Free The Great Wheel by Ian R. MacLeod Page A

veins of a ripple effect that was spreading rapidly across the sky. As he watched, the sky slowly boiled and unraveled. He walked on, wheeling the bicycle towards what he took to be the jeweled lights of Mokifa or Corpus Vali ahead.
    A hole of large but uncertain dimensions lay off in the gloom to his left. He knew it wasn’t possible for a geothermal pit to have been excavated and then left unplugged, but still the hole seemed to shift and extend towards him, and there was a prickling of his skin, a bluish density to the night air—a weird sense of outpouring. He turned back into a space between two warehouses. Above him, a loose cable clanged repeatedly in the wind against a corroded metal dome. He paused, rubbing at the pounding in his head.
    A tingling electrical wash gave him goose bumps. Feeling a twinge of pain in his right armpit, he slid his hand beneath his cassock, then pulled it out sharply as he felt the jolt of a shock. Holding his hand up, he was sure he could detect a faint luminescence on it. Turning his bicycle, checking the power—it was low—he remounted. He followed the swaying powerlines through a short tunnel, past a hut and a barrier that still, impotently, guarded Kushiel’s entrance, then went across a wide strip of wasteground to where the tumble of the Endless City resumed. Soon there were streets, houses, tenements, sounds of life. In a square filled with the smell of frying onion and fresh sweat, people twirled and swayed to the blare of music from a café.
    He stood for a moment, watching from the shadows. There were grinning faces. Beautiful women. Spinning children. Men laughing and handsome, like pirates with their earrings and bandannas. Mothers, ignored, shouted and waved from windows for their children to come to bed while old ladies knitted and nodded their heads to the beat, and men at sidetables turned worry beads and smiled secret smiles, their eyes filmed with memories of other nights.
    The people stopped dancing when John entered the light. Hands darted over chests in the sign of protection against the evil eye as he wheeled his bicycle beneath the colored lanterns strung across the square.
    Several streets later, finally back along the way he’d intended, he dismounted outside the crumbling concrete facade of the old Cresta Motel and picked his way around the rubbish sacks and the clouds of flies that filled the open courtyard. He reached the beaded curtain beyond which Kassi Moss kept her office.
    “Ah, Fatoo…” Even before he had fully parted the curtain, she was up and around her desk, throwing heaps of soiled linen off a chair, turning it and placing it just so for him. “ Gunafana. So good you’ve come.”
    He sat down and waited for Kassi to return to her side of her desk. As always, the room was lit by a painfully bright portable halogen lamp. He realized that he was drenched with sweat.
    Smiling, Kassi rocked back and forth in her chair. She was a round, gray-haired woman with brown, deeply lined skin. On the wall behind her, emphasized and enlarged by the white light, hung a large crucifix.
    “I listened to you church Sunday, Fatoo,” she said, perhaps noticing the direction of his gaze. “About Jesus knowing death when he entered the city gates. Was he such brave man?”
    “Yes, he was a brave man.”
    Kassi nodded, wrinkling her eyes. Was she doubting Christ’s bravery? Asking whether it was truly possible for God to be a man?
    “Fatoo want coffee?”
    “No. I just thought I’d look in, Kassi. And bring you this.” Wiping down with dysol the antibiotic box that Tim Purdoe had given him in the Zone, John placed it within her reach on the desk. “I thought you’d probably make better use of this than I could. You have far more cases of septicemia…”
    Kassi picked the box up, cocked her head to listen to the card on the side, and whistled. “This is…”—she looked at the box again, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe—“the best.