Hakim regarded him, imperturbable. He deactivated the display. “I believe Guidefather Sabbāh has inducted you as an Adjutant in the Conclave of the Rekindled. Of the Deads.”
“Yes, Whatever that means. Also an Acolyte, which has a disturbingly religiose ring to it. What are we deads now, the seeds of a cult? Or an army?”
“Neither.” Hakim gave him a dazzling smile, then, and rose. “A fusion of mysticism and science, perhaps. An unexpected emergent from our condition, and its source. More of that later.”
Klein stood up. “You haven’t told me what you want of me. I have no taste for hunting quaggas and dodos and Tyrannosaurus rex in the game parks of Africa, like some. Like Sybille, in fact. I’ve paid my corporate dues, my insurance investment covered all the costs of my rekindling, what else the hell—”
“Why, Jorge,” Jamal Hakim told him, “we expect great things of you.” He took his arm, and led him out of the room. “Certainly, let us stay with the religious terminology you introduced. Yes. Dr. Klein, you are chosen. Consider yourself in the role of a reborn Paul of Tarsus. You have been selected to be our Apostle to the Warms.”
Gog Poll: Are You Man Enough to be a Dead?
Ya, zinger, zip open your pad and drop some X’s in the Spots X Marks.
Gog how it is this year—can’t nab a nap of wink for the howling dead things creeping about in the dark.
But can’t be bad totally. All that gold, right? And hey, they have a poison stare like you wouldn’t believe.
So—you have the stuff to be a dead? Answer our blood-drenched quizette and check out your score. And if you crave those dead pale or dark thighs—maybe you can be dead, too, and really score, gross time.
***
A: Are your favorite deads
_cold-blood vamps with giant prongs?
_slavering zoms that wanna fuck your brain?
_rotten corpses in the stench of the grave rave?
_Archibald Henrietta Stone, the first dick-swap deader?
B: Why did the dead chicken cross the road?
_To get to the Other Side?
_So its eggs got sucked by Granny?
_For the Sand Witches there?
_For the road kill chicks?
C: When did the first dead like come back?
_In 1348, during the Black Death
_In 1900, when Typhoon Mary was the cook
_In 2021, when Archibald Henrietta Stone like came back
_In 29 AD, when Jeezuz jumped off his cross
D: Are the Cold Towns
_really cold party scenes?
_dens of iniquity that should be torched?
_prisons for the insane?
_dens of monsters that should be blown to shit?
***
Inviting Klein the rekindled into his house with languid gestures that surely failed to disguise his anxiety, Framji Jijibhoi smiled in welcome as his wife Ushtavaity stood demurely in pale rose sari and white kerchief, silent, watchful. His hand did not extend to clasp the dead man’s. Somehow he could not bring himself to touch that pallid skin. Superstition thrummed in him, as always when he stood too near the object of his scholarly investigations, armored in sociological constructs made by default almost entirely at second hand. He knew how he must appear to his former colleague: Yes, he thought, I am a tall nosy intruder from the exoteric world, the neat Zoroastrian sociologist from a teemingly alien city, once Mumbai, again now Bombay under the picturesque resurgent Raj, more than half a world distant—in its ancient blend of living, dying, dead, imaginary reincarnated—from the Cold Towns and their palpably reborn.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Klein said. “The airline schedules these days…” The dead gave an apologetic shrug. Half a head shorter than his host, he had somehow acquired a force, a kind of mana, that Jijibhoi found exquisitely disturbing.
“No, no, come in, come in, Jorge.” Beyond the stilted entry deck, the galaxy of Los Angeles stretched its massed blaze against the darkness. “How kind of you to visit. I must confess that until your call I had not expected the pleasure of your company following your…transition.” He added hastily, babbling, “Despite the recent rise in tourism, deads are sighted so rarely outside your gated domains, you know. The tables are turned; my secondhand knowledge bows to your immersion at the life-death interface. But oh dear—” and he forced himself after all to take the dead’s hand, “we were so sorry to hear of the attack on Zion and the death, the, the second death of Sybille.”
“She is recovering, Framji. Her injuries were severe, but not beyond the healing powers of rekindling. But thank you for your concern. Madam Jijibhoi, how good to see you again, and how generous of you to invite me. Here, I brought a little Chassagne-Montrachet from the Cold Town cellars.”
“You are welcome, welcome, sir,” she murmured, bowing, “Thank you, we do enjoy a nice Chardonnay,” and immediately departed for the kitchen with the cooler-wrapped bottle.
“I have a hundred questions, dear friend. I hope you will not object too much if I seek to remedy my ignorance? But come, sit down at the table, my wife has prepared something for our supper, I hope you still share our fondness for baby goat marinated in red chillies?”
“I look forward to it. I have to confess, though, that my taste buds have not survived the transition in great abundance. It is as you predicted. We eat and drink mainly for nutrition. But your wife’s chillies—yes, I’m certain they will brighten my mouth.”
Ushta came to the dining room with the Chardonnay in an ice bucket, another bottle, opened, breathing, of Cabernet Sauvignon which Jijibhoi poured, then swiftly returned with bowls of dhan daar patio, rich with the odor of turmeric, dhan saak, its basmati rice thickened with vegetable daal, eggs on potatoes and spinach. Wine flowed. They ate, Klein with every appearance of appreciation, and Jijibhoi spoke of university politics, hilarious scandals of the sociology department, Klein’s reassignment as professor mortuus. They finished with ranginak, its wheaten biscuit flavored with dates, walnuts, ground pistachio, cardamom, cinnamon, washed down with hot, dark tea. The specter of this happy repast stripped of its tastes, its odors, its evoked memories filled the Parsee with horror and a renewed determination to avoid rekindling at all costs. Far better to lie at last in the walled Tower of Silence, parching in the hot sun, gnawed to the bone by vultures, than to abandon all the joys of the flesh and live forever in the half-life seated across the table from him.
“Let’s clean up this midden and move into the living room. We’ve still got lots to talk about.” They each carried plates and bowls and cutlery to the kitchen, although it fell to Ushtavaity to rinse and sort into the cleaner. Jijibhoi found snifters and a darkly luminous cut crystal decanter. He lowered the living room lamps so the galaxy of street lights and the true sky were visible through the windows, activated a hushed performance of the madrigals the deads favored. He poured brandy, Klein sipped, set the glass aside, waited patiently with that long and meaningless stare.
“I hope you don’t mind if I’m frightfully direct, Jorge.”
“You’re dying to have me dish the dirt,” Klein said. “So to speak. It’s fine, speak freely. We are old friends.”
“All right.” He found himself fidgeting; Ushta came in and settled herself gracefully in an armchair. “Last time we met, Jorge, you were frantic. Obsessed. In despair. You vanished to Africa—”
“Zanzibar.”
“Yes, yes. And died as mysteriously as Sybille, the first time she passed. And now, not all that much later, here you are. Serene, or at least relaxed. Not the bundle of jumpy nerves I recall.”
“Framji,” his wife said, in a warning tone.
“It’s fine, Madam Jijibhoi,” the dead man said. “Framji and I have already agreed—”
“Ushtavaity,” she said. “Ushta.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My name. Do you know, it’s extraordinary, we have never formally exchanged names. Please call me Ushta.”
“Why, thank you, Usht
a.” The bleak coolness in the man’s voice is an artifact of his condition, Jijibhoi told himself. He does not mean insult. Or does he? That desperate fool Dolorosa showed more passion than this, but of course he was an outcast from the Cold Towns. Who could say what such isolation might do to a man dead once to the living and rejected again by the dead?
“You know that my central interest is the social structure of rekindled society,” Jijibhoi said. “Less so the nuts and bolts. But really, it’s becoming clear that the mysteries quite literally embodied in the deads are the key to this emerging, parallel civilization in our midst. Yet we are denied knowledge of these mysteries and the technique by which dead warms are transformed into, well, living deads. I mean, the simplest things. Do you really age slowly, or not at all? The rumor accepted by the intelligentsia is that of course you are just slowed, aging retarded by a factor of 10 or 20, even as the crackpots of church, mosque, and gog shriek that you are deathless zombies and vampires. Obviously it’s too early to decide the matter by simple inspection. Yes, we’ll have our answer in a century or a millennium. But it would be much more obliging if you could just, you know, tell us.”
Coolly, Klein said, “In the last seven years, fifteen rekindled have been kidnapped and vivisected, according to our information.”
“These were the acts of unhinged rogues and terrorists,” Ushtavaity said, wringing her hands. “They were butchered on camera. We’ve all watched the stereos.”
“Eleven were butchered on camera. The other four were abducted and taken, according to our information, to black ops labs here and in Qatar. The governments involved are now familiar with the results of our advanced medical technology. They are certainly attempting to reverse-engineer it.” Klein sighed. “It won’t do them any good, of course.”
Jijibhoi doubted that or perhaps, he thought, he was stung by Klein’s arrogance. “Come now. They have access to the finest minds in the world. Neuroscientists, genomicists, specialists in epigenetics and the thermodynamics of nanotech. It can’t be that difficult. You are…living proof…of the technology.”
“True in principle. But it would take hundreds of years to digest what they’ve peeled out of our comrades.”
“But this is just assertion. Whistling, if you’ll forgive the expression, past the graveyard. Moore’s law, Jorge. Yes, it’s slowed to a snail’s pace, but the power of technology does still double and redouble. What could possibly prevent us from learning—”
“You don’t even know where the information came from, or who developed it. And it’s been fifteen years now.”
Jijibhoi felt his shoulders slump. Stalemate. It really was like quizzing a cultist. A wave of sadness moved through him.
“The Venter labs, presumably. Gates and Allen funding. NSA connectome cryptographers. Something like that. What matters is—”
“What matters, dear Framji,” Klein said with glacial certainty, “is the source of the information, not its implementation.”
Abruptly, the sour mood of exhaustion was dispelled. Fire rushed through his limbs. Jijibhoi leaned forward, and from the corner of his eye saw that his wife was also intent. “What source? What are you talking about?”
“I could require you both to sign a non-disclosure agreement with hefty penalties, but what I’m about to disclose would make such penalties chickenfeed. So I’ll simply trust you both,” Klein said. “They decrypted a message signal from space.” His dead eyes glittered. “From deep space.” He watched them closely, as if judging and recording their reactions. “From a star in the Andromeda galaxy.”
FIVE
“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”
Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
***
Hester Solomon and her husband Moshe collected Klein at Heathrow and they took an autonomic limo into London. Moshe was a British investment banker, specializing in South American stochastic arbitrage. His doctorate was in a field of mathematics so rarefied Klein could not even begin to understand its uses or principles. Hester, of course, was a good upper middle class Jewish wife and mother, as striking as her mother had been as a young woman. Sybille had introduced her to Moshe Solomon.
“Marjorie Morningstar,” Klein said, with a smile. They had both loved the literature of the mid-20th century as children: Wouk, Chaim Potok, Malamud, Roth. He waited until she stepped forward for a hug and quick kiss on the cheek.
“Asher Lev,” she retorted. Said warmly, he could not help thinking. Warm, a warm, a female warm. Far, a long long way to go. But that was Sound of Music, a different tale of love and persecution entirely.
“No artist I,” he demurred, as tradition required. “An apostate, that I’ll confess.”
In the spacious back of the limo, the eldest son, Eliezer, sat shyly beside his uncle Jorge and said almost nothing, in a refined transatlantic accent. The boy was in Harrow uniform, sans top hat and cane: pale gray trousers, white shirt with black silk tie, and dark blue jacket. In his lap was what Klein surmised was the classic straw boater. The very model of an upper-middle-class English schoolboy. If he was freaked out by the proximity of a dead, he did not allow his discomfort to show.
The adults exchanged mandatory words of sympathy, explanation and conjecture concerning Sybille’s state and its cause—had the fire-bombing been a venomous sectarian attack? A work of political terrorism? The expression of some internal factional dispute among the deads themselves? Klein quickly put an end to that. Police forces and security were looking diligently into the atrocity, but no, emphatically there was no slightest reason to suspect fractures within the closed world of the rekindled. This was no more than a slanderous attempt by media jackals to blacken the victims. “Like Hitler and the Reichstag,” suggested Eli, and an uncomfortable silence fell. Hester said, quickly, “Mom and dad are waiting for us at the hotel, Jorge. They flew in yesterday. It’s quite the meeting of the clans.”
Klein groaned. “So much for leaving the dead to bury the dead, as the Christians so prophetically put it. The parents declined to convey their bereavement when I called them with news of Sybille’s second death. That shiksa. Father all but hung up in my ear.”
“Well. Shiva was sat. You’re not only dead, Jorge, you’re dead. I’m sorry, it’s awful.”
“And yet they’re here, you say.”
Moshe told him in his rumbling voice, “They have seen you on TV, read your interviews. You have become a notable part of the cultural landscape, you know.”
“And they want to shut me up.”
Hester glanced at the 12-year-old. “This should wait.”
“Don’t mind me,” Eli said with a crafty grin. “The other chaps and I can’t see what all the fuss is about, really. Well, Luton had a few snarky things to say but I soon set him straight.” He rubbed the knuckles of his right fist on his trousered knee, and gave his uncle a bland look. Klein laughed softly.
“Good for you, kid. We deads need a few more people like you in our corner.”
The driverless car dropped them at the Montagu Place Hotel, where a slender Pakistani porter took his minimal luggage.
“Not five star, Jorge,” Moshe said apologetically, “but those are getting rather stuffy about…”
“Dead Jews.”
“Not quite. Live Jews have no trouble getting a suite at Claridge’s or the Langham. It’s an old-fashioned city in many respects. The traditional bigotries pass eventually, making way for the new.”
Moshe checked them in and took the boy up to the Solomons’ small suite. Hester led Klein into a snug bar where his parents sat drinking vodka and trying not to look uncomfortable. Sybille’s parents sat across from them, utterly at ease. British consular diplomats interfaced with the Foreign Service of the Department of State, George and Anna Palmer were currently
binational attaches at Brussels. He had not seen them during their quick visit to Zion Cold Town following their daughter’s medical crisis, but he had exchanged brief messages, explaining that Sybille would probably recover completely from her brutal ordeal. Now he shook their hands as everyone rose, hugged his mother, bowed to the cold countenance of his unyielding father.
“I’m glad to find you well, sir.”
“Since you’re here, you might as well find a seat.” It was closest the old man could come to a concession.
“Thank you. Mother, you look lovely.”
“My handsome son!”
Formulae, unreeling the clichés. Clowns, it was true, they were all clowns. Endless emptiness. Sundered. Yet the pain was gone, he realized. If there was no joy in this reunion, neither was there grief nor anger nor the old demand for acknowledgment. Alive, he had been broken until Sybille healed him, or rather he and Sybille colluded in a mutual embrace that excluded the sting of such rejection. She died, impossibly she died; he was not merely broken again but desolate, driven by a need that choked his heart and made him a mad thing, obsessed and futile. And now, he saw finally, all that anguish was drained away. He felt nothing for these people, no love, no yearning for acceptance, even as he felt no animosity nor resentment. He was free.
And it meant nothing at all.
“Can I get anyone another drink,” Klein said.
***
In an atmosphere at once chilly and desperately contained, Moshe called them a limo and instructed it to bear all eight of them the 16 kilometers to Gants Hill. “Not Orthodox, Reformed—but they keep kosher,” he promised. There was a palpable breach in the lowering mood when the name of the restaurant-pub was revealed, antique gold against smoky oak: Bangers & Mashugana. Eli laughed out loud. “Bangers and mash! What an outrage!”
“I don’t even know what that is,” Klein told the boy. “Not kippers steeped in their own haggis, I hope.”
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