The Transmigration of Souls (17 page)

But we’ve almost caught up to them now. What then? Put the silly bastards in chains and go home? I’ll probably spend the next ten thousand years in the stockade for disobeying orders.

So. Where else then? So many worlds. So little time. That’s what we used to say. Memory of Dale, sorry he was “getting a little long in the tooth, just when things have gotten... interesting.” So. Did he mean the Many Worlds? Or just my cunt?

Dale pissed off because he couldn’t go back to the Cretaceous and play with the dinosaurs. Then we found another world with things a
lot
like dinosaurs, a world clearly
not
some past incarnation of the Earth. Pissed off, though, when they wouldn’t let him go hunting. Talking about all his favorite dinosaur movies, about dinosaur toys he’d had as a kid. Christ. Memories of my own toys, of my own cherished moviediscs. Remember
Jurassic Park 3D
? Dale shrugging it off. By then, he’d said, I was getting jaded. Too sophisticated. The original version of
King Kong
, now...

Good old Fay Wray, screaming, screaming...

People always scream in movies, screams never like the real screams you hear in combat. Sudden memory of a day out in the Moroccan desert. Rattle of automatic weapons fire in the distance. Somebody screaming, high, shrill, a man, terror plus horror plus pain. Somebody screaming like that, with all that energy, just has a minor wound. Ow, ow, it
hurts
...

All over but the shouting, standing there in the hot sunlight, talking, Lieutenant Ramirez taking off her helmet as they talked, discussing the next order of business, wiping sweat from her brow...

Whack
.

Ramirez staggering, eyes astonished, blood coming out of her nose, running over her lip. Turning away, little black hole in the side of her head, below the temple, in front of her ear. Reaching up to touch it, then falling to her knees...

Christ. I thought she was dead.

Bullet lodged on the underside of her skull, though. Still intact.

Visiting her in hospital a few weeks later, when I was rotated out. Ramirez grinning through her bandages. Telling me,
fuck
, how bad it hurt, having your damn sinuses all burned up...

Bang.

Far away. Soft echoes.

Realmodo up ahead, stock-still.

Ain’t no damn guns in no damn Paleozoic.

Bang-bang.

Long pause.

Bang-bang.

Realmodo looking over his shoulder, shapely rump tipped to one side.

Bokaitis: “Sarge?”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

o0o

Ling, crouching among the rocks with his comrades, heart pounding softly in his chest, struggling to keep his rapid breathing quiet, looking down a long hill at the Stargate. An odd-looking, muscular man lying on the ground, two rifles lying beside him, pants ripped open, blood pooling under one leg. Crouched over him, working on the wound, a shirtless, tiger-stripe girl.

Of course it’s a girl. Look at those nice little breasts. Standing over both of them, rifle held at port arms, a squatty blond fellow with a strange-looking, beetle-browed face. There was another beetle-brow visible just inside the open Gate, standing, watching them, alarm visible on his face.

Alireza whispered: “What in the name of God is
that
thing?”

Scaly, greenish brown animal the size of a big dog, lying curled on its side, rib cage burst open, obviously dead, looking rather like a cross between a wolf and a monitor lizard. Inbar, voice like a breathy sigh: “Theriodont of some kind. They survived into the Triassic; things like
cynognathus
. Descendants of
dimetrodon
. Ancestors of mammals...”

The tiger-stripe girl and beetle-brow number one picked up their fallen comrade and carried him through the Gate. A moment, then beetle-brow number two came through and picked up the two rifles, went back to the other side.

All alone, here in the Permian, just now...

Alireza: “Rahman!
No
!”

Subaïda Rahman on her feet, leaping over the rocks, sprinting down the hillside. Alireza, foolish, on his feet, shouting at her to come back. Then another shout, this one from beyond the Gate, from inside it. Rahman, standing at the console, reaching. Blond beetle-browed soldier stepping through, just as Rahman started twirling dials, punching buttons.

Thud
.

Ground slamming at their feet.

Rainbows and fire jetting from the Stargate.

Wisp of oily smoke. Gate going black.

Ling reached the bottom of the hill, panting, more with fear, more with excitement, than exertion, striding over to the Gate, stopping, standing still, looking at things on the ground. Bits and pieces. Not bloody, no. Cauterized.

This thing a hand and forearm. This thing a knee, with attached pieces of thigh and calf. The front half of a boot, toes still inside. Some cloth. Desert camouflage. Standing with him, Inbar whispered, “You’d think they’d’ve failsafed against something like this...”

You’d think that, wouldn’t you? No parachutes on airliners, though.

Alireza walked up slowly, stooped, picked up the last piece. “Hmh. Hundred year old M-80 assault rifle.” He popped the clip, took a close look. “Sixty HE rounds.” Slid the clip back in, hefted the weapon his hand. “UAR Marines still use a version copied from this. American military technology at its best”

Ling walked over to where Rahman was sitting on the ground, leaning against the Gate console. Looked down at her. Face almost green, faded pale under the tan. Reached out. Waited for her to take his hand. Helped her to her feet. Stood looking into her face. Finally: “You had to do it, you know.”

Wan smile. “Did I? I suppose so.”

“There’re most likely more soldiers out there somewhere,” gesturing at the wilderness. “Do you think we should wait for them? Surrender?”

She glanced at Inbar and Alireza. “I don’t know.”

Alireza said, “Let’s try again.”

Inbar, angry, afraid: “So? Where to? Some other past era of the Earth? Maybe we’ll be lucky this time and wind up in the days of Harun al-Rashid. Maybe we’ll meet Sindbad!” Angry. Bitter. Sarcastic.

Silence. Then Alireza said, “Set it for Mars-Plus, vary one parameter by the smallest amount possible. Maybe we can sneak back past them...”

Sneak back to
where
? Our ship is...

“It’ll give us breathing space, at least. Time to think.”

Ling said, “I don’t know. They seem to have some method of finding us.”

Then Rahman found the address in her camera’s registry. Called up the image. Set this Gate’s controls the same way. Put her hand on the last rheostat in the bottom row, nudged it slightly. Looked up, straight at Alireza.

He said, “Hit the button.” Voice flat, emotionless.

Colors swirled on the Gate surface, swirled and cleared.

Rahman: “Guess we didn’t break it.”

Rocky red desert, reaching out to a mountainous horizon under a pale orange sky. No clouds. No visible sun. Was that bit of glitter up there one of the tiny moons?

Inbar said, “I don’t know. That doesn’t really look like...”

Alireza: “Let’s go. What have we got to lose?”

Four. Tale of a Tub.

Sometimes, I try to imagine what it must have been like for God Himself. (Herself? Itself? Bits and pieces of my old selves coalescing from different cultural surrounds. How many Academic Phalangists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?)

Not the fact of being an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-pervasive omnipotent deity. I know what that’s like, now, being able to send an infinite number of probabilistic doppelgängers to an infinite number of times and places. Send them out, take them back, absorb and emit them like so many photon packets.

I can’t imagine how I adapted to this reality.

Nor can I imagine what it must have been like for God.

Imagine exploding out of nothingness, into being, into infinite being, just... just because there existed,
a priori
, a finite probability that God and Creation
could
exist? Hell. Simpler to say
just because
.

The records are here that that’s what happened. The paper trail led from the Scavengers to the Colonials, easy for us to follow from Day One. And the Colonials seem to have figured out that Somebody, Somewhere, built the whole shebang. They even seemed to understand, in the end, that the fact of that understanding was what called the Jug down on their sorry little asses.

And, of course, having come to the Throneroom, having become All-Knowing myself... for a long time, if duration can have any meaning in a multiplex plenum, I refused to call the primordial force God. Not my
style
, you see. For a long time I orbited various attractors in Denial Space.

But... the force that through the green fuse drives the flower? What’s not to be God about that? Especially since no crooked worm ever found
my
winding sheet. Then, seeing what faces were gathered round me...

So God’s records are here for all to see, the whole eternal tale of how He/She/It/Whatever grew from a tiny seed, His substance and Platonic Reality and, ultimately, the whole of the Multiverse emerging from the less-than-Planck-length event horizon of a more-than-infinite singularity in something less than Planck Time.

Let there be Light? Hell, more important that He let there be Darkness.

A simple story, compelling, evocative, mythopoeic and more, reminding me a bit of a story,
Universe and Beyond
, that one of me made his life’s work, one of me who somehow escaped the channel that led most of us down into the abyss of hack work and pseudo-science journalism.

God emerges from Nothing At All. Pops into deterministic being from some nondeterministic probability. Sits around For Ever and Ever. Knowing Everything. Doing Nothing. And after an Eternity of that Timeless Time, it occurs to this logbump of a God that, perhaps, just perhaps, the problem is He’s a tad lonely.

So God builds a universe that brings forth sentience, that evolves to omnipotence, so God can have a Pal. The universe, it seems, and everything in it, is no more than God’s womb, gestating Supreme Being, Mark II, over  billions of years. She’sh. That version of me was a bit of a sap. No wonder he died penniless. (Well, sort of died. Somewhere in here/out there, he cruises the byways of the Multiverse, doing Our Thing, having stepped from death to infinite life everlasting in no time at all.)

I used to wonder if this sort of thing would piss people off. Oh, well. At least now I don’t have to wonder anymore. Certainly pissed
me
off.

But the Real God in the Real Multiverse,
did
emerge from Nothing At All, and really
did
build Something (all right,
Everything
) from that selfsame nothingness. Cool. Far out. Fetching. Far fetched. Hell, if you like, I’ve got an infinite number of infinitely sophisticated metalanguages from which you may spend all eternity picking adjectives.

But, God damn it, the Answer is still not here. Where the Hell did God come from? Probability? Okay. Fine by me, folks. So where the Hell did Probability come from? In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with
God, and the Word
was
God? What the fuck is
that
supposed to mean? And, of course, no record of where, pray tell, God went when he left. Or why.

Bob likes to remind me it’s
just a job
. I’m not supposed to have Time to wonder Why, I’m just supposed to keep the God-damned gears oiled and running smoothly.

Bob thinks he should’ve been given the Job, instead of me. Claims he thought up the whole idea first, exploited it more thoroughly, in every iteration that either one of us possessed, back when we were finite. Likes to tell me if I’ve seen farther than other men, it’s merely because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants like him.

I always tell him I thought the correct phrase was, “pygmy typing on a giant typewriter.”

He turns sour for a moment, says, Whatever.

Bob’s shadow popping up in the hereafter/nowandthen, shadow cast down through Platonic Reality, down to the abandoned and dusty Netherworld Throneroom of God All Mighty, from all the iterations and reiterations cruising the Multiverse.

Hey, Pops. Can I have the keys to the Jug?

Someone building a crooked house are they?

Crooked smile. Well, you know, Pops. I
told
you we shouldn’t have been sentimental about Origins. Now your damn girlfriend’s loose in the Multiverse again, spalling iterations as she goes. You should have let me pinch Earth off back at the Beginning.

Sigh. Just a sentimental fool. Maybe
that’s
why I’ve got the Job.

So, in the long ago and far away, I fled the Jug and fled my past and fled my present and my future as well, and went back to my lavender-heather world and sat on my rock and brooded and brooded. (Call it that, if you’d like. Reality doesn’t mean much here, does it?)

What now, silly ass? Out here by yourself? Where did you think you were going to
go
? Through the gate system to wherever? What if
that’s
what brings on the Space-Time Juggernaut? (Well, so what if it does?)

Eventually, as I ate my hoarded rations, I began to plan, as planners will. I’ll go back, you see, to Mars-Plus, one last time, or maybe to the big base we were starting to put up on Munch, where all the technogoodies were laying around, wasting away. Rig myself up some proper traveling gear. Get my guns and ammo, just in case, you see.

And then I’ll head on out.

Smug. Satisfied.

Yes, that’s the ticket.

Because, now, I’m...
free
? Is that the word I want to use?

I had the good grace to feel a moment of disquiet. Free? Free from what? Jesus. Free from, among other things, Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid, USMC. Oh, you idiot. Is
that
what this is all about? Freedom from the requirement to live happily ever after on someone else’s terms? Well, not
all
, but... Me, I never wanted a role in a dream not my own.

Just a moment of disquiet. Come on. You knew you were a selfish bastard. Know it now. And somewhere. Somewhere out here. Somewhere in the infinitely infinite Multiverse, there is a spacetime made up of
your
dreams, people with beings whose only happiness is their part in those dreams.

Best get your ass in gear. The search may take some time.

Rising. Rising.

Uh...

Hair prickling on the back of my neck.

Specks of fire glimmering in the distance, up in that pretty lavender sky.

Oh, no. Oh, no you don’t.

A faraway grin. Leering down on me. Two grins. Four. A thousand. A million. A billion, trillion, vigintillion... Welcome, said the Voice of Bob, Bob the Jug, to the Working Man’s Eternity.

Welcome to the Hereafter, said another voice, sloppy, as if sodden with drink, possessed by vast, infinitely sad eyes, eyes poised above a messily trimmed old-fashioned moustache.
Now
aren’t you sorry you didn’t go home?

Bob said, Shut up Eddie. What did you want him to do, go home and die drunk in the gutter like you? At least he’s met his fate like a man.

Eddie, offended: It was pneumonia, that’s all.

Yeah. Right. Pneumonia. In every single iteration you ever lived. Tell me another one, Eddie.

Another voice, female, exasperated: Boys. Teasing’s fun, but we’ve got work to do.

Rumblerumblerumble from the background. Right. You tell ‘em, Miss Mary. Sick of this shit.

Mary
? Mother of God, I... That face. Those eyes. Those... bolts? Oh, Hell. The poet’s wife. I...

Bob said, Well.
I’m
driving the Jug today. So.

Infinite hand reaching out to touch my breast, sparking fear within, infinite fear. Wait! Wait! What the Hell is going on here?

Mary’s voice, soft, amused, and oh-so-sarcastic: I’m surprised you haven’t guessed, Mr. Millikan.

Um. Guessed what?

Bob: Well, somebody’s got to run the show, write the scripts, do the dialogue. Why not
us
?

Um. What about God?

Heavy sarcasm: Well, pal, if you find him, you can ask.

The hand reaches out, touches me, reaching through and through and through and...

Snap
.

Clean bones gone?

I explode. Painlessly. Explode. Not to shards. Not to pieces. Not to bloody gobbets and bits. Explode into a million, billion, trillion little me’s, fluttering upward like so many shades and shadows, up through the shallow lavender sky, lavender sky painted on a canvass backdrop, into the infinite dark beyond.

Then...

Shadows falling, falling like sparks, like falling leaves, like leaves of fire, down through the Multiverse, down through all the spacetime channels, settling down through Platonic Reality, down, down to the bedrock of All, gathering, gathering, gathering in the Throneroom of God.

Snap
.

One. All-Seeing. All-Knowing. All-Mighty. Me.

Me
?!

And, echoing from above, Bob’s voice, aggrieved, insulted: What do you
mean
, he got the Job?

The others, all the others, bless their pea-pickin’ hearts, on hearing him, started to laugh.