The Great Wheel Read Free Page A

snake charmers, family arguments, scurrying children. Tonight it was much quieter. The alleyways were empty—even the dogs were single and furtive. Everyone who could manage to get there was farther down the hill in the old plazas, the bombsites, the open spaces. Enjoying the carnival.
    He slowed and dismounted where the slick cobbles steepened and broke into a stairway of rubble between the houses, joined halfway down by the flow of what had probably started out as a stream somewhere up in the Northern Mountains. He picked his way with care, lifting the bicycle over a rock and banging his ankle in the process, conscious of the gaze of an old Borderer woman sitting at a window above him. She was watching the carnival’s flickering lights, listening to the squawk of untuned trumpets and the thump of drums and firecrackers that filtered up along this damp maze.
    “Hello,” he called, looking up. “ Gunafana. What can you see up there?”
    He’d asked the question slowly, but the woman only blinked back at him. He was considering raising his voice or turning on the translat, when she spoke.
    “Go home, baraka. We don’t want you here,” she said. “Get back to your own hell.”
    She pursed her thin lips and spat. The saliva plopped on a mossy stone beside his feet, stained red from her chewing the koiyl leaf.
    Then, with more accuracy, she spat again.
    He had two calls to make that evening. He visited the homes of a few of his parishioners each day, even though those Borderers who were prepared to embrace the faith he represented were often unwilling to accept him personally. The only invariable exception came when someone was seriously ill. Then, the Borderers wanted him, and not simply because of the clinic he ran each morning from the old post office in the Plaza Princesa next to the bombed-out towerblock. Even when the doctor’s medicines and scans had been exhausted, they wanted John to pray and touch his silver cross and mutter to Jesus, Mary, and the Lord.
    His first call was down the hill on the Cruz de Marcenado, one of the main streets that bisected this part of the Endless City in line with the coast. Here, the music was louder—he was closer to the carnival’s glittering fringe. Cooking smoke was rising over the patched rooftops, the light in it gleaming on the rancid lakes of winter mud that still filled the middle of the thoroughfare. A couple ran out towards him from an alleyway, laughing, hand in hand, the boy pulling the girl against a show of weak reluctance, her shirt flapping open to show her sweat-shining breasts. Riding his bicycle along the sticky pavement, John stopped; for a moment he thought that they hadn’t noticed him. But the boy and girl had the same unerring sense for the presence of a European that all Borderers had. They halted and turned, their laughter momentarily stilled. Under a starless Magulf sky, they studied him with grave and questioning eyes. Then, laughing again, they ran on.
    John propped his bicycle against the wall in a nameless street, leaving it unlocked in the certain knowledge that its obvious cost and newness would warn any light-fingered Borderer kids to keep clear. He banged hard on an old doorframe. After a pause, the burlap nailed over it was jerked aside.
    “Fatoo. You here. Please, he get worse.”
    He hesitated. Then, turning the translat to Transmit, he followed the woman inside.
    She led him down a low corridor and into the one ground-floor room that was home for her and her family. He heard the familiar scurrying rustle of departing cockroaches as she turned up the lantern.
    The air stank of sickness. There was a cheap, newish sofabed, a methane cooker in an alcove topped by a few cans of Quicklunch, the drip of a water purifier in the corner. A screen hung at a slight angle on the wall, and in it hovering figures moved with a distorted impression of depth. She was picking up some faint transmission from Europe: through the jittery fuzz, he recognized