Beyond the Doors of Death Read Online Free PDF

acknowledged her perception and told her that he too had had it. Communication was swift among the deads and the obvious rarely needed voicing.
    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.