The Transmigration of Souls

by William Barton

  Al-Qamar was a brilliant engineering design, snatched from old American books, designs the Americans could have built in the twentieth century. Should have built no later than the twenty-first. The upper stage was a blunted golden cone, not so very different from the experimental SSTO designs the Americans had built in the 1990s.

  So we went ahead and built a real aerospike engine, complete with a gas-layer heat-shield, so we could descend tail-first all the way from orbit, but it’s still the same design. Little six-man SSTO ship, able to haul a mere 20,000 kilograms to low earth-orbit.

  Until we made a much larger one and made this ship its cargo.

  The lower stage was chopped off, ending in a frustum on which the upper stage would sit for the ride above the atmosphere. They’d covered that with a temporary faring for the radio-controlled booster’s one ride to orbit, its one test flight.

  Almost lost her, too, when we had trouble with the comsat link.

  Today, the booster wasn’t going all the way into space. After placing al-Qamar on a 12,000-kilometer suborbital trajectory, she’d brake and come down at at-Ta’ïf airfield, not far from Mecca. The Faithful, on their hajra, would see her fly overhead, would see her land.

  A moment of remembering that other desert, the desert of his childhood, far to the east, the land beyond the sunrise. An adolescent moment, sitting astride his horse, hooves clattering on a rocky stone desert of degraded lava flows, dry gunpowder smell in his nose, smell of the desert wind.

  A rich man’s son on a rich man’s horse, on weekend holiday from a rich man’s private school. Pretending. Pretending. And yet... Wind in my face, sharp, abrading skin surface. Brilliant sun glaring in my eyes, beating down on a Bedawi’s ghutra, cloth headdress topped with a golden igal it was true, but a ghutra nonetheless... Surge of the horse between my legs, chuffing bellows of its breathing as we rode along.

  Pretending. Pretending. Yet sons of the desert still.

  Southern Hejaz, the ancient land, the heartland. Not so very far from where I was born. In the old days, before the Republic, they would’ve called me a prince. He turned and walked toward al-Qamar’s hatch, where more technicians were waiting, and thought. Prince? Wállah! Colonel suits me just fine.

  o0o

  Just a memory within a memory, momentary, almost elusive, almost illusory. Ahmad Zeq could recall sitting in a hard wooden chair in the hallway at school. Hallway in the engineering building. Sitting with the other graduates. Mostly silent. Hot, sweaty silence in the hallway. An occasional soft murmur, one sufferer to another. Mostly silence. A stir of cloth, a rustling whisper of linen as someone shifted uncomfortably. An involuntary intestinal rumble, someone trying desperately not to fart. The soft cluck of a dry swallow.

  My own thoughts. Desperate. Silly. Childish. Pleading.

  If it please you, O God, this poor, unworthy homosexual man would like to pass his Engineering Board Orals.

  And then. Back then. Those ridiculous inner words triggering a memory of the previous night. I should have been studying. Or sleeping. So I’d be fresh and rested for the ordeal. Just one thin beer, to put me at my ease. A thin beer, like I was a European or a Christian or a Jew or an Atheist, I said, because a good Muslim’s coffee will only keep me awake. And that fucking Englishman grinning up at me from between my legs, down some dark and stinking alleyway, kneeling there, grinning up at me, smacking his blubbery lips and croaking, “Jism-Allah!”

  I should have kneed him right in his weak English chin.

  Then back in the hot, stifling hallway. Wishing he’d slept instead of partying the night away. Tired. Tired. Tired. And then the proctor’s voice. “Zeq? Your turn.” Exhausted, unworthy homosexual man, shuffling off to bare his neck for the headsman’s sharp sword. Passing the Oral Boards anyway, examiners seeming to accept his occasional helpless giggle in the midst of some serious problem, as if it happened all the time.

  Nerves, they’d be thinking. Just nerves. I passed. Passed, and put my feet on the road that led to al-Qamar... Flash to present. Attention to task at hand. Al-Qamar...

  Ahmad Zeq put his hand on the master switch, let his neck fall back onto the headrest, eyes on his readouts, and listened while Alireza counted down. Counted down like a hero in some old adventure movie, Arabic numbers like sharp little snarls.

  It-neyn.

  Wehid.

  Sif.

  He snapped the switch in with his thumb, and muttered, “Yibtidi.” Soft, hardly audible, yet seeming to echo through the ship. Begin. The mission clock, set to 00:00:00:00, began to advance, red numbers flickering, seconds on the far left, which would lead to minutes, then hours, then days on the far right. Two weeks. Fourteen days. Then we’ll be home again, our little ship setting down on a broad concrete pad off the end of the military runway...

  No noise. Nothing so dramatic. Just a faint shivering at first, movement transmitted through structural members, through his chair and into his body. Everything all right so far, sensors from the booster’s annular combustion chamber reporting temperature and pressure, reporting the results of stratified ignition. Thrust stabilizing, pressure building up...

  Zeq looked up from his console, looked out through the pilot’s window, and the bright yellow landscape of the Sahara desert just went down, dropped out of sight, as al-Qamar rose on its pillar of translucent fire, like an elevator into the sky.

  What shall I say? thought Ahmad Zeq. To the world, he whispered, “Alhamdulilah.”

  o0o

  From a little more than 200 kilometers up, the Earth turning below was, for Ling Erhshan, an unbelievable sight. No amount of preparation, the viewing of any number of old films and tapes and VR sensies... Not Mercury-Gemini-Apollo, nor all those old IMAX films, nothing the Russians had done, nothing from the American Renaissance and their return to the Moon in the middle of the last century...

  Nothing. That was it. Absolutely nothing.

  While Chang Wushi twiddled his pilot’s controls, muttering singsong under his breath, a man caught up in the heavy work of talking to himself, while Da Chai monitored the ship’s systems and struggled with a recalcitrant rendezvous radar, Ling stared out the window, spellbound.

  Below, the Pacific was a featureless expanse of shiny blue water. Glittering. Shimmering. Catching sunlight off the wavetops. Not a cloud in sight. How can that be? Not a cloud in sight, and I can see for ten thousand miles. Down by the horizon, where a little band of light blue air separated the dark blue of sea from the black of space, moonrise. Full Moon bulging up from the wall of the world. Somewhere, out there, my Arab comrades are halfway to the Moon. Regret? No. The more who go, the more likely we are to stay. This time.

  The image of their ship, seen on the video net just hours before the first Chinese tanker was due to lift off had been... well. “Futuristic” was the word he wanted to use. Though they were all living in the future now, that was certain. A legacy from Twentieth Century America. A legacy from all those pathetic old writers who dreamed of space and more space, of impossible things like time travel and silly things like pills taking the place of food...

  Da Chai said, “Professor. I need your help.”

  Terse. Sharply spoken. A rebuke.

  But the view out the window...

  He turned away with a sigh. “The problem?”

  Da Chai tapped the radar CRT. “The periodic update is leaving ghosts. Well. I think they’re ghosts. But they also get updated, and now I can’t tell...” Frustration in his voice.

  Ling looked at the screen and shrugged. “Yes. We never did solve the sprite problem. If Chen Li were here...”

  “But he’s not. Can you fix it? Do we need to get him on the radio?” Tapping on the screen again, angrily. “One of these things is the Tanker. I need to know which one.”

  A slow nod, another sigh. Pull yourself together. Transcend. This is an adventure, yes, with so many aesthetic qualities, but... he folded down the radar computer’s hidden keypad and tapped, blanking the image, scrolling numb
ers, reading stored values, data from error traps they’d left in place when the schedule slipped and the software wasn’t quite ready. Yes. Not quite ready. Just ready enough.

  The radar control subsystem had been whipped up from a twenty-year-old Japanese design. You’d think, they could come up with a new design, somehow, some time... But, under Chinese tutelage, the Japanese seemed to lose their spark of usefulness.

  Tap. Tap-tap. The screen blanked and came up again, this time with only one image of the tanker, bracketed by glowing white numbers. Range. Relative velocity. Offset vector...

  Chang Wushi said, “Never mind. I’ve made visual contact.”

  A look of repressed hostility from Da Chai. Ling Erhshan smiled and shrugged. I told you, if only Chen Li were along... No point in that. By the living spirits that inhabit everything, we’re going to the Moon! Going last, it’s true, but going. He felt the skin of his face flush, warm with delight as he turned back to the window...

  Sudden pang. The unmanned tanker was hanging in space, motionless, a few hundred meters away, sunlight almost blinding on its featureless, white-painted hull.

  I can’t believe I am actually here.

  Chang Wushi muttered, “We crash into that thing, you’ll believe it.”

  If only for just a moment.

  o0o

  “It looks,” said Kincaid, “like an old MiG-21 standing on its tail.”

  The little techie, who’d said his name was Bruce, stood quietly at her side, looking at the Scavenger scoutship, hands in the pockets of his artfully roughed-up blue jeans, hair blowing in the warm, humid Pacific breeze. “Guess so.”

  Tall, thin, aerodynamically clean hull. Flat nose inlet with a shock-deflector cone poking out. Smallish triangular wings midway up. Four skewed-vane landing legs around the base. No bubble canopy, though. Little round windows, like the windows on an old-fashioned airliner, arrayed in neat little rows. And sixty meters tall, four meters in diameter. Painted silver. Other techies clustered around that base, doing something to the engine. Men in uniform going up and down a ramp that extruded from between two landing legs, leading to a small, brightly-lit hole near the bottom of the hull.

  If this was a real rocket, they’d be walking into a fuel tank.

  Real rocket. Like the ones we had back then.

  Not this magic thing.

  I wonder how much this is like the one Ethwÿn Nasóól found, when he came through the stargate on Æghóng and found his first abandoned Colony? Maybe like this, maybe not. Visuals in Scavenger literature were hardly evocative. More like exploded diagrams, interladen with numbers and subillustrations.

  Language hard to read too, even when you knew it well. Not like a human language. Even the driest technical literature more like some complex form of poetry, vertical rows of complexly structured pseudo-ideograms, with parenthetical remarks strung out on either side, paragraphs, if it was fair to call them that, more or less like a Scrabble board after the game is done.

  The techie, a scrawny man with thin, sparse sandy hair who looked like he ought to have thick glasses covering his washed-out blue eyes, elbowed her hard in the ribs, standing way closer than he needed to, and said, “Sure are glad you folks decided you need this. We’ve had her ready to fly for fifty years.”

  Looking up at her, eyes sparkling.

  Not looking into my eyes, no. Looking at my tits, the way they push out the front of this old uniform tunic. Well, you little shit...

  The man had a habit of ostentatiously pissing in public, too, bellying up to the side of whatever building was handy, unreeling a pecker twice the size it ought to be, looking around to see who was watching.

  All right. You can have anything you want, these days, so little Brucie here bought himself a big dick. All right. So why is he still only five-three? My toy soldiers all look like fucking Neanderthals and gorillas and comic-book monsters. Is that any better?

  Brucie elbowed her in the ribs again, standing closer still, and said, “Ah, say, Sergeant-Major?” She looked down at him. Sudden thickening of a fake Southern accent. “I wonder if y’all’d like to go off with me fer a quick fuck?” And now, eager like a puppy.

  Disbelief. Here I am, standing next to a man who may be a hundred-fifty years old, and he says...

  “Come on, Sarge. Be a sport.”

  All right. Hundred-fifty-year-old teenager. Sudden memory of Roddie opening up his birthday present. Amaterasu awakening, filling up with ersatz love. And Roddie bending her over the table, mushing her lovely little tits down in the birthday cake, cornholing her right in front of everyone, while his guests clapped and cheered him on.

  A whole country full of centenarian teenagers.

  Because never dying means you don’t really have to grow up.

  Brucie reached out, as if reaching for one of her breasts.

  “In your fucking dreams, asshole.”

  A sudden crafty look. “Yeah? Well, I’m sure your specs are in the net somewhere, Sarge. In my dreams, as you say.”

  If this was some old movie, I’d reach down now and rip that pretty little pecker out by its bioengineered roots. Still, no rule says you can’t grow up. If you want to. She glanced at her chronometer, and said, “You just get my ship ready, Brucie. You’ve got about four hours left.”

  Craft displaced by ingenuousness once again. He said, “That so, Sarge?” A shrug. “Well, we get to fly our toy. That’s all that really matters.” And a serious look, gazing fondly at the little Scavenger spaceship, superimposed against the broad, flat blue Pacific.

  Something, Kincaid thought, we have in common. She looked up into the sky, and said, “Yeah. We shouldn’t have stayed home. There’s more to life than living forever.”

  Softly whispered: “No shit, Sarge. No shit.”

  o0o

  Floating. Floating in the softest sea. No weight. No where. No when. Just floating with my eyes closed. Floating on my way to Heaven. God, I could stay like this forever. Just drifting, alone and unafraid...

  Soft whisper of machinery somewhere. Faint hum of electronic something. Whisper of a turning motor. Soft tickle of air blowing in my face, just under my arms, coming from somewhere behind me. Faint itch of clinging sweat, drying sweat, hardly there, hardly there at all, just like me...

  “All right. I’m ready.” Inbar’s voice, suddenly loud in her ears.

  Subaïda Rahman opened her eyes and felt her insides clench hard. Bright moonscape sweeping by below, no more than twenty kilometers straight down to the lowest plains, corroded, rolling mountains reaching up more than half that. Going by fast! No wind here...

  Laughter. Alireza’s voice, same volume. “Your heart rate was down below 55. I thought you went to sleep.”

  “Um.” Cough. A throat-clearing noise. Smooth, gray-brown plains flying under her now, running north along thirty, Mare Frigoris coming up. Just now over what? Lacus Mortis. She said, “Almost. Not quite.”

  “I understand al-Qahira Journal ran a big article on you in this morning’s edition. They said you were very... calm, I think was the word they used.”

  Inbar’s voice, fatigued, maybe a little out of breath, said, “I’m not calm. I’d like to get this done.” Though he’d been trained for zero-gee EVA, against just such an eventuality, Omry Inbar did not like this business of floating along in naked space. Rahman couldn’t imagine... Maybe he was just afraid. Maybe a little motion sick.

  Down below, the plains were ramping up into the north polar highlands as they passed by 70N. That wide caldera coming up to the west would be Meton, meaning in another few minutes they’d be over the rim of mountains separating Peary from Rozhdestvenskiy, where the old American base lay in ruins. We ought to be down there already. Timeline shot to Hell.

  She toggled the two little hand controllers on her AMU’s armrests, listened to the little peroxide thrusters stutter, noise transmitted through various structural members until it was inside her suit. Inertial tugging on her harness destroying the illusion of weightlessne
ss for a moment, Moon moving beneath her, getting out from under her feet, going behind her back, featureless black space, starless space, sun-glare-dominated space coming round.

  Al-Qamar’s golden cone was about 200 meters away, floating free, skewed at an angle, nose away from her, foreshortened, broad annular aerospike engine bulging toward her, three landing legs down and locked... and the forth one stuck half open, main joint bent up like a dancer’s knee, Omry Inbar a fat white manikin clinging to the hull beside it, tools in place and strapped down. He said, “I need you to position the jack now.”

  “All right. I hadn’t realized I’d drifted so far...” More thruster thudding from behind her back and the ship started to grow. Down near the southern horizon, far beyond the ship, Earth was a tiny blue-white sliver, mostly black and lightless now.

  I’ll be almost sorry to be down on the Moon, back in gravity again. This dreamlike dance. Image of a woman, perhaps no more than fifty years old, perhaps no more than twenty years from now, dancing this dance out among the asteroids, out among the flying hills of Saturn’s ring system...

  Just the second step, that’s all. Remembering President Morwar’s speech, twelve short years ago. Twelve years since President Morwar and his scientific advisors decided there was only one way out of the world’s inevitable downward spiral. One way for us, at any rate, for the desert UAR and its relatively small population. We can survive, you see. But the rest of them. They will drag us down. Forty billion people in the world today. Forty billion, of whom the Arabs constitute less than one percent. One percent of the world’s people holding five percent of all the land, holding ten percent of all the material wealth.

  Compare that to the five billion already starving in the princely states of Hind, to three billion Europeans in their own patchwork quilt of tiny republics. To the seven billion of southern Africa, to the six billion in South America. To the eight billion of Greater China, Green China, which had expanded to fill Siberia and Central Asia, had come all the way to the Ural Mountains.