The Great Wheel by Ian R. MacLeod

that lined the foot of her bed. Kassi had no choice but to allow the witchwomen to bring their own brand of madness into the Cresta Motel, but she grew flustered if he gave any indication of noticing.
    Finally, he followed her back towards the courtyard, rubbing at the bands of pain in his head and the swimming blotches that were forming before his eyes. There were no obvious cases of leukemia here, and he’d asked about bludrut before. Yet the people Kassi Moss tended at the Cresta Motel were generally the poorest, the weakest, the most exposed to infection. He filed the fact away. It was meaningless as yet—but surely formed the part of some pattern.

E IGHT PEOPLE WERE SEATED around the table in conference room G in the main admin block of the European Zone at Bab Mensor. For various reasons, they were all paid to be here this morning. Otherwise, none of them would have attended—although, at the same time, these discussions, part of the complex fantail of Zone committees, had an addictive quality. There was always the sense that someday something might actually happen.
    John propped his head in his hand to cover the muscle in his cheek that had started to judder. Surreptitiously he kneaded it with his fingers, looking along the conference table. Only the telepresences seemed attentive, leaning out from their screens—but he doubted if those postures were true of the people they represented. He glanced at his own screen and drew a squiggle with his finger. They were at item 3a. The agenda items went up to 10, and each was a signpost along a long road—like the times in Hemhill when he was young and every schoolday had a special quality dictated by its proximity to the weekend. Item 1 was like Monday morning, a gray shock. Item 3a was the depths of a dreary Tuesday. Item 10, of course, would be Friday afternoon. As the clock on his schoolscreen had blinked through the minutes of art and history, he could already feel the breeze of freedom blowing through the school gates. But the best of all Fridays were the Fridays at the ends of term, and the best of all ends of term was the end of summer term. In the clear eternal past of childhood, in the days when the world truly had been filled with giants, Hal was already finished at seniors and leaning against the railing under the oak tree as John ran out through the gates. The two brothers would walk home together, and the shops and cars and houses and rainbowed sprinklers circling the lawns had a brilliance that only holidays could bring. And at home the rooms would be in chaos, filled with the straining cases and endless piles of shoes that they would take with them next day to the summerhouse at Ley…
    “I think we should move on to item 4,” said Bevis Headley, the chairman, who represented Halcycon S.A.
    The small globe-shaped secretary sitting in the middle of the table and feeding each member’s display gave a discreet bleep and intoned: “Zone subcommittee on Magulf education. Meeting 28, item 4. Sat broadcasts.”
    Buttocks shifted in seats. Eyes scanned the ceiling. John drew another squiggle on his screen. He disliked item 4 more than any of the others. It was a long way from the start, a long way from the finish. A drab plateau.
    Last night, he’d barely slept. Nowadays, even when he was fully awake, his head often filled with the same gray figures that had once only populated his dreams. Thin or bloated, half comatose or feverish, inflamed or limping, peeling back untaken patches of artificial skin with agonizing care to show him the head of a worm, a spine of metal, or the flesh of ribs and shoulders stripped away by a lurid secretion. European and Borderer, they floated entwined together, smoky fingers reaching out from the clinic, and from the Cresta Motel, and from Southlands, and the backrooms that he’d once visited in Yorkshire. “Father, does the Church have a viewpoint on this?” Faces along the committee table turned towards him. At such