The Transmigration of Souls

by William Barton

  Khazmal said, “Well, you really screwed up this time. Right through the Toolbox and into the Regulators’ lap.”

  She could hear Kincaid whisper toolbox to herself, echoing the angel.

  Edgar, voice somehow wooden, said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  A sigh, a soft frown on the boy’s face. “What a mess.”

  Kincaid said, “So. I guess this means the Jug’s caught up with us.”

  So long ago, so far in the past, those quasi-revelations about the Scavengers and their possibly-imaginary Space-Time Juggernaut. Possibly the last moment when we could have gone back, back through the gate to the Moon and surrender and, just maybe, go back home, to live and die in ignorance. It was my decision to flee through the gate. Flee, spin the dial behind us, try to get away... A hard pang, the eyes of her mother looking through the murk. Accusing me.

  Khazmal said, “Well, Edgar. Time to live.” Hand reaching out, touching Edgar on the forehead, bald man flinching, eyes widening, reflecting sudden awareness, sudden knowledge, turning sullen.

  “Come now, don’t be like that. You knew what the job would entail when you took it.”

  A slow, reluctant nod. “I won’t stop trying, though. Not ‘til I’m whole again.”

  “What do you think you’d gain by reassembly? Do you still think you can become God?”

  A stolid, resentful stare: “The position looks vacant to me.”

  “Only because you see so little.”

  “Only because I’ve been lied to.”

  A final sigh, resigned. A sigh that said, No more point to this. “All right, Edgar. Maybe someday you’ll see. Until then...”

  Anger in his eyes, like the embers of a dying fire. “Right. Back to fucking work.”

  Khazmal reached out to touch him again...

  Flicker of pale blue light, light always coming from behind no matter which way you looked. A sound, like crisp sheets of paper being riffled into a fan... Edgar suddenly erupted into a cone of images, images of himself flying into the sky, cone widening, spreading out across the white sky, sky growing ever more dense with Edgars, thousand, millions, billions of Edgars, all with their arms outstretched, heads tipped back, Edgars flying away into the heavens, diminishing even as they grew in number. Suddenly, the spot where he’d stood was empty, wisp of gray smoke curling upward, dissipating, and...

  One last Edgar standing there, bald Edgar in dusty black leather, looking down at big, blunt, empty hands. Squire Edgar, whispering, “I was inside him after all...”

  Khazmal said, “They were all inside him, consumed one by one.”

  Edgar turned and looked at Amanda Grey for a moment, looked into her eyes, then his own seemed to narrow, as if in pain. He looked back at the angel. “Somewhere,” he said, “One of them, him, me, I guess, will remember. Start the cycle all over again.”

  “Not you though.”

  “No. Not me.”

  “The seed of discontent is always there, ready to erupt in those who deal with the passage of souls from one state to another. The hearts of doctors eventually sicken and grow cold.”

  Edgar looked at Amanda again. Rahman thought, She stands there, motionless, emotionless. Why? Why isn’t she glad to see him? She seems almost... afraid. Hard ram of pity and anger inside. I don’t want to see another hero-woman fall. Let her be... brave. Please.

  Edgar said, “Will you send me back as well?”

  The angel nodded. “Of course. You have your place, your job to do.”

  “And...”

  “The woman? Of course.”

  Sorrowing: “It won’t be the same, you know.”

  “Nothing is ever the same. It’s in the... nature of souls to change.”

  “Still...” Rahman could see it in his eyes, going back... to Hesperidia? Going back to Hesperidia, everything the same. Except what was in their hearts.

  Khazmal, Fire-Speaking Angel, stepped forward, stepped up to Knight-Errant Amanda Grey, reached out, touched her lightly on the forehead. Her stolid eyes suddenly lit from within. Lit with fear. She said, “Oh, no. Oh, no, please...” Desperation in her voice. Crawling-on-my-belly begging in her voice.

  Agony then in Squire Edgar’s eyes as well. “Khazmal. Khazmal I...”

  Another touch and the light in her eyes went out momentarily. Empty eyes staring. Empty eyes waiting to be filled. Then a final touch, eyes suffusing with...

  Rahman looked away. Feeling sick. I don’t want to watch.

  Edgar’s voice. “Not like this, Khazmal. This isn’t what I want.”

  The angel said, “You can’t always have what you want.”

  Rahman thought, Platitudes. Platitudes from God, sent through His Angels to excuse... Amanda Grey’s hard voice, soft now, beseeching, “It’ll be all right, Edgar. You’ll see. I love you now. Let’s go home.”

  Edgar’s voice, full of despair: “Oh, my God.”

  When she looked up, they were gone. All three of them, and...

  o0o

  Jump cut.

  Ling Erhshan stood flat-footed, bare-footed, on the cold, shiny white floor of his swiftly-emptying white world, and thought, Where did our clothes go? All of them naked again. Genda and Amaterasu in the background, seeming now to edge away from the little group, afraid perhaps...

  But where would they go?

  There is nowhere else.

  Kincaid looking down at her lovely breasts, empty handed. Looking down, maybe looking to see if her rifle is there? Then looking up again. Angry. Defiant. As always. Looking at me.

  He felt a sudden urge to cup his hands over his genitals. Hide them from her eyes. Eyes of judgment. Sudden memory of the little graduate student from the plane-crash dream. She seemed so... disappointed when I took off my pants. Disappointed in what she saw? They say women don’t care. But then so many of them seem to...

  I only slept with her twice, then she quit the program and transferred to another school. Maybe only disappointed that she saw anything at all. Why didn’t I know that then? Perhaps, because you were blinded by her breasts and thighs and lovely dark eyes?

  Passiphaë Laing grappling suddenly with naked Subaïda Rahman, arms around her, hands palpating breasts, sliding downward, dropping to her knees, mouth open, trying to slide between the other woman’s legs.

  Rahman shoving her away, staggering back, eyes filled with... I don’t know what. Women’s eyes, to me at least, empty, unreadable. Only full of lies. Full of my own emptiness, perhaps. Full of my reflection. Eyes like mirrors.

  He heard Laing whisper, “Please.” Rahman just staring at her. What do women see in each other’s faces? Things invisible to men, or so it says in a thousand learnèd journals.

  A soft, watery crackling now. Sound coming from everywhere at once. What will we see next? Another formless angel? Or merely one more mythic humanoid? Where could that dream have come from, an angel with the form of Tom Swift? From inside me, from inside the icon-smothered heart of this pagan soul? What did the others see? Mideastern angels, devolved from Zarathustra’s dream? Magic djinni like smoke from the Lamp?

  It was only another double helix that wound down out of the sky, filled with a nimbus of almost-colorless light. Pastel. Barely blue at all. Ling looked around, and thought, We’ve lost all our spokesmen. No Edgar to shout defiance for us now. Kincaid? She could only speak through her gun. Through her gun and the eloquence of those lost silver eyes. Empty eyes, like pools of molten metal. Anonymous eyes she could hide behind.

  Rahman’s voice, full of honest loathing: “What devil are you, come to torment us now?”

  Call me Metatron.

  Defiance suddenly turned to atavistic fear. What does she see?

  Rahman shouted, “Metatron is Satan’s Name!”

  Soft, cold laughter, striking a chill into Ling’s old bones.

  The Devil gives you what you want. Only the Lord takes away. I know what is in your heart, Subaïda Rahman, sham of a Lesbian, sham of a woman.

  Pa
ssiphaë Laing crawling forward, crawling on her belly before the God-Image, voice lost in the wilderness: “Please, God. Please don’t take her away...”

  Blue glow only brightening, then an icy softness: Go.

  Bang.

  A cloud of dark smoke.

  And Rahman gone.

  o0o

  Floating. Floating in the softest sea.

  Subaïda Rahman awoke and opened her eyes slowly. Floating on her back, almost, but not quite touching the left-hand acceleration couch, head tipped back and upward, looking out the triangular left-hand rendezvous window, into black space.

  Not empty space, no. Never empty space. Sliver of the Earth hanging out there, suspended against the void. Moon is behind us now. Hidden behind the mass of the service module. Must be getting pretty big by now, the Earth getting so small. Small. Blue. Fragile. Far away.

  Soft static from the cabin speaker, then a voice, a man’s voice, laconic, roughened by transmission: “Apollo 24, Houston.”

  A woman’s voice replying, close by: “Apollo 24. Read you five-by.”

  Radio voice: “Please be advised 25 has completed TLI.”

  Another voice, man’s voice, also close, also soft: “Yee-hah...”

  The woman: “Copy that, Houston. Good show.”

  Radio: “Johnny says you should wait for him under the lamppost at 42nd and Main.”

  “Will do, Capcom.”

  Rahman turned her head, looking back into the command module’s cramped cabin space. Crowded as Hell in here. Since they installed two more seats, bolting them in under the original three, you could hardly budge. Especially when all five of us are in here together...

  The woman at the radio console, a short, thick-waisted blonde, namestripe on her shirt reading Smithfield, smiled at her. “Good morning, sleepyhead!”

  Rahman said, “Good morning, Nellie.” Nellie. Her name is Nellie...

  Across the cabin, only four feet away, a small, gray-haired man in his late forties floated by the other window, looking out, looking down at the world. Jim Jameson living out his dream, JPL’s first astronaut, on his way to the Moon.

  Nellie said, “Something wrong, Susan?”

  Rahman stretched, arched her back, bumped her head on the seat’s headrest. Opened her eyes again and looked down. The namestripe on her own shirt read Romano. Susan Romano. Rahman? What the Hell was I thinking? She said, “I had the strangest damned dream.”

  From beside the window, Jameson said, “Zero gee’ll do that.”

  “Or that godawful pizza we had last night.”

  Susan said, “Well. Microwave’s better than the old freeze-dried stuff, but NASA’s got a long way to go.” Funny to think about it that way. A long way to go. Hah. She unbuckled her harness and slid away from the acceleration couch, hanging in the air, reaching for docking tunnel hatch. Plenty to do in the orbital habitat, getting ready for LOI. They’d be the first in Lunar polar orbit, if nothing went wrong. And when 25 shows up with the Block 5 lander, some of us will be the first to set down at the North Pole...

  Nellie said, “Better not. Jill and Frazier decided they needed a little privacy.”

  Astonishment. “Frazier?”

  Holding onto a support stanchion, bobbing in mid air, half an arm’s length away, Nellie laughed. “I guess Jill decided if she couldn’t be the first woman to do it on the Moon, she could at least be the first to do it in deep space...”

  Jill Mathers could sometimes be an asshole indeed, with her glory-hog concerns about firsts. All right, first in deep space, but... “Frazier?”

  A shrug. A grin.

  From his window seat, Jameson said, “Sorry you married a ground-pounder now, Susan?”

  Facing toward her, away from him, Nellie Smithfield rolled her eyes. Men.

  Image of Barry, back home in Houston. Barry and the kids, glued to the TV. They’d had a lovely last night together, three weeks ago already, the night before the crew had to go into preflight quarantine. Gone out to dinner as a family. Taken the kids to the movies, then home, home to tuck them in. Barry holding me close, in bed later. Just holding me.

  Six weeks before I’m in bed with him again. Image of herself snuggled against Barry’s warm back, listening to him sleep, soft, even breathing, a little rough, not rough enough you could call it a snore.

  He’s always so still when he sleeps.

  Peaceful.

  Peaceful when I come home from a day that’s practically driven me insane. Never a word about how his own day went, good or bad. Just: It’s an office. It was there when I left it. It’ll be there when I go back tomorrow. Regular hours, kids in the daycare, dropped off and picked up, day after day.

  He’s never once complained about my irregular hours.

  Jameson said, “Oh, there was another thing that came through when you were asleep. Processing confirmed the data from Radar Prospector II. There’s definitely an ice-field under the rimwall separating Peary from Rozhdestvenskii. They’ve moved the landing site down range about twenty klicks.”

  “Twenty... That’ll put us over the horizon.” And out of line-of-site with Earth.

  Nellie’s eyes were serious, measuring. “This is important. We’re going to have to be very careful.”

  Jameson: “Jessup says if we can confirm ready access to the ice, if its composition’s not too... Well, readily usable, if not potable, the President will ask congress for a budget adjunct. They’ll start development on a surface habitat for next year.”

  And Nellie said, “Oh, yes. And TOPS has been funded through launch. They’ve committed four Saturns to the mission. One probe and backup for each trajectory...”

  “They’re going to have to run Michoud flat-out to get that many birds ready.”

  Big grin on Nellie’s face. “You ever think, when you were in college, it’d come to this?”

  A slow headshake, head full of memories. “No. I guess I figured Johnson was going to commit us all to full involvement in Vietnam.” But he didn’t. Reelected in ‘64, again in ‘68. I felt bad when the Republicans managed to put that damned actor in the White House, year before last, but...

  But, by then, the economic theory of Infrastructure Modeling was beginning to catch people’s eyes. Prosperity curves. Government spending curves. The Interstate System. The Strategic Air Command. Project Apollo. Middle class doesn’t care who runs America so long as their jobs are secure. So long as a factory worker can own a house and a car, have a wife who works or not as she pleases...

  More and more men staying home these days too. Barry would have lots of company if I could talk him into it.

  President coming into office, yammering about a 600-ship Navy. But Mister President, we don’t need a new Navy. Well, what’re we going to spend it on, then? In his first State of the Union address, he called it his “Space-Faring Civilization.”

  Out the window, Earth hung against the velvet darkness. Barry down there. Me up here. Working to make our dreams to come true. Odd dream though. Odd dream. Something about angels. Something about the ice under Peary. Oh, well. Too much to do for me to waste time worrying about a dream.

  So. Get to work. Make your dream live.

  In time, that other dream, that very odd dream about black ice and fire and death, would surely fade away.

  o0o

  Vision fading, fading then gone, young American astronaut-woman Susan Romano, echo of Subaïda Rahman no more, sailing off into the emergent history of a Twentieth-Century America that never was. Possibly never could be. I have to keep reminding myself, thought Ling Erhshan, that everything is possible. Everything. Somewhere out there in the Multiverse, a transfinite number of Americas continue to evolve.

  Someone crying softly, a woman’s voice, Passiphaë Laing sprawled naked on the cold white floor of this nearly empty universe. Astrid Kincaid standing near her, arms folded, aloof. Lord Genda Hiroshige and his Lady Amaterasu some distance away, still holding hands.

  Overhead, a fuzzy-edged double helix of warm ligh
t continued to circle in on itself, winding up out of nowhere, winding away into nowhere, as if merely the middlemost coils of an infinitely long entity.

  This is, I think, how a madman feels. All sense of reality lost. Nothing familiar here. A vista so utterly impossible that it calls nothing to mind. Events engulfing us that have no place in our experience. A lunatic would accept this, or a primitive. Some ancient Mesoamerican shaman, downing his peyotl buttons, shivering away into a dream.

  A sudden pang of envy. A sudden hope. Of all the dreamers, all the lost souls, Rahman went to a fate most like the shape of her longed-for dream. Subaïda Rahman, American Technologies Specialist, injected into the America that got away. Will they land at Peary and find the Gate under the ice? With luck, in her reality, the will be no Gate.

  A vision of some future Rahman, matured and hardened, the dream-time of the Multiverse long forgotten, dancing across the red deserts of Mars.

  He stood under the misty coil of light, looking upward, wondering. Finally: “What now, you who call yourself Metatron?”

  Nothing. Blue light seeming to change, grow brittle, more sharply defined, crisp, edges taking shape out of nowhere. As if it were changing from light into steel. He said, “Who are you then? Are you really an instrumentality of God?”

  What would it mean to me, to find myself in the presence of a real God, a god of the sort Western religions prescribe? Ironic. The religious Westerners, the Muslims and Christians and Jews, have already gone. Nothing left here but two pagan Asians, a robot become flesh, and this presumably atheistic American Sergeant-Major...

  Kincaid beside him now, murmuring: “Yes. We’d like to know.”

  Voice hardly audible, but then, if this is the God who sees a sparrow fall, what need to cry out in the wilderness? Every need, perhaps. Every need within me, for I am besotted by all the unspoken assumptions that soaked the prose in all those old books.

  A little Christian God hiding in every fantasist’s all-powerful alien foe. He said, “We don’t believe in you, Metatron. Don’t believe you’re an angel, or even a demon.”

  The shadowy outline of a face started to form, outlined in pale white light, superimposed over the now mirror-bright surface of the helix. Not a human face. Alien. A face with something insectile about it, the irrepressible in Ling Erhshan briefly wondering if it would address him as Quatermass...