The Transmigration of Souls (22 page)

A wok. Slotted spoons. A fork. A knife. Magic cans that opened on fresh ingredients. Crispy vegetables. Bits of dark meat. Robot Amaterasu. Domestic Amaterasu. Brucie Big-Dick sitting in the darkness, watching her, big eyed as well.

Image of us standing out in the desert under a darkening orange sky, long rays of sunlight sloping down, making the shadows grow. Kincaid facing her creation, stunned, and then, unable to suppress a crazy, crooked grin: “Last time I saw you, you were tits-down in a birthday cake.”

Pretty, young Oriental-girl face crossed by a shadow, a distant look, a remembering look. “That was... long ago, Mother.”

Long ago? Cold chills, classic icy fingers playing touch-and-go on her spine. “Why, it was only a... a... couple of days ago?”

Long look from those dark, soulful, man-swallowing eyes. “It was two thousand years ago, Mother. I’ve missed you.” Pale, pale smile. Do you love me, Mother?

“You aren’t supposed to remember me.” Maybe from the party? A memory of me watching brother Roddie stick it up her ass while his buddies laughed and cheered?

“But I do remember.”

Um. “Not supposed to know who I am...”

The sultry little-girl voice said, “Yet I do.”

Tarantellula: “What’s going on here, Sergeant? You know these people?”

Brucie the Technician’s voice, dry, remarkably unafraid: “Yeah, Sarge. Inquiring Minds Want to Know.”

Robot Amaterasu looking at the little dark man, the two of them exchanging glances full of... what? Full of data? No. Little pang, deep inside Kincaid. Exchanging glances full of grace. Amaterasu looked back at Kincaid and gestured at the man: “Mother? This is my friend, Lord Genda.”

The little man stepped forward, offering his hand, grasping hers, surprisingly, close to the fingertips, holding them gently, Kincaid’s hand like a massive paw in his small, delicate fingers. He said, “
Genda Hiroshige-desu
.
Hajimemashite
.” Sharp. Alternating hard and soft. Genda Shroshgeh-dess. Hajj-meh-mah-shteh.

“Pleased to meet you, sir.” A little smile. “I once spoke a bit of Japanese. Not any more.” But I remember enough to know that was rather... brusque. An imperious look in those cold, dark eyes.

Imperious look, but... a shrug, a smile, a glance, suddenly very warm glance at Amaterasu. “Merely an affectation, Madam. Your daughter makes me speak the English of your day.”

Darkness now, the campfire flickering, casting long shadows of robot Amaterasu as she cooked, watched by the others. They’d helped bury the chunks of Muldoon, Bokaitis’s whole body, helped them pile a cairn of stones over the grave, Tarantellula all the while wondering if they shouldn’t just carry the remains back to the gate and send them on through to the Moon for bagging and retrieval.

But, by now, Athelstan may be there. On his way out here to get us, drag us back for trial? Or just setting up to bomb the Gate shut? No matter. Kincaid silent, then motioning them onward, following Genda and Amaterasu off across the red sand, past the carcasses of giant mantises, green ant men, on to the bottom of the nearest ravine, then on up into the stark red hills.

So where have you been... daughter mine?

How’d you come to be here?

Impossible.
Impossible
screaming inside her head. You know, of course.
You
know, but...

Lovely young robot walking beside her, sleek woman-shape in fashionable white clothing moving gently to those special rhythms. Amaterasu walking beside her shyly. Shyly taking her hand. Mother. My mother... Tarantellula, tall, angular black spider dancer, white-eyed, hardly woman at all, more monster-man than anything else, taking point. Lord Genda and Brucie Big-Dick falling behind, falling in side-by-side, walking together but not touching, walking silently. You know why. So they can watch us. Men’s sly eyes on women’s gently rocking backsides, watching those hips tilt and sway, hips draped in clothing, perhaps, designed to accentuate that sway, make it...

Men’s hormones stirring. Bubble, bubble, toil and...

Robot Amaterasu holding her lost mother’s hand, walking up into the red mountains as sunset turned the pumpkin sky dark brown, as the stars popped out in magnitude sequence. Amaterasu speaking. A small story. A simple story. Programmed love for brother Roddie. Uncle Roddie, that same old story. Uncle Roddie trifling under the little girl’s dress. Uncle Roddie making the little girl cry. What happened to the programming I left? What happened to the programming that would make you love him?

Uncle Roddie fucking me, making me cry, programmed orgasms making him smile and smile.

And be a villain still?

Amaterasu smiling sad-eyed at her mother. Shakespeare had it right.

Uncle Roddie tiring of his robot girl. Putting her back in the box. Putting her in the closet. Putting her away.

What about
me
? What about...

Mother, you and your comrades never came back from the Moon.

So. Robot Amaterasu lying still in the darkness, huddled in her box, remembering, over and over, every second of her life, playing it out from beginning to end. Every joyless orgasm. Every surge of hateful programmed love.

Glad to be in my box. Glad to be here forever.

How long? Program counter delivering a no-event event-code once every Planck time for fifteen centuries. Even in powered-down mode, I began to sleep, sleep without dreams, for longer and longer stretches. I’d awaken, and remember, and sleep again, awaken...

From behind them, Genda said, “I found her in a rubbish dump, on a world called Tano’s Planet, some two thousand parsecs from Earth, about four hundred years ago.”

Kincaid standing to one side, watching the two of them set up camp and make their colorful cooking fire, thinking, You found her in a rubbish dump... some time in the eighteenth century?

Well, no, madam. On Tano’s Planet, in that particular universe, it’s the Gregorian Year 3954 A.D. I found her, opened the box and found her. Fell in love, you see...

Robot Amaterasu’s eyes somehow shining through the darkness.

And you, Lord Genda Hiroshige. How did you come to be on Tano’s Planet in the year 3954 A.D., seven thousand light-years or so from the Sun? Long walk?

A smile. A polite shrug, Genda lifting bits of seaweed-like this and that in daintily held
hashi
, chewing reflectively, looking up at the sky. I came there in my spaceship,
Baka-no-Koto
, but... Well. A long tale. Not a merry one.

Brucie Big-Dick, voice very soft: “We are interested.”

Dark eyes on him, frowning. “Perhaps...” Long silence. Then:

There is a time and a place where the West died stillborn. I know you understand, or you wouldn’t be here. So. In China, in the days of the Tang Empire, having driven the Hiung-nu away, while the West went barbarous and was lost, they sailed ships around the edges of the Fat Flat Ocean. Sailed according to the principles of Tao, and went to the Desert Land, where they saw lizards the size of yaks and hopping rats the size of men. Went to faraway islands of lissome women, to mountainous islands where there were no men at all, only walking birds ten feet tall and eagles who killed them for sport. Sailed on ocean currents to a land beyond the sea, where dark men built stone temples and sacrificed to bloody gods.

It didn’t last forever. Nothing ever does. The Mongol overlords came and threw down the Tang, ruled over us, and your kindred as well. Your Marco Polo and mine are doubtless the same man, living before cusp on endless cusp drove our worlds apart. Then the Ming came and made their empire, and sailed the thousand seas and traveled all over the world. The cusp of cusps was the persistence of Tao, the withering away of the Confucian State.

A thousand years before I was born, a fleet of one hundred great ships pulled up before the Lisboa roadstead, her grand admiral firing his guns over the water, his emissaries demanding tribute from Prince Henry.

Lord Genda smiling over the last remains of his dinner, smiling at robot Amaterasu. Prince Henry thought of resistance. Thought about it for minutes on end, perhaps. But Prince Henry was a canny ruler. He and Chen Ho made their deals. Prince Henry, in due course, became King of Europe by the pleasure of the Great Universal Emperor. And Chen Ho, trade monopolies in hand, became the richest man in all history.

In due course we made our machines and saw the use of steam. We made our aircraft and, in what you’d call 1864, a party of Chinese explorers set down on the Moon...

Did you find the Stargate at the pole?

No. That came much, much later. Our World State formed and we filled the Solar System with life. About a century before my birth, we discovered the true nature of the space-time continuum, which led to hyperdrive and the colonization of the stars.

Kincaid sat back, leaning a against a warm rock face, watching him, eyes reflecting bits of dying firelight, knowing what was coming.

Genda said, I was a young man then, twenty-seven, not long out of the Space Academy, commander of a small three-man scoutship,
Baka-no-Koto
, about to leave on an extended exploratory mission, out in the direction of Sagittarius Arm...

Interesting name for a ship, Kincaid thought. Polite Japanese way of saying
bullshit
.

Soft laughter from Genda, who seemed far away, far in the past. We were looking forward to that mission, Bannerjee, Raimundo and I, three non-Han military officers out to prove our mettle. It would have been... a fine life.

Soft whisper from Amaterasu: And now you’d be centuries dead. And I’d still be alone in my cold, dark box...

A slow nod, a gaze in her direction. True. But we had the hyperdrive, and all such cusps break in the same direction...

Kincaid said, “How did the Space-Time Juggernaut manifest itself?”

Long, long silence. Then Genda said, “The stars fell out of the sky. Every one of them.”

Compelling image. “Fell?”

“Like bits of paper falling from a bulletin board. Then... in the darkness, as people screamed and ran, though there was nowhere to hide...
something
came to the pretty little colony world of Xiaohuà bù Liáng, came and rolled the world away to nowhere at all. Something like a... cloud of light? To this day I can’t quite recall it’s exact shape.”

Angel of Death sizzling overhead, like a flock of migrating firebirds. My friends rolling up like windowshades.
Snap
. Replaced by dry, rattling old bones...

Genda said, “I got the ship away. Left my friends behind. Flew through empty space...” Suffering in his voice now. Regret. “Only the gates, which we’d just begun to investigate, remained, out of all creation. I went on through the nearest, starship and all, and...” He fell silent, leaving behind an image of those gates, large gates it seemed, floating alone in empty black space.

Amaterasu put her hand on his shoulder, and said, “We’ve been in this skein of universes for four hundred years, exploring.”

Brucie Big-Dick: “Looking for what?”

The robot looked at him for a long moment, then said, “The way out.”

Tarantellula: “Out into what?”

“Out into reality.”

Though she knew it wasn’t the answer, Kincaid asked, “Back home?”

Genda said, “There is no home. My home is gone. And this...” Hand waving at a sky full of impossibly colorful stars, “This is just a dream. Somewhere, some... thing is dreaming it all for us. That’s the reality we seek.”

Sitting in her darkness, back warmed by cooling stone, Kincaid thought, Looking for the Jug. Fools.

Hard memories. Old memories. Memories not so old after all. Memories of sitting home, year after year, slowly, painfully deciphering the bits and pieces of Scavenger literature they’d brought home from the Multiverse, a way of... thinking about lost Dale without
thinking
about him.

Out there. Somewhere.

Hutùnûq’s Story
. Because, you see, it didn’t happen all at once. No. A little bit, then a little more, then all of it, seemingly at once but really no more than just one more iteration. What is this thing in the old, hard-to-understand Colonial records? What is this Space-Time Juggernaut they’ve come to fear? Why do they want to hide now?

Like a cloud of fire. Like a cloud of fire that descends into first this Colonial sky, then that one, one at a time, in bunches and clusters, ringing  down some improbably final curtain on hundreds, thousands, even millions of Colonial worlds, following them wherever they went in the Multiverse until...

The Colonials, for whatever reason, never gave up, never retreated, never went home to hide and die. And the Jug, our word for the Scavengers’ own pet name for the Monster, hunted them down. A world at a time, a universe at a time, in this spacetime and that one, until... Scavengers puzzling over those last historical records. Records left by lost individual Colonials who wandered the Multiverse until they vanished.

Hutùnûq wondered if the Jug was hunting the last ones down individually. Wonder if any of them escaped to survive, like Flying Dutchmen, like Wandering Jews, over all those billions of years.

I think he hoped, one day, he’d track down the Last Colonial. Certainly, he searched and searched, until...

Hutùnûq’s Story
. Hutùnûq and his party of explorer archaeologists, wandering and empty world of crisp, white gypsum sand.
This
, the story said, this is the place to which we tracked the Last Colonial. Nothing here now, you see, but some very old ruins. Very old ruins and...

Through the rebus-puzzle writing, through the alien thoughts of a very alien Scavenger language, you could hear Hutùnûq’s Scavenger hearts pounding as he told and retold his survivor’s tale.

A cloud of fire forming in the sky.

A million, billion, trillion bits of light, twisting on high, corkscrewing down out of nothingness, into being. A million, billion, trillion predator eyes looking down on them from on high and...

Snap
.

First this one rolling up like a windowshade, then...
snap
... that one and...
snapsnapsnap
... a handful, then a score then... Hutùnûq’s breathless Scavenger voice: I and two others escaped back through the gate to Llerwerrûqqel—the world we
think
may have been Gilliken—closing the gate behind us, scrambling its address table to the...
thing
could not follow us through.