The Great Wheel (24 page)

“I think,” Edmead said, “that you need some kind of strategy first, Father. And more data to confirm the problem exists. Isn’t that what we’ve established?”

The secretary bleeped. One or two heads nodded around the table.

“Nevertheless,” John said, “I’m prepared to deal with this directly.”

“With whom?”

“I have my contacts.”

There was a pause. Someone coughed.
Contacts.
The word seemed to expand and float away from him on the scent of the leaves.

“That has to be your decision, Father,” Edmead said. “And you act on your own authority. I still think that this phenomenon needs to be understood first. The minutes, of course, will show that that is the decision of this meeting.”

Edmead pocketed a leaf and patted his cards and papers into place. It was the signal for other people to stand up and move away, for the few screens that were still active to darken.

John heard someone mutter
contacts
… He looked around. Smiles were exchanged and eyes were averted in an odd, frozen pantomime as his gaze swept the room. He sat there for some time after they had all gone, breathing the fresh tarry scent that came up from the leaves before him on the table.

When he reached the black-windowed block, Laurie was already walking towards him across the worn patch of lawn. They took a tram to the edge of the Zone, then stopped a taxi. She didn’t even ask where he wanted to go; she sensed his mood. The place she’d found for them, beyond the shockwire, was accustomed to a mix of expats and business-chasing Borderers; it was virtually empty today. Their table was flicked for dust, and a chemlight was ignited to compensate for the dimness.

He looked up at the domed roof. Someone had once painted stars on it, and the glint of their gold caught as the chemlight brightened. The food came, but remained untouched. Laurie watched him.

“You haven’t told me about the meeting.”

“I got nowhere.”

“You hate meetings—organizations, formal occasions, dressing up. You’re perverse, do you know that?”

He lifted his glass. It was a small tumbler scoured to translucence by years of washing, but the fluid made it clear again. He sipped. The drink was sweet and strong—not just alcohol. He’d be fuzzy-headed this afternoon if he didn’t eat.

“I tried showing them the leaves. I put some on the table, and they pulled back as if the leaves were turds. There was only one vendor I could find this morning who claimed to have any leaves from Lall. They were lousy specimens. The bottom of the sack. How’s that for luck? I doubt if even…if anyone would want to chew them. I left the leaves, anyway, in the meeting room, there on the table.”

“Why do you expect quick results?” she said. “You’ve made a discovery—that’s the easy part. What will happen now is the real test.”

“I need to work out how the leaf is distributed. The vendors will talk to me—but they won’t talk about that.”

“You could follow them.”

“At the end of the day they just go back home. You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“Where the leaf is stored, who sells it to whom.”

“This is a big city. Do
you
know what they do with the crops in Hemhill?”

“There’s a compound at the end of the valley. I used to—”

“And then? Do you know what happens then?”

“No, of course I don’t. Why can’t we just…”

“Just what?”

The wind was moaning outside, rattling the door. It banged open on its hinges and brought in the roar of a passing taxi, the hiss of sand. The waiter came and pushed the door shut, wedging a chair against it.

Laurie took John’s hand. The pressure was soft, insistent, but he knew that if he didn’t reply to her question, she’d let go.

He continued. “At the end of the meeting, I said something about using Borderer contacts. And it was obvious from the way they reacted that they knew about…” He paused, still looking, after all these weeks, for another, less stupid, phrase. “About us.”

She let go of his hand. “Didn’t you expect that?”

“But it gives them an excuse to ignore what I’m saying—makes me just another priest who’s gone odd.”

The food sat untouched between them. He knew it hadn’t been the right thing to say, but it was true.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Yes.” He nodded.

“What about tonight, John? Do you still plan to stay?”

“If they all know anyway,” he said, “what difference does it make?”

After dark they left the Zone again, this time in Laurie’s van. John felt a sense of release as the shockwire faded behind them. They swung out across the huge junction east of the Zone, where the headlights of massive trucks heading for the processing mills poured though the grit and mist, picking out cyclists, taxis, herds of goats, and thrusting them back swirling through the shadows. John marveled at the way everything seemed to move and slot in. Edmead had been right that the Endless City was a delicate mechanism. At least he knew enough to understand that.

Laurie smoked a tube. A fallen gantry went by. A bleeding, moaning, three-legged calf stumbled out of the gloom, almost too quick to be believed. John reached for another tube from her pack, curious. It was red tonight, as far as he could tell. He broke the seal and inhaled. His eyeballs seemed to shrivel. The columns of smoke that were balanced above the coolers and chimneys rippled against the shifting lights. He saw dragons over the Endless City, a horse’s head, the giant healing arms of a doctor…

The streets turned downhill and narrowed. It was part of the game for him not to ask her where they were going—but wasn’t that a minaret he saw above the houses? And, improbably, the long building to the right seemed to be coated with quivering leaves of vine.

The headlights skittered over the slats of a ramp, and Laurie stopped the van. There was nothing but darkness on all sides now.

“Is this it?”

She turned off the engine. The headlights disappeared. He guessed that they were out on the dry tidal flats beyond the kelpbeds. It smelled that way.

“Listen,” she said. “What do you hear?”

“Nothing.” Only the ticking of the cooling engine. Laurie breathing beside him. The wind.

She said, “That’s okay then,” moving across the duct in the middle of the van that separated them. “
Bona
…”

Her mouth had a flat taste that reminded him of European rain. Or perhaps he was just mixing his memories. And as she lifted her shirt over her head and peeled off his gloves, he wondered if she seriously planned to make love out here when they had the whole night and the cool sheets of her bungalow waiting for them back in the Zone. But she pressed against him, and his hand reached for the seat adjuster, trying to pull it back while at the same time helping her to roll his trousers back from his thighs. The hot wind blew through the window onto his skin. He heard her murmur
just concentrate.

His erection bobbed up, and she slid down and took him in her mouth, holding him there in the van with her fingers clenched over his buttocks until he arched his back and came.

They were driving again, fully dressed, when Laurie suddenly said, “I have to stop.”

“
Again?
”

But her voice was choked, and she opened the door and tumbled out even before the van’s skirts had settled, and leaned with her head bowed and both hands pressed against a mossy wall beside them. He stared out through the windshield at the amber eyes of a slinking dog caught in the headlights, and heard the splatter of her vomit.

She climbed back into the van, wiping her mouth, pulling the door shut.

“Okay now?”

She nodded, looking ahead, her hands pressed on the wheel, the long tips of her fingers extended. “I’m all right.”

“I wasn’t—” he began.

“Forget it.”

“But it was me, wasn’t it? The viruses?”

“It’s no big thing, John. I mean, really…But I still don’t feel that great, to be honest. Perhaps we should just go back to the Zone.”

She turned up the fans and drove on. The dog darted away. John sat in silence, remembering how she’d always climbed out of bed to wash herself after they made love. Even on their second night in that grubby room in Sadiir, she’d gone off somewhere looking for water. What did he know? He’d thought it was just some womanly habit. And hearing the splash of the taps in the bathroom on afternoons in her bungalow, seeing her nose and eyes red that morning after the governor’s party…

She said, “You’re not going to feel guilty about this, are you? It’s only a minor reaction.”

“I seems a pity that two people…”

“We’ll get used to each other. It’ll go away. Or I could ask for an increased dose of lydrin. That might work.”

“But they’d know then, wouldn’t they? If you had to ask.”

He kept his eyes on the road, but he could feel her gaze.

“That bothers you?”

“No,” he said. They were crossing the space of clean concrete towards the waiting guards and the Zone’s heat-glimmering shockwire. “No.”

Late that night in the bungalow, he slipped quietly out of bed and showered with the door shut. Laurie had dumped a towel on the toilet seat when she’d gone in earlier, and he saw that it was streaked with a dilution of her blood, his semen. He washed and used the fans in the shower, then tossed the towels into the chute, where they would be collected, cleaned, and redelivered by a Borderer maid. This whole place was like a vast hotel—no wonder people talked. They’d made love only once here in the bungalow, although Laurie had felt better by then and it had lasted long enough. He’d done the things she’d wanted him to do, pretending he was in the mood to be detached, interested only in her pleasure.

He pulled on his teeshirt. More lydrin. A new, bigger, implant. Or how about condoms? After all, he had a supply of those at the clinic. They were asked for only by hypochondriacs who feared diseases that had long since found less avoidable ways of jumping bodies; but the Church still insisted on providing the things, in vague atonement of some long-forgotten sin. He remembered now that there was a phrase for a boosted lydrin implant. Tim Purdoe had once used it in joking disparagement of something or other: a whore’s muscle. Why had he forgotten that?

He stepped back into the bedroom, where Laurie lay. He loved her most this way, perfected in sleep, loved her with a deep Pentecostal fire that still awoke to reassure him that, between them, there was still everything to be gained. The sheet half-covered her shoulder, and one gracefully arched foot stuck out. She looked so old, so ageless, so young. He could see the dent that his body—almost impossibly, it now seemed to him—had made when he lay beside her, the way her arm now reached to try to close around it. Was she really still asleep? He bent over, but her eyelids were smooth and untroubled. No dreams, even. He tried to imagine her opening them, and the green of her eyes becoming true silver, and his not being a priest; nothing but love lying between them…

He picked up the rest of his clothes and went into the lounge to finish dressing. Bits of crumb and lint stuck to his feet. On the table beneath the screen, half obscured by drifts of Laurie-rubble, were some of the cards about the koiyl that he’d lent her before they went to Lall.

He picked one up, feeling nostalgia for the times of diligent search and the putting of pieces together. Since Martínez, he hadn’t come across a new case of leukemia. Everything else: the torn flesh of dreadful accidents, burrowing parasites, fatal pneumonia. But people were still at risk from it—and dying—he had to remember that. He couldn’t give up. The hazy stars on Laurie’s screen glided or darted or didn’t move, according to the whim of whatever program she was running.

He needed, he supposed, to start the process of unearthing the sale and distribution of the leaf. Easy enough in theory. If you weren’t a European—and if it was really possible for anyone to know and understand the Endless City. He watched as the stars floated in their invisible matrix. One larger star hung center-screen, a pale sun around which the others orbited. It pulsed to some slow, cyclical pattern as he watched. A breathing star. The effect was soothing. It was a fuzzy mandala—drawing in, out. He breathed in, and saw it expand…

“Busy?”

He turned. Laurie stood in her dressing gown, yawning, pushing a hand back through her sleep-messed hair.

“I was trying to work out what to do about the leaf. The trouble is, the discussions in my head sound too much like what I hear in the Zone.”

She muttered something, then put her hands into her pockets and leaned forward. From the corner of his eye, he saw the fuzzy stars dissolve from the screen. She flopped down on the sofa. Her dressing gown fell from her pale brown knees. She tugged it back over them.

He said, “I see you’ve kept those cards.”

“I thought they were spares. Was that a problem? You can have them back.”

“Have you copied them?”

She shrugged. “I can’t remember.” She pointed at the screen. “Put them in there if you want to find out what I’ve done.”

“No. It’s fine. It’s fine…”

“Not that you don’t trust me? Right?” They stared at each other for a moment, then both looked away.

On the trip back from the Zone, he told the taxi driver to stop every time he saw a koiyl vendor. Some vendors, remembering John from the purchases he’d made the day before, called and waved. They were old men generally, with the big-mouthed wicker baskets they slung over their shoulders when they moved their wares. Close up, it was clear that most of them weren’t users themselves; the dust that surrounded them wasn’t sodden with red spittle, their teeth and gums weren’t stained. John wiped his coins with dysol, handed them over, and took the first leaves that were offered. Not exactly a random sample, but it would have to do. It was late in the afternoon but still hot. As he climbed in and out of the taxi and trudged up alleys and across streets, the wind-driven grit seemed to stick more than usual under the sweat of his clothes. The last vendor he stopped for—younger than the rest, and with a fold-out tray set in the shelter of an arch—spoke comprehensible European.

“This is good,” John said. The leaves were the best he’d been offered. Plumper, and without the hard leathery skin that signified age. He bit a corner off the one he’d been offered and smiled to indicate his pleasure as his mouth flooded with odd, slippery saliva. This, he realized, was the first dried leaf he’d actually chewed. It was tougher and sweeter than the fresh one at Lall. “Can you get me more?”