The Great Wheel (13 page)

John finished off the glass of wine and stared at the empty bottle, wondering whether he should blow half his weekly allowance and order another.

Laurie ground out her tube in the ashtray. “Anyway, Father John. You’ve convinced me. So. These are copies, yes…?” She rapped the cards together and placed them in her bag. “I’ll see what I can do.” She stood up.

“Hey—wait.” He reached for the camera.

Laurie Kalmar in the Jubilee Bar of the Hyatt Hotel. She’s smiling, and the cuffs of her jacket are down and her eyes are silver. There is music, and the murmur of voices. In the background, a uniformed Borderer waiter stands behind the bar polishing glasses. He’s staring at her, and his face is blankly hostile.

“Wish you were here, Hal.”

She turns away and walks out of the bar.

H
ERE WAS HAL AT THE
carnival, here was Hal at the fair. Here was Hal on a bright late summer’s afternoon where the great wheel was waiting, rising over the bustling tented city, its hub and vast circumference gaudily painted in man-thick streamers of red and yellow, trapped at the center of everything with struts and gantries straining against the sky.

“Come on Skiddle.” Hal’s hand surrounded John’s own, drawing him on past the eye-shading onlookers, towards the fenced and looping archway that spelled out
THE GREAT WHEEL
and the first of the hugely anchored cables that were pulling hot and tight. “It’ll be good.”

And, yes, John knew that it truly would be good. To be up there, higher than the highest spire and coiled like the spring that kept the whole universe turning. He looked up. The great wheel creaked, and everything else seemed to lean. Already, could it be turning? Or could it be the earth? Or the sky? Could it be him?

“Skiddle, you
said
you would.” Hal was smiling. “You said you would last year.”

But last year, when John made his promise, he never really believed that this year would come. And he’d willingly give next year away with a promise too. By then he’d be different, more like Hal. He’d be strong.

They were drawing close to the back of the queue where there were faces he recognized: girls and lads mostly bigger and older than he was, rubbing at the sweat gathering on their eyebrows as they squinted up, and laughing about how it would be. All day they’d been waiting, holding back amid the sights and the stalls and the amusements, judging the moment. And people are asking, What’s it really like—to be up there, turning? And surely that’s a cloud right there at the top of the thing, caught like a piece of fleece in a spinning wheel, in the engine of the sky.

They were in the queue now, and Hal was finding the money he’d promised for John’s ticket. A clown, a fire-eater, a juggler, a giant automated bear passed by, but the people here were looking up at the sky and their thoughts were already turning, feeling the scream of the wind and the flash of the sun and the drop in their bellies. Up ahead a barrier unhooked, and the first riders climbed up the steps. The open gondola swung as they settled; the thin golden bars of the cage; the creaking padded straps; the clunk of the catches. Then a drivebelt smoked and tensed, and the wheel growled on its bearings and turned flashing in a thunder that came up through the grass and from beyond the sun. The gondola bobbed up like a cork on a river. Already, it was halfway to the sky.

Another gondola. The queue shuffled forward. Again, the wheel flashed, growled, creaked, thundered, turned, and the sun was hot on John’s neck and he could taste the fried onions he’d eaten earlier, could feel the pull of the ground through the soles of his shoes. Again the queue moved forward, and Hal was humming. John stared at the squashed grass. He knew that Hal was looking up. He knew that the great wheel was turning. A shadow passed over him. Silent and expectant as mourners now, filled with dread and excitement, the queue moved forward.

Another moment, and John was facing the steps leading up to the swaying gondola, which seemed high and huge and open and scary in itself. He waited. The great wheel was too close now to take in whole. He waited. Hal squeezed his shoulder and went up the steps first, climbing into the gondola and balancing just as he did at Ley when he was getting into
Omega,
their skittish little boat. Hal leaned back into the padded bench. The straps, the locks. John waited. A painted mermaid, many times life-size, smiled down at him.

Already far above, Hal beckoned from the swaying gondola, held out a hand. “Come on, Skiddle. Now it’s your turn.”

The whole carnival seemed to fall silent. The flags drooped. The engines stopped. The air whitened and froze over. John gazed at the first step leading to the gondola and saw how there was a nailed-down strip of metal at the edge, how the paint had been scuffed away by the passage of many feet.

“Come on, Skiddle! What is—”

Something broke inside him, and he turned and ran. Ran without thinking as the air washed the sweat from his face and roared laughter in his ears. Ran away, stumbling over guy ropes and cables, bumping into avuncular bellies and swinging disconnected arms. Away and through and over a hedge where litter and wild bramble clawed at his arms, across the dusty furrows of the freshly emptied fields where the machines slept like great black insects, and back towards the village. Finally, as the oaks beside the main road cast their shade over him and a spider brushed his face, John stumbled over a root, stopped, and turned.

He could still see the great wheel and hear the piping clangorous wash of the fair. And once again, the wheel glinted and turned. Even from across these fields it looked vast and the people on it were tiny as ants, almost too small to be seen. It turned and he knew that this time the turning would be different, faster. From under his tree, could he really hear the whoops and screams? The great wheel was truly spinning now, over and up and over, blurring, picking up wild momentum like a child’s top, close to the moment of release. As he watched, he saw the puff of the stabilizers as the wheel started to lift from the gantry, saw as it began to rise. The motion was slow now, absurdly right, incredibly graceful. Turning as the earth turns, the great wheel rolled up the slope of an invisible mountain and bore its riders for their sweet and giddy hour tumbling in the skies of Hemhill.

Walking down the road, John felt guiltily grateful that he had run. No leap of the imagination would ever be big enough to put him up there, high in sunlight over the valley. He kicked at the dust. He passed the empty houses, walking on towards the center of the village.

High Street was Sunday-quiet. The trees hung still. The fountain was dead. The machines were resting. The shops were closed. From a window by the old theater came the tinny sound of music, but it only added to the sense of weird tranquillity. Here, deep in Hemhill’s undersea heat, nothing would ever stir.

And there it was, up over the rooftops, far and distant, the great wheel with Hal in it, flashing through the deep rippling blue surface of the sky. It was unreal, and the stories the riders would tell when it returned to earth would never quite convey the meaning. The earth, the wind, the sun, the sky, the sky, the blue and lovely sky, and screaming at the top of your lungs. Next year, maybe next year, another year, he would go.

It seemed that Tilly’s Café was still open; across the empty road, by the booth into the net, there was the green sunflash of its open door. But Tilly always was an old grouch. Farther along the wide street and vague in the heat, the shops and houses dissolved into fields and green haze. Hard to believe on a day like this that autumn would ever come. Yet it was waiting just around the corner and in the squat empty buildings beyond the shockwire at the edge of the village, ready to grab at him with its papery dry-leaf hands.

Inside Tilly’s, the air smelled of dust and vanilla. The screens of the game machines at the far end of the row of empty chairs and tables glowed and beckoned. With the carnival here, no one needed them. Tilly himself was steering a broom across the checker-tiled floor. Seeing John, he stopped and scowled, resting his wrists. Would you believe, he said, that the cleaner’s on the blink again. The rep says I’ve fed it the wrong kind of polish. I should get a Gog in here instead, a real human helper like those big places in the city. You know…

John sat down at one of the stools by the counter. Tilly sighed and gave the broom a few more pushes. But he was happy only when he was miserable. I thought you’d be at the…He nodded out the window at the hot blue undersea sky and the tiny wheel tumbling and gleaming, but he meant the carnival in general. Out there with the rest of them. And what’ll it be? He poured John a chocolate shake, and waved the money away. Take it, son—business is bad anyway. Take it.

John sucked the cool sweet gritty stuff up through the straw, feeling it break and dissolve in his mouth, wondering why it was that things didn’t taste the same when they were free. This is Hal’s last year, isn’t it? Tilly muttered. After that, he’ll be off. Going to London around the time of the next carnival. And what is he talking of studying? Tilly asked, leaning his bare hairy arms on the counter. That brother of yours? Something to do with…Tilly shook his head. What is it to do with?

Structural communication, John said.

Tilly picked up the broom again, pushing at a smear on the floor. He’ll be bound to be doing something smart, will that one. John nodded, stirring the foamy chocolate with his straw, thinking, earth, sky, earth…And what about you? Tilly nodded towards him, singling him out with his eyes as though there were someone else in the café. What is it that you’re planning? Next year, John thought, Hal will be leaving for London, and I’ll be up there with him before he goes. Up on that great wheel. And the year after, too.

I was thinking, he heard himself saying to Tilly for some reason, that I might study to become a priest.

S
TANDING ON THE GRANITE
steps of the Governor’s Residence, John tugged at the white cuffs of his new suit. It was past six by his watch, and the Magulf sky was already starting to darken, draining the color of the stone between the shining yellow windows. He took a step forward when the doors of the residence swung in, expecting the figure who blocked his way to be some Borderer domestic. Then he recognized the governor’s face.

“Father John—come in! I won’t shake hands…” The governor was wearing an apron. His large hands were floured. “I’m in the middle of cooking dinner. One of my hobbies. Straight through to the patio. Help yourself to the drinks. You’ll have to excuse me—I’ve got onions frying.” Wagging a finger, he left.

John walked across the hallway and a wide, sparsely furnished room. The far end, framed by curtains that lifted and fell in the wind, gave onto a patio, a circle of wicker seats, and a drinks trolley. As yet, no one else had arrived. He took the steps down into the garden, where a pathway led through clouds of rhododendron towards a fan of light and the
pock
of tennis balls. The man playing was bald, tall, and thin, clumsy yet quick in his movements. At the other side of the net a machine hissed and tumbled as it lobbed, returned.

“Thirty love, four games to three, final set,” it intoned, trundling back to the line. The man briefly raised his racket to John in acknowledgment, then hunkered down to await the next serve, his bare skull gleaming under the court’s floodlights, his cheeks forming deep hollows. His eyes were brown.

John sat on a bench outside the ball buffer and watched the game unfold. There had been evenings like this at the playing fields across the road from home in Hemhill, when he’d sat and watched Hal serve, run, volley, win…But there was something odd, he realized, about the Borderer’s hands.

He waited for the match to finish; it was won by the machine against serve. Laughing, the man leaped over the net and, gravely ironic, shook the machine by the claw. John heard the clink of metal on metal.

“That’s six-three. I must be losing my touch.”

The man sat down at the other end of John’s bench, still breathless. Inside the court, the machine proceeded to collect the balls from the troughs.

“You’re here for the dinner tonight?” John asked, wondering why no one had ever thought to make the lydrin implant show itself the way the iris-bleaching pigment did for Europeans. “I’m John Alston—a priest. I work on Gran Vía.”

“Call me Ryat.” His fingers clicked. At the place where the metal of his hands met his arms just above the wrists, the flesh had scarred and melted. “I was involved in supplying one of the main contracts for the kelpbeds at Medersa. I imagine that’s why Owen Price has me here tonight. The token—is that the word?—the token Borderer. Although I gather that a girl who works on the net is coming too.” The hands slid together with a sound like knives. He stood up. “I must change.”

The garden was fully dark now. Away from the shelter of the windbreaks, the rhododendrons bowed and swayed. The two men passed the rim of a swimming pool rippling red as blood and entered the large changing hut beyond.

“Where do you live?” John asked as Ryat undressed.

“Mokifa. You know it?” Ryat balled up his clothes and tossed them into the disposer. His body was brown and well muscled but, like Nuru’s, the healthy flesh was stretched over knobbed joints and a thin, angular frame. John studied Ryat’s left arm for an implant scar, but there was no obvious sign.

“I’ve never been inside,” John said. “I assumed that I wouldn’t be welcome.”

“And you have better things to do with your time than worry about
bereket
—a few rich Borderers?”

“If you put it like that.” John shrugged. Ryat turned on a cubical shower. Even after six months in the clinic with the doctor examining Borderers, it was odd to see the clean, un-puckered line of a spine.

“And you know about Kushiel?” Ryat asked over the clatter of the water. The bar of soap, guided by metal fingers, slid, foaming, over his belly and thighs.

“I entered it once by accident.”

Ryat turned off the shower and stepped out, shaking the water from his pointed fingers. Throwing damp towels into the disposer after drying himself, he reached into his locker, withdrew a small syringe, raised a pinch of flesh, and inserted the invisibly thin needle into his arm. Lydrin. So that was how. “On some nights before the rain,” he said, “when the humidity is high, I stand at my window and watch Kushiel send great upward lights into the sky.” He began to dress. “I’m sure one day it will have to be dismantled…”