The Great Wheel by Ian R. MacLeod Page A

happen.”
    “I had to access some maintenance systems.” She fanned her hands in a shrug. “And I remembered what you’d said. It was easy to break through the right partition. Requests from your clinic will have a much higher priority from now on. I won’t say what priority you were given before…” She smiled.
    “I can imagine.”
    Dressed in a loose khaki suit and scuffed flat-heeled boots, she made an odd blend of the strange and the ordinary. And what happens, he wondered, when someone finds out that you’ve illegally tweaked the net? And how, anyway, does a young Borderer get trusted enough, and wanted enough, to work on it in the first place?
    He showed her around the clinic, finding himself stupidly apologizing for the mess, the litter of books and cards, the empty boxes of drugs that he kept for fear of losing the dosage instructions. She looked at the doctor in the backroom for some time, standing closer than most people did. Sensing her presence, it clicked open its wide middle hip-grasping mandibles in a half-hopeful offer of embrace.
    “How old is this?”
    “Don’t ask.”
    “Is it mobile? Do you take it out with you?”
    He shook his head, smiling as he tried to imagine walking around the Endless City with this great red-armored knight clanking behind him.
    “Do you have any plans this afternoon, Father John?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “But I—”
    “Then I’ll show you where I used to live.”
    Here at last, he thought as he locked up the clinic and followed Laurie out into the Plaza Princesa in the shadow of the bombed-out towerblock, where she’d parked a rusty van, was a Borderer he could talk to—even if she did come from the Zone. Someone who was, but for the color of her eyes, really like him. She brushed away the litter of tube wrappers and tissues from the van’s passenger seat for him, then inserted the card and started the engine. As the van rose and began to slide towards the nearest houses, gathering speed, zooming through a gap and down the narrow street, he decided that if Laurie stopped working on the net, she could always earn her living as a Magulf taxi driver.
    She drove him fifteen kilometers west out through the Mella and along the coast to Chott. On the wide concrete ruin of the old highway they overtook vans, donkeys, wagons, big foline-powered twenty-wheelers, sheep, goats, and plodding Borderer families. This was farther out than he’d been before. Here where the road dipped close to the Breathless Ocean, the remains of ancient towerblocks stuck out from slate-colored slime. Laurie explained that they had once been part of a coastal resort, back in the time before the sea rose. Farther on were more kelpbeds, a much earlier project than the ones around Bab Mensor, divided by pipes and narrow concrete piers into a checkerboard that stretched halfway to the horizon across the sea, glossy in the afternoon light.
    The old highway climbed where the coastline rose into cliffs. It veered, breaking perilously near the edge before giving out entirely where there had once been an ambitious suspension bridge. In the bridge’s place, situated along a much used track a little more inland, a rickety span had been built out of wood, jelt, and scaffolding. On each side of the drop, children with guns and leaf tattoos on both cheeks were collecting the toll from the queuing vehicles, signaling across the gap to make sure that only one twenty-wheeler occupied the central span at a time.
    “Take off your gloves,” Laurie said as they waited in a fog of foline. “And keep your sleeve down over your watch. They’ll charge ten times as much if they see you’re a European.”
    He wound down the window, pulled at the threads, and quickly tossed his gloves out before the catalysts began to burn. “Okay now?”
    She fumbled amid the old food wrappers beneath the dashboard and passed him a vial. “And drop this into your eyes.”
    She laughed when he hesitated. “What’s the