The Great Wheel (47 page)

Tim nodded again and smiled.

“And there’s no point in bothering Felipe, dragging him all the way down the corridor to the airwave on those legs. And I never did know what to say to Bella.”

“No.”

“Anyway, I…”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering if you’d heard anything about Laurie.”

Tim shook his head. “Nothing’s changed, John. She’s disappeared, left the Zone—quit her job without what I believe they used to call a forwarding address. Still, I did check as you asked me to, and she’s not with her mother in Mokifa either. I spoke to her mother.”

“You went there?”

“It’s along Gran Vía, John. I
do
know the way. Mrs. Kalmar politely told me that it was none of my business. Of course, I tried mentioning you, but that didn’t help much. She said Laurie would get in touch if and when she wanted to. I’m sorry, John—but it’s not like Europe. In the Magulf, you can’t just call people up on a screen.” Tim stifled a yawn. “Apart from me, that is.”

John nodded. Laurie. The Magulf. Mokifa. Gran Vía. He heard the cleaner knock something over in the kitchen. Outside, a white labyrinth of snow was falling. “Anyway,” he said, drawing a breath, “about the leaf—”

Tim waved a hand. “Christ, John, I’m sorry. I’ll chase it up for you. I’ll have a word with Cal.”

“Don’t worry, Tim. Something may be happening here.”

“Look, if you want—”

“No, really. It’s okay. I mean it.”

“John, is that snow outside?
White
snow?”

“It’s white.”

Tim shook his head. “It really is another world.”

They smiled at each other for a moment. But there was nothing left to say now, except
gonenanh,
goodbye.

Paging back out of the Zone from Tim, John saw that a message flag was flashing for him. His heart began to pound, but then he realized it was from Eliot Farrar’s answerer at Southlands. The answerer said that Farrar had copied the card John gave him about what Farrar called “the foreign analgesic”; he’d sent it down the net to a big Halcycon-funded project in London, and that they were as excited as he was by it. It was clearly vital for them to meet and discuss tactics at the earliest possible date—so could they link datebooks and suggest a time? John got up and went over to the window. Gazing out at the falling white, his shoulders began to shake. He realized after a while that he was laughing.

White streets in moonlight, the snow piled into mountain ridges by the machines that had been brought down specially from

Carlisle. Even then, the car moved with a skidding sigh. It snowed every night, although Halcycon kept making assurances that it wouldn’t. Even the children had grown tired of snowball fights and toboggan sliding. But to John, still an onlooker in

Hemhill’s affairs, everything felt as it should. It was the last night of the year, still the Christmas season: it was right that there should be snow.

Colored lights glittered in the windows and dimly through the white-furred trees. John heard a familiar rustle and snap and saw in the dashboard’s glow that his father was breaking open and inhaling a tube. John smiled as he breathed the scent and the headlights plowed on out of the village past the fields and through the whiteness.

Radway Farm shone like a lantern with its huge lighted doorways. Tonight it was filled with parked cars, the steam of baked potatoes, hot punch, the thump of music. The tall tree in the main barn glittered with phosphorescent tinsel and a million tiny ornaments. John left his father with friends and pushed his way through the crowd to cup one of the globes in his hand where it drooped glowing from the boughs in a haze of green scent. There, inside the intricate hand-made glass, Mary sat nodding and murmuring to the baby in her arms, surrounded by kingly men and plump unengineered cattle. They all had wise and slightly quizzical expressions, no particular shade to their eyes. In one corner, if you held the globe just right, you could read the words
MADE IN THE MAGULF.

When he looked up, Annie was standing beside him.

“I should have come over to Hemhill,” she said, “when I heard what happened. But you know how it is.” She gestured, slopping her punch. The lights of the tree glittered, and John felt the falling needles tickle his back and hands. “The kids, the farm, Bill…How’s your Dad managing? I remember how mine was—picking around all day at the traces. Taking stuff out from the chests and shelves and cupboards, then putting it all back again.”

“There really aren’t that many traces of Mum, Annie. She was like me, neat and tidy most of the time.”

Annie nodded. She was wearing a long green dress, low cut at the shoulders, showing the divide of her breasts.

“Anyway,” he said. “Here I am.”

“Here you are.” She smiled, already a little drunk, and looking, it seemed to him, quite marvelously pretty. “So. It’s the New Year.” She drew him away as a shouting group closed in on them. “What are your plans now?”

He shrugged.

“Someone said you were going to quit being a priest.”

“I’ve thought of it. But I need to find something else to do with my life.”

“Don’t look so glum.” She nudged his side. “It’s still a big world, it’s just Hemhill that makes it…” She chuckled and sipped her drink. “But why am I telling you this? You’re the wanderer, John, the pilgrim. Not me.”

“All you change when you go to another place is the sky.”

“Who said that?”

“I think it was the old priest I shared the presbytery with in the Endless City. Anyway, I’ve had some discussions with Eliot Farrar at Southlands recently.”

She nodded, drawing her top teeth over her bottom lip.

“He…seems genuinely interested in a project that I started in the Endless City. There’s a leaf, a drug, that could help people here. The ill, the old—it would allow them to exercise a kind of control over their minds. A way of getting rid of anxiety and suffering without the need for painkillers.”

“We could all do with some of that.”

They looked at each other. It was getting close to midnight, and the band on the stage beyond the buffet had struck up. The roof, he now saw, had dissolved into stars, story-bright stars overlaid on a sky of black velvet. And it was hot in here.

“Come on,” she shouted. “I need to see how Harry’s doing.”

“Harry?”

“My baby, John. Remember? You saw him in the summer.”

Outside, through the big doors and the barrier that kept in most of the heat, a tracked machine was scouring safe pathways across the ice, marking them with a fluorescent dye.

“It didn’t seem fair to ask anyone to sit with him tonight,” Annie said. “But I really don’t like leaving him with a machine.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

She had her hands clasped tight around her bare arms, and her breath came in clouds, but she shook her head. The farmhouse lay between the powerlines and brightly lit buildings. Inside, it was all still so antique. She had to finger a switch to turn on a light. And there were frost flowers on the windows.

“Don’t you worry,” he asked, “about this hard winter?”

“It’s the same for everyone.”

“I thought you farmers were always complaining.”

She shrugged, her silver eyes shining. A cat shot by. “What is there to complain about?”

He watched the sway of her body as she climbed the creaking stairs ahead of him, and the freckles that dotted her shoulders, the pale scar on her back, the gray in her hair.

In the nursery, the dancing-elephant wallpaper was peeling, and there were familiar odors of dust and mildew. The baby was asleep. It, too, had a familiar smell. Of soap, a whiff of shit, and, even now that its first implants had stabilized, of a different kind of humanity. Of Borderer. The padded machine that squatted by the cot blinked its cartoon face and looked up at them.

“He’s grown so quickly,” John said.

Annie chuckled and brushed at a wisp of the baby’s golden hair. “They do.” Laid out on the coverlet, the screen of a tiny watch now shimmered on the plump curve of the baby’s wrist.

“What made you call him Harry?”

She raised her shoulders. “I didn’t even think. Of course, Bill wouldn’t have made the connection—and for a long time, even after Harry was born, it didn’t occur to me either. I mean, no one ever called Hal Harry, did they? He was always just Hal.”

“No.”

“And I’ll always call my Harry Harry.”

He nodded, gazing at Annie. “You know, I—”

“But it seems right, now, doesn’t it, John? Calling him Harry. We’re older, and we’ve changed. And it was all such a long time ago.”

They walked back down the stairs and across the hallway, where a grandfather clock began to chime just as Annie turned the handle and began to work the front door open. Bong.

“There…” She stopped, leaning against the frame, tilting her head, goose bumps on her arms. “Listen.”

Bong…

The clock whirred and clunked through the year’s last moments. And outside in the darkness and over the rooftops, John could hear cheers and shouts, the ironic drum-thump of the band.

“We’ve missed it,” Annie said. “But no one ever takes these things seriously, do they? Happy new year, John.”

“Happy new year.”

Half in and half out of the cold, Annie pressed herself against him, and they kissed.

He, sat in a London restaurant with Eliot Farrar. They’d taken a seat by the window, and the world outside was crystalline, the passersby hunched and encased in plumes of breath even though it was early afternoon. A long black car slid by, a new model that John didn’t know. Something in its engine was squealing.

“Well.” Farrar raised a glass. “Looks like we have a success.”

John clinked his glass against Farrar’s rim. He was getting used to the feel of these places, to the softness of the carpet, the rippling pools of conversation, the eager and accommodating chairs, the glinting warmth—and to the meetings: Cal Edmead, Bevis Headley, the Zone’s steering committees hadn’t even been close to what went on here.

“Of course,” Farrar said with a grin, “it’s all come quicker than I expected. To get something through channels this fast is quite a miracle. I needed the help of a man of God.”

“Will they use Southlands for the tests?”

Farrar shook his head. “At least, not at first. They’ll do a triple-blind. People like me won’t have any idea what’s happening until the results come out.”

“Do you think they’ll actually use the leaf? Allow people to chew it?”

Farrar smiled. “It’s a nice thought. But no, I don’t think so.”

The waiter came up with a pen and pad. He had a small dimplelike scar on his jaw and black eyebrows that met above his brown eyes. John said
gunafana
to him when they ordered, but the waiter didn’t blink, didn’t even glance up from his pad.

“I guess you’re tired of it,” Farrar said later, when they walked out into the street.

“Of what?”

“People asking you what you’re going to do.” Farrar puffed out his cheeks, wrapped his scarf around his neck, and pulled on his gloves. John, bare-handed, shoved his arms deep into the pockets of the big old coat that his father had insisted on lending him. They walked on for a while, vaguely in the direction of the rental site and the veetol that would take them back to Hemhill. Neither man was in a hurry.

“Oddly enough,” John said, “people don’t ask. Not in a way that expects an answer.”

“I suppose you’ve leaned farther over the edge than most of us have. Even me, doing what I do at Southlands…You know, I had this image of you, John.” He chuckled, looked down a long street at the white, yellow-lit buildings and the frozen river. “But my problem is that when I get to know people, I start to realize that I should never give them advice.”

“So you don’t think I should let Hal go now?”

Farrar sighed, his feet crunching the frosted ground. A muttering male figure ran out towards them across the street, waving his hands. It seemed for a moment that he was going to ask for money.

“John,” Farrar said, “I really don’t think it matters now.”

John’s father was sitting in the lounge when John got home that night. Smoking tubes and listening to the slow movement of Mahler’s Fifth, his father was resting a hand on the warm top plate of the cleaner squatted beside him. There was a trace of what might have been tears on his cheeks.

“How did it go?” he asked, lowering the music.

“Pretty well,” John said, struggling with the coat’s torn inner sleeves and the ragged sense of domesticity that surrounded him. His dinner, he knew, would be dried up on the server in the kitchen; a mute rebuke for his returning a little later than he’d said. And later it would be his turn to see to Hal before he went to bed and dropped into the black pit of sleep that always seemed to be waiting.

“Did you know,” his father said, “that Mahler was forever trying to recreate a moment that happened when he was a child?

His mother was near death from this terrible fever, and outside through the open window in the street he could hear a hurdy-gurdy playing this jolly song…”

“Do you still input that stuff into Hal’s monitor?”

“Stuff?”

“The music.”

“No.” His father shook his head. “Not since I started listening again. It seemed wrong…To keep pushing.”

John reached down and took his father’s hand. It was an odd feeling; the pale scars on his palms—he’d insisted they be left as they were—gave only an intermittent sense of touch. But although his father and he had never really become close after sharing the house for all these months, they kept their hands pressed together, John at his father’s side and the music in the background still whispering about tragedy and loss. At some point, they both started to cry, quietly. It was suddenly clear to both of them that Hal had died long ago.

John called Eliot Farrar at Southlands the next morning through the net. The answerer paged Farrar, and Farrar said he’d come to the house straightaway, but John told him there was no hurry. This evening would be soon enough. He and his father sat together afterward in the kitchen, eating the large breakfast for which, after their decision, they both felt suddenly and shamefully hungry. When the cleaner removed the plates, they went upstairs. Hal’s door opened for them, and the molecular barrier that John had ceased to notice suddenly seemed strong again. A last wall. Stepping in, he checked, as always, the monitors that would have called for aid anyway if there had been the slightest disturbance to the smooth flow of his brother’s vital signs.