Silverberg, Robert - Born with the dead

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ROBERT SILVERBERG

Born with the Dead

"Born with the Dead" won the Nebula Award for the best science fiction novella of 1974. Winning

awards is nothing new to Robert Silverberg, who has won three other Nebulas for "Passengers," the

best short story of 1969, and A Time of Changes and "Good News from the Vatican," the best novel

and short story of 1971. For those who keep score, this ties him with Samuel R. Delany, who also

has won four Nebulas (just as Ursula Le Guin's two Nebulas in one year tie her with Silverberg,

Delany, and Zelazny in that distinction). A former president of SFWA and a former New Yorker who

now lives in Oakland, Bob Silverberg has always been a writer. He graduated from Columbia

University in 1956 already a published author and never has done anything else. For a while he was

the most prolific author around; then, in an astonishing transformation, he changed himself into a

writer of keen perception, startling originality, and sensitive skill. In the story that follows

he deals with the quick and the dead in a world where both exist but separated by the gulf of life

itself.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

-T. S. ELIOT, Little Gidding

Supposedly his late wife Sybille was on her way to Zanzibar. That was what they told him, and he

believed it. Jorge Klein had reached that stage in his search when he would believe anything, if

belief would only lead him to Sybille. Anyway, it wasn't so absurd that she would go to Zanzibar.

Sybille had always wanted to go there. In some unfathomable obsessive way the place had seized the

center of her consciousness long ago. When she was alive it hadn't been possible for her to go

there, but now, loosed from all bonds, she would be drawn toward Zanzibar like a bird to its nest,

like Ulysses to Ithaca, like a moth to a flame.

The plane, a small Air Zanzibar Havilland FP-803, took off more than half empty from Dar es Salaam

at 0915 on a mild bright morning, gaily circled above the dense masses of mango trees, red

flowering flamboyants,and tall coconut palms along the aquamarine shores of the Indian Ocean, and

headed northward on the short hop across the strait to Zanzibar. This day Tuesday, the 9th of

March, 1993-would be an unusual one for Zanzibar: five deads were aboard the plane, the first of

their kind

ever to visit that fragrant isle. Daud Mahmoud Barwani, the health officer on duty that morning at

Zanzibar's Karume Airport, had been warned of this by the emigration officials on the mainland. He

had no idea how he was going to handle the situation, and he was apprehensive: these were tense

times in Zanzibar. Times are always tense in Zanzibar. Should he refuse them entry? Did deads pose

any threat to Zanzibar's ever precarious political stability? What about subtler menaces? Deads

might be carriers of dangerous spiritual maladies. Was there anything in the Revised

Administrative Code about refusing visas on grounds of suspected contagions of the spirit? Daud

Mahmoud Barwani nibbled moodily at his breakfast-a cold, chapatti, a mound of cold curried potato-

and waited without eagerness for the arrival of the deads.

Almost two and half years had passed since Jorge Klein had last seen Sybille: the afternoon of

Saturday, October 13, 1990, the day of her funeral. That day she lay in her casket as though

merely asleep, her beauty altogether unmarred by her final ordeal: pale skin, dark lustrous hair,

delicate nostrils, full lips. Iridescent gold and violet fabric enfolded her serene body; a

shimmering electrostatic haze, faintly perfumed with a jasmine fragrance, protected her from

decay. For five hours she floated on the dais while the rites of parting were read and the

condolences were offered-offered almost furtively, as if her death were a thing too monstrous to

acknowledge with a show of strong feeling; then, when only a few people remained, the inner core

of their circle of friends, Klein kissed her lightly on the lips and surrendered her to the silent

dark-clad men whom the Cold Town had sent. She had asked in her will to be rekindled; they took

her away in a black van to work their tragic on her corpse. The casket, retreating on their broad

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shoulders, seemed to Klein to be disappearing into a throbbing gray vortex that he was helpless to

penetrate. Presumably he would never hear from her again. In those days the deads kept strictly to

themselves, sequestered behind the walls of their self-imposed ghettos; it was rare ever to see

one outside the Cold Towns, rare even for one of them to make oblique contact with the world of

the living.

So a redefinition of their relationship was forced on him. For nine years it had been Jorge and

Sybille, Sybille and Jorge, I and thou forming we, above all we, a transcendental we. He had

loved her with almost painful intensity. In life they had gone everywhere together, had done

everything together, shared research tasks and classroom assignments, thought interchangeable

thoughts, expressed tastes that were nearly always identical, so completely had each permeated the

other. She was a part of him, he of her, and until the moment of her unexpected death he had

assumed it would be like that forever. They were still young, he 38, she 34, decades to look

forward to. Then she was gone. And now they were mere anonymities to one another, she not Sybille

but only a dead, he not Jorge but only a warm. She was somewhere on the North American continent,

walking about, talking, eating, reading, and yet she was gone, lost to him, and it behooved him to

accept the alteration in his life, and outwardly he did accept it, but yet, though he knew he

could never again have things as they once had been, he allowed himself the indulgence of a

lingering wistful hope of regaining her.

Shortly the plane was in view, dark against the brightness of the sky, a suspended mote, an

irritating fleck in Barwani's eye, growing larger, causing him to blink and sneeze. Barwani was

not ready for it. When Ameri Kombo, the flight controller in the cubicle next door, phoned him

with the landing, Barwani replied, "Notify the pilot that no one is to debark until I have given

clearance. I must consult the regulations. There is possibly a peril to public health. " For

twenty minutes he let the plane sit, all hatches sealed, on the quiet runway. Wandering goats

emerged from the shrubbery and inspected it. Barwani consulted no regulations. He finished his

modest meal; then he folded his arms and sought to attain the proper state of tranquility. These

deads, he told himself, could do no harm. They were people like all other people, except that they

had undergone extraordinary medical treatment. He must overcome his superstitious fear of them: he

was no peasant, no silly clove picker, nor was Zanzibar an abode of primitives. He would admit

them, he would give them their anti-malaria tablets as though they were ordinary tourists, he

would send them on their way. Very well. Now he was ready. He phoned Ameri Kombo. "There is no

danger," he said. "The passengers may exit."

There were nine altogether, a sparse load. The four warms emerged first, looking somber and little

congealed, like people

who had had to travel with a party of uncaged cobras. Barwani knew them all: the German consul's

wife, the merchant Chowdhary's son, and two Chinese engineers, all returning from brief holidays

in Dar. He waved them through the gate without formalities. Then came the deads, after an interval

of half a minute: probably they had been sitting together at one end of the nearly empty plane and

the others had been at the other. There were two women, three men, all of them tall and

surprisingly robust-looking. He had expected them to shamble, to shuffle, to limp, to falter, but

they moved with aggressive strides, as if they were in better health now than when they had been

alive. When they reached the gate Barwani stepped forward to greet them, saying softly, "Health

regulations, come this way, kindly. " They were breathing, undoubtedly breathing: he tasted an

emanation of liquor from the big red-haired man, a mysterious and pleasant sweet flavor, perhaps

anise, from the dark-haired woman. It seemed to Barwani that their skins had an odd waxy texture,

an unreal glossiness, but possibly that was his imagination; white skins had always looked

artificial to him. The only certain difference he could detect about the deads was in their eyes,

a way they had of remaining unnervingly fixed in a single intense gaze for many seconds before

shifting. Those were the eyes, Barwani thought, of people who had looked upon the Emptiness

without having been swallowed into it. A turbulence of questions erupted within him: What is it

like, how do you feel, what do you remember, where did you go? He left them unspoken. Politely he

said, "Welcome to the isle of cloves. We ask you to observe that malaria has been wholly

eradicated here through extensive precautionary measures, and to prevent recurrence of unwanted

disease we require of you that you take these tablets before proceeding further. " Tourists often

objected to that; these people swallowed their pills without a word of" protest. Again Barwani

yearned to reach toward them, to achieve some sort of contact that might perhaps help him to

transcend the leaden weight of being. But an aura, a shield of strangeness, surrounded these five,

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and, though he was an amiable man who tended to fall into conversations easily with strangers, he

passed them on in silence to Mponda the immigration man. Mponda's high forehead was shiny with

sweat, and he chewed at his lower lip; evidently he was as disturbed by the deads as Barwani. He

fumbled forms, he stamped a visa in the

wrong place, he stammered while telling the deads that he must keep their passports overnight. "I

shall post them by messenger to your hotel in the morning," Mponda promised them, and sent the

visitors onward to the baggage pickup area with undue haste.

Klein had only one friend with whom he dared talk about it, a colleague of his at UCLA, a sleek

little Parsee sociologist from Bombay named Framji Jijibhoi, who was as deep into the elaborate

new subculture of the deads as a warm could get. "How can I accept this?" Klein demanded. "I can't

accept it at all. She's out there somewhere, she's alive, she's-"

Jijibhoi cut him off with a quick flick of his fingertips. "No, dear friend," he said sadly, "not

alive, not alive at all, merely rekindled. You must learn to grasp the distinction. " Klein could

not learn to grasp anything having to do with Sybille's death. He could not bear to think that she

had passed into another existence from which he was totally excluded. To find her, to speak with

her, to participate in her experience of death and whatever lay beyond death, became his only

purpose. He was inextricably bound to her, as though she were still his wife, as though Jorge-and-

Sybille still existed in any way.

He waited for letters from her, but none came. After a few months he began trying to trace her,

embarrassed by his own compulsiveness and by his increasingly open breaches of the etiquette of

this sort of widower hood. He traveled from one Cold Town to another-Sacramento, Boise, Ann Arbor,

Louisville but none would admit him, none would even answer his questions. Friends passed on

rumors to him, that she was living among the deads of Tucson, of Roanoke, of Rochester, of San

Diego, but nothing came of these tales; then Jijibhoi, who had tentacles into the world of the

rekindled in many places, and who was aiding Klein in his quest even though he disapproved of its

goal, brought him an authoritative-sounding report that she was at Zion Cold Town in southeastern

Utah. They turned him away there too, but not entirely cruelly, for he did manage to secure

plausible evidence that that was where Sybille really was.

In the summer of '92 Jijibhoi told him that Sybille had emerged from Cold Town seclusion. She had

been seen he said, in Newark, Ohio, touring the municipal golf course at Octagon State Memorial in

the company of a swaggering red-haired

archaeologist named Kent Zacharias, also a dead, formerly a specialist in the mound-building

Hopewellian cultures of Ohio Valley. "It is a new phase," said Jijibhoi, "not unanticipated. The

deads are beginning to abandon their early philosophy of total separatism. We have started to

observe them as tourists visiting our world-exploring the life-death interface, as they like to

term it. It will be very interesting, dear friend." Klein flew at once to Ohio and, without ever

actually seeing her, tracked her from Newark to Chillicothe, from Chillicothe to Marietta, from

Marietta into West Virginia, where he lost her trail somewhere between Moundsville and Wheeling.

Two months later she was said to be in London, then in Cairo, then Addis Ababa. Early in '93 Klein

learned, via the scholarly grapevine-an ex-Californian now at Nyerere University in Arusha-that

Sybille was on safari in Tanzania and was planning to go, in a few weeks, across to Zanzibar.

Of course. For ten years she had been working on a doctoral thesis on the establishment of the

Arab Sultanate in Zanzibar in the early nineteenth century-studies unavoidably interrupted by

other academic chores, by love affairs, by marriage, by financial reverses, by illnesses, death,

and other responsibilities-and she had never actually been able to visit the island that was so

central to her. Now she was free of all entanglements. Why shouldn't she go to Zanzibar at last?

Why not? Of course: she was heading for Zanzibar. And so Klein would go to Zanzibar too, to wait

for her.

As the five disappeared into taxis, something occurred to Barwani. He asked Mponda for the

passports and scrutinized the names. Such strange ones: Kent Zacharias, Nerita Tracy, Sybille

Klein, Anthony Gracchus, Laurence Mortimer. He had never grown accustomed to the names of

Europeans. Without the photographs he would be unable to tell which were the women, which the men.

Zacharias, Tracy, Klein . . . ah. Klein. He checked a memo, two weeks old, tacked to his desk.

Klein, yes. Barwani telephoned the Shirazi Hotel-a project that consumed several minutes-and asked

to speak with the American who had arrived ten days before, that slender man whose lips had been

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pressed tight in tension, whose eyes had glittered with fatigue, the one who had asked a little

service of Barwani, a special favor, and had dashed him a much needed hundred

shillings as payment in advance. There was a lengthy delay, no doubt while porters searched the

hotel, looking in the man's room, the bar, the lounge, the garden, and then the American was on

the line. "The person about whom you inquired has just arrived; sir," Barwani told him.

The dance begins. Worms underneath fingertips, lips beginning to pulse, heartache and throat-

catch. All slightly out of step and out of key, each its own tempo and rhythm. Slowly,

connections. Lip to lip, heart to heart, finding self in other, dreadfully, tentatively, burning .

. . notes finding themselves in chords, chords in sequence, cacophony turning to polyphonous

contrapuntal chorus, a diapason of celebration.

-R.D. LAING, The Bird of Paradise

Sybille stands timidly at the edge of the municipal golf course at Octagon State Memorial in

Newark, Ohio, holding her sandals in her hand and surreptitiously working her toes into the lush,

immaculate carpet of dense, close-cropped lime-green grass. It is a summer afternoon in 1992, very

hot; the air, beautifully translucent, has that timeless Midwestern shimmer, and the droplets of

water from the morning sprinkling have not yet burned off the lawn. Such extraordinary grass! She

hadn't often seen grass like that in California, and certainly not at Zion Cold Town in thirsty

Utah. Kent Zacharias, towering beside her, shakes his head sadly. "A golf course! " he mutters.

"One of the most important prehistoric sites in North America and they make a golf course out of

it! Well, I suppose it could have been worse. They might have bulldozed the whole thing and turned

it into a municipal parking lot. Look, there, do you see the earthworks?" She is trembling. This

is her first extended journey outside the Cold Town, her first venture into the world of the warms

since her rekindling, and she is picking up threatening vibrations from all the life that burgeons

about her. The park is surrounded by pleasant little houses, well kept. Children on bicycles

rocket through the streets. In front of her, golfers are merrily slamming away. Little yellow golf

carts clamber with lunatic energy over the rises and dips of the course. There are platoons of

tourists who, like herself and Zacharias, have come to see the Indian

mounds. There are dogs running free. All this seems menacing to her. Even the vegetation-the thick

grass, the manicured shrubs, the heavy leafed trees with low-hanging boughs-, disturbs her. Nor is

the nearness of Zacharias reassuring, for he too seems inflamed with undead like vitality; his

face is florid, his features are broad and over animated, as he points out the low flat-topped

mounds, the grassy bumps and ridges making up the giant joined circle and octagon of the ancient

monument. Of course, these mounds are the mainspring of his being, even now, ` five years post

mortem. Ohio is his Zanzibar.

"-once covered four square miles. A grand ceremonial center, the Hopewellian equivalent of Chichen

Itza, of Luxor, of . . ." He pauses. Awareness of her distress has finally filtered; through the

intensity of his archaeological zeal. "How are you doing?" he asks gently.

She smiles a brave smile. Moistens her lips. Inclines her head:

toward the golfers, toward the tourists, toward the row of darling .`

little houses outside the rim of the park. Shudders. x

"Too cheery for you, is it?"

"Much," she says.

Cheery. Yes. A cheery little town, a magazine-cover town, a ,. chamber-of-commerce town. Newark

lies becalmed on the breast of the sea of time: but for the look of the automobiles, this could be

1980 or 1960 or perhaps 1940. Yes. Motherhood,, baseball, apple pie, church every Sunday. Yes.

Zacharias nods and makes one of the signs of comfort at her. "Come," he whispers. "Let's go toward

the heart of the complex.. We'll lose

the twentieth century along the way.".

With brutal imperial strides he plunges into the golf course. Long legged Sybille must work hard

to keep up with him. In a moment they are within the embankment, they have entered the sacred

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octagon, they have penetrated the vault of the past, and at once Sybille feels they have achieved

a successful crossing of the interface between life and death. How still it is here! She senses;

the powerful presence of the forces of death; and those dark spirits heal her unease. The

encroachments of the world of the' living on these precincts of the dead become insignificant: the

houses outside the park are no longer in view, the golfers are mere foolish incorporeal shadows,

the bustling yellow golf carts become beetles, the wandering tourists are invisible.

She is overwhelmed by the size and symmetry of the ancient.

site. What spirits sleep here? Zacharias conjures them, waving his hands like a magician. She has

heard so much from him already about these people, these Hopewellians-What did they call

themselves? How can We ever know?-who heaped up these ramparts of earth twenty centuries ago. Now

he brings them to life for her with gestures and low urgent words. He whispers fiercely:

-Do you see them?

And she does see them. Mists descend. The mounds reawaken; the mound-builders appear. Tall,

slender, swarthy, nearly naked, clad in shining copper breastplates, in necklaces of flint disks,

in bangles of bone and mica and tortoise-shell, in heavy chains of bright lumpy pearls, in rings

of stone and terra-cotta, in armlets of bears' teeth and panthers' teeth, in spool-shaped metal

ear-ornaments, in furry loincloths. Here are priests in intricately woven robes and awesome masks.

Here are chieftains with crowns of copper rods, moving in frosty dignity along the long earthen-

walled avenue. The eyes of these people glow with energy. What an enormously vital, enormously

profligate culture they sustain here! Yet Sybille is not alienated by their throbbing vigor, for

it is the vigor of the dead, the vitality of the vanished.

Look, now. Their painted faces, their unblinking gazes. This is a funeral procession. The Indians

have come to these intricate geometrical enclosures to perform their acts of worship, and now,

solemnly parading along the perimeters of the circle and the octagon, they pass onward, toward the

mortuary zone beyond. Zacharias and Sybille are left alone in the middle of the field. He murmurs

to her:

-Come. We'll follow them.

He makes it real for her. Through his cunning craft she has access to this community of the dead.

How easily she has drifted backward across time! She leams here that she can affix herself to the

sealed past at any point; it's only the present, open-ended and unpredictable, that is

troublesome. She and Zacharias float through the misty meadow, no sensation of feet touching

ground; leaving the octagon, they travel now down a long grassy causeway to the place of the

burial mounds, at the edge of a dark forest of wide-crowned oaks. They enter a vast clearing. In

the center the ground has been plastered with clay, then covered lightly with sand and fine

gravel; on this base the mortuary

house, a roofless four-sided structure with walls consisting of rows of wooden palisades, has been

erected. Within this is a low clay platform topped by a rectangular tomb of log cribbing, in which

two bodies can be seen: a young man, a young woman, side by side, bodies fully extended, beautiful

even in death. They wear copper breastplates, copper ear omaments, copper bracelets, necklaces of

gleaming yellowish bears' teeth.

Four priests station themselves at the corners of the mortuary house. Their faces are covered by

grotesque wooden masks topped by great antlers, and they carry wands two feet long, effigies of

the death-cup mushroom in wood sheathed with copper. One priest commences a harsh, percussive

chant. All four lift their wands and abruptly bring them down. It is a signal; the depositing of

grave goods begins. Lines of mourners bowed under heavy sacks approach the mortuary house. They

are unweeping, even joyful, faces ecstatic, eyes shining, for these people know what later

cultures will forget, that death is no termination but rather a natural continuation of life.

Their departed friends are to be envied. They are honored with lavish gifts, so that they may live

like royalty in the next world: out of the sacks come nuggets of copper, meteoric iron, and

silver, thousands of pearls, shell beads, beads of copper and iron, buttons of wood and stone,

heaps of metal ear-spools, chunks and chips of obsidian, animal effigies carved from slate and

bone and tortoise-shell, ceremonial copper axes and knives, scrolls cut from mica, human jawbones

inlaid with turquoise, dark coarse pottery, needles of bone, sheets of woven cloth, coiled

serpents fashioned from dark stone, a torrent of offerings, heaped up around and even upon the two

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bodies.

At length the tomb is choked with gifts. Again there is a signal from the priests. They elevate

their wands and the mourners, drawing back to the borders of clearing, form a circle and begin to

sing a somber, throbbing funereal hymn. Zacharias, after a moment, sings with them, wordlessly

embellishing the melody with heavy melismas. His voice is a rich basso cantante, so unexpectedly

beautiful that Sybille is moved almost to confusion by it, and looks at him in awe. Abruptly he

breaks off, turns to her, touches her arm, leans down to say:

-You sing too.

Sybille nods hesitantly. She joins the song, falteringly at first, her throat constricted by self-

consciousness; then she finds

herself becoming part of the rite, somehow, and her tone becomes more confident. Her high clear

soprano soars brilliantly above the other voices.

Now another kind of offering is made: boys cover the mortuary house with heaps of kindling-twigs,

dead branches, thick boughs, all sorts of combustible debris-until it is quite hidden from sight,

and the priests cry a halt. Then, from the forest, comes a woman bearing a blazing firebrand, a

girl, actually, entirely naked, her sleek fair-skinned body painted with bizarre horizontal

stripes of red and green on breasts and buttocks and thighs, her long glossy black hair flowing

like a cape behind her as she runs. Up to the mortuary house she sprints; breathlessly she touches

the firebrand to the kindling, here, here, here, performing a wild dance as she goes, and hurls

the torch into the center of the pyre. Skyward leap the flames in a ferocious rush. Sybille feels

seared by the blast of heat. Swiftly the house and tomb are consumed.

While the embers still glow, the bringing of earth gets under way. Except for the priests, who

remain rigid at the cardinal points of the site, and the girl who wielded the torch, who lies like

discarded clothing at the edge of the clearing, the whole community takes part. There is an open

pit behind a screen of nearby trees; the worshippers, forming lines, go to it and scoop up soil,

carrying it to the burned mortuary house in baskets, in buckskin aprons, in big moist clods held

in their bare hands. Silently they dump their burdens on the ashes and go back for more.

Sybille glances at Zacharias; he nods; they join the line. She goes down into the pit, gouges a

lump of moist black clayey soil from its side, takes it to the growing mound. Back for another,

back for another. The mound rises rapidly, two feet above ground level now, three, four, a

swelling circular blister, its outlines governed by the unchanging positions of the four priests,

its tapering contours formed by the tamping of scores of bare feet. Yes, Sybille thinks, this is a

valid way of celebrating death, this is a fitting rite. Sweat runs down her body, her clothes

become stained and muddy, and still she runs to the earth quarry, runs from there to the mound,

runs to the quarry, runs to the mound, runs, runs, transfigured, ecstatic.

Then the spell breaks. Something goes wrong, she does not know what, and the mists clear, the sun

dazzles her eyes, the

priests and the mound-builders and the unfinished mound disappear. She and Zacharias are once

again in the octagon, golf carts roaring past them on every side. Three children and their parents

stand just a few feet from her, staring, staring, and a boy about ten years old points to Sybille

and says in a voice that reverberates through half of Ohio, "Dad, what's wrong with those people?

Why do they look so weird?" Mother gasps and cries, "Quiet, Tommy, don't you have any manners?"

Dad, looking furious, gives the boy a stinging blow across the face with the tips of his fingers,

seizes him by the wrist, tugs him toward the other side of the park, the whole family following in

their wake.

Sybille shivers convulsively. She turns away, clasping her hands to her betraying eyes. Zacharias

embraces her. "It's all right," he says tenderly. "The boy didn't know any better. It's all

right."

"Take me away from here!" - "I want to show you-"

"Some other time. Take me away. To the motel. I don't want to see anything. I don't want anybody

to see me."

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He takes her to the motel. For an hour she lies face down on the bed, racked by dry sobs. Several

times she tells Zacharias she is unready for this tour, she wants to go back to the Cold Town, but

he says nothing, simply strokes the tense muscles of her back, and after a while the mood passes.

She turns to him and their eyes meet and he touches her and they make love in the fashion of the

deads.

Newness is renewal: ad hoc enim venit, ut renovemur in illo; f making it new again, as on the

first day; herrlich wie am ersten Tag. Reformation, or renaissance; rebirth. Life is Phoenix-like,

always being born again out of its own death. The true nature of life is resurrection; all life is

life after death, a second life, reincarnation. Torus hic ordo revolubilis testatio est

resurrectionis mortuorum. The universal pattern of recurrence bears witness to the resurrection of

the dead.

-NORMAN O. BROWN, Love's Body

"The rains shall be commencing shortly, gentleman and lady,"

the taxi driver said, speeding along the narrow highway to Zanzibar Town. He had been chattering

steadily, wholly unafraid of his passengers. He must not know what we are, Sybille decided.

"Perhaps in a week or two they begin. These shall be the long rains. The short rains come in the

last of November and December. "

"Yes, I know," Sybille said.

"Ah, you have been to Zanzibar before?"

"In a sense," she replied. In a sense she had been to Zanzibar many times, and how calmly she was

taking it, now that the true Zanzibar was beginning to superimpose itself on the template in her

mind, on that dream-Zanzibar she had carried about so long! She took everything calmly now:

nothing excited her, nothing aroused her. In her former life the delay at the airport would have

driven her into a fury: a ten-minute flight, and then be trapped on the runway twice as long. But

she had remained tranquil throughout it all, sitting almost immobile, listening vaguely to what

Zacharias was saying and occasionally replying as if sending messages from some other planet. And

now Zanzibar, so placidly accented. In the old days she had felt a sort of paradoxical amazement

whenever one landmark familiar from childhood geography lessons or the movies or travel posters-

the Grand Canyon, the Manhattan skyline, Taos Puebloturned out in reality to look exactly as she

imagined it would; but now here was Zanzibar, unfolding predictably and unsurprisingly before her,

and she observed it with a camera's cool eye, unmoved, unresponsive.

The soft, steamy air was heavy with a burden of perfumes, not only the expected pungent scent of

cloves but also creamier fragrances which perhaps were those of hibiscus, frangipani, jacaranda,

bougainvillea, penetrating the cab's open window like probing tendrils. The imminence of the long

rains was a tangible pressure, a presence, a heaviness in the atmosphere: at any moment a curtain

might be drawn aside and the torrents would start. The highway was lined by two shaggy green walls

of palms broken by tin-roofed shacks; behind the palms were mysterious dark groves, dense and

alien. Along the edge of the road was the usual tropical array of obstacles: chickens, goats,

naked children, old women with shrunken, toothless faces, all wandering around untroubled by the

taxi's encroachment on their right-of-way. On through the rolling flatlands the cab sped,

to the peninsula on which Zanzibar Town sits. The temperature seemed to be rising perceptibly

minute by minute; a fist of humid heat was clamping tight over the island. "Here is the

waterfront, gentleman and lady," the driver said. His voice was an intrusive hoarse purr,

patronizing, disturbing. The sand was glaringly white, the water a dazzling glassy blue; a couple

of dhows moved sleepily across the mouth of the harbor, their lateen sails bellying slightly as

the gentle sea breeze caught them. "On this side, please-" An enormous white wooden building, four

stories high, a wedding cake of long verandahs and cast-iron railings, topped by a vast cupola.

Sybille, recognizing it, anticipated the driver's spiel, hearing it like a subliminal pre-echo:

"Befit al-Ajaib, the House of Wonders, former government house. Here the Sultan was often make

great banquets, here the famous of all Africa came homaging. No longer in use. Next door the old

Sultan's Palace, now Palace of People. You wish to go in House of Wonders? Is open: we stop, I

take you now. "

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"Another time," Sybille said faintly. "We'll be here awhile. "

"You not here just a day like most?"

"No, a week or more. I've come to study the history of your island. I'll surely visit the Beit al-

Ajaib. But not today."

"Not today, no. Very well: you call me, I take you anywhere. I am lbuni. " He gave her a gallant

toothy grin over his shoulder and swung the cab inland with a ferocious lurch, into the labyrinth

of winding streets and narrow alleys that was Stonetown, the ancient Arab quarter.

All was silent here. The massive white stone buildings presented blank faces to the streets. The

windows, mere slits, were shuttered. Most doors-the famous paneled doors of Stonetown, richly

carved, studded with brass, cunningly inlaid, each door an ornate Islamic masterpiece-were closed

and seemed to be locked. The shops looked shabby, and the small display windows were speckled with

dust. Most of the signs were so faded Sybille could barely make them out:

PREMCHAND'S EMPORIUM

MONJI'S CURIOS

ABDULLAH'S BROTHERHOOD STORE

MONTH-AL'S BAZAAR

The Arabs were long since gone from Zanzibar. So were most of the Indians, though they were said

to be creeping back. Occasionally, as it pursued its intricate course through the maze of

Stonetown, the taxi passed elongated black limousines, probably of Russian or Chinese make,

chauffeur-driven, occupied by dignified self contained dark-skinned men in white robes.

Legislators, so she supposed them to be, en route to meetings of state. There were no other

vehicles in sight, and no pedestrians except for a few women, robed entirely in black, hurrying on

solitary errands. Stonetown had none of the vitality of the countryside; it was a place of ghosts,

she thought, a fitting place for vacationing deads. She glanced at Zacharias, who nodded and

smiled, a quick quirky smile that 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 comers 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 Guide father 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," lbuni 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-

andglobe 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

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Silverberg, Robert - Born with the dead

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