Australian writer, editor, futurist, and critic Damien Broderick, a senior fellow in the School of Cultural Communications at the University of Melboune, made his first sale in 1964 to John Carnell’s anthology New Writings in SF 1. In the decades that followed, he kept up a steady stream of fiction, nonfiction, futurist speculations, and critical work that has won him multiple Ditmar and Aurealis awards. He sold his first novel, Sorcerer’s World, in 1970; it was later reissued in a rewritten version in the United States as The Black Grail. Broderick’s other books include the novels The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala, Transmitters, Striped Holes, and The White Abacus. His many short stories have been collected in A Man Returned, The Dark Between the Stars, Uncle Bones: Four Science Fiction Novellas, and, most recently, The Qualia Engine: Science Fiction Stories. He also wrote: the visionary futurist classic The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technology, a critical study of science fiction; Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction; edited the nonfiction anthology Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge; and edited the SF anthology Earth Is But a Star: Excursions Through Science Fiction to the Far Future and three anthologies of Australian science fiction, The Zeitgeist Machine, Strange Highways, and Matilda at the Speed of Light. His most recent publication is a nonfiction book written with Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985–2010, the novel Quipu, and the novels Human’s Burden with Rory Barnes and Post Mortal Syndrome with Barbara Lamar.

  1

  We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related.

  —Henry Miller, Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion

  “I am called Dr. Imam Hassan Sabbāh,” said the man in the Islamic skullcap, a white embroidered taqiyah. “You may address me as Guidefather, Professor Klein.”

  Klein uttered the vocable denoting “Thank you, sir” in the register of submission. Even now, after these months as a dead, he remained surprised by his fluency in the swift argot shared by his postmortem fellows. Had he learned it, in the way children acquire a vernacular, simply by interacting with other deads, being in their midst, listening to their conversation, climbing a ladder from baby-simple to adult-complexified? No. After an initial week or two of confusion and difficulty in San Diego Cold Town, the new language had emerged spontaneously from his lips, driven presumably by some immense rearrangement of grammar and lexicon from Spanish, English, German, French, his linguistic X-bar trees. All that apparatus of speech and thought tucked away inside the folds of his revived brain. But when had it occurred, this Rosetta Stone of the reborn, this downloaded Berlitz course? He assumed it must have been a side effect of rekindling, or perhaps (was this too paranoiac?) it had been literally stamped upon his vulnerable defunct cortex during the four unconscious weeks in suspension and repair following his death. All he knew for sure was that he and this Muslim Guidefather were equally glib in their accelerated and concise tongue.

  “I am here at the invitation of your staff, but nothing has been explained,” he added. “How may I serve the Conclave?” Five tonal phonemes. However it had been done, it was an impressive accomplishment.

  “You are a gifted man, Jorge. It seems that you resist the temptation of ennui, cafard, the sport of absurdity, indulgence in the iconography of mortality.”

  “A temptation gladly acceded to by my wife, Sybille,” Klein said, bored by the words even as he spoke. No resentment. It was as remarkable, in its way, as his magical acquisition of the music of the dead. Had they rewired his amygdala, his emotional keyboard, his flux of neurotransmitters? No doubt, but Klein knew himself the merest amateur in the sciences of cognition and neurology. Such speculations were useless, then, as well as dull. Still, some small part of his well-trained mind gnawed at the question and its implications. He could not be bothered trying to still it.

  “Your ex-wife,” said the Guidefather. A sharp one-syllable rebuke. You have been here long enough to know better than that, Klein, the man did not need to say.

  “Yes, yes. All bonds broken, I am fully aware of this. Perhaps I resent her flight from all responsibility.” The words clattered in his mouth. Really, he didn’t care what Sybille did. His obsession with her was expunged, their obliterated decade, their lost Jorge-and-Sybille. Wasn’t it?

  “The transition of the rekindled leaves us stranded in absurdity,” Sabbāh said, as if it were an admission. Klein watched him, surprised. The man’s hands lay flat on his thighs; his mouth, through the beard and mustache, suggested a restrained amusement. “Yet we have built the Cold Towns from nothing, we conduct our battles with the pests of the Treasury and Internal Revenue, we pursue our research and marketing. We are not monks, withdrawn from the world, even when we withdraw from the world into our sanctuaries. You follow me.”

  “I believe so. You hope to enlist me as … how should I put it … middle management.”

  Sabbāh smiled. “Not quite, Professor. As an emissary, eventually. For now, as an Acolyte. Better yet, an Adjutant. The Conclave wishes you to reenter the world of the warms and learn in detail how we are regarded. What risks we face. How we might best advance our cause and pursue our goals.”

  Do not ask direct questions, Klein recalled. Dolorosa’s advice, that shabby outcast. Still, though that edict now seemed entirely natural and proper, he forced himself.

  “And what are those goals, Guidefather?”

  “You will learn this in good time.” The man rose, made no attempt to take Jorge Klein’s hand. “That will be all for now. We shall dine this evening in the Rojo Diablo restaurant at eight. You will be prompt.”

  Irritated, Klein remained seated. “You presume too easily, Guidefather.”

  “You were dead, now you walk. Payment is due to your fellows.”

  “My insurance covered your hefty fee for my rekindling. For my ex-wife’s also. Now the Conclave holds attached all my assets—my property, my savings, my future income. You can ask no more.”

  Hassan Sabbāh walked to the door, opened it, stood waiting for Klein to rise.

  “You have paid in the currency of the living,” he said. “Now we seek your cooperation, freely given. Nothing will be forced or extorted. Good morning, Dr. Klein. I shall see you tonight.”

  “Very well,” Klein said, and rose. He followed Sabbāh into the dreary, unornamented hallway. In silence, they parted at an intersection and he made his way to his simple room. His breathing remained calm, the infusion of respirocytes flooded through his vascular system carrying oxygen to his renovated and reconstructed brain, along with its unknown cargo of neuromodulators. You are dead, he thought. And now you walk. You are without family or spouse, except for this company of the deceased. Yes, your parents remain alive, and your sister Hester, and your cousins in America and Argentina, but to them you are truly dead. They have sat shiva for seven days in your memory, and now to them you are as good as buried, alive only in their memories—memories poisoned by your apostasy from the world of the warms. He went into his room and lay down on the simple bed, eyes open, gazing at the plastic meaninglessness of the world.

  Rolling Stone’s I See Dead People 101

  I’ve never seen any deads younger than maybe 20, or older than 50 or 60. What’s up with that?

  * * *

  Maybe it’s built into the process (whatever that is). As usual, the Conclave of the Rekindled refuse to divulge any details, but top gerontologists and neuroscientists suggest that rekindling a postmortem child would, like, upset the balance of the universe—or at least mess with the kid’s developmental trajectory.

  * * *

  And maybe old people are too far gone. The deads are probably working on it in their labs. If they have labs.

  How that kid thing would cash out is anyone’s guess. Maybe the Cold Towns have special schools or dormitories for the, you know, differently dead. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to be stuck at the size and age of six years old for the rest of eternity, or even for a few thousand years. (Nobody yet knows how long the dead will stay … well, “alive” isn’t the right word. Active. Ambulant. Not-really-dead.)

  Is it true that after they dry off, deads are gifted with a pile of gold equal to their weight?

  Let us reason together. Suppose the average American adult weighs 180 lbs. Yes, that’s an understatement and has been for decades, but the Grim Reset probably carved quite a bit of flab off of a lot of citizens. 180 lbs is 2880 ounces (31.1034768 grams to the Troy ounce, since you ask), and today’s gold fix is $New17.67 per ounce. That’d be more than 50,000 Newbucks per dead, on average. Readers who remember the Bad Old Days probably still recalibrate that as five million USD. Per person.

  How likely is that? Rounding off, we have 500 million citizens in the USA, more than half in the prime adult catchment area (like, not kids or olds). But not so many of those 280-Megs die and get rekindled—statisticians estimate about point one percent, and that’s as fine-toothed as it gets, because the census doesn’t count dead people. They’re dead, right?

  Still, that’s maybe two hundred and fifty thousand humans eligible to stick their demortified paws out for their gratuity once they die. More than a trillion old USD/10 billion Newbucks. And where is that absurd pile of loot supposed to come from?

  Mark this one: Urban Legend.

  So who does fund the Cold Towns? Those things are spreading like toadstools after a clammy rain. And now they’re even taking over prime real estate in our city. Why, the ancient cathedral of—

  Calm down. People live where they like, especially when they can afford the real estate. You want to set up ghettoes? Get out of here!

  Call it communism, if you like; call it Galt’s Gulch meets Valentine Michael Smith. (You’re au fait of the classics, right? No? Hit the download. We’ll be here when you get back.) As far as we can tell—locked out here on the wrong side of their guarded gates—it looks as if the deads share their wealth in an egalitarian way that demands only as much in way of toil as each rekindled is prepared to offer. Machine service to the max.

  Most of their community funding comes, of course, from their fabulous patents. Who did you suppose collects the dues for your household cool fusion power system, or the Paycell in your finger? The deads are different from you and me, Scott. They’re smarter. And they’re richer.

  2

  Barn’s burnt down—

  now

  I can see the moon.

  —Mizuta Masahide (1657–1723)

  Sylvie, the young departmental manager, offered Klein a comfortable enough armchair in a nicely appointed anteroom off the large sixth floor Bunche Hall office currently occupied by Professor Bik Liu, Chair of UCLA’s Department of History. Verboten to grad students and lesser creatures, this was the parking station, Klein reflected, for Business and First Class academics. Sylvie tapped, offered him coffee and a slice of her chocolate birthday cake, which he declined. She flushed, presumably dreading a faux pas, and retreated behind her systems display.

  Klein examined the two familiar duck-hunting prints and one rather Lucian Freudish daubing—all grim mustards and murky khakis and shit-browns—of what he supposed was an American tourist couple gazing up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. His lips quirked. The heavy quake-proof door opened, and Bik ushered him into her spacious sanctum, shook his hand with only minimal squeamishness, sat him in a less comfortable chair beside the mandatory wall of old books and journals, antique archival image of itself in an epoch of information storage at the scale of electrons and qubits. Hot afternoon Los Angeles light filtered through the wide solar-screened windows. Plainly Bik was flustered, and she was never flustered.

  “Jorge, you look well,” she said, and then bit her lip. Gaunt, deliberately gray haired, she was a decade older than Klein, and looked closer to twice that.

  “For a dead guy,” Klein said.

  Bik colored slightly, a Lucian Freudish color. She ruled her domain with iron and sound judgment, but this was an intrusion from beyond the grave. Klein had to remind himself how few American warms ever met a dead.

  “No need to lie about my looking well,” she said. “I look like something the chat dragged in. Or the chienne.”

  He watched her eyes. She was a clown, he was a clown, all the world was a pointless pratfall into mud. China had no cats, he recalled, not any longer, even with the cornucopia that had followed upon the cool fusion rollout half a decade ago. Not many dogs, either.

  “Well. I dare say you’ve been traveling?” Bik said.

  “Yes, visiting the Cold Towns.” Without changing his tone, Klein said, “You want me out, I take it?”

  She cleared her throat. “You are more direct than I recall.”

  “We are less concerned with the niceties,” he told her, “we deads. I understand you’ve had some difficulties yourself. I hope everything turned out well?” He had done his due diligence; Bik had suffered a serious cardiac attack six months earlier, and now had a new heart. The experience had diminished her.

  “Not a big deal, Jorge. Autologous regrowth, no need for a transplant. So I suppose in a way we’ve been through the same wars.”

  “Actually, no,” he said. “Not really.”

  After a silence, she said carefully, “You understand why I asked you to drop in today. I am regretful for the necessity, but the institutional governance—”

  “I have no objection to forced retirement, but I do expect the department to allow me the privileges and status of professor emeritus.”

  “That can certainly be arranged. The university board has proposed a new title for rekindled scholars of your standing, Jorge.”

  “Yes. Professor mortuus.” He showed his teeth. “I can live with that.”

  Again, a faint quiver in her surgically tightened upper eyelids, and a tight smile. “Very good. Do you still drink spirits, Jorge?”

  “Of course. We eat, we drink, we sleep, we dream, I’m sure you’ve read the Sunday supplements. Some aspects of life we have put behind us, or are closed to our condition, but fortunately a good whiskey is not one of them.”

  Golden fluid caught a ray of light, swirled in the glass she handed him. Bik sipped her own. “You mean to continue your researches?”

  “Into the Nazi epoch, the Konzentrationslager? Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau? The millions murdered with no rekindling? No. I’m done with that. But what I am is a professor of contemporary history, Bik, and contemporary history is what has remade me in its likeness. Mortuus.” He tasted the scotch. He might have been drinking turpentine. He put the glass on her desk and rose. “I shall study the deads. In due course, I shall lecture to your students on the topic.”

  At the door she took his hand again, and held it loosely. “I’m very pleased that we shan’t lose you entirely, Jorge, and I speak personally as well as for the whole department. Give my love to—” She faltered again, and now her face took on an ashen tint. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But you do still see…” She broke off.

  “Sybille? Rarely, Bik. Matthew, chapter 22, verse 30.”

  “Understood.” She recited it from memory, as he’d know she would. Bik was not a woman of piety, not even a Christian, but this verse was now inscribed in the shell-shocked consciousness of the world of the warms. The intellectual warms, at least. O my prophetic soul. “‘For when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. In this respect they will be like the angels in heaven.’”

  “Just so. Like an angel, Professor. Like an angel.”

  * * *

  The young manager was waiting for him as he left the Chair’s office. Her blouse, his sharp eyes noticed, was now unsealed at her sternum, open enough to show off a substantial portion of her golden brown breasts, their deep cleavage. Something avid in her gaze.

  “Professor Klein—” she began, broke off. “I took your course on the rise of the Third Reich, five years ago. You won’t remember.”

  He didn’t. He regarded her coolly. She was breathing faster. Not fear of faux pas, then, as he’d supposed earlier, but some sort of perverse appetite?

  “Of course I remember you. Sylvie, isn’t it?”

  She smiled, still nervous, but there was a bold amusement in her gaze. “I thought you were wonderful. I always had a … well, a crush. And then I heard you’d been rekindled.” She turned away from him, looking back over her shoulder, checking the Chair’s closed door, and back to Klein. “Have you ever played the President and the Temptress? Everyone’s watching the series on stereo.” And to Jorge Klein’s astonishment, she leaned across her desk, took the hem of her skirt in both hands, and flipped it up. Her buttocks were round and smooth, divided by a startlingly crimson thong. Sylvie let the skirt fall, turning, and took up something long and leaf-brown from the desk. She proffered it. “We could go to Andrew Sinclair’s office, he’s away at the Aung San Suu Kyi colloquium.”

  No faintest stirring in his prick, no tightening of his balls. He looked back at her dispassionately, with just a touch of amusement. Slick Willy and Monica, eh? The uses of history.

  “I’m sorry, Sylvie,” he said.

  She flushed again, licked her mouth, shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, too, Professor Klein. I misunderstood. Please don’t tell—”

  “My lips,” he said, “are sealed.”

  “Oh my god, I’ve made such a fool of myself.”

  “Not your fault, mine entirely. We are wondrously changed, we deads, and not always in a good way. Anyway, take your consolation from what old father Freud taught us.”

  Her flush had receded. She put the panatela back on the desk.

  “Superego über alles?”