The Transmigration of Souls

by William Barton

  A narrow grin. “Ah, yes. That fatuous ‘going double’ theory. I suppose you think the two of us, having met, simply merged?”

  Kincaid: “What would the alternative be, the fate of antiparticles?”

  “Heh. That’s a good one. Blow one Hell of a crater in Great Achaea, wouldn’t it?”

  Ling said, “If everything in the Multiverse is falling here, it seems like this sort of event would be common. By now, you must have met hundreds, even thousands of iterations of yourself...”

  Deep shadow in his eyes. “You’re going to have to tell me more about your travels in this... Multiverse. The Unholy Trinity used to argue about that bit a lot, many histories, time shells, all that rubbish.” One big hand rubbing a heavy, rounded jaw. “I always preferred to work with Wormer. A practical man.”

  Kincaid: “Wormer? That’s an odd name.”

  “Shit. Vairn-Hair, all right?” He said, “We’ve been picking up Americans who’ve fallen here for the past two hundred years or so, since Otis and I decided to found High America and get busy trying to figure out what was what. I think maybe you folks don’t belong here, which is, quite possibly, the first real break we’ve ever gotten.”

  “What about the Squire?”

  “I don’t know where he went. He’s not inside me. And, no, it never happened before. You folks are the first indication we’ve had that there even is a Multiverse.”

  o0o

  We all look the same, thought Subaïda Rahman, in our Yankee bluejeans and boys’ white dress shirts. That brought back a memory of some childhood time in Qahira, boys on their way to religious study classes maybe, in white linen pants and white linen shirts, a red fez on every little round head.

  Like an antique time I remember, like ancient history. Things were changing fast in the UAR when I left. Veils gone in my grandmother’s time. Suited Lesbians walking the streets in my mother’s. Businesswomen, she used to call them, and the curl to her lip meant scorn.

  I used to hear her talking with her friends. They used to imagine things. Imagine terrible things. Things that made them angry at their husbands. Businesswomen, my mother would say. I don’t believe they’re... that. Don’t believe they’re Lesbians, no. They’d sit and talk over coffee midway through the afternoon, their chores and shopping done, these old-fashioned women. Sit and talk about the business women, not really... that. They’d say. Mother and her friends imagining those suited-up, jumped-up women, pretending to work, in the offices with the men...

  Under the desk, that was the phrase my mother liked to use, when she sat talking with her friends. Strange that what I remember most about my mother is how she had so many friends. Women talking together. Women just... being together. And my own memories of the workplace, men and women alike. Always doing. Always doing something. Never the time, never the will, simply to be.

  Outside, the airship began running down an invisible slope out of the dark blue sky, sky brightening, growing hazy perhaps, as they returned to a region where dust from the ground had risen on turbulent winds. Troposphere, if this place even has a troposphere.

  They were above low, rolling hills now, hills sloping up to jagged, snowcapped mountains at the edge of the high plateau. High America, she reminded herself. Something going on down there. Little flashes of light. She got out of her chair and stepped up to one of the wide windows, windowpane sloping away from her so that, if she leaned forward, hands on the brass rail, there was a good view more or less straight down. Tiny figures. Flashes of light. Puffs of white smoke, smaller puffs of black smoke.

  Next to her was a pair of wide-field binoculars fixed to a little stand, on an altazimuthal mount. She turned them on the scene below, and looked. Men. Men on horses, dressed in what looked like brown leather clothing, leather with tassels on the arms and legs. Men with broad-brimmed hats and men with feathers in their hair. Shooting long guns from horseback. At whom?

  Other men, mounted on what looked like rugged little motorcycles. Men in dark blue uniforms shooting shorter guns. Smokeless guns that went flash-flash-flash, very fast. There were a fair number of buckskin men on the ground, a fair number of riderless horses. Only one crashed motorcycle, its blue rider hanging motionless in the branches of a little tree.

  Flash-flash-flash.

  Flash-flash-flash.

  Buckskin men starting to ride away now, ride off down the slope, abandoning their dead and wounded, abandoning their lost horses. Bluebellies firing after them, firing their vicious little tommyguns, shooting buckskin men in their backs, bringing them down. Even shooting the horses. Well. Some of them are getting away...

  I wonder which are the good guys and which the bad? Is there a right side and a wrong? Does it matter? It should. But I’m so curiously empty of feeling just now...

  Nearby, Passiphaë Laing sat on a little chair by the rail, seeming, at first, to be looking out the window, at the scene below. Just staring I thought, morose, the way she’s been since we came here, since...

  Since before Edgar. Since before Smoking Mirror. Since the antwife came back and took Jensen away down the River to... to somewhere. Changed. She changed when we came here. Some people changed, others didn’t. Pixie Aarae turning into a woman. A girl, at any rate. Turning into Omry Inbar’s girl at least. Robot Amaterasu becoming... what’s the phrase? Becoming a real, live girl.

  What has this Laing creature become? Odd to think of her like that. Creature? An invented being, no more than some very sophisticated computer program. Now?

  Passiphaë Laing resting against the brass rail, forehead down on her arms, staring at the floor. Staring at nothing. I ought to do something. Say something. What? I don’t know. I don’t know how to do this. All I know is that I ought to. But...

  Right. All the years in school. Competing with the other girls, then competing with the boys. Winning. Always winning. Then University. Winning some more. Making things up as I went along. That crazy business about being a Lesbian. Just another way to win. And me not knowing all the things I’d lost.

  A sharp memory, again, of her mother’s friends. She stepped forward, put out her hand, hesitated. “Are you all right?”

  Nothing.

  She sat down and put her hand on Laing’s back, up by her shoulder. Opened her mouth to speak... Say what? It seems... wrong to just call her... Laing. Laing is what you’d call a man. You’d say, Buck up, Laing. It isn’t the end of the world... “Passiphaë.”

  The woman sat up, looked out the window for a moment, then looked at her.

  “Are you all right?”

  A long, hollow stare. Nothing.

  What would my mother have done? All sorts of memories, forgotten, suppressed, until now. She looked into the hollow eyes, opened her mouth to speak again... nothing there. Nothing but... held out her arms, and, with Passiphaë Laing nestled on her shoulder, Subaïda Rahman found she did indeed know when to be silent. And why.

  o0o

  Omry Inbar held Aarae tightly by the hand and looked down what he had been told was called the Great White Way. Bizarre neon illumination, signs of moving light, brightening the shadowed canyons of the classic stone city. Not stone, no. Prestressed concrete. Prefabricated cement facades over iron and brick core material.

  All right, so its not so different, really, from the modern cities of the UAR. This could be Midan Tahrir in al-Qahira, where el-Tahrir, Mohammad Mahmoud and Qasr el-Aini all meet. Places like this in Basra, Algiers, Tunis. Overhead, where the tall buildings ended, though, the sky stood out like a river of bright blue. The sky should be dark. A dark black sky, with the stars blotted out by Earthlings’ light.

  All day long, wonder on wonder. The airship landing them at a place called Lakehurst, putting them aground on a grassy field of masts, each mast bearing a huge airship of its own, in response to a question, Edgar saying, This one? Oh, Los Angeles, I think. Painted on the tail somewhere. Another frown, at another question. Hindenburg?! Why? These are American airships.

  Ling, staring with
delight across the field, counting, yes, twenty-seven rigid dirigibles, had pointed out that the Luftschiff Zeppelin company had made the original Los Angeles, as well.

  Edgar, with a sardonic grin: Yep. Made this one, too. Son of a bitch is just full of crazy stories about the Civil War.

  Freddy. Referred to him as Freddy.

  That’s the thing, you see. These are Americans. Whatever that means... Train ride into the city. Tall buildings, already grown old, Kincaid staring at them across flat, brushy landscape, saying, You left out a lot.

  Edgar nodding. Yep. When Jack wouldn’t let Don be Finance Minister, he, ah, went elsewhere. Up in Novyrom last I heard, trying to set up a shipping line with one of those Greek boys. Some guy with the same name as the philosopher that taught Alexander. I forget.

  Ling had said, Jack? Kennedy is president of High America?

  Naw. He never showed up here. Jack’s that fat comedian fellow. Gleason. Does a good job, too. Smart as Hell.

  The hotel had been wonderful too, clean linen on a turned-down bed, little refrigerator in the room, full of liquor and candy. Of course, the linen hadn’t stayed clean too long, he and Aarae scrambling out of their clothes and in between the sheets...

  He’d lain there with her afterward, the two of them, superficially at least, satiated, snuggling close, damp and warm, watching some crazy show on the old-fashioned cable TV, something about a woman, a journalist maybe, searching the Red Desert country to the west of High America, looking for her lost husband.

  Arabian adventure, like Scheherazadë stories.

  Maybe the husband’s name was even Sindbad.

  Warm, whole woman clinging to him now. The way no woman ever held onto me. Like... mother, lover, and comrade all rolled into one. And that faint tickle of fear. Not a magic being, anymore. A woman now. More than that, a person now.

  They always leave me. Memories of many partings. No. That’s not right. They go away because I’ve already left, moved on to the next thing, only my libido left behind. Will that happen again? Will Aarae, sorrowing, go away, simply because I’ve... forgotten how these moments feel?

  No answer, as always. Just a vow. And vows, in time, are forgotten.

  Holding his hand now, close by his side, going from window to window with him, reluctantly moving on. Eventually they came to a newsstand, all colorful magazines that caught Aarae’s eye, newspapers printed on cheap, grayish paper rustling in the wind. Papers in English, full of pictures, mostly grayscale, some in garish color. This...

  The Hebrew characters jumped out at him, making him pick the thing up, eyes already tracking right to left, trying to read. No. Not Hebrew. Phonemes, sounded out, an awful lot like transliterated English. But not English. No, some dialect of German, maybe...

  My God. This is in Yiddish. My grandfather could speak Yiddish. Angry when his children refused to learn. Threatening to emigrate to the Ukraine. Right, Grandpa. Will you send us bushel baskets of the potatoes you pick? Will you send us pictures from the Ghetto?

  The man behind the counter, thin, young like most everyone here, blue-eyed, with curly black hair, was watching him closely. Suspicion. Does he think I’m going to steal the paper?

  The man said something. Clearly something said in the same language as the paper.

  Inbar said, “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Yiddish.”

  Scornful look. “Den vhy...”

  A particle of anger, anger and pride, popping up, bright and hot. In Hebrew, he said, “I’m newly arrived. From...” From where? From the Earth? No. From the United Arab Republic of the Twenty-Second Century? No. “Newly arrived from Israël.”

  The paperseller’s eyes brightened, and in fluidly guttural late Twenty-First-Century Sabraic Hebrew, he said, “Ah. Welcome! I was myself killed in the Arab Conquest.” He held out his hand and said, “Amoz is my name. Amoz bar-Or.”

  o0o

  The Grand Council Chamber, to Astrid Kincaid’s pleasure, turned out to be no more than a meeting room in City Hall, long, brown wooden tables along one wall, gray metal folding chairs filling the rest of the room. There were dirty windows to the outside, pale sunlight slanting in to pool on the floor, just as if their were a real sun up in the sky somewhere to make them cast focused shadows.

  The buildings. The windowpane maybe. They’d thrown shadows out on the plains of course, but... hazy shadows. Going in all directions.

  There was a blackboard on the wall behind the long table, a green board really, written on in yellow chalk. Mathematics. Exclamation points. Off to one side, what looked like some kind of meeting agenda in a neat, square printed hand. Above the blackboard was a banner, done on fanfold paper, all green and white bars, of a sort she dimly remembered from her childhood, the big letters on the sign were, on closer inspection, formed from assemblies of the same letter. A T of tees, an A of aes...

  It said: “Tannu Tuva or Bust.”

  People were coming into the room now, and Edgar said, “OK, let’s get started.”

  One of the men, a tall, muscular blond boy with a fat, round chin and impossibly flashy smile, said, “Don’t be in such a rush, Ed. We’ve got whatever time we need.” Rather peculiar accent.

  “Right. Have a seat, Wormer. We’ll get to that directly.” Big grin as he sat, taking the mangled pronunciation in good humor. Probably an old game between them. Edgar gestured at three rather similar-looking young men: “The Unholy Trinity, Al, Murray and Gerry.”

  Well. I know who the skinny guy with the messy hair is. The others...

  More people coming to the long table, sitting down, identified by unfamiliar first names. One of them seemed to be an Italian named Ricky. And Edgar, sitting down, facing them, hands folded atop the table, big fingers intertwined: “I think I can speak for us all when I say how glad we are to see you!”

  Grins from down the row, toothy-faced European grins, lip-twisted American grins. High America, all right...

  Telling the story, in quick-time:

  You die. You come here. Human cultures from all time past, all mixed together, all the people who lived before you wandering across the face of some gigantic continent. Sort of surveyed, Edgar told them. The big river valley, forests to the east. An ocean beyond that...

  Oh, yes, the River of No Return is just a river. It flows along for forty, maybe fifty thousand miles, from up by the Inland Oceans down to... well, its the same sea as the Eastern Sea beyond Novyrom. Just a sea with no farther shore, a sea full of islands, little and big.

  And the pilgrims. The seekers of Heaven? Image of Jensen and antwife, Alireza and Zeq, Brucie and Tarantellula-Penny, all on their way to Heaven. What about them?

  A shrug, broad palms upraised to... No. Not to Heaven. There is no Heaven. At least, no Heaven around here. Edgar said, There’s a very nice country down around the River’s delta, a green and fertile land maybe half the size of Europe. A lot of them settle there. They call it New East Anglia. I don’t know why.

  A lot of them. Not all?

  No. A lot of those little boats just go on out to sea.

  And the people aboard them?

  It doesn’t matter. All they can do is... live and die and live again. This seems to be the end of the road. A bitter pill for some to swallow. How long will it take for Alireza to find his wife? How long before Zeq knows there’s... no place for him anywhere, not even here? Hell. Maybe he’ll make a place.

  Bruce and Penny will settle in the delta country and live happily every after. They’ve found what they were looking for...

  And what about us? Little lost scientist boys looking at each other? Well. We’ve spent the last few centuries exploring, you see. Exploring. Arguing. Trying to figure things out. Not getting much of anywhere. You could see the arguments starting to surface, people marshaling their rhetoric, mouths starting to open...

  Edgar said, We’re not the sort of people who can live happily ever after. Not in a place like this. A place so... so damned accidental. Maybe there’s no reason for anything. No rea
son at all. But we spent our real lives looking...

  Looking, said Al, soft bitterness in his voice, not really finding anything.

  Edgar said, We’ve been looking for the Exit sign, I guess you might say. Maybe we’ve found it, maybe not.

  In any case, said Al, your existence is the key.

  Many histories, many... Heavens, if you will, said Murray.

  If, said Gerry, it’s not just some almighty slight of hand.

  Ling coughed suddenly, from the back of the room where he’d been sitting. “Still looking for the dice, I see.”

  Al smiled at him, smiled out from under a little brush of a führer moustache, and ran his fingers through curly black hair. “Ach, so. Everyone who ever arrived came here by dying a natural death. Until now. You folks got here through this... Multiverse of yours, confirming many histories...” a grim look around the room, the settling of many old scores. “If there’s another way in, other than the grave, there must be another way out.”

  Gerry said, “And we think maybe we’ve spotted the door.”

  o0o

  In the end, when the shadowless, edgeless days and weeks had gone by, they took them back to Lakehurst-in-the-Sky, not to the field of zeppelins this time, but to a vast concourse paved with hard, pebbly tan concrete. And now, Subaïda Rahman stood on the runway, feeling herself fill up with a cold sense of panic.

  I don’t want to be the last one. Mahal and Tariq, exploded on the Moon. Zeq, red ruin beneath Permian jaws. Alireza, broken and dead when it was all... hardly begun. Zeq and Alireza, so briefly, found again, gone now down a hideously false River of No Return...

  Ling and that bizarre substitute-Edgar, laughing and laughing together at the truth, the bald man saying, Oh, it’s not quite the River Iss, but it’s just as much a lie...

  Offering to send a Search and Rescue airship down the River to look for them all, Zeq and Alireza, Jensen and the antgirl, that ancient, idiotic boy and his little brown monster...

  Long silence. Then Laing: No. Let them be. Then a nod from Kincaid. They’ll find what they’re looking for. But...