This time he awoke instantly.
The pseudo-memory of his post-biostasis dream clung like a rancid film.
Oh. Oh. Oh.
Gasping, he surged up, flung himself from the catafalque. Hands of attendants reached in alarm to prevent him from falling, but Klein was on his hands and knees, staring wildly, seeking a place to hide. His broken mouth! His ribs! His brutalized balls! Crawling from the light, cowering beneath the floating catafalque, he covered his head, touched his tender mouth. His teeth were intact. Wait, wait. No aching in his balls, no contusions or fractures. Why would they impose this horror upon him? He crept out into the large green room, watched by two women and a man. They seemed concerned. Yes, yes, a fantasy, that was all. Something he’d imposed upon himself, no doubt. His specialty study, after all, corroding the depths of his unconscious, the Nazi era of the twentieth. Or some residual guilt. For what? It had not been he who bombed those so-called holy places, smashing them from space.
But that must have happened decades ago. He was…on…Mars? No, the gravity was wrong. Earthlike. Exactly Earthlike. Seeking some scrap of dignity, he got to his feet.
“Dead sir,” said an attendant, “du need not fear us.”
“No,” he said. They were warms, but something had changed in them, some change deep and strange. He covered his face for a moment of consolidation. No beard. They had shaved him, depilated him. Patting, probing, he found a fine thick bush of hair on his scalp, hanging down his neck, like the very non-military coiffure of the male attendant. “All right. Very well. Where is this place? What is the date?”
“Many passed by. No know exactamund. Where is your departure date? What jahr?”
Klein stared. “How could you not know? I was in a machine, a biostasis chamber, they called it. Isn’t there a…a calendar? A data display? A small rectangle with changing numbers in red light or something?”
“So sorry, Meister Dead. No access to biostationary records, all lost in the Disruption.”
The Smash-Up, yes. All the possible wars. Klein groaned. The stupidity of it all. He could not believe it had been occasioned solely by resentment of the rekindling process, envy for what its beneficiaries had created. Who was to say that the deads were not a scapegoat after all? Yet surely the power source required to shunt whole asteroids from orbit and target them at select sites on Earth—that had to be the technology of the Conclave, or some heretical splinter group. He groaned again.
“You must have some idea. Decades? Centuries?”
“Hundreds jahren, certes.” The others nodded their speculative agreement. “Two hundred. Three.” A hand wave.
Klein sank into a gray place.
The woman with streaks in her dark cropped hair was asking him meaningless questions. “Which was your god? Scuzi, that is your gog. And magog.”
“No god, no gog,” he said bleakly. “Magog, for sure. He tore up the world, last time I was there.”
They did not grasp his allusion, shrugged at each other. “Your name, good being? Some records remain, we might find more on your interrupted life course.”
“Call me Ishi,” he said bitterly.
“Ah!” The man was delighted. “Old remnant document. ‘Call me Ishmael.’”
“Close, but no biscuit,” Klein said. That dreadful dream. It could have been his grandfather’s life and pitiless death, except that his family had escaped the iron heel in time. “Ishi was the last member of the Yahi, and they were the last surviving sept of the Californian Yana people. Back at the start of the twentieth. Taken in hand by Kroeber and Waterman. You don’t want to know about this.”
“A jest, a pun, a play of nominalism! Most delightful!” This second young woman was a vivid redhead, curls piled up on curls. Her body was succulent, clad in bright chrome-yellow. Looking at her, he felt nothing.
“And what am I to call you people?”
The man smiled sunnily. “I, Jesus.” Hay-Zeus. The dark haired woman said, “I, Mary.” With the cutest little bow, the girl, the young woman, told him, “I, Joseph.”
Klein burst out laughing. “You’re shitting me.”
“Assuredly not, sir. We adopt these nominations from your mystery book, to render du the more at ease.”
“It hasn’t worked. For one thing, Joseph is a man’s name.”
The redhead cocked her head like a puzzled Pomeranian. “Names have no gender, sire. But we still await your true nomenclature.”
“Jorge Klein,” he said. “Klein is my surname.”
“Ah, so! Sir Klein!”
“No, no, just Klein. Never mind.” These ninnies were as much fun as a barrel of eels. “And you, you’re what we termed warms, back in my day. Whenever that was.”
“Not especially close to identical,” the man told him. “We have the augments, as do all. All but the deads, of whom there are, du know, hardly no more no more. Du are our precious, however contemptible.”
Rekindling, they explained, was now seen as a frightful horror, worse than foot-binding or genital mutilation, worse even than lobotomy.
“They gave some man a Nobel prize for inventing lobotomy, you know,” Klein said, mouth twisted. “Or probably you don’t.”
“It is noway noble to cut open a head or poke through the eye, ruining the tissues. There was awards for this barbarity?”
“Only the one,” Klein reassured him. “I believe it was revoked.”
“Du have one of these Noble Prizes?”
“I could have been a contender,” Klein said.
“But it was done to du, speaking in the manner of a synecdoche. Or mayhap a metonymy.”
Chill through his dead flesh. “What? What?” Without intention, his hands again went at once to his head, probing, pressing his eyes and the sockets holding them. “You’re lying.”
“For no reason would we, sir Ishi. Du are a dead. Du suffered the notorious ‘drying out’ following your revival.”
“Yes. We all did. Part of the procedure. It’s a metaphor. Quite possibly it’s a synecdoche, or mayhap a metonymy. Moths and butterflies. Do you have them now? Have all the beasts been exterminated on Earth? They creep from their pupas and cocoons, altogether changed, wet with the slime of transformation. They dry out. Simile with us.” His tongue caught. He realized that despite his long, long sleep (how long? How long?), he was exhausted. Carefully, he said, “I mean similarly.”
“No, no, for what precedes drying? Why, washing. The washing of the brain. Du was programmed like an old clanker robot, sir.”
“What? Nonsense.” Oh Christ. Oh my god.
“Yes, du see, your language menus reset from without. How to fast dead talk. Prohibitions on sexuality. No children. Too large a population otherwise. Very slick. Now we all do that fast talk, du might have noticed, but with our optional implants. Us warms are enhanced, see it?”
It crushed his spirit. For these years since his rekindling, meaninglessness had been his companion, but this was intolerable, unsustainable. He sagged, and the bright woman caught him under the right arm. He flinched away (the Capo! The Jew-killer!), then let her ease him back on his catafalque. The world, the worlds, had shrunk to a series of small clean well-lighted hospital recovery rooms. So he was not just dead, he was an automaton. Pre-programmed for the long empty life of a dead. Drowning again, this time awake. He sought for something to cling to.
“But the war is over?” he said, and heard an unaccustomed plaintive note in his voice. “The warms and the dead are at peace once more?”
All three laughed. “Oh, no no,” Jesus said “By no means, Mr. Ishi. Mr. Klein. Such enmity is not so easily quelled.” The man took up his hand. “But we have great hopes for du, sir. We ask du to intervene with the voices from Andromeda nebula.” He blinked. “Scuzi, galaxy.”
But Klein was not listening. A child. He was not sterile, then. Not impotent. Not a sexless thing. Or if he was, it was a constraint imposed upon him by the Guidefathers and the sons of bitches running the Conclave. He might break fre
e. He might father a daughter, or a son. If the beings from Andromeda permitted it. For surely they were the puppet masters. Whoever they were. Whatever. He whirled in gray interior space, groped for meaning, for sense, for purpose.
“Voices,” he said, then. “What voices? How could we understand aliens?” It had always been the sticking point. Claims of cyphering, hypercomputers, Gödel coding—none of it was ultimately persuasive. Eppur si muove. And yet it moves. We have the technology.
“Not all alien,” said Joseph. “Some of them are human voices, pojąć? From the future.”
And theatrically, operatically, a tremendous gonging strikes the air, slams the floor. Those fantastical images of bombardment and carnage flare again in Klein’s mind. His daughter Tree.
“We’re under attack,” Mary said, and the three warms went into a huddle. No doubt bolts of energy pulsed between their brains, their rewired neurons, and every other warm in the building. Another immense shock flung them off their feet. The three rolled like circus acrobats, were on their toes in moments. Klein lay where he had fallen, rubbing his bruised elbow.
“Where are we?” he said with what he considered admirable restraint. “And who’s trying to kill us?”
They looked at him fishily. “Approaching the Andromeda vinculum mouth, du did not dig this? The precise location for your undertaking. To speak for all, as a relict of the evenements.”
Klein closed his eyes. He felt very old and useless.
“So I’m still on a spaceship. An attack ship under fire off the shoulder of Orion, I suppose.”
Joseph placed a comforting hand on his cheek. “Nobody transports so far as yet. We remain above the ecliptic, beyond the Oort Cloud.”
“So who the hell is firing on us?”
“Why, can’t you pursue elementary logic, sir Klein? Your last companionables, obviously. The deads on board the pioneer starship Tell Me Not, In Mournful Numbers, stationed at the vinculum. Now we must answer that message with one less harmful. When they learn that you are with us, they shall abandon their fusillade, certes.” She shut her eyes, reached with her left hand for Mary and her right for Jesus. The gravity switched off, and they ascended in a Coriolis curve from the rolling deck, with Klein, like a small flock of wingless angels.
***
Deep space was truly black, and through the unreflecting bubble the Milky Way was a wide, thick band of brightness. In every direction, points of gemlike light. Klein had expected to find his vision adjusted to the faint interior illumination of the transfer bubble—that miracle of field forces centuries in advance of his own lost time—but somehow the clarity was electrifying. Behind him, the complex shape of the warms’ vessel was itself a dozen curved mirrors flinging back starlight. Ahead, the starship of the deads (or was it a blended crew of the dead and the quick? he could not be sure) resembled a finless fish, smooth as black ice in the blackness, rimmed by forces that pulsed almost fast enough to make an uninterrupted glow. And beyond that enormous vehicle, a hanging indigo shape like the manifestation of a tesseract, a rotating impossible object in five or six or thirteen dimensions: the throat of the vinculum created two million years ago by the beings in Andromeda.
It is a phallus, Klein thought. Readying itself to plunge into the yoni of the vinculum. How banal. How inevitable.
“So that thing is going to rocket into—”
“No no, no reaction forces. They use a method. Du would not understand.”
Nettled, Klein said, “Just keep it simple.”
“Oh, like a kinder learning, yes, very good. They employ a strong symplectic homeomorphism. With this—”
Klein gritted his teeth. “Simple, Joseph.”
“But this is elementary. Your Hamiltonian spaceology on its own isotopies are generalized to an intrinsic symplectic topology on the space of symplectic isotopies, obviously.” The young woman gazed at him guilelessly in the darkness, her features limned by starlight. “By coupling to the—”
“Stop,” Klein said. “Just stop.”
Abruptly a glistening bubble came from the star-strewn darkness, hesitated athwart their own, merged. Klein’s ears popped. Four humans stepped forward. One of them he knew at once, hardly changed by the centuries. Perhaps he had slept in stasis as well. Yet was there not an added quality of gravitas to the man, a sense of calm self-worth as he stepped forward and took Klein’s hand?
“Hi. We’re gonna take a little trip. You up for that, doc?” Dolorosa said, and grinned like an avuncular rodent.
Huffing out a cough of amusement, Klein said, “You advised me rather a long time ago not to ask deads a direct question.”
“Things change, Klein. Things change.”
That, too, echoed like some refrain from his lost history. The little Customs man, was it? Barwani. Tags of who he had been, his ignorance, his hopeless and stupid obsession, clung like barnacles washed by brackish waters. Things change. Yet now that he looked at the dead standing beside Dolorosa, he realized with a jolt how utterly that was true.
“Mi-Yun,” he said. “They’d told me you were—”
“Deaxed? Not all of us. Who were the ones you knew? Francine, perhaps? Tom? Those were deaccessioned during the crisis. Didn’t you have a wife once? Gone also. Quite a few of us survived, though, as you see. Let me introduce you to representatives of our crew. This is—”
The names of the warms fell into his ears, and he let them slip away. He went through to their section of the conjoined bubble.
“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, sir Klein. Carry our wishes to the future, to Andromeda. Well faring!”
And falling into the blackness, toward the phallic fish, the ichthyphallic starship. He sniggered. Too much, too much. Another galaxy! Rhodomontades of Wagner, Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, for Christ sakes, he needed Teutonic bombast again. Was he embarking on the Flying Dutchman? Fated to wander the lonely cosmos for eternity, dead, dead, dead, dead?
“Come on, old fellow,” Dolorosa was saying. Their bubble had passed now into the belly of the beast. Busy crew went by with no great evidence of curiosity. In an elevator they ascended to an expanse Klein took to be the control center, or perhaps merely an entertainment alcove, two men and a woman on padded chairs, signally bare of consoles and keypads and swipe bars. Augmented warms, he reminded himself. No doubt they fly this thing by thought, by the flight of entangled electrons from brain to brain to picotechnological hypercomputer navigation systems. He halted.
“This is the commander of the Andromeda mission,” Dolorosa said. “Captain Lucius Olanrewaju.”
“Excuse me, Captain,” Klein said, the words tight between his teeth. He was angry, angry, and this unaccustomed access of emotion seemed beyond his power to contain it. “This is not the moment,” he ground out. “Take me away, please.”
Mi-Yun, the changed Mi-Yun, understood at once. Murmuring to the warms, who smiled, bobbed their machine-laden heads, she departed gracefully with Klein, leaving Dolorosa to follow after them, his glance sardonic.
“How long will this trip take?” Klein asked her in the passageway. Two million years in biostasis? He thought. The dreams, the terrible dreams. That prospect was intolerable. Yet to remain awake and deathless for such eons…Worse still.
“Perhaps a millennium,” Mi-Yun told him. “It will be painless, Jorge.”
“And you wanted me…why?”
“You know why,” Dolorosa said. “This was your vocation. You are to be the Apostle. The Ambassador.”
“To the warms, Jamal Hakim said.”
“Not only to them. To the aliens of Andromeda. They’re waiting for you, sport.”
“How can they know anything about me? How can you know anything about them?”
“You’re muddled in the old errors,” Mi-Yun said. “We know better now. Causality is tangled, entangled. Strictly, you see, there is no causality, only correlation.”
Stupid abstractions. But yes, finally everything was an abstraction. Empty circularity. This never-ending em
ptiness, ruin. Not even yearning, not even disgust. Mi-Yun mistook his blank stare for intellectual engagement. She added, “It is the Shoup Scholium. Quantum entropy showed that measurement is a unitary three-interaction. No collapse, no fundamental randomness. Influence is equal between past and future, as perceived by us.” Again he drifted away. Superposition, entanglement, measurement, locality, causality.
“Yes, Mi-Yun, whatever you say. I will do as you require, but on one condition.”
The two deads, paused, watched him carefully. Did they know already? If past and future were paths one could travel in either direction, they might well have knowledge of his perverse desire. But their expressions conveyed neither revulsion nor excitement. Dolorosa was a scofflaw of old, he might raise no objection. But Mi-Yun—
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