The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4: Trips: 1972-73

  “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 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,’ 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.”

  “I won’t hurt him. Are you going to see him?”

  “No,” she said. She grunted in annoyance and threw her shorts and blouse into a chair. There was a fierce pounding at her temples, a sensation of being challenged, of being threatened, that she had not felt since that awful day at the Newark mounds. She strode to the window and looked out, half expecting to see Jorge arguing with Nerita and Laurence in the courtyard. But there was no one down there except a houseboy who looked up as if her bare breasts were beacons and gave her a broad dazzling smile. Sybille turned her back to him and said dully, “Go back down. Tell him that it’s impossible for me to see him. Use that word. Not that I won’t see him, not that I don’t want to see him, not that it isn’t right for me to see him, just that it’s impossible. And then phone the airport. I want to go back to Dar on the evening plane.”

  “But we’ve only just arrived!”

  “No matter. We’ll come back some other time. Jorge is very persistent; he won’t accept anything but a brutal rebuff, and I can’t do that to him. So we’ll leave.”

  Klein had never seen deads at close range before. Cautiously, uneasily, he stole quick intense looks at Kent Zacharias as they sat side by side on rattan chairs among the potted palms in the lobby of the hotel. Jijibhoi had told him that it hardly showed, that you perceived it more subliminally than by any outward manifestation, and that was true; there was a certain look about the eyes, of course, the famous fixity of the deads, and there was something oddly pallid about Zacharias’ skin beneath the florid complexion,
but if Klein had not known what Zacharias was, he might not have guessed it. He tried to imagine this man, this red-haired, red-faced dead archeologist, this digger of dirt mounds, in bed with Sybille. Doing with her whatever it was that the deads did in their couplings. Even Jijibhoi wasn’t sure. Something with hands, with eyes, with whispers and smiles, not at all genital—so Jijibhoi believed. This is Sybille’s lover I’m talking to. This is Sybille’s lover. How strange that it bothered him so. She had had affairs when she was living, so had he, so had everyone, it was the way of life. But he felt threatened, overwhelmed, defeated, by this walking corpse of a lover.

  Klein said, “Impossible?”

  “That was the word she used.”

  “Can’t I have ten minutes with her?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Would you let me see her for a few moments, at least? I’d just like to find out how she looks.”

  “Don’t you find it humiliating, doing all this scratching around just for a glimpse of her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you still want it?”

  “Yes.”

  Zacharias sighed. “There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m sorry.”

  “Perhaps Sybille is tired from having done so much traveling. Do you think she might be in a more receptive mood tomorrow?”

  “Maybe,” Zacharias said. “Why don’t you come back then?”

  “You’ve been very kind.”

  “De nada.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Thanks, no,” Zacharias said. “I don’t indulge any more. Not since—” He smiled.

  Klein could smell whiskey on Zacharias’ breath. All right, though. All right. He would go away. A driver waiting outside the hotel grounds poked his head out of his cab window and said hopefully, “Tour of the island, gentleman? See the clove plantations, see the athlete stadium?”

  “I’ve seen them already,” Klein said. He shrugged. “Take me to the beach.”

  He spent the afternoon watching turquoise wavelets lapping pink sand. The next morning he returned to Sybille’s hotel, but they were gone, all five of them, gone on last night’s flight to Dar, said the apologetic desk clerk. Klein asked if he could make a telephone call, and the clerk showed him an ancient instrument in an alcove near the bar. He phoned Barwani. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “You told me they’d be staying at least a week!”

  “Oh, sir, things change,” Barwani said softly.

  Four

  What portends? What will the future bring? I do not know, I have no presentiment. When a spider hurls itself down from some fixed point, consistently with its nature, it always sees before it only an empty space wherein it can find no foothold however much it sprawls. And so it is with me: always before me an empty space; what drives me forward is a consistency which lies behind me. This life is topsy-turvy and terrible, not to be endured.

  Søren Kierkegaard: Either/Or

  Jijibhoi said, “In the entire question of death who is to say what is right, dear friend? When I was a boy in Bombay, it was not unusual for our Hindu neighbors to practice the rite of suttee, that is, the burning of the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, and by what presumption may we call them barbarians? Of course”—his dark eyes flashed mischievously—“we did call them barbarians, though never when they might hear us. Will you have more curry?”

  Klein repressed a sigh. He was getting full, and the curry was fiery stuff, of an incandescence far beyond his usual level of tolerance; but Jijibhoi’s hospitality, unobtrusively insistent, had a certain hieratic quality about it that made Klein feel like a blasphemer whenever he refused anything in his home. He smiled and nodded, and Jijibhoi, rising, spooned a mound of rice into Klein’s plate, buried it under curried lamb, bedecked it with chutneys and sambals. Silently, unbidden, Jijibhoi’s wife went to the kitchen and returned with a cold bottle of Heinekens. She gave Klein a shy grin as she set it down before him. They worked well together, these two Parsees, his hosts.

  They were an elegant couple—striking, even. Jijibhoi was a tall, erect man with a forceful aquiline nose, dark Levantine skin, jet-black hair, a formidable mustache. His hands and feet were extraordinarily small; his manner was polite and reserved; he moved with a quickness of action bordering on nervousness. Klein guessed that he was in his early forties, though he suspected his estimate could easily be off by ten years in either direction. His wife—strangely, Klein had never been told her name—was younger than her husband, nearly as tall, fair of complexion—a light-olive tone—and voluptuous of figure. She dressed invariably in flowing silken saris; Jijibhoi affected western business dress, suits and ties in a style twenty years out of date. Klein had never seen either of them bareheaded: she wore a kerchief of white linen, he a brocaded skullcap that might lead people to mistake him for an Oriental Jew. They were childless and self-sufficient, forming a closed dyad, a perfect unit, two segments of the same entity, conjoined and indivisible, as Klein and Sybille once had been. Their harmonious interplay of thought and gesture made them a trifle disconcerting, even intimidating, to others. As Klein and Sybille once had been.

  Klein said, “Among your people—”

  “Oh, very different, very different, quite unique. You know of our funeral custom?”

  “Exposure of the dead, isn’t it?”

  Jijibhoi’s wife giggled. “A very ancient recycling scheme!”

  “The Towers of Silence,” Jijibhoi said. He went to the dining room’s vast window and stood with his back to Klein, staring out at the dazzling lights of Los Angeles. The Jijibhois’ house, all redwood and glass, perched precariously on stilts near the crest of Benedict Canyon, just below Mulholland: the view took in everything from Hollywood to Santa Monica. “There are five of them in Bombay,” said Jijibhoi, “on Malabar Hill, a rocky ridge overlooking the Arabian Sea. They are centuries old, each one circular, several hundred feet in circumference, surrounded by a stone wall twenty or thirty feet high. When a Parsee dies—do you know of this?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to know.”

  “When a Parsee dies, he is carried to the Towers on an iron bier by professional corpse bearers; the mourners follow in procession, two by two, joined hand to hand by holding a white handkerchief between them. A beautiful scene, dear Jorge. There is a doorway in the stone wall through which the corpse bearers pass, carrying their burden. No one else may enter the Tower. Within is a circular platform paved with large stone slabs and divided into three rows of shallow, open receptacles. The outer row is used for the bodies of males, the next for those of females, the innermost one for children. The dead one is given a resting place; vultures rise from the lofty palms in the gardens adjoining the Towers; within an hour or two, only bones remain. Later, the bare, sun-dried skeleton is cast into a pit at the center of the Tower. Rich and poor crumble together there into dust.”

  “And all Parsees are—ah—buried in this way?”

  “Oh, no, no, by no means,” Jijibhoi said heartily. “All ancient traditions are in disrepair nowadays, do you not know? Our younger people advocate cremation or even conventional interment. Still, many of us continue to see the beauty of our way.”

  “—beauty?—”

  Jijibhoi’s wife said in a quiet voice, “To bury the dead in the ground, in a moist tropical land where diseases are highly contagious, seems not sanitary to us. And to burn a body is to waste its substance. But to give the bodies of the dead to the efficient hungry birds—quickly, cleanly, without fuss—is to us a way of celebrating the economy of nature. To have one’s bones mingle in the pit with the bones of the entire community is, to us, the ultimate democracy.”

  “And the vultures spread no contagions themselves, feeding as they do on the bodies of—”

  “Never,” said Jijibhoi firmly. “Nor do they contract our ills.”

  “And I gather that you both intend to have your bodies returned to Bombay when you—” Aghast, Klein paused, shook his head, coughed in embarrassment, for
ced a weak smile. “You see what this radioactive curry of yours has done to my manners? Forgive me. Here I sit, a guest at your dinner table, quizzing you about your funeral plans!”

  Jijibhoi chuckled. “Death is not frightening to us, dear friend. It is—one hardly needs say it, does one?—it is a natural event. For a time we are here, and then we go. When our time ends, yes, she and I will give ourselves to the Towers of Silence.”

  His wife added sharply, “Better there than the Cold Towns! Much better!”

  Klein had never observed such vehemence in her before.

  Jijibhoi swung back from the window and glared at her. Klein had never seen that before either. It seemed as if the fragile web of elaborate courtesy that he and these two had been spinning all evening was suddenly unraveling, and that even the bonds between Jijibhoi and his wife were undergoing strain. Agitated now, fluttery, Jijibhoi began to collect the empty dishes, and after a long awkward moment said, “She did not mean to give offense.”

  “Why should I be offended?”

  “A person you love chose to go to the Cold Towns. You might think there was implied criticism of her in my wife’s expression of distaste for—”

  Klein shrugged. “She’s entitled to her feelings about rekindling. I wonder, though—”

  He halted, uneasy, fearing to probe too deeply.

  “Yes?”

  “It was irrelevant.”

  “Please,” Jijibhoi said. “We are old friends.”

  “I was wondering,” said Klein slowly, “if it doesn’t make things hard for you, spending all your time among deads, studying them, mastering their ways, devoting your whole career to them, when your wife evidently despises the Cold Towns and everything that goes on in them. If the theme of your work repels her, you must not be able to share it with her.”

  “Oh,” Jijibhoi said, tension visibly going from him, “if it comes to that, I have even less liking for the entire rekindling phenomenon than she.”

  “You do?” This was a side of Jijibhoi that Klein had never suspected. “It repels you? Then why did you choose to make such an intensive survey of it?”