A BARELY TEENAGE BOY AND girl were camped outside the clinic’s doors. Their woolen djellabas, stiff with sweat and dust, indicated that they came from the 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 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 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 elegant if you look at it from a wide enough distance…”

The nearest pontoons were gently rising, falling, slopping in and out of the mud. In the gloom beyond, he could just make out figures moving along the walkways. Kelp workers dragging nets, or poling canoes across the thick lagoons. As a rule, an individual worker owned and was responsible for his own kelpbed, maintaining it, buying in quotas from the inflows, selling the product to the operators of the dryingpans, who in turn sold to the bigger bulk processors. A whole food chain based on market forces. It wasn’t unknown for kelp workers, operating alone and in competition with the owners of the pens around them, to fall from the walkways or out of their canoes into the thick unswimmable soup, and for their cries for help to go unheard. A drowned body could easily get tangled and hidden, lost into the process, and end up as food.

“I once tried to feed kelpbread to the ducks in Trinity Gardens,” Laurie said. “But they wouldn’t eat it.”

“Before I came here, I imagined that I’d be eating nothing else,” he said, “but Felipe has his friends and contacts. Still, Bella uses the stuff to bulk things up. I can always taste it…”

Behind them lay a scatter of huts and houses clinging to small islands of mud or raised on drunken stilts. There was an incredible stench, a smell so strong that it flowed into the other senses; it thickened the already dim light and muffled every sound.

“The place I was born is somewhere near,” she said. “I can’t be quite sure. There was a bad tide a few years back, and things collapse and change.” She pointed out over the pontoons. “See the markerbuoy and the big pipe? I think my father’s kelpbeds were in front and to the left. But it’s easy to get lost.”

“What was it like?”

“It was a long time ago. You invent things according to how other people tell you they were. I mean this smell—I don’t remember that—but I do remember the way the kids whose parents weren’t kelp workers used to fight us and say we stank. But the money wasn’t bad, and kelp workers are used to doing things their own way. My father was very much like that—he was stubborn—and the tradition goes back in the family. The big upheaval was when my grandparents moved from the older beds at Tabia to the ones here. I remember how they used to talk about it…”

John gazed at her, wondering why she was telling him this.

“On my mother’s side,” she continued, staring out at the grainy horizon, “I know even less. I think her father used to repair old trucks, but she would never quite say. To be honest, she’s what you Europeans call a snob, although there really isn’t a Borderer word for it, and she never got over working with lydrin in her blood in Europe. And I never did understand why she married my father. It couldn’t have been his looks. It couldn’t have been his money. It certainly couldn’t have been the way he smelled…”

Laurie shook her head in puzzlement. Perhaps, John thought, they’d been in love.

“My mother worked in Europe before they met,” she continued, “but she buckled down to being a kelp worker even though she hated it. Helping my father, having kids—she probably hated that too. There were me and two brothers, and another brother who died. We all used to share this big cot up in the roof, and at night she would lie beside us and watch the lantern lights move across the ceiling as the workers walked up from the shore. The funny thing was, she never told us stories about Zazu or Peter Rabbit or Growling George. Night after night, she told us about her year in Europe.

“She was in personal service with a family in the Lowlands. The main house was huge—at least the way she told it. And outside there were mazes and lakes and pergolas. On one of the children’s birthdays they put up this big carousel with bright wooden horses inside the house. Imagine…” Laurie smiled, far away. “…a carousel turning under the chandeliers in this big hall. And the woman, the lady of the house, for some reason, she singled my mother out. She made her a…” She paused, searching for the word. “Confidante. Is that right?”

John nodded.

“She used to have my mother sit beside her each afternoon in a white bedroom with a balcony and the sound of doves outside. And they would talk and drink iced coffee and tell each other stories of their different lives. And those stories would get tangled up with the ones our mother told us until it got so, when I was nearly asleep, I felt as though I had actually become that woman in that white bedroom with the doves and the balcony and the lakes and the lawns…

“Once in the winter, my mother took a flight with the rich family to London. And she had this wonderful night on her own with no responsibilities and everyone out at some show. It was foggy and dark outside, so she put on a coat and a scarf over her head so no one would see her eyes. And she just walked out. Just looking, staring. Seeing the big terraced houses and gardens and the lights of the cars and the trees and the shiny machines sweeping the leaves, and the glow of the roses, and the sweet green smell of the river. The people were out walking their dogs, and smiling hello because they thought she was a European. There was nothing but clear glass in the windows of the houses, and the curtains were open so she could see into all these happy, wealthy scenes. My mother kept telling us about that night in London as we lay in the big cot. About the time she went out pretending she was European…

“Then my father died, and my two brothers. The anchors to one of the outer pontoons gave way. Floated out. Sank. They tried to swim back through the Breathless Ocean, but of course they were poisoned and drowned. Anyway, that was the story. But it turned out that one of the big kelp processors had got hold of some European cassan—that’s aid money—and needed some of our plots for bypass drainage, and that my father had been holding out without telling any of us. He was always groaning on about quotas and prices. His being stubborn over this drainage thing probably meant that he and Kerr and Tony were killed so that we’d sell out. But I don’t know. Just my mother and I were left, and the joke was, we were paid a good price for the beds and pens. All those years of work—and we got more by simply giving up. Or maybe it was money for what had been done—guilt, compensation. It was enough for me and my mother to go Mokifa. You know Mokifa?”

“Yes.”

“And she did her best to forget about life and get on with her dreams—which by now revolved entirely around me.” Gazing out, elbows on knees, hands clasped, Laurie shrugged. “It gets boring after that, really. My mother put me on treatments of tetje. She didn’t even say at first, but I remember the taste and how she tried to hide the taste in the food with curry and kelp sugar. I’d always been the bright one anyway, the clever prickly kid. I got through the entrance scans for Drezzar. It’s intensive there. You spend five or six hours a day with a hood on your head, and the rest with screens. All day they make you speak European. By then I was taking the tetje myself, and the phenothate you need afterwards to keep you calm. My little secret. Huddled in the toilets with a syringe because the hit was quicker. I was always worried that if I didn’t have the tetje, I’d fail the next scan. I’d be out…”

“Do you still take it?”

“No. And I probably would have done fine at Drezzar without it—most of the kids were there because of money instead of their brains. I quit the phenothate too. Anyway, the aptitude scans at Drezzar kept saying I was abstract/numerate, so they let me work on a screen that had an airwave link with the Zone. There was this routing problem with some of the processing drains at Chott that I sorted out. It was easy enough—I was just doing it as a student project—but it worked and I saved someone a whole lot of money. I was probably the first person looking at the program who’d ever actually got her hands filthy with the kelp…I was a whiz then, a minor celebrity. Word got out.”

Laurie sat on the rock above the mud, hugging her knees.

“And from that,” John prompted her, “you were selected to work with the net?”

“The net selected me. Or maybe it was politics—you know how they like to have the odd Gog in apparently trustworthy positions. So they can point and say look…”

“Laurie, how old are you?”

“Twenty-six. I don’t know,” she continued, answering an internal question. “I’ll maybe stay on at the Zone for another two years. The money is good. Then…Then I’ll decide. I feel like I’ve been on this ride all my life. Pushed along on these rails. You don’t like the way you’re going, but at least it isn’t your fault, you can blame others for what’s been decided. But it’s not always easy to step off…”

It was fully dark now, although people were still working on the kelpbeds. John could see the bobbing yellow lanterns, hear the ticking of a hand-pulled winch.

“Come on,” Laurie said, “I’ll take you back.”

She stood up, rubbing at her legs. Her pale outline shimmered. Chill fingers of mist began to rise as the two of them walked towards the ramshackle nests of houses. They reached lights. Voices. The smoke of cooking. The streets up the hill were swarming, even more crowded than they had been that afternoon. But the people parted for Laurie, and John followed in her wake. A witchwoman sat at a narrow crossroads on an ornate rug, wreathed in smoking incense and surrounded by enamel bowls, tin rockets, chunks of moonrock, star charts, and the polished skulls of rats, goats, humans. John slowed, and saw a small green snake slide out from a candlelit eyesocket. The witchwoman scooped the snake up and held it out to him with a gap-toothed smile.

What had Tim said—that the witchwomen were infected by madness? This odd uniformity of behavior had to be based on something, and the tolerance, too, of the generally atheistic Borderers towards them. And why the obsession with the other planets? All that had been learned in the brief years of the exploration of Venus and Mars was that cycles of devastation were routinely at play. On the cinderblocks and the great gas giants as well. Planets routinely fostered and then shrugged off life.

But now that the world expended its resources exclusively on the great, orbital, winged solar deflectors and thermonuclear toruses that battled to sustain warmth and safe skies, he supposed it was better that the rocks and sand that men and women had journeyed across space for should end up being revered rather than stored and forgotten in some net-maintained warehouse.

Laurie drove back towards Gran Vía on the lower roads through the oldtowns and the gray-walled new housing projects, where even she was forced to stick to the sluggish pace dictated by the lumbering open buses, wandering cattle, scurrying flocks of children, aimless drunks.

“I never came this far,” he said.

“When?”

“This way—when I was gathering data.”

“Ah yes.” She nodded. “I remember. There’s a kind of disease, and you said you thought something could be done…”

“Tim Purdoe’s checking some samples for me.”

“For what?”

“A link between cancer and radiation. Leukemia—bludrut.”

Her mouth tightened. “I do know what leukemia is.”

“Did you ever hear of any cases?”

“No—you’re not disappointed, are you?”

He shook his head and looked out the window. The wind was weaving ribbons of dust and smoke through the lighted evening.

“I’m sorry.” She handed him a tube. He broke the seal but couldn’t tell the shade. “It’s just the way you people always react when you come here. You all take one look and seem to think you have the answer. But if you’re serious, if you really think there is something…”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Then I’d like to see the cards sometime. I might be able to help with the net. I mean, it’s not exactly my field…”

“Tim’s doing tests on some tissue samples and food substances. If there is a cause, a pollutant, it has to be common, but it can’t be something too obvious, like windblown dust or solar breakthrough or kelp—Halcycon wouldn’t have let that through the system all these years. It has to be something else. Something with a slow buildup that’s only present in tiny quantities. Something that has a strong affinity for living cells so that it’s absorbed into the body rather than excreted.” He stopped.

“Sounds like you’re close,” Laurie said after a while.

“I think I am…” He bit off the end of his tube and drew. It tasted of cinnamon, wood leaves, firesmoke, autumn. Briefly, he felt the way he was supposed to: filled with pointless nostalgia, both happy and sad. And the colors streaming from doorways and screens and signs were red, yellow, amber, orange. Sweat-covered faces and sliding limbs. “Where are we now?”

“You’ll see.”

She cranked down her window to let the smoke escape. Arms reached out, but she handled the van well, kept moving, spinning the wheel to avoid the bodies ahead. He heard shouts, laughter. And then there were mouths parting near him, glimpses of flesh. Here, there was no need for a translat. The meaning was universal: the offer of easy surprise. All eyes followed the van. Battered as it was, it still spelled ossar—money.

“Over there.” Laurie pointed to a building that climbed out of the smog, where a faulty screen over the doorway stuttered with an image that John thought for a moment was a mouth, then an opening flower. “…you get the Europeans. It’s a big treat, you know. To have a few drinks, smoke a few tubes, come out here from the Zone.”

So this was Agouna. He drew again on the tube, wondering if it was that or the brown-iris pigment that was giving everything this blur of distance. And Laurie was still talking: See, Father John, over there, see those people across the street—they have their orifices electronically enhanced. And did you know, Father John, that they often die when the acid leaks from their implant batteries? Her words turned bitter, and he caught the dark breeze from the tube she was smoking, quite different from his own.

“I wanted you to see,” she said.

She dropped him off outside the presbytery. His eyes were hurting him now, but in his groggy state he put it down to tiredness until, climbing to his room in the presbytery, he paused by the clouded mirror on the stairway to examine his face. What a joke it would be, he thought, if the catalyst were to hold permanently. But the iris of his left eye was already half-faded, barely a grayish brown. The silver, the iris-bleaching pigment that had started out as a whim of European fashion and then become an unshakable badge of identity, was returning. Vaguely disappointed, John walked the rest of the way up the stairs.