“Well,” he calls, “we’re here. Greetings from Earth.” He announces his name, and the child’s, peering up through eddies of dust that swirl in the star’s hot brightness, dust now streams of shadow, now gleaming and glistening like Brownian motes caught in a beam of light from a leaded window. “What now? What now?” Glancing carefully to either side, he finds none of his companions. Where is Mi-Yun? For an instant anger burns in him. Betrayed. The women leave him, they will not linger. He bats that self-indulgent foolishness away. Dolorosa? Never lean on anybody’s arm. You know what I mean? Yes, he had learned the truth of that, among the dead. Yet it was not altogether the truth, not the whole truth. The rekindled held each other in a certain self-interested regard, making rational assessment of costs and likely benefits, offering an arm to lean on if the pay-off came with a suitable margin. The Guidefathers made it their business to lead the newly dead through their paces, drawing forth from their rewritten brains the sharp-edged concision of their rapid speech, their agreed code of manners, the duties they must enact in suitable payment for the support they would receive in the Cold Towns and elsewhere. Gutter rat Dolorosa himself, once bitter and jumpy, now carrying the maturity of centuries, taking on the burden of Representative of the Conclave. And he himself, Apostle to the articulate squids in space, the robot creatures, the dreaming gas blimps, the mats of conscious algae, the gestalt brains under glass, whatever they were, Ambassador from the worlds of the Solar system…what was he, indeed, if not compliant, amenable, acquiescent in complex and consequential plans laid down by other men and women and indeed aliens so many centuries before. Very well, then. Thou art that.
He holds his arms wide in an accepting embrace.
Light takes him and his child.
***
“They’ve been here an awfully long time,” the stocky young woman told him as they walked through the thick, sweet grass. The pale purple silk of her long dress swirled back and forth as she trod lightly, brushing the stems, some of the grass crushed under her bare feet, releasing the odors of spring and summer. He studied her face when she turned her gaze on him, smiling, content. Those swooping eyelids with their single elegant crease, prescribed by Mi-Yun’s genome. That curly black hair, from his own lineage. That lovely mind, peering from her dark eyes.
“A very long time,” said the other one, walking with them. “Waiting for you, Yael. And your Dad and Mom, of course. And all the others.”
“Warms and deads,” Klein murmured. “Why is that so important? I know it is, it’s almost on the tip of my tongue—”
It slipped away, lost again.
“You’re happy staying here, little mountain goat?” he said doubtfully.
“Gazelle, if you don’t mind.” Mock indignation. She slapped his hand playfully. “Oh yes, what place would be better than this? With all my friends, and you, too, just for now, Dad, and so much to know, and so much to teach.” Her radiant smile.
Stars spreading out all around them burned fiercely in the blackness. Two immense spiraled clouds swung toward each other, fell and fell, merged, their dreadful central black holes closing together, the combined collapsed mass of tens of millions of stars, merging in a tumultuous blaze of quasar luminescence that burned stars, planets, sent a shock wave of relativistic plasma and gamma radiation outward at light speed or close to it, sterilizing all it passed.
“Four billion years from now,” the other said. “Give or take. The galaxy you call the Milky Way will encounter this one, which you call Andromeda. Your Sun will be a red giant by then, in any case, and so will ours. We’ll have to migrate elsewhere. So it makes sense to get a good head start.” Amusement. Warmth. Sorrow for all that will be lost. Joy for what will persist, and grow, and know itself.
It was a dead like him, this other, Klein noticed, although not very like him.
“Are you all rekindled, you Letzten?”
“That’s your word, you know, not ours.”
“Granted,” Klein said. “We had to give you a name chosen from our own languages. It means ‘the last,’ with overtones of ‘the best.’ My grandparents spoke that language. We have done terrible things to each other, we humans.”
“All species do,” the other, the Letzte, told him. Together, they climbed the ziggurat, as if they wore seven league boots and it were a set of broad, high steps. Klein cradled the infant in her crib against his breast.
“It is how they die, and die, and die,” said the Letzte, “and are gone.”
“All of them?” This desolation was unbearable. Klein felt the urge to weep, the tightened chest, the prickling in the nose, the pressure in the head, the eyes blurring. He could not touch his eyes, guarded by his visor. He blinked hard, sniffed. “Every intelligent species, murdered?”
“So far. Except for us. And now you…so far.”
“Why? Why? Must there always be war between the quick and the dead? No peace, no surcease, ever?” This bitter answer to the Fermi paradox, he thought. Where are they, an old scientist had asked teasingly, the alien civilizations? They had thought they knew the answer, that cautious, secretive sodality of the rich and the geeks, when they’d found the first signs of life beyond Earth. Their wild jubilation had driven the decoding of the messages from Andromeda, the application of deep ancient principles to the needs of humans; they had conquered death itself, after a fashion. But it was a false conclusion, Klein now understood. Perhaps across the stars a thousand species had trod forth from the muck, a million, risen to genius, found a cure for death, and immediately exterminated themselves out of jealousy and loathing and madness masquerading as wisdom. Self-slaughtered, every one. Trillions upon trillions of lives, through billions of years, again and again and again.
“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.
T H E E N D
Beyond the Doors of Death Page 19
