The Transmigration of Souls (15 page)

Ling said, “Not Libya. But it is Earth.”

Inbar said, “Eight million years. Continents haven’t drifted far in eight million years.”

Ling looked at him, momentarily surprised, then... Well, of course. A geologist, after all... He said, “But if it opens through a Colonial gate? A billion years is time enough.” And
why
are we assuming Scavenger and Colonials gates...
no
! We’ve tuned them in. The gates go where we
tell
them to go. The rest of it’s just fantasy. If the address we’ve dialed up...

The door opened and Alireza burst in, followed by Zeq, the two of them stopping short at the sight of the open Stargate. Alireza said, “Earth?”

Zeq laughed: “Where, the public gardens of Tobrûq?”

Alireza stepped close to the gate, staring through at the blue sky, sniffing at a soft breeze. “An odd, flat smell... but obviously the Earth...” He turned away, taking them all in with his glance. “We came to tell you, there are... things in the city...”

Pulse of excitement.
Things
. Ling whispered, “The aliens?”

Zeq said, “Might as well be. Only Americans, though.”

Alireza: “Coming this way. I think they know where we are.” He looked at Ling, “Your pistol?”

He tapped a coverall pocket. “Here. But, Colonel, these people have military rifles of unknown...”

“
People
...” Alireza spat. He looked at the gate again, then over at Rahman. Gestured at the console, then the window, open on a familiar world. “Take your pictures. Then we’ll go.” He turned and stepped through the gate, staggered under an obvious increase in gravity. Staggered and looked around, muttered some exclamation to himself.

Inbar murmured, “God...” oncemore, eyes alight with fear, then stepped right through the gate after him.

Fear, thought Ling. Full of fear. But also filled with a desire to
see
.

o0o

Bursting into the room then, door slamming open, rebounding from the old metallic wall with a resounding crack-clank... Remember when you thought it was so odd that Scavengers and Colonials
both
used doors on swinging hinges, just like us? Bursting into the room in time to see a brilliant play of rainbow colors on the floor, the walls, to see the Gate screen behind the control panel coruscating with a complex pattern of silvery sparkles, see the silvery sparkles coalesce and go dark.

Kincaid stood still for just a second, rifle held at port arms across her chest. Killed the curtainfield and took a deep breath. Flat, musty smell, smell of dry vegetation. Smell of old mold. Nothing sweet. Nothing flowery.

These are bold, crazy bastards, doing something like this! Through the big, rebuilt Gate under the Moon, then right on through an unreconstructed Scavenger gate to God knows where...

Well. Maybe
you
know where. You remember that damned smell. And you know now they probably they’ve probably got Dale’s notebooks with them. Probably the Gestalt Manager instruction manual with them too. So they’ve figured out the address-code notation. And seen Dale’s notes about the Terrestrial Gates.

Thin, humorless smile. Sons of bitches in for one big damn surprise, whichever one they jumped. She bent forward over the console, looking at the settings. Address switches were, of course, still set, but the dials would have tumbled when the connect was broken from the other side.
If
they spun the controls again...

Bold,
crazy
damn bastards.

All right. So why are you so insufferably pleased, asshole?

PeeWee, standing next to her, stooped under the Scavenger-height ceiling, said, “Something funny, Sarge?”

She glanced up at him. “Yeah. Take Fred and Barney, go back to the main Gate. Pull through six men. Leave two guys back on the Moon, put to more on this side. Set up a microwave relay and come back with the other four guys.”

“What’s going on, Sarge?”

Hmh. She said, “Get busy. We’re going for a little walk.” Slipped the disk out of her pocket and triggered it, watched images of controls form on its flatpane display. Poked around a little until she got to the address dictionary, started looking things up. OK. Four Arabs and one poor little Chinaman. Most likely headed for Libya, then. Right? Shrug.

 Another look over the control console. All right, you’ve got the spatial settings. You know God damned well they won’t have wound up out-of-skein. So what about the fine tune? Same thread or some other one? Temporal?

Boy are they in for a fucking surprise...

Long, long look at the set of small dials under the mechanical-switch address row. Hmh. Murmur: “Maybe if I had a fingerprint kit I’d know if someone’d touched this thing recently...”

Honeybee said, “I can see near-ultraviolet, Sarge.”

“So?”

“The big switches and these things over here are wet. Like with oil from someone’s fingers.”

Oh. “How about these little ones down here?”

“Dry. But... Well, the dust is disturbed. Like something jiggled them a little bit.”

A little bit... Jesus. What was it my Grandpa used to say? “Fuck a duck...” Get busy then. Not that difficult. That’s your heart going pitter-pat, isn’t it? Just so. Excitement? Or just fear? A little of both?

What will really happen if they’re left on their own, loose in the Multiverse? What if they find their way home? What if the rest of the world finds out about the gates and...

Hell. Maybe the Jug will come for us after all.

o0o

Sunset again, a few small, high clouds striated with red-orange, sun setting beyond distant mountains, throwing the land into deep shadow. Distant mountains, blue mountains, with high, snowcapped peaks, towering, though far away, over rugged, dry, rolling highland plains.

Like no mountains, Omry Inbar thought, anywhere in the world. Standing on top of a tall hill, looking out over an impossible world, looking down on the others, watching them try to build a campfire, he felt a tightness in his chest, a... shortness of breath? Something like that. Just fear? Or real?

If we were on a plateau high enough to reduce the air pressure, it’d be getting cold now. Doesn’t feel like the air pressure’s abnormal. Coming through the gate from Mars-Plus... Step forward. Stagger under what felt like a full gee. Feel your ears pop. Not even painful. Just a little internal
crinkle
of sensation. Still, short of breath... Like I have pneumonia, or like the partial pressure of the oxygen’s...

Sky growing darker. Something’s wrong with the Moon. Same shadowy pattern of bright highlands and dimmer maria.
Familiar
Moon. But... Right. Something wrong. Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Something skittered by in the dusky light, making him jump. Another one of those running, bipedal reptiles, a little bit like those Australian lizards. This could be Australia, couldn’t it? Another look at those tall, snowy mountains. Well, no. Not unless they moved the Himalayas south for the winter.

They’d seen four or five of the lizard-things during the course of a four hour walk. A few bugs. Once what looked like a big dragonfly. Hard to tell how big it had been in the distance. Still. A
big
dragonfly. Maybe the size of a small bird. Where did they have dragonflies the size of sparrows? Not much life here, this place a landscape slowly turning to desert. Southern California? That’d be... interesting. Could those be the Sierra Nevada? Maybe. No part I’ve ever seen depicted, though.

 Sparse fauna. Sparse flora. Green weeds, growing in clumps out of dusty tan soil, soil raising in puffs at the wind’s command. No grasses. Which seemed a little strange. Lots of woody brush. Some things like tumbleweeds blowing along, evoking some odd commentary from Ling, about American cowboy movies.

Tumbling tumbleweeds? A shrug, dismissing the whole business. No birds. And this kind of desert should be full of rodents. Things like mice. Hyraxes, maybe. Snakes. Where are the snakes? Another long look up at the Moon. Inferences resisting hard, resisting the call to clarity. Something about this I don’t want to... think about.

Once, they’d seen something that looked like a tarantula. Where there are spiders, there ought to be wasps. Bees? Not a damned flower in sight. Some trees around that little stream they’d followed for a while before going up onto high ground, heading for the vistas. Mostly scruffy little pine trees. Conifers, at any rate. Unfamiliar things with broad, waxy leaves. Once, something Ling swore was some unknown species of ginkgo.

And that other thing. That other fleck of light, twinkling like a star, but too... big to be a star. What could that be? I could
swear
it’s moving...

“
Inbar
!” Hoarse whisper. Alireza.

The four of them clustered round a small depression. They had a fire going now, but... all looking away from it. Ling on his knees, binoculars pressed to his face. A gesture from Alireza, pointing, down into the shadows, a depression where a small pool, possibly a slow-bubbling spring lay.

Something moving. Something big. Can’t quite make it out... He walked down to where Ling crouched. Ling, whispering, “Look at those
teeth
...”

Inbar kneeled down, reached out and gently took the binoculars, unfamiliar, old fashioned, Chinese characters glittering dim red on the internal displays. Adjusted the traditional knurl...

No more than a gasp as the image jumped up at him.

Something
big
. Smaller than a camel, maybe the size of a pony. Dark, gray-green, it was hard to tell in the failing light. Big eyes, glittering with sunset red. Demon’s face turning toward him... Slanted eyes, like a Chinese dragon, long, narrow muzzle full of...
teeth
! Long buck teeth, crushing, crunching... Eating a tumbleweed? You could hear the dry stuff crackle. See the big head dip down, see the fat front limbs paw at the ground, uprooting something. Crackle. Crunch.

“What is it?” whispered Rahman.

Inbar thought, It’s
not
a
moschops
. It
can’t
be. I’m dreaming all this. In just a minute I’m going to wake up in my bed at Hammaghir Cosmodrome, safe in Maghreb, wake up and hear the
muezzin
calling the Faithful to prayer. I’ll get up, snug in my robe, look down on them and smile, glad I’m Jew. Then I’ll look up into the sunrise and see
al-Qamar
waiting to take me to Geologist Heaven...

Alireza said, “Tomorrow, I guess, we should go back to the Stargate and try again. This isn’t Earth, no matter how familiar looking...”

Omry Inbar took the binoculars away from his eyes and sat down suddenly on the hard, dusty ground. Sat down and started to cry, sniffling softly, big tears rolling across his cheeks, dropping down onto his coverall, the others turning to stare at him, astonished.

o0o

Two-hundred-fifty million years. On the nose. A sharp look through the Gate, at the big, old Moon. Hmh. Even without binoculars or altered vision, you could see Tycho was missing. Not to mention Copernicus...

PeeWee Roth whispered, “Where’s this, Sarge?”

Where indeed? She stood, going around the console, and stepped through the Gate, knees locking for a moment as the increased gravity clutched at her, curtainfield hardening gently as it reacted to the changing atmosphere. Stood, staring at the sky, sky of a hundred thousand stars, or so it seemed, sky with a bright Full Moon. Spun, looking at the world around her. Two-hundred-fifty million years!

Remember the first time? Not here and now, no, but...

We should have
known
it was possible, given the nature of the quantum-holotaxial universe the Scavengers described, given the hints we got from what little we could decipher of Colonial records. We? The scientists should have known, the physicists, the cosmologists. Hell, even I should have known.

Dale knew. Suggested it in a meeting, suggested it, looking up from his notepad. Scientists staring at him. Then smiling at each other. Time travel? Impossible. But. But what? Tipler? Derisive grins.
Tipler
. Sheesh. Go write your article, journalist. Go write another fantasy epic for your legions of fans. Ain’t no such thing as time travel, Mr. Millikan. 

Until, one fine day, we stepped through a freshly tuned Stargate, a recently refurbished Scavenger Stargate, one the Scavs had apparently rebuilt from some old Colonial junk. Stepped through, me and my troopers, Dale, with camerakit, Dr. Beasley, Professor Wingmann...

This
is the forest
primeval
...

What the Hell are these funny-looking plants? Look like
ferns
, for goshsakes...

Well. Convergent evolution?

Then.

A soft growl.

Soft. But... big. Yes. Big. Deep.
Nearby
.

Slowly I turned...

Jesus. Professor Wingmann’s scream was almost ultrasonic, looking at a head the size of a small car, teeth like... Steak knives? Hell, no. Teeth like God damned fucking
railroad spikes
!

Bet you didn’t know a dried-up old biddy like that Wingmann bitch could run like an Olympic sprinter, did you Dale? Nope. Can’t say as I did. Credit to Dale, kneeling, shooting video, panting with excitement. Credit to my soldiers, who waited ‘til they had a
reason
to shoot. Even credit to that old fart Beasley, who’d stood still for a moment, then whispered, “Well no, not
Tyrannosaurus rex
. But a close relative.
Surely
a close relative...”

Surely, Doc. Surely.

Wonder why it let us walk away like that?

Hell. Dale grinning, once they’d got safely back through the gate. Hell, maybe it was just a nice guy.

 Or, said Beasley, sitting down now, getting over the shakes, maybe it just had a fat belly full of nice, juicy
Maiasaura
...

Then, the arguments.

Go
back
through the Gate? You’ve gotta be nuts!

But... Dale gesturing at marines, with rifles, standing in a neat line.