Beyond the Doors of Death (16 page)

“Please step to one side, sir.” The passport remained in the man’s hand.

Klein was led to a formidable apparatus. Two beefy, armed Homeland Security officers in gorgeous braid directed him into its maw.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, I can’t do that. I will certainly submit to a physical examination, if that is requested.”

“You refuse to obey a lawful and proper instruction given you by duly authorized officials?”

“Not at all. But you must know that a gamma scan, however brief, will risk doing irreparable damage to the very delicate medical equipment inside my body. I’m just asking for the same consideration you routinely extend to travelers with pacemakers or brain implants.”

They stared at him with a peculiar intense detestation, but allowed him to pass into an ancillary screened compartment, where he was searched in every crevice, roughly. I’d be passing blood for a week, he thought, if I still had that sort of blood.

No further obstacles were placed in his path, but the contents of his luggage, when he checked them in the large odorous men’s room, were more jumbled than usual. There’d been nothing illegal or incriminating there, of course, not even the well-wrapped head of a dodo or a monkey’s paw. This is intimidation, he realized, pure and simple.

So it had started. Started in earnest, he thought with a spurt of fear, and they will probably haul me away in the middle of the night and lock me up in a dark, foul place. His renovated flesh grew clammy. Pushing through the crowd toward a cab rank, solitary dead in a sea of the quick, he knew that he was scared, really frightened, for the first time in his life. His reborn life.
Nada y pues nada nada nada y pues nada.

S
EVEN

History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.

Johan Huizinga,
In the Shadow of Tomorrow

***

Three large men in dark business suits stood outside his door in the history department. Clearly they had been tracking his movements, waiting until he returned to the West coast and, more recently, left the protective confines of the Cold Towns.

“Office of Mortuary Affairs,” the foremost of the hard-faced Federal officers said, and showed ID that could have been for the city dogcatcher
.
Klein did not doubt the man’s credentials for a moment. The other two loomed behind him, ready to intercept and immobilize Klein if he made a reckless dash for the elevator. “I’m Mr. Jacoby, sir. You will come with us. If you require the services of an attorney, you will have the opportunity to call one when you are in our custody.”

Everything in his heritage rebelled against acquiescence in this warrantless arrest. He would be disappeared, like the tens of thousands in Argentina. Or flung into a concentration camp or some stinking Gulag like his ancestral Jews. But no, he told himself, struggling to retain control of his fear and anger. These goons held no grudge against his ethnicity or supposed religious affiliation. They didn’t care that he was a Jew, or even that he was an intellectual, although that was probably enough to have them curling their lips. No, he was a dead. That was enough. The new Secret Enemy in the belly of America, the Fifth Column for who knew what abominations. He was himself an abomination. His very being did dirt on life. He was a
refusnik
against the due punishment prescribed to mankind by pitiless Laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, so his refusal to remain dead was a blend of dirty joke and grotesque, outrageous treason to his species. Worse still, he thought with dizzy suppressed amusement, he hadn’t paid his taxes. Death and taxes: yes, these were only the scourge of the living. Those laws would change. Perhaps they already had.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the
Federale
said with flat menace. “Turn around. Face the wall. Assume the position.”

“Position? What position?”

“Shut up, smartass. I won’t tell you twice. Assume the position.”

“I assume this position is something criminals know about. Not I, gentlemen. I can give you a quick lecture on the tactics of the Gestapo in the 1940s, if you like.”

Strong fingers gripped him behind the left ear, dug in sharply. Excruciating pain, unbelievable. He thought he would faint. Probably not a mark on his flesh, he thought, stunned by the immediacy of this retribution. His arms were taken easily, crossed behind him, locked together. Klein was frogmarched into the corridor. He thought of screaming his lungs out, but there was no point. Dignity, he decided. Poise. A stately self-presence as he is taken to the tumbrel, the axe, the madhouse, the slaughterhouse.

Sylvie came out of her office, stared aghast.

“Please call that number I left with you and let them know. Tell them it’s Mortuary Affairs,” Klein said. Hard fingertips pressed again on the nerve plexus at his neck. Pain fired through him. He forced himself to add, gasping, “Let Professor Liu know that I won’t be able to meet her for luncheon. Something’s come up.”

“Oh Jesus Christ Almighty fuck,” cried the departmental manager, and ran back inside her office.

***

Jacoby walked at his side as he was taken from the cell. Klein had been confined for six days, stripped of his clothing and obliged to wear coarse orange prison garb, kept in isolation with no contact permitted with the outside world, personal or electronic. No TV or books, no computer, no writing materials. The lighting flickered irritably, surely by design, and a high-pitched whine made his teeth ache when he noticed it. He had decoupled from his situation, sunk in lethargy. Now he forced himself to pay attention, to deal with the urgencies of the living world.

“Am I going to be arraigned, Mr. Jacoby? If so, on what charge?”

Silence, other than the clack of the man’s hard-heeled shoes on the concrete floor. Hushed slithering of Klein’s slippers.

“I want to speak to a lawyer,” he said, as he said every time a guard brought him a tray of barely edible food. “I have a constitutional right—”

Jacoby broke his silence. “You have no rights, Mr. Klein. You are a deceased person. I seriously suggest that you keep your mouth shut and respond only to questions put to you.”

They entered a brightly lit room guarded by a stoical uniformed soldier with no obvious firearm but holding a sturdy baton, a fat LED Incapacitator at his belt. Seven seated men, no women, all warms, watched as Klein was pushed into a metal chair and his left wrist cuffed to a bolt. Jacoby said, “Gentlemen, this dead is Mr. Jorge Klein, a professor in the history department at UCLA, and an agent of the so-called Conclave of the Cold Towns.”

“Professor mortuus,” Klein said, “let us be accurate. And an agent of nothing but myself.”

Astonishingly, Jacoby struck him hard across the face. “Quiet. You have been warned, Mr. Klein. You have no standing before this Board of Inquiry.”

Robespierre, he thought. Yet again.
Terror is only justice that is prompt, severe and inflexible.
He moved his jaw. Not broken. In a loud clear voice he said, “Is one of these people my lawyer?”

Before Jacoby could hit him again, a burly fellow rose and came forward. “This is not a court of law, Mr. Klein, nor shall you have representation. You are here to answer our questions. It is the opinion of the Office of Mortuary Affairs that the rekindled have forfeited their legal status as citizens and indeed as human beings. Even as we speak, the Supreme Court—”

“Let us stay with the point, Colonel,” said an older man at the back of the room.

“Quite right, General. The creature here is owed no explanations. Very well. Klein, you have visited sixteen of the Cold Towns in the last year, as well as traveling in the United Kingdom and Africa. In Tanzania, you engaged in furtive colloquy with your former wife, Sybille Klein, and her—”

“Sy
bille
,” Klein said. “Not
Syb
ille. Already you’re in danger of getting an ‘F’ for your report.”

The burly man bared his yellow teeth. “In the mood for some quips, are we? That won’t last long.” He stroked a control panel on his wrist, and a large display opened on the wall at his left. The other men turned slightly to look at its tree diagram: names, locations of the Cold Towns scattered across the United States, estimates of untaxed net worth, links to the technological products flowing from the automatic factories of the deads. The figures for the fusion generators stood in a box at one side, impressive in both numbers of units and profits flowing from their lease. Klein’s gaze moved steadily across the data as the man spoke, drawing out the connections. Links hinted at the torrents of information pouring in from the deep space telescopes, but it was apparent to Klein that these Jacobins had so far failed to unlock the source of the deads’ accomplishments. He forced calm upon himself. This, it came to him in an instant of epiphany, was why he was here. It was the culmination of his program of highly visible advocacy. And he knew with cold clarity that he would be expunged the moment he had told them what they wished to learn. Well. He had been dead. He would be dead again. The entire cosmos was a long Death March toward obliteration.

A flunky had come forward, pushing a trolley laden with wireless instruments. Several hypodermics gleamed beside fat ampoules. He was deftly wired with contact points. All of this could be handled with microscopic probes, he thought, frightened but amused by the blatant theatrics. A line of colored tracer reports appeared across the top of the display.

“I screwed your fat Momma just now,” he volunteered. A bright crimson bar lit up. “Just kidding,” he added, and the bar switched to a yellowish-green.

“Not another word,” Jacoby said in his ear, with menace.

“But I have so much to tell these gentlemen,” Klein said airily. He entered a state of indifference and clarity. No doubt subtle synaptic changes dictated by his rekindled condition. “We have nothing to hide, after all. You just had to ask.” The bar of light settled into a cheerful leafy green.

He unreeled it for them, the secret history. Klein knew himself to be an authority only on events and horrors a century gone, no expert at all in technology or the arcane of the sciences, but he knew how to tell a story, to hold captive a restive audience of teenaged students lacking interests in any topic beyond keg parties, good mood pills, sport, murderous stereo immersion games, and sex, sex, sex. He called upon these skills effortlessly, and for the most part held his captors spellbound, despite grumbles and occasional shouts of “Bull
shit!
”

Here is the last of the great NASA programs before the Grim Reset devaluation of the globe’s currency slashed away 99 percent of each dollar: the skein of lensed cubesats flung out above the ecliptic to catch light a million, a billion, thirteen billion years old. Heroic and abandoned, processing the noise of deep space, reorienting its autonomic gaze like a star puppy hunting quail. The faint signal—not from a nearby star like the red dwarf Gliese 876 or HD 28185 or Upsilon Andromedae A, whose giant worlds in the habitable zone might hold Earthlike moons, but an unknown world in the nearby galaxy Andromeda, two million lightyears distant. The pulse, the stream, the beat of not just life but intelligence—consciousness! Minds impossibly old, by human standards—sending out their messages from a history more ancient now, if they survived, than the earlier upright ancestor of
Homo sapiens
. And tracked now not by a government, not by a consortium of politically funded academics, but by fanboy and fangirl billionaires, high-technology mavens, hundreds of millions each even after the Reset. Canny dreamers whose disciplines were, as if by magic or cosmic design, precisely fitted to unlocking the intelligible mysteries coded into the signal from Andromeda: coders and decoders, cypherpunks, cold-fusion fans, immensely rich game builders, Übergeeks, do-it-yourself connectomists looking for the tricks of enhancement and immortality that random mutations had never found.

A storm of angry incredulity broke finally over his head.

“Impossible! Maybe there’s a signal, but nobody could decode that torrent so quickly.”

“And if they did, what would they get? The
Weltbild
of silicon blobs! Not even that—no Rosetta Stone!”

“Right. What kind of ethnocentric wet-dream is this?”

Klein waited until they calmed down. “Look at me,” he said. “Do I look like the product of any previous human science?”

“You look like something out of the nightmares of mankind,” one of them cried in an agonized tone. “You look like a fucking vampire!”

Well. For the moment he had lost the argument. But he had planted a seed. They would water it with their own spleen and the enriched blood of his fellow deads, almost certainly his own blood, and that of Mi-Yun, Francine, Tom, the Guidefathers across the country, sure to be seized at gun and gas and bomb-point and incarcerated, probably murdered. Sybille, and her dilettante crew. Poor damned Dolorosa, wherever he was scurrying these days. But the enemy could not win. The warms could not win this war they were unleashing on the deads. Klein swore that to himself.

“Take this creature back to his cell,” the Mortuary Affairs chieftain said. “We have work to do, gentlemen.”

***

He was charged with no crime. No attorney ever heard from him. His family, he supposed, were informed of his accidental death, perhaps on the Kilimanjaro climb. People wept, no doubt, or shrugged. He sat on the hard bed and thought of the child he might have fathered after all with Sybille, the placid life they might have shared had she not perished from idiopathic pulmonary hypertension, had he not pestered her after her rekindling like a love-poisoned swain, and been poisoned himself in turn, fatally, by her bored crew. But he had been brought back, remade, a kind of metaphysical Philoctetes bearing the stench of his change, his rekindling, into the appalled and furious nostrils of his parent species. Days passed. Weeks passed. Months. It was a nothingness fit for a dead man.

In late February, he was taken to a place of execration, where an experimental biostasis unit awaited him. Work stolen from the deads, without doubt. His clothes were stripped from his waxy flesh. Instruments pierced his body. Not Philoctetes now but Saint Sebastian.

“Tell me what’s happened to my colleagues? My friends? Have the Cold Towns been destroyed?”

“Hold your tongue.”

An official of the Office came forward.

“You are an enemy of the State, and more crucially of the entire species of Humankind. You willfully hid knowledge that might have advanced the men and women of your nation by thousands of years. Fortunately for you, we are not a vengeful people. This is a Christian nation. Your sentence is extreme rendition, not death but exile. Jorge Amadeus Kline, you are to be exiled into the future for a period of decontamination not less than one century in duration. May God have mercy on what passes for your soul.”