THE DOCTOR CREAKED IN the stuttering light of the clinic’s backroom, and the cards on the cartons of drugs along the shelves sagging behind it glowed in pinpricks of green, blue, and red. John’s shoes went stick as he crossed the catalyzed dirt floor. The wind rattled the window. The sky boiled over the rooftops beyond. There were still a few voices in the frontroom of the clinic, chuckling laughter, Ah, fornu, as Nuru saw to the last of the callers who required the painkillers, antiseptics, and birth control devices that the clinic dispensed.

John sat down at the wobbly screen that was inset into the desk and ran his fingers through the cases he’d seen that morning. He felt the tug of the files as he copied and separated out each case, reordering it in a scatter of patterns according to illness, age, sex, treatment, severity. Here, at least, he could point to something that he’d accomplished in the Endless City. Even though the doctor lacked the innate facilities, he’d used its memory to reorder and analyze not only all the cases he’d seen but also the records of the priests who’d been here before him. And, outside the clinic, counting, estimating, dictating into his translat, he’d trekked through the local maze of streets and souks, then along the coast, then by the kelpbeds, then the chemical plants, using the data to estimate total population, death rates, age ratios.

He stared at the morning’s last case on the doctor’s screen. Martínez. Hearing the man’s wheezing breath, seeing his red cheeks and the way he waddled, John found that he was still almost as amazed by the fat people here in the Endless City as he was by the disabled and the very old. He had put Martínez down as a sufferer from the common Borderer complaint of circulatory disease, and had assumed that the red on his lips came from chewing the local leaf, until Martínez explained through Nuru that he was having trouble with bleeding gums.

A hard fan of AGTC lines indicated that the doctor’s blood analyzer wasn’t working, but the doctor recommended the taking of a hip-bone marrow sample. A pointless and agonizing procedure—without it, even without a blood test, John knew that a likely diagnosis for Martínez was acute myeloid leukemia.

He felt a sting from the alarm in his watch. Looking up, he saw that Nuru was already standing at the door, and that the frontroom behind him was empty. Nuru had his hands in the pockets of his smoothly creased black trousers, jingling the coins.

“Fatoo finished?”

“Yes, I’ve finished. I have to go to the Zone now. Can you get me a taxi?”

Nuru hesitated for a moment, the brown eyes under their dark fringe registering what could have been amusement, then he turned and went outside. John powered down the doctor, turned off the screen, changed and incinerated his gloves, pulled on his jacket, and began to lock up. Nuru had been a fixture at the clinic when John first arrived—that, anyway, was what he was told—and John had come to rely on him. The odd syringe, carton, and blisterpack went missing, and Nuru charged shamelessly for the supposedly free medicines that the clinic gave out, but he could persuade or manhandle those who panicked at the sight of the doctor’s lobster arms, and he spoke reasonable European.

Nuru ran back into the Plaza Princesa just as John was keying in the clinic’s alarms. Behind Nuru, hammering and rattling, scattering dogs, chickens, and children, came the taxi. It settled on its cushions, and the engine slowed to a dull thwack as John wrenched open the back door. The interior, filled with the smell of Borderer and the cinnamony smoke of a tube, was decked with a mixture of beads and ornaments. As the taxi turned and rose, John glanced through the rear window. Standing in the Plaza Princesa where the bombed-out towerblock clawed the sky like a malignant hand, Nuru smiled and waved.

Plunging between the high walls of a narrow offshoot of the Cruz de Marcenado, John was soon out of oldtown. Children crouched in the road ahead amid puddles reflecting the rusty Magulf sky, but the driver kept his foot firmly on the accelerator, and they scampered off between the piles of aged jelt, soggy cardboard, and corrugated metal. The driver swore, chuckled loudly, tilted back his head to shout Hey, nach Fatoo…

On higher ground, John could see the spires of the shuttle-port of the European Zone at Bab Mensor, where four times a week the Paris shuttle skimmed down from its suborbital loop, turning west to follow the Magulf coast on a glide towards the corridor of lights that winked on beneath the waters of the Breathless Ocean.

The taxi neared the Zone through another part of oldtown, where the various Borderer service industries clustered around the perimeter fence. Some of the streets were paved, and suddenly there were many other vehicles for the driver to curse at. John spotted a number of wandering Europeans; easily identifiable even when he couldn’t catch the color of their eyes, by their clothing, and by the glow—visible at noon under this sky—of their gloves and watches. The buildings along the main street were three-or four-storied for the most part, stuccoed pink, done out with seashell arches, keyhole windows, and bands of colored plastic mosaic in an attempt to recall things Moorish. In the souks that filled the narrow alleys between, leatherwork, embroidered silks, and silver trinkets predominated, with the prices aimed at the expats.

The taxi settled on its skirts outside the shockwire of gate C of the Zone, and a guard with the winged “H” Halcycon S.A. logo on his shoulderpads walked over. John wiped the coins for his fare with dysol, dropped them into the driver’s tray, and climbed out of the taxi. Talking to the guard, he felt that odd click that came in his head nowadays when he spoke European.

The taxi rose in a cloud of dust, turning back into the narrow streets of the Endless City. He walked towards the bright net of shockwire.

The gate slid open.

The road inside led first though gray hectares of warehouses and the stalking shapes of robot cranes. A small passenger rail-truck was parked by a green sign and the door obligingly slid open as he passed, but he walked the kilometer or so to the medical center for his bimonthly check. He needed the time to readjust. The warehouse area was entirely automated, and the sidetracks, overbridges, and rail lines were festooned with warnings about the dangers of human trespass. There were signs of machine life all around him; two cars hissed by on the road with their windows blanked, but he didn’t see another human until he’d gone into the suburbs beyond. Even then, there was an aura of silence as he wandered along the avenues beside the hill leading to the Governor’s Residence. Just a few Borderer gardeners and roadsweepers carting barrows under a red sky, trimming hedges, pushing desultory brooms. The gray bungalows were all on short tenancies, owned and maintained by Halcycon.

The medical center lay by a lake amid rolling lawns. He wandered down corridors and through coffee-scented lobbies to the office where Tim Purdoe sat waiting with his feet on the desk, exuding his usual air of friendly boredom. Tim was an old Zone hand, used to people coming here for a quick tour of duty to help their careers, fuel their bank balance, or wipe out whatever problems they had at home. He was a familiar sight at gatherings, generally wearing the same crumpled tweed jacket, his graying blond hair cut with boyish fringe that would probably once have made him look younger.

“Let’s get on with it then, shall we?” Tim swung his legs off the desk. “No point in wasting the Company’s time when so many others are better than me at doing it…”

He dimmed the window, and John undressed, conscious of every movement as he flattened and folded his clothes on the chair, feeling the goose bumps that always rose on these occasions, no matter how amicable the air. Tim, of course, would have left the room if John has asked him to for the period of the examination, but after his and Nuru’s many attempts to reassure the Borderers at the clinic, that would have seemed like a failure of nerve.

The doctor, tall and yet folded over on itself like some wise mechanical heron, emerged from the alcove beside the window. John crossed the carpet barefoot as it opened itself to receive him. This is never an easy moment, he thought as the silver wings closed around him. Yet it was always a warm embrace, and surprisingly tender. He felt weightless as something passed into his mouth, then over his eyes. Ridges skipped down his spine as the output and integrity of his main recombinant was tested. He had really forgotten how pleasant much of this was. All he had to do was relax and forget about the tiny needles, the way something had apparently taken control of his breathing, and ignore the probe that was now entering his anus. To think of how his body was forming a perfect loop that spread though the nerve synapses of the doctor and out into the local net where the outputs and the calibrations and all the messy stuff of life were compared and contrasted with the thin stream of monitor levels that whispered through the Magulf skies up to the geosynchronous torus that punched the data back down through the atmosphere to be slowed and received and understood once again by the big medical roots and branches of the net back on earth. Yes, to think…To truly…

He opened his eyes and blinked as the ocular sheaths withdrew, feeling a fast extra beat already fading beneath his breastbone where his cpu had been downloaded, analyzed, reformatted. The doctor settled him back down on his feet, and, withdrawing, discreetly set about the process of cleaning itself of his fluids and secretions, stroking its mandibles in sweet puffs of machine oil and disinfectant. A strong chill passed over him as the conducting fluids evaporated into the air. He began to dress while Tim kept his head down, his fingers busy stirring and rearranging whatever story the figures on his screen were telling.

A printout whispered as John finished buttoning his shirt. Tim snatched it up, glanced at it, threw it at the bin. “You’re sleeping all right?”

“Better than I was…” John glanced down at the screen of his watch, the gray blur of quaternary lines beneath the time display.

“You don’t want another packet of sleepers?”

“I haven’t finished the first lot you gave me.”

“You haven’t taken a single tablet.”

John shrugged. Each night, as his mind finally began to relax, the figures and faces that paraded before him each day at the clinic began to emerge, gray and insubstantial now—Dickensian ghosts clanking chains of suffering—from the walls and ceiling of his room in the presbytery. “I’m not sure I ever needed the sleepers, Tim. The answer is to keep busy. More work—”

“Sure, and you’ll end hopping around with your eyes bulging like some hyperactive frog. Believe me, I’ve seen it. There’s only so much you can expect your body to do.”

“You sound like there’s some problem.”

“There’s no problem. You’re under stress, but you’re adjusting. Everyone adjusts.”

“The doctor’s blood analyzer’s down again at the clinic,” John said, staring across at the sleek silver heron in the corner.

“You’re lucky that thing’s still working at all. You know how old it is?”

“Don’t give me that, Tim.”

“I’ll see if I can get one of the engineers to look in, but you know what it’s like…” Tim shrugged. “They’re on time-costing.”

“Sure.”

“Hey.” Standing up, Tim came around the desk and clasped John’s shoulder. “Don’t look so glum—it isn’t your fault. Everyone here gets upset by the hassles and restrictions. That, and the bloody-minded attitude of your average Gog.”

John was surprised at the strength of his urge to shrink away when Tim touched him. He could never get used to people calling the Borderers Gogs.

“Look,” Tim said, leaning back on his desk, “I’ll show you what most people ask to see after their first couple of bimonthlies.” He touched the screen, and the view from the window across the lake and lawns of the medical center dimmed once again. In its place, fuzzily at first, John saw a pinkish gray soup.

“That’s your blood.” Tim twirled the cursor, and the rimmed disk of a red cell jumped into view. He moved up a further magnification, then tapped out a series of commands. “Ah—right. Here’s one of the little buggers.”

John stared at the window where a single rod was floating, magnified to about a meter in length. A scrap of artificial genetic material, waiting to make contact with the living matter that would give it life. It was shaped like a walking stick. “That’s from my recombinant?”

“Yeah.”

“How can you tell it’s not a natural virus?”

“I can’t. But see those numbers in the corner? That means that this particular fellow is combating a poliomyelitis variant. It’s a thing called e-teneysis IV that’s been around for a few years in this part of the Endless City. Methods of defense vary. This one doesn’t attempt to attack the poliomyelitis virus direct, but instead enters your white myeloid cells and binds with the RNA, which in turn issues a new instruction, which then in turn…” Tim sighed and touched the screen. The virus vanished. “You get the idea, anyway.”

“Yes. I’d be crippled or dead if I didn’t have a few million of those things in my blood.”

“It could be a false alarm—or you could even be naturally immune like most of the Gogs. You never know. But it does mean, I’m afraid, John, that you’ve probably been in contact with contaminated fecal matter. You’re not drinking any of the pisswater the Gogs make do with, are you?”

“What difference does it make? You say I’m safe enough anyway.”

“There are limits. Now—” Tim tapped the console again, and a new image appeared on the window. It looked like a small, and rather evil, spider. “See this fellow? Bet you didn’t even know you had him in you, eh? Well, this isn’t a product of your recombinant but a self-replicating virus that you were infected with when you were about three weeks old—has to be introduced, see, because it doesn’t transfer through the placental barrier. After that it just spends its time floating around in your lymphatic system like a seed, waiting to settle down and multiply if it should ever make contact with any of its old friend, HIV. They like each other so much that they join and absorb into one unit, and then die soon after from terminal incompatibility. A bit like marriage, really…”

Smiling at his own drollery, Tim touched his console. The window blurred back to the view of the lake and the lawns. The red sky was darkening again, possibly threatening rain. John stared out. No one had died from contact with a European for almost a century now, but—apart from that one incident with the witchwoman—he’d always been diligent with his gloves and about using dysol-impregnated cloths, surrounding himself in an antiseptic haze. Even so, there was a time early on in his stay here when Nuru wore an awkward-looking chin-high collar that John assumed was a fashionable affectation until he noticed the angry red rash beneath Nuru’s ear that he was attempting to hide. But the rash disappeared, and the risk of anything more serious was minimal. The technology had improved, and the traditional Zone stories of expats who ran mad and naked through the Endless City, hugging people in the streets, had become simply humorous. It wouldn’t be so very long, some now said, until the barriers came down altogether.

Tim ambled around from his desk and pulled on the famous aged sports jacket that was draped over the back of the chair. “Here,” he said, opening a drawer. “Got this for you. Some cock-up when I ordered it.” He tossed a white carton.

“Thanks.” John caught it. It was heavier than he imagined. Brushing the card with his thumb, he saw that, powered up, it would produce over a thousand oral tablets of antibiotic. Crude stuff after what Tim had been showing him. But still. “You fancy a drink?” he said.

“You know me.” Tim smiled, then extracted a comb from his top jacket pocket. “I even know where we can get one free.”

Tim drove the two kilometers from the medical center to mid-Zone. His car was a huge vintage Corona with red fins and sidedoors that rose open like wings and a leather interior with wide backseats that John couldn’t imagine him ever needing. Still, it was his pride and joy; as much a Tim Purdoe trademark as the tweed jacket. And, as usual, he insisted on keeping the car on manual, chattering as he drove, giving the current gossip. Who was on the way up, who was on the way out, and, as always, who was screwing whom. Several times as they passed through the suburbs, the proximity light flashed and the brakes kicked in to prevent them from climbing the verge. Tim was someone for whom the mere prospect of drink often seemed to act as an intoxicant.

He said, “I still wonder about you priests. I mean, you know what it’s all about here. So what’s the point in coming to the Zone if you’re celibate?”

“I don’t live in the Zone. I live outside.”

“Ah—and how is the world outside?”

“Nothing much has changed. I had a close encounter with a witchwoman.”

“They’re all clinically insane, you know,” Tim said, spinning the wheel to avoid a cleaner. “Something that used to be called schizophrenia, probably caused by a virus, although no one’s ever bothered to locate it. What’s amazing is the way that the Gogs fit them into their society. You know, all that moonrock crap—it provides a socially acceptable track along which their obsessions can go. Otherwise,” he continued, belying as he did his general air of ignorance about anything beyond the Zone, “I suppose they’d all be locked up in some high room…

“But I like the simplicity of the Zone,” he said as they finally pulled into the Trinity Gardens carpark next to the suddenly diminutive lines of Company Zephyrs, Furies, and Elysians. “Here, people work, they sleep, they eat, they screw. Then they go back home to Europe again. Everything’s straightforward. You don’t get all that baggage of hope and expectation…”

In the bandstand in the green bowl at the center of Trinity Gardens, a brass band was playing Elgar’s Nimrod, with the musicians done out in uniforms to match the blue-striped marquees. The lake behind them was the color of rose wine, stretching out to mirror every cornice and window of the Hyatt Hotel on the far shore.

Where the groupings of guests thinned at the top of the grass slope beside the tropical houses, there was a big floral display in the shape of a clock, with the words MEDERSA APPEAL picked out in houseleeks. Instead of hours, the clock was graduated in Eurodollars. Now the hands, decorated in red saxifrage, pointed up to the target.

“It’s a fundraiser for some new kelpbeds at Medersa,” Tim said, grabbing a glass of wine from a passing waiter. “You know, let’s help the poor fucking Gogs…” Waving at some familiar face, he headed off into the crowd.

John stood alone, watching him depart. The clouds were low, but the afternoon air was pleasantly warm, incredibly still. For once, the wind had died down, and in the roseate light, with the Elgar, John felt that he could have been inside a sepia-tinted print. The women wore wide-brimmed hats, long dresses. The men were in pastel shirts, one-piece suits ornamented by jeweled brooches and cuffs. The screens said the nineteenth century was this year’s theme, although he doubted that anyone in Europe would have taken it all quite so literally. But the look was appropriate: after all, these were colonial times.

He wandered, almost kicking a peacock that was pecking for crumbs on the grass. The Borderer waiters were wearing the same blue uniforms as the band. They carried not only wine but also trays of red and green tubes, vol-au-vents, cactus fruit, steaming bowls of mint tea; all of it topped off with a discreet bow, a professional smile.

As John faltered over a choice of Chardonnay or Font de Michelle, the smiling waiter stood what would have been, outside in the Magulf, uncomfortably close to him. The Borderers who worked the Zones had a capsule implanted in their left upper arm that contained a synthetic protein to unzip any artificial European virus. It was called lydrin, and, in theory at least, it allowed Borderer and European to touch, talk, shake hands, share food, kiss, fight, exchange saliva, even semen and blood, without the risk of a fever, a rash, or some more serious and unlikely clash between recombinant and atavistic viruses.

Taking the Chardonnay, John walked on towards the lake and the walled gardens, passing through pockets of composed laughter, layers of pastel tubegas that carried the hint of chemical moods. Happy amber, relaxed pale blue. Red for lust—or was it joy? There were people here from main corporate admin, engineers and financiers. Even without his cassock, he was still known and recognized. It came with the job. As he passed each group, jokes and stories were briefly interrupted by the press of manicured hands. Silver eyes crinkled and smiled. Hello, Father. He nodded, tried to remember names. The young people here made him feel incredibly old—the old ones, incredibly young.

The Chardonnay was bitter; he left it on top of an urn and sat down at the edge of a pond. Goldfish and coy carp mouthed the surface in the hope of food. A fountain played over white lilies. From here, a honeysuckle arch opened out to the lawns, the marquees, the bandstand, the lake. He noticed the way the people leaned back as they laughed. The motion looked strange without the sound to go with it, like a dance. The stone rim of the pond where he sat was prettily weathered, covered in florets of lichen. He scraped at it with his fingernail. The color came away in flakes of paint.

The band stopped playing. A young, good-looking man came up to the front of the bandstand. John didn’t recognize him, but even at this distance the man radiated the kind of assurance that made you feel that not recognizing him was your mistake.

“It’s great to see so many of you here today,” he said, the words coming out of the speakers hidden in the cypress trees, spinning in echoes towards the white hotel across the lake. “Our governor, Owen Price, really would have liked to come himself. He knows how important this project is for the whole of the Magulf.” There was scattered applause. “Anyway…” Raising a deprecatory hand. “…there’s one man present that I’m sure we’d all like to hear from. And here he is—our main contractor for the project, the man without whom none of this would ever get off the screen on my desk—Mister Mero!”

A rotund man in a flashy suit picked his way towards the mike. John knew he was a Borderer from the way the cheers grew louder as he stumbled over one of the music stands. Mister Mero would be some wealthy builder who would supervise the actual work on the new kelpbeds. He began to speak in clear and virtually unaccented European, expressing gratitude to the fundraisers. How the new kelpbeds at Medersa would provide much needed food, fuel, jobs…He seemed to be rounding off quickly, but then stopped glancing down at his screen and began to talk about A New Spirit of Cooperation. Attention wandered. Fresh drinks and smokes were found. Conversations started up again.

“Father John! So you made it.”

A firm bony hand drew him by the elbow, through the honeysuckle arch and back into the crowd.

“Look, you haven’t got a drink. Have you eaten? The food’s not spectacular, but you may as well make the most of something that doesn’t taste of kelp.”

Father Orteau took a step back to study John. He didn’t exactly tut.

“I’m fine,” John said. “How are you?”

“Oh, me,” Father Orteau laughed. “I’ll be on top of the world when the bishop lets me out of here.”

John nodded, trying not to smile. It had been Felipe who’d explained how the bishop in Paris, against the policy of regularly shifting priests around in the Magulf, had now reappointed Father Orteau to the Zone parish for a third consecutive year. The Church’s usual fear was that, even in the Zones, priests would go odd, get an addiction, grow ill, mad—or go peculiarly native. But there was no chance of that happening to Father Orteau. Father Orteau was already peculiarly Father Orteau.

He dabbed at his forehead with a white handkerchief. His fingers strayed to check the precision of his center parting, the discreet diamond pinned to his right ear. He reinserted the handkerchief into his pocket, smoothed the crease of his suit.

“Well,” he asked, “what do you think?”

“I’m sure,” John said, surprised to discover just how easy it was to get into the ironic doublespeak of the Zone, “that more kelpbeds are just what the Borderers need.”

“Really?” Father Orteau studied him for a moment, then looked up. “You know, what I wouldn’t give for some blue sky…a few mare’s tails. And don’t you think it looks particularly poisonous up there today? All that smoke and sand. Some more rainforest must have gone up, don’t you think?”

John shrugged.

“One of the few things I have learned about Bab Mensor is that the wind always blows straight at my rooms in the Hyatt. I’m told the warm air has to go north to balance the Gulf Stream or something. That’s the maître d’s excuse for all the muck that gets blown onto my balcony, anyway.” He peered up at the sky. “And I have a terrible feeling today that the net has bungled—or some satellite’s gone down. I know it’s not the time of year for it, but I really do think it’s going to rain.”

“Halcycon’s probably got more important things to worry about than rainfall over Bab Mensor.”

Father Orteau blinked at the suggestion, obviously taken aback.

John blinked back. “You must come and visit us at the Pandera presbytery,” he said. “I’m sure Felipe would love to see you.”

“I don’t know what I’m thinking of—you still haven’t got that drink. Hey, you…” A jeweled cuff fell back from an elegant wrist as Father Orteau raised his arm and snapped his fingers. “Over here. Quick! We have a man in thirst.”

One of the Borderer waiters walked briskly over. John silently urged him to show some sign of reluctance or insolence, but the man kept up his unwavering smile, offering a choice of Chardonnay or Font de Michelle, neither of which John wanted.

Father Orteau was right: the low red sky really did signify rain.

It came chattering across the lake, obscuring the Hyatt, roiling the waters with reddish gray streamers of desert sand, drowning out the end of Mister Mero’s speech, sailing hats over the trees and the bandstand, sending the guests scurrying to shelter.

John sat alone on a marble bench in the Temple of Winds. He could have made it into one of the big marquees or the tropical houses with everyone else. They’d be there now. Drinking, smoking, laughing, eating…

The path that wound through the pear trees to the sunken garden ahead of him was now a brown stream cascading down stone steps where roses and clematis raised drowning hands. Every now and then, the wind sucked in on itself, spraying water from the temple’s sand-clogged gutters.

Still, it wasn’t a mudstorm. Just ordinary rainfall by Magulf standards, turning the world rusty brown. And outside the Zone, the filters for the water butts would be clogging, overflowing, the sewers would be backing up, the streets running thick and fast. The Endless City would be sinking into mud. It was the same in the Zone. On the way from the carpark with Tim, John had seen the lines of yellow tractors that the Borderer gardeners used to cut and vacuum the lawns; the crabs and ladders for cleaning the tropical houses’ acreage of glass; the pumping gear.

He shivered and shook his head, rubbing at the flesh around his watch, which still ached slightly from his examination, as it had when his recombinant was reformatted before he came here, to provide the viral barriers that lined his mouth and throat and lungs. The rain was thinning, but he was soaked by now anyway. The wind rocked the trees. A few more heavy droplets splattered down into his face. He could taste oxidized grit. Still, the gardens looked beautiful. The rain had almost stopped. And now, of all things, the sun was making a rare appearance. Bright rays, the lawns a sudden haze of steaming green, involving every sense. Tame birds started to squawk and sing. He saw a pair of the Trinity Gardens’ famous blue macaws. Squabbling, perhaps mating, fluttering together from branch to branch down the pear tree avenue like tangled flags.

The air was heavy, wet, earthy, and alive. The sunken garden was already draining, rescued by hidden pumps. The paths gleamed. The sky was arched with a rainbow.

Standing up, feeling his wet trousers shift and cling, John saw a blue-striped umbrella approaching along the avenue of pear trees. He wondered if he should wander off to avoid the encounter, but decided that he’d already taken the easy option once too often this afternoon. And it would probably only be Tim, drunk by now on Armagnac.

But it wasn’t Tim. It was a woman.

She climbed the steps, shook and folded her umbrella, and turned to sit on the bench.

“I wouldn’t sit there,” John said. “Everything here is soaked. Me included.”

“All right.” She straightened, twirling her umbrella. “Shall we walk? There’s little else to do here.”

He didn’t recognize her. She was dressed in a blue business jacket, the cuffs hanging down to her knuckles, and a skirt that looked creased and a little less than new. Like him, she probably felt out of place this afternoon.

He got up. “I’m John Alston.”

“The priest? I thought so.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Someone pointed you out.”

His shoes squelched as he and she descended the steps towards the sunken garden. “The rain,” he said. “It must have ruined the party.”

“I thought it was rather picturesque, everyone running for shelter. Like an old movie.”

“Or a sepia print.”

“Hmmm.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

“Laurie Kalmar. I work the net.”

He raised his eyes from the puddles, expecting her to offer a hand for him to shake. She didn’t.

“I’m based at the presbytery beside Gran Vía,” he said, “about ten kils from here…” He stopped there. Few people in the Zone knew or cared where he lived.

“Really? The Pandera presbytery? You live with old Father Felipe?”

“That’s right.” Surprised, he looked at her again. She was younger than he, no more than in her mid-twenties, which in itself was rare among expats, who generally came to the Zone after years of doing—or attempting to do—something else. Her dark hair was cut shoulder-length, and her thinnish face was dominated by wide, slightly protuberant silver eyes and a square jaw. “You seem to know your way around the Magulf a little better than most people,” he said.

She laughed. Like her voice, her laughter was soft yet oddly precise. Both warm and constricted. “Just because I’ve heard of your presbytery? The truth is, I do sometimes get involved in charity things like this one. I would be a leading light if they’d let me.”

“I guess it’s got to be the way forward. More kelpbeds.”

“That doesn’t impress you.”

“It doesn’t matter whether I’m impressed. The Medersa project will feed more people than I’ll ever be able to help. It’s big money, high profile…”

“And all the Europeans sitting at home will be able to feel good for a little while longer about helping the poor bloody Gogs…” She shook her head. “This doesn’t seem to be doing either of us any good, does it? Let’s talk about something else.”

They followed the path around the top of the lake. At first, they did talk about other things—about Father Orteau, the staff at Magulf Liaison; it seemed that he could mention any name and she would know who he meant—but mostly they still talked about the Endless City. Or he did: complaining about the antique doctor at the clinic, the erratic supplies, and the stupidity and ignorance that he encountered in the Zone—and outside, among the Borderers. What it was like to be forever alone in a crowded place: the sense of distant nearness.

“Your Church has always been obsessed with poverty,” she said. “Like all those appeal leaflets—as though starvation had some kind of inherent dignity. You work in a clinic, you must realize that money and medicine could do so much more…”

She opened her umbrella as they passed beneath the dripping canopy of willows beside the boathouse. He was puzzled by her attitude. People were expected to argue with and question priests—it was one of priests’ functions—but they rarely did. Workers on the net were notoriously eccentric—but your Church? As if there were some other.

“How long will you be staying here, Father John?”

“Just a year, unless the bishop extends my term.”

“You think that’s enough?”

“No, of course not. But the experience is that priests in the Endless City grow weary after a time.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“Weary?” He raised his shoulders and shrugged. “Not yet. Confused, maybe. A year isn’t anything like long enough. But how long would be enough—and for what?”

“And then, of course, you have your whole life in the Church.”

He nodded. The grass and the lake were gleaming and steaming. He was walking with a young and apparently charming woman, but he felt weary and alone.

“You didn’t happen to meet any of my predecessors?” he asked.

“I suppose I did. I meet a lot of people. You must know what it’s like in the Zone. You really never get to know them.”

“I passed the one before me, on the ferry,” John said. “He was going out to the shuttle as I came in.”

“That sounds quite typical.”

“There’s no continuity.”

“Of course. No…”

“It’s absurd, really, that so little attention is paid. Even the people you meet here seem in a dream—most of them, anyway.”

“They probably wish they were somewhere else.”

“Do you?”

She smiled and shook her head. Over the lake, blackish clouds were starting to ambush the sun. “And what would happen?”

“What?”

“If everyone woke up.”

“I’ve noticed…” He paused. “Things about the people who come to the clinic. The kind of illnesses they have, disease rates. I’m sure that something could be done—simply—to help.” Just then, the clouds met over the sun. As though someone had turned off a switch, the whole of Trinity Gardens darkened. The effect only lasted a moment. Stimulated by the change, all the lights around the gardens came on. The lake was suddenly glowing. Shadows flared out across the grass from the dripping trees.

In silence, they walked back up the slope to the noise and light of the tropical houses. The southerly wind had picked up too, almost as quickly as the change in the light, tumbling fallen branches, flailing the sodden beds of tulips and black daffodils, throwing scattershots of desert sand.

Suddenly Laurie Kalmar stooped, her hand to her face.

“What is it?” he asked. “Your eye?”

Leaning over the puddled path, she waved him away. “Just grit…”

Fumbling in the pocket of her dress, she produced a small vial. Tilting her head back, lifting the vial, she squeezed out a drop into her right eye.

“There.” She blinked and looked at him. By the second blink, the green of her right iris had turned silver again. “You didn’t realize,” she said. “Did you?”

“No…”

“You thought we Gogs were all waiters, gardeners, cleaners, or peasants, right?”

“Of course I don’t—”

“Come on. Let’s go inside.”

A uniformed waiter had seen them approach the tropical houses and was holding the door open. As it swung shut behind them, John was enclosed in a green wash of heat and the clink of glasses, the smell of European sweat, perfume, citrus fruit, wet clothes, buffet food, and tubes. He attempted to push through, but Laurie Kalmar was already squeezing away from him, between the hats and suits and dresses, between the birds and palm trees. The backs of her legs, John saw as she vanished, were striped with mud.