Free Beyond the Doors of Death by Robert Silverberg, Damien Broderick Page A

frigid, hostile, remote, a terrifying contradiction. “I’ve been sent to bring you to the lodging-place. Come: your car.”
    Other than to give directions, Pablo spoke only three times during the five-minute drive. “Here is the rekindling house,” he said. A five-story building, as inviting as a hospital, with walls of dark bronze and windows black as onyx. “This is Guidefather’s house,” Pablo said a moment later. A modest brick building, like a rectory, at the edge of a small park. And, finally: “This is where you will stay. Enjoy your visit.” Abruptly he got out of the car and walked rapidly away.
    ***
    This was the house of strangers, the hotel for visiting deads, a long low cinderblock structure, functional and unglamorous, one of the least seductive buildings in this city of stark disagreeable buildings. However else it might be with the deads, they clearly had no craving for fancy architecture. A voice out of a data screen in the spartan lobby assigned him to a room: a white-walled box, square, high of ceiling. He had his own toilet, his own data screen, a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, a modest closet, a small window that gave him a view of a neighboring building just as drab as this. Nothing had been said about rental; perhaps he was a guest of the city. Nothing had been said about anything. It seemed that he had been accepted. So much for Jijibhoi’s gloomy assurance that he would instantly be found out, so much for Dolorosa’s insistence that they would have his number in ten minutes or less. He had been in Zion Cold Town for half an hour. Did they have his number?
    ***
    “Eating isn’t important among us,” Dolorosa had said.
    “But you do eat?”
    “Of course we eat. It just isn’t important .”
    It was important to Klein, though. Not haute cuisine, necessarily, but some sort of food, preferably three times a day. He was getting hungry now. Ring for room service? There were no servants in this city. He turned to the data screen. Dolorosa’s first rule: Never ask a direct question. Surely that didn’t apply to the data screen, only to his fellow deads. He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer. Still, the voice behind the screen might not be that of a computer after all, so he tried to employ the oblique, elliptical conversational style that Dolorosa said the deads favored among themselves:
    “Dinner?”
    “Commissary.”
    “Where?”
    “Central Four,” said the screen.
    Central Four? All right. He would find the way. He changed into fresh clothing and went down the long vinyl-floored hallway to the lobby. Night had come; street lamps were glowing; under cloak of darkness the city’s ugliness was no longer so obtrusive, and there was even a kind of controlled beauty about the brutal regularity of its streets.
    The streets were unmarked, though, and deserted. Klein walked at random for ten minutes, hoping to meet someone heading for the Central Four commissary. But when he did come upon someone, a tall and regal woman well advanced in years, he found himself incapable of approaching her. ( Never ask a direct question. Never lean on anybody’s arm. ) He walked alongside her, in silence and at a distance, until she turned suddenly to enter a house. For ten minutes more he wandered alone again. This is ridiculous, he thought: dead or warm, I’m a stranger in town, I should be entitled to a little assistance. Maybe Dolorosa was just trying to complicate things. On the next corner, when Klein caught sight of a man hunched away from the wind, lighting a cigarette, he went boldly over to him. “Excuse me, but—”
    The other looked up. “Klein?” he said. “Yes. Of course. Well, so you’ve made the crossing too!”
    He was one of Sybille’s Zanzibar companions, Klein realized. The quick-eyed, sharp-edged one—Mortimer. A member of her pseudo-familial grouping, whatever that might be. Klein stared sullenly at him. This had to be the moment