The Transmigration of Souls (10 page)

One of the interlopers, smallest of the five, stepped to one side quickly, stepping out of the Gate’s image area, probably ducking her impending fire, just getting out of the way...

Good that they’re afraid.

The image inside the Gate shimmered and dissipated, replaced by rainbow-spattered black formica. “
Shit
!” Not afraid enough, apparently.

Her soldiers gathered behind her, looking around curiously, then fanning out like they’d been taught but still entirely too much like a bunch of huge, friendly puppies. Corky Bokaitis said, “What’s going on, Sarge?”

This is a
bad
thing. Why the Hell are you grinning, Sergeant-Major Kincaid? Why the Hell? Just because. Because. She walked over to the console and sat down, started running the scanner, watching numbers scroll across its little LCD screen. Grin flattening. “Well. Sons of bitches were crazy enough to give the tuner a little spin before they cut power.” But I know where they went.

PeeWee Roth said, “Yuh mean, we lost ‘em?” A little relief in his voice. Maybe he’d read up on the mission beforehand. Smarter than he looks? Hard to tell, with a face like that. She said, “Gillis, go up to the surface and put through a comline link to the ship. I’ll need to tell somebody what’s happened.” Pointing, then. “You six will set up a base here and stand watch on both sides of the gate. The rest of you...”

Bokaitis handed her a scrap of old paper. “Found this in the bushes, Sarge.”

Millikan’s team
... Krimsky’s handwriting. I wonder if Krimsky’s still alive? Maybe I’ll kill him a few times after we get back. When. If. She reset the boards to what was, after all, an unforgettable address, and powered up the Gate. Soft wind rising. Pink sky. Yellow hills, Golden sun. Silver clouds. Empty and bare. “All right. Let’s get going.” A bad business, then. But what is this thrill I feel? Hell.
You
know what it is...

o0o

No more than an hour and the five of them were standing together on a shallow-sloped hillside looking down on the city, sweating in their spacesuits, puffing at each other through the common radio link. Alireza said, “Nothing moving down there...” English clumsy, spoken out of politeness.

Nothing moving anywhere, except that golden fleck of sun, which continued to drift at an angle toward the far horizon, except the silvery clouds, pale and diaphanous, drifting slowly, north to south apparently, across a pastel-shaded backdrop. Faint mother-of-pearl layering, like those first images from Mars...

Dust? Fruitless speculation. Ling listened to his suit vents hiss, the air’s sound, along with his breathing, almost overwhelming the noise of whining motors behind his back. Almost. He wondered if the others could hear it as well. Or if their own suits... Probably not. This suit was based on an old Russian design, life-support hardware actually inside the suit’s pressure vessel, and he could fancy feeling a bit of excess warmth through the beta-cloth shield at his back. A quick glance down at chin-level dials. He said, “My pump-motors are redlining. There are circuit breakers that will trip if the bearings start to overheat.”

Rahman said, “Can you reset them?”

He shrugged, felt a little torrent of sweat go down through his neck ring. “Yes.” Tapping the panel door on his chest pack. “But... if the bearings burn out...”

Zeq said, “Maybe it’s time to make that decision now.”

Snarly, guttural Arabic from Alireza, reply like a hissing whisper from Rahman. He’d gotten little sense of their argument back at the gate, though Inbar, with his fluid, skilled English had thoughtfully provided snatches of translation, between his own participatory remarks.

Shock when Rahman shut the magic portal in the face of those impossibly monstrous American soldiers. The four of them watching her snap a quick series of photos of this second, identical control panel. Consternation when she reached out and spun those dials.

Inbar’s panicky scream crossing the language barrier easily.

Rahman waving the camera, insisting they
could
get back.

Zeq: But how do you know...
that
, gesticulating at the randomized dials, will prevent them from following us?

Rahman’s face very serious, very dark-eyed behind her glass faceplate: I do not.

Now, Ling said, “I am very hot in here.”

Alireza: “We do
not
know what we’re dealing with here. Poison gases. Microorganisms.”

Ling said, “If your analytical instruments are accurate, there are no poisonous elements in this air.”

He watched Inbar look down at the instrument pack strapped to his chest. Doubtless, the same numbers still glowed in their little windows: 740 millibars in a gravity field that seemed to be a little more than one-half gee. Oxygen partial pressure about like Earth’s at four thousand meters. A little bit of nitrogen, not much. Rather more helium, which seemed unlikely, making their voices sound strange. A little too much CO2. Not enough to do them permanent harm. Maybe just enough for headaches. Argon. A lot of argon. Inexplicable.

Ling listened to his backpack whine for another minute, then reached up and popped the helmet seal, listened to his air hiss out. Slid the faceplate up into its receptacle. Felt his nostrils crackle as he breathed in. Dry. Extremely dry. Cold. No jetting breath, though. Not all that cold. Maybe five degrees Celsius. Maybe a little higher. Faint, flowery smell. He shut off his suit coolant flow, opened the vents, turned off the oxygen valve, left the fan motor on. Felt his suit temperature go down, sweat evaporating rapidly into the sudden dryness. Stood looking back at four pale-faced Arabs. He said, “Seems all right.”

Still fear in Alireza’s eyes. And, surprisingly, Inbar was the first one to reach up and twist his bubble helmet loose from its moorings. He sneezed. Shook his head briefly, irritably. “Smells like wild carrots...” he said. Image of European hill country in the fall. White flowers with their little red dots growing everywhere. Hay fever. Inbar sneezed again. Grimace of dismay.

Silence of a sort. The distant wind, very distant wind moaning. Distant wind, perhaps, that lifted the dust that colored this
most
peculiar sky... perhaps. We know... nothing?

Finally, Omry Inbar said, “God damn it.”

More silence, underscored by that soft, distant sighing. Alireza said, “Maybe you’d better keep your Jewish profanity to yourself, Dr. Inbar.”

Said in English, thought Ling. For my benefit? Or just common courtesy? Or...

Inbar, face seeming to darken, said, “Colonel, we’ve been here for something like an hour already and no one’s said a God-damned
word
about what’s happened.”

Ah, yes. The lot of us walking across this dusty...
alien
landscape, staring, silent, baffled, eyes full of fear and wonder and... if this were and old American movie or an old book, what would we be doing? Reacting mightily. Screaming and crying. Running in circles like some Italian buffoon, huffing and puffing like an Irish washerwoman... Americans were good at reacting mightily...

Quietly, Rahman said, “I think it’s been obvious to all of us since the beginning. The Americans came to the Moon not to find fossil ice so they could be a self-sustaining base, but to locate their test center someplace safe. The energies necessary to operate a teleportation system...”

Awesome. They would have to be awesome. And. Yes. That other thing. Several other things. He said, “I don’t think I can make myself believe in faster-than-light transference.”

Rahman, eyes on his face: “Why make that assumption? Assume that sun,” a gesture at the bright bead overhead, “is, oh, Tau Ceti. Why assume it took less than 11.2 years to get here?”

Slight prickle of fear on the back of his neck. Do we tune the transceiver for home then and discover our friends and relatives are a generation older? Assuming we could get down from the Moon, of course.

Zeq said, “How much energy would it take to transmit a human being from the solar system to a planet circling Tau Ceti?”

Right. That’s the other thing. Ling said, “Approximately the same as it would take to accelerate him to the speed of light, push him through the interstellar medium to Tau Ceti, and decelerate him to relative rest.”

Silence.

Then Alireza said, “That can’t be right. Assume they found some way to convert us to radio waves, then convert the signal back to matter again. It’d be the same energy required to punch a high-powered laser to the receiver.”

“With,” said Rahman, “sufficient redundancy to get not less than something like ten-nines reliability?”

Ling thought, Been reading our science fiction, have we Colonel Alireza? The genre had been increasingly popular in the UAR since the inception of the Lunar program. Popular in Green China as well. He said, “How much data processing power would you need, how fast a switching system, to scan and transmit something as complex as a human being?”

More silence.

Zeq: “Too much. Too damned much.”

Right. The problem of information density.

Rahman said, “There are other ways. A wormhole, for example...”

Inbar snarled, “Have you all become unhinged? Where the Hell
are
we?”

Silence resumed, the wind seeming a bit louder than before. Maybe I’m just imagining that. Goosebumps on the back of my neck. Fear suppressed because... there’s no other choice. I...

Alireza said, “We just don’t know.”

People doing no more than looking at one another. Not, Ling told himself, reacting mightily at all.

Zeq said, “Do we really think the Americans really built the stargate? I mean, the English labels looked like they were affixed later.”

“And,” said Rahman, “those bones...”

Stargate
. How easily we slip into that old, old jargon.

After a while, they started walking again, walking along the narrow, rutted track, the same one they’d been following since deciding to move away from the... what? Transmitter station? The little cluster of hardware and corrugated vinyl buildings out in the middle of a veritable nowhere.

Someone’s been going this way. Or did, in the past. Yellow dust drifted over the tracks now. Walking toward the distant city whose spires they could only glimpse ‘til the first row of hills was surmounted. Not a normal city. Not an... Earthly city.

Ling smiled to himself, feeling sweat trickle across his forehead and gather in a wet left eyebrow, wishing he could take off his suit. But the suit was his water supply. His oxygen supply, if necessary. His armor. His warmth if it got colder than this at night, as it likely would.

Nightfall. Golden sun sloping toward the edge of the world.

At least, I wish I could take off my helmet like everyone else. Even Alireza, who’d scowled and shrugged and given in last. Reminds me of Chang Wushi. Regulations. Always regulations. Chang Wushi, who was dry scraps of leather and bone now, lying under an airless sky, baked dry, cooked by a naked sun.

 Below, as they walked down onto more level ground, the city was resolving itself. Big tan buildings, looking like they were made from brick, coated with sandstone stucco maybe. Smaller ones, shiny yellow-gray, more in tune with this world of not so many colors. An occasional colored hut, red, green, orange. American buildings, he suddenly realized. Things they put up for themselves, when they were here.

Lost cities. Lost cities in the desert. Xian? No. Old stories. Stories from Arabia and Persia and Europe. The only other book I ever read by Mr. Thimble Valley, book found in the graduate school library, translated into old-style literary Chinese ideographs, difficult to read even by an educated adult, with its thousands of interrelated signs.

Desert Rider
. About the dying world of Il Xad, of how its savants struggled to build spaceships, so they could colonize the neighboring world of Yttedra, seize it from its barbaric inhabitants. How interesting, I’d thought, that he chooses to show us these worlds through the jaundiced eyes of a high-ranking nonhuman scientist-bureaucrat. I can almost remember the made up name, spelled out in grass writing, footnoted in
pinyin
. Yes. Rondar i’Huiôn. Impossible to pronounce. Ideophonic characters in the text going “lóng-bah lî-wi-yàng.”

Strange that I remember these things, when so many other details of my youth have faded into the mist. Renewed moment of thrill. I was so happy, merely to be going to the Moon. What would I have thought had you told me, back then, that one day I’d be going to a
real alien world
...

Nothing. I would have laughed. These things are impossible. Can’t happen. There are no
real
alien worlds. Oh, maybe out among the stars, worlds so alien that nothing would be familiar, comprehensible. But out of reach. Forever out of reach...

Scientist-mind speaking up: What does this mean for the Standard Interpretation? Answer: Big trouble. Impossibly big trouble. No matter how things resolve themselves, we’re going to have to take a look at that.

Near the edge of the city now. They stopped, mopping their brows, shadows growing longer as the sun scraped the top of the hills. Stopped and looked at the wreckage. Wheels. Crumpled white wings. Cockpit with jumbled bones. Tilted tailplane, rudder broken away and lying on the ground nearby. Traces of fire here and there.

Numbers on the crushed fuselage, black paint on white metal. NCD4044. Meaningless. They went on into the city, Ling Erhshan looking up at the darkening pink sky once again: Just where the Hell
are
we?

o0o

Sunset on Mars-Plus. That
was
what they’d called the place, back in the beginning, when they’d popped open the Gate for the first time and there it was. Sunset. Sky deep pink, swiftly darkening to lavender. Bright stars just beginning to wink on, sun no more than a golden-purple shine on the haze above the horizon where it’d gone down.

So many sunsets like this. I was just a girl then. Happy young girl, though I didn’t know it. Thought of myself as the old-bag noncom lady, pushing forty... Image of the soccer field they’d set up in one of the deserted plazas of Koraad, kicking the black and white ball around.
Futból
in those days, because so many of us were... Hispanic. We said Hispanic. Later image, standing, watching the lavender turn to lilac to purple to indigo to black, fields of unfamiliar stars spangling the night, magic jewels. The pale white lozenge of a nearby spiral galaxy spread out, eight degrees across, behind that starfield. Dale’s arm around my waist, just holding me, watching, not saying a word...