The Great Wheel Read Free Page B

the tanned, smiling faces. The silver eyes.
    He asked, “How is he?”
    A moment later, the translat’s electronic voice declared How ice uhe? To John, it seemed a reasonable rendition of the Magulf dialect, but he didn’t doubt that, booming out in this hot, dank place, it sounded as artificial to the woman as the translat’s European sounded to him.
    “He’s worse, Father.” She pulled back the blanket that screened off one corner of the room to show him her son. “Have you brought any medicine?”
    “No. No medicine.”
    … meed-shun.
    He studied the little figure that lay before him. The boy was about six or seven—the woman’s only son. His name was Daudi. And her name, he how remembered, was Juanita. Unlike many of the Borderers who came to his morning clinics, Juanita had already been one of the regulars at Santa Cristina when her son fell ill. Usually it was the other way around. They’d turn up at the clinic, and if a treatment worked, they’d show an interest in Christianity. Even if things continued to get worse, the Borderers would often offer to take the sacrament in case John was holding something back from those patients who didn’t embrace his faith.
    “Will he live?”
    She’d asked him that question several times before—even that first morning when she brought Daudi to the clinic. Then, Daudi had still been able to walk, although he was weak, dazed and bleeding from the gums and colon. After the buzzings and drillings of its consultation, the clinic’s doctor, which for once had been almost fully operational, confirmed John’s fears of acute myeloid leukemia.
    “Will he live?”
    “He’s very ill. It’s cancer, a disease that can’t be cured. It’s a cancer of the blood, leukemia.”
    … bludrut.
    “In Europe? Even in Europe, he can’t be cured?”
    “In Europe, cancer is different.”
    “There is no cancer?”
    He took a deep breath, feeling the sour wash of his own body heat. Juanita was standing at the usual safe distance the Borderers assumed, two or three steps from him—which in here meant that she was on the opposite side of the room.
    “No,” he said, “not in Europe—not until we grow old. There are these things, Juanita, special viruses in our blood, implants along our spines, inside our bodies. That’s why I can’t…”
    Her brown eyes stared back at him as the translat repeated his words.
    “I’m sorry, Juanita. Daudi’s going to die.”
    “Will you pray for him?”
    “Yes…of course.”
    “Then pray for him. Pray for him now.”
    John looked down at the child on the bed. He’d dealt with several leukemia cases and in his own laymanish way had become a kind of expert. The first case he’d had was a woman with lush, jet-black skin, still young enough to possess the bloom of beauty that Borderer women so rapidly lost. She’d come to him as they always did—too late. He still attempted treatment, but the ancient cytotoxic drugs that Tim Purdoe in the European Zone at Bab Mensor had synthesized for him were never intended for use outside a hospital, and the woman died anyway—pretty much as Tim had told him she would—but probably more horribly, from the green fungal growth of some secondary infection. He’d learned his lesson then; that the desire to help in useless cases was a selfish attempt to deal with his own guilt.
    He unscrewed a flask of holy water and reached out towards the stained, sunken bed. The woman let out an instinctive gasp, but he knew she wouldn’t stop him from touching her son. At least not as long as he kept his gloves on. His sheathed fingers brushed the boy’s forehead, the skin as thin and pale as the bone it scarcely covered. Daudi was comatose, but for a moment the sunken eyelids seemed to quiver.
    Speaking the too familiar words, pausing after each line for the translat to repeat them in a form that Juanita would recognize if not understand, John felt a sudden impulse to rip off the gloves. To heal, to touch. He