Pipes and lines stretched overhead. It was as if an industrial plant had been dumped lopsidedly into this fecund country mud. They passed under the sentinel figures of the pickers and diggers and harvesters, most as high as a house and with years of mud encrusted on their tracks and claws. There wasn’t much going on today, Annie said. Nowadays the workers were all on contract, and moved from farm to farm. You had to wait. Things changed, but it remained one of the essentials of farming that you always had to wait.
“Do you ever go and see Hal?” John asked as they walked between the barns.
“I used to,” she said, “when I thought it would do any good.” She grabbed a blade of grass and began to shred it. “And of course I tried to keep going after you left. But I’d already mourned for him. I lost him, John. Long ago…Before that stunt of his, to be honest.”
John nodded, glad at least that someone else was still angry.
“Come on.” She tossed the grass away. “I’ll show you the milkers.”
They took an open lift up the side of the largest of the stocks. This is new, she said, pointing to something in the jumble of slurry tanks, silage processors, and silos. But it was still the same farm, the same organized mess. And her cheeks were flushed, and the same sweet air that rose from the woodlands still ruffled her hair.
The lift stopped. The upper door irised open. There were pipes everywhere inside, even in the control room, where a young man sat with his feet up on the console eating a sandwich. Beyond, in the main pens, there was a stinging intensification of the smell that pervaded the whole of Radway Farm. John remembered getting lost in the stocks once when he wandered off on his own. He remembered the moist sound of so many creatures breathing, the sourceless lighting, the animal warmth.
Each milker was encased in a rack. Wires, pipes, and monitors drooped above and below it, crossing in great knitted sheaves over the walkways along which Annie led John. He traced the line of a red tube, quivering and warm to the touch, to where it passed through bars and entered a grayish wall of flesh. A tight ring of muscle pulsed and relaxed to receive it, and a pink bovine eye that was pushed against the racking of the pen blinked and seemed to regard him, although he doubted that the nerves reached the brain. It was a great brick of an animal. Tiny stumps for legs, mottled and almost hairless. In the rack above, he could see the pendulous udder of her neighbor. No teats as such, just two long fleshy tubes that faded at some indeterminate point into the plumbing of the machinery.
“What do they think about?”
“They don’t think,” she said. “Not these ones, anyway. But I’ve heard that people are getting an extra twenty-percent yield down in Montgomery from reconstructing their sense receptors and inputting VR.”
“You mean they think they’re grazing out on a meadow?”
She chuckled. “Imagine, having this place filled with cow dreams! Come on. I’ll take you to the house. You should meet the kids and Bill.”
The old redbrick farmhouse. Stone-capped windows, and the gate into the garden that still needed a good hard push. The cats sleeping on the sunny porch, and the smell of damp tiling.
“Wear these,” she said, kicking some slippers across to him. He put them on, wiggling his right toe from the hole in the front as Annie peeled off her socks and rolled her dungarees up above her knees. She picked up a rag from where a cat had been sitting, frowned at the rag, then used it to wipe the stripes of mud that had adhered to her calves. Her legs were still shapely and pale, and a fine down covered the shins. She’d shared a cabin room with him during the one summer that she came to Ley, and he remembered her bending over in the bluish sea-thrown moonlight to fold her clothes, dressed only in panties and a bra. He was used to seeing her in a considerably skimpier swimsuit on the beach, but the intimacy of that moment gave the sight of her a new charge. It was easily the most erotic thing he’d ever seen, and became his secret masturbatory icon in many teenage nights to come.
She looked up, and caught his gaze.
In the kitchen, straggles of laundry hung from beams on the ceiling. John sat on a stool, and a little girl with long blond hair falling from a crimson ribbon immediately started to use him as a climbing frame. As she slid down his legs, all sweaty absorption, another blond child came to stand beside him. She placed a frank hand on his shoulder and said, “Would you like to play?” It was only when he looked into her impossibly silver eyes and saw the emptiness in her mouth that he realized she was a doll.
“That’s my friend Samantha,” the climbing girl said, “and she wets the bed.”
Annie was doing something on the counter that involved oddly shaped implements of a kind that John had never seen before. The room filled with the smell of raw meat and garlic.
Annie’s husband, Bill, came in, dressed only in y-fronts and a crumpled blue shirt.
“This is John Alston. Remember? Hal’s brother? He’s a priest now.”
Bill shook John’s hand and shooed the doll and the girl away. Then he yawned, scratched his head, and looked around.
“You haven’t seen my trousers?”
“They’re wherever you put them.”
Bill turned to John. His face was mostly hidden beneath a whitening beard, eyebrows, and bushy hair. “It’s a permanent rubbish tip around here.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Anyway, John. You must be…where?”
“The Endless City.”
“Ahh. You people.”
Bill waved a hand, then lifted it to his mouth as he yawned again.
“He does the nights,” Annie said, still attending to the meat.
From a previously quiet and undisturbed corner of the kitchen, from what John had thought was a box containing more laundry, noises began to emanate and sheets to stir. A pink arm emerged and waved as if drowning. There was a moment of stillness, then the baby began to squall.
“He’ll be wanting milk,” Bill said.
“Yeah, but—can’t you see?—in a moment. Let John have him.”
The baby was lifted up and placed, struggling amid a caul-like trail of blankets, into John’s arms. Surprised at this big new human, it stopped crying, and John instantly felt more relaxed. It smelled so sweet. And no one ever really expected you to say or do much when you were holding a baby. It nuzzled towards his thumb. He let it suck.
“You must be a big hit at Borderer christenings,” Bill said, taking a bowl of uneaten breakfast cereal from a stool across the kitchen and sitting down.
“They don’t have them,” John said.
Bill nodded, crossed his legs, took the spoon from the breakfast bowl, and began to eat.
The baby still sucked John’s thumb. The sensation was warm and strong; it actually felt as though something nourishing were being drawn out of him. Then the baby pulled away and looked up. In the growing lattice of silver in its irises, there was still a hint of brown.
“He came a bit late,” Annie said. “A surprise gift. Isn’t that right?”
Bill grinned, milky oatflakes on his beard.
Annie gestured with bloody fingers around the kitchen. “We thought we’d finished with all this.”
Accidental pregnancies didn’t happen, but here John could almost believe in them. Annie coming down one morning with her breasts already swollen to give Bill the news with a sour-breathed kiss, a big hug. He envied the chaos of their happy, busy life.
“Here.” She took the baby from John. Her hands made red smears as she unbuttoned her blouse and offered a nipple.
“I’ll have to stop this soon,” she said as the baby began to suck. Her chin bulged as she looked down. “He’s five months already. They planted the crystals, oh, early summer, wasn’t it, Bill?”
Gazing absently at his wife’s breast, Bill nodded.
“There’s inflammation there still,” she said, “and they expect him to be ready in the autumn for his first format.” The baby’s mouth went tick, tick. “You read preliminary medicine, didn’t you, John? Don’
t you work in some kind of clinic?”
“Well. Yes.”
“I’ve been using Calcymix in bottles, too. But the screen says I have to stop breastfeeding soon. It’s so bloody stupid. I’m sure I did it later with Jennie. It’s the only way in the middle of the night when he won’t stop crying.”
“He looks very healthy,” John said, wondering what he could possibly tell these people about babies. “It’s just there’s a danger of your natural antibodies conflicting with the recombinants his implant will be producing. They start that even before formatting, and those antibodies are far more powerful than the intravenous ones you’ll have been giving him. But there would be a rash first if there was a problem…”
“Oh, right.”
There was silence in the room now. The baby had stopped sucking.
Before he left, Annie insisted on showing John the baby’s back. She peeled off his vest and rompersuit, performed whatever trick was necessary to unseal and remove the diaper, and wiped the baby down. He lay there, legs and arms slightly curled in this warm room on a toweling sheet flecked with cat hairs. John turned him over, wishing he’d asked the name. But the baby didn’t cry. And of course there was some inflammation around the scabbed indentation in the baby’s spine. John glanced at Annie as she leaned intently over. He inhaled the soft milky smell of her and the baby. Didn’t she remember her other children? Didn’t she at least remember the last main implant she’d had herself when she was a teenager?
“Do you think I should try applying more cream?”
“Best to just let the air get to it for a while each day. Find him a warm place to lie and dry off after his bath. The inflammation’s not coming from outside, Annie, its coming from him. His own immune system is starting to work for the first time, and he’s reacting against this alien presence.”
“Alien?”
“Well, it is when you think about it, isn’t it?” he said, thinking, You must see this, Annie, every day outside in the stocks. “I’m sure they’d give him a suppressant if they thought there was any real problem, but it’s generally best to let these things work themselves out on their own.”
The baby was clothed, powdered, put away. John shook hands with Bill and walked with Annie back across the yard.
He said, “I’ll be going back tomorrow.”
“Oh? Right.”
“That baby boy…”
“He’s sweet, isn’t he? I’m so glad we had him.” Annie was looking away. One of her contractors had arrived and was doing something with an odd dome-shaped machine that squatted in the mud, giving off puffs of steam from a curved funnel that projected like the spout of a kettle. “He shouldn’t be here today,” she muttered. “Look, I’ll save you the walk and call your car.”
John stood on the worn brick lip of a doorway as Annie went to the nearest screen. By the time his car arrived, she was on the other side of the yard arguing with the kettle contractor. Waving her arms. They were too far away for their words to reach John, but he could catch the sharp European accents of their voices, and the sun, low and golden now, brimmed over the grassy rooftops like a fluid into his eyes. A cock crowed. The Zephyr waited humming beside him. He was tempted just to climb in and drive off.
Then Annie saw him and hurried back over. “You must come again,” she said, pecking his cheek. “When I have more—”
“I still think about you, Annie. The good times. With Hal.”
This time, Hal’s name seemed to pass through her without touching. “I have to dash now. This idiot’s come a day early. He needs someone in the screehopper and that’s muggins here. Bye.”
“Bye.”
John watched her go, then got into his car and drove up the hill. Stopping by the gate, looking back, he saw the kettle rattling across the livid brown-and-green expanse of the early fields of superkale, trailing a scarf of steam. Behind it strode a larger two-legged machine. The machine paused for a moment, turned at an angle, and raised a claw in John’s direction, then strode on.
He drove up the valley, through the woods, and past one of the golf courses where his parents now played. Shadowed by the hills, the figures moved in pairs across a landscape of undulating grass. He saw the lighted balls twirling through the air into the deepening blue sky, then settling into the grass. He didn’t want to go home yet. He turned left, right, waited as a giant machine lumbered past him up the road, walking in a corn-dust haze towards farm buildings and the sunset beyond. He remembered Annie, the flow of moonlight on her body as she undressed when they shared the cabin room at Ley. She and Hal hadn’t been prepared to admit then that they were sleeping together. Thinking back, John really wasn’t sure if they’d ever made love.
The gates at Southlands opened for him. The trees at the far reach of the gardens stretched their shadows across the lawns. Water clattered softly over ornamental rocks. A piano somewhere played a nursery tune. The main doors up the steps of the pale building also opened immediately on John’s approach. The security was good here, this deep into the net. Simplicity of access was just a sign that you had already been monitored and recognized.
The great hall was scattered with chairs, lined with huge paintings of extinct animals, filled with the smells of stone and lavender. A door swung open quicker than John had expected, and he held out his hand, trying not to look surprised. Eliot Farrar had dark hair, a square face, slightly strained and studious eyes.
“This way, Father.”
Here, no one would be surprised to see a priest. John was led along corridors and through open wards. There were voices in the dim air, although they shifted and changed, so that it was hard to locate their source among the shrouded, silver-wired, and screen-surrounded shapes. An eye gleamed. From several beds, the fall of hair; a frozen waterfall. A knobbled foot, the ball of its big toe like polished wood, poked incongruously. This was much the same technology that kept Hal alive, although here it fought a losing battle. What was it now? John wondered. How many years were likely? Fifty-eight? Fifty-nine? Sixty? Now that his parents were close to it, he didn’t want to know. Halcycon would reconfigure the implants, of course, and an extra year or two of life might be gained. But the huge invasion of recombinant technology started an unstoppable clock in the human body; the strain was killing. Your days were numbered. Here were the late-mobile wards. Nowadays, the wheelchairs had no wheels and didn’t possess chairs. They looked more like miniature versions of the great farm implements that many of the ward patients had operated all their lives.
“Virtual reality’s a great bonus when you get to this stage,” Farrar said. An old lady, her eyes fed by wires, hissed and clicked by them. “Sometimes I think you could extend it all indefinitely. Like, ah…” He wiped a hand across his face. “We call in the priest, of course, before we make that final decision. Father Hardimann. You’ve met?”
John pictured the two of them shaking their heads over some helpless case. Then Kassi Moss at the Cresta Motel. “Don’t you find it depressing?”
“Of course.” Farrar shot him a look. “But it’s a necessity, it’s a job. And we consult the family. It’s really up to them. I’m sure you understand that, Father.”
The better cases, still able-bodied, were gathered in a big anteroom with a domed glass ceiling filled with the intense blue of the evening sky and pricked by the first stars. Many came here after a fall at home or some other crisis, only to recover and check out again. Or perhaps they would move for a while into one of the sheltered machine-served chalets that dotted the grounds. For others, for most, this was the beginning of the progression along the wards through which John had already passed. One group, drawn in a corral of high-backed chairs, were laughing and nudging one another at the antics of the actors in a comedy show who argued at cross-purposes and paced, semireal, in the lighted space before them. There was, on the surface, a holiday atmosphere in this big room.
Through illusory gardens scented with pollen, a quavering voice shouted after him. “Look. Isn’t it…?”
John turned. Even without the cassock, he was recognized. But then he heard the hiss and mutter of disappointment, the careful rearranging of limbs, the turning away of eyes. Shaken heads. Not Hal. Hal’s brother. And don’t you remember? Sad. How sad. People, John imagined, who’d taught them both at school. Or served them in the shops. And wasn’t the face over there a strange age-distorted version of Tilly? He didn’t want to ask.
John sat down in Farrar’s office, and the door slid shut behind them, clicking some kind of lock. There was a sudden formality about the occasion as the two men faced each other across the wooden table.
“How often,” John asked, “do you see Hal?”
“Once or twice a week.” Farrar gazed just over the top of John’s head. A tiny nerve in the corner of his right eye was twitching. “But really I go to see your parents, John. I mean, to check their state of mind. I can monitor how they and Hal are doing physically just as easily from here.”
A big screen filled a corner, of a grade even higher than the one Laurie had in the Zone. Spinning stars drifted deep within it.
“What’s that?” John asked.
“That’s how I keep track of the people here. See those two over there?” Farrar clicked his fingers, and the screen scrolled up towards two circling nebulae. The nebulae sailed across the room. “That’s us, sitting here.”
Hovering over the desk, like tiny glowing balls of wire or wool. Each strand, John saw, was alive with swarming lines of AGTC.
“And you can tell where we are?”
“It’s a simple matter of triangulation.” Farrar frowned at the stars. Obediently, they disappeared. “You did say you saw Father Leon?”
“This morning.”
“Did he tell you anything about Hal? I mean, specifically?”
“He said he admired my parents. Most people say that.”
The Great Wheel Page 24
