Beyond the Doors of Death (10 page)

“No,” Klein gasped. “I don’t believe—
no!
”

Zacharias plunged the cold tip of the tube quickly into Klein’s forearm.

***

“The freezer unit is coming,” Mortimer said. “It’ll be here in five minutes or less.”

“What if it’s late?” Sybille asked anxiously. “What if something irreversible happens to his brain before it gets here?”

“He’s not even entirely dead yet,” Zacharias reminded her. “There’s time. There’s ample time. I spoke to the doctor myself, a very intelligent Chinese, flawless command of English. He was most sympathetic. They’ll have him frozen within a couple minutes of death. We’ll book cargo passage aboard the morning plane for Dar. He’ll be in the United States within twenty-four hours, I guarantee that. San Diego will be notified. Everything will be all right, Sybille!”

Jorge Klein lay slumped across the table. The bar had emptied the moment he had cried out and lurched forward: the half-dozen customers had fled, not caring to mar their holidays by sharing an evening with the presence of death, and the waiters and bartenders, big-eyed, terrified, lurked in the hallway. A heart attack, Zacharias had announced, some kind of sudden attack, maybe a stroke, where’s the telephone? No one had seen the tiny tube do its work.

Sybille trembled. “If anything goes wrong—”

“I hear the sirens now,” Zacharias said.

***

From his desk at the airport Daud Mahmoud Barwani watched the bulky refrigerated coffin being loaded by grunting porters aboard the morning plane for Dar. And then, and then, and then? They would ship the dead man to the far side of the world, to America, and breathe new life into him, and he would go once more among men. Barwani shook his head. These people! The man who was alive is now dead, and these dead ones, who knows what they are? Who knows? Best that the dead remain dead, as was intended in the time of first things. Who could have foreseen a day when the dead returned from the grave? Not I. And who can foresee what we will all become, a hundred years from now? Not I. Not I. A hundred years from now I will sleep, Barwani thought. I will sleep, and it will not matter to me at all what sort of creatures walk the earth.

N
INE

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

T.S. Eliot:
Little Gidding

***

On the day of his awakening he saw no one except the attendants at the rekindling house, who bathed him and fed him and helped him to walk slowly around his room. They said nothing to him, nor he to them; words seemed irrelevant. He felt strange in his skin, too snugly contained, as though all his life he had worn ill-fitting clothes and now had for the first time encountered a competent tailor. The images that his eyes brought him were sharp, unnaturally clear, and faintly haloed by prismatic colors, an effect that imperceptibly vanished as the day passed. On the second day he was visited by the San Diego Guidefather, not at all the formidable patriarch he had imagined, but rather a cool, efficient executive, about fifty years old, who greeted him cordially and told him briefly of the disciplines and routines he must master before he could leave the Cold Town. “What month is this?” Klein asked, and Guidefather told him it was June, the seventeenth of June, 2033. He had slept four weeks.

Now it is the morning of the third day after his awakening, and he has guests: Sybille, Nerita, Zacharias, Mortimer, Gracchus. They file into his room and stand in an arc at the foot of his bed, radiant in the glow of light that pierces the narrow windows. Like demigods, like angels, glittering with a dazzling inward brilliance, and now he is of their company. Formally they embrace him, first Gracchus, then Nerita, then Mortimer. Zacharias advances next to his bedside, Zacharias who sent him into death, and he smiles at Klein and Klein returns the smile, and they embrace. Then it is Sybille’s turn: she slips her hand between his, he draws her close, her lips brush his cheek, his touch hers, his arm encircles her shoulders.

“Hello,” she whispers.

“Hello,” he says.

They ask him how he feels, how quickly his strength is returning, whether he has been out of bed yet, how soon he will commence his drying-off. The style of their conversation is the oblique, elliptical style favored by the deads, but not nearly so clipped and cryptic as the way of speech they normally would use among themselves; they are favoring him, leading him inch by inch into their customs. Within five minutes he thinks he is getting the knack.

He says, using their verbal shorthand, “I must have been a great burden to you.”

“You were, you were,” Zacharias agrees. “But all that is done with now.”

“We forgive you,” Mortimer says.

“We welcome you among us,” declares Sybille.

They talk about their plans for the months ahead. Sybille is nearly finished with her work on Zanzibar; she will retreat to Zion Cold Town for the summer months to write her thesis. Mortimer and Nerita are off to Mexico to tour the ancient temples and pyramids; Zacharias is going to Ohio, to his beloved mounds. In the autumn they will reassemble at Zion and plan the winter’s amusement: a tour of Egypt, perhaps, or Peru, the heights of Machu Picchu. Ruins, archaeological sites, delight them; in the places where death has been busiest, their joy is most intense. They are flushed, excited, verbose—virtually chattering, now. Away we will go, to Zimbabwe, to Palenque, to Angkor, to Knossos, to Uxmal, to Nineveh, to Mohenjo-daro. And as they go on and on, talking with hands and eyes and smiles and even words, even words, torrents of words, they blur and become unreal to him, they are mere dancing puppets jerking about a badly painted stage, they are droning insects, wasps or bees or mosquitoes, with all their talk of travels and festivals, of Boghazköy and Babylon, of Megiddo and Masada, and he ceases to hear them, he tunes them out, he lies there smiling, eyes glazed, mind adrift. It perplexes him that he has so little interest in them. But then he realizes that it is a mark of his liberation. He is freed of old chains now. Will he join their set? Why should he? Perhaps he will travel with them, perhaps not, as the whim takes him. More likely not. Almost certainly not. He does not need their company. He has his own interests. He will follow Sybille about no longer. He does not need, he does not want, he will not seek. Why should he become one of them, rootless, an amoral wanderer, a ghost made flesh? Why should he embrace the values and customs of these people who had given him to death as dispassionately as they might swat an insect, only because he had bored them, because he had annoyed them? He does not hate them for what they did to him, he feels no resentment that he can identify, he merely chooses to detach himself from them. Let them float on from ruin to ruin, let them pursue death from continent to continent; he will go his own way. Now that he has crossed the interface, he finds that Sybille no longer matters to him.

—Oh, sir, things change—

“We’ll go now,” Sybille says softly.

He nods. He makes no other reply.

“We’ll see you after your drying-off,” Zacharias tells him, and touches him lightly with his knuckles, a farewell gesture used only by the deads.

“See you,” Mortimer says.

“See you,” says Gracchus.

“Soon,” Nerita says.

Never, Klein says, saying it without words, but so they will understand. Never. Never. Never. I will never see any of you. I will never see you, Sybille. The syllables echo through his brain, and the word,
never, never, never,
rolls over him like the breaking surf, cleansing him, purifying him, healing him. He is free. He is alone.

“Goodbye,” Sybille calls from the hallway.

“Goodbye,” he says.

It was years before he saw her again. But they spent the last days of ’39 together, shooting dodos under the shadow of mighty Kilimanjaro.

PART
TWO
:
QUICKEN

Damien Broderick

O
NE

“We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related.”

Henry Miller,
Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion

***

“I am called Dr. Imam Hassan Sabbāh,” said the man in the Islamic skullcap, a white embroidered taqiyah. “You may address me as Guidefather, Professor Klein.”

Klein uttered the vocable denoting “Thank you, sir” in the register of submission. Even now, after these months as a dead, he remained surprised by his fluency in the swift argot shared by his postmortem fellows. Had he learned it, in the way children acquire a vernacular, simply by interacting with other deads, being in their midst, listening to their conversation, climbing a ladder from baby-simple to adult-complexified? No. After an initial week or two of confusion and difficulty in San Diego Cold Town, the new language had emerged spontaneously from his lips, driven presumably by some immense rearrangement of grammar and lexicon from Spanish, English, German, French, his linguistic X-bar trees. All that apparatus of speech and thought tucked away inside the folds of his revived brain. But when had it occurred, this Rosetta Stone of the reborn, this downloaded Berlitz course? He assumed it must have been a side effect of rekindling, or perhaps (was this too paranoiac?) it had been literally stamped upon his vulnerable defunct cortex during the four unconscious weeks in suspension and repair following his death. All he knew for sure was that he and this Muslim Guidefather were equally glib in their accelerated and concise tongue.

“I am here at the invitation of your staff, but nothing has been explained,” he added. “How may I serve the Conclave?” Five tonal phonemes. However it had been done, it was an impressive accomplishment.

“You are a gifted man, Jorge. It seems that you resist the temptation of ennui, cafard, the sport of absurdity, indulgence in the iconography of mortality.”

“A temptation gladly acceded to by my wife Sybille,” Klein said, bored by the words even as he spoke. No resentment. It was as remarkable, in its way, as his magical acquisition of the music of the dead. Had they rewired his amygdala, his emotional keyboard, his flux of neurotransmitters? No doubt, but Klein knew himself the merest amateur in the sciences of cognition and neurology. Such speculations were useless, then, as well as dull. Still, some small part of his well-trained mind gnawed at the question and its implications. He could not be bothered trying to still it.

“Your
ex
-wife,” said the Guidefather. A sharp one syllable rebuke. You have been here long enough to know better than that, Klein, the man did not need to say.

“Yes, yes. All bonds broken, I am fully aware of this. Perhaps I resent her flight from all responsibility.” The words clattered in his mouth. Really, he didn’t care what Sybille did. His obsession with her was expunged, their obliterated decade, their lost Jorge-and-Sybille. Wasn’t it?

“The transition of the rekindled leaves us stranded in absurdity,” Sabbāh said, as if it were an admission. Klein watched him, surprised. The man’s hands lay flat on his thighs; his mouth, through the beard and mustache, suggested a restrained amusement. “Yet we have built the Cold Towns from nothing, we conduct our battles with the pests of the Treasury and Internal Revenue, we pursue our research and marketing. We are not monks, withdrawn from the world, even when we withdraw from the world into our sanctuaries. You follow me.”

“I believe so. You hope to enlist me as…how should I put it…middle management.”

Sabbāh smiled. “Not quite, Professor. As an emissary, eventually. For now, as an Acolyte. Better yet, an Adjutant. The Conclave wishes you to reenter the world of the warms and learn in detail how we are regarded. What risks we face. How we might best advance our cause and pursue our goals.”

Do not ask direct questions
, Klein recalled. Dolorosa’s advice, that shabby outcast. Still, though that edict now seemed entirely natural and proper, he forced himself.

“And what are those goals, Guidefather?”

“You will learn this in good time.” The man rose, made no attempt to take Jorge Klein’s hand. “That will be all for now. We shall dine this evening in the Rojo Diablo
restaurant at eight. You will be prompt.”

Irritated, Klein remained seated. “You presume too easily, Guidefather.”

“You were dead, now you walk. Payment is due to your fellows.”

“My insurance covered your hefty fee for my rekindling. For my ex-wife’s also. Now the Conclave holds attached all my assets—my property, my savings, my future income. You can ask no more.”

Hassan Sabbāh walked to the door, opened it, stood waiting for Klein to rise.

“You have paid in the currency of the living,” he said. “Now we seek your cooperation, freely given. Nothing will be forced or extorted. Good morning, Dr. Klein. I shall see you tonight.”

“Very well,” Klein said, and rose. He followed Sabbāh into the dreary, unornamented hallway. In silence, they parted at an intersection and he made his way to his simple room. His breathing remained calm, the infusion of respirocytes flooded through his vascular system carrying oxygen to his renovated and reconstructed brain, along with its unknown cargo of neuromodulators. You are dead, he thought. And now you walk. You are without family or spouse, except for this company of the deceased. Yes, your parents remain alive, and your sister Hester, and your cousins in America and Argentina, but to them you are truly dead. They have sat
shiva
for seven days in your memory, and now to them you are as good as buried, alive only in their memories—memories poisoned by your apostasy from the world of the warms. He went into his room and lay down on the simple bed, eyes open, gazing at the plastic meaninglessness of the world.

* * *

Rolling Stone’s
I See Dead People 101

I’ve never seen any deads younger than maybe 20, or older than 50 or 60. What’s up with that?

Maybe it’s built into the process (whatever that is). As usual, the Conclave of the Rekindled refuse to divulge any details, but top gerontologists and neuroscientists suggest that rekindling a postmortem child would, like, upset the balance of the universe—or at least mess with the kid’s developmental trajectory.

And maybe old people are too far gone. The deads are probably working on it in their labs. If they have labs.

How that kid thing would cash out is anyone’s guess. Maybe the Cold Towns have special schools or dormitories for the, you know, differently dead. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to be stuck at the size and age of six years old for the rest of eternity, or even for a few thousand years. (Nobody yet knows how long the dead will stay…well, “alive” isn’t the right word. Active. Ambulant. Not-really-dead.)

***

Is it true that after they dry off, deads are gifted with a pile of gold equal to their weight?

Let us reason together. Suppose the average American adult weighs 180 lbs. Yes, that’s an understatement and has been for decades, but the Grim Reset probably carved quite a bit of flab off of a lot of citizens. 180 lbs. is 2,880 ounces (31.1034768 grams to the Troy ounce, since you ask), and today’s gold fix is $New17.67 per ounce. That’d be more than 50,000 Newbucks per dead, on average. Readers who remember the Bad Old Days probably still recalibrate that as five million USD. Per person.

How likely is that? Rounding off, we have 500 million citizens in the USA, more than half in the prime adult catchment area (like, not kids or olds). But not so many of those 280-Megs die and get rekindled—statisticians estimate about point one percent, and that’s as fine-toothed as it gets, because the Census doesn’t count dead people. They’re dead, right?

Still, that’s maybe two hundred and fifty thousand humans eligible to stick their demortified paws out for their gratuity once they die. More than a trillion old USD/10 billion Newbucks. And where is that absurd pile of loot supposed to come from?

Mark this one:
Urban Legend
.

So who
does
fund the Cold Towns? Those things are spreading like toadstools after a clammy rain. And now they’re even taking over prime real estate in our city. Why, the ancient cathedral of—

Calm down. People live where they like, especially when they can afford the real estate. You want to set up ghettoes? Get out of here!

Call it communism, if you like; call it Galt’s Gulch meets Valentine Michael Smith. (You’re
au fait
of the classics, right? No? Hit the download. We’ll be here when you get back.) As far as we can tell—locked out here on the wrong side of their guarded gates—it looks as if the deads share their wealth in an egalitarian way that demands only as much in way of toil as each rekindled is prepared to offer. Machine service to the max.

Most of their community funding comes, of course, from their fabulous patents. Who did you suppose collects the dues for your household cool fusion power system, or the Paycell in your finger? The deads are different from you and me, Scott. They’re smarter. And they’re richer.