The Transmigration of Souls

by William Barton

  The others, all the others, bless their pea-pickin’ hearts, on hearing him, started to laugh.

  Five. Last and First Men.

  Fucking blood all over the place.

  Kincaid stood in the open Stargate, soft Permian breeze blowing across her back, tunic damp with sweat, looking into the room on Mars-Plus. Christ. Gillis lying on the floor, grimacing, bands of muscle standing out all over, lithe little Honeybee bending over the bloody task of applying a pressure bandage to the ragged wound in his thigh.

  Scared the shit out of me, finding the damn Gate shut, dead whatsit on the ground, pieces of human meat scattered around...

  Soft, soft whimpering. Gillis? No. Troglodyte Fred kneeling beside the chopped up remains of brother Barney. Crying, Oh, Barney, Barney... Fucking mess all over the floor. Out the window, Mars-Plus’s sun was setting, just as high noon came to Permian Earth.

  Heart pounding as she’d run up to the dead gate, sharp tang of burnt something in the air, an electrical smell. Momentary image of herself and her pathetic little band rushing down the hill. Staring. Brucie Big-Dick by her side, eyes wide, voice... uneasy. “Jesus, Sarge. It’s not broken, is it?” That faint tremor saying: Please tell me it’s not broken...

  One thing to be loose and free in the Many Worlds. Quite another to be stuck forever in the Permian. What a strange notion. Stuck forever? No, not quite. Every damned one of us, fucking immortal. Wait patiently, boys and girls. A mere two-hundred-fifty million years and... we’ll be back. Heh. But what world lies in the future of that particular Permian? Our presence alone enough to break a major cusp and start a new thread.

  Horrid awareness. Every possible history has its own singular thread, every quantum-event complex its own subset of strands and plies. You know that. Everyone whose ever thought about it knows that. On the other side of the cusp, I’m back in the Permian, wondering if I can live through the End-Paleozoic Event, just a couple of million years down the road...

  A couple of million years? Shit. Something eat you long before then, asshole.

  Memory of being a child, of reading an old book about brain lateralization. They cut the corpus callosum, you see, to interfere with the propagation of impulses leading to epileptic seizures. And, over time, each side of the brain develops a unique personality. One on the dominant side in control, nondominant side sort of stuck in...

  What a fucking nightmare!

  Cut your brain in two, maybe OK if you wind up on the dominant side, but what if I wound up on the...

  I?

  What the Hell does that mean? I would be stuck in that particular Hell, because both sides would be me.

  Cusp.

  Poor little Fred, Barney’s bits gathered to his breast, smeared with brotherly blood: “I don’t like this, Sergeant-Major. I need to go home now...” Faint itch of pity and contempt, of remembered compassion, threads of feeling commingled. Tired of playing grown up now? Tired of this game? Nobody warned you it might be a little...

  Fred said, “I just didn’t think we’d get... hurt. You know?”

  Jesus.

  Honeybee, finished with Gillis, muscleman now dazed from old military anesthetics, said, “These men need medical attention, Sarge.”

  Especially the dead guy, huh?

  Honeybee stood, facing her. “There’s a modern DocLocker on the ship. And a freezerpac for Barney.”

  Cold meat. Get him home, even in pieces, they’d soon set him to rights. Tired. Quite tired now. Kincaid said, “Sure. Get a bodybag for Barney and tote him on back to the other Gate. Gillis, I guess you...”

  Honeybee, angry: “Why don’t you just tune in the Moon from here and let us put them through?”

  Kincaid leaned her rifle against the side of the Gate console, closed the portal to the Permian—locking my other self into its timeline—started punching up the scanner subroutine. “The other Gate’s locked open. Just haul Barney over in a bag. He’ll keep.”

  “Not without some memory loss, damn it. Lemme call back over the link and have them shut the damn Gate. All they have to do is power-down, right?” Communicator already plucked from her belt.

  Kincaid turned and stared at the small... woman? No more alien than I used to be. Honeybee still had her tunic off, lovely and fit despite the odd coloration and patterning. Damn-all smart, too. And walking into mutiny. All right, you know what to do about that. Image of herself shooting the woman, quickly dismissed. Hardly reasonable. “I’m going to use this Gate’s hardware to track the other party now.”

  Fury rising: “Who gives a fuck about some Arabs and a Chinaman? For Christ’s sake, something will eat them, sure as shit. Let’s just get out of here!” Angry glitter in faceted eyes.

  Murmurs from some, agreement, silence from others. Go home? Kincaid thought about it for a second. No. Not home. I’m home now. Home out there. She said, “Hell. I can reroute the Gates from here. Let me open up on the Moon, then we’ll... decide.”

  The audible sighs of relief, people seeming to relax, we get to go home and... Hell. Irritation? More than that. This is what’s wrong, damn it. When they granted us eternal life, they took away everything else...

  A passage of time; not much time wasted. A mere resetting of dials, warning called out over the comlink, Honeybee helping Gillis limp through to the Moon, a weeping Fred carrying away his sack full of Barney. Unlink. Scanner routines uploaded from the Toolbox, wherever it was, nobody’d ever figured that one out, and Kincaid sat back in her console chair, staring out at an orange sky, sherbet sky over blood-crimson desert, stark red mountains beyond.

  Could have been worse. That was clever, tuning in Mars-Plus, then nudging one damn control. But stupid, too. They’ve got some of the books, enough to guess. Not enough to know. “Well,” a soft murmur. “Out-of-thread, of course. But still in the same skein, it seems.”

  Bokaitis: “What the Hell does that mean, Sarge?”

  Kincaid turned and looked, room now full of thoroughly bewildered soldiers. So. Give them a quickie primer in the theory of the Many Worlds? Tell these ignorant babies about my days on the Moon, about finding the Gate, finding out where it fucking went? Christ. It was years before we figured out it wasn’t just an interstellar-range matter transmitter.

  Softly, Brucie Big-Dick said, “You ever read much alternate-history fiction?”

  Read? What’s that?

  Bokaitis said, “Oh, sure. You mean like that 3V series TimeSwap?”

  Brucie: “Yeah. Like that. A strand is a tiny, highly-localized bit of alternate history made from a quantum-state cusp. A ply is a personal alternate history made from a conscious mind’s cusp-complex. A thread is an alternate world, spun off by a whole array of conscious-mind decision processes, the consequence of a historical cusp. A skein is a bundle of similar threads spun off from a geophysical cusp. I don’t know if they come bigger than that.”

  Kincaid: “I didn’t know anyone cared anymore.”

  “Do they come bigger? I don’t have a license to...”

  She nodded. “A little bit. Terminology never settled down. We closed the door and came home before we had much chance to look outside a few nearby thread-bundles.” A soft snort of laughter, remembered mirth. “Dale Millikan wanted to call the eka-skein structure a scarf, bundle of scarves a sweater. Pissed the scientists off something fierce.”

  Brucie said, “Millikan. I used to read his stuff when I was a kid.”

  Bokaitis, looking through the Gate: “So where’s this place? When? I don’t know what to ask.”

  Kincaid stood up from the console, picked up her rifle and slung it over her shoulder by its old webbing strap. “I don’t think there is an answer, Corky.” She looked round the room. “I don’t think I can order any of you to come with me. I’m going to be court marshaled for this anyway.”

  Tarantellula, spider lady, was standing beside Bokaitis, featureless white eyes on the orange sky. “I’ll go, Sarge.”

  Muldoon, after a moment’s hesitation: “Nobody ever ac
cused me of having much sense either, Sarge.”

  A long silence, then gorilla Realmodo slumped back on his hindquarters, looking away from them. “I think maybe I overestimated my courage when I signed up for this, Sarge.”

  Another silence. Kincaid said, “Sure. No problem. You and Corporal Roth stay here and stand watch over the Gate. Keep it open ‘til Athelstan shows up, I guess. Or until we come back...”

  Relief in the Monster Man’s eyes as well, saved from having to say anything. “Yes, Sergeant-Major.”

  “Corky?”

  Brief pause from Bokaitis, eyes big. “Well. I guess so.”

  Brucie Big-Dick: “Hey, we’d sort of like to...”

  Chuckie Crew-Cut: “Ah. No. Sorry, big boy. I guess I’ll be getting back to old Donnie now, if you don’t mind.”

  Brucie looked at him for a second, surprised, maybe biting his lip. “Well. OK. Just me then, Sarge.”

  “Fair enough. Let’s go.”

  o0o

  The air is too thick, thought Alireza. Thick, a little hard to breath, as if it were denser than the Earth’s air. The gravity seemed a little low. Maybe a lot low. Somehow hard to tell. We seem... light on our feet, and yet... Memory of those stale old rations back on Mars-Plus. I am getting very hungry, just now. How long will it take us to starve? Days? Weeks?

  They’d been walking for a few hours already under a warm orange sky, sweat trickling inside their clothes, like the delicate tracks of gentle insects. Walking now, all done with bickering, just moving slowly, steadily down a rutted, dusty trail between two tall, angular bluffs of dark red... sandstone?

  Sandstone. Maybe. Inbar not willing to say with any certainty.

  Tired of the damned arguing. Useless back and forth. Obviously, this place is not Mars-Plus, let’s go back, let’s press ahead, someone’s been here, gesturing at the flattened surface of the path. There were things that looked like hoofprints. A little... large maybe. And something with three fat toes. Not quite like a lion’s track, though none of them were really familiar with wildlife signs... and, of course, staring down at the footprint, memories of the thing that had killed Zeq sharpening.

  Is this a human footprint? Maybe. Distorted. Wind’s been blowing the sand around, of course. Remember yeti? Let’s not jump to conclusions...

  Inbar just staring at him. Finally: Jump to conclusions, you say? Waving his arms, flapping them at rocks and mountains and fantastical sky with its fat, pink sun. Look around you, Colonel. Where are we?

  All right. So I have to give him that. Just trying to hold onto my... sanity. Then, with the sun slipping across the tops of the mountains, the moon had come up... Moon? Wîhyaht rabbína, don’t call it that! Pale, pale blue sphere rising in what they supposed must be the east, disk against the sky, shocking contrast of pastels, making it look as if the thing were inside the sky, orange color far beyond, making it look huge... and about to fall upon them. Delicate swirls in its substance. Banded like a gas giant. Darker swirl there, in it’s southern hemisphere, just like...

  Ling, speaking his soft, delicate English, had whispered, It looks just like Neptune. Another spark of light visible nearby. Someone, Rahman, asking, Would we be able to see Nereïd, or the rings? Probably not. Ling’s sudden laughter shocking in the stillness: This cannot possibly be Triton beneath our feet.

  No. This cannot possibly be Triton. Can not. Impossible. They’d all agreed on that.

  Where do you think you are, then, Colonel Sir Qamal ibn-Aziz Alireza? Keep asking yourself that. Desert country here, dry in your nostrils, wind dry on your skin, whisking sweat away. No desert like this in North Africa or the Middle East. Not the yellow-sky Gobi. Australia? Perhaps. More likely the old American southwest. Someplace with a name like Roan Mountains?

  So. Is America in orbit around Neptune, then?

  Image of American cowboys, riding the interplanetary range. American Indians, ki-yiing under intergalactic stars, slicing off extraterrestrial scalps.

  So what do you think this is? Did we stumble into some later-day American entertainment production company’s back lot? They do fantastic things with VR and special effects, even in backward old UAR, where you fly into space in old-fashioned rocketships.

  Maybe, if we keep walking, we’ll eventually come to a little door at the base of the sky, open it and find ourselves departing some vast sound stage, coming out into a cool, damp blue evening, palm trees waving in a Pacific Ocean breeze, and it will be California, California of the old movies, Los Angeles... No, Hollywood. Maybe we’ll go out the door and it will be 1927, gangsters and bootleggers and Elliot Ness and Al Capone and...

  Even here, even now, a momentary particle of awareness, of just how thoroughly their plastic claptrap culture had infected the whole world. He felt himself smiling. Why not? No less unbelievable, no less plausible than what’s already happened. They walked up a steep hill, a narrow cut between two tall red cliffs, Inbar panting audibly, less fit than the others, Ling starting to fall behind, showing his age. Came to the top of the ravine, just where it opened up on darkening orange sky, on a narrow, sterile valley, lit pink by the setting sun.

  Alireza stopped dead in his tracks. Ling, coming up behind them, head down, bumped into his back.

  Finally, Inbar, querulous whine marking his voice, said, “I kept thinking if just one more thing, just one more ridiculous, inexplicable, unanticipatable thing, happened, I would take Ling’s pistol and shoot myself.”

  Alireza, carrying the American rifle, found his own voice loud in the stillness: “Perhaps I’ll join you.”

  Below them, a long, rocky defile, a tumbled mess of boulders and shards, streaming away from shattered cliff faces, down onto level ground, beyond, a level red plain stretching out to a distant, flat horizon. And, sprawled across the rocks, broken, crumpled, what looked like the hull of a crashed airliner.

  Not an airliner. You know perfectly well...

  Cigar-shaped body, a bit like an ancient V-2. Painted silver-blue, with some kind of angular design in a darker blue. Windows in the nose. No wings. Fins around the tail. Four visible, bent and torn, crushed metal under the hull that might be two more.

  Instead of a rocket engine, instead of an expansion bell or two or three, there was a long, bronze-colored pole, bent sharply in the middle, leading out to a banged-up cylinder of gray metal mesh, indistinct, complex shapes not quite hidden inside.

  They picked their way slowly down the hillside, slipping on loose rocks, stuff like shale scattered in the sandy dirt, walked toward the thing. Big. Maybe sixty meters long. Lettering now visible on the side. Romanic lettering, sort of, painted in dark black. More or less unreadable because it was... ornate. Decorated, little lines everywhere, extraneous lines, disguising the letters. Only numerals at the end of the row of words easily recovered: 0-220.

  Inbar stood looking up at the buckled metal wall, now bulging over their heads. “Gothic blackprint, like they used to use for German.”

  Alireza: “And... are the words German?”

  Rahman: “No. English. Sort of. It says, ‘GalactoLight HyperNews Channel 0-220.’“

  o0o

  When they climbed up the red rocks and through a big rip in the ship’s hull, Subaïda Rahman felt as if she were tingling all over. Anticipation. Excitement of discovery. A prickle of fear crawling on the back of her neck.

  There’s an inescapable conclusion here. Conclusion that matched the cryptic notes Dale Millikan and his colleagues had scribbled all over their notebooks, had written in the margins of their printed texts.

  They walked down the dark companionway, forward, more or less bunched together, silent. Passed through hatches, past the open doors of compartments, everything a shambles, lockers burst open, their varied contents spilled across tilted decks.

  Came into the control room.

  Obviously the control room.

  Two bucket seats, upholstered in dark brown leather, broad arms festooned with buttons and switches. A padded black-leather joystick
on the right arm of each chair. Console between them, with more switches. Two horseshoe banks of instruments/controls under big, cracked crystalline windows, windows looking like they were made of the finest quartz, not glass, cracks long and straight, the shear-plane cracks of stone, not the crazed, intersecting lines of a supercooled fluid.

  Alireza sat in the left-hand seat. The commander’s seat. Sat staring at row on row of dials and buttons and gauges.

  Ling said, “This looks very strange. No CRTs. No LEDs or LCDs. Nothing even so modern as the turn of the millennium.”

  Rahman’s attention suddenly refocused on her specialty, her education. She said, “A spaceship built by Europeans from the 1940s.”

  Ling nodded. “Something in between Frau im Mond and Destination Moon.”

  Alireza pointed at a set of controls mounted in the center, just above the console, below the middle of the windscreen. More buttons, like old three-position circuit breakers. Lots of circular dials with electromechanical indicator needles. Alireza tapping a label. “Am I correct in reading this word as hyperdrive?”

  Rahman dropped into the right-hand seat, staring, baffled, starting to work back through... theories. Can’t do it. Too much... She said, “I wonder how a mass proximity indicator works?”

  Ling, staring through broken transparent stone, out into the red desert, at a darkening sky now the color of cooked pumpkin purée, where a few stars were beginning to glimmer: “Gravity waves, perhaps...”

  Alireza tapped a console to his left. “I’d like to fly a spaceship that had one of these...” Alireza the pilot speaking. Alireza with a faraway look. Alireza in the land of fantastic dreams.

  Rahman bent forward and looked. Graviton polarity generator.

  Ling said, “The technologies indicated by the labels on these controls presuppose processes that are simply not possible. Unless everything we know about the nature of the universe and all its laws is... incorrect.”

  Moment of silence, then Omry Inbar said, “So, you’re assuming the same rules are valid here.”