THIS TIME, HE PAID extra and hired a personal veetol for the flight back to Hemhill from the shuttleport on the Thames. It was a cloudy day, but for a while the craft stayed low, and he could make out the glassy walls and pipelines that kept the more precious architectural relics safe from the tides. But the Tower of London, he saw, was now a crumbling island. The riverside gardens were flooded. The great dome of Wren’s Abbey was moated by greenish scum. Looking down at a stretch of jagged ruins in the moment before the net routed him higher and the clouds closed in, he was reminded of the Endless City. The stubby-winged machine rose into sunlight. He was alone with blue skies and the passing leviathan of a freighter before the veetol dived back down and the clouds parted for him over the valley of Hemhill. From the Magulf to Bab Mensor, from the rim of space to London, from blue skies to here, all in a few hours. He saw the neat line of High Street, the toy squares and the toy people, the spreading ordered grid of houses, and the wide acres of the processing compound and the fields beyond, mostly fallow at this late season: blank, resting, unwritten. And there, whorled and ravaged as if by subterranean heat, was the carnival field. The screen made no objection when he steered the veetol towards it. It was common land, a throwback to the time when his ancestors grazed their cattle there and feared the uncertain sky.

The veetol settled. John stepped out and felt the unfamiliar give of soil beneath his feet. As the craft rose again, he stood and watched, shading his face from the hot oily wind when the veetol pitched sideways, skimming the rim of the trees, then climbed almost vertically. He saw it swoop, spin, flip over, and disappear into the clouds—free to do as it liked now that it no longer held vulnerable human cargo.

John walked across the field, at first making for the gap in the fence through which he used to climb. But his bag was heavy, and he was conscious of the freshly knitted wheal that ran like a double tramline parallel to the scar of his recombinant, then veered left across his shoulderblade towards the new powerpack in his armpit. The gap in the fence would have been fixed long ago anyway.

The gate swung open at his approach, and he walked the smooth gray road past the last of the fields and into the first of the houses. He felt hot and breathless even in this fresh autumnal air, but still he was glad that he’d arranged to walk the last mile of his return. This gave him a final moment to believe what lay ahead.

The trees were shedding. Dry leaves tumbled in flocks along the gutters. The shops and the houses looked the same. Everything came back to him—like going through old photographs—people and places fitting in with memories he didn’t even know he had. He was conscious that he was being stared at, and was sure that an old man—familiar but unplaceable, with a face that had once been young—crossed to the other side of the road when he saw him.

John turned away from the shops and went past the gateway to the park with the public toilets by it. He heard the familiar stutter of his breath as he went along the railings, and, looking through, he saw the spinning machines and the brown-limbed figures still playing on the tennis courts in the specially warmed air. The season for competitions was over, but you had to keep your hand in if you ever wanted to win anything. Tennis was a game where the body and instinct counted for more than the mind, and in the middle of all that sweaty effort was this magical area that Hal once described—walking, back along this same street, exuding new sweat and joy at a local quarter-final victory. For most of that last set, Skiddle, he’d said, I wasn’t actually there. I was just reactions and muscles. This, John knew, was what all the serious players strove to achieve. The place that was known, oddly enough, as the zone, where everything clicked and body and mind and emotion became one. The place that had to be endlessly worked towards, that could never be taken for granted even by players at the highest level, that was always beckoning at the start of every match, waiting out there somewhere to be attained. There…

The house seemed the same, even to the cat-and-mint smell of the biannually flowering bush by the front doorstep and to the waft of air as the door opened for him. His father was sitting in the lounge, poised, it seemed, from the rigid set of his body, between finishing one thing and starting another. But the room was clear and overtidy. And there was no music.

They said each other’s names. The chair helped his father up, and the two men regarded each other for a moment. Then there was a rough, ill-arranged embrace, and they sat down facing each other.

John felt weak, dried out, dry-eyed.

“Dad, I missed the funeral,” he said. “I wish I’d—”

“It couldn’t be helped, Son. Your being ill. When I heard, I…” His father shook his head at the thought of some impossible eventuality, and the wattles beneath his cheeks creased and uncreased. “But you look okay.”

“There was never any real danger. I just wish I’d been here with you, Dad.”

“To be honest, Son, this place has been like a hotel, and I was glad to send them all away this morning when I knew you were coming. Glad to be alone. And when it happened, I didn’t know how I was going to tell you. It’s something you worry about when it happens. Who to call, what to do, whether there’s enough food in the kitchen. It’s never anything big…”

The room became quiet and still. John blinked as it seemed to fill with a gas, with the clouds that he’d ascended through and looked down on. He realized that he was listening for the sound of his mother’s voice, for the clatter in the kitchen as she and the cleaner competed to get things done, for those singsong, semi-internal conversations where questions unraveled into answers that became questions again. He took a breath and looked down at the scarred palms of his hands. His father sat rigid. The smell of his tubes, John realized, was also missing.

“I kept thinking,” John said, “when I was stuck in the Zone, about how you’d be managing with Hal.”

“That’s been no problem.” His father looked affronted. “I can manage with Hal. After all, there’s very little to it, and anyway I could have got in a doctor. Remember that machine we took with us once to Ley?” He smiled as if at some fond memory—and John supposed that in a sense it was.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I guess I’m just feeling guilty for not being here.”

“And you’ll be wanting to see him now?”

See him? John nodded, feeling as though he was drifting again, breaking through an endless series of paper-thin walls.

He stood up.

“But he hasn’t changed,” his father called through the doorway as John began to climb the stairs. “Everything’s the same.”

Later, the two men ate dinner together in the brightly lit kitchen. John picked at the geometrically presented food, wondering if he should add salt to make it come alive, wondering exactly what flavor it was he was missing. He could see his own pale face and his father’s hunched, birdlike shoulders reflected in the blackened window.

“I don’t,” he said, “have any immediate commitments.”

“No, Son. I’m glad.”

“I’m not even sure if I…”

His father looked up at him, the tip of his fork trembling in his hand. There were many decisions for them to make about life, about the future, about Hal. But the silver of his father’s eyes seemed detached now, like separate lenses, nothing to do with the bloodshot and whitish-brown orbs that surrounded them. He said, “You do what you want to do, Son.”

“I thought I’d stay here with you for a while. The bishop’s given me permission to…take a break.”

“It’ll be good to have you around. As long as you know that you don’t have to. That I can manage.”

After the cleaner removed and destroyed the uneaten remains of their meal, they sat and drank whisky between the silent loudspeakers in the lounge. His father went up to see Hal once, when a screen bleeped, and came down again within a few minutes. His mother, John remembered, had never gone up there for less than an hour.

“I don’t know how much you’ve heard,” his father said, sitting and studying the planes of his glass and the golden fluid that glittered in his eyes. “People expected me to be shocked—but of course I knew. Sarah and I used to talk about it, when we could still make a joke of it, when we were young. How she was older, how she’d be the first to go. And I knew that she’d always hated Southlands, We used to talk about that, too. Until…” He shook his head. “But she’d seen too much of it with Hal. She’d had her fill. So when that new implant they fitted above her watch started acting up, I knew it was a sign. A bad sign. I didn’t think it, Son,” he said, gazing levelly at John, “I knew it. So when it happened, it was like feeling something snap that was already pretty much broken. It was no surprise.”

“She didn’t say anything?”

“It was me really. Son. It was what I said. We were sitting at the breakfast table eating—I don’t know why, but she always gave me cold cereal after we retired, even though I like something cooked—and I saw this red spot on her wrist, and I pointed and said, That’ll be Hal. And she looked down at it and tutted, and I saw that it was actually a spot of blood soaking up through the sleeve of her cardigan. She said something—I think it was just, Oh dear—and put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed as she went out to the stairs, which wasn’t like her, not at breakfast anyway. I just sat there and waited. Stared at the table and my bowl of flakes. And everything went quiet and I could hear this humming and then I remembered that yesterday had been the day of the carnival. Not that we’d gone, but you could see the litter blowing over the park, and that big Ferris wheel had been up in the afternoon sky while I was listening to Turandot. It made me think that, well, this is really a kind of anniversary. Not the precise date that Hal’s accident happened—that was the week before—but still, with the carnival, a kind of anniversary. And that humming from the compound where the Gogs work seemed to get louder and part of me started thinking, This is it, the end, while the rest of me was saying, Oh, this is silly, Sarah’s dabbing the wound and changing her cardigan, or she probably went to see Hal. That would explain it—you know how long she spends in there. But after a while, when she still didn’t come down, I started to cry. It’s the first time I cried in years, apart from when I’m listening to music. And that doesn’t really count, does it?”

“I don’t know, Dad.” John closed his eyes and opened them again, trying to block the image of his mother lying on the bed with the implant trailing from her wrist and blood on the bed-sheets, blood in wild sweeps and scrawls across the walls. But his mother was a neat and orderly woman. It wouldn’t have been like that. “You don’t think it was some change in Hal that finally made it happen?”

“What happened, Son, was that nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. That was what happened.

A little later, John and his father both went to bed. John lay all night, his head fizzy with the whisky. Staring at the closed door that led to the landing. Listening to the sound of humming.

The rooks were circling the hill, and the long churchyard grass had turned a greenish gray that swept down into the valley below, softening to ember blacks and reddish browns in the wooded hills.

“I always thought this would be her last place,” his father said, holding the brass-plated box in his hands. “She never said, of course. But we used to come up here, long ago, in the summer dusk.”

John nodded. He knew that his father was telling him that this was where he wanted his own dust to be cast when the time came.

“They ask you about the extra stuff,” his father said. “All the bumps and the wires. They don’t burn in the furnace like we do, but there’s another machine afterward, and they’ll grind them up and give them back to you in much the same kind of powder. But you know that, Son, don’t you? I said no anyway, keep them, you can reuse the metal—it’s made in space, isn’t it? Expensive.” He nodded at the box, then looked at John. “And the Gog—the Borderers. What do they…?”

“It isn’t that much different, Dad.”

“Couldn’t be really, could it?” His father looked around at the huddle of gravestones: cracked and weathered, nameless. “Not like this lot. No room left under there now—they’ve crowded us out. But it’s a nice thought. To think that so many are waiting for us.”

From the valley a wind was pouring across the brown rooftops of Hemhill, the tall trees in the park, the scarred field of the carnival. John watched as his father, ever practical, licked his finger and held it up to determine the direction.

“I’m glad it’s just us here, Son,” he said, taking a few steps down the slope towards the ha-ha. “We don’t need Father Leon, that priest. I mean, I know you’re a priest too. But you’re my son. All the rest—it’s just badges we put on, isn’t it? Things we try to do.”

They stood together, each holding the open box with one hand where the soft lip of the land fell away. In the moment that the ash fell, the air seemed to rise and take it all from them, lifting it across the valley, bearing it high into the gauzy light, carrying it on some stray thermal. A little more grit in the wind.

Later that afternoon, John got around to emptying the bag he brought with him from the Endless City. Bella had cleaned everything in it before he left, but the bag still smelled of dust, smoke, and dysol, and his clothes felt pleasantly damp when he held them to his skin. At the bottom were scattered the few ancient music disks he’d noticed in the souks and bought occasionally for his father. Leaning over the bed to pick them out from the koiyl that was there also, feeling the scar along his back tighten, he wondered what he had planned to bring back home for his mother. He took the leaves out individually, turning them over, running a finger along the indented stems. In all, he’d brought a dozen home with him, and every one of them was from Lall. But when he scratched their oily surfaces and held them close to his face, the scent was surprisingly weak, drowned out, really, by this Hemhill room. They just looked like shriveled leaves. The physical longing he once felt for them was gone too. There, he thought, another lesson: they’re not truly addictive—unless Tim and his doctor switched off the relevant synapses when they opened me in the Zone. And here, last of all, tucked beneath a sealed flap, was the tiny vial of the leaf-based poison that Kassi Moss had given him. He lifted it to the light and turned it over, gazing at the sticky fluid, wondering if he was ready to open it yet.

Next morning, he borrowed his father’s car. It took him to Southlands along a well-remembered route. He stepped out in front of the big facade where the wind rattled the trees across the lawns, pulling at the clouds, a reminder that he would have to buy warmer clothes if he stayed here for the winter. Up the steps and inside the echoing entrance hall, he sent a machine off to find Eliot Farrar and stood and waited.

Farrar arrived soon enough. John had made an appointment, after all. They shook hands and went to Farrar’s office, going by corridors and across a courtyard that avoided the wards and recreation rooms, the whispering voices, the sad clutching hands. Farrar probably felt he’d made the point he’d wanted to make to John, last time.

When the office door closed, John took a seat in the leather-backed chair facing Farrar’s desk. “Well, here I am,” he said.

“This has all been very sad,” Farrar began. “I had a strong affection, a great respect…”

As Farrar spoke, John’s eyes were drawn to the pale dots that drifted on the screen behind him. All this talk of sadness, regret: as if things could be different. But he knew from experience the replies you were supposed to give, the slow dance you had to do in times of bereavement. He waited. In due course, Farrar would steer things back to the specifics of the situation. How his father was coping—and Hal. But John wasn’t ready to talk about Hal yet.

John took a card from his top pocket and placed it on the desk in front of Farrar. He hadn’t brought any of the koiyl leaves with him today, but the card contained all the necessary information. It would be a start, a way forward. That, at least, was what he was allowing himself to hope. Farrar’s eyebrows went up, and his silver eyes turned blanker than ever when he took the card in his hands. Tapping it with his well-manicured fingers, he promised with a trace of weariness that yes, of course, he would take a look at the possibilities.

He spent the days mostly walking, dutifully exercising as Tim Purdoe had said he should, climbing the hills and looking out over the familiar countryside. He walked the high-hedged lanes that briefly dripped with birdsong and wild fruits before the flashing galleons once more threaded the skies, spiraling a pale wake that frosted the rucked earth to iron. And in the days after, when the weather grew warm again and a pale sun shone over the bare trees, the big machines moved into the fields, automated hippos that wallowed in mud and churned and exposed the soil. The air stank of clay, and the roads were lumped with the clods. The mist that filled the hollows was torn away when the wind came up with the stars. He stood gazing through the shockwire where the lights of the compound shone and the Borderers shouted in strange accents and scurried, working their last few days to make targets and meet deadlines. He walked into the village past the railings where the white figures on the tennis courts were still playing. Even as the door of the house closed and he went up the stairs, he could hear the pock of balls and the faint humming.

He often sat at Hal’s bedside in the evenings, the way Hal had once sat at his. John sat in silence, unwilling to break the antiseptic air with the sound of his voice. What, anyway, could he say? Mother’s dead, Hal. Ma. Mum. Madre. And I found that port in Kushiel you accessed. And I killed a goat. And the sky is blue.

Late autumn hardened to winter. The freshly turned fields grew livid green with late high-nitrogen clover and gave off a strange acid tang. Then something seemed to lift from the air one morning, and as he walked by the shockwire of the compound, he saw empty spaces and that the warehouse doors were closed. Though he hadn’t heard them going, the Borderers had left. He turned and walked back through the streets and up a hardened track at the far side of the valley, through a swing gate leading into the forest. The cold air was still filled with the sharp oily smell of chloroethane sap, but the tree-tappers had settled in the branches, curled until spring into hard silver lumps like ice. Sitting on a fallen log on a hilltop to catch his breath, he could see the green ruins of the city that had been Hereford jutting from the trees below.

The streets, when he walked down into them, were pitted, caved in, distorted by rearing sewerpipes or blocked by the rusty deadfalls of what was once traffic. He remembered someone saying you could still find corpses in some of the roofless houses. Yet he felt at home in the wrecked, ivied buildings, in the snap of his footsteps in the tumbling empty squares around the fallen cathedral, in the brown and furtive animals that lived and died here—excluded from Hemhill’s fertile valley by bitter saps, predatory insects, and shockwire. Although he looked, he couldn’t find the pub with the sign THE ORANGE TREE sticking out into the street, where an atrocity was once committed by Hemhill lads on a Borderer girl.

There were cars parked outside the house when he returned from the woodland that evening, and people filled the hallway and the lounge, taking drinks from the hired machines and the cleaner, propping themselves against the table in the kitchen. Music was playing for the first time since he’d come home, although it wasn’t the sort his father would have chosen. It had a beat, da-de-da de-de-de dum-dum. Felipe would have loved it.

John, the people said, Father John, you must meet…Laying hands on his shoulder, steering him this way and that. His father, now red-faced, seemed genuinely cheerful amid these neighbors, relatives, and cronies. This, he said, seeing John standing alone in a corner in the moment before someone else came over to ask him about the Gogs, is the life. John smiled. He’d noticed how rarely anyone went upstairs, except quickly and furtively when the downstairs toilet was occupied, with glances along the darkened landing. Later, as he stood wedged in a corner while one of the junior Youngsons told him about his plans to marry a girl he’d met on a training course in Cardington, Bedfordshire, John found himself thinking of Hal lying upstairs with the sound of the party and the smell of European bodies and buffet food seeping through the molecular barrier. He understood now why his mother had put that extra monitor into her wrist. Perhaps he should have the same thing done himself.

It was snowing when the people finally left—the first proper flakes of the year—and they all looked up with their hands held out to the darkly spiraling sky. The snow continued all night, and in the morning the whole world was transformed. Even the tennis courts beyond the white-shouldered trees and the railings in the park were finally empty.

John went down to the lounge through the mess that the cleaner had vainly attempted to clear. He powered a chair over to the house’s main screen and called up Tim Purdoe in the Zone. He saw from the image that Tim’s bungalow was much like Laurie’s, although he’d never visited it, and he realized from the crumpled look of Tim’s face that Tim had probably been asleep. Here or there it was still early, but John was touched to think that Tim had arranged for his answerer to awaken him if John happened to call.

They talked for a while about John’s health, then about news from the Zone, although half the names Tim mentioned were unfamiliar.

“How’s Felipe?”

“Oh, he’s fine. He came to a big performance of Mozart’s Requiem that Father Orteau put on at All Saints—snored and farted all the way through.”

John smiled. “And the new priest?”

“I don’t see as much of him as I did of you. But he’s doing okay.”

“I used to think it was terrible—the way posts change hands without people having a chance to meet.”

Tim nodded.

“I was determined that I’d get in touch with whoever replaced me at the presbytery. Maybe even go back for a few days, or at least speak to the person on a decent-sized screen. But I think I understand now why the Church does things this way. All I could give would be preconceptions.”

Tim nodded again and smiled.

“And there’s no point in bothering Felipe, dragging him all the way down the corridor to the airwave on those legs. And I never did know what to say to Bella.”

“No.”

“Anyway, I…”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering if you’d heard anything about Laurie.”

Tim shook his head. “Nothing’s changed, John. She’s disappeared, left the Zone—quit her job without what I believe they used to call a forwarding address. Still, I did check as you asked me to, and she’s not with her mother in Mokifa either. I spoke to her mother.”

“You went there?”

“It’s along Gran Vía, John. I do know the way. Mrs. Kalmar politely told me that it was none of my business. Of course, I tried mentioning you, but that didn’t help much. She said Laurie would get in touch if and when she wanted to. I’m sorry, John—but it’s not like Europe. In the Magulf, you can’t just call people up on a screen.” Tim stifled a yawn. “Apart from me, that is.”

John nodded. Laurie. The Magulf. Mokifa. Gran Vía. He heard the cleaner knock something over in the kitchen. Outside, a white labyrinth of snow was falling. “Anyway,” he said, drawing a breath, “about the leaf—”

Tim waved a hand. “Christ, John, I’m sorry. I’ll chase it up for you. I’ll have a word with Cal.”

“Don’t worry, Tim. Something may be happening here.”

“Look, if you want—”

“No, really. It’s okay. I mean it.”

“John, is that snow outside? White snow?”

“It’s white.”

Tim shook his head. “It really is another world.”

They smiled at each other for a moment. But there was nothing left to say now, except gonenanh, goodbye.

Paging back out of the Zone from Tim, John saw that a message flag was flashing for him. His heart began to pound, but then he realized it was from Eliot Farrar’s answerer at Southlands. The answerer said that Farrar had copied the card John gave him about what Farrar called “the foreign analgesic”; he’d sent it down the net to a big Halcycon-funded project in London, and that they were as excited as he was by it. It was clearly vital for them to meet and discuss tactics at the earliest possible date—so could they link datebooks and suggest a time? John got up and went over to the window. Gazing out at the falling white, his shoulders began to shake. He realized after a while that he was laughing.

White streets in moonlight, the snow piled into mountain ridges by the machines that had been brought down specially from

Carlisle. Even then, the car moved with a skidding sigh. It snowed every night, although Halcycon kept making assurances that it wouldn’t. Even the children had grown tired of snowball fights and toboggan sliding. But to John, still an onlooker in

Hemhill’s affairs, everything felt as it should. It was the last night of the year, still the Christmas season: it was right that there should be snow.

Colored lights glittered in the windows and dimly through the white-furred trees. John heard a familiar rustle and snap and saw in the dashboard’s glow that his father was breaking open and inhaling a tube. John smiled as he breathed the scent and the headlights plowed on out of the village past the fields and through the whiteness.

Radway Farm shone like a lantern with its huge lighted doorways. Tonight it was filled with parked cars, the steam of baked potatoes, hot punch, the thump of music. The tall tree in the main barn glittered with phosphorescent tinsel and a million tiny ornaments. John left his father with friends and pushed his way through the crowd to cup one of the globes in his hand where it drooped glowing from the boughs in a haze of green scent. There, inside the intricate hand-made glass, Mary sat nodding and murmuring to the baby in her arms, surrounded by kingly men and plump unengineered cattle. They all had wise and slightly quizzical expressions, no particular shade to their eyes. In one corner, if you held the globe just right, you could read the words MADE IN THE MAGULF.

When he looked up, Annie was standing beside him.

“I should have come over to Hemhill,” she said, “when I heard what happened. But you know how it is.” She gestured, slopping her punch. The lights of the tree glittered, and John felt the falling needles tickle his back and hands. “The kids, the farm, Bill…How’s your Dad managing? I remember how mine was—picking around all day at the traces. Taking stuff out from the chests and shelves and cupboards, then putting it all back again.”

“There really aren’t that many traces of Mum, Annie. She was like me, neat and tidy most of the time.”

Annie nodded. She was wearing a long green dress, low cut at the shoulders, showing the divide of her breasts.

“Anyway,” he said. “Here I am.”

“Here you are.” She smiled, already a little drunk, and looking, it seemed to him, quite marvelously pretty. “So. It’s the New Year.” She drew him away as a shouting group closed in on them. “What are your plans now?”

He shrugged.

“Someone said you were going to quit being a priest.”

“I’ve thought of it. But I need to find something else to do with my life.”

“Don’t look so glum.” She nudged his side. “It’s still a big world, it’s just Hemhill that makes it…” She chuckled and sipped her drink. “But why am I telling you this? You’re the wanderer, John, the pilgrim. Not me.”

“All you change when you go to another place is the sky.”

“Who said that?”

“I think it was the old priest I shared the presbytery with in the Endless City. Anyway, I’ve had some discussions with Eliot Farrar at Southlands recently.”

She nodded, drawing her top teeth over her bottom lip.

“He…seems genuinely interested in a project that I started in the Endless City. There’s a leaf, a drug, that could help people here. The ill, the old—it would allow them to exercise a kind of control over their minds. A way of getting rid of anxiety and suffering without the need for painkillers.”

“We could all do with some of that.”

They looked at each other. It was getting close to midnight, and the band on the stage beyond the buffet had struck up. The roof, he now saw, had dissolved into stars, story-bright stars overlaid on a sky of black velvet. And it was hot in here.

“Come on,” she shouted. “I need to see how Harry’s doing.”

“Harry?”

“My baby, John. Remember? You saw him in the summer.”

Outside, through the big doors and the barrier that kept in most of the heat, a tracked machine was scouring safe pathways across the ice, marking them with a fluorescent dye.

“It didn’t seem fair to ask anyone to sit with him tonight,” Annie said. “But I really don’t like leaving him with a machine.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

She had her hands clasped tight around her bare arms, and her breath came in clouds, but she shook her head. The farmhouse lay between the powerlines and brightly lit buildings. Inside, it was all still so antique. She had to finger a switch to turn on a light. And there were frost flowers on the windows.

“Don’t you worry,” he asked, “about this hard winter?”

“It’s the same for everyone.”

“I thought you farmers were always complaining.”

She shrugged, her silver eyes shining. A cat shot by. “What is there to complain about?”

He watched the sway of her body as she climbed the creaking stairs ahead of him, and the freckles that dotted her shoulders, the pale scar on her back, the gray in her hair.

In the nursery, the dancing-elephant wallpaper was peeling, and there were familiar odors of dust and mildew. The baby was asleep. It, too, had a familiar smell. Of soap, a whiff of shit, and, even now that its first implants had stabilized, of a different kind of humanity. Of Borderer. The padded machine that squatted by the cot blinked its cartoon face and looked up at them.

“He’s grown so quickly,” John said.

Annie chuckled and brushed at a wisp of the baby’s golden hair. “They do.” Laid out on the coverlet, the screen of a tiny watch now shimmered on the plump curve of the baby’s wrist.

“What made you call him Harry?”

She raised her shoulders. “I didn’t even think. Of course, Bill wouldn’t have made the connection—and for a long time, even after Harry was born, it didn’t occur to me either. I mean, no one ever called Hal Harry, did they? He was always just Hal.”

“No.”

“And I’ll always call my Harry Harry.”

He nodded, gazing at Annie. “You know, I—”

“But it seems right, now, doesn’t it, John? Calling him Harry. We’re older, and we’ve changed. And it was all such a long time ago.”

They walked back down the stairs and across the hallway, where a grandfather clock began to chime just as Annie turned the handle and began to work the front door open. Bong.

“There…” She stopped, leaning against the frame, tilting her head, goose bumps on her arms. “Listen.”

Bong…

The clock whirred and clunked through the year’s last moments. And outside in the darkness and over the rooftops, John could hear cheers and shouts, the ironic drum-thump of the band.

“We’ve missed it,” Annie said. “But no one ever takes these things seriously, do they? Happy new year, John.”

“Happy new year.”

Half in and half out of the cold, Annie pressed herself against him, and they kissed.

He, sat in a London restaurant with Eliot Farrar. They’d taken a seat by the window, and the world outside was crystalline, the passersby hunched and encased in plumes of breath even though it was early afternoon. A long black car slid by, a new model that John didn’t know. Something in its engine was squealing.

“Well.” Farrar raised a glass. “Looks like we have a success.”

John clinked his glass against Farrar’s rim. He was getting used to the feel of these places, to the softness of the carpet, the rippling pools of conversation, the eager and accommodating chairs, the glinting warmth—and to the meetings: Cal Edmead, Bevis Headley, the Zone’s steering committees hadn’t even been close to what went on here.

“Of course,” Farrar said with a grin, “it’s all come quicker than I expected. To get something through channels this fast is quite a miracle. I needed the help of a man of God.”

“Will they use Southlands for the tests?”

Farrar shook his head. “At least, not at first. They’ll do a triple-blind. People like me won’t have any idea what’s happening until the results come out.”

“Do you think they’ll actually use the leaf? Allow people to chew it?”

Farrar smiled. “It’s a nice thought. But no, I don’t think so.”

The waiter came up with a pen and pad. He had a small dimplelike scar on his jaw and black eyebrows that met above his brown eyes. John said gunafana to him when they ordered, but the waiter didn’t blink, didn’t even glance up from his pad.

“I guess you’re tired of it,” Farrar said later, when they walked out into the street.

“Of what?”

“People asking you what you’re going to do.” Farrar puffed out his cheeks, wrapped his scarf around his neck, and pulled on his gloves. John, bare-handed, shoved his arms deep into the pockets of the big old coat that his father had insisted on lending him. They walked on for a while, vaguely in the direction of the rental site and the veetol that would take them back to Hemhill. Neither man was in a hurry.

“Oddly enough,” John said, “people don’t ask. Not in a way that expects an answer.”

“I suppose you’ve leaned farther over the edge than most of us have. Even me, doing what I do at Southlands…You know, I had this image of you, John.” He chuckled, looked down a long street at the white, yellow-lit buildings and the frozen river. “But my problem is that when I get to know people, I start to realize that I should never give them advice.”

“So you don’t think I should let Hal go now?”

Farrar sighed, his feet crunching the frosted ground. A muttering male figure ran out towards them across the street, waving his hands. It seemed for a moment that he was going to ask for money.

“John,” Farrar said, “I really don’t think it matters now.”

John’s father was sitting in the lounge when John got home that night. Smoking tubes and listening to the slow movement of Mahler’s Fifth, his father was resting a hand on the warm top plate of the cleaner squatted beside him. There was a trace of what might have been tears on his cheeks.

“How did it go?” he asked, lowering the music.

“Pretty well,” John said, struggling with the coat’s torn inner sleeves and the ragged sense of domesticity that surrounded him. His dinner, he knew, would be dried up on the server in the kitchen; a mute rebuke for his returning a little later than he’d said. And later it would be his turn to see to Hal before he went to bed and dropped into the black pit of sleep that always seemed to be waiting.

“Did you know,” his father said, “that Mahler was forever trying to recreate a moment that happened when he was a child?

His mother was near death from this terrible fever, and outside through the open window in the street he could hear a hurdy-gurdy playing this jolly song…”

“Do you still input that stuff into Hal’s monitor?”

“Stuff?”

“The music.”

“No.” His father shook his head. “Not since I started listening again. It seemed wrong…To keep pushing.”

John reached down and took his father’s hand. It was an odd feeling; the pale scars on his palms—he’d insisted they be left as they were—gave only an intermittent sense of touch. But although his father and he had never really become close after sharing the house for all these months, they kept their hands pressed together, John at his father’s side and the music in the background still whispering about tragedy and loss. At some point, they both started to cry, quietly. It was suddenly clear to both of them that Hal had died long ago.

John called Eliot Farrar at Southlands the next morning through the net. The answerer paged Farrar, and Farrar said he’d come to the house straightaway, but John told him there was no hurry. This evening would be soon enough. He and his father sat together afterward in the kitchen, eating the large breakfast for which, after their decision, they both felt suddenly and shamefully hungry. When the cleaner removed the plates, they went upstairs. Hal’s door opened for them, and the molecular barrier that John had ceased to notice suddenly seemed strong again. A last wall. Stepping in, he checked, as always, the monitors that would have called for aid anyway if there had been the slightest disturbance to the smooth flow of his brother’s vital signs.

Now, he thought—couldn’t help thinking—now is your last chance. Sit up and say Hey, Skiddle, what’s been happening? But Hal’s face was placid and his flesh was smooth and clear. His hair was a little more ragged now that his mother wasn’t there to see to it, and more of the gray had frosted the temples. John heard a rasp behind him, and looked around to see his father stooped in his awkward old man’s gait, pulling a drawer and tipping out the contents across the clinically dust-free floor.

Although they hadn’t intended to do so, they spent most of the day going through Hal’s things. Part of it felt wrong—almost like the wild-eyed relatives whom John had seen descending on houses in Yorkshire even before the final decision for death was made—but they were soon caught in the past, and moved with slow and half-conscious absorption even as Hal’s body lay with them. John unfolded boxes and had the cleaner take down to the garage all the things they were sure they didn’t want. The ridiculously unfashionable clothing. Little screens that had leaked gummy pools. And the boots, the running shoes, the tennis shoes, the trainers. Those empty receptacles that smelled of nothing but old leather.

“Isn’t there somewhere we can send all this?” his father asked. “Some charity for the Borderers?”

“Dad, you called them Borderers.”

His father blinked at him, a broken dodger ball tinkling in his hands. “What do you mean? What else should I call them?”

“No, I don’t think there is a place where we could send all this. We just have to get rid of it.”

Occasionally a car or van went past, wheels and fans sighing and crackling over the snow. And Hal lay there breathing in his bed as they moved quietly through his possessions. Even now they were expecting, John supposed, some final shock, some great revelation. But there was nothing. Just memories. And the memories seemed less than real. Only once, when his father opened a tall narrow cupboard by the window, was there any sense of surprise when a tide of cups, plaques, and rosettes clattered across the floor.

“I thought we had them all out,” his father muttered, regarding the display of trophies that filled the shelves beside the door. John picked up a shallow brass bowl from the floor. One of the ribbons, faded with age, broke off when he touched it. He read the engraving.

RUNNER-UP

BECKFORD CHAMPION’S CUP

2152

Then a plaque.

HARRY ALSTON

JUDGES’ COMMENDATION

SUMMER 2149

After looking at a few more, he understood why these had been hidden. None were first prizes.

“Aren’t you supposed to hand them back after you’ve kept them for a year?” his father asked, holding up a big-handled loving cup of tarnished pewter.

“I doubt if anyone wanted to come and ask, Dad.”

They packed the trophies away. For a while, with the dust billowing too quickly for the filters to handle it and with Hal’s things spread across the floor, the room looked almost as it had when he was alive. There was no sign, of course, of the equipment that he’d used to destroy himself—that had been taken away by the people from Halcycon S.A. in Leominster. But the suitcases he’d never got around to packing, they were still pushed above the wardrobe. His father couldn’t reach. John took them down and left them open and empty on the floor until he turned and saw them lying there, and the mess of life that was all around them, and felt his spine ache and his heart grow weary. I’ve been going through my things, Skiddle. Clearing out…That was how it started anyway. John closed the cases and looked around. But there was nothing, just the click and sigh, his father’s unhurried movements, the lime trees guarding the tennis courts, and the grainy whiteness of the world.

They were listening to music in the lounge when Eliot Farrar finally came. John supposed that these last hours should have been a time of prayer, but the music—a solo piano, pleasant, though he couldn’t place it—and their exhaustion from the work of clearing had taken over, filling them both with an almost comfortable melancholy. It felt for a while as if they’d done the right thing with the day. John heard the sounds in the driveway and opened the door and saw the vans, cars, machines, and assistants, the lights blazing and circling. He realized that he’d forgotten just how much effort was needed. Father Leon Hardimann was there, he saw. The presence of a priest was desirable on such occasions—and after all that had happened, John could hardly perform that role today.

They filed in, businesslike. Even the people that he knew were strangers. He should have spent more time alone with Hal, shared a last and final word. He wanted to grab an arm or shoulder as they went past and say, Look, I know I called, but I didn’t mean now. This is a little early. Can’t you wait?

They’d already turned up the heat and the light in Hal’s room when John got there, and they’d brought the powdery smell of snow and European sweat in with them. It was tidy here again, with a just a few extra boxes piled beneath Hal’s desk in the corner. A new machine, bigger and mobile, squatted beside Hal’s monitors now. John saw that Farrar had added some extra wires to the ones that ran into Hal’s nose. It was all swiftly and discreetly done. The procedure was familiar to everyone, though it was not something you ever got quite used to. John and his father touched the icons in the screen they were given, to signify their consent, which was witnessed in turn by Eliot Farrar and Father Leon, and then by the net. John watched as the priest unscrewed the little vial and with his hands dripped holy water on Hal’s chest and brow.

In the name of God the almighty Father who created you,

In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who suffered for you,

In the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you,

Go forth, faithful Christian.

Outside the window, pushed by a sudden wind, flakes of snow began to tunnel and fall. Then the final moment came. John took hold of Hal’s left hand and his father took hold of the right, and Farrar did something with the screen. The breather went click, sigh, click, sigh, click, and white silence flowed through the room. John waited for the sound to come again, for something to break, for something to happen. Then, as he looked down at Hal’s face, there was a slight but definite ripple of movement. The eyes and mouth tensed and, for the first time in years, John felt his brother’s hand briefly tighten in his own.