The Transmigration of Souls (14 page)

Old Red Sandstone
. Should’ve answered his question. Let it go though. Old Red Sandstone is the name of a hypothetical Paleozoic continent, out of whose skeletal remains, embedded for a while in Pangaea, then Laurasia, formed the embryo of North America and Europe and parts of Africa. Appalachians and Atlas all that remain of the mountain range pushed up when Old Red Sandstone collided with the edge of a forming World Island...

Be interesting, if...

Well. Morning will come. And, outside, the stars were still turning. But slowly. He lay back on the bed for a while, listening to the silent darkness. No, not completely silent. Someone else is up and walking around. He got up, stood on the cold floor, dressed in his underpants. Somewhere here, my socks, my suit liner coverall crumpled in a pile. The door opened silently, on its still-perfect American hinges, and he padded out into the dark hall.

Back to the common room. Slim silhouette, outlined in pale starlight against the big bay window, curtains drawn aside. Rahman standing still, looking out at the shadows of the city.
Koraad
, the old book said it was called, in the language of the Scavengers. No indication of what the Colonials had called it, if anything. He moved up behind her, marveling that she still hadn’t heard his approach. Deep in thought.

Subaïda Rahman, always so lovely and slim in her trim Lesbian business suits, her short, neatly combed Lesbian hair. I always knew she was faking it. Could tell she knew I knew. Too bad...

Slim now in... yes, still dressed in her coverall. Too bad, again. It would have been... nice to come out here and find her wearing no more than briefs and brassiere, looking, just maybe, like some European catalog model. Maybe, if there was enough light, I’d be able to see the shadow of her pubic hair through sheer white cloth, see the outline of her mons where the cloth pressed up against her...

Conscious now of an erection pushing out the front of his underpants.

A thousand choruses of, If only...

Those images of women, not like real women; women who would turn and behold your desire and...

He reached out and touched her softly on the shoulder.

Subaïda Rahman jerked hard, lurched toward the window, reaching out, smudging the pseudoglass with one damp hand, spun, staring up at him, mouth open, dark, liquid eyes so very wide...

“By God!
Inbar
...” Hand on her breast, gasping for breath.

He grinned. “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d take me for a... um.” Spindly, feathery alien from those lavish illustrations we’ve seen, stalking you in the night... He could see she was looking him up and down now, the whole front of his body, to her dark-adapted eyes, probably well lit by starlight. Can she see... probably. And, in your dream, she reaches out for the waistband of your underpants, reaches inside...

She said, “You should put something on.” Dark eyes glittering, mere wet reflections in the dark, unreadable.

He reached out to touch her again, unexpected, unplanned, felt her push his hand away. Ah, well. Erection subsiding now, all by itself. He turned toward the window, and said, “Seems to be getting a little lighter over that way. Must be east.”

She stood beside him, looking out at stars soon to fade. She said, “Maybe so. We’d better wake the others. They won’t want to miss
subh
.” And she thought, My heart is still pounding. Silly bastard, sneaking up on me like that, like some kind of skulking rapist, with cock at ready...

o0o

Sunrise. Golden drop of sun coming up behind them, throwing streamers of garish pink across the purple-black sky, wiping away the stars, lighting up the silver clouds. Long, angular shadows flowing down the hillside ahead of them, their own shadows, walking toward Lost City of Koraad.

Shadows of my monsters. She’d taken eight of them with her. Left the other eight back at the gate. Four sitting in a cavern under the Moon, griping at being left behind, four sitting it out this side of the gate on Mars-Plus, also griping, Why can’t
we
come, Sarge?

Because you never know.

Just a simple raid, Round up the bad guys and bring them home.

Then blow the gate?

Above, over the square towers of the old city, the sky was a full, glistening pink now. Magic sky. Magic world. Magic universe. We never did figure out how any of it worked. Not the gates, not the worlds...

Memory of Dale Millikan, slowly mutating from journalist to scientist, sitting, looking at the atmosphere comp figures. Saying, This isn’t possible. Why is the helium still here?

What the Hell was that baggy old lady geophysicist’s name? Thalia something. Memory of Dr. Meninger cackling, saying, Because God
wants
you to talk like a cartoon character, sonny.

He’d grumbled. Then put it in his next article. Jesus. An article a week for all those years, every one of them held up by the military censors. Glad we published them as a book after closing the door on the rest of the world. The rest of the universe. Too bad Dale never knew.

No. God damn it. I do not want to blow the gate.

Crazy shadow of the soldier on point, soldier walking down onto flat ground now. Why the Hell would someone want to look like a mountain gorilla, like an silverback male? And that silly name.
Realmodo
? Why the Hell Realmodo?

Shoot, Sarge. ‘Cause
Quasimodo
wuz just a character in a book.

No, I don’t want to blow the gate.

Then they were standing by the wrecked plane, staring into its dark and dusty interior at dark and dusty bones. NCD 4044. Kincaid said, “Well. Hi, Georgie.”

Beside her, Corky Bokaitis said, “You know ‘im, Sarge?”

A slow nod. Georgie Polychronis, little shit Greek boy from southern Maine. Stupidest-sounding twang, almost as bad as some of those mushmouf Southerners.

“How’d this happen?”

“He fucked up. We all did.” Then the car and its old softball, evoking more old memories. Then the building with its open door. Hell, I was the last one out of there. I remember turning out the lights, closing the damned door. You think...

No. You don’t think that.

A quick look around. Her eight soldiers. Brucie Big-Dick and his little friend Chuckie, who’d squirmed with him far into the night, staying in the background like they’d promised. Aw, come on, Sergeant-Major. We’ll stay out of trouble. Donnie’ll watch the ship for us. What could go wrong? Well...

She said, “No sense any of you biggies coming inside. Um. Honeybee.” Fast. “Fred and Barney.” Stronger than any two oxen. “Rest of you take a look around. Don’t go too far.”

Inside then, rifles at ready, slipping in like characters on an old police show. Flip on the lights. Spacesuits on the dining room floor like five dead men, lined up in a careful row, folded just so, backpacks powered down...

Then, she was standing in a back bedroom, looking at a rumpled bed.

I made my bed on that last day. Made my bed, got up to face the Judgment Day, though I didn’t know it yet. Got up, whistling, changed my sheets and thought about how they’d gotten so messy. Hmh. No sign anyone fucked in this bed last night.

Quick memory of lying under Dale for what turned out to be the last time, while he bucked and humped between her legs, thrusting into her with short, quick movements, almost below the threshold of perception downdeep downdeep...

Could’ve been better for a last time. Maybe if we’d
known
...

Better memories, of other times, of time taken, of desires oh-so-carefully fulfilled. You could get him to be oh-so-gentle, soft, grinding, round and round and...

She turned and walked away, walked down the hall to Dale’s office, stood looking at his computer, at his disks and books. Tracks in the dust where someone had been looking things over. Which one. The Chinese scientist? The Arab woman, their “American Technologies Specialist”? What a job title.

Places where some books were missing. Which ones? Would I remember? Fingering them now, looking at titles. Dale’s notebook is missing. Maybe he took it with him when he left. He usually did. Or maybe those nice Arab boys are looking at his drawings of my cunt, snickering and nudging each other...

Another memory, of flipping through his notebook for the first time, half research notes for his articles, half private diary, half... What the fuck is
this
supposed to be? And laughing. Green ink sketches of my crotch, for Christ’s sake. What the Hell did he think he was going to do, forget?

He’d shrugged, half embarrassed. It’s just... how I do things. It’s not real until it’s on a piece of paper I guess. They’d wound up fucking on the floor of his office that day, which was just damned silly. For Christ’s sake, we’re middle aged. What if somebody walked in on us?

Dale had smiled then. Well, they’d’ve just had to be fucking jealous, is all.

Sure. Jealous. Back out into the front room, gathering up Honeybee and the caveboys, back out into the square by the jeep, where the soldiers had gathered. Sigh. “All right, let’s go. They can’t have gotten far...”

Then, a sudden, terrifying thought, image of certain pages from Dale’s notebook surfacing.
Shit
!

o0o

With daylight flooding in through big windows made of something that was, curiously, almost like fine, layered mica, “glass” changing the alien sky from that horrid, gassy pink to a warm almost-tan, Ling, Rahman and Inbar worked through the contents of a room in one of the middle-sized yellow-gray buildings. Scavenger buildings, if the American books were to be believed.

Why would they lie, thought Ling? Why would they make all this up? Just because they were known to make things up, because they were famous for their insidious fantasies? Rahman, book open before the console, said, “I can make neither head nor tail of this. It’s sort of like one of those big gates, but...”

Inbar muttered, “Doesn’t look like it’s eight million years old, either.”

No it doesn’t, but ... hints in the American notebooks, just hints, mind you, that the Scavengers had come prowling through the ruins the Colonials had left behind, maybe eight million years ago. Colonial ruins themselves abandoned maybe a billion years before that. Not that the tan stone buildings looked like they could possibly have sat around weathering for a billion years...

So is this a Scavenger gate, or one of the very old ones, the ones the Colonials left behind? Does it matter?

Maybe. Hints in the green-ink notebook, though, that those figures had no meaning. Millikan. Dale Millikan. Something about that name... Well. No matter. Whoever he was, he cast doubts on the time figures. His question, repeated over and over, making no more sense with each successive iteration: Where do these gates really
go
?

And when? Does
that
make any sense? Maybe. I keep reminding myself about what relativity and simultaneity really
mean
.

Rahman was flipping through the notebook, pausing once again to look at one of the pages with drawings of the naked woman. Inbar smirking. Something I don’t understand going on here. “It doesn’t seem quite appropriate for a scientist’s notebook somehow.”

Rahman said, “No.” Put her finger on a scrawled passage, lips moving as she made colloquial 21st century English into colloquial 22nd century Arabic. “Parts of it seem more like a diary.”

Inbar said, “Maybe it was his girlfriend. I envy him if it was.”

Rahman gave him a sour look.

Ling thought, Envy? Because some long dead man was having sex with a woman who looked like a South American pornnet star? Maybe I’ve missed an important part of life. Who knows? Pleasant memories of the occasional odd girlfriend, usually a pudgy young lab assistant, who’d give up after a few weeks or months, when it became clear she could never be more than... secondary, at best. He looked over her shoulder and tried to read crushed-together lines of Romanic script.

“‘
Times
says they won’t pay any more if I don’t write something the censors will let through. At least the check for ‘Haldane in Love’ finally came. Pays a semester of Ginger’s college tuition. Wish she’d gone to NC State instead of Duke.’“

Rahman flipped through more pages. “Part diary, part something else. I’m not sure this guy was really a scientist. More like a... Mmm. What? A
newfaq
reporter maybe?” Flipped to one of the diagramed pages. “This.”

Ling looked from the drawing to the machine. “Close, but not quite. Maybe close enough.”

Inbar said, “If we’re not sure...” Very uneasy looking.

Rahman looking at Ling, seeking confirmation. He said, “We might as well try. Where are the settings for the one in Libya?”

Inbar said, “God. I don’t know if...”

Rahman handed him the notebook, then took out the binder with the printed pages of charts and pictures. “Here.”

All right.

Power main.

Blinking lights, scrolling screens, these LCD screens, if that’s what they really were, much different from the ones on the larger machines, the ones that had brought them from the Moon. Labels in what looked like ideographs, but weren’t. No English-language tapes, this time.

He said, “We’ll have to assume the switch order is the same.”

Inbar said, “If it’s not?”

Rahman: “I’ve been through the Libyan outback. I’ll recognize it if...” Soft, crackling hiss, smell of burning dust, and the flat wall behind the console spilled rainbows, flickered, shimmered, opened out on a distant vista.

Inbar: “My God. My
God
...”

Ling thought, Any god you wish to name. Any god at all... He said, “Even I know this is not the high desert of Libya.”

Rahman. “No.”

Long, low hill sloping away into the distance, brown dirt covered with shaggy, scruffy green vegetation. Distant trees, widely spaced, a little odd looking. Winding silver stream down in the valley. Yellow-tan boulders. Brilliant, clear blue sky. Shadow-patched full Moon hanging low over the horizon, looming, as if huge.

Our Moon. Recognizably
our
Moon.