The Great Wheel

by Ian R. MacLeod

  The cheeks were slightly hollower, the skin around the placid curve of his eyelids thinner and more stretched, but there was no real sign of age. Although…John leaned a little closer. Yes, his brother was graying at the temples. Quite a bit, once you noticed it. He wondered how his mother reacted when she saw that. Whether she had considered buying something to disguise it. At least Hal wasn’t going bald like Tim Purdoe.

  “So anyway, Hal. I’m here because I’m here. I wanted to look around. See you and Mum and Dad. See Annie…” he paused. Annie. “If she’s still here. I haven’t seen her in years. And I have fond memories.” He stopped. “Fond memories, Hal, of the times when you both used to take me out to places with you. Remember Gloucester? Remember nights at the carnival?”

  He reached out now, watching the slow, underwater movement of his arm as it stretched towards Hal, towards the hand that was resting, palm down and fingers loosely cupped, on the smooth sheet. Then his fingers touching, sliding beneath, closing on Hal’s own. Hand clasping hand. Flesh on flesh. Hal’s greater warmth, the slackness, and the slight dampness of sweat between them. John sniffed, and dabbed at his nose with the hand that wasn’t holding Hal’s. There was always this moment when, coming home and seeing Hal, he felt like crying. But the tears didn’t quite come today. He took a breath. It would pass.

  “Anyway, Hal…” The hand lay cupped in his own. A warm sleeper’s hand, like the flesh of Laurie’s body when she lay against him. “I’ll look in again.” He squeezed, felt bone and cartilage shifting. Was that a slight pressure in return? He dismissed the thought. He’d spent too many years listening as his mother pointed to screens and specially-brought-in monitors and timecharts that supposedly detailed Hal’s responses to real-world events and input changes from the net. It was a blind alley, John decided long ago. If Hal ever recovered, there would be no doubting. The whole world would know.

  Their flesh stuck slightly as John withdrew his hand. He stood up. Hal’s right arm now lay a little crooked, the fingers and palm tipped over, no longer a mirror image of the left. He decided to leave it like that. His mother would rearrange it soon enough anyway, have Hal back the way she wanted. There was no real point in his interfering.

  Click, sigh.

  The door swung open. The barrier passed over him.

  He left the room.

  “We have a happy enough life,” his mother said later as she prepared his room for him to sleep in. It was called the guestroom now, and few signs of his childhood remained beneath the freshly painted and papered surfaces. It seemed as if only the things that had never really been part of his room, like that vase, like that dreadful dampstained engraving of ancient Heidelberg, had been left as they were. “I wake up each morning,” his mother said, “and I think of the whole day ahead. How lucky I am. My time’s really my own. I embroider. And we play golf…”

  He nodded. Her conversation seemed to be something that surfaced from an endless argument in her head. The blessings she had to count. Set against this, set against that…

  “When I think of those poor people you must see every day in the Endless City.”

  “It’s not as bad as people imagine.”

  The bed—a new bed he’d never slept on—was busy making itself. He watched the sheets billow and slide.

  “But do people think, I wonder?” His mother glanced up at him, then returned to supervising the bed, smoothing out imagined rucks, crimping at the corners in a way that would once have infuriated him, fluffing and unstraightening the pillows, making little adjustments that the bed immediately attempted to rectify. He wondered why they’d bought the thing. He realized as he gazed down at her busy, trembling hands, at the pink of her scalp showing through the neatly trimmed helmet of silver hair, that he was intensely irritated by everything they’d done to his room.

  “Next door, you know,” she said, and for a moment he thought she meant Hal, “they have a pool. A pool now for swimming in, and this thing like a frog that swims around it every morning gobbling up all the insects and stuff and then sicking it out into the flowerbeds for mulch. That’s the Youngsons. You remember the Youngsons?”

  He nodded. He’d known the Youngsons all his life. “Do you ever use it? Their pool?”

  “Not often. Stan and Helen say, come around anytime, but you know how it is.” She fluffed the pillow again, then stood back, her head cocked. “Of course, your father complains about the kids always shouting and splashing. He likes to have his windows open when he listens to his music. He says that to get the proper transients you need fresh air.”

  “Don’t they complain about the music?”

  His mother shrugged, raising her shoulders. “Funnily enough, no. Did you enjoy your dinner?”

  “It was fine, Mum.”

  “You look a bit thin. Do you really eat the sludge they grow out there? Seaweed?”

  “It’s just base protein and carbohydrates.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And you know, that food I gave you—the sausage, the bacon—it’s been staring at me in the larder for, I don’t know. For years.” She crossed her arms in front of her, her fingers linked. “You know how your father always loved his breakfast? What he called a proper breakfast? The first day of our retirement, I fried him two eggs myself instead of using the cleaner. And you know, he came and sat down and looked at them and he said, I think I should tell you that I’ve never really liked this kind of stuff. It sticks in my throat. And then he stood up and got himself some flakes.” She smiled and clenched her fingers more tightly together. “Can you imagine? All those years? And then he says he’s never even liked the stuff.”

  “Dad’s Dad.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him, blinking. “He really is, isn’t he? Still…”

  “And you’re managing?”

  “Oh yes.” His mother smiled. “I’m managing.” She untangled her hands, opened them. “Come here, John.”

  He walked around the bed and into her embrace. Her face was close against his chest. She smelled of dust and lavender water, like her wardrobe, where he used to hide.

  “There.” She stepped back. “You must be tired. You know where everything is? Of course.”

  He nodded, looking around the room.

  “I’ll leave you, then.”

  His mother turned and walked out, palming the screen by the door to turn off the light as she left. He stood in the darkness, then heard her tut to herself and stop on the stairs as she realized what she’d done. She came back in, flustered and laughing—girlish, even, for a moment—in the wash of light.

  He slept for little of the night, lying in ridiculous discomfort on the shifting, ever accommodating sheets of this huge, hideously comfortable bed. The room around him kept shimmering, trying to regain shape and familiarity. Here of all places, the pleading white figures that he’d shaken off in the Endless City were trying to get through again. He left the window cleared, but the room remained darker than he was used to. The shadows leaped and re-formed as the headlights of occasional vans and cars swept across the ceiling. Every time, they settled into greater darkness. He could hear the humming of the house, a sound that seemed so distant to him now, when once it had been close and warm.

  He slept through the dawn. When he awoke, the room was a penumbral gray. He got up, and spent some time fiddling with the controls for the window before he realized that the world outside was bathed in mist. Everything had a luminous sheen: the trees, the houses, the tennis courts, the dissolving fields and hills beyond. A car went by, its headlights a cloud of amber. He buzzed down the window, resting his hands on the wet edge of the frame. He licked the dew from his lips, and tasted Laurie. Laurie who didn’t taste of sea and rain, as he’d imagined, but European mist.

  “We generally go to church in the mornings now,” his mother said later in the kitchen, peeling the cards off the packs of food and feeding them into the cooker. The sound of Mozart and the smell of his father’s tubes already came from the lounge. “Of course, peop
le are always asking how you are. I thought you, oh, might have wanted to let Father Leon know you were coming. You’re a real celebrity.”

  “Father Leon? Yes…”

  His mother gave him a significant look as she ripped open the milk carton and it spilled over her fingers. He knew that one of the things his parents still disliked about his being a priest was the sense of obligation it placed on them.

  After breakfast she took him out into the garden. The evilly spiked shrub that had punctured many a football was gone. So was much of the privet border—replaced by white paling, or fluffed up and trimmed into squared-off runs that bore little resemblance to the scrappy bushes of his youth. His mother showed him a bright purple-pink bush: a mass of dewy, upturned sunset and sky-colored flowers. Hydrangea quercifolia aspera, she told him, pronouncing the words with pride, an active member of Hemhill’s garden club now that she had the time. He cupped one of the heavy blooms and sniffed, lifting it to his face.

  “There’s no scent.”

  “No.”

  He held it, breathing deeply. Sap and earth and mist and Laurie. His mother hooked her arm around his, and they walked slowly along the razor-straight flowerbeds, their feet leaving a trail on the wet grass. And this. A cactus, its genes rearranged to accommodate this loamy soil and temperate climate, yet still looking grumpy and out of place. Cerus echinocereus saloni. And this. Wilsoni millefolium, which produces flowers in the autumn. If you catch them before they separate and drift on the air, the flowers dry into little golden-yellow pouches or envelopes that can be placed in drawers. He remembered how they felt when he used to crush them, the oil and the unlikely scent of fruitcake that clung to your fingers. And this. Of course, an old favorite, Malus corinia, a small tree that will soon be bearing tiny inedible apples. But the scent: mellow sweetness, the distillation of autumn. And the new hedge, Fusci magellanica. He trailed his hands amid the hanging pink and white flowers, seeing the tiny stamens that quivered beneath the furled petals, thinking, dancing ladies. Why can’t you just call them dancing ladies, Mother, the way we used to when we collected them wild along the hedgerows above the sea at Ley? Or perhaps you don’t even remember. And here, the roses. Rosa in the Latin, of course. Deo gratias. Amen. The elderflower tree at the far end of the garden was caught in the time between flower and berry. He counted the crooks and angles he’d once climbed, counted until they dissolved into the mist. A cruce salus. Bringing the salvation that comes only through the way of the cross. And the roses, yes, he knew about the roses. Even now, when they competed with the new sharp odor that wafted from the Youngsons’ pool across the fence next door, unseen but for the blue glow it refracted into the air. Domino Optimo maximo…

  Back in the house, he followed the smell of tubes and the chords of the slow movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony into the lounge. As if in prayer, his father was crouched on his knees in the corner. His back had an almost painful curve to it, and his tanned and wrinkled neck looked exposed. John made a noise, picking up the big polished shell on the table. His father remained bowed. John rapped the shell harder.

  “Ah, John.” His father turned, but stayed on his knees. “I was wondering when you’d…”

  “This is new, isn’t it?” John gestured at the speakers that loomed like obelisks spaced between the chairs—faceless Easter Islanders.

  “Yes.” His father made a hunched gesture that John interpreted as an invitation to crouch beside him on the floor. Racks of machines, dials, displays. And, reaching out of sight behind the sofa, there were shelves lined with various types of recorded media, like an organized version of the room in the Pandera presbytery where they kept the airwave transmitter. In the background, the music had changed. Now there was a single phrase from the main melody, repeated at the start of the second movement. Dee dah…dee dah…And again, unresolved. Little more than half a dozen notes.

  His father raised a finger. “That’s Bernstein. Now Barbirolli and the LSO…Early Toscanini. A wax roll, of course, so it’s not…” And so on. An endless parade of the string sections of different orchestras playing the same phrase. His father ran a knotted finger along the dustless shelves. “This,” he said, drawing out a black disk from a card square, “is probably what I would choose. Ancient, of course…” John saw the whorled grooves. “…but much closer to the music. True analogue. Everything since, every format, has been sampled. They take slices of the music, John, but no matter how many samples you take, there’s always the gap between them, isn’t there?”

  He put the disk on a wheel and rested a pivoting arm on it as the wheel turned. Over the hiss, bangs, and crackles, John heard the same opening notes of the second movement.

  “Real, isn’t it?” But then the recording began to play a sequence of notes over and over again, giving an especially loud click each time. John thought the effect was intentional, but his father frowned and lifted the arm from the disk, which gave an even louder screech.

  “Of course,” his father said after the sound of a modern recording again filled the room, “I normally go for something baroque at this time in the morning. That seems about right, doesn’t it? The correct choice. Don’t you think?”

  “Well, yes. I—”

  “Then Mozart at noon. In the afternoon, piano music, but not, of course, Liszt. And then we have a big symphony in the evening. Elgar. Mahler. Or Puccini—an opera. The full gamut of emotion, the wider range. Not something you’d want all day. Too much of—do you agree?”

  Confused, John nodded.

  “Of course, your mother says I play too much to him any-way.

  He understood then that his father was talking about the music he was inputting through the net into whatever remained of Hal’s consciousness.

  “Do you listen to the same stuff yourself, Dad?”

  “It’s a good thing to share, isn’t it? Music’s a great healer. There are cases, recorded cases.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were always very fond of this piece, too. The Schubert, weren’t you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  The Unfinished Symphony was nearing its end. John had never been a great one for music, but his father, so keen to share, interpreted a vaguely expressed liking as undying love.

  “It’s a shame, isn’t it,” John said, making an effort to get on something approximating his father’s wavelength, “that Schubert died before he wrote the last two movements.”

  “Oh no. It wasn’t like that, John. Schubert may have died young, but he wrote a great deal of other music after this. It was just that the challenge of this particular symphony was too great. He was overconscious of Beethoven, and perhaps also the greatness of what he had written…”

  “You mean he gave up?”

  “Yes,” his father said, as the long last chord faded and the room became briefly and blessedly silent. “If that’s how you want to put it. He gave up.”

  The mist was rising as they walked to church; it filled the valley with white. His parents seemed a little stiff and self-conscious—parading, unannounced, their distant, living son—but otherwise there was a true morning air of celebration. The world once again freshly remade. The people came out of the fog, the children running ahead, the older folks behind, and as they drew closer, their shapes gained identity and substance. The damp air smelled incredibly ripe, green, roaring life into the lungs. And John. Father John. You’re back, you’re here. This, he thought, is what it will be like on the Last Day, when people are supposed to rise in raiments of white, holding palm leaves in their hands. Seeing those laughing, dew-shining faces, and as the little cars buzzed by and the invisible church bells began to clang, he truly wished that he believed.

  It was a steeper climb to the Church of Saint Vigor than he remembered. Sleepy headstones, solitary yews. A low stone wall with a ha-ha on the other side that had once been used to keep out the glebe’s flock of sheep; lines of roof and spire washed out and vague on this beautiful morning—an engraving etched into the dim
, distant present from the real, solid past. Yet the people still came here, came in greater numbers and with greater joy than in the stern medieval Old Testament days of backbreaking labor under the threat of hellfire. They came as John’s parents came, and as he and Hal had generally come in their youth. Thoughtful and grateful, almost puzzled—like all of humanity—to find themselves still here and somehow thriving on this wrecked planet.

  The Holy Apostolic Church of Rome had indeed survived well, learning the lessons of history. There were few rules now; after all, God understood all, God forgave. That was the thing, John remembered, that he had found most contemptible when he was in his young and most questioning phase. This lack of fire. At the porch, the new priest was nodding, arms behind his back, counting in his flock. Seeing John, he beckoned him over and placed a pastoral hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ve heard of you, of course,” he said. He was younger than John, with blond hair and sharp silver eyes that almost seemed to bear a shade of blue. “Leon Hardimann,” he said. John felt a warm hand being placed within his own, and smelled the sweet musk of the man’s aftershave. His mouth felt rubbery from smiling. “You will say something in church, won’t you? I’ll call on you…”

  John nodded. The churchyard was almost empty now. Rooks cawed and circled. The stained-glass windows were brightly lit, filled with organ notes and the deeds of saints and color and song.

  “Your mother,” Father Leon said, “she does a fine—a splendid—job with Hal. Ahhummm…” He looked wistful. “She keeps the hope alive. I do so admire her. And your father. That strength. You must be proud.”

  “I am,” John said, disturbed by this man’s familiarity with his family, and more so by the thought of him standing in Hal’s bedroom with that smug smile on his face.