They walked on across a circular lawn surrounded by trellises of nodding sweet pea.
“I look in eyes of the people I have to meet, John, and I often see the same conflict. They know that they should do, give, feel, more. But they try to shift, to look away, to find an excuse, an escape. Yes—I hear it said and I see it unsaid—we should help them, these godless Gogs. But shouldn’t they also help themselves? Why must we always contribute and organize? Aren’t we doing more harm than good? It’s an ancient and inherently feeble argument, of course, and those of us who work to bring healing must try not to condemn, but we must also make sure that we do nothing that fosters that attitude. If we who bring aid seem compromised, if people can point at us and shake their heads, my task of generating money and interest becomes that much more difficult…”
They had stopped walking and now stood at the edge of a copse of trees. The bishop was right, of course. Any excuse: a design fault in a kelpbed, a priest who proclaimed one thing but did another. It offered people a way out.
“You’ve heard,” John said, “that I’m sleeping with a Borderer woman?”
“Not quite that much,” the bishop said, “but enough to feel and pray of you. And to care and wonder.” Like ripples trapped on green water, the sun danced through the branches overhead. She was tearing, John saw, at a leaf. “How is it, John? What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
They walked on in the shade of the trees.
“Do you love her? Tell me about her. She must be special.”
He told her about Chott, Drezzar, about Laurie’s mother working in Europe. He told her about Laurie’s bungalow and the net, about how she had to eat out at lunchtime because people where she worked spat in her coffee. The bishop was smiling at him now. For her, the moment of crisis was over, and her hands were calm again, clasped across her golden cross and white robe. The breeze caught a strand of silver hair, pushing it over her cheek.
She turned and began to walk. The trees shifted and played behind them. “God really does work in mysterious ways, John. Even now. Perhaps more now.”
“I still have doubts about God, Mother, if that’s what you mean.”
“But perhaps the priesthood really isn’t for you, John. I suppose you’ve thought of that…? Of course. Stupid of me. The breaking of a vow is sometimes just the way that leads out from the vocation to another role in life. At the end of the day, whether you continue within or outside the priesthood isn’t important. You shouldn’t turn your back on what’s true to you.”
“I just wish I knew what that was.”
“You want to return to your work in the Magulf, yes? To see Laurie? Felipe? To do something about this leaf?”
“Yes.”
She stopped again and turned to him. “Did you think I might refuse you that?”
“It had crossed my mind, Mother. Laurie and I will have to—”
“At the very least, be more discreet,” she said. She took his arm and drew him on. Their feet sunk into the turf. “But you know my position. Hateful though it is, I do have to pay attention to appearances. You have—what?—less than three months left in the Magulf now, John. I’ll give you that time. And trust you to use your own faith and judgment.”
“Yes. I understand.”
Her hand squeezed his arm. “Don’t tell me you understand, John.” The hand kept its grip on him. The bishop was bent over now, and her breathing was audible. The short walk had tired her. “Remember Bunyan’s Pilgrim, called to return home by his wife and children but stuffing his fingers in his ears and running on and away, shouting about Salvation? I always thought how foolish that was, yet I imagined that one day I’d understand what Bunyan meant. I still don’t, and I don’t know if I’d live again this life I’ve chosen, John. God can wait for us—He has all eternity.”
They turned back along a lavender-edged gravel border towards the sun-warmed brick expanse of St. Georges.
“You’ll stay the night?”
“If that’s possible.”
“And then tomorrow I’d like you to do something else for me?” He looked at her. The hand clasped tighter. “John, it’s not a demand or a favor, it’s something you should do for the sake of yourself. Will you go and see your parents? Will you go to your brother?”
“Time is—”
“Just a day or two. I think you owe yourself that. Do you know how your brother is?”
“I spoke to my parents.” When? Longer ago than he’d realized. “He’s okay. He’s still alive.”
“How old is he now?”
A gardener was busy weeding a bed of pinks. It looked like a small cleaner, except that there was dirt on its pincers and it smelled of manure. Someone had painted roses on its dome.
“Hal’s thirty-nine.”
“Go and see him, John. Go and see your parents. Then return to Laurie, and tell me after the autumn rains who you are and where you want to be.”
He had to smile. “I can’t promise to answer all that, Mother.”
She chuckled too. Her side was pressed against him, and he could feel the weak flutter of her breathing. He helped her as they walked thorough the sunshine back along the path to her office.
It was odd to take dinner at a communal table. The high-beamed ceiling of the refectory was held up by wooden angels. Bare hands served him vegetable soup and pork and potatoes, fresh bread and cheese. He was asked how long he was staying; if, for real or on the net, he played golf or bridge; if he could sing baritone. There were one or two faces that he knew. Silver eyes everywhere. Overpowered, he chose to sit alone for evening Mass as light flooded the stained-glass apostles and the air was filled with the rumble of the organ, the singing of the choir. It was all sweetly nostalgic, distant, unreal.
Next morning at St. Georges, John was woken by sparrows twittering on his window ledge. Looking out across prim lawns still dewy and hazed with mist, he decided to leave before breakfast. He shaved, opened drawers, packed away his cassock, pocketed the fresh card that, at the bishop’s request, Brother Charles in Accounts had given him. He walked along the empty corridors, past the paintings of Christ and Our Lady, past the rails of coat hooks and the chapels and the dorms and the frosted windows of the classrooms. He let himself out through the main doors and headed down the street.
He was surprised to find that even an air-conditioned Elysian was within reach of the funds that the bishop had authorized for him, but he chose a smaller and less-equipped Zephyr and in it called up Hemhill on the screen. The bubble-shaped car took some time to reply; it had probably never traveled beyond Paris. Still, there it was: an estimated ten hours’ journey along the main autoroutes.
By now, Paris was busy with the things of morning. The cobbled streets were filled with dog walkers, bike riders, buzzing cleaners, joggers. The cafés were opening, the markets and squares blossoming with purposeful life. His stomach ached for breakfast, but he instructed the car to hurry out of the city and through parkland dappled with the sailing shadows of clouds, past the ruins, into the wide green farmland beyond. Towards Hemhill.
IT WAS EVENING BY the time he drew close to Hemhill. As the sights grew more familiar, the last part of the journey seemed to slow and expand. The lights of one of the great agripedes sparkled like moonlight through the tall hedges, and he braked the car and buzzed down the window to let in the summer smells of ripening jelt and corn.
After the long journey, it was odd to make this switch to the real and the particular. He remembered how he’d once had dreams of what it would be like to return home from somewhere far off. The dreams were unspecific, but in them he’d always done something marvelous while he was away, and everyone he knew would be waiting. Hal was there at the front, shaking his head and smiling down at his little brother. I’d never have believed it. Skiddle…
He passed the big oak at the railinged edge of Hemhill’s small central park where, swift and exulting—at least until he looked down—he’d once cli
mbed. The streets and the houses were variations on neatness, with names that changed occasionally to suit the whims of death, divorce, company moves, and the house market. Sixpenny House. Arden. Leaves flashed overhead, and the white gate of his parents’ house swung open at his approach. He stopped the car and stepped out, blinking as the lights came on.
“That is you…?”
His mother’s shadow stretched out from the doorstep. His father waited in silhouette behind.
“I was saying, wasn’t I? That you might be back. I had this feeling.”
She planted a dry kiss on his cheek and pulled him swiftly inside.
“Come. It’s…”
Their hands and words floated around him. He went into the lounge, where they had new chairs. He sat on one. And a new carpet; some kind of material that managed to be soft and smooth yet was dustless so as not to irritate their lungs. New wallpaper, too. And a new card in the picture in the wall, which displayed an almost white landscape clothed in either moonlight or snow. His mother had already shot off to the kitchen, and his father sat facing him, hands clasped, elbows on his knees, leaning forward in his chair. There were age mottles on his father’s face now, and the thinning gray hair was swept from a shining sweep of skin-covered bone. His cheeks sagged. He was nearly sixty.
“You look well.”
“Thanks. You too, Dad.”
“It’s…Hmmm.”
John smiled at the house cleaner as it swiveled into the room to pick up the tray of tea china that lay on a sidetable. He raised a hand to delay the command and draw it over. He placed his palm on the warm brass dome, stroking to the rough edge of the cpu plate that he and Hal had so often removed.
“Exactly how long,” his father was asking, “will you be staying, John?” He blinked. “What I mean is…”
“What he means,” his mother called from the kitchen, “is that you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”
“Just two days,” John said. Squeaking slightly, the cleaner rattled out of the room. “I was in Paris,” he added. “The bishop agreed I should take a short rest before going back to the Magulf.”
His father regarded him. It had gone quiet in the kitchen. Rest. Bishop. By that quick statement, John had intended to forestall further questions, but he’d rehearsed it too often in the car, and it now implied all the things he’d meant not to say.
“Did you get the soup?”
“Soup?”
“The soup I sent you, Son. When you called us, you asked for powdered soup.”
“No,” John said. His father would have questioned him about the flavors and the brand if he’d lied and said yes. “These things take time, Dad. But I’m sure it’ll come through.”
“Time. Of course.” But his father looked pained.
John shifted in the new chair. It was huge. His fingers strayed to the screen on the arm. He touched it, and the cushions softened and his feet rose into the air.
His father, still unsmiling, said, “If you’d have known you were coming, John, you could have picked it up and taken it with you. I mean, the soup.”
“Yes. If I had known, that would have been simpler.”
His mother came in with dinner steaming on a tray. He’d already stopped and eaten in the late afternoon. Shaking the salt out over sausages, French toast, chips, and bacon—and with every possibility of pudding to follow—he realized that that had been a stupid thing to do.
“We thought you could go up and see Hal afterward,” his mother said. She perched on the edge of a chair, her hands pressed into her lap.
When he finished eating, he placed the tray on the floor and snapped his fingers, and the three of them watched as the cleaner came in and picked it up. When it left the room, his mother’s face relaxed a little into a smile. “Would you like to go up now?” She half-stood from the chair. “I mean, if you’re…”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m ready.”
“How is Hal?” he asked her in the glare of the hall.
“John, he’s the same. I have this now.” She raised her arm, tugged at her sleeve, and held her left wrist to him, as though inviting him to sample a new perfume. “It saves me having to worry and hang around him quite so much. Pricks at my nerves like a little needle.” He saw a silver implant entwined around the veins above her watch. A pulsing light. She made a face. “And I had to have it done, of course. Your father wouldn’t.”
“No.”
“Anyway, off you go.”
She watched him from the foot of the stairs, one hand resting on the banister, the tiny ruby light in her wrist still showing through the wool of her cardigan. The air was noticeably dimmer on the landing. Past the door into John’s own room, which was slightly ajar, Hal’s door along the landing was shut. John started when, as he reached for it, it swung open. Then came the tingle of the molecular barrier that had kept the outside air at bay ever since Hal’s minor fungal infection—something so odd that even his net-enhanced viruses hadn’t reacted—of a couple of years before. The lighting grew slowly from darkness to a dull glow. That and the soundproofing were innovations made in the years when there were still things to be done to this room that hadn’t yet been tried. Comatose patients, his mother once read in the ancient and esoteric medical books she buried herself in, could be precipitated into fatal crisis by sudden lights and noises.
John pushed through the wall of slightly warmer, moister air. Even the presence of his own body seemed to gather in slow increments inside this increasingly isolated box. He paused, took a breath. He crossed the soft and slightly sticky surface of the material that now covered the floor to the bed where Hal lay. So much about the room had changed, yet so much remained the same. The desk where Hal had worked, the books and cards and games on the shelves. Yet it was all so neat now, the way it would have been if he’d finished cleaning up the detritus of his childhood that night and gone to London to study—what was it called?—structural communication.
“Hello, Hal.”
Click, sigh. The faint pepperminty scent of whatever it was that was used to repurify the air.
Click, sigh.
“It’s me. John. I’m back. In the flesh this time.”
It was so quiet, he could hear his own heartbeat—and the subterranean hum of the transformer in the unit beside the bed that pulled the monitoring data through a direct link with the big thermonuclear torus at Leominster. Enough power, his father had once said, to run a bloody factory. And to light, John now thought, a fair portion of the Endless City. Still, they could afford it on their Halcycon pensions and the extra medical grants they’d been given. If his parents hadn’t had all this expense, they might not have put their summerhouse at Ley up for sale, but John doubted it. Even with Hal fully alive and working somewhere fabulous on things he couldn’t explain, this room would still have remained a shrine.
“I’m just back for a couple of days. I’ve been to see the bishop in Paris. She suggested…” There was a chair by the bed that he recognized from the old diningroom set. The backrest dug into his spine when he sat down. It couldn’t be comfortable to sit here for long hours, as his mother must do. “She suggested I come here. It’s just a day or two, Hal. Then I go back.”
Click, sigh. The peachy smell of the flowers on the other side of the bed washed over him in a sickly wave. Too-bright yellow chrysanthemums from the garden in a tall glass vase. He saw a spider climbing over the petals. Every movement seemed retarded, retracted, delayed.
“I haven’t told Mum and Dad, but this visit is supposed to be a time of regrouping. Coming to terms. She’s a decent woman, the bishop. The sort of thinking priest you always said you could just about come to terms with…”
Click, sigh. The warm starfield of bronzes, marbles, and cups on the far wall blazed and winked at him. Tennis, football, chess.
“…but the fact is, Hal, I’ve been sleeping with this girl, a Borderer woman, Laurie, and word’s got around the Zone. And the business about the contaminated leaf, that’s
also gone a little awry. I don’t, anyway, seem to be getting very far.”
He realized that he was speaking more to the screen on the monitor box than to Hal. It was the instrument that sniffed at and sensed the room, monitored vital signs and brain activity for any traces of movement or pain, and fed data into the ravaged stump of Hal’s consciousness. John could see the wires that ran from the box and tunneled into the pitted flesh of Hal’s wrist where his watch had been—the final threads in the web—and the rainbow-thin but nevertheless slightly thicker cable that was taped to the side of his cheek and then entered his nose to mate with the internal implant that had been embedded through the bone amid the dead cells at the base of his skull.
“But apparently it doesn’t jeopardize my immediate position—my term with Felipe in the presbytery. I’m going back, Hal. Day after tomorrow. It seems that no matter what you do, even if you step out of line, break your vows, discover a way of saving lives…nothing changes. Things remain the same.”
Hal’s flesh had a healthy gloss. Healthier than John’s own. The bare arms and shoulders—lying above the special gray-green sheet that rippled constantly at some imperceptible molecular level to stimulate the skin and that could turn soft or rigid or liquid-smooth at the touch of a screen—had excellent tone and definition. They lay there, easy and relaxed as in an artist’s drawing. A life study. But Hal’s face, as always since the coma deepened, didn’t quite connect with the real, remembered Hal. Like the muscles, it was too relaxed, too smooth. John gazed at the square jaw, the faint dimple in the chin, the broad, slightly compressed lips, the chiseled nose. The closed eyes set wide apart. John remembered the faces of the kings carved in the rocks above Hettie’s cave, and how much, truly, Hal was like them—a king. That noble, unfurrowed brow. His mother kept his hair cut exactly as he used to have it cut. A little less fashionable now, and it still stuck up around the crown no matter what you did with it. That tuft would have always made him appear boyish as he grew older.
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