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.”