Beyond the Doors of Death (12 page)

He dressed snugly and went outside into the cool morning, still sunless, harshly lit by the exterior LEDs. Guidefather stood beside the open passenger hatch of a small Gates fusion jet, a couple of functionaries in attendance. Klein climbed aboard, strapped in, and within a minute was hurtling toward his defuncted wife. Ex-wife.

F
OUR

Human life, because it is marked by a beginning and an end, becomes whole, an entity in itself that can be subjected to judgment, only when it has ended in death; death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

Hannah Arendt
, The Life of the Mind

***

Hard blue-white lighting, sterility itself, diagnostic and monitoring equipment gleaming, the large tank waiting for its occupant, and Sybille supine on a gurney, motionless, eyes shut, totally hairless after the ministrations of the techs, her round scalp eerily pale above her faintly tanned features, breasts flattened only slightly by gravity, the curved purse of her vulva visible within the torn flesh and sundered bone of her smashed hips, legs so badly broken they seemed the remnants of a carnivore’s meal. He had not seen her for four years, and this broken corpse was no memory of his.

“You’re going to amputate her limbs,” Klein conjectured. He stood beside the gurney with Zion’s Guidefather, a purple-skinned fellow as ruthlessly shaved as Sybille. A former Marine? A Navy
SEAL
? Both wore transparent, flexible outer shell and helmet over decontaminated scrubs, in common with the handful of busy medical technicians, all of them, unsurprisingly, deads. The hiss of air from sealed tanks, a faint echo in the voice circuits.

“Nothing so gross. You are here to witness the restoration process, or at least its first steps. Watch in silence.”

Sybille’s corpse was lifted into the tank, lowered on a mesh into some viscous, transparent medium. She—it—seemed to float, rolling slightly, was stabilized by mesh from above. Tubes extruded from the sides of the tank, sharp-tipped; they entered her flesh. After a long minute, her skin took on a roseate flush.

“Repair nanocytes,” said the Guidefather, Jamal Hakim. “This much the academics and media of the warms have long conjectured. But wait.”

The corpse began to swell. Pulsations flexed Sybille’s smashed legs, her hips writhed in a horrid parody of sexual desire. Klein watched without emotion, neither excited nor repelled. The world was comic in its meaningless surges, its appetites, its agonies, but none of what he saw brought a smile to his lips or a burning wish to vomit. Awareness of his own inanition caused him neither self-reproof nor an anxious wish to remedy this loss of emotions that had once overwhelmed his life. All of this he saw clearly, layer within layer, and all he felt was a profound bleakness.

A deep thrumming, and the lights flickered. Magnetic forces, no doubt, the kind of sleeting impalpable magic wrought by resonance scanners. So this is why they insisted we remove all metal from our bodies, change into these scrubs and booties. Even the tanks of air on our backs must be ceramic or plastic. The techs watched their instruments, the dead woman’s body swelled, ballooned, limbs straightening under some impulse he could not detect except through its effects.

“We have engaged her morphogenetic
Bauplan
field,” Hakim said. His deep voice was a profound baritone, effortlessly piercing the rumble of the hidden magnetrons within the tank, in the majestic tones of a cantor in Temple, a holy, authoritative growl of absolute precision. Klein caught himself. Holy? Such nonsense. This place was no more than a highly elaborate body works, a repair shop.

“Body plan,” Klein glossed aloud. “Some genetic master code, I take it.”

“In part. But rekindling searches the genomic recipes in a large sampling of healthy cells of the body, under the direction of the morphic field, and recovers a pristine image of the epigenetic landscape and that maximal state toward which it moves.”

Gibberish, surely. This was the kind of nonsense peddled in the lower echelons of the media.
The Grays Walk Among Us.
Christian Crystal Therapy. Nazi Deads Secret Bases on the Backside of the Moon.
He had sampled them in his studies, when he lived, at first amused, finally infuriated and even sickened by the malign know-nothing gullibility they stood for. Could the Guidefather be pranking him? Testing him in an obscure rite, probing at his own vulnerability to such drivel? It seemed impossible. It was impossible.

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t understand how the information inside widely separated and differentiated cells could—”

“Quantum entanglement. We are bathing the defuncted body with powerful magnetic fields, driving the cells into harmony and oneness at the morphological level.”

“Reprogramming,” Klein said, filled with a wonderment that momentarily bypassed his dispassionate cynicism, overwhelmed its chill, subverted it. Perhaps this was the jolt Sybille and Zacharias and Gracchus and the rest felt as they aimed their weapons at animals lost in prehistory but recovered by genetic science, herds trampling the African plains, and falling under deliberate bombardment from the guns of those who shared their condition. More than a jolt, he told himself. A benediction. A joining. Again, that tincture of the numinous. What is happening to me, he asked himself, and felt a pulse of shame.

“Not quite. Reactivating old programs, in a cascade of recapitulation. Your former wife’s spine is knitting up, her bones coming together, disrupted muscles and dermis finding their proper locations. The respirocytes gather in her lungs, haematocytes in her corrected vasculature. We should leave now, the process is well begun but will take hours to complete.”

“It took weeks for me,” Klein said. Not including the drying off, with its stumbling acquisition of a new, fast speech pattern, spookily growing familiarity with alien social ways. The moth crawling damp and twisted from its rejected pupa, cocoon split open to the air, spreading its folded wings.
Faux pas
upon blunder—yet really, all things considered, attaining social mastery with minimal disruption of the deads one moved among, with their waxen skin, now one’s own, and their numb thousand-yard stare.

“Rekindling after first death, which you have passed through, is a complex procedure. Much of the postmortem body and its metabolism must be reinvented, so to speak, and reconstructed. Repair of a dead is far simpler, and drying off is greatly accelerated.”

Doors slid shut behind them, sealed. A positive pressure airlock. More doors. They stripped off their polymer skins, changed back out of scrubs. Klein donned his linen shirt, patterned cravat, seersucker suit, slipped on his self-sealing boots. The Guidefather dressed again in a bold crimson business suit. Like worshipers in a mystery cult, Klein could not help thinking, returning to the desacralized outer world. He frowned. Enough!

“I hope you will tell me now why I have been brought here halfway across the continent to witness this procedure. Sybille Klein is no longer my wife; I have no special interest in her situation.”

“We shall speak further about this in my office. Come.”

An elevator took them up smoothly two floors from the medical basement to the administrative center. The ubiquitous cinderblock and undecorated corridors. A functional dark gray carpet muted their footsteps. Deads passed, nodding to the Guidefather, ignoring Klein. Hakim’s office was nothing like Chair Bik Liu’s at UCLA: it was starkly utilitarian, windowless, with sturdy, cushioned bentwood chairs around a steel-topped desk with embedded equipment. The only break in this Spartan room was a wall-sized display, currently set to deepest tan flecked with craters. After an instant, Klein knew it: human skin. Not quite the African purple-black of his host.

He sat across the table from Hakim, who muttered some command syllables to activate the display. Images began to flash, pause, animate, graph, chart. Klein listened in a dazed state of concentration to the rush of specialist jargon. Antagonistic pleiotropy. NOTCH gene signaling. Secretory pathway organelles in vast, catalogued order. Synthetic telomeres and centromeres to help lengthen lifespan indefinitely. Code adopted from the extremophile bacterium
Deinococcus
radiodurans
, with its fancy redundant genome and resistance to radiation damage, and clues to emulating this process with devices at the molecular scale.
The proliferative potential of stem and progenitor cells restored and amplified. None of it made absolute sense, even under Hakim’s stately tuition, but the words and images flew by, slowly accreted in his mind.

“Yes, yes, Guidefather,” he said finally. “Enough, please. You know my studies are in the humanities, not the sciences. But it seems to me that none of this explains a damned thing. Who developed these techniques? None of the warms seem to know, for all their media gossiping and academic conferences, and nobody here in the Cold Towns is telling. I smell a rat, Dr. Hakim, but for the life of me”—he gave a brief hard smile—“I still can’t conceive the motives of those who invented these miracles, and cool fusion, and a dozen other innovations, and then just—” He broke off, bit his lip. “Nor what you and Imam Sabbāh expect of me. And perhaps of my ex-wife.” He sat back, irritable and frustrated.

Hakim regarded him, imperturbable. He deactivated the display. “I believe Guidefather Sabbāh has inducted you as an Adjutant in the Conclave of the Rekindled. Of the Deads.”

“Yes, Whatever that means. Also an Acolyte, which has a disturbingly religiose ring to it. What are we deads now, the seeds of a cult? Or an army?”

“Neither.” Hakim gave him a dazzling smile, then, and rose. “A fusion of mysticism and science, perhaps. An unexpected emergent from our condition, and its source. More of that later.”

Klein stood up. “You haven’t told me what you want of me. I have no taste for hunting quaggas and dodos and Tyrannosaurus rex in the game parks of Africa, like some. Like Sybille, in fact. I’ve paid my corporate dues, my insurance investment covered all the costs of my rekindling, what else the hell—”

“Why, Jorge,” Jamal Hakim told him, “we expect great things of you.” He took his arm, and led him out of the room. “Certainly, let us stay with the religious terminology you introduced. Yes. Dr. Klein, you are chosen. Consider yourself in the role of a reborn Paul of Tarsus. You have been selected to be our Apostle to the Warms.”

Gog Poll:
Are You Man Enough to be a Dead?

Ya, zinger, zip open your pad and drop some X’s in the Spots X Marks.

Gog how it is this year—can’t nab a nap of wink for the howling dead things creeping about in the dark.

But can’t be bad totally. All that gold, right? And hey, they have a poison stare like you wouldn’t believe.

So—you have the stuff to be a dead? Answer our blood-drenched quizette and check out your score. And if you crave those dead pale or dark thighs—maybe you can be dead, too, and
really
score, gross time.

***

A:
Are your favorite deads

_cold-blood vamps with giant prongs?

_slavering zoms that wanna fuck your brain?

_rotten corpses in the stench of the grave rave?

_Archibald Henrietta Stone, the first dick-swap deader?

B:
Why did the dead chicken cross the road?

_To get to the Other Side?

_So its eggs got sucked by Granny?

_For the Sand Witches there?

_For the road kill chicks?

C:
When did the first dead like come back?

_In 1348, during the Black Death

_In 1900, when Typhoon Mary was the cook

_In 2021, when Archibald Henrietta Stone like came back

_In 29 AD, when Jeezuz jumped off his cross

D:
Are the Cold Towns

_really cold party scenes?

_dens of iniquity that should be torched?

_prisons for the insane?

_dens of monsters that should be blown to shit?

***

Inviting Klein the rekindled into his house with languid gestures that surely failed to disguise his anxiety, Framji Jijibhoi smiled in welcome as his wife Ushtavaity stood demurely in pale rose sari and white kerchief, silent, watchful. His hand did not extend to clasp the dead man’s. Somehow he could not bring himself to touch that pallid skin. Superstition thrummed in him, as always when he stood too near the object of his scholarly investigations, armored in sociological constructs made by default almost entirely at second hand. He knew how he must appear to his former colleague: Yes, he thought, I am a tall nosy intruder from the exoteric world, the neat Zoroastrian sociologist from a teemingly alien city, once Mumbai, again now Bombay under the picturesque resurgent Raj, more than half a world distant—in its ancient blend of living, dying, dead, imaginary reincarnated—from the Cold Towns and their palpably reborn.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Klein said. “The airline schedules these days…” The dead gave an apologetic shrug. Half a head shorter than his host, he had somehow acquired a force, a kind of
mana
, that Jijibhoi found exquisitely disturbing.