The Great Wheel

by Ian R. MacLeod

“Dad, you called them Borderers.”

  His father blinked at him, a broken dodger ball tinkling in his hands. “What do you mean? What else should I call them?”

  “No, I don’t think there is a place where we could send all this. We just have to get rid of it.”

  Occasionally a car or van went past, wheels and fans sighing and crackling over the snow. And Hal lay there breathing in his bed as they moved quietly through his possessions. Even now they were expecting, John supposed, some final shock, some great revelation. But there was nothing. Just memories. And the memories seemed less than real. Only once, when his father opened a tall narrow cupboard by the window, was there any sense of surprise when a tide of cups, plaques, and rosettes clattered across the floor.

  “I thought we had them all out,” his father muttered, regarding the display of trophies that filled the shelves beside the door. John picked up a shallow brass bowl from the floor. One of the ribbons, faded with age, broke off when he touched it. He read the engraving.

  RUNNER-UP

  BECKFORD CHAMPION’S CUP

  2152

  Then a plaque.

  HARRY ALSTON

  JUDGES’ COMMENDATION

  SUMMER 2149

  After looking at a few more, he understood why these had been hidden. None were first prizes.

  “Aren’t you supposed to hand them back after you’ve kept them for a year?” his father asked, holding up a big-handled loving cup of tarnished pewter.

  “I doubt if anyone wanted to come and ask, Dad.”

  They packed the trophies away. For a while, with the dust billowing too quickly for the filters to handle it and with Hal’s things spread across the floor, the room looked almost as it had when he was alive. There was no sign, of course, of the equipment that he’d used to destroy himself—that had been taken away by the people from Halcycon S.A. in Leominster. But the suitcases he’d never got around to packing, they were still pushed above the wardrobe. His father couldn’t reach. John took them down and left them open and empty on the floor until he turned and saw them lying there, and the mess of life that was all around them, and felt his spine ache and his heart grow weary. I’ve been going through my things, Skiddle. Clearing out…That was how it started anyway. John closed the cases and looked around. But there was nothing, just the click and sigh, his father’s unhurried movements, the lime trees guarding the tennis courts, and the grainy whiteness of the world.

  They were listening to music in the lounge when Eliot Farrar finally came. John supposed that these last hours should have been a time of prayer, but the music—a solo piano, pleasant, though he couldn’t place it—and their exhaustion from the work of clearing had taken over, filling them both with an almost comfortable melancholy. It felt for a while as if they’d done the right thing with the day. John heard the sounds in the driveway and opened the door and saw the vans, cars, machines, and assistants, the lights blazing and circling. He realized that he’d forgotten just how much effort was needed. Father Leon Hardimann was there, he saw. The presence of a priest was desirable on such occasions—and after all that had happened, John could hardly perform that role today.

  They filed in, businesslike. Even the people that he knew were strangers. He should have spent more time alone with Hal, shared a last and final word. He wanted to grab an arm or shoulder as they went past and say, Look, I know I called, but I didn’t mean now. This is a little early. Can’t you wait?

  They’d already turned up the heat and the light in Hal’s room when John got there, and they’d brought the powdery smell of snow and European sweat in with them. It was tidy here again, with a just a few extra boxes piled beneath Hal’s desk in the corner. A new machine, bigger and mobile, squatted beside Hal’s monitors now. John saw that Farrar had added some extra wires to the ones that ran into Hal’s nose. It was all swiftly and discreetly done. The procedure was familiar to everyone, though it was not something you ever got quite used to. John and his father touched the icons in the screen they were given, to signify their consent, which was witnessed in turn by Eliot Farrar and Father Leon, and then by the net. John watched as the priest unscrewed the little vial and with his hands dripped holy water on Hal’s chest and brow.

  In the name of God the almighty Father who created you,

  In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who suffered for you,

  In the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you,

  Go forth, faithful Christian.

  Outside the window, pushed by a sudden wind, flakes of snow began to tunnel and fall. Then the final moment came. John took hold of Hal’s left hand and his father took hold of the right, and Farrar did something with the screen. The breather went click, sigh, click, sigh, click, and white silence flowed through the room. John waited for the sound to come again, for something to break, for something to happen. Then, as he looked down at Hal’s face, there was a slight but definite ripple of movement. The eyes and mouth tensed and, for the first time in years, John felt his brother’s hand briefly tighten in his own.

  WOULDN’T IT BE GOOD, Skiddle, to be up there?

  There was a sunflash in the white sky as John walked out from the church, a hint of blue. At last the bushes were dripping and the ground was softening. Soon, no matter what the machines did, the whole of Hemhill would be a quagmire. But it was to be welcomed, even if this thaw was too frail and early to be called spring.

  Annie had come to the funeral with her husband and baby Harry, who mewed and chuckled all the way through the service, trying to squirm from her arms. Coming out afterward into the churchyard, she took Harry over to John’s father. The baby laughed at the old man’s face and grabbed his knobbly, arthritic fingers. John smiled, watching them and the other people who milled by. Their silver eyes averted, they muttered thanks for the words he’d said at the service. His address had been short and unrehearsed. Even now he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said—just that Hal had been his brother, that he’d loved him, and that the time had come, not to give up but to let go.

  Letting go…There was, it seemed to him now, as he looked up at the clearing, shifting air, a difference. And the moment of prayer he’d entered into as he sat at the back of the church; that had been unplanned too, unthinking. With his head bowed and the smell of the old beams and the flowers, with the waiting silence of the people in their best clothes and slush-sodden shoes surrounding him, he’d just prayed that there would be no more death for a while. And for once, now that he had almost given up hoping, the whiteness and the silence seemed to brighten, and a warmth gathered at his back. It might have been only his scar, but it felt like something more.

  Letting go…

  “I thought you’d like to see this,” Eliot Farrar said, calling him at home on the net a few days later. “Come around to Southlands this afternoon and take a look. I have a bigger screen.”

  So John drove out in his father’s car, seeing the patches of brownish green, which were starting to appear around the village and above the valley, reflected in the flooded fields with the pale blue sky. At Southlands, Farrar took him into an office that was like Laurie’s in the Zone: one entire wall filled with screen.

  “Any news,” John asked, “about the—foreign analgesic?”

  “Relax, sit down.”

  Farrar paged through the Halcycon logo. The room blackened, until suddenly they were looking down at the tumbling streets of the Endless City agleam with grayish snow, patched with fires, smudged with smoke. John searched for the broad stripe of Gran Vía, for Santa Cristina’s stubby tower, and sniffed for the kelpbeds on the wind, but the view was already shifting as the veetol they were in rose and turned and the heat from the fanjets made everything shimmer. The rooftops shrank and blurred, turning to scatters and a few jagged stretches of brown, then to ice-dusted desert and the fuzzy lights of the phosphate mines.

  The Northern Mountains began to loom, white and truly majestic at this time of year, and before
the veetol entered the wide upward sweep of a valley, John glimpsed a walled settlement that could only be Tiir. The village of Lall soon lay below amid the snow, caught in a spiderweb of trails and footpaths. Figures came running out as the veetol turned in to land. When the engines stilled, the roar of the wind strengthened, and with it came a bitter chill, the tinkling of bells as sheep stirred in their winter pens, the barking of dogs, the smell of burning dung, and humanity.

  Even through the net, and although the villagers were wrapped in furs against the cold, John recognized the faces of many. They were smiling at the veetol’s arrival as they had smiled at him, speaking a softly accented gunahana. They watched as the machines the Europeans had brought with them scurried in and out of the drifts beyond the village, clearing ice and snow, erecting the domed and tunneled buildings where these gloved and hooded Outers would stay for the next few seasons. John listened to the explanations and negotiations that night in the main hut’s dingy firelight, and struggled, even as these Halcycon specialists with their barking translats struggled, to make sense of what was said. But there was no hostility, and no real surprise—word must have gone ahead. These villagers knew the prospect of aid and money when they saw it.

  So, John reflected, Laurie had been right: this had all ended with veetols landing in Lall, even if they’d come to study rather than destroy. But the hills would be penned with shockwire to keep out the wild animals and sheep, and little of the koiyl crop would find its way down to the markets for Kassi Moss or anyone else to buy. And the veetols would be back next year to put right the things that they were bound to get wrong in this initial study. Perhaps they might even have the sense to bring a human interpreter with them. The people of Lall would become used to the cassan and the screens and new jelt roofs and generators, and they would be envied and ostracized by the other growers and traders. Within a few years, there would be nothing left of Lall but the machine-guarded stump of some Halcycon project beside the abandoned village, a place to be stumbled on and puzzled over in the future, just as John had puzzled over Kushiel. But the Borderers who lived in the village would at least have time to make new lives, to change and readjust. Borderers always changed and readjusted.

  Driving back through the darkness from Southlands to Hemhill, John wondered how much of this had been inevitable since that day he arrived at Lall with Laurie and Hettie. Was there any way he could have made contact with these people without destroying their lives? He hadn’t thought that the Halcycon-financed study would settle on Lall as a base—Lall was, after all, inaccessible and radioactively polluted—but the specialists had been too wrapped up in clinical questions to consider whether there might not be a better site. John knew Lall would be changed and eventually destroyed when someone in a meeting joked about how convenient it was that the foreign analgesic came ready-tagged with an isotope for tracking its progress through the bodies of the experimental subjects.

  When John got home, he found his father sitting in the lounge smoking a tube, smiling, and close to tears as he listened to one of his favorite slow movements. That was almost always the case now. Nor was it unusual for the old man to have a screen on his lap, but this evening he wasn’t using it to change some aspect of the music. He seemed oddly relaxed, his shoulders less hunched. He seemed almost jolly.

  “Will you look at this?” he said, holding up the screen and prodding it. John leaned over. He heard the screech of gulls, smelled salt, and saw sunlight and bobbing boats: the harbor-front dwellings of Ley. “You know that cottage with the yellow windows that we always walked past on our way to the harbor? There was a stepped alley…”

  John nodded, remembering the sway in his hands of the buckets and spades, the warm breeze sweeping up from the glittering bay. The sound of Hal’s voice as they walked together. Did you know, Skiddle? Just think…The sense of the whole day and nothing but sea and sunlight and laughter ahead.

  “Well, it’s come up for sale.” John’s father looked up at him, his face happy, uncertain, eager. “And I was thinking. I was thinking that…”

  AS THE WEATHER WARMED, his father went to Ley one day to sort out the handover of the cottage with the yellow windows, and for the first time in his life John spent the night alone in Hemhill. The house seemed empty, each room solid like a cube of glass, though there were no barriers left in any of the doorways. He listened to his father’s music, he stared at the polished wooden box engraved with Hal’s name and the dates of Hal’s life that lay on the mantelpiece, then at the blank and meaningless screens. He lay on his bed fully dressed and watched the occasional light flow across the ceiling when the valley grew silent. He got up and pulled his case down from the wardrobe, breathing in as he opened it, although no trace remained of the Magulf air. The lights of a car went by, catching the glint of the vial that Kassi Moss had given him. I’m still waiting, he thought, his fingers gripping the thin glass stem, for something to give, something to snap, something to break. Hal’s dead, but I’m alive.

  He went into his brother’s room, wondering without looking down at the new screen of his watch what time of night it was—somewhere in the uncertain middle hours, when it was too late for sleep, too early to get up, the time when sperm met egg and life began and dreams were formed, when the sky was at its darkest, hope ended, and hearts stopped beating. Hal’s room remained as they’d left it on the night when Eliot Farrar and Father Leon came to take his life. A temple, abandoned, smelling for the first time in years simply of empty air. The breathers and monitors were gone, leaving their indentations on the special floor, and the bed had been powered down. It looked just like a bed now. The sheets sagged and slumped when John touched them.

  Neither he nor his father had thought to reprogram the cleaner to come and do its usual tasks in here. The bowls and trophies on the shelves by the door had become tarnished. He took down the biggest cup, pewter and long-handled. It rattled as he did so, and he unscrewed the lid. Inside, there was a smooth stone—no, a piece of glass. Red, sea-corroded driftglass. He wet it with saliva and held it up to his eye, seeing how his brother’s room changed, how the shadows grayed and the ceiling softened and swelled. The night sky outside the window lightened to mottled red-pink, glowing, forever strange.

  He put on his father’s old coat and went out, gazing at the houses and through the railings of the park. Everything was newly revealed, yet everything was the same. He walked by the shockwire of the compound where the snow still lay in patches beyond. He went up High Street, where a machine whizzed by in a clicking of blue lights. He walked along the road to the field that had once contained the carnival. He looked up at the hills as dawn whiteness began to appear at the edge of the sky. Finally, on his way back into the village, he stooped by a gutter and took Kassi’s vial from his pocket. He crushed it through the grating with the heel of his shoe. Then he walked home, and found his father arriving from Ley, still half asleep as he climbed from his car but excited with the prospect of change and carrying with him the scent, John was sure, of sea and sand and far away.

  Father and son stood watching on the pavement as the house at Hemhill was finally cleared. Machines scuttled in and out, singly and in twos and threes, carrying things into the spring morning, chairs and tables and ornaments that waited on the pavement, looking naked and out of place before they were put into the vans. The cottage with the yellow windows at Ley was too small to take more than a little of this furniture. John’s father had even come to accept that he’d have to change his loudspeakers for something smaller. But that was just another challenge.

  A few days before, the Youngsons had switched on their pool. John could see the top of its steaming bubble over the edge of the fence. He’d watched earlier from a back window as a granddaughter, her hair slicked along the scar of her spine, splashed about in the shallow end. And the tennis players were back out practicing in the park, swiping at balls and bemoaning their lack of timing. Pock. Fuckit. Life went on.

  “You know, Annie called when y
ou were out one day,” his father said. He was dressed in his best suit. His shoes shone. His hair was parted. “We sat and talked about some of the old times. She said I should get a dog for myself when I move to Ley.”

  “It’s not such a bad idea, Dad.”

  “I don’t fancy those collars, though. Snap your fingers, and the creature whines. She says they get used to it, but what kind of life is that?”

  A chair went by, then a mirror, then a rolled carpet. John remembered how after Hal’s accident he’d sometimes look out of his bedroom window as the local kids, in an elaborate mime, put their fingers to their lips as they tiptoed by on the street.

  “I’ve got happy memories of here, Son. Me and your mother and Hal used to sit and play cards a lot when you were younger. The three of us eating crackers and drinking fizz after you went upstairs. I’d sometimes look in on you, sit by your bed. You liked to have the screen from whatever story you were watching left running. Have the bubble images float around you. You seemed to be able to tell if I turned it off, even when you were sleeping.”

  John nodded. They studied the cracked skirt at the rear of the big van they were standing by. In the gutter, bright as tinsel, a thin last thread of frost still lingered in its shadow. The machines were spinning a protective web of shockwire around the house, now that its shell was almost empty and the major work could begin. One of the bigger machines had already climbed up on the roof and was starting to pull away the jelt. The cable-entwined ribs of the joists emerged. Then they, too, disappeared.

  As the task continued, John and his father went and had lunch in the village. They sat at the bar of the café that had once been Tilly’s. By the time they got back, the vans were fully loaded and the site was empty. Even most of the garden had been stripped: his father had decided to take only the codes of a few of the most precious plants with him for the windowbox he’d keep at Ley.