Beyond the Doors of Death (18 page)

“Your sister Hester and my dad were in Israel, in Tel-Aviv, when Jerusalem and much more was destroyed from space. Gone, gone, with millions of Jews.”

“And how many Arabs? A million? Are they at each other’s throats? Or does everyone blame the deads?”

“All the possible wars, I told you. Yes, the dead are blamed by the intelligentsia, because you are the masters of advanced technology. Only your fusion systems could have mobilized asteroids and hurled them at the Earth like David’s rock from a sling. But the great masses curse their favorite enemies and heretics, and martyrs’ blood is shed on all sides. As was planned, I am certain of it.” Solomon sat down again, wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Sybille Klein has been deaccessioned. I did a search before I came down here. I knew you’d want to know. The others, no, their names are not familiar. I imagine they, too, are gone. That’s why we’ve chosen to save you and the rest, Jorge. You are an endangered species, you deads. An experiment that was…cut short. Well, not if we can help it. I must warn you, you’ll be placed back in suspension when we get to our destination.”

What? What? Instant understanding, then. The lightness against his muscles, the tremor at the edge of detection in the floor.

“We’re in space.”

“Yes, I thought you’d been told.”

“Where?”

“Halfway to Mars, at point nine gees. One more day. Then we will put you in protective custody. Biostasis is a lot safer. You’ll complete your sentence. The future might revile you, but they might find some reason for retaining you.”

“No release program, then. No generous reconciliation with the warm Master Race.”

Eliezer Solomon, soldier, went to the door. His face was a cold mask.

“
You
are the Master Race, Jorge. You rekindled. And it looks as if you’ve met the usual fate of Masters.” He said with finality, “I’ll never see you again. Goodbye.”

Klein lowered his eyes. All of them dead, then, deader than dead. Deaccessioned! Filthy, banal euphemism. Or smashed like vermin. Suddenly he felt very tired and tremendously hungry. “Yes, goodbye, Eli.” But when he raised his head his nephew was gone, and the orderly was back, fussing.

***

Was this memory? Was it dream? Drowning Klein fought for consciousness, air, sanity—

Stench of human suffering, of his own decaying flesh. Shivering, filthy, Klein shuffled into the moon-lit darkness from the hateful wooden barracks he shared with a dozen other men, not all of them Jews. Three in the morning again. Nothing to drink for an hour, then that disgusting bitter coffee, all he’d get for five o’clock breakfast. Hours of crippling labor hauling rocks and manure before lunch, weak soup, hardly enough to make you crap. A young Schutzstaffel officer with the detestable lightning runes on the collar of his neat, clean uniform, shouting at some wretched miscreant. From a barracks separate from the Jews, a swaggering “camp elder” came to deliver suitable punishment. The Jews cringed away from him; Klein cowered, tried to hide from the criminal’s gaze. A rapist and murderer, Heinz Klausner was head Capo, boss of the scum “barracks police.” Klein failed to evade the man’s eyes. The prick came striding over in his new green trousers, his tall leather boots catching the pale light of the moon, seized Klein by his own ragged collar. “Slacking again, you creature,” he shouted. They had a miraculous power to find ire within themselves, for their own satisfaction and the enjoyment of the watching SS thugs. He slapped Klein hard, yelling abuse. Nobody came to his aid. Klein fell, was hauled up. The SS officer stepped forward. “Here, men, we have a good ‘boxing sack.’ Time to sharpen your fighting skills.” Piss ran down Klein’s legs. Let me go, Lord, he prayed. Let me die now. Poor Chaim Shustack, burliest and strongest of the remaining Jewish prisoners, was pulled forward. “Hold the creature up, you vermin.” I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Chaim’s eyes told him. Here came Klausner’s boot, swung smashingly into his left knee. He sagged, fell forward. Shustack heaved at his right arm, kept him from falling. Another SS thug found a heavy stick, struck him in the mouth. His teeth splintered. Agony. More kicks. His balls! Cramping in his abdomen, muscles rigid. He could not breathe. Give me death, give me death.

This time he awoke instantly.

The pseudo-memory of his post-biostasis dream clung like a rancid film.

Oh. Oh. Oh.

Gasping, he surged up, flung himself from the catafalque. Hands of attendants reached in alarm to prevent him from falling, but Klein was on his hands and knees, staring wildly, seeking a place to hide. His broken mouth! His ribs! His brutalized balls! Crawling from the light, cowering beneath the floating catafalque, he covered his head, touched his tender mouth. His teeth were intact. Wait, wait. No aching in his balls, no contusions or fractures. Why would they impose this horror upon him? He crept out into the large green room, watched by two women and a man. They seemed concerned. Yes, yes, a fantasy, that was all. Something he’d imposed upon himself, no doubt. His specialty study, after all, corroding the depths of his unconscious, the Nazi era of the twentieth. Or some residual guilt. For what? It had not been he who bombed those so-called holy places, smashing them from space.

But that must have happened decades ago. He was…on…Mars? No, the gravity was wrong. Earthlike. Exactly Earthlike. Seeking some scrap of dignity, he got to his feet.

“Dead sir,” said an attendant, “du need not fear us.”

“No,” he said. They were warms, but something had changed in them, some change deep and strange. He covered his face for a moment of consolidation. No beard. They had shaved him, depilated him. Patting, probing, he found a fine thick bush of hair on his scalp, hanging down his neck, like the very non-military coiffure of the male attendant. “All right. Very well. Where is this place? What is the date?”

“Many passed by. No know exactamund. Where is your departure date? What jahr?”

Klein stared. “How could you not know? I was in a machine, a biostasis chamber, they called it. Isn’t there a…a calendar? A data display? A small rectangle with changing numbers in red light or something?”

“So sorry, Meister Dead. No access to biostationary records, all lost in the Disruption.”

The Smash-Up, yes. All the possible wars. Klein groaned. The stupidity of it all. He could not believe it had been occasioned solely by resentment of the rekindling process, envy for what its beneficiaries had created. Who was to say that the deads were not a scapegoat after all? Yet surely the power source required to shunt whole asteroids from orbit and target them at select sites on Earth—that had to be the technology of the Conclave, or some heretical splinter group. He groaned again.

“You must have some idea. Decades? Centuries?”

“Hundreds jahren, certes.” The others nodded their speculative agreement. “Two hundred. Three.” A hand wave.

Klein sank into a gray place.

The woman with streaks in her dark cropped hair was asking him meaningless questions. “Which was your god? Scuzi, that is your gog. And magog.”

“No god, no gog,” he said bleakly. “Magog, for sure. He tore up the world, last time I was there.”

They did not grasp his allusion, shrugged at each other. “Your name, good being? Some records remain, we might find more on your interrupted life course.”

“Call me Ishi,” he said bitterly.

“Ah!” The man was delighted. “Old remnant document. ‘Call me Ishmael.’”

“Close, but no biscuit,” Klein said. That dreadful dream. It could have been his grandfather’s life and pitiless death, except that his family had escaped the iron heel in time. “Ishi was the last member of the Yahi, and they were the last surviving sept of the Californian Yana people. Back at the start of the twentieth. Taken in hand by Kroeber and Waterman. You don’t want to know about this.”

“A jest, a pun, a play of nominalism! Most delightful!” This second young woman was a vivid redhead, curls piled up on curls. Her body was succulent, clad in bright chrome-yellow. Looking at her, he felt nothing.

“And what am I to call you people?”

The man smiled sunnily. “I, Jesus.” Hay-Zeus. The dark haired woman said, “I, Mary.” With the cutest little bow, the girl, the young woman, told him, “I, Joseph.”

Klein burst out laughing. “You’re shitting me.”

“Assuredly not, sir. We adopt these nominations from your mystery book, to render du the more at ease.”

“It hasn’t worked. For one thing, Joseph is a man’s name.”

The redhead cocked her head like a puzzled Pomeranian. “Names have no gender, sire. But we still await your true nomenclature.”

“Jorge Klein,” he said. “Klein is my surname.”

“Ah, so! Sir Klein!”

“No, no, just Klein. Never mind.” These ninnies were as much fun as a barrel of eels. “And you, you’re what we termed warms, back in my day. Whenever that was.”

“Not especially close to identical,” the man told him. “We have the augments, as do all. All but the deads, of whom there are, du know, hardly no more no more. Du are our precious, however contemptible.”

Rekindling, they explained, was now seen as a frightful horror, worse than foot-binding or genital mutilation, worse even than lobotomy.

“They gave some man a Nobel prize for inventing lobotomy, you know,” Klein said, mouth twisted. “Or probably you don’t.”

“It is noway noble to cut open a head or poke through the eye, ruining the tissues. There was awards for this barbarity?”

“Only the one,” Klein reassured him. “I believe it was revoked.”

“Du have one of these Noble Prizes?”

“I could have been a contender,” Klein said.

“But it was done to du, speaking in the manner of a synecdoche. Or mayhap a metonymy.”

Chill through his dead flesh. “What? What?” Without intention, his hands again went at once to his head, probing, pressing his eyes and the sockets holding them. “You’re lying.”

“For no reason would we, sir Ishi. Du are a dead. Du suffered the notorious ‘drying out’ following your revival.”

“Yes. We all did. Part of the procedure. It’s a metaphor. Quite possibly it’s a synecdoche, or mayhap a metonymy. Moths and butterflies. Do you have them now? Have all the beasts been exterminated on Earth? They creep from their pupas and cocoons, altogether changed, wet with the slime of transformation. They dry out. Simile with us.” His tongue caught. He realized that despite his long, long sleep (how long? How long?), he was exhausted. Carefully, he said, “I mean similarly.”

“No, no, for what precedes drying? Why, washing. The washing of the brain. Du was programmed like an old clanker robot, sir.”

“What? Nonsense.” Oh Christ. Oh my god.

“Yes, du see, your language menus reset from without. How to fast dead talk. Prohibitions on sexuality. No children. Too large a population otherwise. Very slick. Now we all do that fast talk, du might have noticed, but with our optional implants. Us warms are enhanced, see it?”

It crushed his spirit. For these years since his rekindling, meaninglessness had been his companion, but this was intolerable, unsustainable. He sagged, and the bright woman caught him under the right arm. He flinched away (the Capo! The Jew-killer!), then let her ease him back on his catafalque. The world, the worlds, had shrunk to a series of small clean well-lighted hospital recovery rooms. So he was not just dead, he was an automaton. Pre-programmed for the long empty life of a dead. Drowning again, this time awake. He sought for something to cling to.

“But the war is over?” he said, and heard an unaccustomed plaintive note in his voice. “The warms and the dead are at peace once more?”

All three laughed. “Oh, no no,” Jesus said “By no means, Mr. Ishi. Mr. Klein. Such enmity is not so easily quelled.” The man took up his hand. “But we have great hopes for du, sir. We ask du to intervene with the voices from Andromeda nebula.” He blinked. “Scuzi, galaxy.”

But Klein was not listening. A child. He was not sterile, then. Not impotent. Not a sexless thing. Or if he was, it was a constraint imposed upon him by the Guidefathers and the sons of bitches running the Conclave. He might break free. He might father a daughter, or a son. If the beings from Andromeda permitted it. For surely they were the puppet masters. Whoever they were. Whatever. He whirled in gray interior space, groped for meaning, for sense, for purpose.

“Voices,” he said, then. “What voices? How could we understand aliens?” It had always been the sticking point. Claims of cyphering, hypercomputers, Gödel coding—none of it was ultimately persuasive.
Eppur si muove
. And yet it moves. We have the technology.

“Not all alien,” said Joseph. “Some of them are human voices, pojąć? From the future.”

And theatrically, operatically, a tremendous gonging strikes the air, slams the floor. Those fantastical images of bombardment and carnage flare again in Klein’s mind. His daughter Tree.

“We’re under attack,” Mary said, and the three warms went into a huddle. No doubt bolts of energy pulsed between their brains, their rewired neurons, and every other warm in the building. Another immense shock flung them off their feet. The three rolled like circus acrobats, were on their toes in moments. Klein lay where he had fallen, rubbing his bruised elbow.

“Where are we?” he said with what he considered admirable restraint. “And who’s trying to kill us?”