Mammoth Books presents Death in the Promised Land

Book 201: Mammoth Books

by Pat Cadigan

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

'Death in the Promised Land' explores the potential dangers of becoming too closely involved in virtual reality. Parts of the story were later reworked into the novel Tea from an Empty Cup (1988), which had a sequel in Dervish is Digital (2001), both excellent examples of merging cyberpunk with the detective genre.

Release date: July 26, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

I really wish I had more work by women writers in this anthology. It wasn’t for want of looking but somehow each time a story grabbed me as being just right for this book, it turned out to be written by a man. Except this one – and in fact this was the very first story I decided must be included. Cadigan (b. 1953) has been a full-time writer since 1987 but for ten years before that, while working for the Hallmark Company, was involved as an editor on the small press magazines Chacal and Shayol, the latter still one of the most beautiful magazines ever published. Here appeared some of her earliest work including “Last Chance for Angina Pectoris at Miss Sadie’s Saloon, Dry Gulch” (1977) which gave a good idea of the unconventional route her fiction would follow. She has been hailed as the “Queen of Cyberpunk” following her novel Synners (1991) which showed the potential dangers of becoming too closely involved in virtual reality. The following story has the same basis. Parts of it were later reworked into the novel Tea from an Empty Cup (1998), which had a sequel in Dervish is Digital (2001), both excellent examples of merging cyberpunk with the detective genre. But here, in all its glory, is the original full-length story.

The kid had had his choice of places to go – other countries, other worlds, even other universes, à la the legendary exhortation of e. e. cummings, oddly evocative in its day, spookily prescient now. But the kid’s idea of a hell of a good universe next door had been a glitzed-out, gritted-up, blasted and blistered post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. It wasn’t a singular sentiment – post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty was topping the hitline for the thirteenth week in a row, with post-Apocalyptic Ellay and post-Apocalyptic Hong Kong holding steady at two and three, occasionally trading places but defending against all comers.

Dore Konstantin didn’t understand the attraction. Perhaps the kid could have explained it to her if he had not come out of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty with his throat cut.

Being DOA after a session in the Sitty wasn’t singular, either; immediate information available said that this was number eight in as many months. So far, no authority was claiming that the deaths were related, although no one was saying they weren’t, either. Konstantin wasn’t sure what any of it meant, except that, at the very least, the Sitty would have one more month at the number one spot.

The video parlor night manager was boinging between appalled and thrilled. “You ever go in the Sitty?” she asked Konstantin, crowding into the doorway next to her. Her name was Guilfoyle Pleshette and she didn’t make much of a crowd; she was little more than a bundle of sticks wrapped in a gaudy kimono, voice by cartoonland, hair by van der Graaf. She stood barely higher than Konstantin’s shoulder, hair included.

“No, never have,” Konstantin told her, watching as DiPietro and Celestine peeled the kid’s hotsuit off him for the coroner. It was too much like seeing an animal get skinned, only grislier, and not just because most of the kid’s blood was on the hotsuit. Underneath, his naked flesh was imprinted with a dense pattern of lines and shapes, byzantine in complexity, from the wires and sensors in the ’suit.

Yes, it’s the latest in nervous systems, Konstantin imagined a chatty lecturer’s voice saying. The neo-exo-nervous system, generated by hotsuit coverage. Each line and shape has its counterpart on the opposite side of the skin barrier, which cannot at this time be breached under pain of –

The imaginary lecture cut off as the coroner’s cam operator leaned in for a shot of the kid’s head and shoulders, forcing the stringer from Police Blotter back against the facing wall. Unperturbed, the stringer held her own cam over her head, aimed the lens downward and kept taping. This week, Police Blotter had managed to reverse the injunction against commercial networks that had been reinstated last week. Konstantin couldn’t wait for next week.

As the ’suit cleared the kid’s hips, the smell of human waste fought with the heavy odor of blood and the sour stink of sweat for control of the air in the room, which wasn’t much larger than the walk-out closet that Konstantin had shared with her ex. The closet had looked a lot bigger this morning now that her ex’s belongings were gone, but this room seemed to be shrinking by the moment. The coroner, her cam operator, the stringer, and DiPietro and Celestine had all come prepared with nasal filters; Konstantin’s were sitting in the top drawer of her desk.

Putting her hand over her nose and mouth, she stepped back into the hallway where her partner Taliaferro was also suffering, but from the narrow space and low ceiling rather than the air, which was merely over-processed and stale. Pleshette followed, fishing busily in her kimono pockets.

“So bad,” she said, looking from Konstantin to Taliaferro. Taliaferro gave no indication that he had heard her. He stood with his back to the wall and his shoulders up around his ears, head thrust forward over the archiver while he made notes, as if he expected the ceiling to come down on him. From Konstantin’s angle, the archiver was completely hidden by his hand, so that he seemed to be using the stylus directly on his palm.

Never send a claustrophobe to do an agoraphobe’s job, Konstantin thought, feeling surreal. Taliaferro, who pronounced his name “tolliver” for reasons she couldn’t fathom, was such a big guy anyway that she wondered if most places short of an arena didn’t feel small and cramped to him.

“Real goddam bad,” Pleshette added, as if this somehow clarified her original statement. One bony hand came up out of a hidden pocket with a small spritzer; a too-sweet, minty odor cut through the flat air.

Taliaferro’s stylus froze as his eyes swiveled to the manager. “That didn’t help,” he said darkly.

“Oh, but wait,” she said, waving both hands to spread the scent. “Smellin’ the primer now, but soon, nothing. Deadens the nose, use it by the pound here. Trade puts out a lot of body smell in the actioners. ’Suits reek.” She gestured at the other doors lining the long narrow hall. “Like that Gang Wars module? Strapped the trade down on chaises, otherwise they’d a killed the ’suits, rollin’ around on the floor, bouncin’ offa the walls, jumpin’ on each other. Real easy to go native in a Gang Wars module.”

Go native? Taliaferro mouthed, looking at Konstantin from under his brows. Konstantin shrugged. “I didn’t see a chaise in there.”

“Folds down outa the wall: Like those old Murphy beds?”

Konstantin raised her eyebrows, impressed that she was even acquainted with the idea of Murphy beds, and then felt mildly ashamed. Her ex had always told her that being a snob was her least attractive feature.

“Most people don’t use the chaises exce. . .