“That too,” he said, amused. “No, Sigmund offered a more specific and relevant piece of advice. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

  The lovely young woman laughed loudly, and as she saw him out to the corridor pressed his hand. He felt nothing, nothing, nothing.

  3

  There is no other God beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal.

  —Deuteronomy. 32:39

  De damnandis blaspheme redanimatisque

  —Papal Bull on the Condemnation and Excommunication of all blasphemous Heretics, known as the Conclave of the Rekindled, January 3, 2031

  Preamble

  Of the damnable and blasphemously revivified, we proclaim our Condemnation.

  Through the power given him from God, the Roman Pontiff has been appointed to administer spiritual and temporal punishments as each case severally deserves. The purpose of this is the repression of the wicked designs of misguided men, who have been so captivated by the debased impulse of their evil purposes as to forget the fear of the Lord, to set aside with contempt canonical decrees and apostolic commandments, and to dare to formulate new and false dogmas of sacred life and death, and to introduce the evil of “rebirth” after physical death—or to support, help and adhere to such lost souls, who make it their business to cleave asunder the seamless robe of our Redeemer and the unity of the orthodox faith. Hence it befits the Pontiff, lest the vessel of Peter appear to sail without pilot or oarsman, to take severe measures against such men and their followers, and by multiplying punitive measures and by other suitable remedies to see to it that these same overbearing men, devoted as they are to purposes of evil, along with their adherents, should not deceive the multitude of the simple by their lies and their deceitful devices, nor drag them along to share their own error and ruination, contaminating them with what amounts to a contagious disease, one far more terrible than death itself. It also befits the Pontiff, having condemned the “rekindled,” to ensure their still greater confounding by publicly showing and openly declaring to all faithful Christians how formidable are the censures and punishments to which such guilt can lead; to the end that by such public declaration they themselves may return, in confusion and remorse, to their true deaths, making an unqualified withdrawal from the prohibited abomination; by this means they may escape divine vengeance and any degree of participation in their eternal damnation.

  Fatwa against the so-called “Rekindled”

  The revival of dead human beings, in a mockery of Allah’s gift of life to the faithful, is against Islam, against the Prophet of Islam, and against the Koran. All those, alive and dead, who assist in this wicked endeavor are condemned to capital punishment. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to execute this sentence without delay, so that no one henceforth will dare insult and contravene the sacred teachings of the Prophet.

  * * *

  Concussion slapped Sybille awake. She stared in the darkness of the windowless room. The lighted clock display had gone black. No whisper of air-conditioning. A rushing, as of a great wind, and crackling roars, gusts, bangs. Voices cried out. Her chest hurt. Smoke. Another immense crash. High-pitched bleating, on and on. My god, she thought. Zion Cold Town is on fire.

  “Get on the floor,” she said in two sharp syllables. Rolling across the wide bed, she found Kent Zacharias. He lay unmoving. The long-dead were hard to wake, she had noticed that more than once. Groping in the darkness, she found his face, his nose, grasped it hard and twisted. Like a drowning man surfacing, Zacharias snorted and gasped.

  “Sybille. Are we under attack?”

  A stench of burning plastic-coated wiring, paint, probably clothing and furniture, other flammable stuff choked her throat.

  “Out,” she said. “Come on.”

  At the door, she banged her bare hip on the doorknob. She pressed the back of her hand to the wood. It was distinctly warm, but not yet hot. Perhaps the fire was contained in the north wing, where public access was easier and the tall plate-glass windows would shatter in the boiling gases of a bomb. Smoke was the immediate hazard, poisonous and blinding. She opened the door a crack. Zacharias bumped her from behind, a large blundering animal.

  “Don’t open the damned door,” he said, voice rasping.

  “I have to, Kent,” she told him. “We’ll roast alive if we stay here.” She flung it wide. Smoke poured in from the corridor, and a red and white glare danced in it. The floor was hot. “Put your shoes on,” she said, and ran back bare-soled to her side of the bed and found her slippers. Naked, then, she returned to the corridor and turned left. Someone had a flashlight, and called, “This way.” Other people were emerging from their rooms, moving in both directions, stumbling into each other.

  Sybille raised her voice above the racket of the fire alarms. “Head for the back stairs. Down, not up.” The milling took on an abrupt sense of purpose. “Has anyone called 911?”

  “Not answering.” A man’s gruff tones. “Signal’s jammed, or they’re overloaded.”

  The stairwell door opened into emergency lights in a haze of smog. The lights immediately flickered and went out.

  “Shit,” someone said. “Listen up, people. Stay as low as you can. Crawl on your hand and knees if you have to. Try not to breathe this filthy stuff.”

  Like a procession of pilgrims in the dark night of the soul, they crawled and bumped and squirmed down the stairs, sweat pouring from their changed flesh, no more adroit or invulnerable under this threat of final death, Sybille thought madly, than any living creature fleeing in a forest fire. Crackling and crashing. The emergency door opened into cooler night, desert air. She fell through it. The flashlight was casting about, sweeping across the smeared, blackened faces of the dead. In the distance, another explosion slapped the air. The cinderblock walls remained untouched. Sybille thought: Is this why the architects chose these unpromising materials? She had supposed it was a statement against the vanity of the warms. I have looked into the abyss, the walls of the Cold Towns said bleakly, and the abyss has looked back. Well, this time the abyss had done a serviceable job. But next time we’d better find an improved method of lighting the damned place during assault.

  Zacharias found her. To her astonishment, in the dimness, he wore a fire-retardant sheet like a silvery burqa. Where had he found that? Where had he managed to find the time to look for it? He took it off, gallant as Lord Raleigh and, hairy and naked, wrapped it around her own nakedness. It was cold and clammy.

  “We can escape into the woods and then the desert,” he said in her ear, “or go to the front and see what we can do to help.”

  “This place is ours,” she said fiercely, hugging herself, starting to tremor. “Those sons of bitches—” The screams had subsided, but people were weeping. We dead spill our tears, she thought, even if our blood is thick with small machines. She heard no further sounds of explosions, but the rasping noise of flames grew louder by the moment.

  “The fire will put itself out,” Zacharias said. “There’s really not that much to burn.” He paused. “Your cassettes. Are they tucked away in a secure safe?”

  “I think so,” she told him. “Maybe one still in the machine. God damn it, where am I going to find another cassette player?” More than a decade earlier, the university had scoured the net markets for weeks before they turned up an antique Sony sound cassette player so she could transcribe the priceless, irreplaceable ethnographic interviews from Zanzibar. And now that machine was probably warped and melted, along with one of the tapes, charred into meaninglessness. Well, she thought. All right. This is the condition of the deads. Let the dead bury their dead. She shook her head, then, in self-rebuke. No. That was the apologist cant of those who yearned for death, proclaimed its virtue and necessity—the kinds of fools and bigots who had done this terrible thing.

  “The fatwa,” Zacharias said, echoing her thoughts. “Or that Bull of Pope Sixtus VII. The denunciations from the Russian Orthodox prelates. We were right to withdraw from them. We should cut off their cool fusion generators. Damn them to the Fifth Circle of Hell.”

  They had reached the front drive and forecourt of the building, and searchlights were blooming like flowers of cold fire, reflecting from the blurred crimson fire trucks that had finally arrived. Hard streams of water fell through the smoke, spitting in the gaping ruin of the building’s entrance way. Amid the haze and hot sparks she saw another display of sparks, darting, purposeful, a swarm of stereo drones. From Zion’s own media center, she suspected, or maybe Vox News was already on the scene. And yes, all the windows were shattered and gone, and the tall steel main doors lay buckled and useless. Bodies were being borne out on floating stretchers, ready for the retrieval ambulances. Perhaps they could be saved. The deads, Sybille told herself grimly, are hard to kill. She walked forward into the ruin, in her silver mortuary robe like the white-wrapped figure from Arnold Böcklin’s painting Die Toteninsel, drifting across dark water to the embrace of the Isle of the Dead, and felt almost nothing but brief surprise when the whole tall wall, tormented by flame, explosive shock, and the pounding of the hose, fell upon her, sundering her spine in a burst of agony, smashing her legs and hips. The drones, the media flies and bees, surrounded her, hungrily, like tiny metallic and crystal carrion eaters. For a second time Sybille Klein died.

  * * *

  The phone implant buzzed against the back of his ear, waking Klein instantly. “What time is it?”

  “4:32 a.m. Professor Klein, September 29, 2037,” the machine said. “You have two urgent calls.”

  “From?”

  “One is from your Guidefather, Dr. Hassan Sabbāh. The other is from your sister, Hester Solom—”

  “Hester?” he said, in disbelief. “At four in the morning?”

  “She is in London. Do you wish to take her call?”

  “Very well. Put her through. If the call takes longer than two minutes, place her on hold and let me speak to the Imam.”

  “I have your brother now, Mrs. Solomon.”

  “Jorge?” The woman’s voice, so like his mother’s, was frantic.

  “What’s the matter, Hester? Is it Father?”

  “What? No, no, we’re all fine. Not that you’d care.” The inevitable touch of bitterness. He’d scarcely seen any of them since his marriage, not even during the bereavement service for his dead wife. “Look, turn on your stereo. Vox News.”

  “I never watch that crap.” He threw his legs over the sides of the bed, felt around in the dim light of the utilities for his slippers. “What is it? The Second Coming of Jesus?”

  “Just turn the goddamned thing on.”

  The stereopsis TV frame deepened as he spoke the command, and switched directly to a scene of smoke, white-hot fire, shouting men in protective suits and helmets, contained chaos. A Cold Town, evidently. Yes, a bright blue line of text ran across the depth display like a message from the impalpable Hand of Yahweh. Bombing at Zion Cold Town. Seven deads defuncted at least 13 badly damaged.

  His pulse increased a fraction, and he was aware of a pulsing in his temples. The New Man has not entirely displaced the Old Man, he thought.

  “Do you see her?” Hester was wailing. “Did you see Sybille?”

  Images cascaded, jump cuts, paired hologramic bugs seeking the most striking and disturbing pictures. Yes, there she was, crushed under a fall of broken cinderblock. In the tank, her face loomed. Still the same pale, beautiful Michelangelo marble as the moment she’d died the first time, despite the streaks of grime. A revival team was struggling with the hill of broken masonry. In the background, flames were abating, driven back by the foam and water. The image cut away, and again, and again. His accelerated rekindled thoughts slowed into a sort of paralysis. Not so over her after all, part of his consciousness observed sardonically. A world without meaning meant, surely, that a doubled death of a woman once loved ardently, desperately, obsessionally was without meaning. But no. Not quite. Not at all, in fact.

  This is an aberration, he told himself. I will recover my poise in a moment. Besides, the black cryo van is pulling up now, I imagine, and they will have her ruined body in the repair shop within minutes. She’s right there in the very heart of a major Cold Town, he thought. No better location if someone’s going to kill you.

  “Dr. Klein,” said a deep voice, barely accented.

  Hassan Sabbāh. “Yes, Guidefather,” Klein said. “My sister just called to tell me that Sybille—”

  “She will be rekindled,” Sabbāh told him patiently. “In fact, this is why I am calling you. We have decided to advance your position with the Conclave. There are aspects of the revivified you must witness, if you are to act as our speaker among the living.”

  “Your speak—”

  “Get dressed in warm clothes and meet me in the quad. We have a fusion aircraft on standby. You will be with your ex-wife within two hours.” He broke contact. Hester’s voice came back, high pitched, aghast. Perhaps she had not even noticed his absence.

  “I have to go, dear sister,” he told her. “They are flying me to Utah. I’ll catch up with you and the parents as soon as I can.” He heard a gasp. “I know,” he said with an edge in his voice, “‘What do you have to do around here to get some attention, die or something?’ Apparently so. Good night.”

  He dressed snugly and went outside into the cool morning, still sunless, harshly lit by the exterior LEDs. Guidefather stood beside the open passenger hatch of a small Gates fusion jet, a couple of functionaries in attendance. Klein climbed aboard, strapped in, and within a minute was hurtling toward his defuncted wife. Ex-wife.

  4

  Human life, because it is marked by a beginning and an end, becomes whole, an entity in itself that can be subjected to judgment, only when it has ended in death; death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

  —Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

  Hard blue-white lighting, sterility itself, diagnostic and monitoring equipment gleaming, the large tank waiting for its occupant, and Sybille supine on a gurney, motionless, eyes shut, totally hairless after the ministrations of the techs, her round scalp eerily pale above her faintly tanned features, breasts flattened only slightly by gravity, the curved purse of her vulva visible within the torn flesh and sundered bone of her smashed hips, legs so badly broken they seemed the remnants of a carnivore’s meal. He had not seen her for four years, and this broken corpse was no memory of his.

  “You’re going to amputate her limbs,” Klein conjectured. He stood beside the gurney with Zion’s Guidefather, a purple-skinned fellow as ruthlessly shaved as Sybille. A former Marine? A Navy SEAL? Both wore transparent, flexible outer shell and helmet over decontaminated scrubs, in common with the handful of busy medical technicians, all of them, unsurprisingly, deads. The hiss of air from sealed tanks, a faint echo in the voice circuits.

  “Nothing so gross. You are here to witness the restoration process, or at least its first steps. Watch in silence.”

  Sybille’s corpse was lifted into the tank, lowered on a mesh into some viscous, transparent medium. She—it—seemed to float, rolling slightly, was stabilized by mesh from above. Tubes extruded from the sides of the tank, sharp-tipped; they entered her flesh. After a long minute, her skin took on a roseate flush.

  “Repair nanocytes,” said the Guidefather, Jamal Hakim. “This much the academics and media of the warms have long conjectured. But wait.”

  The corpse began to swell. Pulsations flexed Sybille’s smashed legs, her hips writhed in a horrid parody of sexual desire. Klein watched without emotion, neither excited nor repelled. The world was comic in its meaningless surges, its appetites, its agonies, but none of what he saw brought a smile to his lips or a burning wish to vomit. Awareness of his own inanition caused him neither self-reproof nor an anxious wish to remedy this loss of emotions that had once overwhelmed his life. All of this he saw clearly, layer within layer, and all he felt was a profound bleakness.

  A deep thrumming, and the lights flickered. Magnetic forces, no doubt, the kind of sleeting impalpable magic wrought by resonance scanners. So this is why they insisted we remove all metal from our bodies, change into these scrubs and booties. Even the tanks of air on our backs must be ceramic or plastic. The techs watched their instruments, the dead woman’s body swelled, ballooned, limbs straightening under some impulse he could not detect except through its effects.

  “We have engaged her morphogenetic Bauplan field,” Hakim said. His deep voice was a profound baritone, effortlessly piercing the rumble of the hidden magnetrons within the tank, in the majestic tones of a cantor in Temple, a holy, authoritative growl of absolute precision. Klein caught himself. Holy? Such nonsense. This place was no more than a highly elaborate body works, a repair shop.

  “Body plan,” Klein glossed aloud. “Some genetic master code, I take it.”

  “In part. But rekindling searches the genomic recipes in a large sampling of healthy cells of the body, under the direction of the morphic field, and recovers a pristine image of the epigenetic landscape and that maximal state toward which it moves.”

  Gibberish, surely. This was the kind of nonsense peddled in the lower echelons of the media. The Grays Walk Among Us. Christian Crystal Therapy. Nazi Deads Secret Bases on the Backside of the Moon. He had sampled them in his studies, when he lived, at first amused, finally infuriated and even sickened by the malign know-nothing gullibility they stood for. Could the Guidefather be pranking him? Testing him in an obscure rite, probing at his own vulnerability to such drivel? It seemed impossible. It was impossible.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t understand how the information inside widely separated and differentiated cells could—”

  “Quantum entanglement. We are bathing the defuncted body with powerful magnetic fields, driving the cells into harmony and oneness at the morphological level.”

  “Reprogramming,” Klein said, filled with a wonderment that momentarily bypassed his dispassionate cynicism, overwhelmed its chill, subverted it. Perhaps this was the jolt Sybille and Zacharias and Gracchus and the rest felt as they aimed their weapons at animals lost in prehistory but recovered by genetic science, herds trampling the African plains, and falling under deliberate bombardment from the guns of those who shared their condition. More than a jolt, he told himself. A benediction. A joining. Again, that tincture of the numinous. What is happening to me, he asked himself, and felt a pulse of shame.