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

when his imposture would be exposed, for only some six weeks had passed since he had argued with Mortimer in the gardens of Sybille’s Zanzibar hotel, not nearly enough time for someone to have died and been rekindled and gone through his drying-off. But a moment passed and Mortimer said nothing. At length Klein said, “I just got here. Pablo showed me to the house of strangers and now I’m looking for the commissary.”
    “Central Four? I’m going there myself. How lucky for you.” No sign of suspicion in Mortimer’s face. Perhaps an elusive smile revealed his awareness that Klein could not be what he claimed to be. Keep in mind that to a dead the whole universe is plastic, it’s all only a joke. “I’m waiting for Nerita,” Mortimer said. “We can all eat together.”
    Klein said heavily, “I was rekindled in Albany Cold Town. I’ve just emerged.”
    “How nice,” Mortimer said.
    Nerita Tracy stepped out of a building just beyond the corner—a slim, athletic-looking woman, about forty, with short reddish-brown hair. As she swept toward them, Mortimer said, “Here’s Klein, who we met in Zanzibar. Just rekindled, out of Albany.”
    “Sybille will be amused.”
    “Is she in town?” Klein blurted.
    Mortimer and Nerita exchanged sly glances. Klein felt abashed. Never ask a direct question. Damn Dolorosa!
    Nerita said, “You’ll see her before long. Shall we go to dinner?”
    ***
    The commissary was less austere than Klein had expected: actually quite an inviting restaurant, elaborately constructed on five or six levels divided by lustrous dark hangings into small, secluded dining areas. It had the warm, rich look of a tropical resort.
    But the food, which came automat-style out of revolving dispensers, was prefabricated and cheerless—another jarring contradiction. Only a joke, friend, only a joke. In any case he was less hungry than he had imagined at the hotel. He sat with Mortimer and Nerita, picking at his meal, while their conversation flowed past him at several times the speed of thought. They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in periphrastics and aposiopeses, in a style abundant in chiasmus, metonymy, meiosis, oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much doubt was their intention. Now and again they would dart from a thicket of indirection to skewer him with a quick corroborative stab: Isn’t that so, they would say, and he would smile and nod, nod and smile, saying, Yes, yes, absolutely. Did they know he was a fake, and were they merely playing with him, or had they, somehow, impossibly, accepted him as one of them? So subtle was their style that he could not tell. A very new member of the society of the rekindled, he told himself, would be nearly as much at sea here as a warm in deadface.
    Then Nerita said—no verbal games, this time—“You still miss her terribly, don’t you?”
    “I do. Some things evidently never perish.”
    “Everything perishes,” Mortimer said. “The dodo, the aurochs, the Holy Roman Empire, the T’ang Dynasty, the walls of Byzantium, the language of Mohenjo-daro.”
    “But not the Great Pyramid, the Yangtze, the coelacanth, or the skullcap of Pithecanthropus,” Klein countered. “Some things persist and endure. And some can be regenerated. Lost languages have been deciphered. I believe the dodo and the aurochs are hunted in a certain African park in this very era.”
    “Replicas,” Mortimer said.
    “Convincing replicas. Simulations as good as the original.”
    “Is that what you want?” Nerita asked.
    “I want what’s possible to have.”
    “A convincing replica of lost love?”
    “I might be willing to settle for five minutes of conversation with her.”
    “You’ll have it. Not tonight. See? There she is. But don’t bother her now.” Nerita nodded across the gulf in the center of the restaurant; on the far side, three levels up from where they sat, Sybille and Kent Zacharias had