The Great Wheel

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “People will still talk if we are seen with each other.”

  “That’s not what this is about.”

  “I suppose you gave your word to your bishop not to fuck me?”

  “Yes. No. This is all happening so quickly, Laurie. Can’t we just give ourselves time to breathe?”

  “All right.” She pushed the card into the slot, and the engine started, the van began to rise. “It’s a kind of relief for me also. I hate hiding. I’m sick of eating lunches I don’t want at places no one goes to.”

  “I won’t go back to Europe at the end of my term,” he said.

  “I’ll stay on and find work in the Endless City. That isn’t long. And you, Laurie—you always said you wanted to leave the Zone.”

  She took the wheel of the van and gave him a kind of smile.

  “…and when you asked if I loved you, Laurie, I wish I hadn’t said I wasn’t sure. That’s not true, I…”

  Her hand came down on his knee to silence him. Then she touched the grubby dashboard screen. Dust swirled.

  “We couldn’t have made it more difficult,” she said, “could we? Not if we’d worked at it. Not just Borderer and European—but you a priest.”

  He laughed and stretched his hand along the back of the seat, touching her padded, embroidered shoulder, his sleeve riding up, the pale light from his watch glinting on the colored beads.

  “But, then, you could have been a homosexual too, John. Isn’t that what most priests are?”

  She pulled into the darkening, crowded street. There’s not much point after this, he thought, in our going back to the bungalow the way we used to most afternoons. But Laurie had turned the other way in any case—west and away from the Zone.

  “It’s not far to Mokifa,” she said, peering up through the windshield at the low sky.

  “Mokifa?”

  “It’s where my mother lives.”

  As she drove on, he glimpsed a hitherto unseen variant of Santa Cristina’s blackened silhouette over the shanty roofs.

  “I went to Seagates last night,” he said, “with Felipe.”

  “Oh?” She nodded. “The market.”

  “I was looking for the Lall koiyl.”

  “Did you find it?” She slowed for a flock of children. One of them waved and banged the hood of the van. John watched her eyes crinkle with a smile.

  “And I met Ryat. Remember Ryat? He was at the Governor’s Residence that night.”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Do you think I should trust him?”

  “Trust him for what?”

  “He seemed…Well, not unhelpful, but evasive. And he already knew about the leaf being contaminated. Somehow, the news of that must have got out to him.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Laurie said.

  “Then he went on about Quicklunch, about how there were so many other kinds of wrongs…”

  “And he’s right, really,” Laurie said. “The Endless City is bound to have things like the Lall leaf, by its nature.”

  “What do you mean, by its nature?”

  “No one is in control to say—this is, that will be, you must. You’re from a structured society, you expect simple answers.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Ryat now.”

  “Is that surprising?”

  They slowed at a scalloped archway leading into Mokifa. Even before she cranked down the window to show her face to the tattooed child-guard, Laurie was waved on.

  “People know you here?”

  “This was my home.”

  “What about Chott?”

  “Chott was when I was young.”

  He said nothing, irritated that anyone should cordon off a part of the Endless City. The roads were paved here, and there were more taxis and vans than he was used to—their headlights, today, blazing through the gloom—but otherwise Mokifa wasn’t that different. There were even beggars (perhaps they were the beggar gentry). He did notice fewer animals—and fewer children. Many of the houses and tenements were more modern—uglier, disfigured by external pipes and wires.

  Laurie stopped the van. “We are here.”

  He climbed out and looked around. Even with the wind howling, the air was filled with the discordant throb and rattle of generators. A building opposite had been configured to look something like a Roman palazzo, but the ornate golden arches fizzed and brightened unevenly. Through them he could see ghost outlines of corrugated jelt. The people walking by seemed the same here as everywhere else—although there were perhaps fewer obvious oddities and deformities among them, and they stared a little less obviously at him. Were they better dressed? It was hard to tell, wrapped up and hunched as they were against this stormy afternoon.

  “I didn’t think you’d approve,” Laurie muttered.

  The tenement where her mother lived consisted of various boxlike levels of individual dwellings linked and cocooned by a loose network of cables and scaffolding. The steel gate of a lift slid open when Laurie spoke to it. Creaking, it drew them slowly up through the lattice of girders. There was a green scent in the air that could have been polish or a mood change in Laurie’s perfume. She gave him a look, standing by him, then gazed back at the door. The steel caught the reflection of two figures; faceless outlines and colors. Laurie’s pale red legs. Her squared shoulders. Her frilled skirt. He thought dancing ladies, then the lift turned right, juddered, and stopped. The door slid open, and the scented air escaped into the wind.

  “Your mother knows about me?” he shouted, following her on the open walkway.

  “Oh yes,” she said, pulling at her cuffs in the shelter of a doorway, straightening the bands in her hair. “She knows.”

  The apartment was windowless, strung high amid the girders. There was a screen on the sealed door. It greeted them as the door hissed open, and they stepped into a sudden hush and warmly lit gloom. Laurie’s mother had the bustle of someone who was expecting guests—but not quite yet.

  The décor was all very complicated and neat. Furred red wallpaper, the brassy glow of many small electric lanterns, chairs with lacy edges, mobile and unsubtle pictures of scenery; waterfalls and seascapes. A half-meter-tall clown stood atop an implausibly ugly chest of drawers, hopping from foot to foot and juggling tiny balls. The carpet was lumpy from all the cabling.

  Laurie seemed relaxed, and her mother sat facing John in the kind of advanced interactive chair that no elderly European would have sat in—it proclaimed too conspicuously the need for help. Yet she’d moved around easily enough when she saw them in, and she didn’t even look that old. He guessed she was in her late fifties, like his own parents, yet her dark hair was thick and full, her jaw was strong, and the flesh on her hands and face, if slightly crimped, was still plump.

  “I used to go to Santa Cristina,” she told him. “Once. But I did not really go for Christ, for the religion. The priest…”

  “Father Felipe?”

  She thought, then shook her head. “It was many years ago.”

  Did you take Laurie there with you, too? he wondered. Did she sit at the back swinging her legs—and why has she never told me about it?

  “It would be good,” he said, “if you could come to the church again. I see so few people from here, from Mokifa.”

  She smiled and said, “Yes, I will see if I can.” But she looked and sounded so much like Laurie that he knew that that meant no.

  “You worked in Europe, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Laurie told you about that.” It was a statement rather than a question. They gazed at each other for a moment, then looked over as the trolley came rattling in through the wall.

  “Didn’t you say you were going to get the wheel fixed on that thing?” Laurie asked.

  “You know how it is…” Her mother spread her arms. “Fornu.”

  Fornu…That one Borderer word hung in this rich, dark room. John wondered whether it was his imagination, or whether this whole tenement really was rocking in the wind.

>   The cups were filled and passed around. The biscuits on the plate that had been reserved for him were warm and tasted of sugar, butter, and flour in the fractional moment before they dissolved into nothing. John couldn’t remember when he’d sat in a Borderer room and eaten food before—yet it all felt eerily normal, almost boring. Tea with the priest; as though Laurie and her mother were acting out some kind of play.

  “You are good friends, I hear.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “We’ve got to know each other very well. Even these days, I suppose, that’s uncommon. Ah…” He realized he didn’t know what to call her. Mrs. Kalmar, I’d like to marry your lovely daughter. How did that sound? Like one of those stupid tunes Felipe was always humming.

  “You have not many months here?”

  “A couple—two—in this posting. But then I think I’ll try to find work that will keep me in the Endless City.”

  “You miss Europe?”

  “No, I don’t miss Europe. I was just there.”

  “Yes. Laurie told me.”

  Behind her, on a shelf above the juggling clown, was propped a smaller picture, less elaborate than the heaving landscapes on the walls. A younger version of this primly dressed woman looked down on him. The man standing with her, grinning and with his long hair tied back, also managed to look like Laurie, although he could not have been more different from his wife. A stubborn man, Laurie had told John, and her father looked it, although he was relaxed with his two sons beside him, one already fuller and broader than he was, unmistakably self-possessed and handsome, the other thinner, like a poorer and wrongly sexed shadow of Laurie. A girl in a print dress stood in front of them, holding herself still with a tension that suggested she wanted to squirm away from the proprietary hand that her father was trying to place on her shoulder. She had a mischievous face. The background had been blanked to gray—no pens and ramshackle houses and black pillars, none of the stench and gleam of the old kelpbeds. But for the color of their eyes, he thought, the photograph could have been taken at any time, anywhere.

  “And you have both been,” Laurie’s mother said, “to the mountains? So I hear?”

  He tried to tell Laurie’s mother about the koiyl and Ifri Gotal. He hoped that his newly decided policy about the koiyl—the idea of being open, telling everyone—might suggest new leads and possibilities. But he sensed that her attention was as poorly focused as his own. No doubt she was more concerned about the company her daughter was keeping with this alien holy man.

  The conversation faltered. Laurie stood up and said to John that she’d like to show him her old room. Moving carefully around ornaments and the low table, he followed her through the wall. The illusion was thin; as they passed through, it gave no sensation at all.

  “My money keeps this place going now,” Laurie said as they stood in a bare jelt-walled room with a narrow mattress. “My mother’s ran out some time ago.”

  The room was blank, like a cell. “Were you really here?”

  “Try it like this.”

  She touched a screen on the wall. Now there were pictures, a glittering starfield for a ceiling. “This is mostly how I used to have it. It seems smaller to me now.”

  “None of it is real.”

  “Everything is real, John—or as unreal as you make it.”

  He looked around. Compared to the sort of thing Laurie could achieve on the net, the projections here lacked definition. The shelf of analogue books that had appeared by the bed would probably require some kind of physical amplification. It was like a hotel room; offhand, impersonal. And so neat.

  “What do you do, Laurie,” he said, “turn it off at night to save power?” Then he realized, from the look on her face, that that was exactly what you did here in Mokifa.

  “I need to check the kitchen appliances,” she said, turning to go. Then she stopped. “Think of your own life, John, before you criticize and judge others. At least I’m not forcing someone to have pretentious ancient European music churning around in their head all day.”

  She went out through the door without bothering to open it. He caught the leap of static as the frilled edge of her skirt brushed against him. Dulled, confused, expecting no response from the room, he leaned over to the bookcase and tried to take out one of the volumes. To his surprise, it moved—if jerkily—and his fingers received a vague impression of size and weight. The book split open in his hands, and there were words inside it—the shimmering print of a language even stranger than Borderer. It was English-American.

  The door, he read, irised open. Looking up and around Laurie’s room, he saw that the night-sky ceiling now encompassed the floor and walls. Unlike the stars at the Red Heat bar, these looked real enough, but there were also golden arrow-shaped spacerockets whooshing by between pretty, many-ringed planets. The book was telling, he guessed, some long-forgotten tale of the never-to-be future.

  Laurie came back into the room. She clicked her fingers, and the book, with the rocket-threaded stars and planets, faded and vanished. She said, “We’ll have to go soon. Arra comes at four, and anyone else being here gets in her way.”

  “Arra?”

  “She cleans for my mother. I don’t suppose,” Laurie said, “that you feel that you know me any better now.”

  “I keep thinking how much I take for granted.”

  They left the room, and said goodbye to Laurie’s mother. The chair lifted her up, and she studied John gravely. Her face was broader than Laurie’s, reminding him of the distortion that came into his parents’ features when they leaned too close to the console. Touch another screen, he thought, and Laurie and her mother, or this whole place, might disappear. Laurie was good, after all—a quaternary wizard. And now she hung close to the exit, fiddling with the brocade of her sleeve, suddenly anxious to go.

  “Goodbye.”

  “Gonenanh.”

  A deep crackling sound came from the sky as they stood waiting for the lift.

  “Laurie,” he said, holding the railing, which quivered in his hand. “What you said about the music…It was about Hal, wasn’t it?”

  “Music?”

  Something wheezed and snapped somewhere, and he felt the railing shudder. “How did you know about the music my father plays to Hal?”

  “How do you think?”

  He said nothing. Laurie looked around at the webbing and the racked clusters of houses, the wind furrowing her hair, then frowned and waved her hands.

  “I used the net.”

  “You used the net?”

  “Of course I used the net.”

  They stared at each other. The lift arrived. The door squeaked open.

  “If you want to know about my life, Laurie, why don’t you just ask?”

  “I do ask—I just don’t get a great many answers.”

  He was breathing hard. The sky tore at the rooftops. The wind roared. Grit pattered his face. He wished that he could shut it all off for a moment, that the two of them could stand together in some empty place where there was no Europe, no Magulf, no sex, no God, no viruses, no preconceptions.

  The lift peeped to remind them of its presence. Laurie stepped in, and he stood beside her as the door closed, shutting them off.

  “So you already knew,” he said, “that I’d been to Hemhill? Back at that bar, there was no need for you even to ask.”

  “No. Actually, I didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “I accessed Hal some time ago, John. I’m sorry if you think I was curious.”

  Sorry. Curious. Some time ago. These words, he supposed, should be helping. That was what they were for. But Laurie—he knew so much about her, her flesh at every soft and rainy shade and flavor and angle—he could even sense the precise moment when she would reach into her bag for a tube. There—she was doing it now, and the lift was creaking, turning, taking them down.

  “Curious?” he said.

  “Yes.” The space grayed with smoke. “I was curious.”

  “And the
koiyl? You were curious about that too?”

  “What?”

  “Is that why you copied the cards? Because you thought Ryat should know? Was it to satisfy his or your curiosity?”

  She raised her head and nodded quickly, as though getting the final twist of an elaborate joke. Then the door slid open, and she walked to the van.

  “You did tell him, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone.”

  The palazzo opposite glowed and fluttered. Something was screaming in the wind. Looking up, he saw lines, electric cables. One was snapping and swaying; another had broken loose, twisting like a snake. There was no sense of power in them.

  She fumbled for the card, nearly losing it to the wind. He was standing on the van’s passenger side, as though he might actually get back in with her.

  “What…” she muttered, her head down, words lost. Then she faced him with her green eyes across the dented and dusty roof. “You think I went all the way to Ifri Gotal with you…? Fucked you…? For the sake of some stupid…” She gestured, searching for the word. “Conspiracy.”

  He pointed at Mokifa, at the tenements. “Then where do you get all the money?”

  Her face went a little blank. Ah! he thought, weirdly triumphant.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I do sometimes copy cards and let things out. Sometimes, for money that I need for here and for myself. But not you, John.” Her eyes narrowed. “What do you think I am?” Everything seemed to be slowing down, growing more gray and solid. “It’s just stuff about the kelpbed contracts…I…” She thumped the roof of the van. “Why should I tell you this?”

  “Because we’re supposed to trust each other. And Hal!” he shouted in a sudden red burst, disbelieving. “Why did you have to pry?”

  “Pry.” She nodded again, as if that explained something, and he wondered for a moment if she’d misheard and thought he’d said pray.

  “…if you could just see how you are now,” she was shouting, “the way you’re standing there. The way you never really seem to move. The way you never really left Europe. Just what are you, John? A priest, and you don’t even believe in God—do you? You don’t believe in love either…” She shook her head. Her hair obscured her face. She pushed it back from her mouth and eyes. “I’m sick of these discussions with you.”