The Transmigration of Souls (11 page)

Corky Bokaitis coming up to stand beside her now, looking at the sky above the hills, trailed by her two blond brethren, handsome blond Neanderthal Men whose tunics said Fred and Barney in neat white letters against black cloth tape. All right. I get the joke. Everybody gets the joke, even people who weren’t alive when there was still TV, complete with fifty-year-old reruns, get the joke. So why do
they
think it’s a joke? Play-acting at being soldiers. Playacting at being cavemen. Playacting at everything.

Bokaitis said, “Where is this place, Sarge?”

Good question. In the old days, we brought in astronomers, big telescopes, bigger telescopes... memory of bringing through a mobile launcher, of using a portable lightsat launcher to pop arrays of instruments into orbit. Scientists looking farther and farther out into space, not seeing a damn thing they recognized. “Don’t think they ever figured that one out, Corky. We wound up calling it Mars-Plus. Because of the pink sky.”

“Hmh.” Swarthy cavegirl looking up at the stars, one arm around each caveman’s waist. “That so?” Polite amazement.

But then, I was first out the Gate on Alpha Centauri, looking up at familiar stars, watching two suns come up, thinking about it, realizing, God damn, I
knew
where the fuck I was...

Then scientists coming in, jubilant, setting up their instruments...

And one of the first things they’d done was point those instruments back at a bright star on the constellar boundary between Perseus and Cassiopeia, peek-a-boo, I
see
you! Because, you see, we have to, just
have
to have moved some four-plus years into the temporal past right now...

Jubilant. Expecting to find a brilliant radio beacon in the sky, astrometric binary oscillating back and forth, with a period of just one year. Close enough, in fact, that we’d be able to pull meaning out of the static with our computers. Scientists already planning what messages they’d soon be handing to their past selves. And then back, through the gates, to their now-selves, and then...

Jubilant. Fucking
time
travel, God damn it!

Time travel
? What the fuck are we talking about here?

She’d gone to Dale Millikan, science-popularizing journalist, for a simplified layperson’s explanation.

Dale hemming and hawing and scratching around the roots of the dense gray beard on his throat. Well. Duh. Hmmmm... Well, look at it this way: When we come through the gate to Alpha Centauri, we must be moving 4.3 years into the past.

We do? Why? I mean, when we go back through the gate...

Well, that’s it. The rules of relativity, I think they call it “composition of velocities,” or something like that, say if you move faster than light, you have to be moving into the past...

I don’t understand.

Shit. Um. Take my word for it, then.

All right. So where does time travel come in?

OK, we’re four years plus in the past, right now, on this side of the gate. So the light from the Sun, up there in the sky, left the vicinity of the Earth 8.6 six years before we stepped through the gate to come here. Right?

I guess so.

 So. What happens if we build a
new
gate, here at Alpha Centauri, and punch through to the Earth?

Well, assuming we figure out how to build gates of our own... Oh. We arrive on Earth 8.6 six years before we left.

Dale Millikan’s eyes brightening with pleasure. Pleasure because I turned out to be smart enough to get it, sort of, or just pleased because he could explain it successfully to a dumbfuck noncom girl?

Still puzzling over the whole business, she’d gone to one of the scientists for another try, sitting with a bird-like old man who seemed to take great pleasure in eying her breasts while scribbling equations on the screen of his electronic notepad, things with lots of
x
’s and
y
’s and
u
’s and
v
’s and Greek
gamma
s.

Look, Sergeant, this business is really very simple. I don’t know
why
it gives people such fits. Einstein’s principle of relativity states that the analytical form of physical laws is the same in all inertial reference systems. And the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light states that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. Does that make sense?

Duh. Sure.

Well now, Sergeant, Einstein understood that two spatially separated localized occurrences are simultaneous when the readings of two identical clocks adjacent to the events are the same, and it is known that the clocks are synchronized. However, when the clocks are not near each other, they’re synchronism must be defined. Right?

Bright, bright, beady lizardman eyes staring at her tits, as if they held her sentience somehow.

So, Einstein’s particular genius was understanding that two identical clocks, cee and cee-prime, situated at two distant points, pee and pee-prime, fixed in a given inertial frame ess, synchronize
in
ess, when the respective cee and cee-prime times tee-one and tee-one-prime of the sending of a light signal at pee and its arrival at pee-prime are connected by the formula tee-one-prime minus tee-one equals tee-two minus tee-one-prime with the cee time tee-two of its return to pee after reflection at pee-prime
back
to pee...

Holy. Fucking. Christ.

Lizardman writing on his little flatscreen, holding it up for her tits to see, going, Now,
gamma
is equivalent to one divided by the square root of one minus vee-squared,
divided by
  cee-squared,
times
delta-ecks-prime, so...

Maybe if I just pop my shirt open, I’ll be able to see better and...

Lizardman: On the
other
hand, if you-sub-ecks-prime equals cee, and hence, you-sub-why-prime equals you-sub-zee-prime equals
zero
, then you-sub-ecks equals cee and you-sub-why equals you-sub-zee equals zero, in accordance to the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light. Clear?

Duh. Sure.

OK. That cee
does
represent the maximum speed of energy propagation is indicated by Einstein’s 1907 argument using these same equations, Lizardman tapped his screen, pointing at all the various yous and vees and ekses and gammas, which, he said, shows conclusively that in the
contrary
case it would then be possible to transmit information into the past. Q.E.D. Smug little lizardman, shaking a finger at those selfsame tits.

Time travel
. Right. I get it now. Thanks, Doc. Be seein’ ya.

 Only one little problem. That bright, first-magnitude star on the edge of Cassiopeia was silent. Solar radio waves, sure. Oh, you could even pick up Jupiter, farting and whistling away, but...

First order fear: Did something...
happen
to us? A reassuring glance back through the still-open stargate. Second order fear: Is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum cosmology wrong? What if?

Impossible.

But what if?

Dale brought up Bohm’s alternative first, but he wasn’t a scientist and they were to afraid to listen anyway. He’d be pleased to see the literature now, learned articles in journals, by men and women with degrees dating from the twentieth century...

Still afraid after all these years.

General Athelstan, his cronies on Earth in a panic, ordering her to destroy the Gate, plant explosives that would collapse the cavern. God damn it, woman, we gave you fucking nuclear weapons for a reason.
Use
them!

Calling me “woman” like that, for Christ’s sake. What old fantasy can he have been living in for the past three-quarters of a century? Well. I hope he shit his pants when I told him I was making a router call to the trace packager routine, reopening the Gate to Mars-Plus.

She patted a breast pocket, where her own annotated copy of the ten-thousand gigabyte Scavenger manual on the Colonial Stargate operating system nestled, a flat square the size of a turn-of-the-century floptical disk. More than a million toolbox calls into an information system that, apparently, lay snuggled against the keelblocks of Creation, of which we humans have learned to understand and manipulate precisely six.

Just enough to let us get around. Sort of. Get back to places we’ve found by accident, that’s all.

Because we were afraid, and still are.

Because the Scavengers hinted, in their literature, that the million calls they knew were no more than a billion-trillionth of the total. How many possible quantum states are there, for the Universe as a whole?

Toolbox. Jesus. We gave it a name so we could imagine we understood it, as if the universal gate system were some old-fashioned computer and its operating system no more than software calls to some kernel ROM written by a conscious mind...

Cold chill there.

What if?

Then...
who
?

Well. You
know
who, don’t you?

She turned around, looking back toward the Gate, through into the bright, yellow-lit space of the cavern under the Lunar base, her soldiers setting up equipment, some of them, others just standing around gaping at the now black sky. One of Mars-Plus’s moons was up now, a little bronze jewel glowing softly as it sailed low over the hills. I remember the exhilaration I felt when I first saw this place. Like magic, an alien world, right out of a book. Like a child’s dream, somehow. Exhilaration now. I’m glad to be back.

Will I be so glad if...

Brief memory. Suzy Panetta dying in front of her. Maybe dying, maybe something else. Angel of Death sizzling overhead.
Snap
. Suzy’s startled look, wincing, not quite pain.
Snap
. Suzy rolling up like a windowshade.
Snap
. rolling up into nowhere at all.
Snap
. White bones raining down, rattling down from that same nowhere, making a dry, brittle pile on the dusty ground.

Suzy
? Kneeling, picking up a pale skull. Looking, full of disbelief. But Suzy had had quite distinctive front teeth, projecting a little forward, with that little gap, just so, the crooked, slightly malformed, slightly yellowed canine...

Just like the teeth in the skull. She’d dropped it. Dropped poor Suzy on the ground and run.

o0o

Shadows falling on them out of a dull, red-purple sky, shadows of the tall tan buildings masking the shadows of the smaller, metallic yellow ones, which seemed, somehow, ever so much older, masking the tiny shadows of the colorful, new-looking American structures, so obviously temporary.

Level yellowish pavement under their booted feet, dust sliding, just above the ground, on a wind that chilled their faces. The five of them gathering round a boxy, greenish-brown car, looking at cracked black vinyl upholstery, plastic steering wheel curdled by years and years of dry sunlight. Paint faded and peeled, but no rust. Tires flat, dusty looking.

Ahmad Zeq reached down into the back seat and picked up the little white ball, fingering its dusty, crackling, padded surface, trying to make out faded words in what appeared to be Romanic script. “Is this a baseball?”

Ling poked at it. “Softball, I think. They were a little bigger, couldn’t be hit quite so far...” The wind gusted, blowing dust up around them, evoking a soft nightmare whoosh from the blunted edge of the nearest stone building, moaning on American vinyl, then died down, silence restored.

Zeq said, “We must have been insane to do this. What did we gain?”

Alireza: “Maybe our lives. They were starting to shoot. That golden-haired woman...” One of the few in the squad of monsters who even
looked
human, if you discounted those soulless, chrome-bright eyes... He felt a familiar cold shiver recurse up his spine.

Inbar: “What’re we going to do?”

Rahman: “More important, where are we?” Conscious again of the camera clipped to her spacesuit harness, with its precious images of readouts and control settings. Which might, or might not, mean anything. And I did take a picture of that scrap of paper, the one with the scribbled numbers...

Zeq felt a sharp wave of something like despair. “Even if we get back through the... gate. Even if we do, there’s nothing waiting for us on the Moon but those...” Those
things
. No djinni at all. Nothing so familiar.

Almost to himself, Ling whispered, “Famous monsters from movieland.” No one seemed to hear him. Or know what he meant, at any rate. No matter.

Inbar said, “Even if they’re gone, even if they just packed up and went back home, there’s
nothing
on the Moon for us now. All we could do would be stand there in the dome and stare up at Earth and wait until we starved to death.”

Rahman: “A rescue mission, perhaps...” Because, back in the UAR, there were other orbiters, the lower stage even now being cleaned up for its flight back from Hejaz to Hammaghir. But, wistfully, We are
here
. This is... more important than...

Long silence. Finally, Alireza, looking up into a swiftly blackening sky, said, “In any case, it is about
maghrib
. And we have, some of us, missed too many prayers, Travelers’ Rule or no.”

 More silence, eying each other, then Ahmad Zeq whispered, “Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, The Compassionate, the Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Judgment...” Fear. Fear makes us small. And yet there is no power and strength, save in God.

o0o

Ling stood quietly to one side, watching the three of them posture and pray, the two men with their expansive gestures, standing, kneeling, foreheads in the dust, the woman, more... closed. Hands at her sides. Memory of all those years spent in Turkestan, a land of Muslim tribes, Muslim nations, for a millennium before the Chinese conquest, before Soviet rule, before Russian conquest.
Muezzin
calling the faithful to prayer, people falling to the ground, groaning out their rituals.

When I was young, I held them in contempt. Primitive savages, believing in gods and demons, devils and angels, no better than Hindus, with their cows and red dots and epicycles of despair...