The Transmigration of Souls

by William Barton

“Well...”

  Rahman turned in her seat and looked at them, first Inbar, whose face was very pale indeed, then into Ling’s thoughtful eyes. That inescapable conclusion. “Maybe just... a little different. Different enough.”

  A nod, first from one, then the other.

  o0o

  The rest of the ship proved to be a mixture of the known and the unknown, the easily comprehensible, cabinets full of crushed cans and old food dried away to brittle scraps, then the impossibly antique. Rahman felt elated when they found the ship’s computer, mounted in a little cabin all its own aft of the control room. When they opened it up, the others seemed offended. No electronics, you see. Just a maze, a fuzzy mass really, of tiny, tiny, tiny little gears and wheels and whatnot. The machine Babbage would have built, had he been able to manufacture microscopic hardware.

  So what runs this? How does it work? Alireza almost angry.

  In other parts of the ship, they found what purported to be the hyperdrive machinery, and something claiming to be the gravity polarizer that so amazed Alireza. Labels telling what it was, strange instructions printed on little white plaques. Twist this, turn that. Move this lever to...

  It looked like no more than a mass of plumbing, like something you might see in World War II German ünterseeboten. This can’t possibly be right, but...

  Then the bedroom. There’d been a waterbed, of course, now no more than scraps of torn vinyl, a pile of paper and cloth in the corner that had once been wet, had gotten a little moldy before it dried. Books and clothes and bits of this and that strewn everywhere.

  Inbar bending, plucking a little rubbery disk off the floor, turning it over and over in his hands. “What do you suppose this is?”

  Ling looking at it, then smiling. “It’s a pessary. An old-fashioned birth-control device. North Asian women still use them sometimes, because they can be washed and used again.”

  Inbar, still staring at the thing: “So we’re talking about a people here who have faster-than-light starships, but don’t know about reproductive biochemistry?”

  “Not to mention electronics,” said Alireza.

  Rahman, picking up dress after slinky dress, all made from watered silk, in an array of subtle colors and hues, some with metallic glitter mixed into the cloth: Slim-hipped slacks. Lovely clothing, but... I couldn’t have fit into any of these things since about age thirteen. Moment of regret. I wouldn’t mind having a change of clothes right now. We’re all starting to smell.

  She lifted a floor-length dress that flowed from a tight bodice, something with an improbably high waist, and held it against herself. A dress for a woman of 180 centimeters perhaps, weighing no more than forty-five kilograms, at best... “What we have here is the wardrobe of some Twentieth-Century American fashion model, I think...”

  Inbar picked up a pair of tiny silk panties, no more than a triangle of cloth for the woman’s vulva, the rest of it just thin ribbons. Held it up against himself. Frowned. “Unless this thing used to stretch a bit...”

  Alireza snickered and said, “The woman who wore that must have had to shave a bit, here and there...”

  Or it would have looked a little strange. Right. Men so easily distracted by... The thought of clean underwear a distinct wish now. And my period’s not so far off... Maybe this woman left a few tampons behind... Seeing as how these people didn’t seem to know much about... Why didn’t I just get those shots when it was suggested? No reason. Just... same old reason. Every woman’s reason.

  Ling said, “Well. Perhaps she was Chinese.”

  Rahman picked up a thick hardcover book, book bound in expensive-looking red leather, gold printing embossed on the spine. Crimson Desert, by Passiphaë Laing. Flipped it open. A novel of some kind, written in... English? She read aloud: “Whann, in the fulnes of time, I chose seaking of Rhino Jensen, newnes without number it would be, but supposèd not I.”

  Ling took the book, flipped through the pages, a phrase here, another one there. “English. But not English.”

  Inbar said, “So we’re in a parallel world. So what else is new?”

  Rahman began laughing. No hysterical edge to her voice. Not quite.

  And Ling whispered, “Like Glory Road, then? Have I fallen into a book about falling into a book?”

  o0o

  The five of them were glowing softly in the alien dark, curtainfields shimmering like delicate Kirlian auras on the edge of vision. Getting cold out, now. Desert night cold. Switch off the field and your breath is a brief white flag against the night.

  Déjà vu experience because strange is as strange does, not because I’ve been here before. So many strange worlds, under so many strange skies. Scavenger bases, some established, some ramshackle. Colonial worlds like so many planet-wide urban projects here, in other places like little steel fortresses defying eternity. I wish we’d never gone home. Where would we be now if...

  Listen to me. Like my grandfather, whining about Apollo. Americans on the Moon in 1969, maybe on Mars by 1984. Mars colonies. Asteroid mines. That story he used to talk about, astronaut-prospectors finding something like oil-shale out in the Fore-Trojan cluster. Little did he suspect what would really have happened if...

  If and only if.

  This sky now, beyond fantastic, looking like some kind of CCD astronomical photo. Colors up in the sky. Stars picked out in pale red and blue, yellow and white. Look there. A green one. Wolf-Rayet Star? Impending supernova? Globular clusters, balls of white, tinged with the faintest pink, hanging far beyond the sky. Look closely. Those little things you see are distant spiral galaxies, with their reddish cores, arms stained with the blue of youth. Gas giant hanging in the sky, some other little moon sparkling nearby. Dale would’ve loved this place.

  That old, romantic image. Just the two of us here. That would’ve been nice. His arm around me, talking softly, far into the night; holding each other for warmth...

  Wry smile. Like it was only yesterday.

  I remember my great grandmother from when I was a little girl. How old was I then, twelve? Something like that. She must’ve been something like eighty-five. Maybe a little older. Staring at the wreckage of her face, wreckage hard to relate to the pretty face in all those old photographs. Old lady whispering, “I can’t believe it sometimes, Astrid. Inside, I still feel like a girl of eighteen. It seems like I’m... sick, that’s all. Like I’m sick and, soon, I’ll get better. Go out again. Boys. Dates.” Old lady looking at her with a shy grin. Probably remembering her first fuck.

  And here I am, older than she ever dreamed of becoming, mooning away about a lost love, a distracted fat man who screwed me a bit when I was already middle-aged.

  The great-grandmother had died not long after that. Regretting its necessity. My father telling me, wistfully, that her last words, whispered just as she slipped away, were, I wanted to live forever...

  Must have been a pretty deathbed scene. Like in a movie.

  They were all afraid to die. We all were. Mass hysteria in America, in the weeks and months after the interdictions were set up. When the... “Lunar Discoveries” were announced. Headline on the Times that just made me laugh and laugh. Banner covering half the front page: Eternal Life...

  Eternal life, then wave after wave of suicides. Religious folk. Madmen. People afraid that now they’d be depressed and sad for damn-all forever... I wonder how many people turned it down? I wonder how many people just lived until they died?

  I remember how sorry I was then that we’d left Dale behind. It was a long time before I figured out that, somewhere, on the other side of one cusp or another, there was a world in which Dale came home, in which we lived happily ever after. Or maybe a world in which I was left behind too, in which we went out and out, on in the many worlds until...

  Until what?

  Shrug.

  Until something.

  Until the Jug caught on and wiped us away.

  Space-Time Juggernaut. Nice turn of phrase...

  Looking up at the sky, Co
rky Bokaitis said, “That’s not Neptune, I guess, is it, Sarge?”

  Another shrug. “Well. Probably not. Not our Neptune, anyway.”

  Muldoon said, “What other Neptune is there?”

  Silence, then Tarantellula, white eyes on the sky: “I know what you mean, Sarge. I guess we can’t be making too many assumptions here.”

  “Guess not.” That was the mistake so many of the scientists made, back in the beginning. Too many assumptions. Just assumed that they knew...

  Muldoon lifted his rifle and aimed at a little point of glitter in the sky, twinkling thing just below the curving limb of “Neptune,” peered through the gunsight-rangefinder of the guidance system. Just one more little moon that...

  He said, “Huh. I figured it was going to be just a rock. Damn thing looks like a building, tumbling end over end. Lookit all them lights...” Impossible to believe that he’d had himself programmed to talk like that...

  A quick look through her own scope. Long, dark-skinned cylinder, full of what looked like windows, thousands of tiny, yellow-lit windows. Turning slowly, complex motion about two axes of rotation.

  Tarantellula said, “You know, Sergeant-Major, this place is kind of... interesting.”

  Brucie Big-Dick, long silent, said, “No shit.”

  o0o

  In the morning, when the sky was a bright orange verging on pink, the sun a brilliant ruby spark throwing long red shadows all along the cliff face, they abandoned the starship, stumbling down the long ravine, teetering, slipping on shattered rocks, until they were out on the face of the desert, standing in the lee of some tall, russet cliff.

  Here, there was nothing more than red sand and blowing pink dust, dust you could see best down by the horizon, like a layer of distant fog, blowing in the wind. A crashed starship, thought Ling. Confirmation, and yet we learned nothing we hadn’t already known.

  Alireza said, “We might as well go this way.” Gesturing to their right, along the cliff-face, in a direction that seemed like south.

  Seems like south, because the sun rises in the east. Because we define east as the direction of sunrise. Brief memory. Sunrise over the East China Sea. Dirty gray water. Ramshackle boats, as if I lived hundreds of years ago, rather than in an ever-so-modern twenty-second-century sort of China. How old was I then? Fifteen, maybe? Getting too old for the orphanage. Wondering what would become of me.

  Inbar, standing still, frowning, looking uncomfortable, as he had all morning, said, “Why that way? Why not some other way?”

  Alireza just stared at him. Stared, then turned and began walking.

  Silence. Then Inbar muttered a soft word in Arabic, a single clipped syllable, and started after him. Sigh from Rahman. She said, “There’s nothing to decide anymore...” Started after the others.

  Nothing to decide anymore. Ling began walking as well, thinking about that. We could go back to the gate. Go back and try again. Try again. And again. Maybe, sooner or later...

  What? All sorts of possibilities. Maybe, sooner or later, the gate would open onto the surface of some airless world, would open on a Colonial mining station, or some Scavenger techno-resource. Imagine: a ripple of rainbows, a black sky, roaring wind, our shouts of surprise as we’re sucked through, blown out into the void, or onto the surface of a place like the Moon. Sunlight pins and needles on my skin, vacuum a stabbing of knives in my head, my sinuses, my ears...

  Old stories. Old stories of trapped astronauts daring their thirty allotted seconds of vacuum, crossing from ship to ship. Remember the scene from 2001? Should Frank Poole have been bleeding from his nose and ears and mouth? Where were the petechiae on his skin? Where were the bruises?

  Soyuz 11. Three men dead in their couches. Three men who died while they listened to the air whistle out through a malfunctioning valve. Three dead men who’d had more than thirty seconds, a lot more, in which to unstrap, to reach up, to struggle for life, to at least try to close that valve. Why were they still strapped in? Maybe you don’t get thirty seconds.

  Lot’s of reasons why the Soviet’s Lunar program came to a bad end. Clumsy technology. Insane political system that encouraged bureau managers to wreck each others work. But Soyuz 11... if nothing else, that made them think, Maybe we can’t do it.

  Imagine. Imagine the Russians making it to the Moon in 1974. Imagine the Americans deciding, just maybe, they’d keep that Saturn production line open after all, refund Apollo Applications, build a wee little moonbase maybe, while waiting for that damned crazy Shuttle to come on line. Imagine. Maybe imagine somebody landing up at the pole around 1980, maybe prospecting for a pocket of fossil ice. Would they have found the Gate then? Or does it lie only on our side of that particular cusp?

  Rahman, speaking English, said, “What the Hell is that?” Pointing at the sky.

  Alireza said, “I’ve been wondering.”

  Ling stopped, squinting upward, looking where she indicated. A distant, metallic sparkle against an apricot sky. Inbar said, “How long has it been there?”

  “A couple of minutes.”

  Fighter pilot. Eyes caught by the barest fleck of light, shiver of motion. Ling shaded his eyes, trying to see. Middle-aged eyes still pretty good, never nearsighted, though he’d be needing corrective surgery for hyperopia sooner or later, a twenty-four-hour nuisance he’d been putting off for years. This thing now...

  Rahman said, “You know, it looks like a nineteenth century passenger liner.”

  Inbar said, “Yes. Yes it does.”

  Still subtending less than a minute of arc, the thing was shiny metal, it’s lower half featureless, long, relatively slim, perhaps six times as long as it was wide. No telling how big. No telling how far away. Above, some kind of superstructure, made of darker stuff, details indistinct. Were those tiny, fluttering bits of color flags?

  Alireza said, “Maybe. I think... gun emplacements?” Squinting hard now, hands folded like binoculars around his eyes.

  Inbar sighed, unclipped the real binoculars from his belt, put them to his face. Made a slight choking sound.

  Alireza snorted, leveled his stolen rifle at the sky, peered through its gunsight. Silence. Then a muttered exclamation, a short Arabic phrase in which Ling thought he could hear the word Allah, emerging from a language that sometimes seemed to be little more than strings of ells separated by muddy, half-swallowed vowels. Alireza passed the rifle to Rahman, who merely gasped. Ling stared at distant, glinting metal until Inbar nudged him, handed over the binoculars.

  Focusing, and... Impossible. Ship sailing through the sky, two broad, six-bladed propellers turning lazily at the stern. Gun turrets. Tiny figures moving about the canted deck, colored flags fluttering from invisibly thin rigging. And a radar dish. That’s a radar dish turning atop the mast.

  Sputt.

  Loud, shuddery sound, like some huge gas burner igniting from its pilot light. Ling lowered his binoculars, turned and looked at another part of the sky, the part above the mountain cliffs. Long, thin trail of reddish smoke, smoke hard to make out against bright orange sky, pointing to a dull red flame, small black object racing out over the desert.

  Alireza’s voice terse: “Missile.”

  Sputt.

  Another one rising, chasing the first.

  The people on the ship... People? The crew seemed to see them right away, ship slowing, wallowing, seeming to turn. Dots running around up there, tiny mites clinging to their host, turrets turning, turning in their direction.

  Flicker-flicker-flash.

  Twinkles of bright green light, light almost too bright to look at. Light from the muzzles of those aerial guns.

  Bang.

  Missile exploding, falling in a shower of golden sparks. Flicker-flicker-flash. Flicker-flicker-flash. Alireza crying out in Arabic, voice urgent. Telling them, perhaps, to tighten their aim. Red flame merging with the ship and... Gorgeous blossom of silvery fire, an explosion, a gout of incongruous brown smoke. Ship staggering against the sky, turning, turning, moving in towa
rd the cliffs, listing to one side.

  Those tiny dots. Tiny dots against the sky. Falling men. You could hear a dull, grinding roar now. The engines struggling perhaps. But one propeller was stopped, the other one whirling faster and faster. Ship still distant, coming closer and closer, lying on its side in the sky, falling... It passed over the cliffs, out of view. A moment later, a plume of gray smoke began to rise.

  Silence. Soft wind blowing over the desert sand, lifting tiny particles that stung on the skin of their faces. Alireza was looking around, at all of them. “I’d like to go... see.”

  Madness. We should go back to the gate and...

  It was Inbar who said, “Yes. Let’s do that.”

  They began walking again, following the line of cliffs, watching as the gray plume grew to a tall tower, rising thousands of meters until it was sheared away by high-altitude wind.

  o0o

  The starship was, somehow, no surprise. Looking at it from the top of the ravine, Kincaid thought, Why is this place so familiar to me? Certainly no place I’ve ever been before. No place I’ve even dreamt about. Something Dale said? Memory of standing with him on a windswept crag. Where? Gilligan. No, that’s just what he called it. A joke. The Stargate Commission’s official name was Gilliken. A joke. Private joke piled on top of a public joke. Gilligan’s Planet. But then, Gillikens, Millikens, Munchkins and Winkies, the names we selected for the four principal Scavenger colony planets. Look, Dale. A planet of your own.

  Something though about the design of the ship, the topography of the planet. The topography of the sky. We were standing atop that cliff on Gilligan, surrounded by yellow-green forest, looking out across a plain of grass like ripe wheat, ripe wheat waving in the wind like the surface of some strange yellow sea, looking toward the city. Tall towers surrounded by a light pink mist, city shining against the backdrop of a pastel blue-green sky, tall towers connected by fragile-looking aerial runways, flying roads, pedestrian corridors, whatever.

  Dale looking at it through his binoculars, we two, part of the first party to come through, first humans to look down on this vista. Dale whispering, Every dream I ever had. Every God-forsaken dream...