The Great Wheel by Ian R. MacLeod

Northern Mountains. Whatever they had been wearing on their feet had given out along the way. The girl held a small bundle close to her chest. John realized it was a baby.
    He turned on his translat.
    “What can I do?”
    Ee do hep?
    They cringed away from him. They’d probably never seen a European before.
    The girl said something that the translat rendered as “Help my baby.”
    “Come in.”
    Cum ha…
    He unlocked the clinic, disabled the alarms, and gestured at the open doorway, trying to smile. There was likely to be little else he could do: anyone who came from beyond the Endless City would be seeking him as a last resort. The family remained huddled at the doorway. Deciding to wait for Nuru, he checked the rodent and insect traps for occupants, then packaged more samples to add to the box in the refrigerator he’d send by taxi to Tim in the Zone. It was grisly job, even with the neatly sealed tubes and cartons that the doctor, a couple of local healers, and workers at the incinerator plant at El Teuf had provided him with. Fishing a blank card from the desk, he activated it and said:
    “Tim, I know I’m probably sending you far more than you need. Here’s another card with copies of most of my case files on it. I took it as a backup a few weeks ago. And this card I got from Kassi Moss, the woman who runs the Cresta Motel. I tried playing it here but came up with nothing. So I suspect it’s in binary…”
    He fired up the small incinerator and placed the spare tissue samples inside, making the sign of the cross as the fats sizzled. A few minutes later, Nuru arrived and persuaded the family from the Northern Mountains to enter. Eventually, he also succeeded in prizing the baby from the girl’s fear-rigid arms for the doctor to examine, but the tiny body was cold and stiff, with leathery skin and cavernous eyes: it had been dead for at least two days.
    When John attempted to say a prayer, the girl bared her teeth in fear and made a sign against the evil eye. Snatching the corpse back from Nuru, she and the boy ran from the surgery. John blinked and rubbed his eyes, breathing the fecal stink of decay that they had left behind them. Surely they’d realized their baby was dead. So had they come all this way to the Plaza Princesa expecting a miracle?
    “Peasants,” Nuru said.
    “Everyone is someone else’s peasant,” John said. “Have you ever been in the Northern Mountains? Do you know what it’s like there?”
    Nuru shook his head, amazed at the suggestion.
    “But they’re supposed to grow their own food, aren’t they? They have some independence, they don’t rely on the kelp-beds.”
    “They eat pig shit, grow koiyl.”
    “Is that where the koiyl leaf comes from? The Northern Mountains?”
    “Yep. But don’t Fatoo try the stuff. Nuru’s gramadre say it rot your blood.”
    John stared at Nuru. Bludrut.
    “Fatoo wanna see next?”
    “Yes. But will you do me a favor?”
    Nuru smiled and held out his hand.
    John took out a coin, wiped it with dysol, and placed it on the surgery desk. Nuru picked it up.
    John said, “I want you to buy me some koiyl.”
    Later, when Nuru and the last of the patients had gone, John was in the frontroom preparing to lock up when the main door creaked open again, letting in a roseate gust of Magulf wind and light.
    Turning, he saw that it was Laurie Kalmar, and automatically took a step back before he remembered her lydrin implant.
    “I got your message from my answerer,” she said, picking up from the desk the broken card of one of the old cartons that John had been trying to decipher. She turned it over in her hands. The leaking card trailed a few pinkish-gray nerves. Today, her eyes were green. “So I thought I’d have a look…”
    “Did you really get the engineer to come here?”
    “It was simple enough.” She wiped her fingers and put the card down.
    “No—I’m really curious. How did you do it? It usually takes so long to make anything