“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.”
NINE
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 pep
per, 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.
TEN
I did not think I was strong enough to retain for long a past that went back so far and that I bore within me so painfully. If time enough were allotted me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea imposed upon me with so much force: that humans are monsters occupying in time a habitation infinitely more significant than the restricted locations reserved for them in space, a place immeasurably extended because, touching widely separated epochs and the slow accretion of days upon days passed through, we stand like giants immersed in Time.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained
***
The world LBGS 2374b39c, third planet of its Andromedan star, turns below them into the light of its Sun as the battle cruiser goes on orbit. Captain Lucius Olanrewaju stands before the command deck’s immense holo display. Klein is seated; in the last weeks of the ship’s deceleration he has undertaken extensive briefings, and awaits his removal to the surface. The planet is a golden-red haze of dust, Mars inflated to the diameter of the Earth, plus eleven percent. Atmosphere is negligible, by human standards, totally unbreathable. The world is old, old, but then all worlds are old; this one is old by the clock of evolved life. Not everything is known about the Andromedan minds, the Kardashev II’s, the Letzten, who called them here via their sterile neutrino beam with its modulated message shining through the vinculum that subverted the millions of lightyears of space and time. Perhaps that message has not yet been transmitted, here and now. Time, like causality, is a pretzel of correlations, Klein has been assured. This much, and much more, was unpacked from the message stream long, long ago, on Earth in the 21st century, by that furtive coalition of brilliant billionaires and genius nerd rebels who unlocked the secret of rekindling, or perhaps invented it, using the clues Gödel-coded into the gushing encyclopedia their wide-spread cubesat receiver had stumbled upon. Except that they had not found it by accident; there are no accidents of this magnitude, only intentions and stochastic correlations, correlations, correlations. Klein does not pretend to understand a tenth of it, a thousandth. All he knows is that the humans are here now, the living and the living dead, where they were summoned, where he is to speak face to face with their ancient benefactors. Who knew his name, and uttered it in pixels, millions of years ago. Who called him here, their invitation a command. Very well. Let us look upon their bleak, dried up world.
As they orbit into brightness, the face of the world turns to show them…what? A vast ridge or cyclonic outflow boundary curving inward toward the poles, dark dust hurled up into a roaring, turbulent ring constrained by its own dynamics, held in place, an impossible disk-edge thousands of kilometers in circumference, cupped within the greater circle of the planet’s extent. And inside the hurricane, if that’s what the thing was, smooth air interrupted by—Suddenly, laughter breaks out on the deck.
“O my gog,” murmurs the meteorologist. “A cartoon?”
“It is,” Klein tells them. He is one of the few old enough to recognize it. The great crater eyes. The upwardly curved tectonic suture, its shadowed rift reaching across a third of the planet’s visible surface. “A Smiley Face,” he says. “Old computer icon from my childhood.” He feels a smile spreading across his own face, lips curved up in amazed amusement. “A goddamned Happy Face.”
“I guess they’re glad to see us,” Mi-Yun says, and she is grinning as well.
A brilliant red light blooms suddenly on the equator, miles across, at the very center of the planetary storm.
“Our landing site,” says a dead woman, intently studying a gridded map floating before her.
Dolorosa catches Klein’s eye, and winks at Mi-Yun.
“Yep, we’ll take a bubble down,” he says, and adds with a smirk, “Right on the nose.”
Voices seem to be muttering in Klein’s head, but he can make no sense of them. The Captain turns to him.
“Ambassador Klein, I have a message for you from the Letzten. They extend their greetings and welcome you to their home world. And…” He breaks off, shakes his head slightly.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Klein, I don’t think we can allow this.”
“Allow what? I remind you, sir, than once I leave this vessel I am in charge of first contact on the ground.”
“They insist that you—” Olanrewaju pauses again, clears his throat. “They request that you bring the child with you. Yael, your daughter.”
***
Ructions. Moral and ethical outbursts. Flat refusals. Practical objections. What grotesque proposal is this? Some travesty borrowed from Klein’s ancestral religion? Father bearing his child to the altar for ritual slaughter, mandated in that case by an imaginary tribal war-god? Echoes of sacred infants offered up to fate, or dashed against walls, blood flowing in the streets, babies slashed and flung into pits of fire in Carthage, Aztecs ripping the hearts from children and eating them raw, infant skulls axed, brains spilled in religious frenzies in every land on humanity’s home world—now to be replicated on another world, in another galaxy?
Klein listens to it all without paying heed. In the flat cosmic pointlessness, one lamp shines: his daughter. Mi-Yun’s daughter also, he admits, but the dead woman has shown no particular interest in the infant, nor fondness for. A scrap of her dermis, a scrap of his, developmental clocks flicked backward, epigenetic markers demethylated, age reset to the zero point, stripped of the molecular intrusions of rekindling, combined in vit
ro, nurtured in fabricated juices and tissues, bathed in warmth, comforted in pulsing mimicry of heart and belly, brought forth in her season from the glass and steel, hugged and cleaned and washed and diapered and hugged again by a team of cooing warms, offered finally into his arms, his dead, reborn arms…Her tiny whimsical face, her own reaching arms, her small kicking legs. Was this a spark of love in the midst of his endless vastation? Was this a rekindling, in truth, of the compulsive bond he’d known before only with his lost spouse? What fools we were, he thought, gazing down at Yael, bringing her face slowly, carefully, close to his lips, kissing her with his waxy dead lips…What fools to deny ourselves this joy. Yes, she will travel with me to the surface. She is the best promise of humankind. She is life brought out of death.
“Will you come down with us, Mi-Yun?”
“They have machines now, you know, to carry her warm milk, her diapers, her, her swaddling clothes…” The woman laughs. “It’s ridiculous. I’m not the mothering kind. You know that, Jorge.”
“Of course she’ll come,” Dolorosa tells him. “Me too. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. And our captain will insist on a support crew of mission specialists. Ecumenical little party, off to see the Wizard.”
***
Jorge Klein steps through the permeable wall of the bubble onto the rusty golden surface of the Letzten’s world. He carries his daughter pressed against the breast of his environment suit, borne in an ergonomic support lifted against gravity by a static field. He had half expected to find here a platform of blazing red light, to match the landing grid visible from the orbiting starship. Ahead, through the haze of the blowing dust, he does see an elevation, perhaps a ziggurat. Arms wrapped around Yael’s support, he strides toward the structure that seems to loom larger with each step, impossibly, like an optical illusion. Perhaps that is all it is, a trick played directly upon his brain, through the augments the warms placed there as he slept. Under the guidance of these very entities, he now realizes, these Letzten, these Andromedans. Will they step forth lightly from their stolid rank upon rank of smooth black stone? Will they lumber out like sapient dinosaurs, like wise-eyed bears? Will they coil in ambulant tanks of murky fluid, parodies of Yael’s mechanical gestation? Fly out from the topmost levels of the ziggurat on bronze wings? Slither like serpents? Exhale from slots, gaseous conglomerates? The nonsense clatters through his distracted mind, detritus of every computer game and stereo he’s ever engaged. No. No. They will be nothing so obvious.
Beyond the Doors of Death Page 18
