Beyond the Doors of Death (11 page)

T
WO

Barn’s burnt down —
now
I can see the moon.

Mizuta Masahide (1657–1723)

***

Sylvie, the young departmental manager, offered Klein a comfortable enough armchair in a nicely appointed anteroom off the large sixth floor Bunche Hall office currently occupied by Professor Bik Liu, Chair of UCLA’s Department of History.
Verboten
to grad students and lesser creatures, this was the parking station, Klein reflected, for Business and First Class academics. Sylvie tapped, offered him coffee and a slice of her chocolate birthday cake, which he declined. She flushed, presumably dreading a
faux pas
, and retreated behind her systems display.

Klein examined the two familiar duck-hunting prints and one rather Lucian Freudish daubing—all grim mustards and murky khakis and shit-browns—of what he supposed was an American tourist couple gazing up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. His lips quirked. The heavy quake-proof door opened, and Bik ushered him into her spacious sanctum, shook his hand with only minimal squeamishness, sat him in a less comfortable chair beside the mandatory wall of old books and journals, antique archival image of itself in an epoch of information storage at the scale of electrons and qubits. Hot afternoon Los Angeles light filtered through the wide solar screened windows. Plainly Bik was flustered, and she was never flustered.

“Jorge, you look well,” she said, and then bit her lip. Gaunt, deliberately gray haired, she was a decade older than Klein, and looked closer to twice that.

“For a dead guy,” Klein said.

Bik colored slightly, a Lucian Freudish color. She ruled her domain with iron and sound judgment, but this was an intrusion from beyond the grave. Klein had to remind himself how few American warms ever met a dead.

“No need to lie about
my
looking well,” she said. “I look like something the
chat
dragged in. Or the
chienne.
”

He watched her eyes. She was a clown, he was a clown, all the world was a pointless pratfall into mud. China had no cats, he recalled, not any longer, even with the cornucopia that had followed upon the cool fusion rollout half a decade ago. Not many dogs, either.

“Well. I dare say you’ve been traveling?” Bik said.

“Yes, visiting the Cold Towns.” Without changing his tone, Klein said, “You want me out, I take it?”

She cleared her throat. “You are more direct than I recall.”

“We are less concerned with the niceties,” he told her, “we deads. I understand you’ve had some difficulties yourself. I hope everything turned out well?” He had done his due diligence; Bik had suffered a serious cardiac attack six months earlier, and now had a new heart. The experience had diminished her.

“Not a big deal, Jorge. Autologous regrowth, no need for a transplant. So I suppose in a way we’ve been through the same wars.”

“Actually, no,” he said. “Not really.”

After a silence, she said carefully, “You understand why I asked you to drop in today. I am regretful for the necessity, but the institutional governance—”

“I have no objection to forced retirement, but I do expect the department to allow me the privileges and status of professor emeritus.”

“That can certainly be arranged. The university board has proposed a new title for rekindled scholars of your standing, Jorge.”

“Yes. Professor mortuus.” He showed his teeth. “I can live with that.”

Again, a faint quiver in her surgically tightened upper eyelids, and a tight smile. “Very good. Do you still drink spirits, Jorge?”

“Of course. We eat, we drink, we sleep, we dream, I’m sure you’ve read the Sunday supplements. Some aspects of life we have put behind us, or are closed to our condition, but fortunately a good whiskey is not one of them.”

Golden fluid caught a ray of light, swirled in the glass she handed him. Bik sipped her own. “You mean to continue your researches?”

“Into the Nazi epoch, the
Konzentrationslager
? Buchenwald, Dachau,
Auschwitz-Birkenau? The millions murdered with no rekindling? No. I’m done with that. But what I am is a professor of contemporary history, Bik, and contemporary history is what has remade me in its likeness. Mortuus.” He tasted the scotch. He might have been drinking turpentine. He put the glass on her desk and rose. “I shall study the deads. In due course, I shall lecture to your students on the topic.”

At the door she took his hand again, and held it loosely. “I’m very pleased that we shan’t lose you entirely, Jorge, and I speak personally as well as for the whole department. Give my love to—” She faltered again, and now her face took on an ashen tint. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But you do still see…” She broke off.

“Sybille? Rarely, Bik. Matthew, chapter 22, verse 30.”

“Understood.” She recited it from memory, as he’d known she would. Bik was not a woman of piety, not even a Christian, but this verse was now inscribed in the shell-shocked consciousness of the world of the warms. The intellectual warms, at least. O my prophetic soul. “‘For when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. In this respect they will be like the angels in heaven.’”

“Just so. Like an angel, Professor. Like an angel.”

***

The young manager was waiting for him as he left the Chair’s office. Her blouse, his sharp eyes noticed, was now unsealed at her sternum, open enough to show off a substantial portion of her golden brown breasts, their deep cleavage. Something avid in her gaze.

“Professor Klein—” she began, broke off. “I took your course on the rise of the Third Reich, five years ago. You won’t remember.”

He didn’t. He regarded her coolly. She was breathing faster. Not fear of
faux pas
, then, as he’d supposed earlier, but some sort of perverse appetite?

“Of course I remember you. Sylvie, isn’t it?”

She smiled, still nervous, but there was a bold amusement in her gaze. “I thought you were wonderful. I always had a…well, a crush. And then I heard you’d been rekindled.” She turned away from him, looking back over her shoulder, checking the Chair’s closed door, and back to Klein. “Have you ever played the President and the Temptress? Everyone’s watching the series on stereo.” And to Jorge Klein’s astonishment, she leaned across her desk, took the hem of her skirt in both hands, and flipped it up. Her buttocks were round and smooth, divided by a startlingly crimson thong. Sylvie let the skirt fall, turning, and took up something long and leaf-brown from the desk. She proffered it. “We could go to Andrew Sinclair’s office, he’s away at the Aung San Suu Kyi colloquium.”

No faintest stirring in his prick, no tightening of his balls. He looked back at her dispassionately, with just a touch of amusement. Slick Willy and Monica, eh? The uses of history.

“I’m sorry, Sylvie,” he said.

She flushed again, licked her mouth, shook her head.

“I’m sorry, too, Professor Klein. I misunderstood. Please don’t tell—”

“My lips,” he said, “are sealed.”

“Oh my god, I’ve made such a fool of myself.”

“Not your fault, mine entirely. We are wondrously changed, we deads, and not always in a good way. Anyway, take your consolation from what old father Freud taught us.”

Her flush had receded. She put the panatela back on the desk.

“Superego
uber alles
?”

“That too,” he said, amused. “No, Sigmund offered a more specific and relevant piece of advice. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

The lovely young woman laughed loudly, and as she saw him out to the corridor pressed his hand. He felt nothing, nothing, nothing.

T
HREE

There is no other God beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal.

Deuteronomy. 32:39

***

De damnandis blaspheme redanimatisque

Papal Bull on the Condemnation and Excommunication of all blasphemous Heretics, known as the Conclave of the Rekindled, January 3, 2031.

Preamble

Of the damnable and blasphemously revivified, we proclaim our Condemnation.

Through the power given him from God, the Roman Pontiff has been appointed to administer spiritual and temporal punishments as each case severally deserves. The purpose of this is the repression of the wicked designs of misguided men, who have been so captivated by the debased impulse of their evil purposes as to forget the fear of the Lord, to set aside with contempt canonical decrees and apostolic commandments, and to dare to formulate new and false dogmas of sacred life and death, and to introduce the evil of “rebirth” after physical death—or to support, help and adhere to such lost souls, who make it their business to cleave asunder the seamless robe of our Redeemer and the unity of the orthodox faith. Hence it befits the Pontiff, lest the vessel of Peter appear to sail without pilot or oarsman, to take severe measures against such men and their followers, and by multiplying punitive measures and by other suitable remedies to see to it that these same overbearing men, devoted as they are to purposes of evil, along with their adherents, should not deceive the multitude of the simple by their lies and their deceitful devices, nor drag them along to share their own error and ruination, contaminating them with what amounts to a contagious disease, one far more terrible than death itself. It also befits the Pontiff, having condemned the “rekindled,” to ensure their still greater confounding by publicly showing and openly declaring to all faithful Christians how formidable are the censures and punishments to which such guilt can lead; to the end that by such public declaration they themselves may return, in confusion and remorse, to their true deaths, making an unqualified withdrawal from the prohibited abomination; by this means they may escape divine vengeance and any degree of participation in their eternal damnation.

Fatwa against the so-called “Rekindled”

The revival of dead human beings, in a mockery of Allah’s gift of life to the faithful, is against Islam, against the Prophet of Islam, and against the Koran. All those, alive and dead, who assist in this wicked endeavor, are condemned to capital punishment. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to execute this sentence without delay, so that no one henceforth will dare insult and contravene the sacred teachings of the Prophet.

***

Concussion slapped Sybille awake. She stared in the darkness of the windowless room. The lighted clock display had gone black. No whisper of air-conditioning. A rushing, as of a great wind, and crackling roars, gusts, bangs. Voices cried out. Her chest hurt. Smoke. Another immense crash. High pitched bleating, on and on. My god, she thought. Zion Cold Town is on fire.

“Get on the floor,” she said in two sharp syllables. Rolling across the wide bed, she found Kent Zacharias. He lay unmoving. The long-dead were hard to wake, she had noticed that more than once. Groping in the darkness, she found his face, his nose, grasped it hard and twisted. Like a drowning man surfacing, Zacharias snorted and gasped.

“Sybille. Are we under attack?”

A stench of burning plastic-coated wiring, paint, probably clothing and furniture, other flammable stuff choked her throat.

“Out,” she said. “Come on.”

At the door, she banged her bare hip on the door knob. She pressed the back of her hand to the wood. It was distinctly warm, but not yet hot. Perhaps the fire was contained in the north wing, where public access was easier and the tall plate-glass windows would shatter in the boiling gases of a bomb. Smoke was the immediate hazard, poisonous and blinding. She opened the door a crack. Zacharias bumped her from behind, a large blundering animal.

“Don’t open the damned door,” he said, voice rasping.

“I have to, Kent,” she told him. “We’ll roast alive if we stay here.” She flung it wide. Smoke poured in from the corridor, and a red and white glare danced in it. The floor was hot. “Put your shoes on,” she said, and ran back bare-soled to her side of the bed and found her slippers. Naked, then, she returned to the corridor and turned left. Someone had a flashlight, and called, “This way.” Other people were emerging from their rooms, moving in both directions, stumbling into each other.

Sybille raised her voice above the racket of the fire alarms. “Head for the back stairs. Down, not up.” The milling took on an abrupt sense of purpose. “Has anyone called 911?”

“Not answering.” A man’s gruff tones. “Signal’s jammed, or they’re overloaded.”

The stairwell door opened into emergency lights in a haze of smog. The lights immediately flickered and went out.

“Shit,” someone said. “Listen up, people. Stay as low as you can. Crawl on your hands and knees if you have to. Try not to breathe this filthy stuff.”

Like a procession of pilgrims in the dark night of the soul, they crawled and bumped and squirmed down the stairs, sweat pouring from their changed flesh, no more adroit or invulnerable under this threat of final death, Sybille thought madly, than any living creature fleeing in a forest fire. Crackling and crashing. The emergency door opened into cooler night, desert air. She fell through it. The flashlight was casting about, sweeping across the smeared, blackened faces of the dead. In the distance, another explosion slapped the air. The cinderblock walls remained untouched. Sybille thought: Is this why the architects chose these unpromising materials? She had supposed it was a statement against the vanity of the warms.
I have looked into the abyss
, the walls of the Cold Towns said bleakly,
and the abyss has looked back
. Well, this time the abyss had done a serviceable job. But next time we’d better find an improved method of lighting the damned place during assault.

Zacharias found her. To her astonishment, in the dimness, he wore a fire-retardant sheet like a silvery burqa. Where had he found that? Where had he managed to find the time to look for it? He took it off, gallant as Lord Raleigh and, hairy and naked, wrapped it around her own nakedness. It was cold and clammy.

“We can escape into the woods and then the desert,” he said in her ear, “or go to the front and see what we can do to help.”

“This place is ours,” she said fiercely, hugging herself, starting to tremor. “Those sons of bitches—” The screams had subsided, but people were weeping. We dead spill our tears, she thought, even if our blood is thick with small machines. She heard no further sounds of explosions, but the rasping noise of flames grew louder by the moment.

“The fire will put itself out,” Zacharias said. “There’s really not that much to burn.” He paused. “Your cassettes. Are they tucked away in a secure safe?”

“I think so,” she told him. “Maybe one still in the machine. God
damn
it, where am I going to find another cassette player?” More than a decade earlier, the university had scoured the net markets for weeks before they turned up an antique Sony sound cassette player so she could transcribe the priceless, irreplaceable ethnographic interviews from Zanzibar. And now that machine was probably warped and melted, along with one of the tapes, charred into meaninglessness. Well, she thought. All right. This is the condition of the deads. Let the dead bury their dead. She shook her head, then, in self-rebuke. No. That was the apologist cant of those who yearned for death, proclaimed its virtue and necessity—the kinds of fools and bigots who had done this terrible thing.

“The fatwa,” Zacharias said, echoing her thoughts. “Or that Bull of Pope Sixtus VII. The denunciations from the Russian Orthodox prelates. We were right to withdraw from them. We should cut off their cool fusion generators. Damn them to the Fifth Circle of Hell.”

They had reached the front drive and forecourt of the building, and searchlights were blooming like flowers of cold fire, reflecting from the blurred crimson fire trucks that had finally arrived. Hard streams of water fell through the smoke, spitting in the gaping ruin of the building’s entranceway. Amid the haze and hot sparks she saw another display of sparks, darting, purposeful, a swarm of stereo drones. From Zion’s own media center, she suspected, or maybe Vox News was already on the scene. And yes, all the windows were shattered and gone, and the tall steel main doors lay buckled and useless. Bodies were being borne out on floating stretchers, ready for the retrieval ambulances. Perhaps they could be saved. The deads, Sybille told herself grimly, are hard to kill. She walked forward into the ruin, in her silver mortuary robe like the white-wrapped figure from Arnold Böcklin’s painting
Die Toteninsel
, drifting across dark water to the embrace of the Isle of the Dead, and felt almost nothing but brief surprise when the whole tall wall, tormented by flame, explosive shock, and the pounding of the hose, fell upon her, sundering her spine in a burst of agony, smashing her legs and hips. The drones, the media flies and bees, surrounded her, hungrily, like tiny metallic and crystal carrion eaters. For a second time Sybille Klein died.

***

The phone implant buzzed against the back of his ear, waking Klein instantly. “What time is it?”

“4:32 a.m., Professor Klein, September 29, 2037,” the machine said. “You have two urgent calls.”

“From?”

“One is from your Guidefather, Dr. Hassan Sabbāh. The other is from your sister, Hester Solom—”

“Hester?” he said, in disbelief. “At four in the morning?”

“She is in London. Do you wish to take her call?”

“Very well. Put her through. If the call takes longer than two minutes, place her on hold and let me speak to the Imam.”

“I have your brother now, Mrs. Solomon.”

“Jorge?” The woman’s voice, so like his mother’s, was frantic.

“What’s the matter, Hester? Is it father?”

“What? No, no, we’re all fine. Not that you’d care.” The inevitable touch of bitterness. He’d scarcely seen any of them since his marriage, not even during the bereavement service for his dead wife. “Look, turn on your stereo. Vox News.”

“I never watch that crap.” He threw his legs over the sides of the bed, felt around in the dim light of the utilities for his slippers. “What is it? The Second Coming of Jesus?”

“Just turn the goddamned thing on.”

The stereopsis TV frame deepened as he spoke the command, and switched directly to a scene of smoke, white-hot fire, shouting men in protective suits and helmets, contained chaos. A Cold Town, evidently. Yes, a bright blue line of text ran across the depth display like a message from the impalpable Hand of Yahweh.
Bombing at Zion Cold Town. Seven deads defuncted at least 13 badly damaged.

His pulse increased a fraction, and he was aware of a pulsing in his temples. The New Man has not entirely displaced the Old Man, he thought.

“Do you see her?” Hester was wailing. “Did you see Sybille?”

Images cascaded, jump cuts, paired hologramic bugs seeking the most striking and disturbing pictures. Yes, there she was, crushed under a fall of broken cinderblock. In the tank, her face loomed. Still the same pale, beautiful Michelangelo marble as the moment she’d died the first time, despite the streaks of grime. A revival team was struggling with the hill of broken masonry. In the background, flames were abating, driven back by the foam and water. The image cut away, and again, and again. His accelerated rekindled thoughts slowed into a sort of paralysis. Not so
over her
after all, part of his consciousness observed sardonically. A world without meaning meant, surely, that a doubled death of a woman once loved ardently, desperately, obsessionally was without meaning. But no. Not quite. Not at all, in fact.

This is an aberration, he told himself. I will recover my poise in a moment. Besides, the black cryo van is pulling up now, I imagine, and they will have her ruined body in the repair shop within minutes. She’s right there in the very heart of a major Cold Town, he thought. No better location if someone’s going to kill you.

“Dr. Klein,” said a deep voice, barely accented.

Hassan Sabbāh. “Yes, Guidefather,” Klein said. “My sister just called to tell me that Sybille—”

“She will be rekindled,” Sabbāh told him patiently. “In fact, this is why I am calling you. We have decided to advance your position with the Conclave. There are aspects of the revivified you must witness, if you are to act as our speaker among the living.”

“Your speak—”

“Get dressed in warm clothes and meet me in the quad. We have a fusion aircraft on standby. You will be with your ex-wife within two hours.” He broke contact. Hester’s voice came back, high pitched, aghast. Perhaps she had not even noticed his absence.

“I have to go, dear sister,” he told her. “They are flying me to Utah. I’ll catch up with you and the parents as soon as I can.” He heard a gasp. “I know,” he said with an edge in his voice, “‘What do you have to
do
around here to get some attention,
die
or something?’ Apparently so. Good night.”