Beyond the Doors of Death by Silverberg Robert & Broderick Damien

Author:Silverberg, Robert & Broderick, Damien [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: life after death, Nebula, Hugo, to open the sky, Grandmaster, majipoor
Publisher: Phoenix Pick
Published: 2013-05-31T14:00:00+00:00

TWO

Barn’s burnt down —

now

I can see the moon.

Mizuta Masahide (1657–1723)

***

Sylvie, the young departmental manager, offered Klein a comfortable enough armchair in a nicely appointed anteroom off the large sixth floor Bunche Hall office currently occupied by Professor Bik Liu, Chair of UCLA’s Department of History. Verboten to grad students and lesser creatures, this was the parking station, Klein reflected, for Business and First Class academics. Sylvie tapped, offered him coffee and a slice of her chocolate birthday cake, which he declined. She flushed, presumably dreading a faux pas, and retreated behind her systems display.

Klein examined the two familiar duck-hunting prints and one rather Lucian Freudish daubing—all grim mustards and murky khakis and shit-browns—of what he supposed was an American tourist couple gazing up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. His lips quirked. The heavy quake-proof door opened, and Bik ushered him into her spacious sanctum, shook his hand with only minimal squeamishness, sat him in a less comfortable chair beside the mandatory wall of old books and journals, antique archival image of itself in an epoch of information storage at the scale of electrons and qubits. Hot afternoon Los Angeles light filtered through the wide solar screened windows. Plainly Bik was flustered, and she was never flustered.

“Jorge, you look well,” she said, and then bit her lip. Gaunt, deliberately gray haired, she was a decade older than Klein, and looked closer to twice that.

“For a dead guy,” Klein said.

Bik colored slightly, a Lucian Freudish color. She ruled her domain with iron and sound judgment, but this was an intrusion from beyond the grave. Klein had to remind himself how few American warms ever met a dead.

“No need to lie about my looking well,” she said. “I look like something the chat dragged in. Or the chienne.”

He watched her eyes. She was a clown, he was a clown, all the world was a pointless pratfall into mud. China had no cats, he recalled, not any longer, even with the cornucopia that had followed upon the cool fusion rollout half a decade ago. Not many dogs, either.

“Well. I dare say you’ve been traveling?” Bik said.

“Yes, visiting the Cold Towns.” Without changing his tone, Klein said, “You want me out, I take it?”

She cleared her throat. “You are more direct than I recall.”

“We are less concerned with the niceties,” he told her, “we deads. I understand you’ve had some difficulties yourself. I hope everything turned out well?” He had done his due diligence; Bik had suffered a serious cardiac attack six months earlier, and now had a new heart. The experience had diminished her.

“Not a big deal, Jorge. Autologous regrowth, no need for a transplant. So I suppose in a way we’ve been through the same wars.”

“Actually, no,” he said. “Not really.”

After a silence, she said carefully, “You understand why I asked you to drop in today. I am regretful for the necessity, but the institutional governance—”

“I have no objection to forced retirement, but I do expect the department to allow me the privileges and status of professor emeritus.

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