The Days of Solomon Gursky

Wednesday

The seguridados were on the boulevards tonight, hunting the trespassing dead. The meat were monsters, overmoneyed, understimulated, cerristo males and females who deeply enjoyed playing angels of Big Death in a world where any other kind of death was temporary. The meat were horrors, but their machines were beautiful. Mechadors: robot mantises with beaks of vanadium steel and two rapid fire MIST 27s throwing fifty self-targeting drones per second, each separating into a hail of sun-munitions half a second before impact. Fifteen wide-spectrum senses analyzed the world; the machines maneuvered on tightly focused impeller fields. And absolutely no thought or mercy. Big beautiful death.

The window in the house in the hills was big and wide and the man stood in the middle of it. He was watching the mechadors hunt. There were four of them, two pairs working each side of the avenue. He saw the one with Necroslayer painted on its tectoplastic skin bound over the shrubbery from the Sifuentes place in a single pulse of focused electrogravitic force. It moved over the lawn, beaked head sensing. It paused, scanned the window. The man met its five cluster eyes for an instant. It moved on. Its impeller drive left eddy patterns on the shaved turf. The man watched until the mechadors passed out of sight, and the seguridados in their over-emphatic battle-armor came up the avenue, covering imagined threats with their hideously powerful weapons.

“It’s every night now,” he said. “They’re getting scared.”

In an instant, the woman was in the big, wood-floored room where the man stood. She was dressed in a virtuality bodyglove; snapped tendrils retracting into the suit’s node points indicated the abruptness with which she had pulled out of the web. She was dark and very angry. Scared angry.

“Jesus Joseph Mary, how many times do I have to tell you? Keep away from that window! They catch you, you’re dead. Again. Permanently.”

Solomon Gursky shrugged. In the few weeks that he had lived in her house, the woman had come to hate that shrug. It was a shrug that only the dead can make. She hated it because it brought the chill of the abyss into her big, warm, beautiful house in the hills.

“It changes things,” the dead man said.

Elena Asado pulled smart-leather pants and a mesh top over the bodyglove. Since turning traitor, she’d lived in the thing. Twelve hours a day hooked into the web by eye and ear and nose and soul, fighting the man who had killed her lover. As well fight God, Solomon Gursky thought in the long, empty hours in the airy, light-filled rooms. He is lord of life and death. Elena only removed the bodyglove to wash and excrete and, in those early, blue-lit mornings that only this city could do, when she made chilly love on the big white bed. Time and anger had made her thin and tough. She’d cut her hair like a boy’s. Elena Asado was a tight wire of a woman, femininity jerked away by her need to revenge herself on Adam Tesler by destroying the world order his gift of resurrection had created.

Not gift. Never gift. He was not Jesus, who offered eternal life to whoever believed. No profit in belief. Adam Tesler took everything and left you your soul. If you could sustain the heavy inmortalidad payments, insurance would take you into post-life debt-free. The other 90 percent of Earth’s dead worked out their salvation through indenture contracts to the Death House, the Tesler Thanos corporada’s agent of resurrection. The contratos were centuries long. Time was the province of the dead. They were cheap.

“The Ewart/OzWest affair has them rattled,” Elena Asado said.

“A handful of contradados renege on their contracts out on some asteroid, and they’re afraid the sky is going to fall on their heads?”

“They’re calling themselves the Freedead. You give a thing a name, you give it power. They know it’s the beginning Ewart/OzWest, all the other orbital and deep-space manufacturing corporadas; they always knew they could never enforce their contracts off Earth. They’ve lost already. Space belongs to the dead,” the meat woman said.

Sol crossed the big room to the other window, the safe window that looked down from the high hills over the night city. His palm print deconfigured the glass. Night, city night perfumed with juniper and sex and smoke and the dusky heat of the heat of the day, curled around him. He went to the balcony rail. The boulevards shimmered like a map of a mind, but there was a great dark amnesia at its heart, an amorphous zone where lights were not, where the geometry of the grid was abolished. St. John. Necroville. Dead town. The city of the dead, a city within a city, walled and moated and guarded with the same weapons that swept the boulevards. City of curfew. Each dusk, the artificial aurora twenty kilometers above the Tres Valles Metropolitan Area would pulse red: the skysign, commanding all the three million dead to return from the streets of the living to their necrovilles. They passed through five gates, each in the shape of a massive V bisected by a horizontal line. The entropic flesh life descending, the eternal resurrected life ascending, through the dividing line of death. That was the law, that plane of separation. Dead was dead, living was living. As incompatible as night and day.

That same sign was fused into the palm of every resurrectee that stepped from the Death House Jesus tanks.

Not true, he thought. Not all are reborn with stigmata. Not all obey curfew. He held his hand before his face, studied the lines and creases, as if seeking a destiny written there.

He had seen the deathsign in the palm of Elena’s housegirl, and how it flashed in time to the aurora.

“Still can’t believe it’s real?”

He had not heard Elena come onto the balcony behind him. He felt the touch of her hand on his hair, his shoulder, his bare arm. Skin on skin.

“The Nez Perce tribe believe the world ended on the third day, and what we are living in are the dreams of the last night. I fell. I hit that white light and it was hard. Hard as diamond. Maybe I dream I live, and my dreams are the last shattered moments of my life.”

“Would you dream it like this?”

“No,” he said after a time. “I can’t recognize anything any more. I can’t see how it connects to what I last remember. So much is missing.”

“I couldn’t make a move until I was sure he didn’t suspect. He’d done a thorough job.”

“He would.”

“I never believed that story about the lifter crash. The universe may be ironic, but it’s never neat.”

“I think a lot about the poor bastard pilot he took out as well, just to make it neat.” The air carried the far sound of drums from down in the dead town. Tomorrow was the great feast, the Night of All the Dead. “Five years,” he said. He heard the catch in her breathing and knew what she would say next, and what would follow.

“What is it like, being dead?” Elena Asado asked.

In his weeks imprisoned in the hill house, an unlawful dead, signless and contractless, he had learned that she did not mean, what was it like to be resurrected. She wanted to know about the darkness before.

“Nothing,” he answered, as he always did, but though it was true, it was not the truth, for nothing is a product of human consciousness and the darkness beyond the shattering hard light at terminal vee on Hoover Boulevard was the end of all consciousness. No dreams, no time, no loss, no light, no dark. No thing.

Now her fingers were stroking his skin, feeling for some of the chill of the no-thing. He turned from the city and picked her up and carried her to the big empty bed. A month of new life was enough to learn the rules of the game. He took her in the big, wide white bed by the glow from the city beneath, and it was as chill and formulaic as every other time. He knew that for her it was more than sex with her lover come back from a far exile. He could feel in the twitch and splay of her muscles that what made it special for her was that he was dead. It delighted and repelled her. He suspected that she was incapable of orgasm with fellow meat. It did not trouble him, being her fetish. The body once known as Solomon Gursky knew another thing, that only the dead could know. It was that not everything that died was resurrected. The shape, the self, the sentience came back, but love did not pass through death.

Afterward, she liked him to talk about his resurrection, when no-thing became thing and he saw her face looking down through the swirl of tectors. This night he did not talk. He asked. He asked, “What was I like?”

“Your body?” she said. He let her think that. “You want to see the morgue photographs again?”

He knew the charred grin of a husk well enough. Hands flat at his sides. That was how she had known right away. Burn victims died with their fists up, fighting incineration.

“Even after I’d had you exhumed, I couldn’t bring you back. I know you told me that he said I was safe, for the moment, but that moment was too soon. The technology wasn’t sophisticated enough, and he would have known right away. I’m sorry I had to keep you on ice.”

“I hardly noticed,” he joked.

“I always meant to. It was planned; get out of Tesler Thanos, then contract an illegal Jesus tank down in St. John. The Death House doesn’t know one tenth of what’s going on in there.”

“Thank you,” Sol Gursky said, and then he felt it. He felt it and he saw it as if it were his own body. She felt him tighten.

“Another flashback?”

“No,” he said. “The opposite. Get up.”

“What?” she said. He was already pulling on leather and silk.

“That moment Adam gave you.”

“Yes.”

“It’s over.”

The car was morphed into low and fast configuration. At the bend where the avenue slung itself down the hillside, they both felt the pressure wave of something large and flying pass over them, very low, utterly silent.

“Leave the car,” he ordered. The doors were already gull-winged open. Three steps and the house went up behind them in a rave of white light. It seemed to suck at them, drawing them back into its annihilating gravity, then the shock swept them and the car and every homeless thing on the avenue before it. Through the screaming house alarms and the screaming householders and the rush and roar of the conflagration, Sol heard the aircraft turn above the vaporized hacienda. He seized Elena’s hand and ran. The lifter passed over them and the car vanished in a burst of white energy.

“Jesus, nanotok warheads!”

Elena gasped as they tumbled down through tiered and terraced gardens. The lifter turned high on the air, eclipsing the hazy stars, hunting with extra-human senses. Below, formations of seguridados were spreading out through the gardens.

“How did you know?” Elena gasped.

“I saw it,” said Solomon Gursky as they crashed a pool party and sent bacchanalian cerristos scampering for cover. Down, down. Augmented cyberhounds growled and quested with long-red eyes; domestic defense grids stirred, captured images, alerted the police.

“Saw?” asked Elena Asado.

APVs and city pods cut smoking hexagrams in the highway blacktop as Sol and Elena came crashing out of the service alley onto the boulevard. Horns. Lights. Fervid curses. Grind of wheels. Shriek of brakes. Crack of smashing tectoplastic, doubled, redoubled. Grid-pile on the westway. A mopedcab was pulled in at a tortilleria on the right shoulder. The cochero was happy to pass up his enchiladas for Elena’s hard, black currency. Folding, clinking stuff.

“Where to?”

The destruction his passengers had wreaked impressed him. Taxi drivers universally hate cars.

“Drive,” Solomon Gursky said.

The machine kicked out onto the strip.

“It’s still up there,” Elena said, squinting out from under the canopy at the night sky.

“They won’t do anything in this traffic.”

“They did it up there on the avenue.” Then; “You said you saw. What do you mean, saw?”

“You know death, when you’re dead,” Solomon Gursky said. “You know its face, its mask, its smell. It has a perfume, you can smell it from a long way off, like the pheromones of moths. It blows upwind in time.”

“Hey,” the cochero said, who was poor, but live meat. “You know anything about that big boom up on the hill? What was that, lifter crash or something?”

“Or something,” Elena said. “Keep driving.”

“Need to know where to keep driving to, lady.”

“Necroville,” Solomon Gursky said. St. John. City of the Dead. The place beyond law, morality, fear, love, all the things that so tightly bound the living. The outlaw city. To Elena he said, “If you’re going to bring down Adam Tesler, you can only do it from the outside, as an outsider.” He said this in English. The words were heavy and tasted strange on his lips. “You must do it as one of the dispossessed. One of the dead.”

To have tried to run the fluorescent vee-slash of the Necroville gate would have been as certain a Big Death as to have been reduced to hot ion dust in the nanotok flash. The mopedcab prowled past the samurai silhouettes of the gate seguridados. Sol had the driver leave them beneath the dusty palms on a deserted boulevard pressed up hard against the razor wire of St. John. Abandoned by the living, the grass verges had run verdant, scum and lilies scabbed the swimming pools, the generous Spanish-style houses softly disintegrating, digested by their own gardens.

It gave the cochero spooky vibes, but Sol liked it. He knew these avenues. The little machine putt-putted off for the lands of the fully living.

“There are culverted streams all round here,” Sol said. “Some go right under the defenses, into Necroville.”

“Is this your dead-sight again?” Elena asked as he started down an overhung service alley.

“In a sense. I grew up around here.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Then I can trust it.”

She hesitated a step.

“What are you accusing me of?”

“How much did you rebuild, Elena?”

“Your memories are your own, Sol. We loved each other, once.”

“Once,” he said, and then he felt it, a static purr on his skin, like Elena’s fingers over his whole body at once. This was not the psychic bloom of death foreseen. This was physics, the caress of focused gravity fields.

They hit the turn of the alley as the mechadors came dropping soft and slow over the roofs of the old moldering residential. Across a weed-infested tennis court was a drainage ditch defended by a rusted chicken-wire fence. Sol heaved away an entire section. Adam Tesler had built his dead strong, and fast. The refugees followed the seeping, rancid water down to a rusted grille in a culvert.

“Now we see if the Jesus tank grew me true,” Sol said as he kicked in the grille. “If what I remember is mine, then we come up in St. John. If not, we end up in the bay three days from now with our eyes eaten out by chlorine.” They ducked into the culvert as a mechador passed over. MIST 27s sent the mud and water up in a blast of spray and battle tectors. The dead man and the living woman splashed on into darkness.

“He loved you, you know,” Sol said. “That’s why he’s doing this. He is a jealous God. I always knew he wanted you, more than that bitch he calls a wife. While I was dead, he could pretend that it might still be. He could overlook what you were trying to do to him; you can’t hurt him, Elena, not on your own. But when you brought me back, he couldn’t pretend any longer. He couldn’t turn a blind eye. He couldn’t forgive you.”

“A petty God,” Elena said, water eddying around her leather-clad calves. Ahead, a light from a circle in the roof of the culvert marked a drain from the street. They stood under it a moment, feeling the touch of the light of Necroville on their faces. Elena reached up to push open the grate. Solomon Gursky stayed her, turned her palm upward to the light.

“One thing.” he said. He picked a sharp shard of concrete from the tunnel wall. With three strong savage strokes he cut the vee and slash of the death sign in her flesh.