“This, ah…This can’t go on forever.”
“No. Of course. Hal will probably decline and die. We’ve known that for years. My mother still—”
“What I mean, Father John, is that that time may have come already. Is, in fact, overdue.”
John stared back, wondering if Farrar was going to have the nerve to talk about resources to someone who worked at a clinic in the Endless City.
“Hal is hopeless, John. There’s nothing left there to save. You’re an educated man—you know about medicine—you don’t need me to tell you that no matter how close we get to understanding the mind and body, we still can’t isolate consciousness. But there’s no mystery to that. Consciousness is everywhere, it’s a function of life. Look for it in a specific place, and it disappears. But I’d say with certainty that Hal has no consciousness left. Or that, if he somehow does, he’s suffering.”
“Those are two separate possibilities.”
“What?”
But John was grateful to this man for defining the issue, for pushing him into a corner. “I don’t,” he said, “want Hal to stop being alive.”
“Look, I walked you through the wards. You must know by now what it’s like. Your own mother and father—I know, I’ve spoken to them—have been faced with similar decisions about their own parents and relatives.”
“That’s different. People who are aging know that they’ve lived their lives. Hal hasn’t. Not yet. It’s unfinished business. I know that”—John heard himself saying—“with a greater certainty than I can probably convey to you. I know it with more certainty than I know anything else in my life.”
“Okay.” Farrar sat back from his desk. “Have it your way, Father John.” From his expression, from the Laurie-like emphasis on the word Father, John didn’t doubt that all the usual battles between medics and priests took place across this table. “But the decision still remains to be taken, I’m afraid. Your parents—and I hate to have to put it this way,” he said, unblinking, “are what? Now?”
“Whatever,” John said. “It’s a responsibility I’m prepared to shoulder.”
The two men regarded each other. The window at Farrar’s back was open. Faintly, John could hear the chatter of water, the sound of a piano playing, could feel the pull of the night. The silence in the room seemed to lapse, and the tension was lost. It became apparent to both of them that, for now, there was no more to be said.
He drove out into the summer dark. All the gates opened for him. He kept the windows down to blow away the heat that had risen to his face. He felt tired, confused, hungry.
The little car hurried along the main road to Hemhill. The occasional lights of other cars flashed by him, but the houses he passed were mostly dark, seemingly deserted. He stopped when he saw the lights of a roadside café. His parents would probably have something waiting for him, cooked hours before and now congealing on the plate. It seemed easier not to bother them.
He took a seat in the café, and the table asked him what he wanted. He shrugged, which would normally have been taken as a signal to recite Today’s Specials, but his body language was too compromised by the ways of the Magulf. The table repeated the question. He chose a green salad and pepper steak.
He looked around. There were a few other people here in the yellow-lit gloom. Solitary diners like himself. People in transit from one place to another. He jumped when the plate arrived, rising through an opening in the table. This kind of arrangement had been a fad of his youth, but now people preferred more traditional ways of ordering and serving. Unless in his absence all this trickery had come back in fashion.
He pecked at the food, which was rich and ornate on his tongue.
“Mind if I sit with you?” It was a woman with close-cropped blond hair, stripes of sunburn across her cheeks.
“Sure.”
She straddled the chair. She wore a sleeveless shirt, and the muscles in her arms and shoulders were sharply defined. Nobody needed to be that fit and strong these days. No European, anyway. He guessed that she used one of the reconfiguring recombinants that Halcycon, amid a maze of warnings, permitted.
“I’m passing through now,” he said. “But this place used to be my home. I mean, Hemhill.”
She nodded, a gold crucifix dangling between her breasts, called up a dry wine from the table, and asked, “Where do you work now?”
“The Endless City.”
“Yes.”
“You can tell? Most people seem surprised.”
“It’s your coloring, and the way you look around. I nearly took a contract there myself.”
They talked. Her breasts, outlined beneath the shirt, were more like a man’s pectorals. A few months ago, he probably wouldn’t have consciously registered the fact. He realized she’d seen that he was staring. He looked up into her eyes, then away.
“I have a bunk in my truck outside,” she said. “Sometimes I find that having company’s a more natural way to end the day.”
“I’ve got to go home soon,” he said.
“I thought you said you didn’t live here now.”
“My parents do. They’re still alive. They used to talk about moving to this place they had by the sea. But it never quite came off. They ended up selling it.”
“I know what you mean. It’s all talk, isn’t it?” She told him about her own parents, who were dead, and he sat and listened. Then she told him about her work. Like most people of this age of quick and easy travel, she was from the same part of the country. She’d been born in Ross on Wye, had trained for one of the low fliers that captured the purple blooms that lay through the summer like a knobbly carpet over the flat-lands from Cambridge to Norwich. With the first cool days, they snapped their stalks and rose into the air. “It used to be a real skill to capture them,” she said, “a trick you never thought you’d master. And then you did…” She had another drink. “But Halcycon thought of a way of polarizing the plants as they grow. Some new twist in the genes, positive to negative charge. Now it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. They come hissing and cracking after you even if you try to turn your scoop away.”
He nodded. He still hadn’t told her what he did for a living. If she asked now, he’d lie.
“I aimed too low, I guess. I had the right marks to be a pilot, all the synapses. I should have studied harder. Spent less time…less time…” Her gaze faded as he wondered what it was she’d spent her time doing. “Should have studied structural communication, like my father used to say.”
“That’s for controlling the satellites, isn’t it?”
“That’s changed too. A lot of the people are switching over to cloudpickers now. It’s all so automated and implanted that you hardly need the old special aptitudes to fly. It’s all part of the net.”
“Studying structural communication would get you a job flying a cloudpicker?”
“I should have seen it coming. Me, up in the sky with the angels instead of down here. You want another drink?”
“I’d better be going.”
“Me too.” She took his hand and squeezed it. There was a surprising softness in the touch of her broad palm and fingers. “You know, it’s the story of my life…”
His parents had a comedy show on in the lounge when he got back. It looked, in fact, like part of the same broadcast that the better Southlands patients had been running. The characters paced, and the audience’s ragged laughter sighed and broke like the sea. But his parents seemed uninvolved. He guessed that they’d been waiting for him.
“Ah, it’s you. Where have you been?”
He sat down, feeling the years of his youth tumbling back over him again as he fumbled for an excuse. But when he looked at their faces, he saw that they were showing a polite interest, nothing more.
“If this is what you’re telling me,” the fading man in the comedy said, “then I…” And he was gone. The room seemed very large and quiet without him.
“I went to see Annie.”
“Yes. How is sh
e?”
“She’s fine. She has a new baby. A boy.”
“How lovely. What’s he called?”
John did his best to spin out a story of the way the farm was now. His parents leaned forward, smiling. From there, the conversation wandered back to the Magulf, the Endless City.
“Where do you think they’ll send you next?” his father asked.
“I don’t know. I may choose to stay on. Try something—something a bit different…with my life.” He looked for a reaction. There was none.
Soon it was bedtime. John went to his room. His mother followed him and stood there as he undressed. He saw how selfish he’d been this visit, how little time he’d spent with them, trying to get beneath the surface of this life they were living.
She touched his shoulder and smiled. “Are you happy, Son? Something’s changed about you this time.”
He smiled back and kissed her cheek.
“Here.” She gave him his old pajamas. The tang of fresh linen.
“Thanks.” He pulled them on and climbed into bed, conscious now that they were both reenacting a childhood ritual. She looked down at him, then her hand went to her wrist. The red standby light that linked her with Hal. He wondered if she was turning something off, or checking.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. It was still early; the windows were clear, and the passing cars beat waves of light across her face and hands. The effect made her seem old, then young again.
“You know if there’s anything—anything, Mum. When you need me, you know I’ll come back.”
She leaned down and kissed him. “Now it’s time for sleep.” When she stood up, the center of gravity didn’t shift the way it had with his old mattress.
“Goodnight, John.”
She left the room.
He lay there, watching the lights, counting the cars. Soon he was asleep, dreaming about something he couldn’t remember. Even as he dreamed, he knew that he was losing it.
THE BROWNSTONE BUILDINGS ALONG Gran Vía seemed translucent where the big-bellied clouds hung above them like swathes of soiled velvet. As John backed through the screeching door and the wind-stirred dust and clotted cobwebs of the presbytery hallway, he decided that the Magulf light really had thickened and changed. He climbed the stairs. The presbytery was quiet, and there was no sign of Bella—it was, he remembered, her afternoon off—but his bed was freshly made, the sheets taut. He dropped his bag with a clink of the bottles he’d bought for Felipe and sat down, peeling off and destroying his gloves, kicking off his shoes. The koiyl leaves he’d collected still lay in the corner, in a Quicklunch box he’d found. Part of the welcoming aura of the room, he realized, came from the smoky undertow that emanated from them. He sorted out his bag, then climbed the stairs and found Felipe in the top room overlooking Gran Vía. The old priest sat with his feet up on a stool, the fan circling, whisky and trisoma on the low table.
“There you are,” Felipe said. “A good trip?”
“Good enough.” John handed him the bottles. “I brought you these.”
Felipe studied the labels. “Herefordshire. So you’ve been home?”
“The bishop suggested it. She wanted to give me time to think. To readjust.”
“She would…” Felipe sighed and put the bottles down. “Although I’d have thought that home would be a poor place for contemplation.”
“She gave me an ultimatum,” John said. “About my seeing Laurie Kalmar.”
Felipe nodded.
“But I’ve decided now what I’m going to do.”
“That’s good, my son.” With a wince, Felipe shifted in his chair. “Of course, you’ll still be staying your term here?”
“Yes, I plan to remain a priest until then.”
“And after that?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
“Do you have any plans?”
“Not really, Felipe. It’s a big step. I can still hardly see as far as my taking it, let alone beyond.”
“These things are sometimes for the best.”
“That’s pretty much what the bishop said.”
Felipe nodded, and crinkled his eyes. The fan on the roof creaked and circled. “And Laurie?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t want to lose her.” Outside, a truck went by. John looked down at the green spines of his gloves; the tiny Halcycon logo, which he noticed for the first time, was incorporated into the thread of the cuff, with the blur of his flesh beneath.
“Up to the west,” Felipe said, “where the coast of Africa meets the River Ocean, the climate is better. Things grow unaided. Life is said to be easier there. I mean”—Felipe made a face and waved his hand at a fly—“that society between Europeans and Borderers is more relaxed. They work jointly, and there’s no fence around the Zone. The freighters that head from there for Australasia have mixed crews. After all, if people live closely enough together, they forget their prejudices, they develop a physical and a mental tolerance…”
John nodded. He’d heard this before—from Borderers here in the Endless City, from priests at Millbrooke Seminary—but it was always about another place, some part of the Endless City they’d heard about but never actually seen.
“You managed,” John asked, “when I was away?”
“Oh, you know.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve been…a little preoccupied.”
He heard the bang of a door and the tramp of footsteps on the stairs. That would be Bella returning. Although this was her afternoon off, she’d have managed to come back laden with shopping.
“I’ve been thinking about that leaf while you were away,” Felipe said. “The koiyl. Not really the kind of thing that a European priest—even I—would be expected to show any curiosity about. Still, I made my inquiries.” He smiled. “I think we should go out later tonight, my son, after you’ve done Mass. See what we can see…”
Nuru was waiting at the church for him, his hands clamped under his armpits, his dapper black clothes flapping in the wind. They were both early, and the door was unlocked, but Nuru hadn’t bothered to go in: here, unlike at the clinic, he had no plans to take over.
“Fatoo John.” Nuru spread his hands and followed John into the church as a cawing black squall clattered up from the roof. The emphasis was on the John. Who had he expected to see? Some new priest? He knew, after all, that John had been called back unexpectedly by the Fatoo Bishop. He probably knew about Laurie, too.
Dim light and cool air. John went alone into the vestry and dressed for Mass. The damp surplice was torn at the hem and smelled of incense and Felipe; even after Paris and Hemhill, the smell of a European was instantly recognizable to him. He tried to remember who had said to him that he hadn’t really come back at all, and where it had been. He drew a breath and attempted to compose himself as the sound of footsteps and laughter came through the open doorway with the first of the arriving congregation. He changed his gloves and unlocked the sealed box that contained the Sacrament, wishing that Laurie would come at least once to the church during a service.
When he returned to the presbytery, he went into the backroom and called her on the airwave. All he got was her answerer. He stared at the answerer’s face and said, “You’ve changed the color of your eyes.”
“We thought it was time.”
“We?”
“It was causing confusion. I always told Laurie that it would.”
“Blue eyes make you look very different.”
“I know.”
“Almost the same as Laurie.”
The answerer smiled.
“I’d like to meet her tomorrow,” he said.
“I’m sure she’ll be free. Would it be lunchtime, as usual?”
“I was thinking of that bar just outside the Zone.”
“Which one? Is it one that you’ve been to before?”
“It has stars on the roof. A big place—”
“It’s called Red Heat.”
“Red Heat? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Back in his room, waiting for whatever it was that Felipe had arranged to happen that night, John settled on the bed with the Quicklunch box of koiyl leaves beside him. The window was open. Across the street, the lights of most of the tenements were on and people were moving. Bella had certainly got their generator started by now, but he decided to work in darkness. The black shapes of the leaves in the box reminded him of figs at Christmas. Even the smell. And of old-fashioned Christmas soap, the kind shaped to look like something else. Touching one of the cards he’d attached to the leaves, he heard the sound of his own voice and the rumble of the taxi’s engine in the background. A street name, and a description—deeply unflattering—of the vendor.
As he worked through the box, he found that the leaves were surprisingly varied. Of course, Laurie had pointed that out long ago. There were other high valleys that grew a product that was harmless and pure. This fat leaf, for example, was almost wider than his palm. And the stem was cut farther down—another local variation. He licked the rough and slightly oily skin. Sweet and tarry. He took a bite, and his mouth flooded with juice—or was it his own saliva? He pulled the wastebin over to the bed and spat out the reddish lump.
The next leaf was thinner, cut higher up the stem. Less sweet, more astringent. He spat that out too, aiming and hitting the bin from a slight distance, beginning to see that this would be part of the pleasure of the chewing: expectorating as a sport. His mouth, initially numb, seemed to swell and regain sensation.
It was fully dark now. Little stars rose and expired inside his eyes. Another leaf. Another. He heard his voice from the cards describing the taste and sensation, heard the wet smacking of his lips. Here, now, was a leaf from Lall. Not a particularly good specimen. Smaller than the rest. Almost shriveled. His voice on the card told him that he’d even managed to buy it at a slightly lower price. It was nothing like the fat green specimen that he’d been offered in the village, and after the others it seemed to have little effect on him. Perhaps he’d reached the maximum active dose, or was developing a tolerance. He got up and went to the window.
The Great Wheel Page 25
