Beyond the Doors of Death (19 page)

They looked at him fishily. “Approaching the Andromeda vinculum mouth, du did not dig this? The precise location for your undertaking. To speak for all, as a relict of the
evenements
.”

Klein closed his eyes. He felt very old and useless.

“So I’m still on a spaceship. An attack ship under fire off the shoulder of Orion, I suppose.”

Joseph placed a comforting hand on his cheek. “Nobody transports so far as yet. We remain above the ecliptic, beyond the Oort Cloud.”

“So who the hell is firing on us?”

“Why, can’t you pursue elementary logic, sir Klein? Your last companionables, obviously. The deads on board the pioneer starship
Tell Me Not, In Mournful Numbers
, stationed at the vinculum
.
Now we must answer that message with one less harmful. When they learn that you are with us, they shall abandon their fusillade, certes.” She shut her eyes, reached with her left hand for Mary and her right for Jesus. The gravity switched off, and they ascended in a Coriolis curve from the rolling deck, with Klein, like a small flock of wingless angels.

***

Deep space was truly black, and through the unreflecting bubble the Milky Way was a wide, thick band of brightness. In every direction, points of gemlike light. Klein had expected to find his vision adjusted to the faint interior illumination of the transfer bubble—that miracle of field forces centuries in advance of his own lost time—but somehow the clarity was electrifying. Behind him, the complex shape of the warms’ vessel was itself a dozen curved mirrors flinging back starlight. Ahead, the starship of the deads (or was it a blended crew of the dead and the quick? he could not be sure) resembled a finless fish, smooth as black ice in the blackness, rimmed by forces that pulsed almost fast enough to make an uninterrupted glow. And beyond that enormous vehicle, a hanging indigo shape like the manifestation of a tesseract, a rotating impossible object in five or six or thirteen dimensions: the throat of the vinculum created two million years ago by the beings in Andromeda.

It is a phallus, Klein thought. Readying itself to plunge into the yoni of the vinculum. How banal. How inevitable.

“So that thing is going to rocket into—”

“No no, no reaction forces. They use a method. Du would not understand.”

Nettled, Klein said, “Just keep it simple.”

“Oh, like a kinder learning, yes, very good. They employ a strong symplectic homeomorphism. With this—”

Klein gritted his teeth. “Simple, Joseph.”

“But this is elementary. Your Hamiltonian spaceology on its own isotopies are generalized to an intrinsic symplectic topology on the space of symplectic isotopies, obviously.” The young woman gazed at him guilelessly in the darkness, her features limned by starlight. “By coupling to the—”

“Stop,” Klein said. “Just stop.”

Abruptly a glistening bubble came from the star-strewn darkness, hesitated athwart their own, merged. Klein’s ears popped. Four humans stepped forward. One of them he knew at once, hardly changed by the centuries. Perhaps he had slept in stasis as well. Yet was there not an added quality of gravitas to the man, a sense of calm self-worth as he stepped forward and took Klein’s hand?

“Hi. We’re gonna take a little trip. You up for that, doc?” Dolorosa said, and grinned like an avuncular rodent.

Huffing out a cough of amusement, Klein said, “You advised me rather a long time ago not to ask deads a direct question.”

“Things change, Klein. Things change.”

That, too, echoed like some refrain from his lost history. The little Customs man, was it? Barwani. Tags of who he had been, his ignorance, his hopeless and stupid obsession, clung like barnacles washed by brackish waters. Things change. Yet now that he looked at the dead standing beside Dolorosa, he realized with a jolt how utterly that was true.

“Mi-Yun,” he said. “They’d told me you were—”

“Deaxed? Not all of us. Who were the ones you knew? Francine, perhaps? Tom? Those were deaccessioned during the crisis. Didn’t you have a wife once? Gone also. Quite a few of us survived, though, as you see. Let me introduce you to representatives of our crew. This is—”

The names of the warms fell into his ears, and he let them slip away. He went through to their section of the conjoined bubble.

“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, sir Klein. Carry our wishes to the future, to Andromeda. Well faring!”

And falling into the blackness, toward the phallic fish, the ichthyphallic starship. He sniggered. Too much, too much. Another galaxy! Rhodomontades of Wagner, Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, for Christ sakes, he needed Teutonic bombast again. Was he embarking on the Flying Dutchman? Fated to wander the lonely cosmos for eternity, dead, dead, dead, dead?

“Come on, old fellow,” Dolorosa was saying. Their bubble had passed now into the belly of the beast. Busy crew went by with no great evidence of curiosity. In an elevator they ascended to an expanse Klein took to be the control center, or perhaps merely an entertainment alcove, two men and a woman on padded chairs, signally bare of consoles and keypads and swipe bars. Augmented warms, he reminded himself. No doubt they fly this thing by thought, by the flight of entangled electrons from brain to brain to picotechnological hypercomputer navigation systems. He halted.

“This is the commander of the Andromeda mission,” Dolorosa said. “Captain Lucius Olanrewaju.”

“Excuse me, Captain,” Klein said, the words tight between his teeth. He was angry, angry, and this unaccustomed access of emotion seemed beyond his power to contain it. “This is not the moment,” he ground out. “Take me away, please.”

Mi-Yun, the changed Mi-Yun, understood at once. Murmuring to the warms, who smiled, bobbed their machine-laden heads, she departed gracefully with Klein, leaving Dolorosa to follow after them, his glance sardonic.

“How long will this trip take?” Klein asked her in the passageway. Two million years in biostasis? He thought. The dreams, the terrible dreams. That prospect was intolerable. Yet to remain awake and deathless for such eons…Worse still.

“Perhaps a millennium,” Mi-Yun told him. “It will be painless, Jorge.”

“And you wanted me…why?”

“You know why,” Dolorosa said. “This was your vocation. You are to be the Apostle. The Ambassador.”

“To the warms, Jamal Hakim said.”

“Not only to them. To the aliens of Andromeda. They’re waiting for you, sport.”

“How can they know anything about me? How can
you
know anything about
them
?”

“You’re muddled in the old errors,” Mi-Yun said. “We know better now. Causality is tangled, entangled. Strictly, you see, there is no causality, only correlation.”

Stupid abstractions. But yes, finally everything was an abstraction. Empty circularity. This never-ending emptiness, ruin. Not even yearning, not even disgust. Mi-Yun mistook his blank stare for intellectual engagement. She added, “It is the Shoup Scholium. Quantum entropy showed that measurement is a unitary three-interaction. No collapse, no fundamental randomness. Influence is equal between past and future, as perceived by us.” Again he drifted away. Superposition, entanglement, measurement, locality, causality.

“Yes, Mi-Yun, whatever you say. I will do as you require, but on one condition.”

The two deads, paused, watched him carefully. Did they know already? If past and future were paths one could travel in either direction, they might well have knowledge of his perverse desire. But their expressions conveyed neither revulsion nor excitement. Dolorosa was a scofflaw of old, he might raise no objection. But Mi-Yun—

“I want a child,” he told them.

“You know that’s impossible. The physiology—”

“I’m not taking about fucking and carrying a child in utero. Now that I find you here, waiting for me, I wish you to be the child’s mother, Mi-Yun. Cells from each of us, reverted skin cells, they were doing this with mammals back in the 21st century.”

She lifted her eyes to the left. She was augmented, as he’d suspected, searching the same grand and gnarly information spaces as the warms. “Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells,” she said, nodding. “Primordial oocyte and spermatozoa precursors generated from— But our bodies are changed, Jorge. We are not strictly human. There is no reason to suppose that this could work.”

“Surely this ship has biomedical equipment.”

“Of course, but what you’re asking is illegal and immoral.” She regarded him with growing dismay. “You expect me to be the donor.”

“Why not? Why not? You plan a voyage of two million lightyears, surely you don’t balk at essaying parenthood?”

Mi-Yun’s face showed agonized indecision. “And if I do this thing?”

“Why, then, call me Spock. Ambassador Spock,” said Jorge Klein, raising his right hand in an ancient, long-forgotten salute, ironic twinned fingers raised to starboard and port. “Die long and prosper.”

N
INE

We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean.

Anna Freud

***

And again awakens, this time from no dreams he can recall. A thousand years into the future. The machines newly placed within his cranium as he slept tell him his location in the Andromeda galaxy, in a star battle cruiser warped there by an arcwise homeomorphism, its complement blended of the quick and the dead.

Tell him that he has been remade once more.

Stepping from the cool medical catafalque, his naked flesh maggot pale but in peak postmortem condition, Jorge Klein knows instantly, and with no need to search his declarative memory, these things and many more: That a millennium, yes, has passed as he lay immobile, tended by guardian machines, not merely dead but comatose. That he is aboard the battle cruiser
Tell Me Not, In Mournful Numbers
(and that it emerged from a transport vortex ninety-three minutes earlier, and is now decelerating at 50 gravities from light speed, that its complement is 1019 humans, and, irrelevantly, that the number 1019 is prime). That its destination is the G0 star Longer Baseline Galactic Survey 2374b39 in the Andromeda galaxy. That the war between the quick and the dead continues in fits and starts, fragmented across centuries, threatening ruin and extinction to both. That his illicit daughter, built from his codons and Mi-Yun’s, nurtured in an artificial uterus, sleeps in biostasis, like the baby she is, three decks below. And, above all, in this cascade of immanent knowingness, that some grievous change has been wrought upon him. Within him. Again.

In a greater access of passion than his condition has permitted him for a thousand years, he speaks his unfamiliar rage to the empty room, “You bastards. You have
augmented
me! Against my express instruction.”

A man stands before him. A holographic image, a stereo, a sentimental record of the lost past? But no, his hand reaches compassionately to touch Klein’s brow. Dolorosa again, hair long, clad in a golden caftan. No longer the street rat, the snarling outsider. A man at home in his station. Which is, the augment tells Klein at once and without his striving for its access, Representative of the Conclave in Andromeda Space. Information has been flooding in from Earth, from Mars, from all the worlds of the Solar system, a thousand years of archived history, scientific advances, reports of the endless war. Flurries of art, new modes of music invented, abandoned as hackneyed, rediscovered, bypassed, overwhelmed by newer forms, and again and again. Through it all, the continuing augmentation of the warms, while the deads are all but paralyzed by their first adopter technological lock-in. Only the grim endurance of their indifference, their intrinsic aloofness, allows the rekindled to persist, even thrive. And of course the deads hold one important distinction: they don’t die. Unless they are “deaccessioned.”

All of this in stacked tree-indexed hierarchical order, a vast data cathedral rising in a triumphant architectonic surge into Klein’s soul through his own augments, low-level as they are, as he now understands.

“Hey, man,” says Dolorosa. He smiles in friendship, and his teeth are dazzlingly white and perfectly formed. If anything has been lost in this millennial chronicle of change, genemod dental implants has not been one. “I see you’re back, and in fine fettle. Just cool it a mo, hey? The Droms want to talk to you, before we get to their world. Come with me, and we’ll get you up to speed.”

In a dry, rasping voice, Klein says, “My child. I want to see my baby.”

“Sure, we can do that en route. Do you have a name for her yet? She’s a little darlin’, man.”

Of course he has a name for her. “Eurydice,” he says.

Dolorosa laughs out loud. “That’d do. You’ve brought her back from the dead. From two deads, hey.” A beat. “Just don’t look over your shoulder when—Never mind.”

“You’re right. There’d be endless jokes at her expense.” He ponders as they walked through the twisted corridors of the battle cruiser. “Yael,” he says. “For her grandmother.”

“On your side, I guess. No say for Mi-Yun.”

“She is my child,” Klein says urgently. “Mine, mine.”

“Keep your shirt on. Yai-el. Pretty name for a pretty gal. What’s it mean?”

“Strength of God. Or maybe to ascend like a mountain goat. Everything’s god to my people, even the goddam mountain goats.” He thinks of his long exhausting climb up Kilimanjaro. Up this two million light-year staircase of stars and impossible constrained forces.

They pass through a gauzy veil of light, and enter a place of medical machines. “Here,” Dolorosa says. “You can see her in the display.”

Bitterly disappointed, Klein says, “I can’t hold her? Not even a window to look through?”

“Her immune system is still having its final prep. But isn’t she a cutie?”

The holo display above Yael’s crib shows a sleeping infant with curly hair. Her eyes, with their enchanting epicanthic slant, will be dark as his, Klein thinks; as dark as grandmother’s. And her hair already is black as her Korean mother’s. He reaches despite himself into the depth field of the image, and meets nothing but air crossed by rays of light.

“I’ll come back and get you soon,” he whispers to his daughter. “I love you, little one.”

As he turns away, reluctantly, following Dolorosa’s tug at his sleeve, he feels tears leaking down his cheeks, and his narrow world, slowing fantastically from light speed, blurs and shivers.

***

Battle cruiser or not, this vessel seems to be run on a surprisingly relaxed basis. Warms and deads walk the passageways, doors slide open and shut, voices murmur. He hears no ship-wide announcements snapped from hidden speaker systems; no flashing red or green panels alert the crew to the status of the vessel. Perhaps such functions are delegated to the augments, all the complex background information vital to the running and survival of the craft somehow integrated into the silent activity of the flesh, like the body’s automatic awareness of heat and cold, bright and dim, loud explosions, a fist swung toward the face, with responses mechanical and instantaneous. Would his own unsought implants bear the same warnings and requests? Perhaps so. Nobody stops him from entering the public spaces, but no door opens to private cabins. For an hour he prowls this way and that, building a slowly clarifying sense of the structure of this immense ship. In one room, apparently a dedicated place for dining, he finds warms eating and drinking, laughing a little but not raucously, chatting but not chattering. At an empty table he sits, suddenly weary, and after a time a man in a horizontally striped shirt and a jaunty black beret fetches him a plate of steaming spaghetti with a thick red fishy sauce. He sprinkles cheese across it, adds pepper, tastes. A piquant flavor. Is his sense of taste returning? It’s true; his nostrils clear, as if for years he has been afflicted by a tiresome cold. Klein shovels the spaghetti marinara into his mouth, overwhelmed by the rediscovery of taste and appetite. Wine is poured, a rich red Cabernet. The plate is taken away. He places his head on his folded arms, overwhelmed, and drifts off.

He dreams that he is in República
Argentina again, in the heart of Buenos Aires, leading a team of architects through the magnificent Edificio Kavanagh, its lofty Art Deco setbacks imploring the sky, clean in its towering concrete lines, brilliant with sunlight; it will become the first Cold Town outside the borders of the United States. The builders frown, mutter among themselves angrily. An affront! This classic building is one of the marvels of their city. It is not a mausoleum, a vertical catacomb, it is a home for the living, the warm. No, no, he protests; he tries to explain. It is his father and mother he addresses; their faces are flushed with anger. Who does he think he is? Little Hester cowers in her mother’s skirts. Across the dining room in this high Westwood Plaza restaurant, the neo-Babylonian Hanging Gardens, he sees a lovely young woman enter, and Hester plucks at his sleeve. “She’s perfect for you. She’s your type, I swear.” It is Mick Dongan’s bony fingers grabbing at his jacket. “Her name is Sybille. She’s from Zanzibar. Look, look, she’s a dead, Klein, just like you, the perfect choice.” He groans in protest, and the hand is shaking his shoulder.

“This isn’t really the place for a snooze,” Mi-Yun tells him, gazing down. Her wise old face. Klein blinks, clears away the film of moisture from his eyes. It is not that she looks old. No new lines, no sinking of the cheeks, her dark eyes have not withdrawn within crêpey sockets, there’s no desperate thinning of the lips. Yet she is changed profoundly. Has she been awake all these ten long centuries? Or just for the two or three hundred years beyond the catastrophic bombing of Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, all the high places of faith and power and mad rivalrous bigotry? She picks up his limp hand. “Come on, my dear. You’ve had a hard transition. Let’s go to bed.”

She leads him down carpeted passageways to a large cabin, a suite really. They undress in the lowered light of softly glowing lamps, and she draws him beneath the sheets. Under her gentle ministrations, Jorge Klein relaxes, at last, tension easing, tight muscles yielding. They do not kiss; he does not stiffen, enter her; they make love in the way of the deads, touching lightly, placing their hands upon each other, the blooms of flowers brushing before a cool breeze.

Klein smiles, sighs, slips into sleep.