again.

“The doctor at my clinic’s been fixed,” he said. “A veetol came from the Zone. Which is about as likely as…” He took a breath. “Since I mentioned the problem when we talked in Trinity Gardens, I though it might be thanks to you.”

“I really can’t say, Father John,” she said. “But of course I’ll tell Laurie what you said as soon as she’s available.”

“You’re not Laurie—you’re just an answerer?”

The face on the screen nodded. She was smiling, as if amused. “I’m just the answerer. I’m sorry if you were confused.”

He glanced at the cursor at the side of the screen, but it gave no indication. Another trick, like the silver eyes.

The answerer tilted her head, waiting for him to speak.

“Anyway,” he said, “tell Laurie that if she ever goes into the Endless City, she should call in at the clinic sometime, and I’ll show her.”

“Of course, Father John. Goodb—”

He touched Exit, and sat for a moment. Then he called his parents, who still lived in the same house back in England.

“John…It
is
you…” His father sat down before him. He had a habit of leaning forward towards his own screen, which extended his neck and distorted the image slightly. Faintly, John could hear birdsong, and could smell something cooking. “I was just saying this morning to your mother that it was about time you called.”

“Dad, how are you?”

“We’re fine. How are you?”

John nodded. “I’m keeping well, thanks.”

“Still curing the Gogs—Borderers?”

“I do my best.” Ever since John could remember, his father had always called the Borderers Gogs, then corrected himself. John doubted whether his father even realized that he was doing it.

“That’s good.” His father was in his armchair in the lounge, where these days he spent most of his time, puffing his way though packs of mildly nostalgia-inducing tubes and listening to classical music, while John’s mother, when she wasn’t seeing to Hal, pottered in a garden that grew both neater and less attractive with the passing of every year. There, on the shelf just behind his father, stood the old willow-pattern vase with the chip still showing on the glaze. Kicking a football across the lounge one morning, preparatory to going to the park, John had sent it tumbling. “Is there anything,” his father asked, “that you need?”

“Some powdered soup would be useful,” John said. “You can get it in condensed blocks about so big…” He held up his fingers.

“You do your own
cooking
there?”

“No, but the maid…” John shrugged. In the rare event that the package actually made its way through the Magulf postage system to the Pandera presbytery, he’d give it to one of his patients at the clinic.

“Okay, Son, powdered soup it is. What flavor?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

His father looked doubtful.

“Asparagus would be fine, Dad. If you could get asparagus.”

“I’ll see what there is.”

“Great.”

The two men gazed at each other for a moment, holding on to their smiles. Then his father pulled back from the screen, and his face assumed its proper dimensions.

“I’ll get your mother. Son, you take care.”

“You too, Dad.”

His father disappeared from view. John heard footsteps and shouts, the busy drone of a weeder cut short. He waited, looking at the chipped vase, the turning brass wheels of the clock on the wall that said a quarter past two (the same time as here, although that was hard to believe), the shifting shadows cast by the boughs of the cherry tree beyond the window, the pale dots of sunlight. He leaned forward and tilted his head a little to see if it was yet in full blossom.

“Ah, there you are.” His mother sat down in the chair, plucking off her green gardening gloves. “You know,
he’s
made me trudge all the way in here when there’s a unit in the garage and he could have…” She stopped herself, put her gloves in her lap, and smiled. “How are you, love?”

“I’m fine.” John read in her eyes that she thought he looked tired. “How’s Hemhill?”

“Oh, I doubt if you’d notice much change. But you must come and see when you’ve finished there. No more promises.”

He nodded. “Dad says he’ll send me some soup.”

“You don’t
need
it, do you?”

“You know how he likes to send something. Tying stuff up.”

They smiled, sharing their little conspiracy.

“And I want
you
to send me some pictures of that place you’re staying at,” his mother said. “Can you
do
that? I mean, I keep asking and you still haven’t sent a thing. They do sell cameras there?”

“I can get one in the Zone, Mum. This isn’t…”

“I want,” his mother said, “to have something that I can show to Hal.”

He nodded. “And how is he?”

“He’s the same, John. Your father went up and sat with him for a while yesterday. He hasn’t done
that
in years. Maybe he’s finally starting to get used to it. He was always like this, you know, when we were younger, courting. A big kid. I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me for having these four extra years on him.”

John smiled.

His mother glanced away from the screen, towards the clear and sunlit window. “If it keeps like this, I may even try to get Hal downstairs and into the garden for a few hours. I’m sure he enjoys it.”

“How are you coping?”

“The machines are a big help. They get a little better all the time. A good thing, really…”—she folded her hands in her lap—“…considering that the opposite is happening to me.”

“You look very well, Mum.”

“You know me. I’m only grouching. Would you like to send a message? I mean, to Hal?”

John said, “Sure.”

“Then you may as well get on with it. These links are expensive. And you know I’ll be thinking of you. Just break the connection when you’ve finished.” Briskly as always, and with her usual aversion to farewells, his mother reached forward to reconfigure the screen. “Goodbye, John. Call again. And next time don’t make it so long…”

The screen blanked over. With just the address cursor showing in the top right-hand corner, it felt as though contact with Hemhill had already been broken. And more than ever, sitting here in this booth nearly a thousand miles away, John was certain that nothing he could say to Hal would get through. Still, this wasn’t the time to break his mother’s hope—if, nowadays, hope was what it actually was.

He closed his eyes. He opened them again. He imagined Hal as he’d last seen him, almost a year ago, lying upstairs in his bedroom with its view, through the lime trees across the road, of the track and the playing fields. Nothing his mother had said in the year since indicated that there’d been any improvement. She used to call John at midnight on the net in a state of girlish excitement just to say how Hal had smiled at something or turned his head or had seemed to recognize a face. It had been years since John received that kind of call.

“It’s me, Hal—John. I’m still at work in the Endless City, doing services at the old church, doling out treatment at the clinic.” He paused. He licked his lips. “The clinic’s the part of the work that I enjoy most here, Hal—although enjoy isn’t the right word. I know it’s not some great big ambitious project…But it’s a way of saying, Here, look, we care, we want to help. If everyone did as much, there would be less of a problem…”