Klein was remorseless. “If a child is threatened with death by a congenital heart defect, should that go untreated?”

  “Plainly, not. A repair of localized—”

  “A soldier is shot in the field of battle and bleeds out. His biometrics report an EEG crisis. In moments he will be dead. Should the medics zip him up in a body bag, untreated?”

  “Certainly not. This is sophistry! We were talking about people already dead who are subject to a grossly unnatural procedure that some ethicists claim produces a ‘zombification’ of its victims.”

  Klein bared his teeth, then smiled. “Do you fear I might lunge and eat your brain?”

  “Stranger things have happened.” Di Stefano returned a dazzling grin. “Don’t bite the messenger, doc.”

  “Messengers can catch Stockholm Syndrome too. Open your eyes and look at the evidence, Brine. Death has always been an abomination, a horrible accident of evolution. Nobody designed death. It’s an evolutionary kludge. We’re disposable. Our genes don’t care about our survival once we’ve multiplied them through reproduction. But now we have scientific means to reverse that blunder. Rekindling is no more unethical nor Satanic than having damaged teeth replaced by genomic implants, or fixing your worn-out knee cartilage or heart with autologous stem cells reprocessed from your own skin.”

  “So saith the Chamber of Commerce of the Cold Towns. Philosophers and ordinary folks vehemently disagree. You’ve crossed a line. Some are anticipating a severe government crackdown. What will be the response of the Conclave if and when that comes?”

  Klein stood up. “It’s been delightful chatting with you, sir. Please don’t forget to mention the Stockholm syndrome argument in your piece. If you need a quote to support that, look at Keats.”

  “The poet?” Brine Di Stefano nodded. “Ah. ‘Half in love with easeful Death.’”

  “‘Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme.’”

  “Point taken.” Ushered to the door, shaking Klein’s hand, the journalist said with every evidence of sincerity: “I just hope you guys have good guns and lawyers, when Der Tag comes.”

  * * *

  Albany Cold Town was literally cold on Christmas Eve, 2037. Strictly speaking, it was part of the city of Cohoes rather than the State capital, but the name had stuck. Jorge Klein took an autonomic cab north from Albany along 787 beside the Hudson. Icicles glittered in bare branches in the streets below, and a little fall of snow sifted down. The Conclave had taken over the Van Schaick Island Country Club, purchasing it outright for a fabulous sum to the fury of its dispossessed members but with the connivance of three members of its Board of Directors including the President and Treasurer, each signed up for rekindling. Its lush championship golf course was now a grid of graceless cinderblock structures, heavily walled, newly braced against attack from the lawless and the law alike. Klein entered the redoubt, displaying proof of his bona fides.

  “Come in, come in.” The house of strangers was like any other, but he was expected, a notable guest; clearly word had gone ahead from Jamal Hakim. He was to be integrated more fully into the community of the deads, the better to perform his duties for the Conclave. “Welcome, welcome, welcome.” Gently they touched and nudged him; after all this time, their waxy skin and staring gaze no longer dismayed him. He was one of them, he knew their thousand-yard stare from within, it was his own condition. “Hello,” he said, “hello, hello.”

  A trio circled about him as he met the residents, two handsome women and a ratty-looking man with a distant but somehow droll demeanor. It was unsaid but immediately understood: these were to be his companions, his set, his crew. They made themselves known to him as the occasion arose, unobtrusively. Here was Francine, slim, elegant, perhaps fifty, a goyishe version of his mother, perhaps. And a pretty young third-generation Korean. “Mi-Yun,” she said, placing her hand on her breast. “Please don’t say ‘Me Tarzan,’ it gets very, very old.” He nodded, amused. And the short fellow with the beaky nose was Tom, an experimental picotechnologist, whatever that was. Finally they bore him away to his guest room, his small suite, in fact, bringing wine and a plate of cookies. “If you decide to make Albany your home base for a while, we’ll move you into the main house,” Tom told him.

  In the night, after all the formalities were completed, he lay beside Francine in the darkness, listening to her breathe. He had decided it would be crass to choose Mi-Yun for this first encounter. Francine was not the first dead woman he had been intimate with, but none of his early experiments had been satisfactory. In the earliest days after his rekindling, he’d been informed again and again by the technicians that he was no longer a sexual being, not in any traditional sense, perhaps in no sense at all. The process altered not the genitalia but the brain, the gusts and flows of hormone secretions, the mechanisms of arousal and performance. He was a eunuch now, as were they all, male and female. The senses remained alert, however, and a numb craving for contact, the bleak reassurances of the grave. He placed his hand on Francine’s elbow, where it rested against his ribs, and heard her breathing alter. Slowly he stroked her forearm, clasped her hand lightly. She murmured sleepily; they said nothing in words; they slept.

  * * *

  Christmas morning was chilly, subzero, snow crisp on the flattened ground where well-heeled local golfers had once swung their irons in more propitious weather. Klein and Francine met the others for a quick breakfast, dressed warmly, went out under a sky of cloud pregnant with more snow. Church bells rang in the distance, carried with sharp clarity under the clouds. In the traditional houses to the north of the Cold Town, the children of the warms no doubt did all the traditional things that drove their parents nuts: noisily tearing open boxes and plastic cartons, squabbling, shouting happily at the tops of their voices, jumping on parental beds, banging drums, blowing trombones. Santa’s been here, Santa’s been here! None of that for us, Klein thought, and was relieved. He recalled the pledge he and Sybille had made: no children for us, no rug rats, no heartbreak and responsibility, no hostages to fortune. No joy, either. But now, he told himself, we have our own futures. We are our own futures. We need not fantasize an extended duration through offspring or in a magic afterlife where we wait in bliss to rejoin them; we are our own replacements, dead but deathless. Arrows flung into a future that surely would become ever stranger, decade by decade, in increments perhaps of centuries, millennia, years falling away and drifting like snowflakes …

  “We did this when we were kids.” Mi-Yun let herself fall back in a mound of snow, ooffed, flung out her leather-jacketed arms and dragged them up and down. “Angel wings!”

  “Not in California, land of the sun,” Klein said. “And not in Buenos Aires either. It did snow there once, thirty years ago, after I’d left for America with my mom and dad. None before that for another ninety years.” He found a curious impulse rising in his breast, bent, scooped up two handfuls of granular snow, crushed them into a ball, looked around. Tom stood looking across the Hudson, back to them; Klein flung his snowball, caught the man in the small of his back.

  “Hey! No fair!”

  Francine joined in, then Mi-Yun, with Tom pelting Klein so hard that his hat flew off. Distanced from himself, Klein marveled. These were deads? These crazy lunatics playing like kids, himself included? Well, why not? If the world was a vortex of meaninglessness, as it was, there was ample space for the acte gratuit. If all human activity was the empty capering of clowns in a plastic empty world, let us all be clowns at play, he thought. C’est moi, Camus—yes, regard that French existentialist’s childhood football fixation, his ferocious smoking, his daredevil and finally self-slaying driving, even though he was not at the wheel of the Facel Vega when he died. Could that intoxication with being and nothingness be the explanation? One worth copying? The deads as rebels, whose cause was to be without a cause. “When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself,” Camus had written, “and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical.”

  But the playful impulse drained quickly. He dropped his handful of snow, walked away toward the naked deciduous trees and brush at the water’s edge. Shivering, he pulled his coat more tightly about him. His toes felt chilled through boots and heavy socks. Gloved fingers touched his arm. Francine, he thought, and turned, but it was Tom.

  “Saw your interview on the Times gog. What an idiot. Where do they find these poseurs?”

  “Brine was okay,” Klein said. “He was treading the party line. It’s up to us to change it.”

  “Or stay out of the line of fire. Not that I’m criticizing you for—”

  “Understood. The Conclave Elders anticipate a Reichstag fire followed by a Kristallnacht. I’m doing what I can to help avert it, but it’s a long trudge up the hill of fear and misunderstanding and guile and simple stupidity.”

  “Yeah.” Tom gestured at the barricaded blockhouse structures of the Cold Town. “We country boys don’t know much about those old Krauts, Jorge, but we remember Ruby Ridge and … what was it called? Those crazy cultists the government torched to the ground?”

  “David Koresh,” Klein said. “The Branch Davidians, in Texas.”

  “Them too, I guess. No, those others down in Florida. Crazy as loons, but shit. Burned out the whole goddam town. Thousands of people kindled, and no rekindling for them.”

  “Clearwater. Yes. That’s what concerns us. That’s what I’m trying to head off.”

  A hand touched his other arm. Francine. Very well. These were to be his closest companions, his pals, his affinity group. He touched her glove, nudged her shoulder.

  “We should be getting back.”

  Snow was falling again, harder now. It squeaked and crackled under their boots.

  * * *

  Half reclining in his medical bed, Mick Dongan was reduced from the boisterous, vulgar monologist Klein remembered. The anthropologist was eaten out from within, it was plain to see, by cancer. In the final stages of cachexia, it seemed from his sunken etched cheeks and the knotted joints of his exposed wrists hanging like the lumps of bone they were from arms piteously atrophied.

  “Come in, for Christ’s sake, Jorge. I know I look like shit. But at least I’m not dead, like some people.” Dongan emitted a ghastly croaking laugh, coughed for half a minute, breath rasping in his caved-in, bony chest. Oxygen went into his lungs from transparent tubes run to his nostrils, but it brought no flush to his face. “It’s not catching, dude.”

  “It’s been some time,” Klein said, and drew a chair closer to the bed. “You’ll have heard about Sybille’s little adventure in the bombing at Zion.”

  “Bloody nasty, that. Pour me some juice, there’s a good fellow. Bastards won’t let me have anything stronger.” He slurped a mouthful of pale lemon liquid through a bent straw, swirled it in his mouth, screwed up his face, spat it out into a kidney-shaped steel basin. “Looks like piss, tastes worse.” He sighed, lay back against the shaped pillow of his elaborate bed, closed his eyes.

  After a time, Klein concluded that the dying man had fallen asleep, and stood. Dongan opened his eyes and grinned at him, like a man who has won a bet. Several of his teeth were missing. Lost from the shrinkage of the disease? Rotted inside his head? This was no traditional cancer, Klein knew. Bitter rumormongers were already blaming the rekindled for its origin and spread. Why would they do that? Pick up new customers, like funeral directors fallen on hard times in a place stricken by good health?

  “Siddown, Jorge. I have to get this off my chest.”

  A wave of weariness flooded through Klein. Last-minute repentance, confession of misdeeds, pleas for forgiveness. Or could the man be about to declare a windfall for his old best friend, a bequest, perhaps his townhouse on leafy Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice?

  “I’m not your father confessor, Mick. Not even the right faith. Not any faith, in fact, as you’ll recall.”

  “It’s about Sybille. She and I—”

  “Hush.” He made a quieting motion with one hand, irritated by this banality. “It was the time. We all slept around. I’ve known about your affair with my wife for years. We hid nothing from each other. Nothing of that kind, anyway.”

  “Shit, Jorge, don’t make it harder than it already is.” Breath catching in his throat, shoulders hunching. Stopped. Restarted with a jolt. A deep breath, then slow, shallow intaking of air. Was this Cheyne-stokes respiration? If so, the man was surely at the very edge of death.

  “Have you made arrangements for rekindling?” Klein said. “I didn’t see a van outside.”

  “Not doing it. Refused. World’s got enough damned zoms already. No, sorry, sorry, feeble humor. Made up my mind when Sybille asked for rekindling. Not for me.”

  “You’d prefer to be ashes? Rot into slime in the ground? Don’t be absurd, Mick.” He hesitated. “I’ve never known a man with the appetite for living that you had.” And would lose, he acknowledged silently, in this resurrection into bleak forever. He wondered if he would have chosen it himself, had death and rekindling not been forced upon him.

  Shameless in the proximity of his own nothingness, Dongan put the same thought into words.

  “Doesn’t seem to have done you a hell of a lot of good, Jorge. Death warmed up.” Something caught again in his throat. His face went into rictus. Klein watched him, said nothing. “Still haven’t said it. Professor Klein, old chum, I’m making a clean breast of it. Your wife and I were going to abscond together.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know it goes against your fairytale romance. The one-and-onlies, despite the bed hopping. The magic dyad. Two souls as one.” More coughing. “Lovely fancy, I know, was same with me and Iris, for about five years. And you were heading toward what … a decade? Things change, pal. Christ, look at you. Walking definition of mutatis mutandis. Hang on, that’s not what I mean. Whatever. But she’d lost that lovin’ feeling. The first fine careless rapture was well and truly over. So we made our plans. Then she fucking got sick and died. Don’t that beat all?”

  Klein stood up. He felt nothing. Not resentment, not bitterness, not a wish to shout or deny or plead or to beat the man’s face in. Without a word, he turned and left the room. A racking laugh followed him, and perhaps feeble words, but he could not make out their meaning.

  6

  Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen so much worse.… He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times.

  —Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

  Rain was sleeting down when Klein was driven into Moshi town in Tanzania in June 2039, his nonautonomic taxi piloted by a wizened black man with gleaming teeth, presumably genomic implants courtesy of the Gates Foundation. The deads had selected this shooting season for its dry but moderately cool weather, halfway between the northern monsoonal downpours of the year’s start and the southern monsoon in its latter months. Climate change, that universal chaotic disrupter, ruined the forecasts again. Their plane had staggered through dense clouds that blocked any overhead view of the gigantic, hardened, ash-coated mudpie that was the all-but-extinct stratovolcano. A sky island, geologists dubbed this immense mountain, tallest in all of Africa; it was only 150,000 years (would he and his companions live that long? perhaps!) since it erupted last, spewing from its Kibo cone boiling lava that hardened into immense scarps and valleys.

  From his room in the New Livingstone Hotel, he gazed now into the rain and saw nothing but a darker shadow, its peaks some twenty miles distant.

  The deluge had abated, then stopped, by the time the party of deads arrived in a hired van: the old crew, Zacharias, inevitably in charge, Gracchus the white hunter in all his antique Hemingway glory, Mortimer, Nerita Tracy in a fetching safari suit. And, as arranged, his former wife Sybille. Seeing her step from the van, still young, still beautiful, fully restored, Klein felt washed with grace. Now she was nothing to him. The last remnants of desolation were fled, or, rather, desiccated and swept away by the winds of time.

  In the clearing sky, pterodactyls—or were they pteranodons, with those imposing twenty-foot wingspans—flurried like black umbrellas caught in an updraft. At their back, high above rolling remnant clouds, the great mountain jutted toward the vacuum of space. Nineteen thousand feet and more above sea level, three and two-thirds miles, the Kibo peak almost a mile higher than this elevated ground. Reports were accurate. No trace of frozen white about its upper reaches. Famously, the legendary snows or glaciers of Kilimanjaro were gone entirely, melted and evaporated or run off for good. Or at least until the bitterly contested spread of cool fusion generators forced the final replacement of carbon fuels and reversed the ruin that warms were inflicting upon their planet. His planet, too, he grudgingly admitted.

  Klein withdrew from his window, lay down on the simple bedding. Time enough to greet the other deads when they were rested after the uncomfortable trip. Did this faint ache indicate that he missed the presence of his new crew? No. Those three had their own concerns and interests. Mi-Yun had laughed in disbelief when he mooted the trip to Africa. So be it. Let this be closure.

  * * *

  Alcohol was not advised at altitude, but he found them in the bar off the lobby drinking whiskey sours. When you are dead you are dead all the way, he hummed to himself, and ordered one to be companionable. They greeted him with a knuckled nudge to the shoulder, a bow, a quick comradely hug from Sybille.

  “You have become prominent,” she said. “Your face on TV rivals the President’s.”

  “And I’m not even running for reelection.”

  “Still, you’ve acquired your own share of abuse,” Nerita said. The Brazilian was not as lovely as Sybille: sweeping red hair this year, a pert freckled young-middle-aged face, trim as a gym addict. Somehow she did not have the look of a hunter, even of dead animals. But then neither, after all, did Sybille.