Ian McDonald - The Days of Solomon Gursky.pdf - Ian McDonald - widez2

The Days of Solomon Gursky

IAN McDONALD

MONDAY

Sol stripped the gear on the trail over Blood of Christ Mountain. Clickshifted

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.

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 bedrock 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 sunscreened

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