Free The Great Wheel by Ian R. MacLeod Page B

Bona. Yes? The very?”
    “That’s right,” he said. “The very.”
    His gaze drifted back to the wall behind Kassi, where the agony of Christ’s delicately carved flesh was thrown into sharp relief by the halogen blaze.
    “Would you like to see?” she asked.
    “See?”
    “My people.”
    “Yes. Of course.”
    Kassi led him back across the courtyard and up the creaking steps into the Cresta Motel. It was a hospital of sorts, although hospitals were uncommon in the Endless City, where illness wasn’t anticipated by internal defenses but diagnosed only when symptoms showed and treated by the age-old remedies of tablet and injection, where even the practice of invasive surgery still sometimes occurred. The sick were generally looked after at home by their families. Money could still buy a reasonable degree of health with the drugs and treatments provided by healers, quacks, witchwomen, locally built doctors, and market stalls, but those Borderers who grew ill and had no one to see to them risked dying in the street. Kassi picked up a few of these, laid them on a mattress along one of the corridors of the Cresta Motel, pumped them up with what food and drugs a largely forgotten joint Magulf-Halcycon initiative still provided, and occasionally helped John with the cases he discovered. She had just four assistants.
    There was an odd, whispering silence along the arched stone hallways that could never have belonged to any kind of motel. It came from the breathing of the patients; the exhalation of a sluggish sea, broken occasionally by coughs, grunts, cries of pain.
    Kassi’s lantern danced over the posters and screens that she had put up to disguise the wet gray walls; it arched shadows across the figures that lay curled on their pallets, it glistened on the faces that turned towards Kassi and John. Some were pale, sweat-sheened. Some were like skulls. In contrast, a young man sat smiling and nodding his head to the beat of whatever music he’d wired into his ear, the ulcer in his gut sealed by the miracle of a recombinant drug. He wanted, Kassi said, patting and squeezing his shoulder, to stay on and learn how to become a healer. But as they walked off, she added, in European, that her patients often said that when they were in the first rush of recovery. It was usually a different matter when the time actually came to leave. Not, of course, that she blamed them. She shrugged, waving her hands. Fatoo knew how it was— fornu…
    As usual, deferring to a knowledge that she surely knew he didn’t possess, Kassi stooped and pulled back the blankets of some of the more difficult or troubling cases to seek his advice. Here were the butchered legs of a young lad who had somehow managed to step on a landmine that must have lain buried beneath a wastepit for at least two centuries. And here was the pustulating flesh of a woman in the last phases of smallpox VII. She was still conscious enough to attempt to pull away when John leaned over her.
    “Is right?” Kassi whispered, drawing him away, “that I give an ending? Is that the way of God?”
    Every time he came, Kassi would take him to some hopeless case and ask if it was right to give an ending, if that was the way of God.
    “You know what she has, Kassi,” he said. “She’ll be dead soon anyway.”
    “So I give an ending?”
    Kassi gazed up at him.
    “Yes,” he said. “It’s the way of God.”
    Her face relaxed a little. Later, she’d return to this bed with one of the tiny hand-blown glass vials he’d seen her secretly fingering. She’d break it and dribble the sticky poison onto the woman’s lips or, if the woman was still conscious, Kassi would let her crush it with her own teeth and swallow. That, anyway, was what he supposed. Kassi led him farther along the stinking passageway where little rivers of blood, sweat-fever, and urine snaked across the floor. John spoke the last rites over an elderly woman, trying to ignore the bones, moonrocks, and bowls