Beyond the Doors of Death (20 page)

T
EN

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 vitro
, 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.

“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.