Free The Great Wheel by Ian R. MacLeod

surgery. He found that his hands were enormously tense. The guard and the engineer had left a faint sense of purpose and hope that still hovered in the gray air. He wanted to hold on to it, that promise that you could open a toolbox and produce a scrap of magic.
    Nuru returned, then left. There were no more patients to see today; the veetol had scared them away. John tidied up, set the vermin traps, locked the clinic. Outside, the Plaza Princesa was busy again. People were still pointing towards the sky, making sweeping, expansive gestures. Many of them glanced at John as he mounted his bicycle, but he couldn’t tell from their expressions whether the veetol’s arrival had increased their fear of him, or their contempt.
    He cycled up the street. It was late afternoon, and the sun was in decline behind the clouds, already breeding hints of darkness, deepening the browns and reds and blues around him, mingling the black shapes of the widow women with terra-cotta shadows, open doorways, glimpses of flesh, the bickering flocks of caroni birds. In Europe, evening came first out of the sky; in the Magulf, it always seemed to well up from the ground.
    He went through the archway in the old medina wall, turned, and crossed the Plaza El-Halili. The wide square was barely recognizable from the last time he’d been here, on the night of the carnival. The scaffolding of the stage had been removed, and the few stalls that remained were selling recycled chemlights and rusty tins of Quicklunch: an old product that had been banned in Europe after an additives scare. People drifted here and there amid swirls of dust and queerly shaped bundles of litter that had caught and aggregated in the wind. They watched him go by.
    He crossed the slope of ancient paving and turned right where the high, windowless, wire-strewn outer walls of the wealthy Borderer enclave of Mokifa turned its back on the Endless City. He cycled on beside the walls. Along Corpus Vali, parts of the ancient drybrick medina had been incorporated into gleaming stretches of modern shockwire. There were glimpses of stepped, neatly cobbled streets beyond the curving walls of the old Moorish fort, lit by unwavering light. Here, a modern gateway had been constructed from ornate, vine-encrusted pillars of jelt. A man toting a large-snouted subsound pistol stood guard. His expression was quite impossible to read.
    John turned left down an alley he thought he recognized. Then right. But, as still often happened, he found that he’d gone a different way from the one he’d intended. He’d kept Mokifa to his right, but instead of reaching the square that led back into Corpus Vali he was driving down a series of stagnant alleys. Thick, moss-strewn cables reached overhead or, broken, lay coiled like nests of snakes. There was no sound other than the whirring of the bicycle motor, the hiss of tires over wet rubble, the rattle and sigh of the Magulf wind. He realized how unused he had become to emptiness and silence. It was almost like the vast squares and blind untenanted houses of his childhood dreams.
    The sunken passage widened. The claws of a huge pylon hung over him, still crowned with white ceramics. Ahead in the fading light lay only ruined warehouses, stalking pylons, fallen cranes, shattered concrete. He realized that he was within the remains of the Kushiel geothermal project. By tapping the radioactive heat below the earth’s crust, Kushiel had been intended to provide low-maintenance power—and, by implication, health, education, enlightenment—to a fifty-kilometer stretch of the Endless City. Before the funding ran out, only a single geothermal root had been sunk, and that had failed to generate sufficient power to supply even the needs of those who lived in the wealthy enclave of Mokifa. Now, nearly a century later, Kushiel was just a ruin.
    He stopped and dismounted, looking up between the jagged buildings where the moon shone faintly through the clouds, roped by the