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

languages—not merely English, French, and German, but also Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujerati, Farsi, the tongues of Jijibhoi’s polyglot upbringing among the tiny Parsee colony of Bombay, a community in which no language once cherished was ever discarded. Pushing aside a stack of dog-eared professional journals, he drew forth a glistening picture-cube, activated its inner light with a touch of his thumb, and handed it to Klein.
    The sharp, dazzling holographic image showed three figures on a broad grassy plain that seemed to have no limits and was without trees, boulders, or other visual interruptions, an endlessly unrolling green carpet under a blank death-blue sky. Zacharias stood at the left, his face averted from the camera; he was looking down, tinkering with the action of an enormous rifle. At the far right stood a stocky, powerful-looking dark-haired man whose pale, harsh-featured face seemed all beard and nostrils. Klein recognized him: Anthony Gracchus, one of the deads who had accompanied Sybille to Zanzibar. Sybille stood beside him, clad in khaki slacks and a crisp white blouse. Gracchus’ arm was extended; evidently he had just pointed out a target to her, and she was intently aiming a gun nearly as big as Zacharias’.
    Klein shifted the cube about, studying her face from various angles, and the sight of her made his fingers grow thick and clumsy, his eyelids to quiver. Jijibhoi had spoken truly: she had lost none of her beauty. Yet she was not at all the Sybille he had known. When he had last seen her, lying in her casket, she had seemed to be a flawless marble image of herself, and she had that same surreal statuary appearance now. Her face was an expressionless mask, calm, remote, aloof; her eyes were glossy mysteries; her lips registered a faint, enigmatic, barely perceptible smile. It frightened him to behold her this way, so alien, so unfamiliar. Perhaps it was the intensity of her concentration that gave her that forbidding marmoreal look, for she seemed to be pouring her entire being into the task of taking aim. By tilting the cube more extremely, Klein was able to see what she was aiming at: a strange awkward bird moving through the grass at the lower left, a bird larger than a turkey, round as a sack, with ash-gray plumage, a whitish breast and tail, yellow-white wings, and short, comical yellow legs. Its head was immense and its black bill ended in a great snubbed hook. The creature seemed solemn, rather dignified, and faintly absurd; it showed no awareness that its doom was upon it. How odd that Sybille should be about to kill it, she who had always detested the taking of life: Sybille the huntress now, Sybille the lunar goddess, Sybille-Diana!
    Shaken, Klein looked up at Jijibhoi and said, “Where was this taken? On that safari in Tanzania, I suppose.”
    “Yes. In February. This man is the guide, the white hunter.”
    “I saw him in Zanzibar. Gracchus, his name is. He was one of the deads traveling with Sybille.”
    “He operates a hunting preserve not far from Kilimanjaro,” Jijibhoi said, “that is set aside exclusively for the use of the deads. One of the more bizarre manifestations of their subculture, actually. They hunt only those animals which—”
    Klein said impatiently, “How did you get this picture?”
    “It was taken by Nerita Tracy, who is one of your wife’s companions.”
    “I met her in Zanzibar too. But how—”
    “A friend of hers is an acquaintance of mine, one of my informants, in fact, a valuable connection in my researches. Some months ago I asked him if he could obtain something like this for me. I did not tell him, of course, that I meant it for you.” Jijibhoi looked close. “You seem troubled, dear friend.”
    Klein nodded. He shut his eyes as though to protect them from the glaring surfaces of Sybille’s photograph. Eventually he said in a flat, toneless voice, “I have to get to see her.”
    “Perhaps it would be better for you if you would