The Great Wheel Read online

  The doctor, tall and yet folded over on itself like some wise mechanical heron, emerged from the alcove beside the window. John crossed the carpet barefoot as it opened itself to receive him. This is never an easy moment, he thought as the silver wings closed around him. Yet it was always a warm embrace, and surprisingly tender. He felt weightless as something passed into his mouth, then over his eyes. Ridges skipped down his spine as the output and integrity of his main recombinant was tested. He had really forgotten how pleasant much of this was. All he had to do was relax and forget about the tiny needles, the way something had apparently taken control of his breathing, and ignore the probe that was now entering his anus. To think of how his body was forming a perfect loop that spread though the nerve synapses of the doctor and out into the local net where the outputs and the calibrations and all the messy stuff of life were compared and contrasted with the thin stream of monitor levels that whispered through the Magulf skies up to the geosynchronous torus that punched the data back down through the atmosphere to be slowed and received and understood once again by the big medical roots and branches of the net back on earth. Yes, to think…To truly…

  He opened his eyes and blinked as the ocular sheaths withdrew, feeling a fast extra beat already fading beneath his breastbone where his cpu had been downloaded, analyzed, reformatted. The doctor settled him back down on his feet, and, withdrawing, discreetly set about the process of cleaning itself of his fluids and secretions, stroking its mandibles in sweet puffs of machine oil and disinfectant. A strong chill passed over him as the conducting fluids evaporated into the air. He began to dress while Tim kept his head down, his fingers busy stirring and rearranging whatever story the figures on his screen were telling.

  A printout whispered as John finished buttoning his shirt. Tim snatched it up, glanced at it, threw it at the bin. “You’re sleeping all right?”

  “Better than I was…” John glanced down at the screen of his watch, the gray blur of quaternary lines beneath the time display.

  “You don’t want another packet of sleepers?”

  “I haven’t finished the first lot you gave me.”

  “You haven’t taken a single tablet.”

  John shrugged. Each night, as his mind finally began to relax, the figures and faces that paraded before him each day at the clinic began to emerge, gray and insubstantial now—Dickensian ghosts clanking chains of suffering—from the walls and ceiling of his room in the presbytery. “I’m not sure I ever needed the sleepers, Tim. The answer is to keep busy. More work—”

  “Sure, and you’ll end hopping around with your eyes bulging like some hyperactive frog. Believe me, I’ve seen it. There’s only so much you can expect your body to do.”

  “You sound like there’s some problem.”

  “There’s no problem. You’re under stress, but you’re adjusting. Everyone adjusts.”

  “The doctor’s blood analyzer’s down again at the clinic,” John said, staring across at the sleek silver heron in the corner.

  “You’re lucky that thing’s still working at all. You know how old it is?”

  “Don’t give me that, Tim.”

  “I’ll see if I can get one of the engineers to look in, but you know what it’s like…” Tim shrugged. “They’re on time-costing.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey.” Standing up, Tim came around the desk and clasped John’s shoulder. “Don’t look so glum—it isn’t your fault. Everyone here gets upset by the hassles and restrictions. That, and the bloody-minded attitude of your average Gog.”

  John was surprised at the strength of his urge to shrink away when Tim touched him. He could never get used to people calling the Borderers Gogs.

  “Look,” Tim said, leaning back on his desk, “I’ll show you what most people ask to see after their first couple of bimonthlies.” He touched the screen, and the view from the window across the lake and lawns of the medical center dimmed once again. In its place, fuzzily at first, John saw a pinkish gray soup.

  “That’s your blood.” Tim twirled the cursor, and the rimmed disk of a red cell jumped into view. He moved up a further magnification, then tapped out a series of commands. “Ah—right. Here’s one of the little buggers.”

  John stared at the window where a single rod was floating, magnified to about a meter in length. A scrap of artificial genetic material, waiting to make contact with the living matter that would give it life. It was shaped like a walking stick. “That’s from my recombinant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How can you tell it’s not a natural virus?”

  “I can’t. But see those numbers in the corner? That means that this particular fellow is combating a poliomyelitis variant. It’s a thing called e-teneysis IV that’s been around for a few years in this part of the Endless City. Methods of defense vary. This one doesn’t attempt to attack the poliomyelitis virus direct, but instead enters your white myeloid cells and binds with the RNA, which in turn issues a new instruction, which then in turn…” Tim sighed and touched the screen. The virus vanished. “You get the idea, anyway.”

  “Yes. I’d be crippled or dead if I didn’t have a few million of those things in my blood.”

  “It could be a false alarm—or you could even be naturally immune like most of the Gogs. You never know. But it does mean, I’m afraid, John, that you’ve probably been in contact with contaminated fecal matter. You’re not drinking any of the pisswater the Gogs make do with, are you?”

  “What difference does it make? You say I’m safe enough anyway.”

  “There are limits. Now—” Tim tapped the console again, and a new image appeared on the window. It looked like a small, and rather evil, spider. “See this fellow? Bet you didn’t even know you had him in you, eh? Well, this isn’t a product of your recombinant but a self-replicating virus that you were infected with when you were about three weeks old—has to be introduced, see, because it doesn’t transfer through the placental barrier. After that it just spends its time floating around in your lymphatic system like a seed, waiting to settle down and multiply if it should ever make contact with any of its old friend, HIV. They like each other so much that they join and absorb into one unit, and then die soon after from terminal incompatibility. A bit like marriage, really…”

  Smiling at his own drollery, Tim touched his console. The window blurred back to the view of the lake and the lawns. The red sky was darkening again, possibly threatening rain. John stared out. No one had died from contact with a European for almost a century now, but—apart from that one incident with the witchwoman—he’d always been diligent with his gloves and about using dysol-impregnated cloths, surrounding himself in an antiseptic haze. Even so, there was a time early on in his stay here when Nuru wore an awkward-looking chin-high collar that John assumed was a fashionable affectation until he noticed the angry red rash beneath Nuru’s ear that he was attempting to hide. But the rash disappeared, and the risk of anything more serious was minimal. The technology had improved, and the traditional Zone stories of expats who ran mad and naked through the Endless City, hugging people in the streets, had become simply humorous. It wouldn’t be so very long, some now said, until the barriers came down altogether.

  Tim ambled around from his desk and pulled on the famous aged sports jacket that was draped over the back of the chair. “Here,” he said, opening a drawer. “Got this for you. Some cock-up when I ordered it.” He tossed a white carton.

  “Thanks.” John caught it. It was heavier than he imagined. Brushing the card with his thumb, he saw that, powered up, it would produce over a thousand oral tablets of antibiotic. Crude stuff after what Tim had been showing him. But still. “You fancy a drink?” he said.

  “You know me.” Tim smiled, then extracted a comb from his top jacket pocket. “I even know where we can get one free.”

  Tim drove the two kilometers from the medical center to mid-Zone. His car was a huge vintage Corona with red fins and sidedoors that rose open like wings and
a leather interior with wide backseats that John couldn’t imagine him ever needing. Still, it was his pride and joy; as much a Tim Purdoe trademark as the tweed jacket. And, as usual, he insisted on keeping the car on manual, chattering as he drove, giving the current gossip. Who was on the way up, who was on the way out, and, as always, who was screwing whom. Several times as they passed through the suburbs, the proximity light flashed and the brakes kicked in to prevent them from climbing the verge. Tim was someone for whom the mere prospect of drink often seemed to act as an intoxicant.

  He said, “I still wonder about you priests. I mean, you know what it’s all about here. So what’s the point in coming to the Zone if you’re celibate?”

  “I don’t live in the Zone. I live outside.”

  “Ah—and how is the world outside?”

  “Nothing much has changed. I had a close encounter with a witchwoman.”

  “They’re all clinically insane, you know,” Tim said, spinning the wheel to avoid a cleaner. “Something that used to be called schizophrenia, probably caused by a virus, although no one’s ever bothered to locate it. What’s amazing is the way that the Gogs fit them into their society. You know, all that moonrock crap—it provides a socially acceptable track along which their obsessions can go. Otherwise,” he continued, belying as he did his general air of ignorance about anything beyond the Zone, “I suppose they’d all be locked up in some high room…

  “But I like the simplicity of the Zone,” he said as they finally pulled into the Trinity Gardens carpark next to the suddenly diminutive lines of Company Zephyrs, Furies, and Elysians. “Here, people work, they sleep, they eat, they screw. Then they go back home to Europe again. Everything’s straightforward. You don’t get all that baggage of hope and expectation…”

  In the bandstand in the green bowl at the center of Trinity Gardens, a brass band was playing Elgar’s Nimrod, with the musicians done out in uniforms to match the blue-striped marquees. The lake behind them was the color of rose wine, stretching out to mirror every cornice and window of the Hyatt Hotel on the far shore.

  Where the groupings of guests thinned at the top of the grass slope beside the tropical houses, there was a big floral display in the shape of a clock, with the words MEDERSA APPEAL picked out in houseleeks. Instead of hours, the clock was graduated in Eurodollars. Now the hands, decorated in red saxifrage, pointed up to the target.

  “It’s a fundraiser for some new kelpbeds at Medersa,” Tim said, grabbing a glass of wine from a passing waiter. “You know, let’s help the poor fucking Gogs…” Waving at some familiar face, he headed off into the crowd.

  John stood alone, watching him depart. The clouds were low, but the afternoon air was pleasantly warm, incredibly still. For once, the wind had died down, and in the roseate light, with the Elgar, John felt that he could have been inside a sepia-tinted print. The women wore wide-brimmed hats, long dresses. The men were in pastel shirts, one-piece suits ornamented by jeweled brooches and cuffs. The screens said the nineteenth century was this year’s theme, although he doubted that anyone in Europe would have taken it all quite so literally. But the look was appropriate: after all, these were colonial times.

  He wandered, almost kicking a peacock that was pecking for crumbs on the grass. The Borderer waiters were wearing the same blue uniforms as the band. They carried not only wine but also trays of red and green tubes, vol-au-vents, cactus fruit, steaming bowls of mint tea; all of it topped off with a discreet bow, a professional smile.

  As John faltered over a choice of Chardonnay or Font de Michelle, the smiling waiter stood what would have been, outside in the Magulf, uncomfortably close to him. The Borderers who worked the Zones had a capsule implanted in their left upper arm that contained a synthetic protein to unzip any artificial European virus. It was called lydrin, and, in theory at least, it allowed Borderer and European to touch, talk, shake hands, share food, kiss, fight, exchange saliva, even semen and blood, without the risk of a fever, a rash, or some more serious and unlikely clash between recombinant and atavistic viruses.

  Taking the Chardonnay, John walked on towards the lake and the walled gardens, passing through pockets of composed laughter, layers of pastel tubegas that carried the hint of chemical moods. Happy amber, relaxed pale blue. Red for lust—or was it joy? There were people here from main corporate admin, engineers and financiers. Even without his cassock, he was still known and recognized. It came with the job. As he passed each group, jokes and stories were briefly interrupted by the press of manicured hands. Silver eyes crinkled and smiled. Hello, Father. He nodded, tried to remember names. The young people here made him feel incredibly old—the old ones, incredibly young.

  The Chardonnay was bitter; he left it on top of an urn and sat down at the edge of a pond. Goldfish and coy carp mouthed the surface in the hope of food. A fountain played over white lilies. From here, a honeysuckle arch opened out to the lawns, the marquees, the bandstand, the lake. He noticed the way the people leaned back as they laughed. The motion looked strange without the sound to go with it, like a dance. The stone rim of the pond where he sat was prettily weathered, covered in florets of lichen. He scraped at it with his fingernail. The color came away in flakes of paint.

  The band stopped playing. A young, good-looking man came up to the front of the bandstand. John didn’t recognize him, but even at this distance the man radiated the kind of assurance that made you feel that not recognizing him was your mistake.

  “It’s great to see so many of you here today,” he said, the words coming out of the speakers hidden in the cypress trees, spinning in echoes towards the white hotel across the lake. “Our governor, Owen Price, really would have liked to come himself. He knows how important this project is for the whole of the Magulf.” There was scattered applause. “Anyway…” Raising a deprecatory hand. “…there’s one man present that I’m sure we’d all like to hear from. And here he is—our main contractor for the project, the man without whom none of this would ever get off the screen on my desk—Mister Mero!”

  A rotund man in a flashy suit picked his way towards the mike. John knew he was a Borderer from the way the cheers grew louder as he stumbled over one of the music stands. Mister Mero would be some wealthy builder who would supervise the actual work on the new kelpbeds. He began to speak in clear and virtually unaccented European, expressing gratitude to the fundraisers. How the new kelpbeds at Medersa would provide much needed food, fuel, jobs…He seemed to be rounding off quickly, but then stopped glancing down at his screen and began to talk about A New Spirit of Cooperation. Attention wandered. Fresh drinks and smokes were found. Conversations started up again.

  “Father John! So you made it.”

  A firm bony hand drew him by the elbow, through the honeysuckle arch and back into the crowd.

  “Look, you haven’t got a drink. Have you eaten? The food’s not spectacular, but you may as well make the most of something that doesn’t taste of kelp.”

  Father Orteau took a step back to study John. He didn’t exactly tut.

  “I’m fine,” John said. “How are you?”

  “Oh, me,” Father Orteau laughed. “I’ll be on top of the world when the bishop lets me out of here.”

  John nodded, trying not to smile. It had been Felipe who’d explained how the bishop in Paris, against the policy of regularly shifting priests around in the Magulf, had now reappointed Father Orteau to the Zone parish for a third consecutive year. The Church’s usual fear was that, even in the Zones, priests would go odd, get an addiction, grow ill, mad—or go peculiarly native. But there was no chance of that happening to Father Orteau. Father Orteau was already peculiarly Father Orteau.

  He dabbed at his forehead with a white handkerchief. His fingers strayed to check the precision of his center parting, the discreet diamond pinned to his right ear. He reinserted the handkerchief into his pocket, smoothed the crease of his suit.

  “Well,” he asked, “what do you think?”

  “I’m sure,”
John said, surprised to discover just how easy it was to get into the ironic doublespeak of the Zone, “that more kelpbeds are just what the Borderers need.”

  “Really?” Father Orteau studied him for a moment, then looked up. “You know, what I wouldn’t give for some blue sky…a few mare’s tails. And don’t you think it looks particularly poisonous up there today? All that smoke and sand. Some more rainforest must have gone up, don’t you think?”

  John shrugged.

  “One of the few things I have learned about Bab Mensor is that the wind always blows straight at my rooms in the Hyatt. I’m told the warm air has to go north to balance the Gulf Stream or something. That’s the maître d’s excuse for all the muck that gets blown onto my balcony, anyway.” He peered up at the sky. “And I have a terrible feeling today that the net has bungled—or some satellite’s gone down. I know it’s not the time of year for it, but I really do think it’s going to rain.”

  “Halcycon’s probably got more important things to worry about than rainfall over Bab Mensor.”

  Father Orteau blinked at the suggestion, obviously taken aback.

  John blinked back. “You must come and visit us at the Pandera presbytery,” he said. “I’m sure Felipe would love to see you.”

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking of—you still haven’t got that drink. Hey, you…” A jeweled cuff fell back from an elegant wrist as Father Orteau raised his arm and snapped his fingers. “Over here. Quick! We have a man in thirst.”

  One of the Borderer waiters walked briskly over. John silently urged him to show some sign of reluctance or insolence, but the man kept up his unwavering smile, offering a choice of Chardonnay or Font de Michelle, neither of which John wanted.