The Great Wheel (12 page)

“Tim Purdoe’s checking some samples for me.”

“For what?”

“A link between cancer and radiation. Leukemia—
bludrut.
”

Her mouth tightened. “I do know what leukemia is.”

“Did you ever hear of any cases?”

“No—you’re not disappointed, are you?”

He shook his head and looked out the window. The wind was weaving ribbons of dust and smoke through the lighted evening.

“I’m sorry.” She handed him a tube. He broke the seal but couldn’t tell the shade. “It’s just the way you people always react when you come here. You all take one look and seem to think you have the answer. But if you’re serious, if you really think there
is
something…”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Then I’d like to see the cards sometime. I might be able to help with the net. I mean, it’s not exactly my field…”

“Tim’s doing tests on some tissue samples and food substances. If there is a cause, a pollutant, it has to be common, but it can’t be something too obvious, like windblown dust or solar breakthrough or kelp—Halcycon wouldn’t have let that through the system all these years. It has to be something else. Something with a slow buildup that’s only present in tiny quantities. Something that has a strong affinity for living cells so that it’s absorbed into the body rather than excreted.” He stopped.

“Sounds like you’re close,” Laurie said after a while.

“I think I am…” He bit off the end of his tube and drew. It tasted of cinnamon, wood leaves, firesmoke, autumn. Briefly, he felt the way he was supposed to: filled with pointless nostalgia, both happy and sad. And the colors streaming from doorways and screens and signs were red, yellow, amber, orange. Sweat-covered faces and sliding limbs. “Where are we now?”

“You’ll see.”

She cranked down her window to let the smoke escape. Arms reached out, but she handled the van well, kept moving, spinning the wheel to avoid the bodies ahead. He heard shouts, laughter. And then there were mouths parting near him, glimpses of flesh. Here, there was no need for a translat. The meaning was universal: the offer of easy surprise. All eyes followed the van. Battered as it was, it still spelled
ossar
—money.

“Over there.” Laurie pointed to a building that climbed out of the smog, where a faulty screen over the doorway stuttered with an image that John thought for a moment was a mouth, then an opening flower. “…you get the Europeans. It’s a big treat, you know. To have a few drinks, smoke a few tubes, come out here from the Zone.”

So this was Agouna. He drew again on the tube, wondering if it was that or the brown-iris pigment that was giving everything this blur of distance. And Laurie was still talking: See, Father John, over there, see those people across the street—they have their orifices electronically enhanced. And did you know, Father John, that they often die when the acid leaks from their implant batteries? Her words turned bitter, and he caught the dark breeze from the tube she was smoking, quite different from his own.

“I wanted you to see,” she said.

She dropped him off outside the presbytery. His eyes were hurting him now, but in his groggy state he put it down to tiredness until, climbing to his room in the presbytery, he paused by the clouded mirror on the stairway to examine his face. What a joke it would be, he thought, if the catalyst were to hold permanently. But the iris of his left eye was already half-faded, barely a grayish brown. The silver, the iris-bleaching pigment that had started out as a whim of European fashion and then become an unshakable badge of identity, was returning. Vaguely disappointed, John walked the rest of the way up the stairs.

F
ELIPE IS SEATED IN
his chair in the Pandera presbytery’s top room, smiling. Bella stands behind him, having removed her facemask at John’s request. Uncovered, her mouth looks odd. The card’s five available seconds go by as he silently urges them to speak, move—do at least something for the camera. But there is only the creak of the circling fan and sounds through the open window from the street below. A baby crying. A donkey braying. The hot Magulf wind.

Gran Vía, under a pouring sky where children dart like dragonflies and a koiyl vendor scowls, hauling his tall wheeled basket down the rutted street towards the Alcalá souk. In the background, a high tenement’s rotting masonry.

Light falls through Santa Cristina’s roof, pointing a finger in a drizzle of dust at the ravaged body of the stone crusader. John pans left for a glimpse through the open west doorway, where caroni birds are circling.

Tim Purdoe sits with his feet up in his surgery as the cleared window behind him shows the lawns and the lake beyond. The freezer box containing the tissue samples John sent over a week before lies unopened on the floor. Tim raises a hand and manages an affable but long-suffering smile. He is, as he’s reminded John a few moments before, a very busy man.

Nuru is seated relaxed in the clinic, his feet also up in the front office desk in curious mimicry of Tim Purdoe at the medical center, although the two have never met and are unlikely to do so. He stretches out a hand and points.

“This your brother Hal? Fatoo John, do a fine job…”

The local healer Winah also stands in the clinic’s frontroom, holding open the huge carpetbag she always carries with her. An Aladdin’s cave of potions and vials, and the dried koiyl flowers, stronger and rarer than the leaves, which, so it is said, the women of the Endless City swallow to stifle the pains of labor. But John knows only what he’s heard: women in pregnancy are more than usually wary of his presence, afraid he’ll give their babies his silver eyes.

Beyond the rooftops of the Endless City and the rising spires of the Bab Mensor shuttleport, a river of light blinks across the Breathless Ocean. Then comes the roar of engines as the Tuesday evening Paris shuttle emerges through the darkening clouds from reentry, her fins glowing.

The wires and rails surrounding the smoking chimney-finger of the El Teuf incinerator flutter with thousands of offerings to the dead. A child’s teddybear with the speech circuit hanging out, the skin of a cat, ribbons stippled with images of happier days, and endless messages, many on cards of the type given out at Santa Cristina. Some, damaged but still functioning, mutter and growl into the wind.

A Borderer family. Two teenage children, a baby, an old woman, a young man. They knew John was coming, and the glowing screen of a Borderer speak-and-talk Bible lies conspicuously open on the table in the corner. The deep gurgle of one of the main kelp-feed pipelines rumbles nearby like an endless train.

“What say, Fatoo?”

“Just anything, whatever.”

The family frown as, uncertainly, they mouth the alien words
anything whatever.

Back in his room at the Pandera presbytery in the hour before the generator goes down. The chair, the washstand, the bed. John is still dressed in his cassock and wishing that he’d also left his gloves on. That, after all, is the truth of how most people see him here.

“For now, Hal,” he says, “I call this my home.”

Laurie was already waiting for John in the Jubilee Bar of the Hyatt Hotel. The wine bottle on the table was half empty. There were the ends of four tubes in the ashtray.

“Father John…”

“Am I late? Are you early?”

She fanned her hands in a Borderer shrug, then tipped red wine into the other glass.

He sat down and unslung the camera from his shoulder.

“Your eyes are silver again,” he said.

“It’s easier in a place like this. Otherwise people ask you to bring them a drink or another tray of nuts.”

“Really?”

“Do you want me to show you?”

He shook his head. Dimly, he could see his own outline reflected in her eyes. He still couldn’t get used to the difference it made.

“So…” She nodded at the camera. “You’ve been taking pictures?”

“For my parents. And for my brother.”

“Can I see?”

He handed her the camera and waited as she looked at the small flat screen on the back. Felipe. Bella. Santa Cristina. El Teuf. Gran Vía. Nuru…Biting her lip, she paused, touching the pads to clear and focus on some part of an image, then moved on. The Jubilee Bar’s wide windows looked out across the lake at the green of Trinity Gardens and the spire of All Saints where Father Orteau ministered to the needs of the Zone. The fountain in the middle of the room clattered. The empty glass-top tables caught the mid-afternoon light.

She placed the camera on the couch. “What is this brother of yours like? Is he much younger than you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Just the way you spoke to him at the end.”

“I only said about three words.”

She nodded.

He put his hand around the glass on the table. He lifted it, took a sip of his wine, and swallowed. “Hal’s older than me,” he said, “but there was an accident in his late teens. We used to go to this house by the coast every summer. The last year, soon after we came home, Hal was supposed to go to study in London. But he didn’t make it. It was obvious that he was depressed, although because it was Hal, no one really believed it. Then one night, late after the carnival, he got into the net from his bedroom terminal. He found this high-level port somewhere that they’ve never been able to locate, and used it to reprogram his implants. Since then he’s been in a coma.”

“Then there can’t…” She paused. “There can’t be much hope.”

“Hope really isn’t a thing you can weigh or quantify, is it? Hope’s either there or it’s not.”

“I suppose so. A still small voice. And you wanted to show him the Endless City. You think that some of it might get through?”

“You know the story of Elijah?”

“Elijah?”

“A still small voice. You were quoting from the Bible…” He trailed off. Without even moving, Laurie seemed to be drifting away from him. “It doesn’t matter.”

She twisted around to rummage in her pockets for a tube. She offered him one. He shook his head. “Did you bring,” she said, exhaling bluish smoke, “the cards?”

He placed them on the table. She took one, smoothed out a creased corner, and fed the card into the slot at the side of the table. Between the glasses and the bottles, the small screen brightened into life, throwing green and gold across her face. She paged up through the meal offers and lonely-heart adverts until she found the right port.

“How do you spell leukemia?”

Blinking though the tube haze, he reached over and pulled the letters up himself. Then they were looking down at the lattice of his main spreadsheet.

Laurie nodded. “Very impressive.” The tips of her fingers dissolved as, shifting the cursor, she tiered back through the levels.

1A/924/K. (36) Male, adolescent. Bleeding from membranes. “Bone pain.” N. Keno—place of origin and last name unknown. Doctor reports immature monocytes 6 x 10
⁹
/liter. As usual recommends myelosuppression despite failed previous attempts to input.

3C/5626/K. (58) Female, mature. Skin lesions. Ulceration. Secondary gout. Worker at El Teuf. Doctor reports neutrophils 30 x 10
⁹
/Vliter.

“What are all the numbers for?”

“I tried to think up a simple filing system based on the mission guidance. That way I was able to incorporate most of the data for the ten years since the last time the doctor was wholly reformatted. You know what it’s like—you have to make a decision about groups and categories, then you’re stuck with it.”

Nodding in a way that suggested she didn’t know what it was like at all, Laurie pushed deeper into the spreadsheet on the table. The entries became a blur. She hummed to herself and her eyes flickered, somehow seeming to take it all in even at this speed. John wondered if he wasn’t making a mistake in showing her this. Like Tim, she was a professional. She’d see nothing but the faults and limitations in his work.

“This is just the top layer. Photographs—” He reached over and pulled something up from the screen. A brown-irised human eye appeared in close-up: swollen, streaked with blood.

“I saw that option on the menu,” she said.

“But the point is a simple one. In the reports for the past ten years there have been a total of 78 separate cases of acute myeloid leukemia in the 63,000 entered into the doctor. With that number of people, there should have been only two or three.” The blood-weeping eye on the screen blinked, and someone who’d just arrived at the bar glanced over and said something John didn’t catch. Laurie picked up her glass and blanked the screen.

“Okay,” she said. “At the clinic you are seeing whoever comes in the door—but they won’t all be different people, will they? You’ll get returns and repeats. And, how do you know how typical they are? You’re bound to get people with unusual complaints, people who wouldn’t ordinarily come to a clinic but are desperate for help.”

John explained how he’d estimated the number of people in the surrounding Magulf who were likely to make some use of the surgery and how, even then, there were still far too many cases. And he’d gone back to the old analogue textbooks—not that they were perfect—but unless there had been some radical change, he knew that he shouldn’t expect to see one case of leukemia a year, and that was all types, spleen and bone-marrow, acute and chronic…

“I have to deal with these people, Laurie,” he said. “They’ll let the doctor hold them because they think it’ll stitch a wound or diagnose a problem. Then the readout comes up on the screen with this long list of pointless recommendations for drugs. Those that I can synthesize or get hold of through Tim only make the patients iller, quicker. And then I have to decide what to tell them. Whether they’ll cope…”

He stopped. His voice had grown loud, and he realized that the people who were now filling the Jubilee Bar from the ending afternoon shift were glancing over at him and Laurie with undisguised irritation. Earlier that day he’d seen Martínez, who was still surviving, who was in fact looking better. The man had even managed to get back for a few hours to renovating and repairing his vans. Fatoo, it’s just this fever, he’d said, sitting in the parlor as the silver-eyed people hung frozen on the screen he’d been watching and as his children peered in from the doorway. Martínez was a living advert for the incredible strength of the Borderers’ natural defenses. He’d put on a little weight, and for the last few days he’d even stopped coughing up the pale-whitish blood. I’m making sure I still eat, he said, smiling as a fly crawled over the sweat on his face. So I don’t need you to tell me it’s
sumfo
—nothing, Fatoo. I know that already…