To the billions of southeast Asia and Mexico and Central America. Even to the hundred million of isolated Canada, to the four hundred million refugees now crowding poverty-stricken Australia’s dry red deserts...
You could look at all the old graphs and all the old plans, and you could see that no one ever extended them far enough. Far enough to see that, no matter what you did, no matter how draconian your solution, the world would come to an end, some time in the late twenty-second century, or early twenty-third.
President Morwar looking at his advisors. Gentlemen, that time is now. We have perhaps a half-century to do what we must, for, sooner or later, those starving billions will come for what we have. Come and take it, and then we’ll all go down together.
And the Americans? A shrug. Who knows what they’ll do? Waiting for them to save us would be like waiting for... I don’t know. Waiting for the Archangels to come down and wash away our sins.
I was just a graduate-school girl then, trying to pass my courses, make honors, trying to keep grope-handed professors out of my skirt without offending them.
Sharp memory of that skinny, dark Sudanese mathematics professor, the one who held the honors seminar in advanced multivariable topology. Sitting beside her that afternoon in a back corner kiosk at the library, making her suddenly very sorry she’d worn that short dress, putting his hand on her thigh, grinning, tucking his fingers between her knees, making that little prying motion...
What now, little girl? An “honor” mark from this greasy little man is your ticket to the next level. And you do so want to be accepted into the astronaut corps. Applications have to be in by the first of Hazirahn, and...
But the image that called up. Lying on her back, dress pulled up, legs spread, his garlicky hummus-breath in her face...
Mmmh. Mmmh. This feels soooo gooood, little girl...
Small crunch of revulsion. Not against the act, which had been... rewarding, perhaps, the few times she’d tried it with... suitable boys. No. Against the implication. The implication.
Fingers prying at her thighs now. That other hand stealing up her arm, headed, perhaps, for a breast or two...
All right. Then think of something, little girl.
She’d smiled and taken him by the hand, patted him on the wrist. “I know just how you feel, Professor Wahid. It’s so frustrating when a girl won’t just... go along with it.”
Puzzled look. “What do you mean?” Those fingers between her thighs relaxing just a bit.
“Well. You know I’m a lesbian, don’t you?”
She’d almost laughed at his comic gape. “A lesbian? But...” A gesture, at her body. Sudden quirk of anger. “But you don’t dress like a lesbian. You don’t...”
“My parents. My parents are very traditional.”
Professor Wahid then, chewing his lower lip in dismay. “Why are we here then?”
Feigned astonishment. “Why, to talk about the seminar. It’s... so seldom I get to talk to such an... intelligent, such a learned man.” Push a button, pull the chain...
A soft popping of backpack thrusters and the ship was a golden wall before her, Inbar’s plump face looking out at her through his helmet faceplate. Pale. Fretful. A face that pleaded, let’s be done with this...
Pale, fat face. Deep, brilliant, penetrating eyes. He was one of the few who’d tried to bother her, during the years of training, as she moved up and up, got on crew rosters, got up in space on orbital missions, got herself named as American Technologies Specialist on the first flight to the Moon. Bothered me. Though I wore the uniform, walked the walk, talked the talk. Told me, fatuously, insipidly, how much he liked women in short hair and trousers...
All right. One of the few... cosmopolitan enough to see through the ruse. Well, Zeq of course. But he merely thought it was funny. Offering to get her dates with his female “pals.”
She said, “Let’s go.”
Only gratitude in his eyes now. Let’s go.
o0o
Looking out one of Ming Tian’s small portholes from ten thousand kilometers up, the Moon was a vast yellow circle of light, a circle of harshly-lit landscape, mountains becoming real mountains, endless circular craters becoming visible on the face of the shadowy maria.
Over the hump now, over the hump into the Moon’s gravitational field and falling straight down. Ming Tian was moving slowly, no more than eight hundred kilometers an hour, bare residual velocity. But we’re falling. Falling down to the Moon. Behind them, Earth was a tiny, blue and white crescent. A lost world. I remember staring at the Moon when I was a boy...
Little boy Ling Erhshan, lying out on the orphanage fire escape, industrial stinks from the ruinous slums of Shanghai making the old brick walls of a two-hundred-year-old building seem damp and slimy, smelling the stench of Shanghai’s close-packed sixty million souls, staring up at the old white Moon. White like death. No. Always yellow to me. Warm and yellow like the sun. Yellow like life.
The orphanage had had a little library, mostly children’s primers. A few adult Chinese novels none of us could read. Some books printed in Russian we could do no more than essay, sounding out the Cyrillic characters, getting that Siberian girl, what was her name? Anyushka, to tell us what the words meant.
I remember finding that other book, Moon Man, printed in pinyin Putonghua, Chinese language in Romanic letters, a translation of an early twenty-first century story by some writer with an unpronounceable foreign name, Dutch, maybe English, name transliterated into simplified Chinese characters that meant “thimble valley.”
Cover picture showing a muscular Caucasian hero in torn military camouflage, with sword and pistol to hand, beautiful, half-naked blond woman by his side, the two of them standing in an eldritch landscape, facing a red and blue tiger under a dark lavender sky, sky in which hung a blue-white crescent Earth. Realistic-looking Earth, because people had already seen it thus. Like the Earth hanging outside Ming Tian just now. The Moon I dreamed of seeing.
Wonderful, impossible story about a middle-aged soldier, called up against his will to fight in one of his country’s wretched foreign adventures, author’s anger reminding me how foul the world had seemed to its denizens at the turn of the millennium. They should have known how very much worse it would get. Yet they did nothing.
Story about a soldier standing on a mountaintop, defeated, watching as a cruise missile came in over the sea, smashed into the base of the cliff on which he stood. Nuclear explosion. Unadorned flash of white light. Soldier awakening in his tattered uniform on a dusty plain covered with pale yellow moss under a dark lavender sky in which hung the lost blue Earth. Moon Man.
Ling Erhshan lying on the fire escape, looking up at the yellow circle of the Moon over Shanghai, imagining himself to be soldier Dorian Haldane, beloved of the beautiful Goth slave-woman Valetta, blown away to another dimension, rather than merely to the timeless eternity of death. Imagining himself lost on the Moon of the Greek-speaking Kalksis oppressors, descended from Ptolemaic colonists stranded after a nuclear war between Rome and Carthage. A Moon inhabited by Chinese-speaking red Indians, by Gothic slaves and Roman guerrillas determined to win free of Greek dominion...
I would lie there in the stinking darkness. Lie there and imagine myself captaining some creaky pentekonter, imagine myself the pirate scourge of the Five Seas I could see, so shadowy, in the yellow world overhead...
The radio speaker set in the main instrument panel suddenly blatted static, then, “Ming Tian, do you read?” Chen Li’s voice.
Da Chai leaned close to the audio pickup, and said, “We read you poorly, Control.”
Chen Li said, “We’re having some trouble with your telemetry channel.”
Equipment failure. A cold hand on Ling Erhshan’s heart. Because nothing had really been ready on time, or fully tested.
“What sort of trouble?”
“Interruptions. A second of no signal, then a second of signal. Very regular. Inexplicable.”
Inexplicable. Ling
said, “What’s in the interrupted signal? Static?”
“Hello, Professor. No. More like a carrier-wave hum. Nothing our equipment could produce, I don’t think...”
Ling stared at the worried look on Chang’s face for a moment. “Maybe. If one of those old transistors is...”
The radio speaker, completely free of static, said, “This is Major-General Morris K. Athelstan, speaking for the Department of Defense, United States of America. All spacecraft now flying in Cislunar Space are warned that the Earth’s natural satellite Luna has been claimed as national territory by the United States. Unauthorized landings on United States territory anywhere in the solar system will be treated as a military invasion and dealt with accordingly. This warning will be repeated in one hour, broadcast to all communication systems throughout the world and Cislunar Space. Major-General Morris K. Athelstan, speaking for the Department of Defense, United States of America, signing off.”
The speaker said, “
Da Chai turned away from the speaker, mouth hanging open. No words.
The speaker said, “Come in, Ming Tian. Do you read? Over.” Static fading, fading, becoming no more than a background hiss, the familiar music of the spheres.
Ling leaned forward toward the pickup, and said, “We hear you, Chen. Um. Did you... um. Did you pick up the transmission from, um, General...” hard to pronounce, even when you spoke English well, “Athelstan?”
Open microphone from the ground, people shouting in the background, jangly Chinese excitement, then Chen Li: “Yes.”
Chang Wushi said, “What do you suppose it meant?”
Quite possibly, just what it said, but...
No American presence in space for the better part of a century, and...
A piece of that message suddenly jumping back out of memory “... unauthorized landings on United States territory anywhere in the solar system...”
Anywhere in the solar system?
Da Chai said, “A decision will have to be made on how we proceed.”
Chang Wushi: “Or if we proceed.”
Ling Erhshan gestured out the window with a wan smile at the bright yellow Moon looming huge before them. “We proceed in that direction. Captain Newton won’t be letting us turn back just yet.”
Da Chai looked over at the beamer’s control console, and said, “Well. We are, at any rate, well armed.”
Another cold hand clutching at Ling Erhshan’s heart.
o0o
Now, by the splendid shores of the endless blue Pacific, that near-mythical California ocean, Astrid Kincaid and her soldiers got ready to go. Pale blue sky, dark blue sea. Extraordinary. And yet... yet I remember so many more extraordinary scenes. Skies and seas without number. Worlds beyond imagining.
Why the Hell did I come home?
Because they ordered me?
Yes. That was the reason. Do this, soldier. Do it now. That’s an order.
All right.
Now this.
This is an order too.
Line of men and women, filing toward the ship. Following orders. Getting ready. Ready to go.
Corky Bokaitis, Kincaid decided, looks just like a gorilla. A little girl gorilla. Well. Maybe not quite. But the jutting jaw, the dense, reddish-black hair on her arms, the beetling brows...
PFC Bokaitis was one of three Neanderthalers in the squad, the other two males, none of them taller than five feet three, each of them stronger than any three “normal” humans. I wonder if there are any normal humans left, these days? Sure there are. Billions of them. Outside.
Sometimes, I can’t even remember a time when human beings in America were as alike as so many little frogs. Sure, a white one here, a black one there. A yellow one. Every now and again a red one. And picture books showing off the rare breeds. Tall, slim, naked-bodied Nilotics. Khoi-San people with yellow-brown skin and peppercorn hair. Melanesians, Australoids. Hairy Ainu.
What was it, three, four, five years after Closure, when people began toying with the new possibilities? Hey, me, I can look like a muscle-bound superhero. Look like the most beautiful woman who ever lived. And all without the torture of dieting, without spending a single moment sweating in the gym.
Then... why, I can be tall. I can be white. Or black, or yellow, or red, or... Damnation. It isn’t easy being Green. But it’s possible, you see. Purple. Blue. Rainbow hued and covered with glitter and... She remembered going to that nature-park play, what? Twenty years back? Maybe more, maybe less. “Breakfast in the Holocene Dawn,” it’d been called. Five muscular runts chasing that damned aurochs retroclone through the woods, jumping on the bastard’s back, knocking him down, animal lowing pitifully, burly blond trolls jabbering as they struggled to break his neck.
After every performance one or the other of the players would be limping from some fracture or another, arm or leg twisted, rib or two buckled. Once, the aurochs, furious about being killed over and over again, had gotten one of the actors down, running one long, red-dripping horn through and through his guts, actor wriggling and squalling in a thick, old-fashioned, very artificial-sounding Yankee accent: “Ow! Ow! Get ‘im aaaff me! Ow!”
That day, the audience had roared.
And, just so everything would be “right,” they’d let the actor lay there blubbering until he died, before hooking him up to a MedDep terminal. Post-resurrection, we gave them both a standing ovation, man and aurochs alike. Blond. Neanderthalers were mostly blond, PFC Bokaitis rather inauthentic in that respect. It’s just that black hair looks so ... mean.
Zappa’s Law: “Give a guy a big nose and funny-looking hair...”
Jesus. What a fucking waste of time.
Rest of the squad wasn’t much better, little gargoyles, big gargoyles, men and women constructed to look like heroes and, um... heroines, one supposed, from old, old movies. And post-Immortal, every one. every one of them born since the Event, and not one of these babies has ever thought he or she might have to die...
Remember what that felt like? Remember when you were seventeen, and everyone said, Teenagers think they’re immortal? Who the Hell dreamed up that lie? Remember being seventeen, lying in bed at night, thinking about the sick, sorry inevitability of death? Thinking about it. In twenty years, you’d say, I’ll be middle aged. Twenty more years and I’ll be old. Twenty years after that, ancient. Twenty years after that, no matter how careful, no matter how lucky, I’ll be dead.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
What kind of sorry damn God would rig a game with rules like that?
Fuck you, God.
I’m off to see the Wizard.
Who, it turned out, had immortality for us, after all.
Now, watching her sixteen little playtoy soldiers march back and forth, loading supplies and gear into the hull of the Scavenger rocketship, Kincaid wondered just how they’d face it, when and if, if ever. Hell. Nothing’s going to go wrong. Nobody’s going to get killed. Fly to the Moon in a fucking invincible alien spacecraft, arrest some fucking Arabs and Chinamen. Make sure the Base is still locked up tight. Come home.
Right.
And make sure the fucking Gate is still shut, its address tables thoroughly scrambled.
Make sure they can’t find us...
Whoever they are.
Brief, sharply repressed memory of fire, fear, and blood.
We just didn’t understand the Scavenger records at first. Space-Time Juggernaut? What the Hell is that? Didn’t understand that the Scavengers had combed through all those incomprehensible Colonial records. Combed through them for years and decades and centuries, until they thought, just maybe, they understood... that it might be coming for them.
It didn’t occur to us to wonder why they were gone.
Until it came for us.
Remember how we waited? Days and weeks and months and... no Space-Time Juggernaut. No end of the world. Whew. Got away with it. Generals and politicians relieved. Made it. Safe. Home free. Home.
> But I didn’t destroy the gate. It’s still up there. Waiting.
I used to imagine just a few more weeks would go by. A few weeks, a month, two or three, no more than a year, surely... and the radios would crackle, crackle on down from the Moon. Dale Millikan here. Sorry I’m late. Could you folks send up a ship?
A year, Two. Three. Five. Ten. Twenty. Forty. Sixty...
PeeWee Roth, a noseless, toothy gargoyle just a little more than eight feet tall, came and towered over her, saluting. “All loaded up, m’am.” It was amazing he could talk around those fangs at all, much less sound like some old borscht-circuit comedian, making tired jokes about gefillte fish.
“I don’t suppose it’d do any good to remind you I’m just a noncom...” She looked for some readable expression in those glassy weimaraner eyes. “No, guess not.”
The communicator on her belt chirped and she pulled it off, holding it in the palm of her hand, remembering a favorite TV show from her childhood. Why the Hell are we using eighty-year-old junk like this? Answer: Because no one bothered to make new ones. Didn’t think of it. Didn’t think we’d need them. She flipped it open and said, “Kincaid.”
“Sergeant, this is General Athelstan.”
“Sir.” No urge to salute. This bastard had been a little shitass second louie back in the old days, had been with her on the Moon, sure, but never once stuck his nose through the Gate. Now look at him.
“The Arabs have initiated their descent sequence, Sergeant. You are go for launch. Plan Bravo.”
Plan Bravo, for Christ’s sake. Like they had a full array of tactical paths ready to whip out at a moment’s notice. Like they’d actually planned for this.
“Acknowledged.” She flipped the communicator shut and stuck it back on her belt, turned to the toy soldiers of her new squad. Bright-eyed, every one, looking at her like, what? Mommy? No, more like Playground Leader. “OK, boys and girls,” she said, “Boots and saddles...” And, for just one moment, felt a tiny atavistic thrill. Boots and saddles. We’re going up and out.
o0o
Strapped in his seat in al-Qamar’s control room, surrounded by his comrades, hands on joystick and throttle, Alireza waited for final burn initiation. Waited for Zeq to say sif and hit the switch. Not watching the mission clock. No, just waiting, staring up at the black sky, nothing, not the sun, not the Earth, not the Moon visible. Nothing but dead black velvet sky.
The Transmigration of Souls Page 4