Robert Silverberg: Born with the Dead

Nerita takes the picture.

Calmly Sybille pulls the trigger.

“Kazi imekwisha,” Gracchus says. “The work is finished.”

“You better believe what Jeej is trying to tell you,” Dolorosa said. “Ten minutes inside the Cold Town, they’ll have your number. Five minutes.”

Jijibhoi’s man was small, rumpled-looking, forty or fifty years old, with untidy long dark hair and wide-set smoldering eyes. His skin was sallow and his face was gaunt. Such other deads as Klein had seen at close range had about them an air of unearthly serenity, but not this one: Dolorosa was tense, fidgety, a knuckle-cracker, a lip-gnawer. Yet somehow there could be no doubt he was a dead, as much a dead as Zacharias, as Gracchus, as Mortimer.

“They’ll have my what?” Klein asked.

“Your number. Your number. They’ll know you aren’t a dead, because it can’t be faked. Jesus, don’t you even speak English? Jorge, that’s a foreign name. I should have known. Where are you from?”

“Argentina, as a matter of fact, but I was brought to California when I was a small boy. In 1955. Look, if they catch me, they catch me. I just want to get in there and spend half an hour talking with my wife.”

“Mister, you don’t have any wife any more.”

“With Sybille,” Klein said, exasperated. “To talk with Sybille, my—my former wife.”

“All right. I’ll get you inside.”

“What will it cost?”

“Never mind that,” Dolorosa said. “I owe Jeej here a few favors. More than a few. So I’ll get you the drug—”

“Drug?”

“The drug the Treasury agents use when they infiltrate the Cold Towns. It narrows the pupils, contracts the capillaries, gives you that good old zombie look. The agents always get caught and thrown out, and so will you, but at least you’ll go in there feeling that you’ve got a convincing disguise. Little oily capsule, one every morning before breakfast.”

Klein looked at Jijibhoi. “Why do Treasury agents infiltrate the Cold Towns?”

“For the same reasons they infiltrate anywhere else,” Jijibhoi said. “To spy. They are trying to compile dossiers on the financial dealings of the deads, you see, and until proper life-defining legislation is approved by Congress there is no precise way of compelling a person who is deemed legally dead to divulge—”

Dolorosa said, “Next, the background. I can get you a card of residence from Albany Cold Town in New York. You died last December, okay, and they rekindled you back east because—let’s see—”

“I could have been attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York,” Klein suggested. “That’s what I do, you understand, professor of contemporary history at UCLA. Because of the Christmas holiday my body couldn’t be shipped back to California, no room on any flight, and so they took me to Albany. How does that sound?”

Dolorosa smiled. “You really enjoy making up lies, Professor, don’t you? I can dig that quality in you. Okay, Albany Cold Town, and this is your first trip out of there, your drying-off trip—that’s what it’s called, drying-off—you come out of the Cold Town like a new butterfly just out of its cocoon, all soft and damp, and you’re on your own in a strange place. Now, there’s a lot of stuff you’ll need to know about how to behave, little mannerisms, social graces, that kind of crap, and I’ll work on that with you tomorrow and Wednesday, and Friday, three sessions; that ought to be enough. Meanwhile let me give you the basics. There are only three things you really have to remember while you’re inside:

“(1) Never ask a direct question.

“(2) Never lean on anybody’s arm. You know what I mean?

“(3) Keep in mind that to a dead the whole universe is plastic, nothing’s real, nothing matters a hell of a lot, it’s all only a joke. Only a joke, friend, only a joke.”

Early in April he flew to Salt Lake City, rented a car, and drove out past Moab into the high plateau rimmed by red-rock mountains where the deads had built Zion Cold Town. This was Klein’s second visit to the necropolis. The other had been in the late summer of ’91, a hot, parched season when the sun filled half the sky and even the gnarled junipers looked dazed from thirst; but now it was a frosty afternoon, with faint pale light streaming out of the wintry western hills and occasional gusts of light snow whirling through the iron-blue air. Jijibhoi’s route instructions pulsed from the memo screen on his dashboard. Fourteen miles from town, yes, narrow paved lane turns off highway, yes, discreet little sign announcing private road, no admittance, yes, a second sign a thousand yards in, zion cold town, members only, yes, and then just beyond that the barrier of green light across the road, the scanner system, the roadblocks sliding like scythes out of the underground installations, a voice on an invisible loudspeaker saying, “If you have a permit to enter Zion Cold Town, please place it under your left-hand windshield wiper.”

That other time he had had no permit, and he had gone no farther than this, though at least he had managed a little colloquy with the unseen gatekeeper out of which he had squeezed the information that Sybille was indeed living in that particular Cold Town. This time he affixed Dolorosa’s forged card of residence to his windshield, and waited tensely, and in thirty seconds the roadblocks slid from sight. He drove on, along a winding road that followed the natural contours of a dense forest of scrubby conifers, and came at last to a brick wall that curved away into the trees as though it encircled the entire town. Probably it did. Klein had an overpowering sense of the Cold Town as a hermetic city, ponderous and sealed as old Egypt. There was a metal gate in the brick wall; green electronic eyes surveyed him, signaled their approval, and the wall rolled open.

He drove slowly toward the center of town, passing through a zone of what he supposed were utility buildings—storage depots, a power substation, the municipal waterworks, whatever, a bunch of grim windowless one-story cinderblock affairs—and then into the residential district, which was not much lovelier. The streets were laid out on a rectangular grid; the buildings were squat, dreary, impersonal, homogeneous. There was practically no automobile traffic, and in a dozen blocks he saw no more than ten pedestrians, who did not even glance at him. So this was the environment in which the deads chose to spend their second lives. But why such deliberate bleakness? “You will never understand us,” Dolorosa had warned. Dolorosa was right. Jijibhoi had told him that Cold Towns were something less than charming, but Klein had not been prepared for this. There was a glacial quality about the place, as though it were wholly entombed in a block of clear ice: silence, sterility, a mortuary calm. Cold Town, yes, aptly named. Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract developments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet. Klein shivered.