The Days of Solomon Gursky
by Ian McDonald
Illustration by Darryl Elliott
Monday
Sol stripped the gear on the trail over Blood of Christ Mountain. Click-shifted down to sixth for the steep push up to the ridge, and there was no sixth. No fifth, no fourth; nothing, down to zero.
Elena was already up on the divide, laughing at him pushing and sweating up through the pines, muscles twisted and knotted like the trunks of the primeval bristlecones, tubes and tendons straining like bridge cable. Then she saw the gear train sheared through and spinning free.
They’d given the bikes a good hard kicking down in the desert mountains south of Nogales. Two thousand apiece, but the salesperson had sworn on the virginity of all his unmarried sisters that these MTBs would go anywhere, do anything you wanted. Climb straight up El Capitan, if that was what you needed of them. Now they were five days on the trail—three from the nearest Dirt Lobo dealership, so Elena’s palmtop told her—and a gear train had broken clean in half. Ten more days, four hundred more miles, fifty more mountains for Solomon Gursky, in high gear.
“Should have been prepared for this, engineer,” Elena said.
“Two thousand a bike, you shouldn’t need to,” Solomon Gursky replied. It was early afternoon up on Blood of Christ Mountain, high and hot and resinous with the scent of the old, old pines. There was haze down in the valley they had come from, and in the one they were riding to. “And you know I’m not that kind of engineer. My gears are a lot smaller. And they don’t break.”
Elena knew what kind of engineer he was, as he knew what kind of doctor she was. But the thing was new between them and at the stage where research colleagues who surprise themselves by becoming lovers like to pretend that they are mysteries to each other.
Elena’s palmtop map showed a settlement five miles down the valley. It was called Redención. It might be the kind of place they could get welding done quick and good for norte dollars.
“Be happy, it’s downhill,” Elena said as she swung her electric-blue padded ass onto the saddle and plunged down off the ridge. One second later, Sol Gursky in his shirt and shorts and shoes and shades and helmet came tearing after her through the scrub sage. The thing between them was still at the stage where desire can flare at a flash of electric-blue lycra-covered ass.
Redención it was, of the kind you get in the border mountains; of gas and food and trailers to hire by the night, or the week, or, if you have absolutely nowhere else to go, the lifetime; of truck stops and recreational Jacuzzis at night under the border country stars. No welding. Something better. The many-branched saguaro of a solar tree was the first thing of Redención the travelers saw lift out of the heat haze as they came in along the old, cracked, empty highway.
The factory was in an ugly block annex behind the gas and food. A truck driver followed Sol and Elena round the back, entranced by these fantastic macaw-bright creatures who kept their eyes hidden behind wrap-around shades. He was chewing a sandwich. He had nothing better to do in Redención on a hot Monday afternoon. Jorge, the proprietor, looked too young and ambitious to be pushing gas, food, trailers, and molecules in Redención on any afternoon. He was thirty-wise, dark, serious. There was something tight-wound about him. Elena said in English that he had the look of a man of sorrows. But he took the broken gear train seriously, and helped Sol remove it from the back wheel. He looked at the smooth, clean shear plane with admiration.
“This I can do,” he declared. “Take an hour, hour and a half. Meantime, maybe you’d like to take a Jacuzzi?” This, wrinkling his nose, downwind of two MTBers come over Blood of Christ Mountain in the heat of the day. The truck driver grinned. Elena scowled. “Very private,” insisted Jorge the nanofacturer.
“Something to drink?” Elena suggested.
“Sure. Coke, Sprite, beer, agua minerale. In the shop.”
Elena went the long way around the trucker to investigate the cooler. Sol followed Jorge into the factory and watched him set the gears in the scanner.
“Actually, this is my job,” Sol said to make conversation as the lasers mapped the geometry of the ziggurat of cogs in three dimensions. He spoke Spanish. Everyone did. It was the universal language up in the norte now, as well as down el sur.
“You have a factory?”
“I’m an engineer. I build these things. Not the scanners, I mean; the tectors. I design them. A nano-engineer.”
The monitor told Jorge the mapping was complete.
“For the Tesler corporada,” Sol added as Jorge called up the processor system.
“How do you want it?”
“I’d like to know it’s not going to do this to me again. Can you build it in diamond?”
“All just atoms, friend.”
Sol studied the processor chamber. It pleased him that they looked like whisky stills; round-bellied, high-necked, rising through the roof into the spreading fingers of the solar tree. Strong spirits in that still, spirits of the vacuum between galaxies, the cold of absolute zero, and the spirits of the tectors moving through cold and emptiness, shuffling atoms. He regretted that the physics did not allow viewing windows in the nanofacturers. Look down through a pane of pure and perfect diamond at the act of creation. Maybe creation was best left unseen, a mystery. All just atoms, friend. Yes, but it was what you did with those atoms, where you made them go. The weird troilisms and menages you forced them into.
He envisioned the minuscule machines, smaller than viruses, clever knots of atoms, scavenging carbon through the nanofacturer’s roots deep in the earth of Redención, passing it up the buckytube conduits to the processor chamber, weaving it into diamond of his own shaping.
Alchemy.
Diamond gears.
Sol Gursky shivered in his light biking clothes, touched by the intellectual chill of the nanoprocessor.
“This is one of mine,” he called to Jorge. “I designed the tectors.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Jorge fetched beers from a crate on the factory floor, opened them in the door. “I bought the whole place from a guy two years back. Went up north, to the Tres Valles. You from there?”
The beer was cold. In the deeper, darker cold of the reactor chamber, the nanomachines swarmed. Sol Gursky held his arms out: Jesus of the MTB wear.
“Isn’t everyone?”
“Not yet. So, who was it you said you work for? Nanosis? Ewart-OzWest?”
“Tesler Corp. I head up a research group into biological analogs.”
“Never heard of them.”
You will, was what Solomon Gursky would have said, but for the scream.
Elena’s scream.
Not, he thought as he ran, that he had heard Elena’s scream—the thing was not supposed to be at that stage—but he knew it could not belong to anyone else.
She was standing in the open back door of the gas and food, pale and shaky in the high bright light.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to get some water. There wasn’t any in the cooler, and I didn’t want Coke. I just wanted to get some water from the faucet.”
He was aware that Jorge was behind him as he went into the kitchen. Man mess: twenty coffee mugs, doughnut boxes, beer cans, and milk cartons. Spoons, knives, forks. He did that too, and Elena told him off for having to take a clean one every time.
Then he saw the figures through the open door.
Somewhere, Jorge was saying, “Please, this is my home.”
There were three of them; a good-looking, hard-worked woman, and two little girls, one newly school-age, the other not long on her feet. They sat in chairs, hands on thighs. They looked straight ahead.