The Transmigration of Souls

by William Barton

  She went back to the first notebook and began looking at the control-setting diagrams, comparing them to the pictures and explanations in Millikan’s notebook, time starting to slide by, unnoticed.

  o0o

  Kincaid stood in a cavern on the Moon, just inside the yawning Gate, looking out at the nighttime stars of Mars-Plus, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet, almost taking off in low-gee. Muscular tension. A wish she could reach through the antique communicator pressed to her ear and...

  Athelstan was saying, “Now you listen to me, Sergeant-Major.” Arrogant, overbearing, self-inflating tones: the Man In Charge. Listen to me, Sergeant-Major, or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll...

  Outside, Corporal PeeWee Roth, fangy monster-man, was directing people, getting them to line up their gear. People. Sheesh. That big guy next to Roth right now, arguing with him, waving his arms, curtainfield sparkling like pixiedust. Tall, maybe over seven feet. Big, square head, dead white face, angular bones in his neck.

  Sepulchral voice: Me? Francis Muldoon, ma’m. No, ma’m. I enlisted just for this mission.

  Jesus Christ. Why would someone want to look like a giant polio cripple from some old movie or something? And that laugh of his...

  Athelstan: “Now, you pull your people back through the Gate. You set a demolition charge at the control console on Mars-Plus, set the timer, and you shut the gate. Then you set the timer on the 200 megaton weapon we gave you and leave it in base. You lift off, loiter until the weapon detonates, then you come home.”

  Or you’ll what?

  What difference does it make, what they do or think?

  Outside, outside in the real world of Mars-Plus, the alien galaxy was sliding slantwise down through the horizon now, magic glitter on the other side of the sky. She looked down at the little man by her side, Brucie Big-Dick she’d begun to call him, and... what the Hell was the name of this other little shit, his systems engineer? Chuckie. Buck teeth. Blond fuzz flattop. Jesus Christ. Chuckie?

  Pressed the mute on the communicator.

  “How long’ll it take your buddies back on Earth to launch the other ship?” Still standing in the hangar, surrounded by scaffolding, hull access panels gaping open.

  Chuckie looked up at her and smirked, bumped Brucie with his hip. “Jeez, Sarge. We took the drive apart twenty years ago, to see what made it tick. Never did figure out how to get it back together. Sorry.”

  Brucie, looking up at her. Knowing. He said, “You know, it’ll take ‘em three weeks or so to program up our macrovacuole to make a conventional scavtech commuter transport like the ones you fellas found on Winkie. If there’s anyone willing to program it for ‘em...”

  Winkie was one of four residential planets where the Scavengers actually seemed to live, among the thousands upon thousands where they merely... mined. Tract housing for about eight billion skeletonbirds. Never did find Emerald City, what we’d called the Scavenger homeworld in the early days, still called it later, even after we learned to read their language, learned they’d called it Æghóng.

  “What’s a macrovacuole?”

  Brucie eying her. “Haven’t paid much attention to consumer tech, have you?”

  “No.” Busy with my memories. And my books. Twenty years spent translating the Héláq encyclopedia, among other things. What a fucking waste of time.

  Chuckie said, “You got a foodserver in your house?”

  “Sure.”

  “Vacuole’s what makes all those nice, tasty goodies out of your shit and piss and bathwater. We’ve got a big one can make anything. One of the original models, copied from the wrecked factory you guys found on Munch.”

  I remember Munch. Like the empty ruins of a planet-wide slum. Technicolor forests growing over everything. And fucking giant hurricanes, savage earthquakes, because something blew the planet’s big moon into a steep elliptical orbit. A bizarre sight, hanging in the sky, like Earth’s Moon, but swollen, blackened, a fucking enormous bite taken out of its side...

  Outside, Roth was through with Muldoon, was now talking with PFC Tarantellula. Skinny black gargoyle, three and a third meters tall, just shy of eleven feet. Hairless. Huge, clawed hands. No nose. Beak for a mouth. Big white eyes. A fucking professional spiderdancer. Surprised to see her in the squad, someone I’d actually run across in real life, on one of my few “vacations.” Watched her dance in Central Park. Graceful. A dancing demon. Saw her at a party after the show. Saw her palm a basketball and pop it with a squeeze...

  She punched the mute button again, listened to Athelstan’s furious squawking. “God damn it, Sergeant... God damn it, Sergeant...” Sputtering hiss, like he was spitting into his microphone. Christ. Foaming at the mouth.

  She said, “I’m sorry. General. Reg 4314A. An officer outside the direct chain of command, in combat, is required under law to use his or her own best judgment to...”

  A scream, classic, banshee scream, rising in pitch: “God damn it you’re not an officer God damn it you’re not in combat God damn it to Hell, Sergeant, you’re not outside the fucking chain of command...”

  She snapped the communicator shut. And Brucie Big-Dick said, “Such refined language. They give special courses at West Point?”

  She smiled at him. “Don’t know. Never went to West Point. Just a scumbag sergeant.”

  Later, Kincaid stood out under the stars of Mars-Plus with her curtainfield shut down, breathing the strange air, smelling those familiar smells, feeling its cold wind on her face, like fingers stirring in her hair. Stars in the sky, the little moons sailing in their low orbits. Dwarf galaxies so much like the Magellanics that, at first, the scientists were fooled.

  Like most fools, easy to fool...

  Oh, God, I remember. Memories put aside. Pain surrendered, then forgotten. No. Not forgotten. Never forgotten. Walking up onto a low hill, looking back toward the bright area around the Gate, looking back through into a yellow-lit cavern under the Moon. Just like old times. Shadow shapes of soldiers back on the Moon, moving things around, setting up their basecamp, other shapes, distinct, on this side, Bokaitis posting a guard, for Christ’s sake, following regs.

  A look around in the darkness. Arabs and Chinaman not lurking out in the dark. They’ll have followed the track over to Koraad. Dark buildings in the distance. Is that a gleam of light I see? Or imagination? More likely, complex, reflected moonlight.

  Brucie and Chuckie, glittering inside their silvery armor of harnessed quantum inference. Curtainfield not a field, as such, just... an artificial spacetime configuration where the air atoms are likely to stay... because they want to?

  Brucie and Chuckie still looking up at the sky, pointing things out to each other. Brucie Big-Dick had an arm around Chuckie’s narrow shoulders now. Well, well.

  Another couple holding hands. Gillis, who was, perhaps, the most human looking of the lot, once you discounted those... sinews. Not muscles. Like steel bands and cables crisscrossing under his skin. Gillis went for function, not appearance like the rest of these idiots. Gillis, able to bend steel in his bare hands... Holding hands with a tiny, wiry black and yellow tigerstripe girl with glittering, faceted eyes whose uniform tunic said “Honeybee.” Christ, look at that. She’s got her hand in his back pocket.

  Kincaid switched on her curtainfield, felt its warmth spill around her like a magic shawl, lay down on the hard rock of the dusty hillside, looking up at the night sky. Sometimes, it’s summertime here. Sometimes. Winds warm and lovely.

  Can’t have been far from here... Lying naked on a scratchy green wool blanket. He was fat and flabby, gray and scruffy, fifteen years older than me, a civilian, for Christ’s sake. Belly like a skinful of soft margarine. Hand on my hard stomach, rubbing back and forth, eyes sparkling right through the warm darkness, looking at my pussy instead of me, like a man contemplating a steak dinner... Not even very good at it. Not at first. But Jesus could he talk.

  I never knew I was starved for that kind of attention. Not ‘til old Dale Millikan g
ot hold of me. Hell, I decided he was all talk and no action, but... Well. Got better at it, once he decided I wasn’t going to run off before he could throw a few quick fucks into me. Wry smile. You’d think a man in his fifties, a man who could whisper sweet nothings so well, would have things figured out a little better than that.

  I just have a way with words, he’d said. Not much else.

  A way with words.

  I wonder what happened to him, after...

  I wonder what his last moments were like...

  I wonder...

  Long pause.

  Jesus, don’t be so stupid, you old bag. Over and done with. Long gone. Bullshit. She sat up, stretched. Yawned. Four hours to local dawn. Might as well tell them to take a little break, get some rest before we head out. Catch them Arabs over in Koraad and...

  Then what?

  Yeah. Good question.

  Just bomb the gate and go on fucking home?

  Bullshit.

  Never thought you’d see this place again.

  Now, here you are.

  What do you want to do, girly-girl?

  o0o

  Finally, late at night, the five of them sat sleepy-eyed in the prefab building’s little lounge, perched uncomfortably on American couches and chairs meant for sprawling. Toiletted. Bathed. Brushed and combed with the combs and brushes of men and women long departed. Full of freeze-dried food long gone stale. Rahman’s notebooks were propped open on the room’s big, transparent plastic coffee table, astronauts and scientists flipping through them, finding bits of knowledge here and there. Mostly though, mere bafflement. Questions and more questions.

  Rahman said, “I don’t know. The simplest explanations, for the impossibly fantastic... What the historical record seems to indicate is that the Americans came to the Moon a little more than a century ago for the same purpose as we did: to bootstrap a space-faring civilization so humanity, their part of it at least, could escape the coming disaster. Their instruments told them Peary was sitting on what seemed to be a big pocket of fossil ice, maybe some trapped gas.”

  “They don’t seem to have understood what they’d found at first, either.” Ling was flipping through one of the printed hardcover books, marveling at the feel of its slick, sturdy, old-fashioned paper. “This business about thinking they’d found an old Nazi base...”

  Alireza shrugged. “The Peenemunde team could have gotten to the Moon.”

  Inbar said, “Didn’t, though.”

  Rahman: “In any case, they found the Stargate, with it’s controls preconfigured to take them here. Mars-Plus.”

  “Interesting name,” murmured Zeq, turning, staring out the window into featureless darkness.

  “So they found a system of teleportation devices, devices of extraterrestrial origin, apparently. Somehow worked out a methodology for using them. Found hundreds, maybe even thousands of abandoned worlds...”

  “And,” said Ling, “they, for some reason we don’t know, decided to come home and leave it all behind.”

  “Not quite all,” said Alireza. “At least now we know the secret of their magical consumer technology.”

  Inbar: “What a waste. What a damned waste.”

  Ling: “There was a time when that was considered the American Way.” He kept flipping the pages of his book. “This business about Scavengers and Colonials...”

  Rahman said, “As near as I can figure out, Colonials is what the Americans called the people who built the system of gates. Scavengers are a later folk who, like the Americans, spent some time exploring the abandoned transport net.”

  Zeq said, “So. And where are they now?”

  Inbar: “Maybe that’s what sent the Americans scurrying for home, ill-gotten booty clutched in their hot little hands.”

  Ling said, “What do you suppose is meant by the phrase, ‘Space-Time Juggernaut’?”

  Long silence, then Rahman sighed and pushed one of the big notebooks to the center of the table. “Well, we’ve got one thing. This appears to be a working text on Stargate net operations. In it, I found this.” She flipped through the pages to a columnar table and shoved the book across to Ling.

  “‘Hypothetical Terrestrial Gate Loci.’“

  She said, “As near as I can tell, the only way to move is between two physical gates, a transmitter and a receiver. There are instructions for how to call a downed gate and do a remote power-up from here.”

  Staring at the columns of figures and words, picked out in some fine Romanic sans-serif font, Ling said, “I wonder how the... Colonials set up the system in the first place. Surely they didn’t fly the gates all over the universe in starships...”

  “No answer.”

  Alireza slid forward off the couch and kneeled beside the table, running his finger over the figures. “Does this note say ‘Old Red Sandstone’? I wonder what that means?” More figures, latitude and longitude figures. “This one is somewhere in southern Libya.” Looking up, looking around at a circle of faces.

  Finally, Zeq said, “In the morning, we could go back to the gate. Set its console according to these directions...”

  And go home? Rahman said, “If there are gates all over the Earth...” she pointed to a set of figures that seemed to be somewhere in North America, “why did they come after us in a rocket ship? Why not just pop through the gate and be waiting for us under the Moon?”

  Why indeed? “Cowboys,” muttered Alireza.

  Maybe, thought Ling. Or maybe not. Sometimes, when it was important, Americans could... act decisively enough. He said, “We shall uncover something of the truth when morning comes.” And, if there is a gate buried in the Libyan desert...

  Looking out the window again, Zeq said, “Morning. I wonder how long that will be?”

  o0o

  Omry Inbar awoke and, as always, opened his eyes slowly. No muezzin now. No wan morning sunlight. Dark night. He sat up, half awake, suddenly came alert with a pang of... not terror, no. Just... surprise. Folding upright in unexpectedly low gravity, dusty, unfamiliar bed creaking softly under his weight.

  He pushed open the draperies and looked out on cold, dark night. The windowpane was slightly fogged, moisture from his breathing condensed out of the warm room air on cold ersatz glass. Outside, the stone street was all shadows and blotches of... imaginary somethingness. No movement. No haze. Moons gone down, sun not risen. Sky full of stars.

  He glanced at his watch. Pale blue numbers, barely visible. 0440. No wonder I’m awake. Summer sunrise in northern Maghreb not so far away. No telling how far away it is here. Still tired, though. Dreams awakening me. Idle thoughts, percolating merrily away.

  Old Red Sandstone. Should’ve answered his question. Let it go though. Old Red Sandstone is the name of a hypothetical Paleozoic continent, out of whose skeletal remains, embedded for a while in Pangaea, then Laurasia, formed the embryo of North America and Europe and parts of Africa. Appalachians and Atlas all that remain of the mountain range pushed up when Old Red Sandstone collided with the edge of a forming World Island...

  Be interesting, if...

  Well. Morning will come. And, outside, the stars were still turning. But slowly. He lay back on the bed for a while, listening to the silent darkness. No, not completely silent. Someone else is up and walking around. He got up, stood on the cold floor, dressed in his underpants. Somewhere here, my socks, my suit liner coverall crumpled in a pile. The door opened silently, on its still-perfect American hinges, and he padded out into the dark hall.

  Back to the common room. Slim silhouette, outlined in pale starlight against the big bay window, curtains drawn aside. Rahman standing still, looking out at the shadows of the city. Koraad, the old book said it was called, in the language of the Scavengers. No indication of what the Colonials had called it, if anything. He moved up behind her, marveling that she still hadn’t heard his approach. Deep in thought.

  Subaïda Rahman, always so lovely and slim in her trim Lesbian business suits, her short, neatly combed Lesbian hair. I a
lways knew she was faking it. Could tell she knew I knew. Too bad...

  Slim now in... yes, still dressed in her coverall. Too bad, again. It would have been... nice to come out here and find her wearing no more than briefs and brassiere, looking, just maybe, like some European catalog model. Maybe, if there was enough light, I’d be able to see the shadow of her pubic hair through sheer white cloth, see the outline of her mons where the cloth pressed up against her...

  Conscious now of an erection pushing out the front of his underpants.

  A thousand choruses of, If only...

  Those images of women, not like real women; women who would turn and behold your desire and...

  He reached out and touched her softly on the shoulder.

  Subaïda Rahman jerked hard, lurched toward the window, reaching out, smudging the pseudoglass with one damp hand, spun, staring up at him, mouth open, dark, liquid eyes so very wide...

  “By God! Inbar...” Hand on her breast, gasping for breath.

  He grinned. “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d take me for a... um.” Spindly, feathery alien from those lavish illustrations we’ve seen, stalking you in the night... He could see she was looking him up and down now, the whole front of his body, to her dark-adapted eyes, probably well lit by starlight. Can she see... probably. And, in your dream, she reaches out for the waistband of your underpants, reaches inside...

  She said, “You should put something on.” Dark eyes glittering, mere wet reflections in the dark, unreadable.

  He reached out to touch her again, unexpected, unplanned, felt her push his hand away. Ah, well. Erection subsiding now, all by itself. He turned toward the window, and said, “Seems to be getting a little lighter over that way. Must be east.”

  She stood beside him, looking out at stars soon to fade. She said, “Maybe so. We’d better wake the others. They won’t want to miss subh.” And she thought, My heart is still pounding. Silly bastard, sneaking up on me like that, like some kind of skulking rapist, with cock at ready...