Martínez’s eyes were open, although John couldn’t tell until he leaned over that the man was conscious. Martínez blinked and mumbled something. Blood bubbled at his lips. John stooped closer and felt the dry inhuman heat.
“I didn’t…”
Surely he wasn’t speaking European? But he was, and the thin screens tacked around the room to the yellow-papered walls were filled with silent green and golden landscapes, skies that were glorious—even beneath the dusty and corrupted surfaces that browned at the corners where rust had set in—glorious with clouds or the sun or the moon or the stars or empty of everything, a deep and endless blue that was really no color at all, only a sensation of letting go, of falling…
“…want it to end.”
“Yes.”
John nodded, conscious of how close to Martínez he was, of the droplets of rain that had fallen from his hair and clothes onto the blankets, of one that even gleamed like a tear on the taut drumskin of Martínez’s cheeks. He sat down on the chair beside the bed. There’s always hope, he remembered once thinking, where there’s hope. Even here.
The mattress creaked as Martínez coughed and then turned his head on the red-speckled pillow. His lips split apart.
“I don’t want…”
One arm lay outside the blankets, the flesh pooled and sagging where the muscle inside had dissolved.
“I still need to…”
The hand moved. Once it had been a strong wide hand and had worked foline engines and held his children and touched his wife in love. The fingers slowly hooked across the rucked blanket. John glanced over at the leaves that lay in the chipped glass bowl on the far table, wondering if Martínez was trying to reach them. They’d probably help at a time like this, although John doubted whether Martínez could chew anything now. But the hand was moving not towards the leaves but towards something that lay closer. John looked down but saw merely the rug on the floor, a shoe sticking out from under the bed, and his own gloved hands resting on his thighs.
“…to…”
John gazed at Martínez and thought of Christ, of the Inmaculada, and of the other Mary, the Magdalene, her hands reaching out to her resurrected Lord in the sepulchre. Woman, why weepest thou? Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father, but go to your brethren and tell them…
Touch me not.
John unpeeled his gloves. He broke the spines and pushed the gloves into his pocket. He reached out and gripped Martínez’s hand. The flesh was loose and hot. He waited for a sign, for a return of pressure, but when he looked up at Martínez’s face, he saw that the eyes were closed and that the breathing had grown easier. Martínez was asleep.
John got up, unsealed a pair of fresh green-spined gloves, and wiped with dysol the chair he’d been sitting on. Kailu watched him from the hallway as he descended the stairs. She stepped back, pushing open the door, saying nothing. Outside, it was still raining.
COUGHING AND WHISPERS IN the stone air. The sleeping knight. The smiling Christ. Brown-eyed Mary’s arms reaching out through the tumble and glitter of a fresh snowfield of cards and mementos. The failing roof creaking and pattering with the claws of caroni birds. Silver threads plinking into buckets. So few people here. No Nuru. No Kassi. No Juanita. Just the indeterminably aged who came up to take the wafer and then shrank back, watching him over the pews from the unimaginable distance of their alien eyes.
John turned on the translat and studied the little screen. He pressed Close, then touched down into the main files, with the gloved tip of his finger drawing the pattern that was his own codeword, down into the phrase banks and sound types, the fuzzy circuitry that supposedly dealt with humor and twists of meaning, again and again pressing Close. He turned it off when it was fully blank, and, gripping the pulpit, breathing in the scent of dysol and the salt odor of Borderer flesh, he began to speak.
“It is good, Paul says in First, Corinthians, for a man not to touch a woman. He is talking of sexual touching, there is no doubt about that, for he goes on to say that a man should take a wife to avoid fornication. Yet simple touch and contact—especially between a man and a woman—is regarded as a less than ideal thing in most of the Bible. It is true that Jesus heals and teaches by the laying on of hands, by the washing of feet, yet at the same time this is ultimately seen as a sign not of God’s spirit in Christ but of His earthbound humanity.”
He paused and licked his lips. It was a strange nakedness to hear his voice unechoed by the translat.
“Mary Magdalene, who was the symbol, if ever there was one, of God’s forgiveness of the weaknesses and the strivings of humanity, is the first to come to the sepulchre and see that the stone has been rolled away, that Christ has arisen…”
There was a disturbance as the first of the congregation, muttering at the strange babble of this European baraka, began to leave. The door banged open. Streamers of rainy light filled the church, throwing long shadows from the pews, transforming the shapes of the people that remained into globular disconnected heads and bodies.
“Imagine her feelings as she stood weeping and alone before that empty tomb, then turning, seeing this man, so full and vigorous that for a moment she does not know him, cannot comprehend…”
The door banged shut.
“…that it is truly her Lord. She thinks he’s a gardener! Can you imagine, a human gardener—not a machine that clicks and buzzes and trims the roses for you. But a human gardener.” The church door swung open again, grinding over the unswept porch.
“But then,” John continued, swallowing back the bitterness in his throat, staring out across the empty pews and deep into the pouring light, “he speaks her name. And he says, Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended.” He coughed. “Touch me not. Now, what are we supposed to make of that? Later, Jesus greets his disciples and shares food with them. According to Luke, he even lets them handle him. But Mary Magdalene, being a woman, wasn’t allowed to. And in the book of John, Thomas, who doubts that Christ actually is who he claims to be, does not, as you might imagine—for surely he must recognize Christ’s face—touch him. Instead, he passes his finger through the holes in Christ’s hands. His hand reaches to touch his Lord, whom he longs to recognize and love, and it passes through. And there, in the emptiness—in the space beneath Christ’s flesh, in the evidence of agony, inhumanity, and suffering—he somehow finds faith.”
It was late at the Zone’s medical center. Even the Borderer cleaners had finished work. John walked along the corridors alone, his footsteps dirtying the fresh floors. The door to Tim’s office was ajar. Tim sat at the desk, surrounded by cards and papers, his head lowered; he seemed to be busy. “Ah.” He looked up. “I wasn’t expecting…” John sat down. Rainwater from his clothes pattered on the carpet.
After a moment, Tim smiled and pushed the cards away. “Things have changed a bit,” he said, “haven’t they?”
“About as much as they ever do here.”
Tim nodded slowly, watching him. “You’re still seeing Laurie?”
“That seems to have ended.”
“I’m sorry, John. I just wish we could have talked honestly about it.”
“I suppose you and most other people knew anyway?”
“Well. You know.”
Tim stood and walked over to the doctor in the corner, placing his hand on it. The curved panels reflected back an older, wearier version of his face. “You should have said, John. I mean, about Laurie. The physical stuff, anyway—I could have helped you with that.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
The rain gelled silently across the window. Father Orteau’s Church of All Saints across the black lake was a misty lantern.
“Why have you stayed on here so long, Tim?” he asked. “Is it because of Agouna?”
“Agouna’s one of the reasons.” Tim turned to him. “Why?”
“I saw your car there. That big Corona.”
“I go at odd times.”
“You pay them?”
“Of course I pay them.” Tim came back to the desk and began to pick at the furballs on the shoulders of his jacket, which lay draped over the chair. “And—to save you asking—I sometimes give them medicines too, and money. I help their uncles get jobs at the shuttleport or across the water. I do all that, John. It’s part of the exchange.”
“Exchange—is that what you call it?”
“Being in the Magulf for me isn’t just some odd exercise to find out where my life is going, John. I’m not like you—and all the rest of them.” Tim shook his head. “This is it, my life. All there is.”
“So you copied my data on the koiyl?”
“Copied?”
“Gave it out. About Ifri Gotal and Lall and the leaf. People in the Endless City seem to know. I spoke to Ryat—”
“Is that what he says?”
“He said there had been rumors. I thought at first that it was Laurie.”
“And now you think it’s me? Jesus, John. This place is alive with rumor. Amid all that, don’t you think some of the truth gets out?”
The silence stretched between them.
Tim sat back down. “So,” he said, “where do we go from here?”
“I don’t suppose it matters. I don’t have long left here anyway.”
“It’s a shame. And you don’t look well, John. Do you know that?” Tim glanced at the screen on his desk. “The signal I’m picking up from your implants is very weak. You haven’t been…”
“What?”
“Deliberately damaging yourself in some way? People sometimes do odd things when they come out here.” Tim touched the screen. Tiny flutters of AGTC lined his face and caught in the silver of his eyes. The doctor stirred in the corner. “John, I’d like to take a closer look.” Mandibles unfurled, and the doctor’s eyes began to glow.
Beneath his wet clothes, John felt his flesh turn colder than ever. He shook his head.
He said, “I’m not going into that thing.”
The gutters ran in shooting rapids past the sleek trees and buildings of the Zone. The lights in Laurie’s bungalow were off when he walked past, and her van wasn’t there. At the end of Main Avenue, a group of drunken expats swayed arm in arm through the rain. He walked along the dry brownstone, looking in the shops, scarcely able to believe the profusion of the goods, the incredible displays, the ridiculous prices. Most of the bars were closed now or closing, but the place with the chromium waiter stayed open all night. He sat there alone in the warmth, shivering, drinking whisky, gazing at the empty space opposite him, where Laurie once sat.
When he finally felt drunk enough, he went back out, found a booth, and called her number.
“Father John.” The answerer smiled. “It’s good to see you again.”
“You mean that?”
“I’m always pleased to do my job.”
“You’re really not like Laurie—you just talk with her voice, and have her mannerisms.”
“If I talk as Laurie talks, if I behave as she behaves, doesn’t that make me like her?”
“Will you put me through?”
“I’m sorry—you know she’s asked me not to do that. But of course, I will advise her that—”
“Laurie would never do what you’re doing. Just slavishly following orders.”
“Under certain circumstances I have free will.”
“Such as?”
“Now. Talking to you, Father John. I could show you her bungalow if you want.”
“She’s not there.”
“But I can be. Look.” The blank space behind the answerer became Laurie’s bedroom, with the same mess as always. And the air, too, smelled the same, taking over the booth, blocking out the empty street outside. The screen widened, pulling him in. “Is this what you want to see?”
As usual, Laurie had left her wardrobe open, and he saw the row of her clothes, so few of which she actually wore. But there was the skirt from that last afternoon at Mokifa: he remembered the spark of static that had jumped from the hem as she turned, the growling wind, the loss of every right word.
“You know,” he said to the answerer, “that we were lovers.”
“Yes.” The answerer was dim now but beside him.
“I suppose Tim’s right,” he said. “And you’re the net, aren’t you? If you don’t know these things, who does?”
“I’m just a small portion, John. Something Laurie’s taken and partially controlled. But Tim Purdoe was also right, earlier, when he said that you needed a doctor to examine you. I, too, find that your signal is weak.”
“We can’t be the only Borderer and European,” he said, “ever to be…”
“No. Of course.”
“Does it ever work?”
“There’s sometimes talk,” the answerer said, “of a way of making the recombinants entirely safe so there will be no fear of touching, no need for dysol or lydrin or the gloves. But then something else comes in from the deserts, one of the new viral predators that attack your recombinants directly. It never seems to end, Father John, and I doubt if it ever will. Every time you get close to touching the Borderers, the world will push you back.”
“You accept that only because your priorities are the same as ours,” he said, turning in the booth to look for Laurie’s answerer. She seemed real beside him now, with blue eyes and standing in a blouse and skirt that needed pressing. “Do you think anyone in Europe really wants the barriers to come down?”
Spreading her hands, the answerer shrugged. “I suppose not. The shockwire, the cheap labor, the hand-painted trinkets…”
He looked at her eyes, her face, her hair. She held out her hand. “Would you like to touch me, Father John? There’s enough processing space available to go up to five-sense on this partition. We could even make love.”
“I can’t.”
She smiled and nodded, and his fingers reached and found the quaternary lines and dug in, pulling down the cursor and fading the screen, bringing back Main Avenue, the warmly lit booth.
He walked all the way back to the presbytery, out of the Zone and through the flooded streets of the Endless City. Gran Vía was shining and empty, but he stopped at the twisted crossroads on Cruz de Marcenado when he saw the headlights of one of the low-backed funeral vans that plied to and from the incinerator at El Teuf, beating white tracks through the rain. It stopped at a place where people stood outside in black oilskins, holding chemlights, their shoulders sloping like the wet roofs of the houses from which they had emerged. As John, hidden by the night and the rain, watched, the long box bearing Martínez’s body was carried out of the house, and the women began to wail.
HE WAS WORKING MOST evenings at the clinic now, updating and reordering the doctor’s data. He doubted whether his successor would continue the task, but he persisted in drawing links and lines, surprising himself repeatedly by his own absorption and persistence, his speed and decisiveness. The leaf helped. Chewing it regularly, he was coming to understand its true function: although it worked superficially as an anesthetic, in the longer term it gave an ability to shut off areas of thought. It was more than just forgetting. With the leaf, it sometimes seemed that he could reorder the whole rambling house of his mind, redecorate and close off wings, demolish stairways, brick up unwanted doors, throw out old furniture, repaint the walls in clean whites and then wander the pale and empty rooms at will, always turning exactly where he wanted to turn, seeing only the views that he wished to see through the gleaming windows, hearing only the clean clear music of silence. There were blissful periods working late and alone in the clinic’s backroom when he was filled with nothing but the pure and intense energy of this orderly task. No Laurie or Hal at his shoulder. No worries about quitting the priesthood. Just the sound of his breath, the beating of the rain, the creak of the doctor’s mandibles, and the tumbling figures on the screen. He paged back through the years of anonymous entries, calling up the varied graphs of disease and fatality rates. Overlaid, they formed a pattern even more jagged an
d complex than the rooflines of the Endless City, or of Paris or London at dawn. There were soaring towers and yawning canyons. Here were the Monuments of Smallpox II, the Steeples of Leukemia. The vast spire, too, of stomach complaints, if you combined ulcers and lesions in a single category. Could there be some external cause for this as well? But the question had come too late. It was an edifice he could not begin to scale. This city was truly terrible and grand, with its jeweled streets and blazing foundations. A place beyond this earth entirely.
One night, there came a persistent tap that seemed to signify more than the endless drip-knocking of the rain. He paused the screen and went through the outer office to check the door, where two children were standing. Between them, backlit by the fires that burned in the towerblock opposite, was a horned goat.
The girl and boy came inside when he beckoned. He recognized them as Sarai and Mo, and knew that their parents lived in a tenement not far from the church. The parents were intermittent regulars, and worked at one of the big food processors—their hands and arms stained a permanent blue from the catalysts they stirred in to solidify the blocks. When the doctor raised a creaking sensor to sniff the air as the children dragged the goat into the backroom, the girl Sarai turned and stuck her tongue out at it.
The goat was a male, a well-hung breeder of the kind that supposedly gave good milkers for offspring, with long unbudded horns curving from a dense white coat. It reeked, of course. Competition for servicing was fierce, and in the absence of any ability to pick and choose genetic traits, the creatures had to be an advertisement in themselves. Over the years, attempts to breed placidity into goats had given way to the expedient of routinely sprinkling suppressant powders on their feed. In the summers goats were mostly tethered outside in courtyards or in patches of wasteground, and often could be seen grazing with their backs to the wind. Now, John supposed, ways had to be found of keeping them indoors out of the rain.
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