Beyond the Doors of Death by Robert Silverberg, Damien Broderick Read Free Book Online

such an intensive survey of it?”
    Jijibhoi looked genuinely amazed. “What? Are you saying one must have personal allegiance to the subject of one’s field of scholarship?” He laughed. “You are of Jewish birth, I think, and yet your doctoral thesis was concerned, was it not, with the early phases of the Third Reich?”
    Klein winced. “Touché!”
    “I find the subculture of the deads irresistible, as a sociologist,” Jijibhoi went on. “To have such a radical new aspect of human existence erupt during one’s career is an incredible gift. There is no more fertile field for me to investigate. Yet I have no wish, none at all, ever to deliver myself up for rekindling. For me, my wife, it will be the Towers of Silence, the hot sun, the obliging vultures—and finis, the end, no more, terminus.”
    “I had no idea you felt this way. I suppose if I’d known more about Parsee theology, I might have realized—”
    “You misunderstand. Our objections are not theological. It is that we share a wish, an idiosyncratic whim, not to continue beyond the allotted time. But also I have serious reservations about the impact of rekindling on our society. I feel a profound distress at the presence among us of these deads, I feel a purely private fear of these people and the culture they are creating, I feel even an abhorrence for—” Jijibhoi cut himself short. “Your pardon. That was perhaps too strong a word. You see how complex my attitudes are toward this subject, my mixture of fascination and repulsion? I exist in constant tension between those poles. But why do I tell you all this, which if it does not disturb you, must surely bore you? Let us hear about your journey to Zanzibar.”
    “What can I say? I went, I waited a couple of weeks for her to show up, I wasn’t able to get near her at all, and I came home. All the way to Africa and I never even had a glimpse of her.”
    “What a frustration, dear Jorge!”
    “She stayed in her hotel room. They wouldn’t let me go upstairs to her.”
    “They?”
    “Her entourage,” Klein said. “She was traveling with four other deads, a woman and three men. Sharing her room with the archaeologist, Zacharias. He was the one who shielded her from me, and did it very cleverly, too. He acts as though he owns her. Perhaps he does. What can you tell me, Framji? Do the deads marry? Is Zacharias her new husband?”
    “It is very doubtful. The terms ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ are not in use among the deads. They form relationships, yes, but pair-bonding seems to be uncommon among them, possibly altogether unknown. Instead they tend to create supportive pseudo-familial groupings, of three or four or even more individuals, who—”
    “Do you mean that all four of her companions in Zanzibar are her lovers?”
    Jijibhoi gestured eloquently. “Who can say? If you mean in a physical sense, I doubt it, but one can never be sure. Zacharias seems to be her special companion, at any rate. Several of the others may be part of her pseudo-family also, or all, or none. I have reason to think that at certain times every dead may claim a familial relationship to all others of his kind. Who can say? We perceive the doings of these people, as they say, through a glass, darkly.”
    “I don’t see Sybille even that well. I don’t even know what she looks like now.”
    “She has lost none of her beauty.”
    “So you’ve told me before. But I want to see her myself. You can’t really comprehend, Framji, how much I want to see her. The pain I feel, not able—”
    “Would you like to see her right now?”
    Klein shook in a convulsion of amazement. “What? What do you mean? Is she—”
    “Hiding in the next room? No, no, nothing like that. But I do have a small surprise for you. Come into the library.” Smiling expansively, Jijibhoi led the way from the dining room to the small study adjoining it, a room densely packed from floor to ceiling with books in an astonishing range of