They walked into the church.
“John, but you will speak, won’t you? A few words. Sorry to drop it on you, but I’d only learned you were here this morning. Of course, if I’d heard earlier, I’d have said…”
John sat in a front pew, his hands pushed between his thighs and his fingers tightly laced, conscious of flesh on flesh, cold sweat on sweat, a nervousness he’d thought he’d long shaken off for such occasions. As he climbed to the pulpit, he could feel the outstretched arms of Christ floating on the screen behind him like an eagle at his shoulders. Votive candles glittered. A baby was crying, and the mother was saying shush, shush. An old woman in a hat mopped her eyes. Everything was neater than in Santa Cristina, the rows of faces, the neatly spaced way the people sat. Yet the differences were marginal. Seen from up here, he thought, with the pages of the parish bible open before him and smelling of mildew, nothing is ever very different.
“We read in the Bible,” he began, slipping into that old phrase because his mind would come up with no other, pausing only fractionally to wait for the echo of the translat that didn’t come, “of God’s anger, of God’s wrath, even of God’s jealousy. These are all emotions that we understand and recognize within ourselves, yet they seem strange when we try to apply them to an all-powerful being. So, how is it that God feels these often destructive and impotent emotions…?”
After the congregation had gone, John sat in the vestry with Father Leon. Father Leon reminded him a little of the priest he’d seen across the water when he first took the ferry from the shuttle to Bab Mensor; his immediate predecessor. The man had the same blond hair.
“I was unsure,” Leon said, pouring John coffee, “when they offered me this posting. It’s my first, and it seemed like something suited for a more elderly priest. I didn’t know…”
John took the cup, touched the handle with his bare fingers, and felt it begin to warm.
“I thought it wouldn’t be a sufficient challenge.” Leon smiled, smoothed out his cassock, and sat. Crossing his legs, he made small circles in the air with the polished tip of a shoe.
“You met Father Gulvenny?” John asked.
Leon nodded. “But he was ill by then, up at Southlands. He was your priest here, I suppose, when you were younger?” His eyes narrowed. He sipped his coffee. “John, I tell you I came here determined to make everything change. Not at once, of course. I decided I’d give myself a year to settle in and reach a decision about the appropriate action. But by then…” Leon gestured around, smiling. This room was clear testimony to how little he’d changed things.
John was grateful that some of Father Gulvenny’s presence remained. Soon after what his parents were already starting to call Hal’s accident, Father Gulvenny had been a big influence on John’s life. He had been Hemhill’s parish priest for some years by then, but John—and, it seemed, the rest of Hemhill—had taken little notice of him. Father Virat, who’d come before Father Gulvenny, had been a rich fund of stories of drunken tomfoolery, gaffes in the pulpit, and odd sightings of him wandering the fields. In comparison, Father Gulvenny was functional and gray. He had a cracked voice, an awkward smile, long cheekbones, and a long body. After Hal’s accident, as the initial exclamations and concerns gave way to the dull realization that Hal would never recover, when his parents turned inward and the people who used to come by began to avoid them, Father Gulvenny was the one person who actually sought John out, and made the effort to talk to him like an adult.
This old church, Father Gulvenny had said—sitting in the same overstuffed chair where Father Leon now sat, and where even the surplices seemed to cover the stone in the same folds—this village, this sky, this earth, you have to learn to see through them all and feel the fire that’s beneath. Most people are dreamers, John. They dream their way through life. They know of nothing but the tiles of this fireplace, that cobweb (could it be the same cobweb now? or at least an ancestor of the same spider?), that triangle of light at the window. And the Church, the whole Holy Apostolic Church, is mostly the same.
Father Gulvenny would talk for hours in that notched and crackly voice, his eyes wandering the room, rarely meeting John’s. To others, it might have seemed that this priest was simply conducting an awkward inner dialogue with his faith, but John was fascinated, not least by Father Gulvenny’s willingness—obsession—to criticize the Church that he supposedly represented. All of it nothing, a sham. And yet, and yet…Through all those evenings and afternoons, in the summers and winters of John’s teenage years, as the logs sighed in the fire or the windows lay open to the sound of birdsong drifting with the haze of pollen up the valley, Father Gulvenny, charged and yet soothing, personal and impersonal, deeply attentive and far away, had tried to express the things that lay beyond the everyday. The things that he could never reach. John now understood that Father Gulvenny’s short, awkward sermons, which had passed over most of his congregation, were also an attempt to express this same unlikely spiritual fire. And all from a gray man in a small, insignificant village. A sense of meaning beyond the ordinary. A sense, if not quite of purpose, at least of a direction in which purpose might lie…
“I suppose it must come as a relief,” Father Leon was saying, “to speak directly to a congregation as you did this morning. I mean, after the Endless City.”
“I hadn’t thought. But, yes. It is.”
“To express more…ah, complex feelings.” Father Leon gazed into his empty mug. John realized that he’d expected a talk rather than a sermon from him. Bringing the Good News to the Magulf. This new priest certainly hadn’t expected an off-center exploration of God’s anger. To John, the connection between what he’d said and his work in the Endless City had seemed obvious. And he had—or hadn’t he?—mentioned the cases of suffering he saw in the streets and at the clinic. But, looking at the still warm, blue-flowered mug he was holding, seeing it was the same one that he used to drink from years ago, sitting with Father Gulvenny, he understood that things had come full circle. This morning, he’d done little more than ape one of Father Gulvenny’s old sermons.
With the coffee finished, the two priests crossed the empty church and stepped out into the brightening noonday light.
The sky was still hazy, but the valley below them was clear of fog, a brilliant undersea world held beneath a dazzling white that frothed and lapped around the hilltops. The heraldic gold of the cornfields. The soft greens of the meadows and the jelt reaching up to the forest. So many greens. John could scarcely believe there were this many shades of green in the world. And the spirit, he thought, the fire beneath. Of the three personages of God, Father Gulvenny would say, the most important is the Holy Spirit; it must come first. Without it, the Father and the Son could not exist. Yet people hardly talk…Hardly ever. The fire. The spirit.
He looked up at the sky, where something seemed to be moving. A shadow, shifting. A wave-tip glint of light. And a whoosh, a crackle in the air. He felt the hairs on his neck and arms prickle.
With a great swooping sigh, the cloudpicker fell out of the mist towards them. Ionized cloud churned, shivered, and dissolved. There were tracks of white spirals, and a brisk, sea-scented wind tugged at his clothes, pushing the hair back from his face. The sun flickered through. The trees bowed, the rooks took flight. Ghost-ship spiderwebs of spars glistened. Close to, the thing was so large and yet so fragile that it seemed to be sustained more by aspiration than the rules of flight.
The cloudpicker’s delicate shadow was over them now. John could just see the tiny silver bubble where the pilot sat, and both he and Leon raised a hand. This whole display was obviously intended for them. There was no need to come this low; a drone would have cleared the fog easily—if it had actually needed clearing. But that was one of the reasons they put people instead of telepresences inside the cloudpickers. Forget about fractional lightspeed delays and the need for conscious, random, and intuitive levels of response that the net found hard to imitate in realtime: surely humans piloted the big clo
udpickers for the joy of doing so.
The shadow passed. The air was clear now, and the sun shone as a dazzling disk through the haze, glinting on the river. John glanced at Leon, but nothing was left to be said between them now. They shook hands, and he walked out through the graveyard and back down the hill towards his parents’ house, taking a diversionary route along a green-tunneled hawthorn lane. Harebells lay amid the grass, their heads still drowsy with the dew. And the sky through the branches above was now the same color. Harebell blue? he thought, looking up. But no, the shades weren’t the same. He walked on into the village.
There were few children along his parents’ road by the park now, and the paintwork was pristine, the gardens all neat, done out in complex ways that no one would ever bother to program a machine for. The days of mossy lawns and pollarded trees and goalposts by the garage were gone. Now, it was all genuine human effort; a sign to the world that the people who lived in these houses were still able-bodied and alive.
His father was playing The Ride of the Valkyries. He went upstairs and saw that the door to Hal’s room was open.
“There you are,” his mother said, looking up. “What you said was interesting, dear. There in church.”
“Do you need help?”
“No,” she said flatly.
He nodded and remained in the doorway, feeling the tingle of the molecular barrier as it brushed and retreated from his face. His mother had lifted the top sheet back from Hal, and it hovered stiff and frozen at the foot of the bed. Underneath, Hal was naked. The base of the mattress twitched, lifting him a little to one side. His mother raised his arm by hand, and wiped his flank with a disposable towel. Of all things, the air smelled of dysol.
“You don’t really seem to be back, John,” she said, “if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Back?”
“You’re still thinking about the Endless City.”
She walked around to Hal’s other side. Her back was to him. She wouldn’t press her questions.
“I suppose I am,” he said.
They still used, he saw, a crude-looking catheter to extract urine—the kind of thing you might see Kassi Moss using at the Cresta Motel, although a large and serious pipe extracted the solid waste directly from Hal’s gut, and probably went deep inside him to aid digestion. A more advanced method of dealing with Hal’s urine would probably involve some form of emasculation. The technology was well proven, but it had been perfected for the elderly for whom such indignities no longer mattered, and his mother wouldn’t have that done to Hal, not anything that would damage his life when he eventually rose from that bed. John remembered once, what was already years ago, watching his brother’s penis flip over and stiffen as his mother tried to perform the delicate task of removing the condom-shaped thing that they then used, and hearing her recite, under her breath from one of her textbooks, “The penis may sometimes become engorged during manipulation…” At the time, he’d been faintly horrified, but now he thought that she’d probably been pleased to think that Hal could still get an erection. It was a sign of life.
“There,” his mother said, dropping a sealed bag into the disposer. She touched a screen, and bed settled down again, the sheets slid back.
She turned and stood there with her arms folded, looking at John. Perhaps, he thought, I’m supposed to say something now. Outside, across the road, white-suited figures were out on the tennis courts. And machines were parrying with a thrust and a glide. A blur, the last fragments of the mist.
“Hal was always such a bad patient before, you know,” she said.
For a moment John was confused. “Oh, you mean…”
“When he had that bug that his recombinants made a mess of. Remember that? He would wander around coughing and with his nose blocked and mutter about lousy programming, how any idiot could do better than this. And that time he fell and broke his foot. Being ill was always such an effort for Hal. It was as though he had put so much of himself into it.” She glanced back at the bed, touching the now soft sheets. “You know, he ricked his shoulder recently. When he did his exercises. I had to get him on his tummy and rub in this warm foul-smelling stuff. Eliot Farrar says it’s best done by hand. For the contact.”
“So it’s still Farrar? I remember him saying he was going to move on.”
“Everyone says that here, dear. You’ll probably find him down at Southlands today.”
Southlands. John nodded.
“He made a terrible sound when it happened. When he pulled his shoulder.”
“It must have hurt.”
“But he didn’t show it.”
John, who was squeamish about the treatment of Hal’s apparently healthy body in a way that the sicknesses of the Borderers at the clinic never affected him, had always found the spectacle of Hal’s exercises unbearable. He remembered the first time he came into the room, and that brief bubble of hope that rose inside him as he saw his brother sitting up with his head turned, one arm outstretched. Then he noticed the jaggedly angular movement and realized that Hal was under the control of the net. But they’d probably improved things by now. He had this brief vision of Hal up and walking, of Hal dressed and coming down the stairs, of Hal sitting at his old place for breakfast, a fleshy mannequin with the eyes dead and closed. John lowered his gaze to the old bedside rug, so out of place on the new, smooth flooring.
From the hallway, louder this time, came the sound of Wagner.
“Come on,” his mother said. “Dinner’s probably ready. I leave a lot of it to the kitchen and the cleaner now. I keep out of the way, although I sometimes feel like a guest in my own house.” Hal’s door closed behind them. Explosions of string and brass crashed up the stairwell, and she smiled and rolled her eyes. “And it all happens so quickly if I leave it to the house. I end up racing to keep up. But time really seems to be running faster now, don’t you think? Just these last couple of years, and the summers more than the winters. Everyone else I’ve asked says so. The clocks are all running faster too, even the particles around the atoms…” Her grip tightened on John as they descended the stairs. “Everything’s speeding up. But there’s some part of us that runs to a different time, that still knows.”
The music grew even louder at the foot of the stairs, but to John it sounded oddly sterile and fractured. Perhaps his father was right and something did slip out between the samples.
He asked, “Does Dad really feed this racket into Hal’s console all day?”
“He thinks he does, dear.” His mother patted his hand. They shared one of their old conspiratorial smiles. “He thinks he does. And it keeps him happy.”
After dinner, heavy with the weight of more food than he’d wanted, John announced that he was going out. His father stood outside on the drive watching him as he climbed into his rented Zephyr. The sun was bright now. John took a left down the road, away from the compound and towards the center of Hemhill. He studied the screens. Annie, he thought. He’d been at her wedding—already a novitiate and a target for smirks and the confidences of elderly relatives, but content with his lot because he was still looking into the fire beneath. He found her address easily enough; and he remembered it now anyway. Annie lived at Radway Farm. Near the ruins.
The farmhouse was centuries old, even if it was now surrounded by cleverly landscaped areas of warehousing, storage, silaging, and stocks. Looking down into the sunny bowl at the squared-off jumbles of flowering meadowgrass that covered the acres of flat roofs with their colors, angles, and heights all at slight variance, he was reminded of expressionist paintings where everything was rendered as a series of overlapping blocks, created in a time when artists were trying to take apart the world rather than keep it whole.
He had to announce his name into the gate, and there was a pause as it paged for human advice. Getting out of the car as he waited, taking deep breaths of this deep country air, he looked up at the sky, which was an incredible blue. He hadn’t been here since—when?
The gat
e swung open, and there was Annie in dungarees and Wellingtons, walking towards him through the bright afternoon.
“John,” she said, offhand and smiling. “You’re back?”
“Just today.”
They left the car to park itself and walked down the springy track and into the brown of the yards. Chickens scattered around them. His shoes quickly became heavy with mud. He felt clumsy and earthbound here, but Annie took his hand to steer him onto a sterile blue walkway and found him boots in an old barn.
“I don’t get rid of anything,” she said. “I did once, but I lived to regret it.”
“I should have come to see you before, Annie,” he said. “You haven’t changed.”
She turned her head away from him. Of course, she had changed. The skin around her eyes had lines. There were lank strands of gray in her hair. But that wasn’t what he meant. In his own way, he’d always loved Annie. Adored her when she and Hal were courting and they used to take him with them when they visited places. Even now, he couldn’t really understand why they’d wanted to bring this gooseberry kid along with them. But they had, and by doing so left him with eternal memories of a boat amid swans on a river in some town whose shining cobbled streets he saw as vividly as daylight. And the giant golden walls of Gloucester Cathedral. Annie, with her boyish hands, bare freckled arms, thin shoulders, strong lips, and short dark-brown hair, had always been the kind of girl he liked. But not wanted for himself, not in any real sense.
Annie was proud of her farm. A tenant, but she said by now she felt it was as much hers as it was Halcycon’s. She seemed immersed in the present, in the particular warm minute of this particular warm afternoon. The smell of bovine feed and excrement was leaking from the pipes that led to the stocks. That smell, too, he associated with Annie. With coming here with Hal to see her after her parents had moved from Brimfield to run the place.
She showed him a tiled room, once a dairy, where the new calves were checked and encoded. ATGCTA unraveling on the screens. As they walked on towards the open fields, a black-and-white dog ran up and sniffed at John’s crotch. He reached to stroke its silver-collared head, but it growled. Annie aimed a kick at it, sending it away. She said that farm dogs were never any good with people, even when they were linked into the net.
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