Necroville, p.1
Necroville, page 1
‘Astonishing, dazzling – this book matters’
Locus
‘McDonald portrays this macabre future with a whirlwind of imagery and emotion that immediately pulls the reader in and won’t let go until the last page’
Publishers Weekly
‘Superlative, cutting-edge SF from one of the genre’s best stylists’
Booklist
‘McDonald’s lush prose paints a vivid and credible Armageddon. World-building SF that’s punk, funky, and frightening: a fantastic acid trip to the end of the world’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Conveys the strangeness of the future with a thrilling urgency’
Paul McAuley
Also by Ian McDonald from Gollancz:
River of Gods
Brasyl
Cyberabad Days
The Dervish House
NECROVILLE
Ian McDonald
Trisha,
For you.
Watson’s Postulate: Never mind turning trash into oil or asteroids into heaps of Volkswagens, or hanging exact copies of Van Goghs in your living room, the first thing we get with nanotechnology is immortality.
Tesler’s Corollary: The first thing we get with nanotechnology is the resurrection of the dead.
CONTENTS
ALSO BY IAN MCDONALD FROM GOLLANCZ
MORNING AND AFTERNOON
SUNSET – 21:30
21:30–MIDNIGHT
MIDNIGHT – 04:00
04:00–SUNRISE
DAY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, ETC.
COPYRIGHT
MORNING AND AFTERNOON
NOVEMBER 1
In the morning there was a dead man melted into the street wall of Santiago’s house.
Wakened by the first spasms of the skysign fifty kilometres above the city, the bodyglove spat Santiago out into crash, loathing and the dawn’s early light. Virtuality dreams disconnected neurone by neurone. Tendrils of intimate tectoplastic uncoiled from his cochlea, his hemispheres, his eustachian tubes, slipped free from his optic nerves. The film circuitry of the bodyglove peeled back from his skull, his spine, his genitals, flowed across his skin like amniotic fluid, down his arms, to re-form in a trembling sphere of semi-intelligent nanopolymer in his cupped hands. Introibo ad altare. The chemical fire that had burned through his bloodstream all night settled in flakes of narcotic ash in the bottom of his veins.
The skysign was a tortured writhe of crimson fire, an artificial aurora of microscopic light-emitting tectors hung across the tropopause and kindled by the touch of a sun still below the eastern mountains. Its light fell through the studio’s transparent roof on to the bodies of his companions lying spreadeagled on the floor. Lurid little crucifixions. Toy Golgothas. Saints and martyrs.
Santiago collected saints and martyrs.
He replaced the dormant bodyglove in the carved wooden cinerary casket he had bought down in the teeming necrovilles of Viejo Mexico. Glimpsed in the decorated mirrors that lined the walls, he was no longer an angel wreathed in silver filigree nanocircuitry, Lord of the Web. He was only Santiago Columbar, twenty-seven. Two metres and some. Big. Massive. Black hair scraped back into an economical queue, emphasizing the geomorphological solidity of his features. Neurochemical artist. Virtualisto. It had been enough once. No more. It did not do it any more. He was Santiago Columbar. Low. Cold. Naked. Disgusted. Alone. Mortal.
The balcony was one of the many architectural eccentricities Santiago had inherited from his residencia’s previous owner. Uniquely, it had survived the transformations of his suites by reconstructive tectors. West-facing, its creator had intended it for twilit parties with intimate friends viewing sunset among the luxuriant hills of Copananga. Santiago used it to watch the coming of the army of the dead.
Batisto his dead servant brought Santiago agua minerale, lightly pétillante. He drank nothing stronger. Caffeine, alcohol threw erratic variables into the precisely calculated curves of his drugs.
The veils of the dawn skysign throbbed overhead. Geneered monkeys gibbered and rattled the branches of Copananga’s many trees. Curfew ended, the seguridados and their mechadors – defenders of the night – had withdrawn. The gates to the necrovilles were unsealed, the borders opened. Living and resurrected might cross into each other’s demesnes. Between dawn and dusk skysigns the dead could move among the living – the meat – but never as equals. Life was life and death was death, nanotechnological resurrection notwithstanding. Thus spake the Barantes Ruling. Forty years since the dead walked and no one had succeeded in toppling that pillar of the new world order. History enshrined the precedent and discarded Barantes. When where who what had it been about, that epochal case? YoYo would know, clever little lawyer girl. He must remember to ask her. Tonight, at the Terminal Café. Money probably. An inheritance, like as not. Where there’s a will, there’s a wrangle. The pun only worked in English.
Heard before seen; the army of the dead channelled up Copananga Canyon, along its steep twisting avenues and closes: houseboys, gardeners, cooks, maids, valets, chauffeurs, swimming-pool attendants, butlers, sports coaches, personal trainers, tutors, governesses, child-minders, nannies, private secretaries, amanuenses, sculptors, painters, craftspersons, builders, masons, joiners, architects, designers, masseurs, spiritual guides, lovers, sex toys. The world of the living is upheld by the hands of the dead, the woman who called herself Miclantecutli – his spirit guide, lover, tormentor and muse – had once said. But Miclantecutli was five years gone, down with the dead in the Saint John Necroville. Not for her the Death House contract, that second pillar of the world. Institutionalized indenture. The Miclantecutlis of the Tres Valles Metropolitan Area afforded Immortalidad policies to pay their ferryman’s fee. Lump sum, with interest. By side gates and service entrances the morning migration was absorbed into Copananga’s haciendas and residencias and split-level retro Frank Lloyd Wrights. Another working day in heaven. How many thousand journeys before the price of resurrection was paid back to the Death House and its monolithic one-eyed Baal, the Tesler-Thanos corporada?
Santiago swigged back his gaseoso. An eyebrow of light lifted above the hills of Old Hollywood.
‘More water, seor?’
Three years of service had not accustomed Santiago to Batisto’s unnerving talent for pre-empting his wishes. He accepted the second bottle of Tres Marias.
‘Why not? After all it is the Day of the Dead. ¡Salud! Batisto.’
‘¡Salud! seor.’
The scream rent the deep, clean silence that filled Copananga’s leaf-shady avenues. Desperate, terrible, and long long long, the scream of a woman who has finally come face to face with everything she has ever dreaded.
One more scream on Estramadura Avenue would not have troubled Santiago but that it came from outside his gate.
A few metres from his craftsperson-wrought iron gates what remained of a man was fused with the lower part of the white perimeter wall that let on to the service alley. Seora Sifuentes, the neighbour Santiago notionally tolerated, stood staring, unable to tear her attention from the one thing she could least bear to see. Her Tuesday Thursday Saturday fitness regime had sent her jogging past the execution site.
Santiago squatted to study more closely the obscene thing.
Dead man dead. Death by tesler was unmistakable.
‘MIST 27s,’ Santiago surmised aloud. Multiple Impact Self Targeting. A needle of intelligent tectoplastic accelerating from tesler muzzle at a constant twelve gees, seeking its target by biofield resonance. Thirty centimetres from impact, it reconfigured into a hail of submunitions, each the size of a coriander seed, each capable of fatally disrupting the tector systems of the resurrected dead. Sure kill. Big Death, that not even the Death House could reverse. The resurrected’s one fear.
The tesler round had taken the dead dead man square in the body. Tan Tien, the centre of being. And not-being. The lower half of his body was a fetid stew of blacktop and synthetic flesh. His hands reached out of the blistered wall in futile pleading. His upper torso leaned forward like some piece of extreme high-relief sculpture. The impression that the man had been walking through the wall when his unclean dead voodoo suddenly failed him was eerily insistent. His head inclined sadly to the left. The declination of Christ on the cross. Christ would have worn the same expression. Horror. Pain. Anger. Sorrow. Betrayal. Eloi eloi lamach sabachthani, cold-welded on to the backs of his eyes. An old, old belief, from the very dawn of the Information Age: that the retinas of a dead man’s eyes shoot a snapshot of the last thing he ever sees.
Even in death, he was beautiful. The dead were a beautiful people. When flesh can be dismantled and re-forged into any shape, beauty is easy, youth cheap. Ugliness too, and age, strange great monsters, elegantly disturbing deformities, the faces and forms of the famous moviedrome starlets.
Genetweak macaques in their coats of many colours had already been at work on the fingers, peeling tectoplasm from synthetic bones. One lay dead, a huddle of iridescent fur in the storm-gutter. Others would follow, poisoned by the sweet, treacherous meat of the dead. Soon the birds would come for the eyes, the ears, the lips.
Santiago examined the dead dead man’s hands. The palm was intact, entire.
‘No deathsign?’ Mrs Sifuentes voiced their shared concern.
The vee-slash in the palm of the hand – the descending stroke of entropy-bound meat-life, the ascending diagonal of resurrected, eternal life, the horizontal cross-bar of mortality – was the ineradicable imprimatur of the Death House. Very rarely, spin-variabl es during reconfiguration might stamp it on the left hand rather than the right, but the Jesus tanks never missed. As impossible to be reborn unsigned as to be without hands, heart, head.
Mystery, here at the foot of the wall.
‘Shouldn’t someone, I don’t know, like, take it away or put something over it?’ Mrs Sifuentes asked, revulsion finally overcoming curiosity. ‘I mean, before the staff see it or something.’
‘I’ll call Copananga Securities,’ Santiago said. ‘In the meantime, I’m sure you’ve had a nasty shock, Seora Sifuentes; if you like, I can have my man make you a pot of tea or something.’
Seora Sifuentes declined politely. Santiago had always been aware that he was something of a dragon in Copananga’s sprinklered Eden. He watched the woman hurry up the road, lycra-bound ass swinging, to the succour of her houseware trauma-counselling service.
A shout from within the walls.
‘With you in a minute, Batisto,’ Santiago called back. Crouching on sun-warmed Estramadura like one awaiting the image of Christ stamped on a wafer, Santiago took the dead dead man’s head between his hands. He leaned forward and kissed the dead dead man on the mouth. The dead dead man’s lips were soft and tasted of strange musks.
Batisto led Santiago through parts of his grounds long untended, lushly overgrown. When even your own home becomes an alien planet to you, it is time to re-examine your life-path.
In the shelter of a small stand of jacarandas heavily burdened with tropical epiphytes stood a dead mechador. The killing machine stood askew in a shallow furrow of soil. Its impellors must have failed, suddenly, catastrophically. The beaked head studded with sensory systems was locked in a final snap of defiance. The tesler arm was still aimed at the coordinates of its last target. Santiago examined the weapon. Four rounds chambered, two fired. Over the manufacturer’s ident and serial number, the Copananga Securities trifurcate yin-yang.
The robot’s self-repair systems had been overwhelmed before it could transmit a distress call. The left side was gone, the left arm subsumed into the black cancerous slag that coated the wound. There were eyes in the black slag. Eyes, and mouths. Between the eyes and red-lipped mouths, centimetre-long fingers, complete with black nails and prints, followed, pointing, the movements of his eyes. The centre of the cratered mess had crazed into untidy hexagons. Oily black insects crept from the fissures and gathered in a hovering, droning cloud.
A dead dead man who never was, a destroying angel destroyed. Deep mystery here. More: signs and wonders. Spirit messengers, eldritch omens. The night before, after he had watched Mislav and Cheetah dissolve into the virtualizer, he had prayed as he pressed the hallucinogenic spider to his forehead: give me a sign: whether it is meant to be or not to be.
Are you answered, Santiago Columbar?
His parents, whom he had not seen in the ten years since they had adapted to join the Milapa Kelp Swimmer Community, were lapsed New Revelation Buddhists; Santiago himself had no interest in orthodox religion except as a system of belief to be compared to similar systems, physics, mathematics, post-Mandelbrot economics.
Santiago’s faith was in the junk aesthetic. Drugs, to Santiago, were alternative programs for the meat computer. Coupled with virtual reality they became tools for the exploration of the limits of the self. Understanding machines, subtle guillotines severing spirit from flesh and sending it out into darkness, into the void, and, beyond the void, primal light.
Until the day he woke up (he can finger the exact date, time, microclimate, world news, state of the Rim dollar against a basket of competing currencies) and found that it did not do it any more.
The doors of personal experience, through which he had attempted his years-long escape from himself, slammed one by one behind and before him. Had been slamming, almost unheard, far away down the immensely long corridor of being, all his life, until, that California winter morning almost a year ago, the final pair of doors closed and locked him within his Santiago-ness. Nowhere to go. Until one night the dark angel whispered into his numb dreams there is a way, the better way, the braver way, there is a way that is higher, if you have the courage to take it. The highest game of all.
For a year he had looked at it, contemplated it, planned and prepared it, and in the end he was still not brave enough to face it alone.
The polymorphous house unfolded its transparent carapace to admit Santiago. He had given years to its loving conversion into a shrine to those who had found it better to burn out than rust. The halls and landings of his shapeshifting hacienda were occupied by the monochrome likenesses of the brief and bright. James Dean. Buddy Holly. Jimi Hendrix. Mama Cass. Judy. A warped plastic cochlea, the Amadeus room – one of his earliest forays into the land of premature death – would automatically play selections of Mozartiana and sow the air with mood enhancers of Santiago’s own design. His Vincent room immersed its visitors in shivering colour and subharmonics tuned to the exact key of schizophrenia. Elsewhere, Isadora Duncan danced, scarf flapping behind her, while antique automobiles from the gasoline age shaved past, perilously close. Again, body-heat would trigger an antique moviola and fill a discreet wall alcove with a hand-coloured D. W. Griffith crucifixion. Jim Morrison and John Belushi were the two thieves, Harry Chapin and Charlie ‘the Bird’ Parker lifted a sponge soaked in vinegar to Christ’s lips while a leering Keith Moon ran his spear between fifth and sixth ribs and let forth the water and the blood. Kneeling at the foot of the cross, Billie Holliday played Mother Mary with just the right touch of pain and pathos while Mary Magdalene, wearing a slightly louche smirk, was Jean Harlow. The old swimming pool had been floored with a mosaic of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe icon. Santiago no longer swam there, though his guests loved to splash and submerge themselves in its blood-warm waters, but on nights when the heat in the house grew too great to bear he would lie prone atop his Marilyn, breathing through a skinsuit and listening to the unearthly throb of Robert ‘Crossroads’ Johnson from the underwater speakers while monkeys leaped through the riotous trees, noisily decrying the sluggish, inexorable invasion of their territory by jewel-bright feral tectosaurs.
In the hope that they had crept away, disgusted with themselves, while he was occupied in the grounds, Santiago peeped in on his night-guests. Candle smoke and spew.
Mislav’s face was racked in introverted agony. Neurological fire burned along the delicate silver feathering of his bodyglove circuitry. Cheetah lay curled foetally on the parquet floor, sensory skin peeled back from breasts, belly, loins. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved silently. Her skin was spattered with vomit.
Niños, niños: learn: some day it will not do it for you any more. Delphic wisdom from the heady heights of twenty-seven.
Santiago closed the door on their private heavens and hells. To his study, and business more important than teenage Hansel and Gretels who had dared each other into the candy-witch’s lair.
Santiago’s study was a place between, not quite house, not quite gardens, possessing the spirit of both. Mahogany shutters kept out the already stifling heat of the Copananga day: promise of storms to come in this monsoon humidity. Slats of light fell across the coir carpet, the antique wooden desk he had infected with information processing tectors. Wood and illusion. He summoned icons to the surface of the desk. ’Wares and familiars went howling out into the web and called Miclantecutli. Visual hold, blinked the icons. Speech only.
‘Santiago.’ The voice seemed to speak from the air. Clever, expensive audio. The last time Santiago had seen the face behind the words the translucent lid of a Jesus tank had been closing over it. ODs left clean corpses.
‘Miclantecutli.’
‘If you’re going to play the game, call me Miclan. All God’s chillun gotta have street names. Pack rules. I presume because we’re having this conversation that you are insistent on following through this little Night of the Dead Trick or Treat?’
‘A dead dead man and an assassin assassinated say I should, Miclan.’
‘You always were a too-smart cabrón, Santiago. I never could teach you a thing.’
‘You taught me everything I know.’
