The Great Wheel

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “What is that?” he croaked. The witchwoman frowned, pushing back a rope of hair and holding a pointed ear close to his mouth. “That sky, that color…There has to be a word…”

  The witchwoman pursed her lips and nodded. She stepped back, and once again the cart began to jolt and rumble, and he looked up, falling into the sky.

  This was a shadowed place with a curved, cracked ceiling. The darkness flowed with coughing and laughter, snores and moans. A shape loomed over him. A hand raised his head, and something hot was pressed to his lips. He gagged at the dense aroma. It was drawn away for a moment, then tipped back, the liquid sliding over his swollen tongue, down his throat. The taste was familiar, savory. Soup. Asparagus soup. He fell back, feeling the heat spread through him.

  “Skiddle…”

  His gummed eyes were closed. He could hear only the scuffle of feet, the drip of water, the breathing of rank air.

  But Hal wasn’t here. He knew that now. The sound was just the clang of a bucket. The echo of footsteps on stone. Hal wasn’t anywhere. What John had seen on that old screen in Kushiel were only ripples from the past, caught in the net from an abandoned project to bring light and heat to the Endless City. Kushiel was probably the lost port that Hal had accessed, a forgotten backdoor into the net’s higher levels—but he and it were both history. Gone.

  “Skiddle…”

  Drip, tap. The rasp of his own breath. The bang of a door.

  He remembered bursting into his parents’ room in the clarity of that long-ago autumn morning when the birds were singing in the browning trees and carnival litter blew across the park, and the compound in the valley was humming. Bursting in and yelling something. Hal. His brother’s name. Something about Hal. And his mother, already frail as she clutched the sleeves of her nightdress and her pale bare feet pattered down the landing. And his father, who yawned and stumbled behind. They pushed open the door to Hal’s room, and he was there. Slumped over the desk and half off his chair, the cases empty and open on the bed and his mouth slack and his breath coming in long slow rasps. The wires and screens were all around him, and the soldering crab still moved, clawing pointlessly across Hal’s face, squatting to lay another tiny silver egg above his flaccid eyes. The smell in the room was of hot nerve tissue and electricity, of armpits, socks, and semen.

  The men and women who came later that day from the big torus at Leominster put on gloves and prodded amid the clever tangle on the desk, which the medical people had so carefully left undisturbed when they took Hal away to Southlands. And they sat and questioned John in the lounge, although it was already obvious that this was some sad and stupid prank. Or an accident. The house’s own screens gave proof of that, and there was the evidence of the room, and what had been gathered from the few ravaged clues that Hal left in the net. Sitting with John in the pale light of the lounge with his father’s big loudspeakers like sentinels around them, the men and women who came from some branch of Halcycon S.A. told him over and over that Hal had been alone all night. John, you weren’t responsible. John. You just walked into his room when it was morning. You saw him slumped there when it was already too late. And of course you ran and told your parents. All the rest has to be a bad dream. Truly understandable, but you mustn’t blame yourself. When the pretty silver-eyed woman leaned over and smiled and reached to touch him, he shrank away. The screens and the tests cannot lie, John. There’s still a great deal we’d like to know about how Hal created the virus that destroyed him, how and from where he managed to get so deep into the net, but even he wouldn’t have been able to change the record of everything around him. Not even your big brother Hal could make you disappear from his room all night if you’d really been there. The evidence is plain, John. Hal was alone when it happened. The woman smiled. The silence settled in white folds.

  John opened his eyes and managed to turn his head. Bright, then gone, a lantern bobbed by with a rounded figure shuffling behind it. He looked at the ceiling, feeling tacky wetness along his back, pain in his hands, the heat and the cold that surrounded him. He tried to persuade his mind to produce the commands that would tell his body to sit up. Suddenly, he managed it, and saw this tunnel-like room. The man on the pallet beside him was coughing and muttering, plucking feverishly at his vest. A few of the other patients, John saw, were sitting up, inspecting themselves, counting limbs and bruises, rubbing heads, covering torn or exposed parts of their bodies. A bald man with a swollen eye and a luminous snake tattooed on his arm looked over, spat, then shook his head.

  “Vi mal aboara, eh? Ice fa nah judia…”

  John nodded. Somewhere to the right, a door banged open, shut again. Bang. And a silver balloon with a demonic, leering face bobbed out from beneath his pallet. The witchwoman had dumped him, he guessed, among the rest of the human detritus washed up at the Cresta Motel after the carnival. People mostly injured through fights, falls, one kind of overindulgence or another. The door in the corridor banged again, and the balloon, caught on a pleasant and oddly fragrant breeze, floated away. It was, he now saw, plain silver, although he couldn’t quite believe that the face reflected in it had been his own. Using his teeth and the crusted claws of his hands, he pulled the rags off his sleeve. The screen of his watch was entirely blank.

  As the door banged, posters and blinds fluttered along the stained walls. Breathing in the rich cool scent that flowed around him, John felt a sudden strength come into his limbs. Bang. He found that he was standing up almost without willing it. He hobbled between the pallets. The heavy iron door—rusted, apart from the shine of the drawn bolts—was swinging open, banging shut. The soft wind blew through him again. He felt pain as he held the door and limped down the worn stone steps. The door closed behind him. A cold, healing wind pushed at his face. Bang. Sigh. A hissing in his ears, prolonged by some trick of this building. He smelled a fresh and delicious breeze, which brought memories of clouds racing over a high valley and white-flowered bushes trembling where a stream ran clear. The scent of koiyl.

  The steps straightened and leveled into a domed subterranean room. It was lit by one halogen lamp and half obscured by a ribboned forest of oddly assorted rocks. Gray clinker, he supposed, from the moon. Crumbling red dirt from Mars. And between, in shadows and swathes, were darker piles of leaves. They were shriveled and uncured, but he could tell simply from the look of them that they were mostly from Lall. Here, at last, was this year’s crop. He swayed, feeling sweat beading through the grime of his skin. It was warm in here despite the breeze, and the sweet strong scent that had drawn him came not from these shriveled leaves but from drifts of steam, from a big-bellied pot that bubbled in a corner. Swallowing saliva, he peered over the rim. A black residue was plopping inside. It looked like glue or overdone jam, but on a lined shelf at the back he saw, neat and out of place in this primitive kitchen, tubes and wires, a monitoring screen and a retort, a small set of Halcycon-logoed scales. Some method, he guessed, of refining and distilling, of turning the residue of a harmless narcotic into a poison. Hal would have been at home here.

  The pot bubbled, and the breeze blew up and around him. Bang. Then the slide of bolts. Footsteps and the sound of jingling. His heart kicked as he turned from the pot and gazed over the moonrocks through the steam-ribboned room at the figure that emerged at the base of the stairs. Though she was wearing gloves and a mask and struggling to carry a tray of empty vials, he saw at once that it was Kassi Moss. More shocked than he was, she dropped her tray in a silver shower when she saw him.

  “Nach Fatoo,” she said, pulling back her mask, stumbling in one sentence from Borderer to European, “…your eyes.”

  FROM HIGH ON THE flat tiled roof of the Cresta Motel, the Endless City gleamed, and the sounds of life that the wind and rain had masked for so long rose with the steam from the sun-warmed streets. There were children shouting, pump engines coughing, people cursing, chickens clucking, dogs barking, couples arguing, music playing, shutters banging, brooms swishing, footsteps squelching i
n the mud.

  As John looked up at the deep blue sky, another sound caught his ear, distant, perhaps only recognizable because his ears were still European, still attuned. The whine of fanjets. He saw a bright speck, then another. Two veetols like scratches of orange paint above the misty rooflines of the Endless City. He saw a third to the south, hovering over its reflection beyond the kelpbeds of the Breathless Ocean. They were still a long way off, but all were leaving the Zone. As he watched, the two inland veetols turned slowly, headed one way, then another. A tiny ballet. He decided they were working some kind of triangulated grid, methodically searching the Endless City for him, although they were still three or four kilometers off. It would be many hours before they got here. But there was no hurry. He could wait.

  HE WAS IN AN airy suite at the Zone’s medical center, propped up and massaged by cooled shifting sheets and a powered mattress. A bright yellow spray of chrysanthemums sat on the console beside him, a gift Felipe had brought from one of the souks. The petals were already falling, but the scent was ripe, almost overpowering. The old priest had gone. But for the spectacle of the hopelessly optimistic spider that was attempting to draw its web between the serrated leaves, John would have called the machine that squatted in the corner and had the flowers removed.

  The small screen on his lap was specially configured to respond to the wildly approximate movements of the glossy cocoons that still swathed his hands. He’d spent some time scrolling through the net’s great multilayered dictionary, from which his own translat’s data had come. There were so many words in so many languages for the word blue, and the word sky, but the best word—the nearest to the soft, short sound that he was almost sure the witchwoman who’d taken him to the Cresta Motel had uttered—came from the old English-American language that once dominated the world, the language from which much of both the Borderer and European languages were derived. Blue. A good word.

  He pulled back from the database and paged down through the communications field of the local area of net, calling up the full address—28 All Saints Drive—now that he could get no response to the simple instruction to find Laurie Kalmar.

  “Yeah?”

  Broad cheeks and dark hair, a fleshy but handsome face. From the man’s expression, John guessed that even though the silver iris pigment had almost fully returned, and his eyes were no longer blue, he still looked iller and stranger than he thought. Or perhaps it was just the background that he hadn’t bothered to blank out. The humming sheets, the hospital smell.

  “Have you been here long?”

  “Here?” The man’s eyes darted up to the cursor to check who John was, then back again.

  “I mean in the Zone.”

  The man raised his shoulders in a lopsided shrug. “Just a few days, Father. I’m settling in. Why?”

  “Do you know anything about the previous tenant? Where she went? Whether there’s still a port to access her anywhere?”

  “Wait…” The man looked down, his hands rippling the screen. “No. I don’t think so. Not at this end.”

  “Did you see her?”

  The man shook his head.

  “But I suppose the place must have needed a lot of clearing up,” John said. “All that dust, mess…Life…”

  “Someone said she was a Borderer, so I guess. But look, Father, if there’s a problem, if you want to—”

  “No. It’s okay,” John said, feeling white waves of tiredness begin to descend on him again. “It’s okay. And I hope you enjoy your time here.”

  He faded the screen. When he looked up, he saw that Tim Purdoe was standing in the doorway.

  The barrier flickered as Tim walked in and leaned down to inspect the monitor screens, hands on his knees, the sleeves riding up on his old tweed jacket and that ridiculous fringe of his thinning hair in need of a trim once more.

  John said, “I couldn’t get Laurie.”

  Tim sat down on the bed, his shoulders stiff and the steepled tips of his fingers whitening as he pressed them together.

  “And you know, Tim, I really did think you were responsible for copying the cards about the leaf. I thought at first that it was Laurie, then I thought it was you. I never imagined that there was a port into the net at Kushiel.”

  “Whoever closed up the plant probably thought they’d be coming back in a few weeks. Anyway, someone sent a veetol over. It’s been closed now.”

  “What about the geothermal root? All that power in the ground?”

  “There’s hardly any power in the ground, John.” Tim was looking down at the sheets now, holding himself oddly.

  “I thought—”

  “It wasn’t Kushiel that damaged you, John. Don’t you think they make you strong enough to stand a few electric shocks, a magnetic field? It was just some virus you picked up.” Tim glanced up at him, then down again. “Actually, it’s not quite like anything we’ve seen before, otherwise your recombinants would have dealt with it. But I did a search on the net, and there it was, not in the medical sectors at all but in the Magulf environmental stuff. A suggested code for the infection that might cause the, ah…disturbance of the witchwomen. I don’t suppose that their and our paths cross that often, which would explain…” Tim smiled briefly. “So it’s really a bit of a discovery, John. A new virus that could hurt us Europeans. But then that’s one of the main reasons we’re here, to catch anything bad before it reaches Europe. So we could both be minor celebrities for this, although I guess that’s not either of our styles.” Tim clenched and unclenched his hands. “Look, I—”

  “And the leaf. You know, Tim, the leaf from Lall. I found out where the year’s crop went. It was Kassi Moss.”

  Tim nodded. Even now, John thought, he’s not interested. But then his recollection of the times they talked before in this room was hazed by the drugs the doctor had pushed into him. Perhaps he’d said all this before.

  “…and she uses the refined leaf on her patients, Tim, to kill them when there’s nothing else left that she can do. To bring an end. I remember how you said that if you distilled it and strung the molecules up, it would become a poison. And that’s what she was doing. She says she bought the Lall leaf because a witchwoman once told her it was close to a place of death. I guess Kassi’s a little mad herself, a little that way. But then, who isn’t?”

  “Yes,” Tim said.

  “But it’s not an answer.”

  “Maybe not. But what is?”

  “Kassi doesn’t need that much of the leaf. It’s become an obsession with her. But it’ll stop. And people are still dying, Tim. Even now, some of the polluted leaf is still reaching the streets. And there will be more of it in a few years, unless something is done.”

  Tim nodded. “You know that place—the Cresta Motel. I should really call in there. See what I can…” As Tim looked out through the window at the green lawns, the racing skies, the ducks on the chilly, wind-ripped lake, John studied his profile, the way he was holding his mouth, wondering what was bothering him.

  “About Agouna, Tim. I have no right to—”

  “Look, John.” Tim turned back to him and placed his bare hands over the shiny lumps of John’s own. “I have some bad news about your family. It happened three days ago, but I’ve been holding it until I was sure you were mending. I hope you’ll forgive me. It had to happen soon anyway, and there was nothing you could have done.”

  John stared at him, waiting.

  “Your mother’s dead, John,” Tim said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  THIS TIME, HE PAID extra and hired a personal veetol for the flight back to Hemhill from the shuttleport on the Thames. It was a cloudy day, but for a while the craft stayed low, and he could make out the glassy walls and pipelines that kept the more precious architectural relics safe from the tides. But the Tower of London, he saw, was now a crumbling island. The riverside gardens were flooded. The great dome of Wren’s Abbey was moated by greenish scum. Looking down at a stretch of jagged ruins in the moment before the net routed hi
m higher and the clouds closed in, he was reminded of the Endless City. The stubby-winged machine rose into sunlight. He was alone with blue skies and the passing leviathan of a freighter before the veetol dived back down and the clouds parted for him over the valley of Hemhill. From the Magulf to Bab Mensor, from the rim of space to London, from blue skies to here, all in a few hours. He saw the neat line of High Street, the toy squares and the toy people, the spreading ordered grid of houses, and the wide acres of the processing compound and the fields beyond, mostly fallow at this late season: blank, resting, unwritten. And there, whorled and ravaged as if by subterranean heat, was the carnival field. The screen made no objection when he steered the veetol towards it. It was common land, a throwback to the time when his ancestors grazed their cattle there and feared the uncertain sky.

  The veetol settled. John stepped out and felt the unfamiliar give of soil beneath his feet. As the craft rose again, he stood and watched, shading his face from the hot oily wind when the veetol pitched sideways, skimming the rim of the trees, then climbed almost vertically. He saw it swoop, spin, flip over, and disappear into the clouds—free to do as it liked now that it no longer held vulnerable human cargo.

  John walked across the field, at first making for the gap in the fence through which he used to climb. But his bag was heavy, and he was conscious of the freshly knitted wheal that ran like a double tramline parallel to the scar of his recombinant, then veered left across his shoulderblade towards the new powerpack in his armpit. The gap in the fence would have been fixed long ago anyway.