The Great Wheel by Ian R. MacLeod Page B

problem?”
    “This isn’t like you in Trinity Gardens. Out here, I can’t play games with my identity.”
    She looked at him, no longer laughing, and he caught the faint seashore Borderer smell that, he realized, didn’t come from the eating of kelp, as he’d always imagined. “Why come to the Endless City if you don’t want to be involved? What is the point…?”
    He opened the vial and tilted back his head. As the fluid spilled over his cheeks, Laurie turned up the fans and followed the sixteen-wheeler ahead of them to the lip of the bridge. He touched his eyelids.
    “Do you have a mirror?”
    She shook her head, winding down her window to pay the toll. The boy who took the money said Ossar? skay —hardly glancing at them.
    A kilometer beyond the bridge, Laurie turned off the old highway towards Chott. Many of the sixteen-wheelers were also heading that way, and the buildings were scarred by their collisions. Chott was the site of some of the largest and most productive kelpbeds, and big effluent pipes ran downhill beside them. She turned again beneath a broken arch and killed the engine in a small square.
    She opened the van’s doors. “We can walk from here.”
    “What about my accent? What happens if someone tries to talk to me?”
    “Act dumb—I’m sure you can manage that.” She studied him. “It’s good that you dress so poorly. You really don’t look like a European.”
    “Well, thanks.”
    “Keep your hands in your pockets and keep your watch out of sight. Act sensibly.”
    “This is acting sensibly?”
    He followed as she left the square. There was a small stall in the first street they came to. It sold chimes, dried gourds, and an assortment of ornamental mirrors. She held one up, tilting it towards his face, and laughed at his reaction.
    “Brown,” she said. “Is that right?”
    “What do you mean, right?”
    “Is that the color you were born with?”
    “I don’t know. Somehow, I always thought blue…”
    As he walked on with Laurie, John could feel the faint breeze on his face from the passage of other bodies, the changes in the air as the street narrowed, widened, as they passed dank alleyways, noisy doorways, the swarming heat that issued from raked-up piles of dung, the drafts of koiyl and cinnamon from the spice souk, the white flutter of the tiers of washing hung overhead. The sounds seemed stronger too. Everything was more intense. Eyes that were green or brown or blue studied him—he was taller than most Borderers, and his fair skin was uncommon—but only in vague curiosity, and no one came close. He recalled something that he’d noticed many times before, but only as an observer: how the Borderers were able to move swiftly in a confined space without ever bumping into one another. It was a complex dance he was incapable of performing, but as long as he stuck close to Laurie, he felt safe.
    Already it was late afternoon and the streets downhill were getting grimmer and darker, the reek of the kelpbeds was growing stronger. Laurie and John ended up picking their way across a slippery maze of piers and duckboards close to the shore. The mud here was topped by the sluggish tide of the Breathless Ocean, which seeped in past the protective pontoons and sluices. To the west, the thickening sky was netted with the lights and cranes of Chott’s main depots and processing plants, where refined kelp was collected in anything from huge barge skips to wheelbarrows. From there the proteins, starches, and edible oils were taken to be boiled and flavored in the vats of cookshops, homes, and factories; the bulk fiber was pressed for a cheap kind of jelt; the flammable vapors and oils were refined into foline.
    Laurie sat down on a smooth-topped rock, and John sat beside her. Oddly enough, there was something contemplative about this place.
    “What are you thinking?” she asked eventually.
    “How the old fathers in the seminary explained the kelpbeds. How anything can seem neat and