o0o
Sunrise. Golden drop of sun coming up behind them, throwing streamers of garish pink across the purple-black sky, wiping away the stars, lighting up the silver clouds. Long, angular shadows flowing down the hillside ahead of them, their own shadows, walking toward Lost City of Koraad.
Shadows of my monsters. She’d taken eight of them with her. Left the other eight back at the gate. Four sitting in a cavern under the Moon, griping at being left behind, four sitting it out this side of the gate on Mars-Plus, also griping, Why can’t we come, Sarge?
Because you never know.
Just a simple raid, Round up the bad guys and bring them home.
Then blow the gate?
Above, over the square towers of the old city, the sky was a full, glistening pink now. Magic sky. Magic world. Magic universe. We never did figure out how any of it worked. Not the gates, not the worlds...
Memory of Dale Millikan, slowly mutating from journalist to scientist, sitting, looking at the atmosphere comp figures. Saying, This isn’t possible. Why is the helium still here?
What the Hell was that baggy old lady geophysicist’s name? Thalia something. Memory of Dr. Meninger cackling, saying, Because God wants you to talk like a cartoon character, sonny.
He’d grumbled. Then put it in his next article. Jesus. An article a week for all those years, every one of them held up by the military censors. Glad we published them as a book after closing the door on the rest of the world. The rest of the universe. Too bad Dale never knew.
No. God damn it. I do not want to blow the gate.
Crazy shadow of the soldier on point, soldier walking down onto flat ground now. Why the Hell would someone want to look like a mountain gorilla, like an silverback male? And that silly name. Realmodo? Why the Hell Realmodo?
Shoot, Sarge. ‘Cause Quasimodo wuz just a character in a book.
No, I don’t want to blow the gate.
Then they were standing by the wrecked plane, staring into its dark and dusty interior at dark and dusty bones. NCD 4044. Kincaid said, “Well. Hi, Georgie.”
Beside her, Corky Bokaitis said, “You know ‘im, Sarge?”
A slow nod. Georgie Polychronis, little shit Greek boy from southern Maine. Stupidest-sounding twang, almost as bad as some of those mushmouf Southerners.
“How’d this happen?”
“He fucked up. We all did.” Then the car and its old softball, evoking more old memories. Then the building with its open door. Hell, I was the last one out of there. I remember turning out the lights, closing the damned door. You think...
No. You don’t think that.
A quick look around. Her eight soldiers. Brucie Big-Dick and his little friend Chuckie, who’d squirmed with him far into the night, staying in the background like they’d promised. Aw, come on, Sergeant-Major. We’ll stay out of trouble. Donnie’ll watch the ship for us. What could go wrong? Well...
She said, “No sense any of you biggies coming inside. Um. Honeybee.” Fast. “Fred and Barney.” Stronger than any two oxen. “Rest of you take a look around. Don’t go too far.”
Inside then, rifles at ready, slipping in like characters on an old police show. Flip on the lights. Spacesuits on the dining room floor like five dead men, lined up in a careful row, folded just so, backpacks powered down...
Then, she was standing in a back bedroom, looking at a rumpled bed.
I made my bed on that last day. Made my bed, got up to face the Judgment Day, though I didn’t know it yet. Got up, whistling, changed my sheets and thought about how they’d gotten so messy. Hmh. No sign anyone fucked in this bed last night.
Quick memory of lying under Dale for what turned out to be the last time, while he bucked and humped between her legs, thrusting into her with short, quick movements, almost below the threshold of perception downdeep downdeep...
Could’ve been better for a last time. Maybe if we’d known...
Better memories, of other times, of time taken, of desires oh-so-carefully fulfilled. You could get him to be oh-so-gentle, soft, grinding, round and round and...
She turned and walked away, walked down the hall to Dale’s office, stood looking at his computer, at his disks and books. Tracks in the dust where someone had been looking things over. Which one. The Chinese scientist? The Arab woman, their “American Technologies Specialist”? What a job title.
Places where some books were missing. Which ones? Would I remember? Fingering them now, looking at titles. Dale’s notebook is missing. Maybe he took it with him when he left. He usually did. Or maybe those nice Arab boys are looking at his drawings of my cunt, snickering and nudging each other...
Another memory, of flipping through his notebook for the first time, half research notes for his articles, half private diary, half... What the fuck is this supposed to be? And laughing. Green ink sketches of my crotch, for Christ’s sake. What the Hell did he think he was going to do, forget?
He’d shrugged, half embarrassed. It’s just... how I do things. It’s not real until it’s on a piece of paper I guess. They’d wound up fucking on the floor of his office that day, which was just damned silly. For Christ’s sake, we’re middle aged. What if somebody walked in on us?
Dale had smiled then. Well, they’d’ve just had to be fucking jealous, is all.
Sure. Jealous. Back out into the front room, gathering up Honeybee and the caveboys, back out into the square by the jeep, where the soldiers had gathered. Sigh. “All right, let’s go. They can’t have gotten far...”
Then, a sudden, terrifying thought, image of certain pages from Dale’s notebook surfacing. Shit!
o0o
With daylight flooding in through big windows made of something that was, curiously, almost like fine, layered mica, “glass” changing the alien sky from that horrid, gassy pink to a warm almost-tan, Ling, Rahman and Inbar worked through the contents of a room in one of the middle-sized yellow-gray buildings. Scavenger buildings, if the American books were to be believed.
Why would they lie, thought Ling? Why would they make all this up? Just because they were known to make things up, because they were famous for their insidious fantasies? Rahman, book open before the console, said, “I can make neither head nor tail of this. It’s sort of like one of those big gates, but...”
Inbar muttered, “Doesn’t look like it’s eight million years old, either.”
No it doesn’t, but ... hints in the American notebooks, just hints, mind you, that the Scavengers had come prowling through the ruins the Colonials had left behind, maybe eight million years ago. Colonial ruins themselves abandoned maybe a billion years before that. Not that the tan stone buildings looked like they could possibly have sat around weathering for a billion years...
So is this a Scavenger gate, or one of the very old ones, the ones the Colonials left behind? Does it matter?
Maybe. Hints in the green-ink notebook, though, that those figures had no meaning. Millikan. Dale Millikan. Something about that name... Well. No matter. Whoever he was, he cast doubts on the time figures. His question, repeated over and over, making no more sense with each successive iteration: Where do these gates really go?
And when? Does that make any sense? Maybe. I keep reminding myself about what relativity and simultaneity really mean.
Rahman was flipping through the notebook, pausing once again to look at one of the pages with drawings of the naked woman. Inbar smirking. Something I don’t understand going on here. “It doesn’t seem quite appropriate for a scientist’s notebook somehow.”
Rahman said, “No.” Put her finger on a scrawled passage, lips moving as she made colloquial 21st century English into colloquial 22nd century Arabic. “Parts of it seem more like a diary.”
Inbar said, “Maybe it was his girlfriend. I envy him if it was.”
Rahman gave him a sour look.
Ling thought, Envy? Because some long dead man was having sex with a woman who looked like a South American pornnet star? Maybe I’ve missed an importan
t part of life. Who knows? Pleasant memories of the occasional odd girlfriend, usually a pudgy young lab assistant, who’d give up after a few weeks or months, when it became clear she could never be more than... secondary, at best. He looked over her shoulder and tried to read crushed-together lines of Romanic script.
“‘Times says they won’t pay any more if I don’t write something the censors will let through. At least the check for ‘Haldane in Love’ finally came. Pays a semester of Ginger’s college tuition. Wish she’d gone to NC State instead of Duke.’“
Rahman flipped through more pages. “Part diary, part something else. I’m not sure this guy was really a scientist. More like a... Mmm. What? A newfaq reporter maybe?” Flipped to one of the diagramed pages. “This.”
Ling looked from the drawing to the machine. “Close, but not quite. Maybe close enough.”
Inbar said, “If we’re not sure...” Very uneasy looking.
Rahman looking at Ling, seeking confirmation. He said, “We might as well try. Where are the settings for the one in Libya?”
Inbar said, “God. I don’t know if...”
Rahman handed him the notebook, then took out the binder with the printed pages of charts and pictures. “Here.”
All right.
Power main.
Blinking lights, scrolling screens, these LCD screens, if that’s what they really were, much different from the ones on the larger machines, the ones that had brought them from the Moon. Labels in what looked like ideographs, but weren’t. No English-language tapes, this time.
He said, “We’ll have to assume the switch order is the same.”
Inbar said, “If it’s not?”
Rahman: “I’ve been through the Libyan outback. I’ll recognize it if...” Soft, crackling hiss, smell of burning dust, and the flat wall behind the console spilled rainbows, flickered, shimmered, opened out on a distant vista.
Inbar: “My God. My God...”
Ling thought, Any god you wish to name. Any god at all... He said, “Even I know this is not the high desert of Libya.”
Rahman. “No.”
Long, low hill sloping away into the distance, brown dirt covered with shaggy, scruffy green vegetation. Distant trees, widely spaced, a little odd looking. Winding silver stream down in the valley. Yellow-tan boulders. Brilliant, clear blue sky. Shadow-patched full Moon hanging low over the horizon, looming, as if huge.
Our Moon. Recognizably our Moon.
Ling said, “Not Libya. But it is Earth.”
Inbar said, “Eight million years. Continents haven’t drifted far in eight million years.”
Ling looked at him, momentarily surprised, then... Well, of course. A geologist, after all... He said, “But if it opens through a Colonial gate? A billion years is time enough.” And why are we assuming Scavenger and Colonials gates... no! We’ve tuned them in. The gates go where we tell them to go. The rest of it’s just fantasy. If the address we’ve dialed up...
The door opened and Alireza burst in, followed by Zeq, the two of them stopping short at the sight of the open Stargate. Alireza said, “Earth?”
Zeq laughed: “Where, the public gardens of Tobrûq?”
Alireza stepped close to the gate, staring through at the blue sky, sniffing at a soft breeze. “An odd, flat smell... but obviously the Earth...” He turned away, taking them all in with his glance. “We came to tell you, there are... things in the city...”
Pulse of excitement. Things. Ling whispered, “The aliens?”
Zeq said, “Might as well be. Only Americans, though.”
Alireza: “Coming this way. I think they know where we are.” He looked at Ling, “Your pistol?”
He tapped a coverall pocket. “Here. But, Colonel, these people have military rifles of unknown...”
“People...” Alireza spat. He looked at the gate again, then over at Rahman. Gestured at the console, then the window, open on a familiar world. “Take your pictures. Then we’ll go.” He turned and stepped through the gate, staggered under an obvious increase in gravity. Staggered and looked around, muttered some exclamation to himself.
Inbar murmured, “God...” oncemore, eyes alight with fear, then stepped right through the gate after him.
Fear, thought Ling. Full of fear. But also filled with a desire to see.
o0o
Bursting into the room then, door slamming open, rebounding from the old metallic wall with a resounding crack-clank... Remember when you thought it was so odd that Scavengers and Colonials both used doors on swinging hinges, just like us? Bursting into the room in time to see a brilliant play of rainbow colors on the floor, the walls, to see the Gate screen behind the control panel coruscating with a complex pattern of silvery sparkles, see the silvery sparkles coalesce and go dark.
Kincaid stood still for just a second, rifle held at port arms across her chest. Killed the curtainfield and took a deep breath. Flat, musty smell, smell of dry vegetation. Smell of old mold. Nothing sweet. Nothing flowery.
These are bold, crazy bastards, doing something like this! Through the big, rebuilt Gate under the Moon, then right on through an unreconstructed Scavenger gate to God knows where...
Well. Maybe you know where. You remember that damned smell. And you know now they probably they’ve probably got Dale’s notebooks with them. Probably the Gestalt Manager instruction manual with them too. So they’ve figured out the address-code notation. And seen Dale’s notes about the Terrestrial Gates.
Thin, humorless smile. Sons of bitches in for one big damn surprise, whichever one they jumped. She bent forward over the console, looking at the settings. Address switches were, of course, still set, but the dials would have tumbled when the connect was broken from the other side. If they spun the controls again...
Bold, crazy damn bastards.
All right. So why are you so insufferably pleased, asshole?
PeeWee, standing next to her, stooped under the Scavenger-height ceiling, said, “Something funny, Sarge?”
She glanced up at him. “Yeah. Take Fred and Barney, go back to the main Gate. Pull through six men. Leave two guys back on the Moon, put to more on this side. Set up a microwave relay and come back with the other four guys.”
“What’s going on, Sarge?”
Hmh. She said, “Get busy. We’re going for a little walk.” Slipped the disk out of her pocket and triggered it, watched images of controls form on its flatpane display. Poked around a little until she got to the address dictionary, started looking things up. OK. Four Arabs and one poor little Chinaman. Most likely headed for Libya, then. Right? Shrug.
Another look over the control console. All right, you’ve got the spatial settings. You know God damned well they won’t have wound up out-of-skein. So what about the fine tune? Same thread or some other one? Temporal?
Boy are they in for a fucking surprise...
Long, long look at the set of small dials under the mechanical-switch address row. Hmh. Murmur: “Maybe if I had a fingerprint kit I’d know if someone’d touched this thing recently...”
Honeybee said, “I can see near-ultraviolet, Sarge.”
“So?”
“The big switches and these things over here are wet. Like with oil from someone’s fingers.”
Oh. “How about these little ones down here?”
“Dry. But... Well, the dust is disturbed. Like something jiggled them a little bit.”
A little bit... Jesus. What was it my Grandpa used to say? “Fuck a duck...” Get busy then. Not that difficult. That’s your heart going pitter-pat, isn’t it? Just so. Excitement? Or just fear? A little of both?
What will really happen if they’re left on their own, loose in the Multiverse? What if they find their way home? What if the rest of the world finds out about the gates and...
Hell. Maybe the Jug will come for us after all.
o0o
Sunset again, a few small, high clouds striated with red-orange, sun setting beyond distant mountains, throwing the land into deep
shadow. Distant mountains, blue mountains, with high, snowcapped peaks, towering, though far away, over rugged, dry, rolling highland plains.
Like no mountains, Omry Inbar thought, anywhere in the world. Standing on top of a tall hill, looking out over an impossible world, looking down on the others, watching them try to build a campfire, he felt a tightness in his chest, a... shortness of breath? Something like that. Just fear? Or real?
If we were on a plateau high enough to reduce the air pressure, it’d be getting cold now. Doesn’t feel like the air pressure’s abnormal. Coming through the gate from Mars-Plus... Step forward. Stagger under what felt like a full gee. Feel your ears pop. Not even painful. Just a little internal crinkle of sensation. Still, short of breath... Like I have pneumonia, or like the partial pressure of the oxygen’s...
Sky growing darker. Something’s wrong with the Moon. Same shadowy pattern of bright highlands and dimmer maria. Familiar Moon. But... Right. Something wrong. Can’t quite put my finger on it.
Something skittered by in the dusky light, making him jump. Another one of those running, bipedal reptiles, a little bit like those Australian lizards. This could be Australia, couldn’t it? Another look at those tall, snowy mountains. Well, no. Not unless they moved the Himalayas south for the winter.
They’d seen four or five of the lizard-things during the course of a four hour walk. A few bugs. Once what looked like a big dragonfly. Hard to tell how big it had been in the distance. Still. A big dragonfly. Maybe the size of a small bird. Where did they have dragonflies the size of sparrows? Not much life here, this place a landscape slowly turning to desert. Southern California? That’d be... interesting. Could those be the Sierra Nevada? Maybe. No part I’ve ever seen depicted, though.
Sparse fauna. Sparse flora. Green weeds, growing in clumps out of dusty tan soil, soil raising in puffs at the wind’s command. No grasses. Which seemed a little strange. Lots of woody brush. Some things like tumbleweeds blowing along, evoking some odd commentary from Ling, about American cowboy movies.
Tumbling tumbleweeds? A shrug, dismissing the whole business. No birds. And this kind of desert should be full of rodents. Things like mice. Hyraxes, maybe. Snakes. Where are the snakes? Another long look up at the Moon. Inferences resisting hard, resisting the call to clarity. Something about this I don’t want to... think about.
The Transmigration of Souls Page 12