The Great Wheel
Page 39
“You know it’ll be different, don’t you, Dad?” John said. “We only went to Ley for a few months in the summer.”
“Different.” His father nodded. “You will come and visit, won’t you, Son? When you’ve seen the bishop, in a few days. I mean, that room at the back is small, but—”
“It’s okay, Dad. It’ll be good to see Ley again.”
But they looked at each other, suddenly aware that this was more than the temporary parting they’d planned. John opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment one of the brown-eyed Borderer workers who’d supervised the removal came over and handed his father the house’s last screen. There, glowing in the warm spring air, were all the rooms and all the history, all the changes and adjustments they’d made. His father moved his hand to erase the house forever, then paused and held it out towards John.
“I can’t.”
John took it without looking, feeling the quaternary pressure on his fingertips.
“And you’ll know what to do about Hal, Son? Something that’s right?”
John nodded.
“I’d better be going. It’s a long way.”
They embraced.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
His father opened the doors of his car, half-lifted the cleaner into the front passenger seat, then got in himself. John heard the plangent trumpets of Mahler’s Fifth fading as his father drove off. He stood watching the car until it vanished down the familiar street where the lime trees were starting to bud. Then he realized that he still held the house’s last screen in his hand. As he raised it and prepared to bring an end, he saw that one final message had come through.
THE SHUTTLE WAS QUITE different from the ones he’d taken before in his life. The floor was tilted even before takeoff, and the seats were crammed close together, up against the thick and tiny portholes. The food, as he juggled elbows with the other passengers during the wait of some technical delay, was clearly expensive, as was the wine, and the screen in front of him offered to take him far away. He supposed it was all an effort to justify the cost of the tickets, although when the engines finally thundered and flames flickered at the edge of the porthole and his flesh seemed to slide from his bones, it was obvious where the money was actually going.
He’d dressed as a priest today, and as a result the other passengers seemed more inclined to talk to him when the bellow of the engines finally settled down, and to smile nervously and nod. Most were like him, on their first orbital flight.
The Earth still looked beautiful from high in the blackness: blue, brown, and green marbled with white—there was barely any red or gray—and surrounded by a loose necklace of satellites that turned and flashed in the light of a rising moon. There were glimpses in the distance of dark wings that trapped the sun, and of something else large and closer, distorted to a glowing oval at the edge of the porthole as the shuttle turned to dock with the barrel-bodied silver insect to which several other similar craft already clung.
The chair released John, and he drifted with the other passengers through the irised doorway into a concourse that, despite all he’d expected, had walls, a floor, a ceiling: an up and a down. He guessed it was for the benefit of novices like himself who feared that they would bob up like corks if they let go of the handholds or kicked wrongly with their adhesive shoes. It was easy enough, as long as he kept his eyes ahead of him and concentrated on moving his legs and arms and stilling the airy balloon that floated in his belly. Then he was occupied in a dispute with a Halcycon-logoed screen about the small cargo he’d brought with him. Yes, the screen said, not deigning, here, to give itself a human face, yes, it had dealt with such requests before. But it was customary to apply some time in advance. You must understand, Father John, it added, that more is involved than simply opening an airlock and pushing out your brother’s remains. Special canisters are required. Machine, human, and online time must be set aside. John nodded, waited. Arguing with a screen wasn’t like arguing with a human. If it was going to say no, it would have said no already. Yet it was with a sense of vague anger, diffuse regret, that he lowered the weightless wooden box into the drawer that finally presented itself. Once more, his last moments with Hal had been snatched away.
He drifted along the handrails into a moving tunnel and through the surprisingly strong wall of a molecular barrier. I’m here, he thought, and yet, even when he saw her waiting, her dark midlength hair fanning out around her like seaweed in clear water, he still didn’t believe. But there she was. Her green eyes. Smiling. He drifted to her. His heart, he realized, was hammering. His throat ached.
Laurie said, “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
He lifted his shoulders in a shrug and felt his whole body start to sink with the motion. “I had another thing to do here.”
She placed a hand on his arm. “Hal’s dead, isn’t he? And your mother? I heard, John. I’m so sorry…” Her hair billowed, and her eyes glinted in the sourceless light. Her hands, he saw, were gloved.
“We call this docking satellite the Median,” she said, leading him into a large sphere where people floated, talked, drank, and ate on the walls, floor, ceiling. “It’s the place where down there and up here meet.”
Down There. Up Here. He nodded, watching her fingers unseal a tube. She snatched at the wrapping as it started to twist away. Her gloves had colorless spines along their backs. It was hard to tell in this light whether they were glowing. She chuckled. “I’m really not used to pure free fall,” she said. “The Median is pretty strange to me, too. Out there, it’s different.”
“You look great.”
Unself-consciously, she nodded. But it was true. She was wearing the kind of unfussy coverall that he’d always imagined people wore in places like this. It was pale green and blue, silver-buttoned, clean and new and neat. He caught a waft of the gas from her tube, and her Laurie-scent as she turned her head and her hair swayed around him. The memories tumbled in. “And you look better, John,” she said, studying him. “Healthier.”
“It’s sometimes that way, after you’ve been ill.” He chuckled. “I’d never expected to be ill.”
“How bad was it?”
“I don’t know. Ask me in twenty years. If I’m still here.”
“But I thought…” She stopped and narrowed her eyes.
“I really don’t know how long it’ll be, Laurie. They had to rip the old recombinant out, put a new one in.”
She nodded, unsure whether this new uncertainty was good or bad. But how could she know, when he didn’t know himself?
He looked around again. All he could hear was the murmur of voices. “It’s so quiet here. I’d imagined…”
“We regulate the sounds and vibrations. Tune them to the right pitch and recycle them through the oxygen vats as heat. Nothing’s wasted. In space, a lot of things are more straightforward, once you get used to the difficulties.”
He nodded.
“It’s a small self-contained environment,” she said. “That’s where my own experience came in. The net, the kelpbeds, recycling. If you’re going to live up here, it all has to be done.”
“It’s funny,” he said, “that the technology of the Endless City should—”
“John, are you going to stay a priest?”
“It’s what I always was, wasn’t it? We found that out. And the mystery, the loss, the whiteness…”
“Whiteness?”
“Didn’t I ever tell you? It was as though I was looking through into emptiness—blazing white. Seeing that beyond everything there was nothing.”
“Do you feel the same way now?”
“I’m still looking,” he said. “I’ve realized that that’s what I’m here for. To look.” He gazed at her. Even the gas from her tube behaved differently here, spread and tugged into ripples by the silent air. “So I’ve stopped pretending that I was owed some great insight. It’s just a journey, isn’t it? A journey for all of us, no matter what we think. And I have
to go where my heart leads, which is still towards God, even if I may never find Him. I’m not giving up.”
“You’ll never give up, John. That isn’t how you are.”
“I learned that too. What’s—”
“John, I…”
They looked at each other, feeling the barriers falling momentarily, opening into other worlds, other times, other ways. Places where they might never have met, or might have stayed apart, or remained together and in love.
She lowered the stub of her tube. A receptacle opened like a mouth to take it.
“I’d like to show you something.”
He followed her as she swam and tumbled across the sphere. Here was Laurie upside down—or was it him? And here was a vertiginous glimpse, as if of a great wellshaft, all the way down through the Median’s main central tunnel. A plump machine fluttered by them, flapping silver wings in pursuit of a stray glob of litter.
She caught his hand and pulled him through a doorway; out, it seemed, into the bright darkness of space itself.
“Over there,” she said, hovering by him inside the huge transparent dome, pointing across Earth’s nightside curve towards the great space station that turned nearby. “That’s where I live.”
“Does it have a name?”
She chuckled. “Several.”
He turned slowly to look at her. He saw her smiling, outlined against the stars.
“Will you stay for a while, John? Will you come over there with me?”
“I can’t just go across, though, can I?”
“It’s only a couple of days here in Median for quarantine, and then a few more to let your recombinants subside. And these gloves—” She drew a slow, bright curve. “I hate them. These rules. But it’s the price you pay. There’s always a price, isn’t there?”
“Then it’s really true, that on the satellites it doesn’t matter?”
“It’s what I told you, John. It’s a controlled environment. The dangers aren’t the ones you get down there…unless someone carries them up. Recombinants are hardly needed, and it doesn’t matter what color your eyes are. In fact, there are quite a lot of my people up here. There”—a smile—“you see! I still think of them as my people. But I’m glad we’re here. All of us. It’s the best chance we have. I remember when we ran out in the streets under those skies, and the witchwomen, the star-maps, the moonstones…” She blinked. Her eyes were shining. “One day, this’ll be about more than just tending the climate, John. One day, we’ll…” Laurie shook her head, gazing out at the turning wheel of the great station. “I wish I could show you.”
“I really can’t go over there, Laurie. I have to return to Rome. I have an appointment with the bishop tomorrow, and the last reentry’s—when?” He looked at his watch. When he touched it with his fingers, it told him that he had less than an hour.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s not as though we’re…”
“No.”
“…never going to see each other again. I mean, I just wanted to settle, John. To get used to being here. You do understand that?”
“It was what I needed too.”
“But if you really are…if you’re going back on the reentry. I need to go back myself. It’s where I live, and I have a shift tonight.”
“What you do, does it have anything to do with structural communication?”
“Structural what?”
“It was just a thought.”
Laurie floated in the starry darkness, her shining hands outstretched. He took them and felt the warmth of her flesh through the thin gloves.
He said, “I’ll stay here alone for a while.”
“You brought Hal’s remains with you, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“Maybe we could…” She let go of him as she pondered something, then shook her head and waved a hand. The motion made her begin to drift away, and at their backs the space station she called home rolled on and on over Earth’s darkside. “Over there, it makes you dizzy at first, although they’ve never quite worked out why. Something called the Coriolis force.”
He said, “Gunafana, Laurie,” as she drifted, before she could pull herself back to him.
He saw her grin.
“You just said good evening,” she said. “Even here, John, it isn’t evening.”
“Goodbye, then.”
Her face flashed out of the moon’s light. She became a thinning silhouette as she waved to him from the tunnel leading from the dome, then there was nothing at all.
He looked out into space, where time poured from the darkness and where, so close, the endless lights of the space station turned. She’d be there again soon, tumbling over and over in that great wheel where all hands were joined. Or that, anyway, was how he’d like to leave it. That was what he’d like to think.
He looked at the Earth’s gleaming darkside curve. Even with all the wonders of up here, down there was still more wonderful, and vast. He gazed at his planet for a timeless moment, feeling the glint of stars and satellites all around him, breathing Laurie’s scent as it faded in the silent air, knowing that he was truly here, and watching as the hidden but rising sun broke a silver crescent on the gleaming rim of the River Ocean. Just as the sun began to throw filaments of light into his eyes, he saw something else flash below in the near-darkness, a silver capsule breaking the surface of the atmosphere like an arrow, a pointing finger, a line of fire where all elements were joined. Blue and black and white. It was the last of Hal. A shooting star.
Father John turned away and floated back towards the lighted tunnel.
About the Author
Ian R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His most recent novel, Wake Up and Dream, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series Playhouse Presents. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley.
Gillian Bowskill
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Ian R. MacLeod
Cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4804-2370-1
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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