“What happened to your thumb?” the corporadisto asked.
When he’d cracked the tank and lifted Jesus the Rhesus out of the waters of rebirth, the monkey had seemed more pissed off at being sopping wet than at having been dead. There had been a pure, perfect moment of silence, then the simultaneous oath and gout of blood, and the Lazarus team had exploded into whooping exultation. The monkey had skittered across the floor, alarmed by the hooting and cheering, hunting for height and hiding. Elena had caught it spastically trying – and failing – to hurl itself up the side of a desk. She’d swaddled Jesus up in thermal sheeting and put the spasming thing in the observation incubator. Within the hour, Jesus had regained full motor control and was chewing at the corners of her plastic pen, scratching imaginary fleas and masturbating ferociously. While delivery companies dropped off pizza stacks and cases of cheap Mexican champagne, someone remembered to call Adam Tesler.
The dead monkey was not a good flier. She set up a wailing keen that had even the pilot complaining.
“Stop that,” Sol Gursky snapped. It would not do anything for him, though, and rocked on its bare ass and wailed all the louder.
“What way is that to talk to a piece of history?” the PA said. He grinned in through the grille, waggled fingers, clicked tongue. “Hey there, little fellow. Whatcha call him?”
“Little bitch, actually. We call her Jesus; also known as Bride of Frankenstein.”
Bite him, Solomon Gursky thought as ten thousand mirrored swimming pools slipped beneath the belly of the Tesler Corporada lifter.
Frankenstein’s creations were dead. That was the thing. That was the revelation.
It was the Age of Everything, but the power to make anything into anything else was not enough, because there was one thing the tectors of Nanosis and Aristide-Tlaxcalpo and the other founders of the nanotech revolution could not manipulate into anything else, and that was death. A comment by a pioneer nanotechnologist captured the optimism and frustration of the Age of Everything: Watson’s Postulate. Never mind turning trash into oil or asteroids into heaps of Volkswagens, or hanging exact copies of Van Goghs in your living room; the first thing we get with nanotechnology is immortality.
Five billion Rim dollars in research disproved it. What tectors touched, they transformed; what they transformed, they killed. The Gursky-Asado team had beaten its rivals to the viral replicators, that infiltrated living cells and converted them into a different, tector-based matrix, and from their DNA spored a million copies. It had shaped an algorithm from the deadly accuracy of carcinomas. It had run tests under glass and in tanks. It had christened that other nameless Rhesus Frankenstein and injected the tectors. And Sol and Elena had watched the tiny machines slowly transform the monkey’s body into something not even gangrene could imagine.
Elena wanted to put it out of its misery, but they could not open the tank for fear of contamination. After a week, it ended.
The monster fell apart. That was the thing. And then Asado and Gursky remembered a hot afternoon when Sol got a set of diamond gears built in a place called Redencion.
If death was a complex thing, an accumulation of micro-death upon mini-death upon little death upon middling death, life might obey the same power law. Escalating anti-entropy. Pyramid-plan life.
Gursky’s Corollary to Watson’s Postulate: The first thing we get with nanotechnology is the resurrection of the dead.
The Dark Tower rose out of the amber haze. Sol and Elena’s private joke had escaped and replicated itself; everyone in R&D now called the thing Adam Tesler was building down in the valley Barad Dur, in Mordor, where the smogs lie. And Adam Tesler, its unresting, all-seeing Eye.
There were over fifty levels of it now, but it showed no signs of stopping. As each section solidified and became dormant, another division of Adam Tesler’s corporate edifice was slotted in. The architects were unable to say where it would stop. A kilometer, a kilometer and a half; maybe then the architectors would stabilize and die. Sol loathed its glossy black excrescences and crenellations, a miscegeny of the geological and the cancerous. Gaudi sculpting in shit.
The lifter came in high over the construction, locked into the navigation grid and banked. Sol looked down into its open black maw.
All just atoms, the guy who owned the factory had said. Sol could not remember his name now. The living and the dead have the same atoms.
They’d started small: paramecia, amoebae. Things hardly alive. Invertebrates. Reanimated cockroaches, hurtling on their thin legs around the observation tank. Biological machine, nanotech machine, still a machine. Survival machine. Except now you couldn’t stomp the bastards. They came back.
What good is resurrection, if you are just going to die again?
The cockroaches came back, and they kept coming back.
He had been the cautious one this time, working carefully up the evolutionary chain. Elena was the one who wanted to go right for it. Do the monkey. Do the monkey and you do the man.
He had watched the tectors swarm over it, strip skin from flesh, flesh from bone, dissolve bones. He had watched the nanomachines put it all back together into a monkey. It lay in the liquid intact, but, its signs said, dead. Then the line kicked, and kicked again, and another twitched in harmony, and a third came in, and then they were all playing together on the vital signs monitor, and that which was dead was risen.
The lifter was into descent, lowering itself toward the exact center of the white cross on the landing grid fastened to the side of the growing tower. Touchdown. The craft rocked on its bug legs. Seat-belt sign off, steps down.
“You behave yourself,” Solomon Gursky told Jesus.
The All-Seeing Eye was waiting for him by the upshaft. His Dark Minions were with him.
“Sol.”
The handshake was warm and strong, but Sol Gursky had never trusted Adam Tesler in all the years he had known him; as nanoengineering student or as head of the most dynamic nanotech corporada in the Pacific Rim Co-Prosperity Sphere.
“So this is it?” Adam Tesler squatted down and choo-choochooked the monkey.
“She bites.”
“I see.” Jesus grabbed his thumb in her tiny pink homunculus hand. “So, you are the man who has beaten the final enemy.”
“Not beaten it. Found something on the far side of it. It’s resurrection, not immortality.”
Adam Tesler opened the cage. Jesus hopped up his arm to perch on the shoulder of his Scarpacchi suit. Tesler tickled the fur of her belly.
“And humans?”
“Point one percent divergence between her DNA and yours.”
“Ah.” Adam Tesler closed his eyes. “This makes it all the harder.”
Fear pulsed through Solomon Gursky like a sickness.
“Leave us, please,” Adam Tesler said to his assistants. “I’ll join you in a moment.”
Unspeaking, they filed to the lifter.
“Adam?”
“Sol. Why did you do it?”
“What are you talking about, Adam?”
“You know, Sol.”
For an instant, Sol Gursky died on the landing grid fused to the fifty-third level of the Tesler corporada tower. Then he returned to life, and knew with cool and beautiful clarity that he could say it all, that he must say it all, because he was dead now and nothing could touch him.
“It’s too much for one person, Adam. This isn’t building cars or growing houses or nanofacturing custom pharmaceuticals. This is the resurrection of the dead. This is every human being from now to the end of the universe. You can’t be allowed to own that. Not even God should have a monopoly on eternal life.”
Adam Tesler sighed. His irises were photochromed dark, their expression unreadable.
“So. How long is it?”
“Thirteen years.”
“I thought I knew you, Sol.”
“I thought I knew you.” The air was clear and fresh and pure, here on this high perch. “How did you find out?”
Adam T
esler stroked the monkey’s head. It tried to push his fingers away, baring sharp teeth.
“You can come here now, Marisa.”
The tall, muscular woman who walked from the upshaft across the landing grid was no stranger to Sol. He knew her from the Yucatan resort mastaba and the Alaskan ski-lodge and the gambling complex grown out of the nanoengineered reef in the South China Sea. From clandestine conversations through secure channels and discreet meetings, he knew that her voice would be soft and low and tinted Australian.
“You dressed better when you worked for Aristide Tlaxcalpo,” Sol said. The woman was dressed in street leathers. She smiled. She had smiled better then as well.
“Why them?” Adam Tesler said. “Of all the ones to betray me to, those clowns!”
“That’s why,” said Solomon Gursky. “Elena had nothing to do with this, you know.”
“I know that. She’s safe. For the moment.”
Sol Gursky knew then what must happen, and he shivered with the sudden, urgent need to destroy before he was destroyed. He pushed down the shake of rage by force of will as he held his hand out and clicked his fingers to the monkey. Jesus frowned and frisked off Tesler’s shoulder to Sol’s hand. In an instant, he had stretched, twisted, and snapped its neck. He flung the twitching thing away from him. It fell to the red mesh.
“I can understand that,” Adam Tesler said. “But it will come back again, and again, and again.” He turned on the bottom step of the lifter. “Have you any idea how disappointed I am, Sol?”
“I really don’t give a shit!” Solomon Gursky shouted but his words were swallowed by the roar of engine power-up. The lifter hovered and swooped down over the great grid of the city toward the northern hills.
Sol Gursky and Marisa were alone on the platform.
“Do it!” he shouted.
Those muscles he had so admired, he realized, were augments; her fingers took a fistful of his neck and lifted him off the ground. Strangling, he kicked at air, snatched at breath. One-armed, she carried him to the edge.
“Do it,” he tried to say, but her fingers choked all words in his throat. She held him out over the drop, smiling. He shat himself, and realized as it poured out of him that it was ecstasy, that it always had been, and the reason that adults forbade it was precisely because it was such a primal joy.
Through blood haze, he saw the tiny knotted body of Jesus inching toward him on pink man-fingers, its neck twisted over its back, eyes staring unshielded into the sun. Then the woman fingers at last released their grip, and he whispered “thank you” as he dropped toward the hard white death-light of Hoover Boulevard.
Wednesday
The seguridados were on the boulevards tonight, hunting the trespassing dead. The meat were monsters, overmoneyed, under-stimulated, 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 body-glove. 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.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 48
