Beyond the Doors of Death by Robert Silverberg, Damien Broderick Page A

more do you want, then? More humiliation?”
    Klein shook his head wearily and stared at the tablecloth. After a moment he looked up, and his eyes met those of Gracchus, and he was astounded to realize that he trusted the hunter, that for the first time in his dealings with the deads he felt he was being met with sincerity. He said in a low voice, “We were very close, Sybille and I, and then she died, and now I’m nothing to her. I haven’t been able to come to terms with that. I need her, still. I want to share my life with her, even now.”
    “But you can’t.”
    “I know that. And still I can’t help doing what I’ve been doing.”
    “There’s only one thing you can share with her,” Gracchus said. “That’s your death. She won’t descend to your level: you have to climb to hers.”
    “Don’t be absurd.”
    “Who’s absurd, me or you? Listen to me, Klein. I think you’re a fool, I think you’re a weakling, but I don’t dislike you, I don’t hold you to blame for your own foolishness. And so I’ll help you, if you’ll allow me.” He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a tiny metal tube with a safety catch at one end. “Do you know what this is?” Gracchus asked. “It’s a self-defense dart, the kind all the women in New York carry. A good many deads carry them, too, because we never know when the reaction will start, when the mobs will turn against us. Only we don’t use anesthetic drugs in ours. Listen, we can walk into any tavern in the native quarter and have a decent brawl going in five minutes, and in the confusion I’ll put one of these darts into you, and we’ll have you in Dar General Hospital fifteen minutes after that, crammed into a deep-freeze unit, and for a few thousand dollars we can ship you unthawed to California, and this time Friday night you’ll be undergoing rekindling in, say, San Diego Cold Town. And when you come out of it you and Sybille will be on the same side of the gulf, do you see? If you’re destined to get back together with her, ever, that’s the only way. That way you have a chance. This way you have none.”
    “It’s unthinkable,” Klein said.
    “Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing’s unthinkable once somebody’s thought it. You think it some more. Will you promise me that? Think about it before you get aboard that plane for Zanzibar. I’ll be staying here tonight and tomorrow, and then I’m going out to Arusha to meet some deads coming in for the hunting, and any time before then I’ll do it for you if you say the word. Think about it. Will you think about it? Promise me that you’ll think about it.”
    “I’ll think about it,” Klein said.
    “Good. Good. Thank you. Now let’s have lunch and change the subject. Do you like eating here?”
    “One thing puzzles me. Why does this place have a clientele that’s exclusively non-African? Does it dare to discriminate against blacks in a black republic?”
    Gracchus laughed. “It’s the blacks who discriminate, friend. This is considered a second-class hotel. All the blacks are at the Kilimanjaro or the Nyerere. Still, it’s not such a bad place. I recommend the fish dishes, if you haven’t tried them, and there’s a decent white wine from Israel that—”

E IGHT
O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of water in mine ears!
What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks;
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatt’red in the bottom of the sea.
Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,
As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep
And mocked the dead bones that lay scatt’red by .
    Shakespeare: Richard III
    ***
    “—Israeli wine,” Mick Dongan was saying. “Well, I’ll try anything once, especially if