“What was it like?”
“It was a long time ago. You invent things according to how other people tell you they were. I mean this smell—I don’t remember that—but I do remember the way the kids whose parents weren’t kelp workers used to fight us and say we stank. But the money wasn’t bad, and kelp workers are used to doing things their own way. My father was very much like that—he was stubborn—and the tradition goes back in the family. The big upheaval was when my grandparents moved from the older beds at Tabia to the ones here. I remember how they used to talk about it…”
John gazed at her, wondering why she was telling him this.
“On my mother’s side,” she continued, staring out at the grainy horizon, “I know even less. I think her father used to repair old trucks, but she would never quite say. To be honest, she’s what you Europeans call a snob, although there really isn’t a Borderer word for it, and she never got over working with lydrin in her blood in Europe. And I never did understand why she married my father. It couldn’t have been his looks. It couldn’t have been his money. It certainly couldn’t have been the way he smelled…”
Laurie shook her head in puzzlement. Perhaps, John thought, they’d been in love.
“My mother worked in Europe before they met,” she continued, “but she buckled down to being a kelp worker even though she hated it. Helping my father, having kids—she probably hated that too. There were me and two brothers, and another brother who died. We all used to share this big cot up in the roof, and at night she would lie beside us and watch the lantern lights move across the ceiling as the workers walked up from the shore. The funny thing was, she never told us stories about Zazu or Peter Rabbit or Growling George. Night after night, she told us about her year in Europe.
“She was in personal service with a family in the Lowlands. The main house was huge—at least the way she told it. And outside there were mazes and lakes and pergolas. On one of the children’s birthdays they put up this big carousel with bright wooden horses inside the house. Imagine…” Laurie smiled, far away. “…a carousel turning under the chandeliers in this big hall. And the woman, the lady of the house, for some reason, she singled my mother out. She made her a…” She paused, searching for the word. “Confidante. Is that right?”
John nodded.
“She used to have my mother sit beside her each afternoon in a white bedroom with a balcony and the sound of doves outside. And they would talk and drink iced coffee and tell each other stories of their different lives. And those stories would get tangled up with the ones our mother told us until it got so, when I was nearly asleep, I felt as though I had actually become that woman in that white bedroom with the doves and the balcony and the lakes and the lawns…
“Once in the winter, my mother took a flight with the rich family to London. And she had this wonderful night on her own with no responsibilities and everyone out at some show. It was foggy and dark outside, so she put on a coat and a scarf over her head so no one would see her eyes. And she just walked out. Just looking, staring. Seeing the big terraced houses and gardens and the lights of the cars and the trees and the shiny machines sweeping the leaves, and the glow of the roses, and the sweet green smell of the river. The people were out walking their dogs, and smiling hello because they thought she was a European. There was nothing but clear glass in the windows of the houses, and the curtains were open so she could see into all these happy, wealthy scenes. My mother kept telling us about that night in London as we lay in the big cot. About the time she went out pretending she was European…
“Then my father died, and my two brothers. The anchors to one of the outer pontoons gave way. Floated out. Sank. They tried to swim back through the Breathless Ocean, but of course they were poisoned and drowned. Anyway, that was the story. But it turned out that one of the big kelp processors had got hold of some European cassan—that’s aid money—and needed some of our plots for bypass drainage, and that my father had been holding out without telling any of us. He was always groaning on about quotas and prices. His being stubborn over this drainage thing probably meant that he and Kerr and Tony were killed so that we’d sell out. But I don’t know. Just my mother and I were left, and the joke was, we were paid a good price for the beds and pens. All those years of work—and we got more by simply giving up. Or maybe it was money for what had been done—guilt, compensation. It was enough for me and my mother to go Mokifa. You know Mokifa?”
“Yes.”
“And she did her best to forget about life and get on with her dreams—which by now revolved entirely around me.” Gazing out, elbows on knees, hands clasped, Laurie shrugged. “It gets boring after that, really. My mother put me on treatments of tetje. She didn’t even say at first, but I remember the taste and how she tried to hide the taste in the food with curry and kelp sugar. I’d always been the bright one anyway, the clever prickly kid. I got through the entrance scans for Drezzar. It’s intensive there. You spend five or six hours a day with a hood on your head, and the rest with screens. All day they make you speak European. By then I was taking the tetje myself, and the phenothate you need afterwards to keep you calm. My little secret. Huddled in the toilets with a syringe because the hit was quicker. I was always worried that if I didn’t have the tetje, I’d fail the next scan. I’d be out…”
“Do you still take it?”
“No. And I probably would have done fine at Drezzar without it—most of the kids were there because of money instead of their brains. I quit the phenothate too. Anyway, the aptitude scans at Drezzar kept saying I was abstract/numerate, so they let me work on a screen that had an airwave link with the Zone. There was this routing problem with some of the processing drains at Chott that I sorted out. It was easy enough—I was just doing it as a student project—but it worked and I saved someone a whole lot of money. I was probably the first person looking at the program who’d ever actually got her hands filthy with the kelp…I was a whiz then, a minor celebrity. Word got out.”
Laurie sat on the rock above the mud, hugging her knees.
“And from that,” John prompted her, “you were selected to work with the net?”
“The net selected me. Or maybe it was politics—you know how they like to have the odd Gog in apparently trustworthy positions. So they can point and say look…”
“Laurie, how old are you?”
“Twenty-six. I don’t know,” she continued, answering an internal question. “I’ll maybe stay on at the Zone for another two years. The money is good. Then…Then I’ll decide. I feel like I’ve been on this ride all my life. Pushed along on these rails. You don’t like the way you’re going, but at least it isn’t your fault, you can blame others for what’s been decided. But it’s not always easy to step off…”
It was fully dark now, although people were still working on the kelpbeds. John could see the bobbing yellow lanterns, hear the ticking of a hand-pulled winch.
“Come on,” Laurie said, “I’ll take you back.”
She stood up, rubbing at her legs. Her pale outline shimmered. Chill fingers of mist began to rise as the two of them walked towards the ramshackle nests of houses. They reached lights. Voices. The smoke of cooking. The streets up the hill were swarming, even more crowded than they had been that afternoon. But the people parted for Laurie, and John followed in her wake. A witchwoman sat at a narrow crossroads on an ornate rug, wreathed in smoking incense and surrounded by enamel bowls, tin rockets, chunks of moonrock, star charts, and the polished skulls of rats, goats, humans. John slowed, and saw a small green snake slide out from a candlelit eyesocket. The witchwoman scooped the snake up and held it out to him with a gap-toothed smile.
What had Tim said—that the witchwomen were infected by madness? This odd uniformity of behavior had to be based on something, and the tolerance, too, of the generally atheistic Borderers towards them. And why the obsession with the other planets? All that had been learned in the brief years of the exploration of Venus and Mars was that cycles
of devastation were routinely at play. On the cinderblocks and the great gas giants as well. Planets routinely fostered and then shrugged off life.
But now that the world expended its resources exclusively on the great, orbital, winged solar deflectors and thermonuclear toruses that battled to sustain warmth and safe skies, he supposed it was better that the rocks and sand that men and women had journeyed across space for should end up being revered rather than stored and forgotten in some net-maintained warehouse.
Laurie drove back towards Gran Vía on the lower roads through the oldtowns and the gray-walled new housing projects, where even she was forced to stick to the sluggish pace dictated by the lumbering open buses, wandering cattle, scurrying flocks of children, aimless drunks.
“I never came this far,” he said.
“When?”
“This way—when I was gathering data.”
“Ah yes.” She nodded. “I remember. There’s a kind of disease, and you said you thought something could be done…”
“Tim Purdoe’s checking some samples for me.”
“For what?”
“A link between cancer and radiation. Leukemia—bludrut.”
Her mouth tightened. “I do know what leukemia is.”
“Did you ever hear of any cases?”
“No—you’re not disappointed, are you?”
He shook his head and looked out the window. The wind was weaving ribbons of dust and smoke through the lighted evening.
“I’m sorry.” She handed him a tube. He broke the seal but couldn’t tell the shade. “It’s just the way you people always react when you come here. You all take one look and seem to think you have the answer. But if you’re serious, if you really think there is something…”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Then I’d like to see the cards sometime. I might be able to help with the net. I mean, it’s not exactly my field…”
“Tim’s doing tests on some tissue samples and food substances. If there is a cause, a pollutant, it has to be common, but it can’t be something too obvious, like windblown dust or solar breakthrough or kelp—Halcycon wouldn’t have let that through the system all these years. It has to be something else. Something with a slow buildup that’s only present in tiny quantities. Something that has a strong affinity for living cells so that it’s absorbed into the body rather than excreted.” He stopped.
“Sounds like you’re close,” Laurie said after a while.
“I think I am…” He bit off the end of his tube and drew. It tasted of cinnamon, wood leaves, firesmoke, autumn. Briefly, he felt the way he was supposed to: filled with pointless nostalgia, both happy and sad. And the colors streaming from doorways and screens and signs were red, yellow, amber, orange. Sweat-covered faces and sliding limbs. “Where are we now?”
“You’ll see.”
She cranked down her window to let the smoke escape. Arms reached out, but she handled the van well, kept moving, spinning the wheel to avoid the bodies ahead. He heard shouts, laughter. And then there were mouths parting near him, glimpses of flesh. Here, there was no need for a translat. The meaning was universal: the offer of easy surprise. All eyes followed the van. Battered as it was, it still spelled ossar—money.
“Over there.” Laurie pointed to a building that climbed out of the smog, where a faulty screen over the doorway stuttered with an image that John thought for a moment was a mouth, then an opening flower. “…you get the Europeans. It’s a big treat, you know. To have a few drinks, smoke a few tubes, come out here from the Zone.”
So this was Agouna. He drew again on the tube, wondering if it was that or the brown-iris pigment that was giving everything this blur of distance. And Laurie was still talking: See, Father John, over there, see those people across the street—they have their orifices electronically enhanced. And did you know, Father John, that they often die when the acid leaks from their implant batteries? Her words turned bitter, and he caught the dark breeze from the tube she was smoking, quite different from his own.
“I wanted you to see,” she said.
She dropped him off outside the presbytery. His eyes were hurting him now, but in his groggy state he put it down to tiredness until, climbing to his room in the presbytery, he paused by the clouded mirror on the stairway to examine his face. What a joke it would be, he thought, if the catalyst were to hold permanently. But the iris of his left eye was already half-faded, barely a grayish brown. The silver, the iris-bleaching pigment that had started out as a whim of European fashion and then become an unshakable badge of identity, was returning. Vaguely disappointed, John walked the rest of the way up the stairs.
FELIPE IS SEATED IN his chair in the Pandera presbytery’s top room, smiling. Bella stands behind him, having removed her facemask at John’s request. Uncovered, her mouth looks odd. The card’s five available seconds go by as he silently urges them to speak, move—do at least something for the camera. But there is only the creak of the circling fan and sounds through the open window from the street below. A baby crying. A donkey braying. The hot Magulf wind.
Gran Vía, under a pouring sky where children dart like dragonflies and a koiyl vendor scowls, hauling his tall wheeled basket down the rutted street towards the Alcalá souk. In the background, a high tenement’s rotting masonry.
Light falls through Santa Cristina’s roof, pointing a finger in a drizzle of dust at the ravaged body of the stone crusader. John pans left for a glimpse through the open west doorway, where caroni birds are circling.
Tim Purdoe sits with his feet up in his surgery as the cleared window behind him shows the lawns and the lake beyond. The freezer box containing the tissue samples John sent over a week before lies unopened on the floor. Tim raises a hand and manages an affable but long-suffering smile. He is, as he’s reminded John a few moments before, a very busy man.
Nuru is seated relaxed in the clinic, his feet also up in the front office desk in curious mimicry of Tim Purdoe at the medical center, although the two have never met and are unlikely to do so. He stretches out a hand and points.
“This your brother Hal? Fatoo John, do a fine job…”
The local healer Winah also stands in the clinic’s frontroom, holding open the huge carpetbag she always carries with her. An Aladdin’s cave of potions and vials, and the dried koiyl flowers, stronger and rarer than the leaves, which, so it is said, the women of the Endless City swallow to stifle the pains of labor. But John knows only what he’s heard: women in pregnancy are more than usually wary of his presence, afraid he’ll give their babies his silver eyes.
Beyond the rooftops of the Endless City and the rising spires of the Bab Mensor shuttleport, a river of light blinks across the Breathless Ocean. Then comes the roar of engines as the Tuesday evening Paris shuttle emerges through the darkening clouds from reentry, her fins glowing.
The wires and rails surrounding the smoking chimney-finger of the El Teuf incinerator flutter with thousands of offerings to the dead. A child’s teddybear with the speech circuit hanging out, the skin of a cat, ribbons stippled with images of happier days, and endless messages, many on cards of the type given out at Santa Cristina. Some, damaged but still functioning, mutter and growl into the wind.
A Borderer family. Two teenage children, a baby, an old woman, a young man. They knew John was coming, and the glowing screen of a Borderer speak-and-talk Bible lies conspicuously open on the table in the corner. The deep gurgle of one of the main kelp-feed pipelines rumbles nearby like an endless train.
“What say, Fatoo?”
“Just anything, whatever.”
The family frown as, uncertainly, they mouth the alien words anything whatever.
Back in his room at the Pandera presbytery in the hour before the generator goes down. The chair, the washstand, the bed. John is still dressed in his cassock and wishing that he’d also left his gloves on. That, after all, is the truth of how most people see him here.
“For now, Hal,” he says, “I call this my hom
e.”
Laurie was already waiting for John in the Jubilee Bar of the Hyatt Hotel. The wine bottle on the table was half empty. There were the ends of four tubes in the ashtray.
“Father John…”
“Am I late? Are you early?”
She fanned her hands in a Borderer shrug, then tipped red wine into the other glass.
He sat down and unslung the camera from his shoulder.
“Your eyes are silver again,” he said.
“It’s easier in a place like this. Otherwise people ask you to bring them a drink or another tray of nuts.”
“Really?”
“Do you want me to show you?”
He shook his head. Dimly, he could see his own outline reflected in her eyes. He still couldn’t get used to the difference it made.
“So…” She nodded at the camera. “You’ve been taking pictures?”
“For my parents. And for my brother.”
“Can I see?”
He handed her the camera and waited as she looked at the small flat screen on the back. Felipe. Bella. Santa Cristina. El Teuf. Gran Vía. Nuru…Biting her lip, she paused, touching the pads to clear and focus on some part of an image, then moved on. The Jubilee Bar’s wide windows looked out across the lake at the green of Trinity Gardens and the spire of All Saints where Father Orteau ministered to the needs of the Zone. The fountain in the middle of the room clattered. The empty glass-top tables caught the mid-afternoon light.
She placed the camera on the couch. “What is this brother of yours like? Is he much younger than you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Just the way you spoke to him at the end.”
“I only said about three words.”
She nodded.
He put his hand around the glass on the table. He lifted it, took a sip of his wine, and swallowed. “Hal’s older than me,” he said, “but there was an accident in his late teens. We used to go to this house by the coast every summer. The last year, soon after we came home, Hal was supposed to go to study in London. But he didn’t make it. It was obvious that he was depressed, although because it was Hal, no one really believed it. Then one night, late after the carnival, he got into the net from his bedroom terminal. He found this high-level port somewhere that they’ve never been able to locate, and used it to reprogram his implants. Since then he’s been in a coma.”
The Great Wheel Page 9
