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Authors: Robert Silverberg,Damien Broderick

Tags: #life after death, #Hugo, #Nebula, #to open the sky, #Grandmaster, #majipoor

Beyond the Doors of Death (21 page)

BOOK: Beyond the Doors of Death
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“We are doing what we can, Ambassador. With the aid of your child.” Yael walked beside them, and for a moment Klein mistook her for Mi-Yun, and then for his sister Hester. She took his hand once more, squeezed it tightly, and the other who climbed with them added, “You are a new thing, you augmented deads. Perhaps. Perhaps…”

Klein sat down on the flat top of the great archive that was the repository of the active minds of a trillion Letzten deads. It was coated in thick ice. The corpse of a leopard lay gaunt and rimed near his feet. When he looked for it again, it had gone. The aliens, he saw, moved in these abstracted spaces like the angels of mythology: impalpable, interpenetrating, born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related. No warm could endure that frozen realm. Not even his daughter, held for now from the blight of the dead planet by forces beyond his comprehension. And here she would remain, after the starship returned to carry in person a message that already pulsed its correlations in the vinculum across two million lightyears of nothingness and death.

***

I am Eurydice, as he foretold. Or call me Yael. Clambering like a goat to the high places of the vital, descending to the darkness and the cold of the dead. All around me in their choirs, in quires and places where they sing, in loops of entanglement from past to tomorrow and beyond and back again, in heaven as it was in Earth, uttering the ends and the beginnings of things and everything between. Like my father, they know the dread of vastation, that closure of meaning and hope, that occlusion of love, yet they know also its contrary, the leaps of aspiration, trust in the unfolding, knitting up the wounds of yesterday and healing the broken, rutted pathways yet to be trodden. I stand beside my father’s lost beloved, Sybille, Cybele, that first Eurydice, borne away by Pluto, rescued by hapless Orpheus who could not leave well enough alone but pursued her in that bleak place until she was lost to him forever. There she went with her companions into the landscapes of fatality, the fallen temples and stilled voices of the priests and congregation of the mound builders, to the cenotaphs of Luxor and Chichén Itzá, the caves where the bones of ancient children lay with skulls splintered, to the death-obsessed magnificent worshiping grounds of the planet that would be smashed into glass and flame and dust by the flung stones of the avenging deads. I walk with my father in the place of his birth, with its cold blue ocean that sucked down so many into oblivion, guns roaring above them, and the blown grasses of the Pampas utterly alive with herds of guanaco, rabbitty viscachas, foxes in their holes, hawks and sparrows a-wing, and the cities rife with corruption and murder and the willful disappearance of generations crying out their hope and despair, and my mother’s ancestral home, bustling and terrified under the unending threat of nuclear annihilation, gods and goddesses of the quick and the dead, Hallakkungi Igong, tender and plucker in the Flower Garden Of Life And Death, Yuhwa, goddess of the willow, daughter of Habaek the lord of the river, desired by the sungod Haemosu who trapped her, as I have been trapped, in a wonderful edifice that holds the brightness of the sun and its yearning, of Koenegitto the wargod, who married the youngest daughter of the sea dragon and at last transformed his father into a mighty mountain and his mother into a shrine, and Halmang the immense goddess who strode across the land ungarbed, her piss stream tearing open a gulf between Jeju Island and the mainland, who swallowed up all the fish into her vagina. Is that my mother? Myself? All mankind and womankind, perhaps, on Earth as in the heavens? We shall be as gods, neither living nor dead, and both, like the Great Ones who hold me cupped in their ancient presence on this memorial world of golden dust and whimsical artistry, for they are my friends, my patient teachers, my own companions in death and life, and I sing across the stoma, the vinculum between galaxies, all the coded songs that will teach my people, have taught them, what they must know to avoid the calamity that has stricken every other species across the sky, will draw them to me, finally, my father Jorge and my mother Mi-Yun, and through them carry me into existence so that all these foretold things might come to pass. I will bring them faith in a future escaped from certain doom, and hope in their power to bring it about, and love for each other, these poor damned creatures blowing a threnody across the lip of the cracked jar of their combined souls, moved to pity and laughter by the stars. Hello, hello, hello. I love you.

***

His daughter sat beside him, head on his shoulder, and he kissed her forehead. It was cool. She smiled at him with love and forgiveness, and kissed him in return, on the cheek. His heart was breaking. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. As always.

He stood up again, brushed snow pointlessly from the seat of his insulated environment suit, and trudged down the steps to walk through the blowing grass and wildflowers to the dirty golden dust and the bubble, where the others waited for him.

“All right,” he told the alien deads, aloud. “All right. Let us hope, then, that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

Dolorosa stepped forward, clapped him on the shoulder. “Talking to yourself again, Mister?” But Mi-Yun gave a shriek, touching the empty container on Klein’s chest. “Where is she? Oh my god, Jorge, where’s the baby? What have you done with Yael?”

“She’s staying with her godparents,” he said. “She’ll be fine.” Klein shrugged off the empty container, let it fall to the ground. It skittered away in the wind on its stasis field suspension. He placed his arms around their shoulders, and walked them to the group of waiting warms. Not meaningless after all, not plastic, not nothingness. The vastation was lifted. He smiled to himself, and hugged Mi-Yun tightly.

And ascended with them into the dark sky and the stars, and the waiting ship that would bear them back through the plenum, he thought with a smile, to waiting Ithaca.

 

 

 

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BOOK: Beyond the Doors of Death
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