The Transmigration of Souls (19 page)

Not an airliner. You know perfectly well...

Cigar-shaped body, a bit like an ancient V-2. Painted silver-blue, with some kind of angular design in a darker blue. Windows in the nose. No wings. Fins around the tail. Four visible, bent and torn, crushed metal under the hull that might be two more.

Instead of a rocket engine, instead of an expansion bell or two or three, there was a long, bronze-colored pole, bent sharply in the middle, leading out to a banged-up cylinder of gray metal mesh, indistinct, complex shapes not quite hidden inside.

They picked their way slowly down the hillside, slipping on loose rocks, stuff like shale scattered in the sandy dirt, walked toward the thing. Big. Maybe sixty meters long. Lettering now visible on the side. Romanic lettering, sort of, painted in dark black. More or less unreadable because it was... ornate. Decorated, little lines everywhere, extraneous lines, disguising the letters. Only numerals at the end of the row of words easily recovered: 0-220.

Inbar stood looking up at the buckled metal wall, now bulging over their heads. “Gothic blackprint, like they used to use for German.”

Alireza: “And... are the words German?”

Rahman: “No. English. Sort of. It says, ‘GalactoLight HyperNews Channel 0-220.’“

o0o

When they climbed up the red rocks and through a big rip in the ship’s hull, Subaïda Rahman felt as if she were tingling all over. Anticipation. Excitement of discovery. A prickle of fear crawling on the back of her neck.

There’s an inescapable conclusion here. Conclusion that matched the cryptic notes Dale Millikan and his colleagues had scribbled all over their notebooks, had written in the margins of their printed texts.

They walked down the dark companionway, forward, more or less bunched together, silent. Passed through hatches, past the open doors of compartments, everything a shambles, lockers burst open, their varied contents spilled across tilted decks.

Came into the control room.

Obviously the control room.

Two bucket seats, upholstered in dark brown leather, broad arms festooned with buttons and switches. A padded black-leather joystick on the right arm of each chair. Console between them, with more switches. Two horseshoe banks of instruments/controls under big, cracked crystalline windows, windows looking like they were made of the finest quartz, not glass, cracks long and straight, the shear-plane cracks of stone, not the crazed, intersecting lines of a supercooled fluid.

Alireza sat in the left-hand seat. The commander’s seat. Sat staring at row on row of dials and buttons and gauges.

Ling said, “This looks very strange. No CRTs. No LEDs or LCDs. Nothing even so modern as the turn of the millennium.”

Rahman’s attention suddenly refocused on her specialty, her education. She said, “A spaceship built by Europeans from the 1940s.”

Ling nodded. “Something in between
Frau im Mond
and
Destination Moon
.”

Alireza pointed at a set of controls mounted in the center, just above the console, below the middle of the windscreen. More buttons, like old three-position circuit breakers. Lots of circular dials with electromechanical indicator needles. Alireza tapping a label. “Am I correct in reading this word as
hyperdrive
?”

Rahman dropped into the right-hand seat, staring, baffled, starting to work back through... theories. Can’t do it. Too much... She said, “I wonder how a
mass proximity indicator
works?”

Ling, staring through broken transparent stone, out into the red desert, at a darkening sky now the color of cooked pumpkin purée, where a few stars were beginning to glimmer: “Gravity waves, perhaps...”

Alireza tapped a console to his left. “I’d like to fly a spaceship that had one of these...” Alireza the pilot speaking. Alireza with a faraway look. Alireza in the land of fantastic dreams.

Rahman bent forward and looked.
Graviton polarity generator
.

Ling said, “The technologies indicated by the labels on these controls presuppose processes that are simply not possible. Unless everything
we
know about the nature of the universe and all its laws is... incorrect.”

Moment of silence, then Omry Inbar said, “So, you’re assuming the same rules are valid
here
.”

“Well...”

Rahman turned in her seat and looked at them, first Inbar, whose face was very pale indeed, then into Ling’s thoughtful eyes. That inescapable conclusion. “Maybe just... a
little
different. Different enough.”

A nod, first from one, then the other.

o0o

The rest of the ship proved to be a mixture of the known and the unknown, the easily comprehensible, cabinets full of crushed cans and old food dried away to brittle scraps, then the impossibly antique. Rahman felt elated when they found the ship’s computer, mounted in a little cabin all its own aft of the control room. When they opened it up, the others seemed offended. No electronics, you see. Just a maze, a fuzzy mass really, of tiny, tiny,
tiny
little gears and wheels and whatnot. The machine Babbage would have built, had he been able to manufacture microscopic hardware.

So what runs this? How does it work? Alireza almost angry.

In other parts of the ship, they found what purported to be the hyperdrive machinery, and something claiming to be the gravity polarizer that so amazed Alireza. Labels telling what it was, strange instructions printed on little white plaques. Twist this, turn that. Move this lever to...

It looked like no more than a mass of plumbing, like something you might see in World War II German
ünterseeboten
. This can’t possibly be right, but...

Then the bedroom. There’d been a waterbed, of course, now no more than scraps of torn vinyl, a pile of paper and cloth in the corner that had once been wet, had gotten a little moldy before it dried. Books and clothes and bits of this and that strewn everywhere.

Inbar bending, plucking a little rubbery disk off the floor, turning it over and over in his hands. “What do you suppose this is?”

Ling looking at it, then smiling. “It’s a pessary. An old-fashioned birth-control device. North Asian women still use them sometimes, because they can be washed and used again.”

Inbar, still staring at the thing: “So we’re talking about a people here who have faster-than-light starships, but don’t know about reproductive biochemistry?”

“Not to mention electronics,” said Alireza.

Rahman, picking up dress after slinky dress, all made from watered silk, in an array of subtle colors and hues, some with metallic glitter mixed into the cloth: Slim-hipped slacks. Lovely clothing, but... I couldn’t have fit into any of these things since about age thirteen. Moment of regret. I wouldn’t mind having a change of clothes right now. We’re all starting to smell.

She lifted a floor-length dress that flowed from a tight bodice, something with an improbably high waist, and held it against herself. A dress for a woman of 180 centimeters perhaps, weighing no more than forty-five kilograms, at best... “What we have here is the wardrobe of some Twentieth-Century American fashion model, I think...”

Inbar picked up a pair of tiny silk panties, no more than a triangle of cloth for the woman’s vulva, the rest of it just thin ribbons. Held it up against himself. Frowned. “Unless this thing used to stretch a bit...”

Alireza snickered and said, “The woman who wore that must have had to shave a bit, here and there...”

Or it would have looked a little strange. Right. Men so easily distracted by... The thought of clean underwear a distinct wish now. And my period’s not so far off... Maybe this woman left a few tampons behind... Seeing as how these people didn’t seem to know much about... Why didn’t I just get those shots when it was suggested? No reason. Just... same old reason. Every woman’s reason.

Ling said, “Well. Perhaps she was Chinese.”

Rahman picked up a thick hardcover book, book bound in expensive-looking red leather, gold printing embossed on the spine.
Crimson Desert
, by Passiphaë Laing. Flipped it open. A novel of some kind, written in... English? She read aloud: “Whann, in the fulnes of time, I chose seaking of Rhino Jensen, newnes without number it would be, but supposèd not I.”

Ling took the book, flipped through the pages, a phrase here, another one there. “English. But not English.”

Inbar said, “So we’re in a parallel world. So what else is new?”

Rahman began laughing. No hysterical edge to her voice. Not quite.

And Ling whispered, “Like
Glory Road
, then? Have I fallen into a book about falling into a book?”

o0o

The five of them were glowing softly in the alien dark, curtainfields shimmering like delicate Kirlian auras on the edge of vision. Getting cold out, now. Desert night cold. Switch off the field and your breath is a brief white flag against the night.

Déjà vu
experience because strange is as strange does, not because I’ve been here before. So many strange worlds, under so many strange skies. Scavenger bases, some established, some ramshackle. Colonial worlds like so many planet-wide urban projects here, in other places like little steel fortresses defying eternity. I wish we’d never gone home. Where would we be now if...

Listen to me. Like my grandfather, whining about Apollo. Americans on the Moon in 1969, maybe on Mars by 1984. Mars colonies. Asteroid mines. That story he used to talk about, astronaut-prospectors finding something like oil-shale out in the Fore-Trojan cluster. Little did he suspect what would
really
have happened if...

If and only if.

This sky now, beyond fantastic, looking like some kind of CCD astronomical photo.
Colors
up in the sky. Stars picked out in pale red and blue, yellow and white. Look there. A green one. Wolf-Rayet Star? Impending supernova? Globular clusters, balls of white, tinged with the faintest pink, hanging far beyond the sky. Look closely. Those little things you see are distant spiral galaxies, with their reddish cores, arms stained with the blue of youth. Gas giant hanging in the sky, some other little moon sparkling nearby. Dale would’ve loved this place.

That old, romantic image. Just the two of us here. That would’ve been nice. His arm around me, talking softly, far into the night; holding each other for warmth...

Wry smile. Like it was only yesterday.

I remember my great grandmother from when I was a little girl. How old was I then, twelve? Something like that. She must’ve been something like eighty-five. Maybe a little older. Staring at the wreckage of her face, wreckage hard to relate to the pretty face in all those old photographs. Old lady whispering, “I can’t believe it sometimes, Astrid. Inside, I still feel like a girl of eighteen. It seems like I’m... sick, that’s all. Like I’m sick and, soon, I’ll get better. Go out again. Boys. Dates.” Old lady looking at her with a shy grin. Probably remembering her first fuck.

And here I am, older than she ever dreamed of becoming, mooning away about a lost love, a distracted fat man who screwed me a bit when I was already middle-aged.

The great-grandmother had died not long after that. Regretting its necessity. My father telling me, wistfully, that her last words, whispered just as she slipped away, were,
I wanted to live forever
...

Must have been a pretty deathbed scene. Like in a movie.

They were all afraid to die. We all were. Mass hysteria in America, in the weeks and months after the interdictions were set up. When the... “Lunar Discoveries” were announced. Headline on the
Times
that just made me laugh and laugh. Banner covering half the front page:
Eternal Life
...

Eternal life, then wave after wave of suicides. Religious folk. Madmen. People afraid that
now
they’d be depressed and sad for damn-all forever... I wonder how many people turned it down? I wonder how many people just lived until they died?

I remember how sorry I was then that we’d left Dale behind. It was a long time before I figured out that, somewhere, on the other side of one cusp or another, there was a world in which Dale came home, in which we lived happily ever after. Or maybe a world in which I was left behind too, in which we went out and out, on in the many worlds until...

Until what?

Shrug.

Until something.

Until the Jug caught on and wiped us away.

Space-Time Juggernaut. Nice turn of phrase...

Looking up at the sky, Corky Bokaitis said, “That’s not Neptune, I guess, is it, Sarge?”

Another shrug. “Well. Probably not. Not
our
Neptune, anyway.”

Muldoon said, “What other Neptune is there?”

Silence, then Tarantellula, white eyes on the sky: “I know what you mean, Sarge. I guess we can’t be making too many assumptions here.”

“Guess not.” That was the mistake so many of the scientists made, back in the beginning. Too many assumptions. Just assumed that they
knew
...

Muldoon lifted his rifle and aimed at a little point of glitter in the sky, twinkling thing just below the curving limb of “Neptune,” peered through the gunsight-rangefinder of the guidance system. Just one more little moon that...

He said, “Huh. I figured it was going to be just a rock. Damn thing looks like a
building
, tumbling end over end. Lookit all them lights...” Impossible to believe that he’d had himself
programmed
to talk like that...

A quick look through her own scope. Long, dark-skinned cylinder, full of what looked like windows, thousands of tiny, yellow-lit windows. Turning slowly, complex motion about two axes of rotation.

Tarantellula said, “You know, Sergeant-Major, this place is kind of... interesting.”

Brucie Big-Dick, long silent, said, “No shit.”

o0o

In the morning, when the sky was a bright orange verging on pink, the sun a brilliant ruby spark throwing long red shadows all along the cliff face, they abandoned the starship, stumbling down the long ravine, teetering, slipping on shattered rocks, until they were out on the face of the desert, standing in the lee of some tall, russet cliff.