“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 Tester’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, 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.