IT WAS EVENING BY the time he drew close to Hemhill. As the sights grew more familiar, the last part of the journey seemed to slow and expand. The lights of one of the great agripedes sparkled like moonlight through the tall hedges, and he braked the car and buzzed down the window to let in the summer smells of ripening jelt and corn.

After the long journey, it was odd to make this switch to the real and the particular. He remembered how he’d once had dreams of what it would be like to return home from somewhere far off. The dreams were unspecific, but in them he’d always done something marvelous while he was away, and everyone he knew would be waiting. Hal was there at the front, shaking his head and smiling down at his little brother. I’d never have believed it. Skiddle…

He passed the big oak at the railinged edge of Hemhill’s small central park where, swift and exulting—at least until he looked down—he’d once climbed. The streets and the houses were variations on neatness, with names that changed occasionally to suit the whims of death, divorce, company moves, and the house market. Sixpenny House. Arden. Leaves flashed overhead, and the white gate of his parents’ house swung open at his approach. He stopped the car and stepped out, blinking as the lights came on.

“That is you…?”

His mother’s shadow stretched out from the doorstep. His father waited in silhouette behind.

“I was saying, wasn’t I? That you might be back. I had this feeling.”

She planted a dry kiss on his cheek and pulled him swiftly inside.

“Come. It’s…”

Their hands and words floated around him. He went into the lounge, where they had new chairs. He sat on one. And a new carpet; some kind of material that managed to be soft and smooth yet was dustless so as not to irritate their lungs. New wallpaper, too. And a new card in the picture in the wall, which displayed an almost white landscape clothed in either moonlight or snow. His mother had already shot off to the kitchen, and his father sat facing him, hands clasped, elbows on his knees, leaning forward in his chair. There were age mottles on his father’s face now, and the thinning gray hair was swept from a shining sweep of skin-covered bone. His cheeks sagged. He was nearly sixty.

“You look well.”

“Thanks. You too, Dad.”

“It’s…Hmmm.”

John smiled at the house cleaner as it swiveled into the room to pick up the tray of tea china that lay on a sidetable. He raised a hand to delay the command and draw it over. He placed his palm on the warm brass dome, stroking to the rough edge of the cpu plate that he and Hal had so often removed.

“Exactly how long,” his father was asking, “will you be staying, John?” He blinked. “What I mean is…”

“What he means,” his mother called from the kitchen, “is that you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

“Just two days,” John said. Squeaking slightly, the cleaner rattled out of the room. “I was in Paris,” he added. “The bishop agreed I should take a short rest before going back to the Magulf.”

His father regarded him. It had gone quiet in the kitchen. Rest. Bishop. By that quick statement, John had intended to forestall further questions, but he’d rehearsed it too often in the car, and it now implied all the things he’d meant not to say.

“Did you get the soup?”

“Soup?”

“The soup I sent you, Son. When you called us, you asked for powdered soup.”

“No,” John said. His father would have questioned him about the flavors and the brand if he’d lied and said yes. “These things take time, Dad. But I’m sure it’ll come through.”

“Time. Of course.” But his father looked pained.

John shifted in the new chair. It was huge. His fingers strayed to the screen on the arm. He touched it, and the cushions softened and his feet rose into the air.

His father, still unsmiling, said, “If you’d have known you were coming, John, you could have picked it up and taken it with you. I mean, the soup.”

“Yes. If I had known, that would have been simpler.”

His mother came in with dinner steaming on a tray. He’d already stopped and eaten in the late afternoon. Shaking the salt out over sausages, French toast, chips, and bacon—and with every possibility of pudding to follow—he realized that that had been a stupid thing to do.

“We thought you could go up and see Hal afterward,” his mother said. She perched on the edge of a chair, her hands pressed into her lap.

When he finished eating, he placed the tray on the floor and snapped his fingers, and the three of them watched as the cleaner came in and picked it up. When it left the room, his mother’s face relaxed a little into a smile. “Would you like to go up now?” She half-stood from the chair. “I mean, if you’re…”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“How is Hal?” he asked her in the glare of the hall.

“John, he’s the same. I have this now.” She raised her arm, tugged at her sleeve, and held her left wrist to him, as though inviting him to sample a new perfume. “It saves me having to worry and hang around him quite so much. Pricks at my nerves like a little needle.” He saw a silver implant entwined around the veins above her watch. A pulsing light. She made a face. “And I had to have it done, of course. Your father wouldn’t.”

“No.”

“Anyway, off you go.”

She watched him from the foot of the stairs, one hand resting on the banister, the tiny ruby light in her wrist still showing through the wool of her cardigan. The air was noticeably dimmer on the landing. Past the door into John’s own room, which was slightly ajar, Hal’s door along the landing was shut. John started when, as he reached for it, it swung open. Then came the tingle of the molecular barrier that had kept the outside air at bay ever since Hal’s minor fungal infection—something so odd that even his net-enhanced viruses hadn’t reacted—of a couple of years before. The lighting grew slowly from darkness to a dull glow. That and the soundproofing were innovations made in the years when there were still things to be done to this room that hadn’t yet been tried. Comatose patients, his mother once read in the ancient and esoteric medical books she buried herself in, could be precipitated into fatal crisis by sudden lights and noises.

John pushed through the wall of slightly warmer, moister air. Even the presence of his own body seemed to gather in slow increments inside this increasingly isolated box. He paused, took a breath. He crossed the soft and slightly sticky surface of the material that now covered the floor to the bed where Hal lay. So much about the room had changed, yet so much remained the same. The desk where Hal had worked, the books and cards and games on the shelves. Yet it was all so neat now, the way it would have been if he’d finished cleaning up the detritus of his childhood that night and gone to London to study—what was it called?—structural communication.

“Hello, Hal.”

Click, sigh. The faint pepperminty scent of whatever it was that was used to repurify the air.

Click, sigh.

“It’s me. John. I’m back. In the flesh this time.”

It was so quiet, he could hear his own heartbeat—and the subterranean hum of the transformer in the unit beside the bed that pulled the monitoring data through a direct link with the big thermonuclear torus at Leominster. Enough power, his father had once said, to run a bloody factory. And to light, John now thought, a fair portion of the Endless City. Still, they could afford it on their Halcycon pensions and the extra medical grants they’d been given. If his parents hadn’t had all this expense, they might not have put their summerhouse at Ley up for sale, but John doubted it. Even with Hal fully alive and working somewhere fabulous on things he couldn’t explain, this room would still have remained a shrine.

“I’m just back for a couple of days. I’ve been to see the bishop in Paris. She suggested…” There was a chair by the bed that he recognized from the old diningroom set. The backrest dug into his spine when he sat down. It couldn’t be comfortable to sit here for long hours, as his mother must do. “She suggested I come here. It’s just a day or two, Hal. Then I go back.”

Click, sigh. The peachy smell of the flowers on the other side of the bed washed over him in a sickly wave. Too-bright yellow chrysanthemums from the garden in a tall glass vase. He saw a spider climbing over the petals. Every movement seemed retarded, retracted, delayed.

“I haven’t told Mum and Dad, but this visit is supposed to be a time of regrouping. Coming to terms. She’s a decent woman, the bishop. The sort of thinking priest you always said you could just about come to terms with…”

Click, sigh. The warm starfield of bronzes, marbles, and cups on the far wall blazed and winked at him. Tennis, football, chess.

“…but the fact is, Hal, I’ve been sleeping with this girl, a Borderer woman, Laurie, and word’s got around the Zone. And the business about the contaminated leaf, that’s also gone a little awry. I don’t, anyway, seem to be getting very far.”

He realized that he was speaking more to the screen on the monitor box than to Hal. It was the instrument that sniffed at and sensed the room, monitored vital signs and brain activity for any traces of movement or pain, and fed data into the ravaged stump of Hal’s consciousness. John could see the wires that ran from the box and tunneled into the pitted flesh of Hal’s wrist where his watch had been—the final threads in the web—and the rainbow-thin but nevertheless slightly thicker cable that was taped to the side of his cheek and then entered his nose to mate with the internal implant that had been embedded through the bone amid the dead cells at the base of his skull.

“But apparently it doesn’t jeopardize my immediate position—my term with Felipe in the presbytery. I’m going back, Hal. Day after tomorrow. It seems that no matter what you do, even if you step out of line, break your vows, discover a way of saving lives…nothing changes. Things remain the same.”

Hal’s flesh had a healthy gloss. Healthier than John’s own. The bare arms and shoulders—lying above the special gray-green sheet that rippled constantly at some imperceptible molecular level to stimulate the skin and that could turn soft or rigid or liquid-smooth at the touch of a screen—had excellent tone and definition. They lay there, easy and relaxed as in an artist’s drawing. A life study. But Hal’s face, as always since the coma deepened, didn’t quite connect with the real, remembered Hal. Like the muscles, it was too relaxed, too smooth. John gazed at the square jaw, the faint dimple in the chin, the broad, slightly compressed lips, the chiseled nose. The closed eyes set wide apart. John remembered the faces of the kings carved in the rocks above Hettie’s cave, and how much, truly, Hal was like them—a king. That noble, unfurrowed brow. His mother kept his hair cut exactly as he used to have it cut. A little less fashionable now, and it still stuck up around the crown no matter what you did with it. That tuft would have always made him appear boyish as he grew older.

The cheeks were slightly hollower, the skin around the placid curve of his eyelids thinner and more stretched, but there was no real sign of age. Although…John leaned a little closer. Yes, his brother was graying at the temples. Quite a bit, once you noticed it. He wondered how his mother reacted when she saw that. Whether she had considered buying something to disguise it. At least Hal wasn’t going bald like Tim Purdoe.

“So anyway, Hal. I’m here because I’m here. I wanted to look around. See you and Mum and Dad. See Annie…” he paused. Annie. “If she’s still here. I haven’t seen her in years. And I have fond memories.” He stopped. “Fond memories, Hal, of the times when you both used to take me out to places with you. Remember Gloucester? Remember nights at the carnival?”

He reached out now, watching the slow, underwater movement of his arm as it stretched towards Hal, towards the hand that was resting, palm down and fingers loosely cupped, on the smooth sheet. Then his fingers touching, sliding beneath, closing on Hal’s own. Hand clasping hand. Flesh on flesh. Hal’s greater warmth, the slackness, and the slight dampness of sweat between them. John sniffed, and dabbed at his nose with the hand that wasn’t holding Hal’s. There was always this moment when, coming home and seeing Hal, he felt like crying. But the tears didn’t quite come today. He took a breath. It would pass.

“Anyway, Hal…” The hand lay cupped in his own. A warm sleeper’s hand, like the flesh of Laurie’s body when she lay against him. “I’ll look in again.” He squeezed, felt bone and cartilage shifting. Was that a slight pressure in return? He dismissed the thought. He’d spent too many years listening as his mother pointed to screens and specially-brought-in monitors and timecharts that supposedly detailed Hal’s responses to real-world events and input changes from the net. It was a blind alley, John decided long ago. If Hal ever recovered, there would be no doubting. The whole world would know.

Their flesh stuck slightly as John withdrew his hand. He stood up. Hal’s right arm now lay a little crooked, the fingers and palm tipped over, no longer a mirror image of the left. He decided to leave it like that. His mother would rearrange it soon enough anyway, have Hal back the way she wanted. There was no real point in his interfering.

Click, sigh.

The door swung open. The barrier passed over him.

He left the room.

“We have a happy enough life,” his mother said later as she prepared his room for him to sleep in. It was called the guestroom now, and few signs of his childhood remained beneath the freshly painted and papered surfaces. It seemed as if only the things that had never really been part of his room, like that vase, like that dreadful dampstained engraving of ancient Heidelberg, had been left as they were. “I wake up each morning,” his mother said, “and I think of the whole day ahead. How lucky I am. My time’s really my own. I embroider. And we play golf…”

He nodded. Her conversation seemed to be something that surfaced from an endless argument in her head. The blessings she had to count. Set against this, set against that…

“When I think of those poor people you must see every day in the Endless City.”

“It’s not as bad as people imagine.”

The bed—a new bed he’d never slept on—was busy making itself. He watched the sheets billow and slide.

“But do people think, I wonder?” His mother glanced up at him, then returned to supervising the bed, smoothing out imagined rucks, crimping at the corners in a way that would once have infuriated him, fluffing and unstraightening the pillows, making little adjustments that the bed immediately attempted to rectify. He wondered why they’d bought the thing. He realized as he gazed down at her busy, trembling hands, at the pink of her scalp showing through the neatly trimmed helmet of silver hair, that he was intensely irritated by everything they’d done to his room.

“Next door, you know,” she said, and for a moment he thought she meant Hal, “they have a pool. A pool now for swimming in, and this thing like a frog that swims around it every morning gobbling up all the insects and stuff and then sicking it out into the flowerbeds for mulch. That’s the Youngsons. You remember the Youngsons?”

He nodded. He’d known the Youngsons all his life. “Do you ever use it? Their pool?”

“Not often. Stan and Helen say, come around anytime, but you know how it is.” She fluffed the pillow again, then stood back, her head cocked. “Of course, your father complains about the kids always shouting and splashing. He likes to have his windows open when he listens to his music. He says that to get the proper transients you need fresh air.”

“Don’t they complain about the music?”

His mother shrugged, raising her shoulders. “Funnily enough, no. Did you enjoy your dinner?”

“It was fine, Mum.”

“You look a bit thin. Do you really eat the sludge they grow out there? Seaweed?”

“It’s just base protein and carbohydrates.”

“Yes,” she said. “And you know, that food I gave you—the sausage, the bacon—it’s been staring at me in the larder for, I don’t know. For years.” She crossed her arms in front of her, her fingers linked. “You know how your father always loved his breakfast? What he called a proper breakfast? The first day of our retirement, I fried him two eggs myself instead of using the cleaner. And you know, he came and sat down and looked at them and he said, I think I should tell you that I’ve never really liked this kind of stuff. It sticks in my throat. And then he stood up and got himself some flakes.” She smiled and clenched her fingers more tightly together. “Can you imagine? All those years? And then he says he’s never even liked the stuff.”

“Dad’s Dad.”

“Yes.” She looked at him, blinking. “He really is, isn’t he? Still…”

“And you’re managing?”

“Oh yes.” His mother smiled. “I’m managing.” She untangled her hands, opened them. “Come here, John.”

He walked around the bed and into her embrace. Her face was close against his chest. She smelled of dust and lavender water, like her wardrobe, where he used to hide.

“There.” She stepped back. “You must be tired. You know where everything is? Of course.”

He nodded, looking around the room.

“I’ll leave you, then.”

His mother turned and walked out, palming the screen by the door to turn off the light as she left. He stood in the darkness, then heard her tut to herself and stop on the stairs as she realized what she’d done. She came back in, flustered and laughing—girlish, even, for a moment—in the wash of light.

He slept for little of the night, lying in ridiculous discomfort on the shifting, ever accommodating sheets of this huge, hideously comfortable bed. The room around him kept shimmering, trying to regain shape and familiarity. Here of all places, the pleading white figures that he’d shaken off in the Endless City were trying to get through again. He left the window cleared, but the room remained darker than he was used to. The shadows leaped and re-formed as the headlights of occasional vans and cars swept across the ceiling. Every time, they settled into greater darkness. He could hear the humming of the house, a sound that seemed so distant to him now, when once it had been close and warm.

He slept through the dawn. When he awoke, the room was a penumbral gray. He got up, and spent some time fiddling with the controls for the window before he realized that the world outside was bathed in mist. Everything had a luminous sheen: the trees, the houses, the tennis courts, the dissolving fields and hills beyond. A car went by, its headlights a cloud of amber. He buzzed down the window, resting his hands on the wet edge of the frame. He licked the dew from his lips, and tasted Laurie. Laurie who didn’t taste of sea and rain, as he’d imagined, but European mist.

“We generally go to church in the mornings now,” his mother said later in the kitchen, peeling the cards off the packs of food and feeding them into the cooker. The sound of Mozart and the smell of his father’s tubes already came from the lounge. “Of course, people are always asking how you are. I thought you, oh, might have wanted to let Father Leon know you were coming. You’re a real celebrity.”

“Father Leon? Yes…”

His mother gave him a significant look as she ripped open the milk carton and it spilled over her fingers. He knew that one of the things his parents still disliked about his being a priest was the sense of obligation it placed on them.

After breakfast she took him out into the garden. The evilly spiked shrub that had punctured many a football was gone. So was much of the privet border—replaced by white paling, or fluffed up and trimmed into squared-off runs that bore little resemblance to the scrappy bushes of his youth. His mother showed him a bright purple-pink bush: a mass of dewy, upturned sunset and sky-colored flowers. Hydrangea quercifolia aspera, she told him, pronouncing the words with pride, an active member of Hemhill’s garden club now that she had the time. He cupped one of the heavy blooms and sniffed, lifting it to his face.

“There’s no scent.”

“No.”

He held it, breathing deeply. Sap and earth and mist and Laurie. His mother hooked her arm around his, and they walked slowly along the razor-straight flowerbeds, their feet leaving a trail on the wet grass. And this. A cactus, its genes rearranged to accommodate this loamy soil and temperate climate, yet still looking grumpy and out of place. Cerus echinocereus saloni. And this. Wilsoni millefolium, which produces flowers in the autumn. If you catch them before they separate and drift on the air, the flowers dry into little golden-yellow pouches or envelopes that can be placed in drawers. He remembered how they felt when he used to crush them, the oil and the unlikely scent of fruitcake that clung to your fingers. And this. Of course, an old favorite, Malus corinia, a small tree that will soon be bearing tiny inedible apples. But the scent: mellow sweetness, the distillation of autumn. And the new hedge, Fusci magellanica. He trailed his hands amid the hanging pink and white flowers, seeing the tiny stamens that quivered beneath the furled petals, thinking, dancing ladies. Why can’t you just call them dancing ladies, Mother, the way we used to when we collected them wild along the hedgerows above the sea at Ley? Or perhaps you don’t even remember. And here, the roses. Rosa in the Latin, of course. Deo gratias. Amen. The elderflower tree at the far end of the garden was caught in the time between flower and berry. He counted the crooks and angles he’d once climbed, counted until they dissolved into the mist. A cruce salus. Bringing the salvation that comes only through the way of the cross. And the roses, yes, he knew about the roses. Even now, when they competed with the new sharp odor that wafted from the Youngsons’ pool across the fence next door, unseen but for the blue glow it refracted into the air. Domino Optimo maximo…

Back in the house, he followed the smell of tubes and the chords of the slow movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony into the lounge. As if in prayer, his father was crouched on his knees in the corner. His back had an almost painful curve to it, and his tanned and wrinkled neck looked exposed. John made a noise, picking up the big polished shell on the table. His father remained bowed. John rapped the shell harder.

“Ah, John.” His father turned, but stayed on his knees. “I was wondering when you’d…”

“This is new, isn’t it?” John gestured at the speakers that loomed like obelisks spaced between the chairs—faceless Easter Islanders.

“Yes.” His father made a hunched gesture that John interpreted as an invitation to crouch beside him on the floor. Racks of machines, dials, displays. And, reaching out of sight behind the sofa, there were shelves lined with various types of recorded media, like an organized version of the room in the Pandera presbytery where they kept the airwave transmitter. In the background, the music had changed. Now there was a single phrase from the main melody, repeated at the start of the second movement. Dee dah…dee dah…And again, unresolved. Little more than half a dozen notes.

His father raised a finger. “That’s Bernstein. Now Barbirolli and the LSO…Early Toscanini. A wax roll, of course, so it’s not…” And so on. An endless parade of the string sections of different orchestras playing the same phrase. His father ran a knotted finger along the dustless shelves. “This,” he said, drawing out a black disk from a card square, “is probably what I would choose. Ancient, of course…” John saw the whorled grooves. “…but much closer to the music. True analogue. Everything since, every format, has been sampled. They take slices of the music, John, but no matter how many samples you take, there’s always the gap between them, isn’t there?”

He put the disk on a wheel and rested a pivoting arm on it as the wheel turned. Over the hiss, bangs, and crackles, John heard the same opening notes of the second movement.

“Real, isn’t it?” But then the recording began to play a sequence of notes over and over again, giving an especially loud click each time. John thought the effect was intentional, but his father frowned and lifted the arm from the disk, which gave an even louder screech.

“Of course,” his father said after the sound of a modern recording again filled the room, “I normally go for something baroque at this time in the morning. That seems about right, doesn’t it? The correct choice. Don’t you think?”

“Well, yes. I—”

“Then Mozart at noon. In the afternoon, piano music, but not, of course, Liszt. And then we have a big symphony in the evening. Elgar. Mahler. Or Puccini—an opera. The full gamut of emotion, the wider range. Not something you’d want all day. Too much of—do you agree?”

Confused, John nodded.

“Of course, your mother says I play too much to him any-way.

He understood then that his father was talking about the music he was inputting through the net into whatever remained of Hal’s consciousness.

“Do you listen to the same stuff yourself, Dad?”

“It’s a good thing to share, isn’t it? Music’s a great healer. There are cases, recorded cases.”

“Yes.”

“And you were always very fond of this piece, too. The Schubert, weren’t you?”

“Well, yes.”

The Unfinished Symphony was nearing its end. John had never been a great one for music, but his father, so keen to share, interpreted a vaguely expressed liking as undying love.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it,” John said, making an effort to get on something approximating his father’s wavelength, “that Schubert died before he wrote the last two movements.”

“Oh no. It wasn’t like that, John. Schubert may have died young, but he wrote a great deal of other music after this. It was just that the challenge of this particular symphony was too great. He was overconscious of Beethoven, and perhaps also the greatness of what he had written…”

“You mean he gave up?”

“Yes,” his father said, as the long last chord faded and the room became briefly and blessedly silent. “If that’s how you want to put it. He gave up.”

The mist was rising as they walked to church; it filled the valley with white. His parents seemed a little stiff and self-conscious—parading, unannounced, their distant, living son—but otherwise there was a true morning air of celebration. The world once again freshly remade. The people came out of the fog, the children running ahead, the older folks behind, and as they drew closer, their shapes gained identity and substance. The damp air smelled incredibly ripe, green, roaring life into the lungs. And John. Father John. You’re back, you’re here. This, he thought, is what it will be like on the Last Day, when people are supposed to rise in raiments of white, holding palm leaves in their hands. Seeing those laughing, dew-shining faces, and as the little cars buzzed by and the invisible church bells began to clang, he truly wished that he believed.

It was a steeper climb to the Church of Saint Vigor than he remembered. Sleepy headstones, solitary yews. A low stone wall with a ha-ha on the other side that had once been used to keep out the glebe’s flock of sheep; lines of roof and spire washed out and vague on this beautiful morning—an engraving etched into the dim, distant present from the real, solid past. Yet the people still came here, came in greater numbers and with greater joy than in the stern medieval Old Testament days of backbreaking labor under the threat of hellfire. They came as John’s parents came, and as he and Hal had generally come in their youth. Thoughtful and grateful, almost puzzled—like all of humanity—to find themselves still here and somehow thriving on this wrecked planet.

The Holy Apostolic Church of Rome had indeed survived well, learning the lessons of history. There were few rules now; after all, God understood all, God forgave. That was the thing, John remembered, that he had found most contemptible when he was in his young and most questioning phase. This lack of fire. At the porch, the new priest was nodding, arms behind his back, counting in his flock. Seeing John, he beckoned him over and placed a pastoral hand on his shoulder.

“I’ve heard of you, of course,” he said. He was younger than John, with blond hair and sharp silver eyes that almost seemed to bear a shade of blue. “Leon Hardimann,” he said. John felt a warm hand being placed within his own, and smelled the sweet musk of the man’s aftershave. His mouth felt rubbery from smiling. “You will say something in church, won’t you? I’ll call on you…”

John nodded. The churchyard was almost empty now. Rooks cawed and circled. The stained-glass windows were brightly lit, filled with organ notes and the deeds of saints and color and song.

“Your mother,” Father Leon said, “she does a fine—a splendid—job with Hal. Ahhummm…” He looked wistful. “She keeps the hope alive. I do so admire her. And your father. That strength. You must be proud.”

“I am,” John said, disturbed by this man’s familiarity with his family, and more so by the thought of him standing in Hal’s bedroom with that smug smile on his face.

They walked into the church.

“John, but you will speak, won’t you? A few words. Sorry to drop it on you, but I’d only learned you were here this morning. Of course, if I’d heard earlier, I’d have said…”

John sat in a front pew, his hands pushed between his thighs and his fingers tightly laced, conscious of flesh on flesh, cold sweat on sweat, a nervousness he’d thought he’d long shaken off for such occasions. As he climbed to the pulpit, he could feel the outstretched arms of Christ floating on the screen behind him like an eagle at his shoulders. Votive candles glittered. A baby was crying, and the mother was saying shush, shush. An old woman in a hat mopped her eyes. Everything was neater than in Santa Cristina, the rows of faces, the neatly spaced way the people sat. Yet the differences were marginal. Seen from up here, he thought, with the pages of the parish bible open before him and smelling of mildew, nothing is ever very different.

“We read in the Bible,” he began, slipping into that old phrase because his mind would come up with no other, pausing only fractionally to wait for the echo of the translat that didn’t come, “of God’s anger, of God’s wrath, even of God’s jealousy. These are all emotions that we understand and recognize within ourselves, yet they seem strange when we try to apply them to an all-powerful being. So, how is it that God feels these often destructive and impotent emotions…?”

After the congregation had gone, John sat in the vestry with Father Leon. Father Leon reminded him a little of the priest he’d seen across the water when he first took the ferry from the shuttle to Bab Mensor; his immediate predecessor. The man had the same blond hair.

“I was unsure,” Leon said, pouring John coffee, “when they offered me this posting. It’s my first, and it seemed like something suited for a more elderly priest. I didn’t know…”

John took the cup, touched the handle with his bare fingers, and felt it begin to warm.

“I thought it wouldn’t be a sufficient challenge.” Leon smiled, smoothed out his cassock, and sat. Crossing his legs, he made small circles in the air with the polished tip of a shoe.

“You met Father Gulvenny?” John asked.

Leon nodded. “But he was ill by then, up at Southlands. He was your priest here, I suppose, when you were younger?” His eyes narrowed. He sipped his coffee. “John, I tell you I came here determined to make everything change. Not at once, of course. I decided I’d give myself a year to settle in and reach a decision about the appropriate action. But by then…” Leon gestured around, smiling. This room was clear testimony to how little he’d changed things.

John was grateful that some of Father Gulvenny’s presence remained. Soon after what his parents were already starting to call Hal’s accident, Father Gulvenny had been a big influence on John’s life. He had been Hemhill’s parish priest for some years by then, but John—and, it seemed, the rest of Hemhill—had taken little notice of him. Father Virat, who’d come before Father Gulvenny, had been a rich fund of stories of drunken tomfoolery, gaffes in the pulpit, and odd sightings of him wandering the fields. In comparison, Father Gulvenny was functional and gray. He had a cracked voice, an awkward smile, long cheekbones, and a long body. After Hal’s accident, as the initial exclamations and concerns gave way to the dull realization that Hal would never recover, when his parents turned inward and the people who used to come by began to avoid them, Father Gulvenny was the one person who actually sought John out, and made the effort to talk to him like an adult.

This old church, Father Gulvenny had said—sitting in the same overstuffed chair where Father Leon now sat, and where even the surplices seemed to cover the stone in the same folds—this village, this sky, this earth, you have to learn to see through them all and feel the fire that’s beneath. Most people are dreamers, John. They dream their way through life. They know of nothing but the tiles of this fireplace, that cobweb (could it be the same cobweb now? or at least an ancestor of the same spider?), that triangle of light at the window. And the Church, the whole Holy Apostolic Church, is mostly the same.

Father Gulvenny would talk for hours in that notched and crackly voice, his eyes wandering the room, rarely meeting John’s. To others, it might have seemed that this priest was simply conducting an awkward inner dialogue with his faith, but John was fascinated, not least by Father Gulvenny’s willingness—obsession—to criticize the Church that he supposedly represented. All of it nothing, a sham. And yet, and yet…Through all those evenings and afternoons, in the summers and winters of John’s teenage years, as the logs sighed in the fire or the windows lay open to the sound of birdsong drifting with the haze of pollen up the valley, Father Gulvenny, charged and yet soothing, personal and impersonal, deeply attentive and far away, had tried to express the things that lay beyond the everyday. The things that he could never reach. John now understood that Father Gulvenny’s short, awkward sermons, which had passed over most of his congregation, were also an attempt to express this same unlikely spiritual fire. And all from a gray man in a small, insignificant village. A sense of meaning beyond the ordinary. A sense, if not quite of purpose, at least of a direction in which purpose might lie…

“I suppose it must come as a relief,” Father Leon was saying, “to speak directly to a congregation as you did this morning. I mean, after the Endless City.”

“I hadn’t thought. But, yes. It is.”

“To express more…ah, complex feelings.” Father Leon gazed into his empty mug. John realized that he’d expected a talk rather than a sermon from him. Bringing the Good News to the Magulf. This new priest certainly hadn’t expected an off-center exploration of God’s anger. To John, the connection between what he’d said and his work in the Endless City had seemed obvious. And he had—or hadn’t he?—mentioned the cases of suffering he saw in the streets and at the clinic. But, looking at the still warm, blue-flowered mug he was holding, seeing it was the same one that he used to drink from years ago, sitting with Father Gulvenny, he understood that things had come full circle. This morning, he’d done little more than ape one of Father Gulvenny’s old sermons.

With the coffee finished, the two priests crossed the empty church and stepped out into the brightening noonday light.

The sky was still hazy, but the valley below them was clear of fog, a brilliant undersea world held beneath a dazzling white that frothed and lapped around the hilltops. The heraldic gold of the cornfields. The soft greens of the meadows and the jelt reaching up to the forest. So many greens. John could scarcely believe there were this many shades of green in the world. And the spirit, he thought, the fire beneath. Of the three personages of God, Father Gulvenny would say, the most important is the Holy Spirit; it must come first. Without it, the Father and the Son could not exist. Yet people hardly talk…Hardly ever. The fire. The spirit.

He looked up at the sky, where something seemed to be moving. A shadow, shifting. A wave-tip glint of light. And a whoosh, a crackle in the air. He felt the hairs on his neck and arms prickle.

With a great swooping sigh, the cloudpicker fell out of the mist towards them. Ionized cloud churned, shivered, and dissolved. There were tracks of white spirals, and a brisk, sea-scented wind tugged at his clothes, pushing the hair back from his face. The sun flickered through. The trees bowed, the rooks took flight. Ghost-ship spiderwebs of spars glistened. Close to, the thing was so large and yet so fragile that it seemed to be sustained more by aspiration than the rules of flight.

The cloudpicker’s delicate shadow was over them now. John could just see the tiny silver bubble where the pilot sat, and both he and Leon raised a hand. This whole display was obviously intended for them. There was no need to come this low; a drone would have cleared the fog easily—if it had actually needed clearing. But that was one of the reasons they put people instead of telepresences inside the cloudpickers. Forget about fractional lightspeed delays and the need for conscious, random, and intuitive levels of response that the net found hard to imitate in realtime: surely humans piloted the big cloudpickers for the joy of doing so.

The shadow passed. The air was clear now, and the sun shone as a dazzling disk through the haze, glinting on the river. John glanced at Leon, but nothing was left to be said between them now. They shook hands, and he walked out through the graveyard and back down the hill towards his parents’ house, taking a diversionary route along a green-tunneled hawthorn lane. Harebells lay amid the grass, their heads still drowsy with the dew. And the sky through the branches above was now the same color. Harebell blue? he thought, looking up. But no, the shades weren’t the same. He walked on into the village.

There were few children along his parents’ road by the park now, and the paintwork was pristine, the gardens all neat, done out in complex ways that no one would ever bother to program a machine for. The days of mossy lawns and pollarded trees and goalposts by the garage were gone. Now, it was all genuine human effort; a sign to the world that the people who lived in these houses were still able-bodied and alive.

His father was playing The Ride of the Valkyries. He went upstairs and saw that the door to Hal’s room was open.

“There you are,” his mother said, looking up. “What you said was interesting, dear. There in church.”

“Do you need help?”

“No,” she said flatly.

He nodded and remained in the doorway, feeling the tingle of the molecular barrier as it brushed and retreated from his face. His mother had lifted the top sheet back from Hal, and it hovered stiff and frozen at the foot of the bed. Underneath, Hal was naked. The base of the mattress twitched, lifting him a little to one side. His mother raised his arm by hand, and wiped his flank with a disposable towel. Of all things, the air smelled of dysol.

“You don’t really seem to be back, John,” she said, “if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Back?”

“You’re still thinking about the Endless City.”

She walked around to Hal’s other side. Her back was to him. She wouldn’t press her questions.

“I suppose I am,” he said.

They still used, he saw, a crude-looking catheter to extract urine—the kind of thing you might see Kassi Moss using at the Cresta Motel, although a large and serious pipe extracted the solid waste directly from Hal’s gut, and probably went deep inside him to aid digestion. A more advanced method of dealing with Hal’s urine would probably involve some form of emasculation. The technology was well proven, but it had been perfected for the elderly for whom such indignities no longer mattered, and his mother wouldn’t have that done to Hal, not anything that would damage his life when he eventually rose from that bed. John remembered once, what was already years ago, watching his brother’s penis flip over and stiffen as his mother tried to perform the delicate task of removing the condom-shaped thing that they then used, and hearing her recite, under her breath from one of her textbooks, “The penis may sometimes become engorged during manipulation…” At the time, he’d been faintly horrified, but now he thought that she’d probably been pleased to think that Hal could still get an erection. It was a sign of life.

“There,” his mother said, dropping a sealed bag into the disposer. She touched a screen, and bed settled down again, the sheets slid back.

She turned and stood there with her arms folded, looking at John. Perhaps, he thought, I’m supposed to say something now. Outside, across the road, white-suited figures were out on the tennis courts. And machines were parrying with a thrust and a glide. A blur, the last fragments of the mist.

“Hal was always such a bad patient before, you know,” she said.

For a moment John was confused. “Oh, you mean…”

“When he had that bug that his recombinants made a mess of. Remember that? He would wander around coughing and with his nose blocked and mutter about lousy programming, how any idiot could do better than this. And that time he fell and broke his foot. Being ill was always such an effort for Hal. It was as though he had put so much of himself into it.” She glanced back at the bed, touching the now soft sheets. “You know, he ricked his shoulder recently. When he did his exercises. I had to get him on his tummy and rub in this warm foul-smelling stuff. Eliot Farrar says it’s best done by hand. For the contact.”

“So it’s still Farrar? I remember him saying he was going to move on.”

“Everyone says that here, dear. You’ll probably find him down at Southlands today.”

Southlands. John nodded.

“He made a terrible sound when it happened. When he pulled his shoulder.”

“It must have hurt.”

“But he didn’t show it.”

John, who was squeamish about the treatment of Hal’s apparently healthy body in a way that the sicknesses of the Borderers at the clinic never affected him, had always found the spectacle of Hal’s exercises unbearable. He remembered the first time he came into the room, and that brief bubble of hope that rose inside him as he saw his brother sitting up with his head turned, one arm outstretched. Then he noticed the jaggedly angular movement and realized that Hal was under the control of the net. But they’d probably improved things by now. He had this brief vision of Hal up and walking, of Hal dressed and coming down the stairs, of Hal sitting at his old place for breakfast, a fleshy mannequin with the eyes dead and closed. John lowered his gaze to the old bedside rug, so out of place on the new, smooth flooring.

From the hallway, louder this time, came the sound of Wagner.

“Come on,” his mother said. “Dinner’s probably ready. I leave a lot of it to the kitchen and the cleaner now. I keep out of the way, although I sometimes feel like a guest in my own house.” Hal’s door closed behind them. Explosions of string and brass crashed up the stairwell, and she smiled and rolled her eyes. “And it all happens so quickly if I leave it to the house. I end up racing to keep up. But time really seems to be running faster now, don’t you think? Just these last couple of years, and the summers more than the winters. Everyone else I’ve asked says so. The clocks are all running faster too, even the particles around the atoms…” Her grip tightened on John as they descended the stairs. “Everything’s speeding up. But there’s some part of us that runs to a different time, that still knows.”

The music grew even louder at the foot of the stairs, but to John it sounded oddly sterile and fractured. Perhaps his father was right and something did slip out between the samples.

He asked, “Does Dad really feed this racket into Hal’s console all day?”

“He thinks he does, dear.” His mother patted his hand. They shared one of their old conspiratorial smiles. “He thinks he does. And it keeps him happy.”

After dinner, heavy with the weight of more food than he’d wanted, John announced that he was going out. His father stood outside on the drive watching him as he climbed into his rented Zephyr. The sun was bright now. John took a left down the road, away from the compound and towards the center of Hemhill. He studied the screens. Annie, he thought. He’d been at her wedding—already a novitiate and a target for smirks and the confidences of elderly relatives, but content with his lot because he was still looking into the fire beneath. He found her address easily enough; and he remembered it now anyway. Annie lived at Radway Farm. Near the ruins.

The farmhouse was centuries old, even if it was now surrounded by cleverly landscaped areas of warehousing, storage, silaging, and stocks. Looking down into the sunny bowl at the squared-off jumbles of flowering meadowgrass that covered the acres of flat roofs with their colors, angles, and heights all at slight variance, he was reminded of expressionist paintings where everything was rendered as a series of overlapping blocks, created in a time when artists were trying to take apart the world rather than keep it whole.

He had to announce his name into the gate, and there was a pause as it paged for human advice. Getting out of the car as he waited, taking deep breaths of this deep country air, he looked up at the sky, which was an incredible blue. He hadn’t been here since—when?

The gate swung open, and there was Annie in dungarees and Wellingtons, walking towards him through the bright afternoon.

“John,” she said, offhand and smiling. “You’re back?”

“Just today.”

They left the car to park itself and walked down the springy track and into the brown of the yards. Chickens scattered around them. His shoes quickly became heavy with mud. He felt clumsy and earthbound here, but Annie took his hand to steer him onto a sterile blue walkway and found him boots in an old barn.

“I don’t get rid of anything,” she said. “I did once, but I lived to regret it.”

“I should have come to see you before, Annie,” he said. “You haven’t changed.”

She turned her head away from him. Of course, she had changed. The skin around her eyes had lines. There were lank strands of gray in her hair. But that wasn’t what he meant. In his own way, he’d always loved Annie. Adored her when she and Hal were courting and they used to take him with them when they visited places. Even now, he couldn’t really understand why they’d wanted to bring this gooseberry kid along with them. But they had, and by doing so left him with eternal memories of a boat amid swans on a river in some town whose shining cobbled streets he saw as vividly as daylight. And the giant golden walls of Gloucester Cathedral. Annie, with her boyish hands, bare freckled arms, thin shoulders, strong lips, and short dark-brown hair, had always been the kind of girl he liked. But not wanted for himself, not in any real sense.

Annie was proud of her farm. A tenant, but she said by now she felt it was as much hers as it was Halcycon’s. She seemed immersed in the present, in the particular warm minute of this particular warm afternoon. The smell of bovine feed and excrement was leaking from the pipes that led to the stocks. That smell, too, he associated with Annie. With coming here with Hal to see her after her parents had moved from Brimfield to run the place.

She showed him a tiled room, once a dairy, where the new calves were checked and encoded. ATGCTA unraveling on the screens. As they walked on towards the open fields, a black-and-white dog ran up and sniffed at John’s crotch. He reached to stroke its silver-collared head, but it growled. Annie aimed a kick at it, sending it away. She said that farm dogs were never any good with people, even when they were linked into the net.

Pipes and lines stretched overhead. It was as if an industrial plant had been dumped lopsidedly into this fecund country mud. They passed under the sentinel figures of the pickers and diggers and harvesters, most as high as a house and with years of mud encrusted on their tracks and claws. There wasn’t much going on today, Annie said. Nowadays the workers were all on contract, and moved from farm to farm. You had to wait. Things changed, but it remained one of the essentials of farming that you always had to wait.

“Do you ever go and see Hal?” John asked as they walked between the barns.

“I used to,” she said, “when I thought it would do any good.” She grabbed a blade of grass and began to shred it. “And of course I tried to keep going after you left. But I’d already mourned for him. I lost him, John. Long ago…Before that stunt of his, to be honest.”

John nodded, glad at least that someone else was still angry.

“Come on.” She tossed the grass away. “I’ll show you the milkers.”

They took an open lift up the side of the largest of the stocks. This is new, she said, pointing to something in the jumble of slurry tanks, silage processors, and silos. But it was still the same farm, the same organized mess. And her cheeks were flushed, and the same sweet air that rose from the woodlands still ruffled her hair.

The lift stopped. The upper door irised open. There were pipes everywhere inside, even in the control room, where a young man sat with his feet up on the console eating a sandwich. Beyond, in the main pens, there was a stinging intensification of the smell that pervaded the whole of Radway Farm. John remembered getting lost in the stocks once when he wandered off on his own. He remembered the moist sound of so many creatures breathing, the sourceless lighting, the animal warmth.

Each milker was encased in a rack. Wires, pipes, and monitors drooped above and below it, crossing in great knitted sheaves over the walkways along which Annie led John. He traced the line of a red tube, quivering and warm to the touch, to where it passed through bars and entered a grayish wall of flesh. A tight ring of muscle pulsed and relaxed to receive it, and a pink bovine eye that was pushed against the racking of the pen blinked and seemed to regard him, although he doubted that the nerves reached the brain. It was a great brick of an animal. Tiny stumps for legs, mottled and almost hairless. In the rack above, he could see the pendulous udder of her neighbor. No teats as such, just two long fleshy tubes that faded at some indeterminate point into the plumbing of the machinery.

“What do they think about?”

“They don’t think,” she said. “Not these ones, anyway. But I’ve heard that people are getting an extra twenty-percent yield down in Montgomery from reconstructing their sense receptors and inputting VR.”

“You mean they think they’re grazing out on a meadow?”

She chuckled. “Imagine, having this place filled with cow dreams! Come on. I’ll take you to the house. You should meet the kids and Bill.”

The old redbrick farmhouse. Stone-capped windows, and the gate into the garden that still needed a good hard push. The cats sleeping on the sunny porch, and the smell of damp tiling.

“Wear these,” she said, kicking some slippers across to him. He put them on, wiggling his right toe from the hole in the front as Annie peeled off her socks and rolled her dungarees up above her knees. She picked up a rag from where a cat had been sitting, frowned at the rag, then used it to wipe the stripes of mud that had adhered to her calves. Her legs were still shapely and pale, and a fine down covered the shins. She’d shared a cabin room with him during the one summer that she came to Ley, and he remembered her bending over in the bluish sea-thrown moonlight to fold her clothes, dressed only in panties and a bra. He was used to seeing her in a considerably skimpier swimsuit on the beach, but the intimacy of that moment gave the sight of her a new charge. It was easily the most erotic thing he’d ever seen, and became his secret masturbatory icon in many teenage nights to come.

She looked up, and caught his gaze.

In the kitchen, straggles of laundry hung from beams on the ceiling. John sat on a stool, and a little girl with long blond hair falling from a crimson ribbon immediately started to use him as a climbing frame. As she slid down his legs, all sweaty absorption, another blond child came to stand beside him. She placed a frank hand on his shoulder and said, “Would you like to play?” It was only when he looked into her impossibly silver eyes and saw the emptiness in her mouth that he realized she was a doll.

“That’s my friend Samantha,” the climbing girl said, “and she wets the bed.”

Annie was doing something on the counter that involved oddly shaped implements of a kind that John had never seen before. The room filled with the smell of raw meat and garlic.

Annie’s husband, Bill, came in, dressed only in y-fronts and a crumpled blue shirt.

“This is John Alston. Remember? Hal’s brother? He’s a priest now.”

Bill shook John’s hand and shooed the doll and the girl away. Then he yawned, scratched his head, and looked around.

“You haven’t seen my trousers?”

“They’re wherever you put them.”

Bill turned to John. His face was mostly hidden beneath a whitening beard, eyebrows, and bushy hair. “It’s a permanent rubbish tip around here.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Anyway, John. You must be…where?”

“The Endless City.”

“Ahh. You people.”

Bill waved a hand, then lifted it to his mouth as he yawned again.

“He does the nights,” Annie said, still attending to the meat.

From a previously quiet and undisturbed corner of the kitchen, from what John had thought was a box containing more laundry, noises began to emanate and sheets to stir. A pink arm emerged and waved as if drowning. There was a moment of stillness, then the baby began to squall.

“He’ll be wanting milk,” Bill said.

“Yeah, but—can’t you see?—in a moment. Let John have him.”

The baby was lifted up and placed, struggling amid a caul-like trail of blankets, into John’s arms. Surprised at this big new human, it stopped crying, and John instantly felt more relaxed. It smelled so sweet. And no one ever really expected you to say or do much when you were holding a baby. It nuzzled towards his thumb. He let it suck.

“You must be a big hit at Borderer christenings,” Bill said, taking a bowl of uneaten breakfast cereal from a stool across the kitchen and sitting down.

“They don’t have them,” John said.

Bill nodded, crossed his legs, took the spoon from the breakfast bowl, and began to eat.

The baby still sucked John’s thumb. The sensation was warm and strong; it actually felt as though something nourishing were being drawn out of him. Then the baby pulled away and looked up. In the growing lattice of silver in its irises, there was still a hint of brown.

“He came a bit late,” Annie said. “A surprise gift. Isn’t that right?”

Bill grinned, milky oatflakes on his beard.

Annie gestured with bloody fingers around the kitchen. “We thought we’d finished with all this.”

Accidental pregnancies didn’t happen, but here John could almost believe in them. Annie coming down one morning with her breasts already swollen to give Bill the news with a sour-breathed kiss, a big hug. He envied the chaos of their happy, busy life.

“Here.” She took the baby from John. Her hands made red smears as she unbuttoned her blouse and offered a nipple.

“I’ll have to stop this soon,” she said as the baby began to suck. Her chin bulged as she looked down. “He’s five months already. They planted the crystals, oh, early summer, wasn’t it, Bill?”

Gazing absently at his wife’s breast, Bill nodded.

“There’s inflammation there still,” she said, “and they expect him to be ready in the autumn for his first format.” The baby’s mouth went tick, tick. “You read preliminary medicine, didn’t you, John? Don’t you work in some kind of clinic?”

“Well. Yes.”

“I’ve been using Calcymix in bottles, too. But the screen says I have to stop breastfeeding soon. It’s so bloody stupid. I’m sure I did it later with Jennie. It’s the only way in the middle of the night when he won’t stop crying.”

“He looks very healthy,” John said, wondering what he could possibly tell these people about babies. “It’s just there’s a danger of your natural antibodies conflicting with the recombinants his implant will be producing. They start that even before formatting, and those antibodies are far more powerful than the intravenous ones you’ll have been giving him. But there would be a rash first if there was a problem…”

“Oh, right.”

There was silence in the room now. The baby had stopped sucking.

Before he left, Annie insisted on showing John the baby’s back. She peeled off his vest and rompersuit, performed whatever trick was necessary to unseal and remove the diaper, and wiped the baby down. He lay there, legs and arms slightly curled in this warm room on a toweling sheet flecked with cat hairs. John turned him over, wishing he’d asked the name. But the baby didn’t cry. And of course there was some inflammation around the scabbed indentation in the baby’s spine. John glanced at Annie as she leaned intently over. He inhaled the soft milky smell of her and the baby. Didn’t she remember her other children? Didn’t she at least remember the last main implant she’d had herself when she was a teenager?

“Do you think I should try applying more cream?”

“Best to just let the air get to it for a while each day. Find him a warm place to lie and dry off after his bath. The inflammation’s not coming from outside, Annie, its coming from him. His own immune system is starting to work for the first time, and he’s reacting against this alien presence.”

“Alien?”

“Well, it is when you think about it, isn’t it?” he said, thinking, You must see this, Annie, every day outside in the stocks. “I’m sure they’d give him a suppressant if they thought there was any real problem, but it’s generally best to let these things work themselves out on their own.”

The baby was clothed, powdered, put away. John shook hands with Bill and walked with Annie back across the yard.

He said, “I’ll be going back tomorrow.”

“Oh? Right.”

“That baby boy…”

“He’s sweet, isn’t he? I’m so glad we had him.” Annie was looking away. One of her contractors had arrived and was doing something with an odd dome-shaped machine that squatted in the mud, giving off puffs of steam from a curved funnel that projected like the spout of a kettle. “He shouldn’t be here today,” she muttered. “Look, I’ll save you the walk and call your car.”

John stood on the worn brick lip of a doorway as Annie went to the nearest screen. By the time his car arrived, she was on the other side of the yard arguing with the kettle contractor. Waving her arms. They were too far away for their words to reach John, but he could catch the sharp European accents of their voices, and the sun, low and golden now, brimmed over the grassy rooftops like a fluid into his eyes. A cock crowed. The Zephyr waited humming beside him. He was tempted just to climb in and drive off.

Then Annie saw him and hurried back over. “You must come again,” she said, pecking his cheek. “When I have more—”

“I still think about you, Annie. The good times. With Hal.”

This time, Hal’s name seemed to pass through her without touching. “I have to dash now. This idiot’s come a day early. He needs someone in the screehopper and that’s muggins here. Bye.”

“Bye.”

John watched her go, then got into his car and drove up the hill. Stopping by the gate, looking back, he saw the kettle rattling across the livid brown-and-green expanse of the early fields of superkale, trailing a scarf of steam. Behind it strode a larger two-legged machine. The machine paused for a moment, turned at an angle, and raised a claw in John’s direction, then strode on.

He drove up the valley, through the woods, and past one of the golf courses where his parents now played. Shadowed by the hills, the figures moved in pairs across a landscape of undulating grass. He saw the lighted balls twirling through the air into the deepening blue sky, then settling into the grass. He didn’t want to go home yet. He turned left, right, waited as a giant machine lumbered past him up the road, walking in a corn-dust haze towards farm buildings and the sunset beyond. He remembered Annie, the flow of moonlight on her body as she undressed when they shared the cabin room at Ley. She and Hal hadn’t been prepared to admit then that they were sleeping together. Thinking back, John really wasn’t sure if they’d ever made love.

The gates at Southlands opened for him. The trees at the far reach of the gardens stretched their shadows across the lawns. Water clattered softly over ornamental rocks. A piano somewhere played a nursery tune. The main doors up the steps of the pale building also opened immediately on John’s approach. The security was good here, this deep into the net. Simplicity of access was just a sign that you had already been monitored and recognized.

The great hall was scattered with chairs, lined with huge paintings of extinct animals, filled with the smells of stone and lavender. A door swung open quicker than John had expected, and he held out his hand, trying not to look surprised. Eliot Farrar had dark hair, a square face, slightly strained and studious eyes.

“This way, Father.”

Here, no one would be surprised to see a priest. John was led along corridors and through open wards. There were voices in the dim air, although they shifted and changed, so that it was hard to locate their source among the shrouded, silver-wired, and screen-surrounded shapes. An eye gleamed. From several beds, the fall of hair; a frozen waterfall. A knobbled foot, the ball of its big toe like polished wood, poked incongruously. This was much the same technology that kept Hal alive, although here it fought a losing battle. What was it now? John wondered. How many years were likely? Fifty-eight? Fifty-nine? Sixty? Now that his parents were close to it, he didn’t want to know. Halcycon would reconfigure the implants, of course, and an extra year or two of life might be gained. But the huge invasion of recombinant technology started an unstoppable clock in the human body; the strain was killing. Your days were numbered. Here were the late-mobile wards. Nowadays, the wheelchairs had no wheels and didn’t possess chairs. They looked more like miniature versions of the great farm implements that many of the ward patients had operated all their lives.

“Virtual reality’s a great bonus when you get to this stage,” Farrar said. An old lady, her eyes fed by wires, hissed and clicked by them. “Sometimes I think you could extend it all indefinitely. Like, ah…” He wiped a hand across his face. “We call in the priest, of course, before we make that final decision. Father Hardimann. You’ve met?”

John pictured the two of them shaking their heads over some helpless case. Then Kassi Moss at the Cresta Motel. “Don’t you find it depressing?”

“Of course.” Farrar shot him a look. “But it’s a necessity, it’s a job. And we consult the family. It’s really up to them. I’m sure you understand that, Father.”

The better cases, still able-bodied, were gathered in a big anteroom with a domed glass ceiling filled with the intense blue of the evening sky and pricked by the first stars. Many came here after a fall at home or some other crisis, only to recover and check out again. Or perhaps they would move for a while into one of the sheltered machine-served chalets that dotted the grounds. For others, for most, this was the beginning of the progression along the wards through which John had already passed. One group, drawn in a corral of high-backed chairs, were laughing and nudging one another at the antics of the actors in a comedy show who argued at cross-purposes and paced, semireal, in the lighted space before them. There was, on the surface, a holiday atmosphere in this big room.

Through illusory gardens scented with pollen, a quavering voice shouted after him. “Look. Isn’t it…?”

John turned. Even without the cassock, he was recognized. But then he heard the hiss and mutter of disappointment, the careful rearranging of limbs, the turning away of eyes. Shaken heads. Not Hal. Hal’s brother. And don’t you remember? Sad. How sad. People, John imagined, who’d taught them both at school. Or served them in the shops. And wasn’t the face over there a strange age-distorted version of Tilly? He didn’t want to ask.

John sat down in Farrar’s office, and the door slid shut behind them, clicking some kind of lock. There was a sudden formality about the occasion as the two men faced each other across the wooden table.

“How often,” John asked, “do you see Hal?”

“Once or twice a week.” Farrar gazed just over the top of John’s head. A tiny nerve in the corner of his right eye was twitching. “But really I go to see your parents, John. I mean, to check their state of mind. I can monitor how they and Hal are doing physically just as easily from here.”

A big screen filled a corner, of a grade even higher than the one Laurie had in the Zone. Spinning stars drifted deep within it.

“What’s that?” John asked.

“That’s how I keep track of the people here. See those two over there?” Farrar clicked his fingers, and the screen scrolled up towards two circling nebulae. The nebulae sailed across the room. “That’s us, sitting here.”

Hovering over the desk, like tiny glowing balls of wire or wool. Each strand, John saw, was alive with swarming lines of AGTC.

“And you can tell where we are?”

“It’s a simple matter of triangulation.” Farrar frowned at the stars. Obediently, they disappeared. “You did say you saw Father Leon?”

“This morning.”

“Did he tell you anything about Hal? I mean, specifically?”

“He said he admired my parents. Most people say that.”

“This, ah…This can’t go on forever.”

“No. Of course. Hal will probably decline and die. We’ve known that for years. My mother still—”

“What I mean, Father John, is that that time may have come already. Is, in fact, overdue.”

John stared back, wondering if Farrar was going to have the nerve to talk about resources to someone who worked at a clinic in the Endless City.

“Hal is hopeless, John. There’s nothing left there to save. You’re an educated man—you know about medicine—you don’t need me to tell you that no matter how close we get to understanding the mind and body, we still can’t isolate consciousness. But there’s no mystery to that. Consciousness is everywhere, it’s a function of life. Look for it in a specific place, and it disappears. But I’d say with certainty that Hal has no consciousness left. Or that, if he somehow does, he’s suffering.”

“Those are two separate possibilities.”

“What?”

But John was grateful to this man for defining the issue, for pushing him into a corner. “I don’t,” he said, “want Hal to stop being alive.”

“Look, I walked you through the wards. You must know by now what it’s like. Your own mother and father—I know, I’ve spoken to them—have been faced with similar decisions about their own parents and relatives.”

“That’s different. People who are aging know that they’ve lived their lives. Hal hasn’t. Not yet. It’s unfinished business. I know that”—John heard himself saying—“with a greater certainty than I can probably convey to you. I know it with more certainty than I know anything else in my life.”

“Okay.” Farrar sat back from his desk. “Have it your way, Father John.” From his expression, from the Laurie-like emphasis on the word Father, John didn’t doubt that all the usual battles between medics and priests took place across this table. “But the decision still remains to be taken, I’m afraid. Your parents—and I hate to have to put it this way,” he said, unblinking, “are what? Now?”

“Whatever,” John said. “It’s a responsibility I’m prepared to shoulder.”

The two men regarded each other. The window at Farrar’s back was open. Faintly, John could hear the chatter of water, the sound of a piano playing, could feel the pull of the night. The silence in the room seemed to lapse, and the tension was lost. It became apparent to both of them that, for now, there was no more to be said.

He drove out into the summer dark. All the gates opened for him. He kept the windows down to blow away the heat that had risen to his face. He felt tired, confused, hungry.

The little car hurried along the main road to Hemhill. The occasional lights of other cars flashed by him, but the houses he passed were mostly dark, seemingly deserted. He stopped when he saw the lights of a roadside café. His parents would probably have something waiting for him, cooked hours before and now congealing on the plate. It seemed easier not to bother them.

He took a seat in the café, and the table asked him what he wanted. He shrugged, which would normally have been taken as a signal to recite Today’s Specials, but his body language was too compromised by the ways of the Magulf. The table repeated the question. He chose a green salad and pepper steak.

He looked around. There were a few other people here in the yellow-lit gloom. Solitary diners like himself. People in transit from one place to another. He jumped when the plate arrived, rising through an opening in the table. This kind of arrangement had been a fad of his youth, but now people preferred more traditional ways of ordering and serving. Unless in his absence all this trickery had come back in fashion.

He pecked at the food, which was rich and ornate on his tongue.

“Mind if I sit with you?” It was a woman with close-cropped blond hair, stripes of sunburn across her cheeks.

“Sure.”

She straddled the chair. She wore a sleeveless shirt, and the muscles in her arms and shoulders were sharply defined. Nobody needed to be that fit and strong these days. No European, anyway. He guessed that she used one of the reconfiguring recombinants that Halcycon, amid a maze of warnings, permitted.

“I’m passing through now,” he said. “But this place used to be my home. I mean, Hemhill.”

She nodded, a gold crucifix dangling between her breasts, called up a dry wine from the table, and asked, “Where do you work now?”

“The Endless City.”

“Yes.”

“You can tell? Most people seem surprised.”

“It’s your coloring, and the way you look around. I nearly took a contract there myself.”

They talked. Her breasts, outlined beneath the shirt, were more like a man’s pectorals. A few months ago, he probably wouldn’t have consciously registered the fact. He realized she’d seen that he was staring. He looked up into her eyes, then away.

“I have a bunk in my truck outside,” she said. “Sometimes I find that having company’s a more natural way to end the day.”

“I’ve got to go home soon,” he said.

“I thought you said you didn’t live here now.”

“My parents do. They’re still alive. They used to talk about moving to this place they had by the sea. But it never quite came off. They ended up selling it.”

“I know what you mean. It’s all talk, isn’t it?” She told him about her own parents, who were dead, and he sat and listened. Then she told him about her work. Like most people of this age of quick and easy travel, she was from the same part of the country. She’d been born in Ross on Wye, had trained for one of the low fliers that captured the purple blooms that lay through the summer like a knobbly carpet over the flat-lands from Cambridge to Norwich. With the first cool days, they snapped their stalks and rose into the air. “It used to be a real skill to capture them,” she said, “a trick you never thought you’d master. And then you did…” She had another drink. “But Halcycon thought of a way of polarizing the plants as they grow. Some new twist in the genes, positive to negative charge. Now it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. They come hissing and cracking after you even if you try to turn your scoop away.”

He nodded. He still hadn’t told her what he did for a living. If she asked now, he’d lie.

“I aimed too low, I guess. I had the right marks to be a pilot, all the synapses. I should have studied harder. Spent less time…less time…” Her gaze faded as he wondered what it was she’d spent her time doing. “Should have studied structural communication, like my father used to say.”

“That’s for controlling the satellites, isn’t it?”

“That’s changed too. A lot of the people are switching over to cloudpickers now. It’s all so automated and implanted that you hardly need the old special aptitudes to fly. It’s all part of the net.”

“Studying structural communication would get you a job flying a cloudpicker?”

“I should have seen it coming. Me, up in the sky with the angels instead of down here. You want another drink?”

“I’d better be going.”

“Me too.” She took his hand and squeezed it. There was a surprising softness in the touch of her broad palm and fingers. “You know, it’s the story of my life…”

His parents had a comedy show on in the lounge when he got back. It looked, in fact, like part of the same broadcast that the better Southlands patients had been running. The characters paced, and the audience’s ragged laughter sighed and broke like the sea. But his parents seemed uninvolved. He guessed that they’d been waiting for him.

“Ah, it’s you. Where have you been?”

He sat down, feeling the years of his youth tumbling back over him again as he fumbled for an excuse. But when he looked at their faces, he saw that they were showing a polite interest, nothing more.

“If this is what you’re telling me,” the fading man in the comedy said, “then I…” And he was gone. The room seemed very large and quiet without him.

“I went to see Annie.”

“Yes. How is she?”

“She’s fine. She has a new baby. A boy.”

“How lovely. What’s he called?”

John did his best to spin out a story of the way the farm was now. His parents leaned forward, smiling. From there, the conversation wandered back to the Magulf, the Endless City.

“Where do you think they’ll send you next?” his father asked.

“I don’t know. I may choose to stay on. Try something—something a bit different…with my life.” He looked for a reaction. There was none.

Soon it was bedtime. John went to his room. His mother followed him and stood there as he undressed. He saw how selfish he’d been this visit, how little time he’d spent with them, trying to get beneath the surface of this life they were living.

She touched his shoulder and smiled. “Are you happy, Son? Something’s changed about you this time.”

He smiled back and kissed her cheek.

“Here.” She gave him his old pajamas. The tang of fresh linen.

“Thanks.” He pulled them on and climbed into bed, conscious now that they were both reenacting a childhood ritual. She looked down at him, then her hand went to her wrist. The red standby light that linked her with Hal. He wondered if she was turning something off, or checking.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. It was still early; the windows were clear, and the passing cars beat waves of light across her face and hands. The effect made her seem old, then young again.

“You know if there’s anything—anything, Mum. When you need me, you know I’ll come back.”

She leaned down and kissed him. “Now it’s time for sleep.” When she stood up, the center of gravity didn’t shift the way it had with his old mattress.

“Goodnight, John.”

She left the room.

He lay there, watching the lights, counting the cars. Soon he was asleep, dreaming about something he couldn’t remember. Even as he dreamed, he knew that he was losing it.