Robert Silverberg: Born with the Dead

The route to the hotel seemed extraordinarily involuted, and the driver halted frequently in front of shops, saying hopefully, “You want brass chests, copper pots, silver curios, gold chains from China?” Though Sybille gently declined his suggestions, he continued to point out bazaars and emporiums, offering earnest recommendations of quality and moderate price, and gradually she realized, getting her bearings in the town, that they had passed certain corners more than once. Of course: the driver must be in the pay of shopkeepers who hired him to lure tourists.

“Please take us to our hotel,” Sybille said, and when he persisted in his huckstering—”Best ivory here, best lace”—she said it more firmly, but she kept her temper. Jorge would have been pleased by her transformation, she thought; he had all too often been the immediate victim of her fiery impatience. She did not know the specific cause of the change. Some metabolic side-effect of the rekindling process, maybe, or maybe her two years of communion with Guidefather at the Cold Town, or was it, perhaps, nothing more than the new knowledge that all of time was hers, that to let oneself feel hurried now was absurd?

“Your hotel is this,” Ibuni said at last.

It was an old Arab mansion—high arches, innumerable balconies, musty air, electric fans turning sluggishly in the dark hallways. Sybille and Zacharias were given a sprawling suite on the third floor, overlooking a courtyard lush with palms, vermilion nandi, kapok trees, poinsettia, and agapanthus. Mortimer, Gracchus, and Nerita had long since arrived in the other cab and were in an identical suite one floor below. “I’ll have a bath,” Sybille told Zacharias. “Will you be in the bar?”

“Very likely. Or strolling in the garden.”

He went out. Sybille quickly shed her travel-sweaty clothes. The bathroom was a Byzantine marvel, elaborate swirls of colored tile, an immense yellow tub standing high on bronze eagle-claw-and-globe legs. Lukewarm water dribbled in slowly when she turned the tap. She smiled at her reflection in the tall oval mirror. There had been a mirror somewhat like it at the rekindling house. On the morning after her awakening, five or six deads had come into her room to celebrate with her her successful transition across the interface, and they had had that big mirror with them; delicately, with great ceremoniousness, they had drawn the coverlet down to show herself to her in it, naked, slender, narrow-waisted, high-breasted, the beauty of her body unchanged, marred neither by dying nor by rekindling, indeed enhanced by it, so that she had become more youthful-looking and even radiant in her passage across that terrible gulf.

—You’re a very beautiful woman.

That was Pablo. She would learn his name and all the other names later.

—I feel such a flood of relief. I was afraid I’d wake up and find myself a shriveled ruin.

—That could not have happened, Pablo said.

—And never will happen, said a young woman. Nerita, she was.

—But deads do age, don’t they?

—Oh, yes, we age, just as the warms do. But not just as.

—More slowly?

—Very much more slowly. And differently. All our biological processes operate more slowly, except the functions of the brain, which tend to be quicker than they were in life.

—Quicker?

—You’ll see.

—It all sounds ideal.

—We are extremely fortunate. Life has been kind to us. Our situation is, yes, ideal. We are the new aristocracy.

—The new aristocracy—

Sybille slipped slowly into the tub, leaning back against the cool porcelain, wriggling a little, letting the tepid water slide up as far as her throat. She closed her eyes and drifted peacefully. All of Zanzibar was waiting for her. Streets I never thought I should visit. Let Zanzibar wait. Let Zanzibar wait. Words I never thought to speak. When I left my body on a distant shore. Time for everything, everything in its due time.

— You’re a very beautiful woman, Pablo had told her, not meaning to flatter.

Yes. She had wanted to explain to them, that first morning, that she didn’t really care all that much about the appearance of her body, that her real priorities lay elsewhere, were “higher,” but there hadn’t been any need to tell them that. They understood. They understood everything. Besides, she did care about her body. Being beautiful was less important to her than it was to those women for whom physical beauty was their only natural advantage, but her appearance mattered to her; her body pleased her and she knew it was pleasing to others, it gave her access to people, it was a means of making connections, and she had always been grateful for that. In her other existence her delight in her body had been flawed by the awareness of the inevitability of its slow steady decay, the certainty of the loss of that accidental power that beauty gave her, but now she had been granted exemption from that: she would change with time but she would not have to feel, as warms must feel, that she was gradually falling apart. Her rekindled body would not betray her by turning ugly. No.

— We are the new aristocracy —

After her bath she stood a few minutes by the open window, naked to the humid breeze. Sounds came to her: distant bells, the bright chatter of tropical birds, the voices of children singing in a language she could not identify. Zanzibar! Sultans and spices, Livingstone and Stanley, Tippu Tib the slaver, Sir Richard Burton spending a night in this very hotel room, perhaps. There was a dryness in her throat, a throbbing in her chest: a little excitement coming alive in her after all. She felt anticipation, even eagerness. All Zanzibar lay before her. Very well. Get moving, Sybille, put some clothes on, let’s have lunch, a look at the town.

She took a light blouse and shorts from her suitcase. Just then Zacharias returned to the room, and she said, not looking up, “Kent, do you think it’s all right for me to wear these shorts here? They’re—” A glance at his face and her voice trailed off. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve just been talking to your husband:”

“He’s here ?”

“He came up to me in the lobby. Knew my name. ‘You’re Zacharias,’ he said, with a Bogarty little edge to his voice, like a deceived movie husband confronting the Other Man. ‘Where is she? I have to see her.’”

“Oh, no, Kent.”

“I asked him what he wanted with you. ‘I’m her husband,’ he said, and I told him, ‘Maybe you were her husband once, but things have changed,’ and then—”

“I can’t imagine Jorge talking tough. He’s such a gentle man, Kent! How did he look?”

“Schizoid,” Zacharias said. “Glassy eyes, muscles bunching in his jaws, signs of terrific pressure all over him. He knows he’s not supposed to do things like this, doesn’t he?”

“Jorge knows exactly how he’s supposed to behave. Oh, Kent, what a stupid mess! Where is he now?”

“Still downstairs. Nerita and Laurence are talking to him. You don’t want to see him, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Write him a note to that effect and I’ll take it down to him. Tell him to clear off.”

Sybille shook her head. “I don’t want to hurt him.”

“Hurt him? He’s followed you halfway around the world like a lovesick boy, he’s tried to violate your privacy, he’s disrupted an important trip, he’s refused to abide by the conventions that govern the relationships of warms and deads, and you—”

“He loves me, Kent.”

“He loved you. All right, I concede that. But the person he loved doesn’t exist any more. He has to be made to realize that.”

Sybille closed her eyes. “I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want you to hurt him either.”