by John Shirley
“Doyle,” I asked, on another evening, “If people can eat from sunlight, if they don’t get sick and need health care, really, and if they can formulate housing and clothes . . . what motivates people to work? I mean, on Earth . . . in the Before . . . we’re all sort of under the lash of survival, all the time. But here, people seem to work without really any need to. Why have shops and so on? Just—to earn luxuries?”
“Extras, luxuries, that enters into it. Some people don’t formulate things well and they go to people who do. But really, I should think it’s more about following one’s bliss, as a gentleman here likes to say—a Mr. Campbell. Here, they work because they enjoy it, it confers satisfaction, it leaves them feeling complete. There are social reasons, too. There’s pride, there’s a desire to be part of the community. Of course, some don’t do much, and they tend to wander off, at random . . . and in time become forgetters.”
“Why is it that people in the afterworld don’t form nations? Or do they? I don’t get any sense of it around here.”
“What are nations formed for? Originally for mutual defense, as much as anything. We have no need for a nation here! We have our little territorial conceits, but it means nothing really. Could one afterlife culture take up arms and conquer another, here? I suppose so. But why? Food is not an issue. We have no gold. Money is only a minor consideration here. Would we fight over women? Why—for reproduction? We don’t reproduce here! Would we make war to take slaves? What would they do for us? We need not work if we don’t want to. We can pursue art, we can pursue love, we can pursue anything to hand, here.”
“Doyle—oh, yes, thanks, one more brandy.”
“You were going to ask me something else?”
“Well, take brandy. Is it brandy, here?”
“It’s actually made from grapes.”
“But—are they grapes, really?”
“They taste like it. Mostly.”
“People are always qualifying their descriptions that way here. ‘Mostly.’ Hell, I do it, too.”
“Well things aren’t exactly the same. Nor are they idealized, Fogg. If you look at tree bark under a microscope, it’s not exactly the same. So a poplar tree isn’t exactly a poplar tree. But for us it is. If you kill a frog . . . and you can kill one, yes . . . as far as you can kill anything . . . it lasts just long enough for you to dissect it a bit. Then it dissolves into the air. When you dissect it you find small things breaking down in its stomach, some froglike parts. And some missing. It ’tis a frog and it ’tisn’t. Of course nature in the afterworld has an abundance of mysteries. We don’t understand the Scargel at all, for example. But how well did we understand nature in the Before? I take it that a great deal was learned, after I died. DNA and so on. Confirmation of Darwin’s evolution. But there was always something left, something mysterious. We must merge spiritually with nature before we can understand it fully.”
“Doyle, if this is the afterlife, where are all the aliens?”
“Aliens? Why, we have Spaniards, Norwegians, Chinese—”
“Sorry, I was using the word the way we tend to in my own time. Mostly the fault of Hollywood movies. No, I meant extraterrestrials. Beings who, in the Before, were from other planets. The sort of beings Moore worries about in theory—but the real thing. Stands to reason they exist somewhere in the universe. Don’t they have an afterworld—or afterworlds? If I go far enough on this plane, can I see their afterworlds?”
“Yes they do, and yes you can, but conditions there would be uncomfortable for you, in most cases, to say the least. It’s so very far. Would take you centuries of sailing and walking and riding to get there . . . however, if you get the Summons I’m told you may move on to a level where such beings and people of Earth mix quite comfortably . . . once you achieve the body of light.”
“What’s that?”
“Something like what we have here in Garden Rest but incredibly more refined—and very much more capable of travel within the universe. Oh, but speaking of moving pictures. Do you know, while we have no movie projectors in Garden Rest, there’s a way a person can enjoy a good moving picture?”
“Movies? Here? How?”
“You can be in the movie. You see, there’s a splinter plane created by the mentation of creative people. Some are rather fuzzy—you can find yourself in a novel for example, but it may break down along the way. But others are crystal clear because the whole thing was viewed many times by many people. So you can find yourself in, say . . . what was that moving picture Brummigen likes? Something quite recent, in the Before. Ah. I think it was called Zero Dark Thirty. It appeared in the vision splinter not long ago. Brummigen seems to enjoy seeing a fellow get his just desserts in it. Chap named Bin Laden. Brummigen likes to play the naval-commando chap who shoots this Bin Laden.”
“What do you mean, he plays him?”
“He enters the splinter, sees the film as if he’s the camera, and eventually becomes one of the characters. Then when the credits roll, he’s pitched back here.”
“Yeah? You think I could be in Casablanca? The Bogart role?”
“Och, why not? Winn Chauncey likes to go into a film called The Wizard of Oz. Haven’t seen it myself. He likes to be the girl with her little dog . . .”
“Doyle—what about sexual preference in the afterworld? We were getting pretty fair-minded about sexual preference in the States just before I . . . when I aftered.”
“And it’s wise to cultivate such fair-mindedness.” Doyle sighed. “I have had to abandon many cherished biases. It does appear that homosexuals do not choose their preference. Nature chooses for them. When they get here, the orientation remains the same. I met Oscar Wilde, briefly, here. Never met a happier man in the afterlife. He’s since gone on to a settlement they like to call the West Village, about three months’ journey to the west.”
“No reason not to have sexual license, between consenting adults and . . . I don’t know . . . within sane boundaries. I mean, if there are no STDs in the afterlife—why not? It seems to be just another way to communicate, here. There doesn’t seem much in the way of real diseases in the afterworld, so . . .”
“STDs? That term I do not know.”
“Sexually transmitted diseases.”
“Ah! Happily we have none. We do have . . . people can become psychically infected by other people, in an odd sort of way. And they can fall under psychological dominance. But . . . no STDs. A great blessing of the afterlife! Many’s the time when I was a ship’s physician, especially on that dreadful trip along the west coast of Africa, I had to treat sailors for syphilis. In those days the treatment was almost viler than the disease. I had to poison them with mercury! How I would have loved access to true antibiotics. In the Boer War—oh yes. I’d have saved many a limb. But, unhappily, penicillin came along after my time as a physician—after my time on Earth, really.” He shook his head. “And then again there were viruses. We had only crude vaccinations to defend against them. I’ve heard about the immune deficiency virus, from people who died of it. Ghastly! And the remarkable genetic elasticity of germs! Their adaptation to antibiotics and antiviral agents—when I was first a physician, germs were still a subject of controversy! Many a respected physician doubted they had any application to disease. But the wiser heads knew.”
“There aren’t any microorganisms here?”
“I didn’t say that. But let’s just say that this plane does not seem to plague us with them, as it were . . .”
“Doyle—what happens to . . . well, for example, people with Down’s syndrome, in the afterworld?”
“Down’s syndrome . . . ?”
“People with mental handicaps. Very low IQ, or . . .”
“Ah yes. Their souls are as sturdier, and often sturdier than yours or mine, since they tend to have developed their feelings, and other areas of
sensitivity. So on passing, they are rerouted into new bodies . . . reincarnated . . . and there they develop other sorts of intelligence, and when they pass from that form, why, they come here.”
“And, uh—where’s . . . for example . . . Hitler? Oh, that was after your time.”
“I certainly have heard of Hitler. I was astounded when we got word of the Holocaust. We have had many grisly accounts of it, which make one almost despair of humanity. But in my time, King Leopold of Belgium was quite nearly as bad. Spiritually, quite as much a brute as Hitler—and could have been Hitler’s understudy of atrocities. They’re both somewhere in the outer darkness, I would suppose, if they haven’t reincarnated. There is no torturous hell, you know, just an exclusion from light, a dark place where misery-inducing souls are left alone with one another. Here in Garden Rest we are in one—merely one!—of the outer rings of light.
“Hitler and his ilk are probably in that lightless, frowsy waiting room, tortured by their own minds and the minds of their fellows in darkness, if they’re tormented by anything. In time, they’ll be reduced to mere sparks, and reused, or reincarnated . . . and something in them will evolve . . .”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN SHIRLEY is an award-winning author, screenwriter, television writer, and songwriter. He lives in California.
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COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DOYLE AFTER DEATH. Copyright © 2013 by John Shirley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062304995
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062305008
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