The Great Wheel Read online

  Now, he’d gone the last mile. Maybe another stroke—but more likely he’d had enough of the indignities of age and got hold of something to end the pain. Peering at the clenched and smiling lips, John saw the glitter of tiny glass flakes that might have come from a crushed vial, and a sticky bubble that looked too black to be simply blood. Whatever it was, the presence of the witchwoman who’d scrawled these walls could hardly have been coincidental. It seemed as if this Church old faithful had finally chosen the witchwoman’s comforts over those of a priest when he decided to bring his life to an end.

  John pulled off his gloves. What difference could it make here? He took out the flask of holy water, flicking away the beetle that had crawled out from the sleeve onto the old man’s hand. Once again, John began to recite the too familiar words: May Christ be merciful in judging our brother…

  He heard the moaning sound again—obviously some pig or goat on the floor above. The clump of feet. The footsteps faded, then suddenly grew loud and close, bringing with them the moaning and a bizarre, Christmassy jingle of bells.

  He ceased his blessing and spun around to look at the open doorway behind him, which was blocked by a shadow.

  “There’s a dead man in here.” He buried his bare hands in the pockets of his cassock. “I’m from the Church of Santa Cristina. Do I—”

  The figure spat out a chain of sound that lay far beyond his understanding of the Magulf dialect.

  “Look—danna-comma—I don’t understand—”

  Still muttering, the witchwoman stepped into the room. John was torn between shock and curiosity—he’d never seen one at such close quarters before—and the first thing that struck him was the feverishly intense body heat she gave off. Even at two or three meters, it was like standing close to a fire. And then her eyes. She had some sort of fringed cape over her head, and the rest of her face was deep in shade, but the eyes were like wet slate and impossibly big. He tried to calm his breathing.

  The witchwoman was breathing heavily, too. Her shoulders were shuddering, heaving, jingling the forest of silver and gold that hung on her. There were boxes dangling from the knotted ribbons, tiny cages that contained chittering insects, gilded skulls. The whole thing made a tinkling, whispering cacophony, like the crackle of frost…a flock of panicked sparrows…a thousand windchimes caught in a breeze. Then the pebble-bright eyes blinked back at him, and every sound stopped at the same instant.

  In sudden, absolute silence—the chirping of every insect hushed, every bell magically still—the witchwoman stepped towards him.

  “I suppose you and I…” His voice came out as a whisper. “We have something in common. We see to the needs of the dead.”

  The witchwoman studied him. More slowly this time, she spoke again. He still couldn’t understand a word, but the voice was young, and he saw now that she wasn’t as he’d imagined such creatures to be. All he could see of her face was her eyes, but through the silent curtain of bells and insect cages and the elaborately woven smock beneath, a sense of youth and physical power beat from her almost as strongly as the body heat.

  Rocking gently, the witchwoman began to moan. And with her movement, the insects resumed chirping, the bells jingling. Tiny flashes of light sparkled through the swaying veils of her smock.

  He stared. The noise seemed to pulse and sway with her movement, filling the room. The sound of it was as compelling as her heat and her scent. Glittering, unearthly, musical.

  He saw her hands emerge from the frayed golden cloth around her waist and penetrate the chattering curtain of cages and bells. Transfixed, he watched her turn her palms towards him. They were bloodied red, and each bore a wide gash, a yawning mouth, a wound; like stigmata, a vulva.

  He felt cold air break on his sweat-covered palms a moment before he realized that he had drawn his hands out of his pockets, and that he was reaching out towards the witchwoman.

  Her eyes stared back at him.

  Clearly, she said, “Touch me, Skiddle. Here—take my hands.”

  She was amused. Unafraid. He swayed and took an unthinking step backwards, bumping into the arm of the chair where Banori’s corpse sat. That broke the spell. He ducked and ran out of the room, tumbling down the stairway, slamming from side to side along the main corridor. He slid down the steps into the mud of the square, falling to his knees. He could still feel the witchwoman’s presence behind him, but the square was silent, and when he looked back, the tenement doorway was empty.

  Somewhere, a dog began to bark. The air was spinning. Faintly, he could hear music. Wiping the mud off his bare hands onto his cassock, he mounted his bicycle and hurried away.

  Pedaling along empty Gran Vía through the litter of tubes and chemlights left by the afternoon’s procession, he saw that Felipe’s top-floor light still shone from the Pandera presbytery. He parked his bicycle, kicked off his boots. He climbed through the freshly roped cobwebs of two empty stories that led to the building’s inhabited quarter, and made his way along a corridor by the light of a bare electric bulb. Bella was obviously still up, too; it was always her final job to switch off the generator before turning in. Or perhaps she was out like everyone else tonight, enjoying the carnival.

  He paused outside the door of Felipe’s room. He could hear voices inside. Felipe’s phlegmy rumble, then Bella’s soft vowels. The pad of footsteps.

  He stepped back in the moment that Bella opened the door.

  “Ah…” She was in her nightgown, but still wearing the facemask. “Fatoo John.” She glanced down at his bare, mud-smeared hands. With clumsy, cotton-gloved fingers she reached to button the collar that had loosened around her neck.

  “Ah, John!”

  Over Bella’s shoulders, John saw Felipe sitting propped up in bed, surrounded by pillows, with the usual whisky tumbler and blisterpacks of trisoma on the table beside him.

  “Fancy a word? Come in, come in.”

  John shrugged, then shook his head. “I’m tired. I’ll go to bed.”

  “The Lord bless you tonight, my son…”

  In his own room, he combed his hair rigorously, shaking out the dead husks of the lice killed by the phylum-specific poisons secreted from his skin, then washed himself with the greasy soap and bowl of tepid water that Bella had put out. He rubbed hard at the lump beneath his right armpit, where his powerpack projected slightly from the flesh, and at the watch’s indentation in his wrist. Then he found himself leaning forward, peering into the mirror on the wall, studying his eyes. The whites were bloodshot tonight, the lids faintly trembling. Close up, the irises seemed translucent, like misted glass against a bright sky. Sometimes he imagined he could detect the blue that he guessed the silver pigment probably disguised in someone with his dark hair, his pale coloring.

  The ceiling light blinked out as Bella switched off the generator on her way to bed. He turned from the mirror, pulled the shabby curtains back from the window, and completed his toilet in the red wash that came from the Magulf sky. There were voices along Gran Vía now. Singing, laughter, and the splash of footsteps as the revelers made their way home…

  He dropped his cassock into the wicker box in the corner from which Bella took the washing. He picked up the translat. The red standby light was still glowing. He pressed rewind. How long had it been? An hour? The translat searched, stopped, searched again. Bella murmured Fatoo John…, and he heard the labored sound of his own breathing, the swish of tires as he cycled back through the empty streets to the presbytery.

  Search. Stop. Search. His own voice, speaking a blessing for Banori. May Christ be merciful in judging our brother… Forward. The sound of moaning, footsteps from the floor above. He ran it on a few seconds. The jingling. Even through the translat’s small speaker, it sounded like more than simply insects and bells.

  Then the witchwoman’s initial exclamation. He took the volume down, went back, pressed play. The red light flickered, the power meter sagged. For an extraordinary time, the screen flashed Wait. He waited for translat d
o its usual job of breaking any mystery by reducing all words to the dispassionate phonemes of Eurospeak. Finally, the screen announced: File not accessed. Try another language.

  He stared at the bland message. So she hadn’t been speaking the Magulf dialect—or any of its close variants. He supposed that that shouldn’t come as too big a surprise. After all, even the Church still occasionally resorted to Latin. It was probably some garbled variant of an old African language, and maybe if he saved the data and accessed the net, he might get somewhere with it.

  He ran the recording forward half a minute. He wanted to hear how she’d managed to speak so suddenly and clearly in European, in a voice that was so strong and that came—not that it was really possible—from his own past. He heard the jingling bells. The silence. The jingling again. The swaying. The moaning. The squawk of his own voice. The stutter of his agitated breath. Then the thump of feet and furniture as he stepped back into Banori and tumbled out of the room.

  He ran it back again. And again. Whatever had happened, whatever words the witchwoman had said to him, the translat hadn’t recorded. Touch me. Had he imagined it? It was easier to think so.

  The screen flashed: File full. Store/Erase?

  Crouched on his bed, with the Magulf sky flickering beyond the window, Father John selected Erase.

  “HEY, SKIDDLE, LOOK AT THIS.”

  It was a hot day, and the River Ocean was flat and clear, with blue fingers fanning through the rocks like the sky upturned. Crouching in cutoff jeans, Hal reached down and held something up. A stone. No, a jewel in the sun. A fragment of dripping fire.

  “See…”

  Skipping carelessly over the shingle, his shrimping net aloft, the soles of his feet hardened to grubby whorls by the long weeks of summer, John scampered over.

  Hal lifted the stone to John’s eye, a large red iris over his own of pale silver. John squinted through it, looking along the beach, scanning the horizon, then up at the clear and empty sky.

  “What is it?”

  “Just a piece of driftglass, Skiddle. Here. But you need to keep it wet…”

  Hal dipped his hand in a shallow pool where anemones danced. He held the jewel out, and salt rivulets ran glinting down his arm.

  “Look through it. See how everything changes. Even the sky…”

  THE DOCTOR CREAKED IN the stuttering light of the clinic’s backroom, and the cards on the cartons of drugs along the shelves sagging behind it glowed in pinpricks of green, blue, and red. John’s shoes went stick as he crossed the catalyzed dirt floor. The wind rattled the window. The sky boiled over the rooftops beyond. There were still a few voices in the frontroom of the clinic, chuckling laughter, Ah, fornu, as Nuru saw to the last of the callers who required the painkillers, antiseptics, and birth control devices that the clinic dispensed.

  John sat down at the wobbly screen that was inset into the desk and ran his fingers through the cases he’d seen that morning. He felt the tug of the files as he copied and separated out each case, reordering it in a scatter of patterns according to illness, age, sex, treatment, severity. Here, at least, he could point to something that he’d accomplished in the Endless City. Even though the doctor lacked the innate facilities, he’d used its memory to reorder and analyze not only all the cases he’d seen but also the records of the priests who’d been here before him. And, outside the clinic, counting, estimating, dictating into his translat, he’d trekked through the local maze of streets and souks, then along the coast, then by the kelpbeds, then the chemical plants, using the data to estimate total population, death rates, age ratios.

  He stared at the morning’s last case on the doctor’s screen. Martínez. Hearing the man’s wheezing breath, seeing his red cheeks and the way he waddled, John found that he was still almost as amazed by the fat people here in the Endless City as he was by the disabled and the very old. He had put Martínez down as a sufferer from the common Borderer complaint of circulatory disease, and had assumed that the red on his lips came from chewing the local leaf, until Martínez explained through Nuru that he was having trouble with bleeding gums.

  A hard fan of AGTC lines indicated that the doctor’s blood analyzer wasn’t working, but the doctor recommended the taking of a hip-bone marrow sample. A pointless and agonizing procedure—without it, even without a blood test, John knew that a likely diagnosis for Martínez was acute myeloid leukemia.

  He felt a sting from the alarm in his watch. Looking up, he saw that Nuru was already standing at the door, and that the frontroom behind him was empty. Nuru had his hands in the pockets of his smoothly creased black trousers, jingling the coins.

  “Fatoo finished?”

  “Yes, I’ve finished. I have to go to the Zone now. Can you get me a taxi?”

  Nuru hesitated for a moment, the brown eyes under their dark fringe registering what could have been amusement, then he turned and went outside. John powered down the doctor, turned off the screen, changed and incinerated his gloves, pulled on his jacket, and began to lock up. Nuru had been a fixture at the clinic when John first arrived—that, anyway, was what he was told—and John had come to rely on him. The odd syringe, carton, and blisterpack went missing, and Nuru charged shamelessly for the supposedly free medicines that the clinic gave out, but he could persuade or manhandle those who panicked at the sight of the doctor’s lobster arms, and he spoke reasonable European.

  Nuru ran back into the Plaza Princesa just as John was keying in the clinic’s alarms. Behind Nuru, hammering and rattling, scattering dogs, chickens, and children, came the taxi. It settled on its cushions, and the engine slowed to a dull thwack as John wrenched open the back door. The interior, filled with the smell of Borderer and the cinnamony smoke of a tube, was decked with a mixture of beads and ornaments. As the taxi turned and rose, John glanced through the rear window. Standing in the Plaza Princesa where the bombed-out towerblock clawed the sky like a malignant hand, Nuru smiled and waved.

  Plunging between the high walls of a narrow offshoot of the Cruz de Marcenado, John was soon out of oldtown. Children crouched in the road ahead amid puddles reflecting the rusty Magulf sky, but the driver kept his foot firmly on the accelerator, and they scampered off between the piles of aged jelt, soggy cardboard, and corrugated metal. The driver swore, chuckled loudly, tilted back his head to shout Hey, nach Fatoo…

  On higher ground, John could see the spires of the shuttle-port of the European Zone at Bab Mensor, where four times a week the Paris shuttle skimmed down from its suborbital loop, turning west to follow the Magulf coast on a glide towards the corridor of lights that winked on beneath the waters of the Breathless Ocean.

  The taxi neared the Zone through another part of oldtown, where the various Borderer service industries clustered around the perimeter fence. Some of the streets were paved, and suddenly there were many other vehicles for the driver to curse at. John spotted a number of wandering Europeans; easily identifiable even when he couldn’t catch the color of their eyes, by their clothing, and by the glow—visible at noon under this sky—of their gloves and watches. The buildings along the main street were three-or four-storied for the most part, stuccoed pink, done out with seashell arches, keyhole windows, and bands of colored plastic mosaic in an attempt to recall things Moorish. In the souks that filled the narrow alleys between, leatherwork, embroidered silks, and silver trinkets predominated, with the prices aimed at the expats.

  The taxi settled on its skirts outside the shockwire of gate C of the Zone, and a guard with the winged “H” Halcycon S.A. logo on his shoulderpads walked over. John wiped the coins for his fare with dysol, dropped them into the driver’s tray, and climbed out of the taxi. Talking to the guard, he felt that odd click that came in his head nowadays when he spoke European.

  The taxi rose in a cloud of dust, turning back into the narrow streets of the Endless City. He walked towards the bright net of shockwire.

  The gate slid open.

  The road inside led first though gray hectares of wareh
ouses and the stalking shapes of robot cranes. A small passenger rail-truck was parked by a green sign and the door obligingly slid open as he passed, but he walked the kilometer or so to the medical center for his bimonthly check. He needed the time to readjust. The warehouse area was entirely automated, and the sidetracks, overbridges, and rail lines were festooned with warnings about the dangers of human trespass. There were signs of machine life all around him; two cars hissed by on the road with their windows blanked, but he didn’t see another human until he’d gone into the suburbs beyond. Even then, there was an aura of silence as he wandered along the avenues beside the hill leading to the Governor’s Residence. Just a few Borderer gardeners and roadsweepers carting barrows under a red sky, trimming hedges, pushing desultory brooms. The gray bungalows were all on short tenancies, owned and maintained by Halcycon.

  The medical center lay by a lake amid rolling lawns. He wandered down corridors and through coffee-scented lobbies to the office where Tim Purdoe sat waiting with his feet on the desk, exuding his usual air of friendly boredom. Tim was an old Zone hand, used to people coming here for a quick tour of duty to help their careers, fuel their bank balance, or wipe out whatever problems they had at home. He was a familiar sight at gatherings, generally wearing the same crumpled tweed jacket, his graying blond hair cut with boyish fringe that would probably once have made him look younger.

  “Let’s get on with it then, shall we?” Tim swung his legs off the desk. “No point in wasting the Company’s time when so many others are better than me at doing it…”

  He dimmed the window, and John undressed, conscious of every movement as he flattened and folded his clothes on the chair, feeling the goose bumps that always rose on these occasions, no matter how amicable the air. Tim, of course, would have left the room if John has asked him to for the period of the examination, but after his and Nuru’s many attempts to reassure the Borderers at the clinic, that would have seemed like a failure of nerve.