Beyond the Doors of Death

by Silverberg, Robert

  “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.”

  As he screamed, they put him into the chamber. A nurse attached a tube to the catheter in his neck. The face loomed above him, wavered, went away. Klein was gone.

  EIGHT

  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

  May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

  Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

  Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

  Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Mind Has Mountains”

  ***

  Was this death? Was it dream? Was it some cheapjack gamer fantasy he had been plugged into, solace of a kind in his century of incarceration? He drowned. Or was he surfacing from the deeps? Thalassa! Thalassa! The sea! The sea! The wild cries of Xenophon’s men, at the end of this great and terrible march upcountry, sighting the Black Sea. The black endless sea of deep space. No sibilants in that cry from Hellene throats and tongues, in ancient Greek: The latter! The latter! That dry scholarly jest, he’d heard it as a student of history from his pretty fellow student. Was her name…Genevieve? Jennifer? Simply Jenny? Should it be spelled Thalatta or Thalassa? Why, the latter. All Greek to me, Jorge Klein had muttered (mussered?) with a grin. What is this nonsense chasing through his gelid, his sluggish mind? Cliffs of fall. Frightful, sheer. The sea, the sea! Is this hypnogogic or hypnopompic fancy? He cannot put his finger on it. He cannot put his finger on anything. He is entirely paralyzed. Dies with sleep. Drowning. Dies—

  ***

  He was dead and stilled. The anguish of it terrified him.

  Again a voice cried loudly: “Awaken, Klein! Behold your child!”

  Klein convulsed out of death’s sleep to some state more piercing, more clarified, than the distanced alertness of the dead. A legged fish, nearly weightless, he kicked in air. I’m on a free trajectory spacecraft, he told himself. Or a Lagrange station. Faces peered at him. A high priest of himself loomed, clad in ceremonial silk embroidered with the raw nerves of a flayed human body. Klein shuddered.

  Figures tussled for a view of their divinity, their maker and destroyer, rekindled again from the deeper death. Three bald youths, struttish but dutiful, faces like warrior fiends, brandished meter-long scrolls of gold and jade. In tattered remnants of silk, an old man huddled closer. His lips moved in senile supplication. Two young women struggled to hide awed giggles behind cowls torn from silvery insulation. Klein blinked, cursing. The place was a shambles. A young woman’s face came into focus, an Asian face, pretty, desecrated with rusted wire and small vivid points of light. Her full breasts were bared in the prideful modesty of a Primipara Mother. She held forth a small struggling bundle.

  “The child of death!” cried the priest, reaching down from his floating eminence to unswaddle the tiny infant. “Behold !” Her discarded clothing hung free, tugged by stray air currents. Klein blenched as his eyes rose to the baby’s face. Her features were a delicious blend of mother and father. She squalled: passion suffused her small cheeks and forehead. His daughter, beyond question. What madness had he done in death? It was forbidden. But by whose law? Damn their prohibitions and strictures!

  “August Personage!” bellowed the gathering of his shabby worshipers. “Welcome back to the life of the dead!”

  “Take the daughter of your loins, Lord!” the priest urged. Klein shook his head in repudiation. “Your beloved child! Prophesied from time out of time.”

  Very well; renewed living death. Reluctantly, impelled by a kind of ancient reverence, Klein held out his hands and took the baby’s weightlessness, glanced again at her milky features, murmured her name as the devotees howled and babbled in holy delight.

  “Peach Tree of Immortality,” he said softly. She should have been male, his son and heir, Heavenly Master of the Dawn of Jorge Klein of the Golden Door. For a moment, catching himself, he suspected treachery, imposture. But his blood sang with hers. This was his child.

  “Tree! Sacred Tree! Child of Klein!” screamed the last of his believers.

  Concussion struck the vessel. The faithful squealed and scrambled, fleeing backward out of the cramped cabin. Metallic but controlled, a rough voice announced from an ancient ambient system: “Hull breach. An armed vessel attacks. All hands! All hands!”

  Explosions thumped terrifyingly, transmitted through the hull. Klein stared about him, clutching the baby. The young Queen-Mother reached for her daughter, desperate, face distorted. Her name was…was…Struck again and again by the enemy weapons, the ruined starcraft jolted, ringing like a bell. Milk leaped from Mi-Yun’s naked nipples, opalescent globules that hung in the sweat-reeking air like pearls.

  “What vessel assails us?” the priest demanded of the ambient. He was calm, no longer ludicrous in vile robes.

  Again a crash. “It appears to be…a ship of Earth.”

  Klein stared. The warms? In an instant, his torpor was flung from him, and with it every vestige of learned sophistication, acquired so painfully in a long lifetime and deadtime of intensely diligent study in the ways of human civilization. He raged like a wild beast in a cage, yet careful in his fury of the baby against his shirtless chest, wrathful.

  “The child,” cried Queen-Mother Mi-Yun, tearing at his arms with nails that left bloodless tracks down his flesh. “Put down my baby!”

  Klein ignored pain and cries alike. He drew his daughter against his breast, and crossed to the tangle locus. “Send me to their ship,” he said. Terrified, the technician matched parameters and activated the entanglement field. Klein transitioned instantly into the enemy vessel.

  Glancing at him without visible surprise, a dead woman smiled coolly with eyes blue as Californian summer skies. She sat upright but utterly relaxed in her acceleration chair on the bridge, clad in the crisp whites of a spacecraft commander. Nobody else was on the bridge. He listened to her controlled breathing, and his own, and the baby’s steady heart beat. Nothing else but machinery. They were alone on the great vessel.

  “Jorge,” she said. Sybille’s voice was crushed mint on chilled glass. “A daddy now, I see. How touching.”

  ***

>   Convulsion. Confusion. Nightmare, nothing but a nightmare. Muddled thoughts in a blue funk.

  “Sir. Sir. Mr. Klein. Are you fully awake, sir?”

  And his full consciousness switched on, like a searchlight. He sat up. A small room with curved walls, pale peach, air humming. A young man in the classic garb of an orderly watched him, cautiously. A warm. A warm! So. They had brought him back up from his purging, his term of punishment, his warehousing. A century come and gone on a calendar, lost to him forever. Klein twitched his muscles, sat up without a pang, swung his legs over the side of what appeared to be an operating table.

  “I’m feeling surprising well, actually.” He touched his neck, regarded his arms. Tubes gone, no apparent scars. Klein turned his back on the orderly, put his hands on the edge of the table and did several squats. He felt terrific. Light on the soles of his feet. Vim and vigor, with a faint tremor that seemed to spread outward into the floor itself. Well, this was the future, after all, home of fantastic progress. His thoughts darkened immediately. The prison gates would open, even in the best of all possible worlds, and he’d be released into a world as a stranger and afraid, sundered by a hundred years from all he knew. Cold seized him, and he fell forward, pressed hard, gripping the table’s padded edge. “No, no,” he said sharply, waving away the orderly (or cryo-technician? A doctor perhaps?). “Give me a moment.” He breathed slowly. “So we’re halfway through the twenty-second century.”

  “No, sir. Really, I’d feel happier if you’d lie down again for a moment.”

  Grumbling, Klein did so. The electrostatic field he associated with Sybille’s funeral lifted him smoothly, like rocking gently in air. Not, in this case, an antinecrotic, he supposed. Was there the same tang of jasmine? His impoverished nostrils could not discern subtle odors.

  “Thank you. Sir, you have been released from suspension early. It is now a little more than 43 years after your interment.”

  That was a jolt. Klein did hasty calculations. So: 2083. Chances were, though, that his brother in-law-Moshe would have succumbed to old age, perhaps to death. Hester? She might still be alive. Or would they, too, despite their early prejudice, turn to rekindling? He pushed himself up again on his elbows.

  “Who authorized this?”

  “The Committee of the Party for Unification,” the orderly said somewhat piously. “Sir, all your questions will be answered in a—”

  A man in dark blue military uniform came into the room, a hard-faced fellow perhaps in his late fifties. His features seemed oddly familiar. Moshe? No, no. The orderly saluted and made himself scarce. Surely not—

  “Jorge Klein,” the man said, and his lined face made a smile as his hand reached across in a firm grip. “Uncle Jorge, I mean.”

  “Eli! Eliezer! My god, boy. You’re older than I am!”

  “Physiologically, yes. While you’ve been snoring on your back, my associates and I have been trying to hold the world together.”

  “There’s a war, I suppose.” Klein felt his lips twist.

  “All the possible wars at once,” Solomon said. He dragged over a stool, reached into his breast pocket for gum, offered a stick to Klein, who shook his head, appalled and amused. “Worst of all, the war between the quick and the deads.”

  “Christ. It really did come to that, then.” He stared at the man’s clenched jaw, powerful hands. “But you’re a warm yourself, Eli. Am I to be executed after all?”

  “On the contrary. My faction is opposed to retribution against the rekindled at large. They were hardly responsible for the actions of the madmen among them. We’re reviving all the imprisoned—”

  “Retribution?” Klein was taken aback. “We were the victims, Eli, from day one. Sybille was killed in the bombing of Zion Cold Town. You can’t possibly believe that.”

  “Shut up, Klein.” Solomon stood, face flushed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. How could you possibly offer a germane opinion?”

  “Don’t shout at me, Eliezer.” Klein forced himself to take a breath. “I’m sorry—Mr. Solomon. What’s your rank, anyway?”

  The man ignored him, voice deepening in fury. “You know nothing of the hyperkinetic rock that smashed Jerusalem. Here, look at what your people did to mine. And to all the others.”

  A wall stereo display activated, opening its imaginary space into echoing depths. For a moment, Klein was dizzied; the protocols of presentation were unfamiliar. Images, captions, a muted voice-over that Solomon silenced. Temple Mount—Har haBáyith, the Haram Ash-Sharif—key disputed holy ground of Judaism and Islam, smashed into ruin by a blazing infalling rock the size of a hill. St. Peter’s Papal Basilica, marvel of art and devotion, majestic Renaissance triumph of Michelangelo and a hundred other artists of genius, gone with the whole of Rome in a kinetic fireball. The Kaaba in the Grand Mosque, with its ancient meteoric Black Stone, obliterated by another ravening meteorite. A great Hindu temple to Lord Shiva, a thousand years old, hundreds of feet of brilliantly carved granite, expunged. The Temple of the Latter Day Saints. Image after brilliant archival image, spliced with the burning things in the sky caught from below, from the screaming distance, from sharp-eyed satellites.

  “The Hajar-e-Aswad II that wiped out Mecca. The Petrus impactor on Rome. All the great holy places of the world. Rajarajeswaram, India’s largest Hindu temple. Lhasa. Salt Lake City. Smashed into craters of glass and dust by targeted rocks flung down by deads in lunar orbit. Murder and desecration. The worst assault on people of faith since—”

  You see, I don’t care, Klein thought. He had a distant academic interest in how this global apocalypse, this new Holocaust, might work itself out, and from what disputed beginnings it had arisen, but these impassioned words and fearful images seemed to him altogether detached from his own reality.

  “You think the deads are opposed to religion? Violently opposed?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Violently? No, absolutely not.”

  “You see the evidence there.”

  “No. Only evidence of violence, not of dead involvement. Why should we go to such absurd lengths? Such effort? You simply don’t get it, Eli. The deads don’t care.”

  He waved his hand back and forth, finally put it on his nephew’s arm.

  “Eliezer. Listen to me. Yes, this is terrible, but so was the Black Death. So were the millions dead in Cambodia and China. So was the Holocaust, and we are both tied to that in our bone and gristle, but listen to me: it doesn’t matter. Not to me.”

  Eliezer Solomon was speechless with disbelief and then with outrage. “You cannot begin—”

  “You’re right, Eli, I can’t, What I want to know is much more immediate. What news of your parents? Are they alive? What of the deads I lived with? Sybille you yourself knew, but there were others. A woman named Mi-Yun, another named Francine. A man called Tom.” Did they mean anything to him, those deads, in this wasteland of noise and nothingness? No, not truly. But he had to ask.

  “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.