Falling!
Like... thought Ling Erhshan, like I’m back in orbit. Zero gee, objects floating before my face, bits and pieces of scrap, things left behind by technicians we hadn’t suspected of such carelessness, rising up from their resting places, behind control consoles, under storage lockers... I can feel my insides floating up from their little beds, beds of fat and suddenly unstressed tissue, head suddenly full, nausea reaching out its feather-light touch...
Look out the window. Is that Earth down below? Chang, Da Chai and I circling in orbit, mated to the tanker pumping our fuel aboard, preparing to leave for the Moon...
Surely they live again, somewhere in Heaven?
Out the window, though, only blue-white light, light so bright it was without form, a window into the void. Light so bright it left only darkness behind... or like a dream I once had. I’d been flying a lot, riding military transport around Siberia, setting up my various resources, get the Program started. Shaky old planes, the sort of thing a low-priority academic project could requisition. Sitting there, in my dream, belted securely into my airline seat, plane shuddering around me, plane banked hard to the right, angling down out of the sky to a snowcovered landscape, things rattling and crashing around me, people screaming, screaming.
Me, looking out the window, watching the ground heel hard over as it came up into the sky, reaching for us, thinking, No. This can’t be happening. I must be having a dream...
Then looking at my seat mate, some young staffer I barely knew, her eyes wide, shocked, looking at me, looking right into my soul. I could read her mind, for just a moment: Please. Tell me this is just a dream.
Scream of tearing metal, crackle of breaking wings, thud of fuel ignition, seats tearing from their mounts, tumbling forward into flaring white light... I remember seeing her fly away. Remember seeing her torn asunder, eyes unchanged, shock of disbelief fixed for eternity. Remember my last thought, regret, wishing I could reach out and touch those soft young limbs...
Hand reaching out, warm hand on my arm, hand reaching to me out of the impenetrable black light, blinding light and darkness all run together in my heart. Ling said, “Kincaid...”
Patting him on the arm, she said, “You were making... noises.”
Noises. I remember waking up in my sweaty bed, whimpering, clutching a damp pillow to my breast. Another hand on my arm then. The girl from the dream. One of my graduate students. I don’t remember her name. “Sorry. Are we blind?”
Soft laughter. “I don’t think so. I think it just got dark so fast our eyes didn’t know what to make of it.”
From the front of the cabin, Edgar’s voice: “Well, God damn it, Al, is there air out there or not?”
Al, voice... delicate: “Well now. I don’t know.” Soft creaking noise. “When I work the yoke and rudder pedals, I don’t feel any non-mechanical resistance. We could be sitting on the runway. Or floating in a vacuum.”
Ling thought, Complete darkness. No gravity. No air. No nothing. “Floating in an... empty plenum?”
Murray said, “The thought has crossed our minds, I think.”
Edgar: “Why have the engines stopped? They’re nuclear-electric, not dependent on air for their operation.”
No vibration beneath their feet, coming through their seats. I wonder what’s happening to the folk in back? Would we be able to hear them through the hatch. Someone should...
Gerry said, “I don’t know. We can’t see the instruments...”
“Well? Turn on the fucking panel lights.”
A brief silence, then: “There aren’t any. Cabin lights neither.”
A sharply hissed sigh of exasperation: “Why the fuck not?”
Gentle laughter from Al: “When was the last time you remember it being dark in the World Without End? There were plenty of windows. We didn’t think...” Right. Even up on Mike’s Peak, under a black and pseudo-starry sky, full daylight blazing down.
“Hmh. Fucking great.” And a voice-tone that said: Now what?
Murray: “There’s a switch on the underside of the yoke column, Al. We did put in small landing lights.”
“What for?”
Gerry: “Cloudy days.”
Ling thought, But I don’t remember seeing any clouds...
Murray: “Fog lights, really. Not much more than that.”
Ling heard the dull crack of the switch, a sense, almost, of an echo.
Diffuse orange light coming in through the windshield, outlining the heads and shoulders of the others, black forms superimposed on hazy night and...
Al’s voice, raised on high, pitch winding up through the scale from a thick and gargling scream: “Fürgrossekackenscheiss’gibs’herrgott!!”
Kincaid’s echoing whisper: “Holy fuck.”
Misty orange light reflecting back at the from, what? A wall? A dark, shiny wall? Outlined against it, Ling could see Al more or less standing up in his harness, standing on the rudder pedals, wall before them tilting crazily, hauling on the yoke, pulling it against his chest, wall flattening out, stretching away to infinite distance, orange light, barely a glow, fading away.
Murray said, “I can’t get the engines to come on...” A look out the window, back aft, motionless props, not feathered, not windmilling, reflecting orange forward. “Dead circuit indicator.”
Edgar: “For Christ’s sake. Try to put the gear down.”
Metal switches going tick-tock. Silence.
“Jesus. Can you keep her level? Where the Hell is that God damned crank...”
Plane softly shuddering. Light from outside growing brighter. Al: “No, I can’t keep her level. Hold on.”
The props touched first, a magnified scream of fingernails on blackboard.
o0o
Kincaid stood looking back at the crash-landed airplane from a little way off across the darkling plain, listening to her breath whisper through the oxygen-assisted respirator’s valve, shush in, snap, hiss out, hose running down to a little oxygen tank and rebreather canister clipped to her belt, M-1 clutched across her chest.
A little air here, Al and the boys, the Unholy Trinity, mumbling over their instruments, muttering to each other, Edgar snarling at them over the issue of panel lights. For Christ’s sake. We were going into the fucking unknown...
Cold here, around minus forty, near where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet, air pressure low, maybe 400 millibars, skin tingling, ears popping every time she swallowed. Sounds muffled. No wind though. Good damned thing. These cotton-batting-lined wool coats are piss-poor.
Plane resting on its belly, suffused by orange light, props bent, dug into the... substrate. Stuff like formica, but, waxier, softer. Murray kneeling, looking into the long troughs they’d dug, scraping and clattering to a stop.
A soft mutter, fingering grit. Reminds me of that black wax we had in biology class.
You mean, said Edgar, the stuff we’d pin frogs too?
Yes.
Evocation of a brief memory: Holding a shivery green leopard frog in her left hand, the long needle with its wooden handle in the other. Some male teacher, thin, young, approaching her, surgical scissors in his hand, eyes on her breasts. Scissors at the back of the frog’s neck. Frog motionless. Seeming apathetic. Snip.
Teacher patting me on the shoulder, and you could see him wishing for the nerve to accidentally touch my tits...
OK, Astrid. Go to it. He won’t feel a thing.
Frog just doesn’t seem to care.
Putting the needle into the hole. Running it up into the skull, wagging it back and forth. Nothing. How would I feel if someone just scrambled my brain? OK. Now, the spine. Slide the needle home...
Frog suddenly squirming in her hand, screaming, all the agonies of a soul in Hell...
Falling with a splat to the floor. Blood on her hands.
Don’t be such a sissy, Astrid. Now put him in the pan and get to work.
Pins through his hands, pins through his feet, sliding on down to the soft black wax.
People around the sprawling, crashed plane. We’d never get it aloft now, even if we get the electrical system working again. Stuck here. People huddled around the plane, looking off into the empty distance. Edgar, the boys, walking round and round, making their bitter survey. Genda and Amaterasu, holding hands. Laing and Rahman, holding hands. Ling standing alone. Amanda Grey standing alone.
Me standing alone. What if we’re stuck here? What if this is all there is? Walk to the end of the world? What if it has no end?
Edgar saying, What the Hell? We’ll run out of food and water and air eventually. Probably just reify somewhere near the River and...
What if we can’t die here? The Rapture? How long do I have to stay here, God? Forever.
A muffled outcry, from back at the plane. Someone, Laing, pointing up into the black sky. Kincaid turned to look. A bright spark, isolated. Like a single star. Moving. Growing larger? Coming toward us? I can’t tell.
Another spark. Then another. Another. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. A thousand. Familiar scene, forming in her mind. The worst of it coming true then, the rules clustered round the concept of Hesperidia coming true, Lord Ahriman forming around them. In a moment, the stars would be bursts of fire. Bursts of fire turning to fiery birds, birds assembling into some nightmare angel...
Laing’s cry ringing out. No. Long, drawn out, unhappy. A glance back and Laing had fallen against Rahman, fallen against the woman’s protecting bosom. And, in the sky...
A sharp sense of being out of breath. Expecting to look up and see that the Angel of Death had formed again, formed to carry us away, roll us up like windowshades, leaving dry bones behind, little piles of dry bones to rest beside the plane, mute witness to our...
Little sparks of light above them, motionless but... moving, sparks of white light resolving into tiny coils, tiny coils spinning round and round, held fast to their axes, each image reflected into every other image, each fiery double helix the same.
Suddenly beside her, Ling whispered, “They look like little men. Like little soldiers, marching in place.”
She stared at them, wondering. Sound in the distance. Wind rushing through the tops of trees in the late summer. Sigh of the wind presaging Fall.
Rahman was standing with them now too, leading a downcast Laing by the hand. She said, “Almost like a choir singing. Singing far away in the distance. When I was a girl, I would sometimes go down to the Christian quarter on Sunday. Would stand outside a church and listen to them sing, so different from the songs of Islam.”
Ling: “Or like men whistling. Whistling as they march.”
One of the coils seemed to expand suddenly. Expand or merely grow closer? Impossible to know.
Voice, like a whisper inside their heads: You have no business here.
Behind the coil, the little helixes did indeed look like marching soldiers now. No. Not soldiers. Marching marionettes. Naked things, sexless things, things made of white light. A little like the way Amaterasu looked, before I put on her skin and organs...
Edgar, shouting: “Who are you?”
A Mediator.
Mediator no more than a coil of misty light, coiling in on itself, round and round...
It said, The Soldiers of the Light were to guard against this, but they fail, as everything fails, in time. The Princes of the Worlds have sent me here to Mediate your... return.
Return. She called out, “To where?”
Home? Will it send us home? Home to try again, to try... I don’t know. I don’t know what we were meant to be. If anything.
Edgar shouted, “We don’t want to go back to the World Without End! There’s nothing there for us!” Nothing there for anyone whose never been... content.
The Mediator said, The World Without End is no more, all its souls fallen into darkness. Your crossing of the Boundary saw to that.
Moment of freezing shock. All its souls fallen... Eternal life lost? Because of us? One word, bitter, hard, a word without end: Unfair. But, when you act, you incur responsibility.
In a whisper: “Where, then?”
I know not.
Back at the crashed plane, the hatch suddenly popped back open, built-up air pressure chuffing, air sighing out into the void. Us? Back in there?
No. Not all of you. Only the three, not the One.
Edgar cried out, “Are you God?”
Not God. A Mediator between the Worlds.
Kincaid suddenly conscious that Al, Murray and Gerry were standing together, postures stiff and unnatural, three little robots standing in a row. Al’s voice, as if talking to himself: “No. This is not right.”
Wandering Jews.
Flying Dutchmen.
All the same.
Al: “Verdammt noch mal!”
Beside him, Murray said, “Damned and stitched, I’m afraid...” Not afraid, though. Voice... resigned. And they turned, together, as one, marching in step, marched into the plane and were gone. In a minute, you could see their heads appear in the cockpit windows, taking their seats, looking out into the darkness.
Edgar shouted, “What the Hell is going on here?”
A groan of metal from the crashed plane. A scrape. Another. It started to slide, slide back along its own long skidmark, faster and faster, shriek of its passage growing louder and louder. Behind Rahman, Kincaid could see Laing cowering, holding her hands over her ears.
Plane in the sky now, rising, flying backwards for a moment, then banking, turning away from them, nose rising, pointing at the black heavens, a twinkle of torn metal, wings bent and graceless, growing smaller against the darkness, smaller and smaller still, a bit of flotsam, miniature junk, a glitter like a bit of lost Christmas tinsel blowing on the wind, then gone.
o0o
Rahman stood still in a darkness lit only by angelic light, skin crawling from a cold breeze that had sprung up out of nowhere. Laing, still holding her hand, was shivering as well. Fear? Impossible to know. When the plane fell, she held tight to me. Held tight, put her hands...
Incredulity, even as I waited for us to die. Woman-construct like a man, like some man’s absurd dream, women-construct with her hands in my crotch, groping, groping, even as we fell through blue light down into the nothingness of Hell. That’s where we are now. Where we must be. I know it. But the certainty wasn’t there. Not really. Conviction only a matter of culture. Of expectation.
Astrid Kincaid beside her, suddenly standing, raising her weapon, click-clink of bolt interspersed with a hard bamm, bamm, bamm, bullets whistling away to nowhere.
Pointless, said the Angel.
Pointless indeed.
I imagine my mother, bitter amusement in her mouth, watching this always-defiant American soldier try to shoot down God. Not, she would say with evident satisfaction, the Right Sort of Woman.
Not right at all.
Edgar’s shout: “God damn you!” Obvious, helpless rage.
God is damning no one these days.
Rahman felt herself take a step forward, letting go of Laing’s trembling hand. “If you’re not God, who are you?”
Mediator.
“Who?”
Sari-el.
Ah. My mother’s voice: Sari-el, deciding the fate of those angels who transgress the Laws of God...
And the Archangel Sari-el said, Finished.
Double helix winding in on itself, receding, fitting itself in among the heavenly host, one more android soldier, soldier of light among the men, men marching in step, whistling softly as they marched. Soldiers diminishing to sparks, sparks of light become as one with the stars...
Hard strands of light, all pointing away, universe receding...
All of them then, all who were left, standing in darkness. Then Professor Ling’s voice, muffled by his oxygen mask, punctuated by the snap-click of its valve: “For just a moment there, I was on the deck of the Millennium Falcon.”
Kincaid: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Hideous Americans, equally hideous Green Chinamen, spoiling etern
ity for me, blotting out my mother’s voice. Then Laing’s trembling fingers again, seeking her out, hand on her breast. My God. Made to be as her Creator made her. Creator not God, nor even god. Merely some hideous man, living out his hideous dreams, in the fiction of Crimson Desert. Passiphaë Laing, equally ready to swing a heroic sword, save the man who needs saving by a mother’s grace, equally ready to lift her skirt, expose her soft underbelly, take him into the grace of a whore’s inner warmth...
Icon. Fragile now, her script erased.
Edgar said, “Well...”
Jump cut.
White light, blinding, dizzying. Rahman felt herself stagger, almost fall, felt Laing’s strong hand steady her, hold her upright. The eight of them then, standing together, almost touching, standing together in the middle of a featureless white plain, standing beneath a featureless white sky.
Rahman, shading her eyes: “Nothing. No horizon line.”
Kincaid stamped the floor, if that’s what it was. “Nice and level though.” She fired the gun, report muffled, flat, anechoic. A long-seeming wait, then a distant spock of impact.
Professor Ling said, “One gee gravity. Just about the time the bullet would take to fall.”
Kincaid took a bullet out of her belt and dropped it from shoulder height. Spock. Louder, with a clink of brass.
“Well.”
Voice behind them, the lot of them, somehow facing in one direction, whirling as one. It was a slim man, very young, hardly out of his teens. Bright blue eyes, blonde hair cropped so short you could see his scalp. An old hair style English-speakers called a crew-cut, boy-man wearing white sneakers, high-tops with a red decal at the ankle, dressed in white chinos, a white tee-shirt, long white linen lab-coat open down the front. Smiling. He said, “Well, Edgar, you’ve gotten yourself in a pile of trouble this time, haven’t you?”
Edgar taken aback, edging back. Trying to stand behind us... He said, “What the Hell are you talking about? Who the Hell are you?”
The smiling man said, “Don’t you remember your old pal Khazmal?”
Khazmal? This open-faced, smiling-eyed boy the Fire-Speaking Angel? Edgar was silent, jaw clenched, eyes a mirror of fear.
The Transmigration of Souls Page 38