It was only because they did not blink, that their bodies did not rock gently to the tick of pulse and breath, that Sol could understand.
The color was perfect. He touched the woman’s cheek, the coil of dark hair that fell across it. Warm soft. Like a woman’s should feel. Texture like skin. His fingertips left a line in dust.
They sat unblinking, unmoving, the woman and her children, enshrined in their own memorabilia. Photographs, toys, little pieces of jewelry, loved books and ornaments, combs, mirrors. Pictures and clothes. Things that make up a life. Sol walked among the figures and their things, knowing that he trespassed in sacred space, but irresistibly drawn by the simulacra.
“They were yours?” Elena was saying somewhere. And Jorge was nodding, and his mouth was working but no words were manufactured. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“They said it was a blow-out.” Jorge finally said. “You know, those tires they say repair themselves, so they never blow out? They blew out. They went right over the barrier, upside down. That’s what the truck driver said. Right over, and he could see them all, upside down. Like they were frozen in time, you understand?” He paused.
“I went kind of dark for a long time after that; a lot crazy, you know? When I could see things again, I bought this with the insurance and the compensation. Like I say, it’s all just atoms, friend. Putting them in the right order. Making them go where you want, do what you want.”
“I’m sorry we intruded,” Elena said, but Solomon Gursky was standing there among the reconstructed dead and the look on his face was that of a man seeing something far beyond what is in front of him, all the way to God.
“Folk out here are accommodating.” But Jorge’s smile was a tear of sutures. “You can’t live in a place like this if you weren’t a little crazy or lost.”
“She was very beautiful,” Elena said.
“She is.”
Dust sparkled in the float of afternoon light through the window.
“Sol?” “Yeah. Coming.”
The diamond gears were out of the tank in twenty-five minutes. Jorge helped Sol fit them to the two thousand norte dollar bike. Then Sol rode around the factory and the gas-food-trailer house where the icons of the dead sat unblinking under the slow fall of dust. He clicked the gears up and clicked them down. One two three four five six. Six five four three two one. Then he paid Jorge fifty norte, which was all he asked for his diamond. Elena waved to him as they rode down the highway out of Redención.
They made love by firelight on the top of Blessed Virgin Mountain, on the pine needles, under the stars. That was the stage they were at: ravenous, unselfconscious, discovering. The old deaths, down the valley behind them, gave them urgency. Afterward, he was quiet and withdrawn, and when she asked what he was thinking about, he said, “The resurrection of the dead.”
“But they weren’t resurrected,” she said, knowing instantly what he meant, for it haunted her too, up on their starry mountain. “They were just representations, like a painting or a photograph. Sculpted memories. Simulations.”
“But they were real for him.” Sol rolled onto his back to gaze at the warm stars of the border. “He told me he talked to them. If his nanofactory could have made them move and breathe and talk back, he’d have done it, and who could have said that they weren’t real?”
He felt Elena shiver against his flesh.
“What is it?”
“Just thinking about those faces, and imagining them in the reactor chamber, in the cold and the emptiness, with the tectors crawling over them.”
“Yeah.”
Neither spoke for a time long enough to see the stars move. Then Solomon Gursky felt the heat stir in him again and he turned to Elena and felt the warmth of her meat, hungry for his second little death.
Tuesday
Jesus was getting fractious in the plastic cat carrier; heaving from side to side, shaking the grille.
Sol Gursky set the carrier on the landing mesh and searched the ochre smog haze for the incoming liftercraft. Photochromic molecules bonded to his irises polarized: another hot, bright, poisonous day in the TVMA.
Jesus was shrieking now.
“Shut the hell up,” Sol Gursky hissed. He kicked the cat carrier. Jesus gibbered and thrust her arms through the grille, grasping at freedom.
“Hey, it’s only a monkey,” Elena said.
But that was the thing. Monkeys, by being monkeys, annoyed him. Frequently enraged him. Little homunculus things masquerading as human. Clever little fingers, wise little eyes, expressive little faces. Nothing but dumb animal behind that face, running those so-human fingers.
He knew his anger at monkeys was irrational. But he’d still enjoyed killing Jesus, taped wide open on the pure white slab. Swab, shave, slip the needle.
Of course, she had not been Jesus then. Just Rhesus; nameless, a tool made out of meat. Experiment 625G.
It was probably the smog that was making her scream. Should have got her one of those goggle things for walking poodles. But she would have just torn it off with her clever little human fingers. Clever enough to be dumb, monkey-thing.
Elena was kneeling down, playing baby-fingers with the clutching fists thrust through the bars.
“It’ll bite you.”
His hand still throbbed. Dripping, shivering, and spastic from the tank, Jesus had still possessed enough motor control to turn her head and lay his thumb open to the bone. Vampire monkey: the undead appetite for blood. Bastard thing. He would have enjoyed killing it again, if it were still killable.
All three on the landing grid looked up at the sound of lifter engines detaching themselves from the aural bed rock of two million cars. The ship was coming in from the south, across the valley from the big site down on Hoover where the new corporada headquarters was growing itself out of the fault line. It came low and fast, nose down, ass up, like a big bug that thrives on the taste of hydrocarbons in its spiracles. The backwash from its jets flustered the palm trees as it configured into vertical mode and came down on the research facility pad. Sol Gursky and Elena Asado shielded their sun-screened eyes from flying grit and leaf-storm.
Jesus ran from end to end of her plastic cage, gibbering with fear.
“Doctor Gursky.” Sol did not think he had seen this corporadisto before, but it was hard to be certain; Adam Tesler liked his personal assistants to look as if he had nanofactured them. “I can’t begin to tell you how excited Mr. Tesler is about this.”
“You should be there with me,” Sol said to Elena. “It was your idea.” Then, to the suit, “Dr. Asado should be with me.”
Elena swiped at her jet-blown hair.
“I shouldn’t, Sol. It was your baby. Your gestation, your birth. Anyway, you know how I hate dealing with suits.” This for the smiling PA, but he was already guiding Sol to the open hatch.
Sol strapped in and the ship lurched as the engines screamed up into lift. He saw Elena wave and duck back toward the facility. He clutched the cat carrier hard as his gut kicked when the lifter slid into horizontal flight. Within, the dead monkey burbled to herself in exquisite terror.
“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.