The Transmigration of Souls (24 page)

They don’t want, you see, to be mere... creations.

o0o

Later, when the sun was past noon, crossing beyond the zenith, afternoon advancing as it settled down the western sky once again, sky darkening very slowly from bright orange to dun, they walked and walked, Inbar’s feet in agony now, the cheap patent leather of the thin boots that he’d worn inside his spacesuit starting to tear here and there, creasing and tearing, exposing stuff like gray cardboard.

They were on the western slope of the mountain range now, the side away from the flat red desert, the sun always in their faces, but you could see the city in the distance, Kanthol, the City on the Mountain, Jensen called it with obvious pride. Kanthol, towering above lesser peaks in the foreground, some great Himalayan range visible beyond it, peering over the horizon, washed out pink with distance and haze.

On Earth, the distant mountains would look blue, this...
pinkness
enhances the alien feel of Arrasûn, the imaginary world of
Crimson Desert
.
Imaginary
. My God. And what had Ling meant, when he’d said, Gathol, it ought to be called Gathol? And the other one should be Helium, not Halian.

Soldier Kincaid laughing with delight, heavy American breasts shaking on her chest: Not
quite
Barsoom, is it, Professor Ling?

Ling staring at the red ants, listening to them
clangclang
away. No, he’d said. I suppose not.

But still wishing it was?

I’m wishing it was
Moon Man
’s Moon. At least it’d be Earth, hanging up there in the sky, not Neptune...

Kincaid silent then, for a long moment, odd expression on her face. She’d whispered: I wish it was too. Maybe that’s where he went, off to join Iulianos and Red Hawk and Valetta. Off to join them and fight the Kalksis together...

Obvious pleasure on Ling’s face. Has he met a kindred spirit? Maybe not, something else in the American woman’s face, in her face, not in those liquid silver eyes. Torment? Maybe.

Kanthol, the City on the Mountain, glittered atop its crag, as if its buildings were made from the purest of white marble, as if its domes were plated in gold, platinum, silver, electrum. Like some Hellenistic city of old. No. Not quite. Hellenes painted their marble cities in pastels, reds and blues. and in rich browns, greens. This city, Kanthol, was like the Greek cities as eighteenth century European tourists imagined them to be, dreaming among the weathered ruins.

Walking and walking. And listening. Listening to the American woman... can she really be 130 years old? Look at those luscious breasts, those broad, fertile hips... Listening to her tell the story. Can it really be true, this story of the Colonists and the Scavengers, the old abandoned system of Stargates, beginning with the one under the Moon?

Of course it can. We’re
here
.

It was some time, she’d said, before we understood they
weren’t
stargates, leading nowhere anyone could see. Gateways to other universes, to other times in other universes. Gateways across creation itself. We’d had the mathematics, the quantum cosmology to understand it for more than fifty years before we went to the Moon. It just didn’t seem like the highest probability explanation. Besides which, we
wanted
them to be stargates.

And why did you come home, after finding such a thing? Why did you create Fortress America? Why did you...
hide
?

She’d said, Let me tell you a little bit about something the Scavengers liked to call the Space-Time Juggernaut. We just like to call it the Jug...

So. Is their really something, an entity of some kind, loose out here in the... the Multiverse, cosmologists call it, something which doesn’t want us probing out among the gates?

Something, Kincaid told them, which destroyed the Colonists on all their worlds. Something which destroyed the Scavengers when they went looting among the worlds. Something which almost destroyed us.

Something, said Lord Genda Hiroshige, which erased the very fabric of the universe I called home.

Possible?

Why not, considering what’s turned out to be possible so far?

Rahman, long quiet as they walked and walked, said, Why has it left the gates open then? Why not close them all and keep us all home where we belong?

Home where we belong
.

Genda only smiled, and said, “Good question. When my own universe was destroyed, utterly destroyed, apparently down to its very atoms, though I got away before then, all that remained were the gates, floating alone in the black void.”

“A wonder you survived.”

“A wonder indeed. I was on hyperdrive as the stars fell. I got through the gate. Call it luck.”

Call it anything you like.

By nightfall they were down on the dusty plains and rolling hills east of the mountain range, but the city of Kanthol, lit now by a hundred thousand twinkling golden lights, hardly seemed closer at all.

o0o

A long walk, a long night’s walk, and Subaïda Rahman sat in a little outdoor cafe in the heart of Kanthol, City on the Mountain, wishing mightily for fresh clothing, and thought,
Butyl mercaptan
. That’s it. My armpits smell like a natural gas pipeline leak. Any minute now there’ll be a little spark and I’ll explode, taking this whole silly world with me. We few, we band of heroes... I’m thinking like a madwoman again.

They sat at a nice round table, the twelve of them together, drinking from little sake glasses of what tasted like DeKuyper’s Peppermint Schnapps, white marble buildings towering all around them, towering from crag to crag, slanting rays of brilliant, late afternoon sunlight throwing long shadows down a red-brick-paved avenue, avenue thronged with hordes of bustling red ants, ants going
clangety-clang
as they maneuvered around one another, going
clickety-clack
, plastic skin on plastic skin.

City On the Mountain? Mirth. Ought to call it Kanthol, City of the Living Fire Engines. All we need now is to hear the hoo-hah of a French police car tootling in the distance and my life would be complete...

Pity the red ants aren’t people. At least I could get some fresh underwear then...

Image of herself, like Jensen here, dressed in red-ant harness. How would I look? I’m in good shape, nice breasts, not too large, not too small. Firm waist. I wonder if I have a nice-looking rear end...

Inbar leaned close, peppermint breath masking the fact that he hadn’t brushed his teeth in a week, and whispered, “What’re you smiling about?”

Soap bubble popped. By the one person here who’d be ever so glad to advise me about my rear end. “Nothing. Daydreaming.”

He said, “Not really necessary. Not here.” Looking up at that orange sky, that brilliant pink sun.

Across the table, Ling and Laing, Genda and Kincaid were sitting together, talking. The others. Jensen tinkling away with his... wife? How very odd that seemed. Not quite the way it is in children’s storybooks. The pretty Oriental girl, a robot incredibly, sitting to one side, talking with that little American who called himself Brucie, little man bright-eyed, focused on her in an obvious way. The big black thing with the white eyes and strange name sitting with them, with some strange interest of... her? Stranger and stranger. In any event, with some interest of her own. And Inbar. And Alireza. And me. Rather like outsiders here. I wonder why?

Genda, voice rather forceful, rather certain, was saying, “You’re not
going
to get home.
None
of you are. It is almost certain the Juggernaut is sniffing along your trail even now, making what rectifications it can.”

Hard pang. Hard pang inside.
Not going home
. And that other possibility, the possibility that home is... gone. A deep, hollow forming within her. Rahman thought, This is
not
what I wanted. Remembered image then, the excitement of going into space, going to the Moon. Space-Faring Civilization. Mars of the red sky, black at zenith, lit by a cold, faraway Sun. Voyages to the asteroids. Jupiter a fat orange ball, hanging over Callisto’s black-ice horizon, hanging over the spires and domes and steamy smokes of the new volatiles plant they would one day build.

Image of an old woman. Subaïda Rahman, life winding down, spending her last productive days among the moons of lovely yellow Saturn.

Cold sense of despair.

That dream is lost.

And... this one?

Unknown. Perhaps unknowable.

Ling said, “How can you be sure? It’s been almost a century since the Americans first found the gate system. They haven’t been ‘rectified.’ Maybe if we just turn back...”

Kincaid, quiet, reflective: “The rectification, a good word for it, is retroactive. The Jug will have pulled our whole timeline.”

Ling, with obvious disbelief: “Then why were the Scavenger worlds left behind? Why are the gates themselves still in place?”

Genda: “I don’t know.”

Kincaid: “The Scavengers didn’t know either. They knew about the Jug itself from Colonial literature they’d read. We think they kept on pushing out into the gate system on the assumption that they’d simply misunderstood. After all, the Colonial worlds themselves are still intact, if a little beat up. The Jug seems like... well. Like eschatological literature. You know: like the last chapter of the Bible. I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am coming to punish every one for what he has done. That sort of thing.”

Rahman heard Alireza whisper, “
When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars scatter and the oceans roll together; when the graves are hurled about; each soul shall know what it has done, and what it has failed to do.
”

The others, fallen silent, were staring at him. Had he spoken in English or in Arabic? She couldn’t remember. Probably the latter. His English wasn’t really that good.

“And yet,” said Kincaid, “
I
know the Space-Time Juggernaut is real.”

“And I. “ Somber-faced Genda said, “
Al-Infitahr
82:1. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this business.” He turned to back to the main conversation, and said, “We’re safe enough, here in the Pseudouniverse, whether inside the script manager, or back in the main thread. I don’t think it matters.”

“Unless,” said Amaterasu, “the parent Creation that led to the Ohanaic subset is rectified.”

Strange. I didn’t notice she’d moved away from Brucie, had come to sit by Genda’s side again. The little American was focused on the tall black thing now. Tarantellula? Quite focused, in fact. Surely he wasn’t thinking...

Laing said, “No one knows what that is. Beyond the audience track, there may be no more than some prehyperspatial variation of Earth. As long as they keep their noses out of other people’s business and stay home where they belong, we’re safe enough.”

Genda said, “I’ve had time to sample a number of the script manager’s alternate histories. In most timelines, Earthmen stay home.”

Laing said, “In most timelines, Earthmen are extinct. Or never existed.”

Rahman thought,
Script manager
. Interesting concept. How does he knows those timelines aren’t just more... stories?

Kincaid said, “Scavengers never figured any of this out. They treated the Colonial gate system more or less like a set of interstellar transporters, even though they knew that wasn’t the case, knew they were loose in the Multiverse. That’s why it took
us
so long to figure out what was really going on. I think maybe the Scavengers thought if they stayed away from the probability manager, the Jug’d just let them be.”

Genda stretched, leaning back in his chair, reaching out to put his arm around Amaterasu’s shoulders. “Come with us. My ship’s up in the hills. We can reach one of the deep space gates and get out of this skein entirely.”

Alireza: “And go where?”

He smiled. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for the last four hundred years. I’ve picked up a clue here and there, even some good ones right here on Arrasûn. I’ve got a good idea where to go next.”

“And do what?”

Rahman thought, Good question. Go off to God knows where and find... what? Why? Were just
lost
.

Genda said, “I think maybe it’s the Space-Time Juggernaut we’re looking for. I’d like to go home again. Or at least to somewhere, somewhen I can pretend is home. Somewhere I can imagine is safe. Jug alone knows where that might be.”

Alireza’s voice was oddly strained: “You sound like you’re talking about God.”

Genda merely stared at him, not quite smiling.

Is that what he thinks, then? Does he believe this... Jug is God? Cold thought. Could
I
believe that? I never
really
believed in God. Not in my heart of hearts. What if... just that. What
if
?

Laing said, “I think you’re right. Let’s go.”

Jensen: “
Us
? We can’t do that. We’re not real.”

Laing said, “Sure we can. And, out of skein, we’re as real as any of these
people
.”

“Well...” Red ant wifey tugging on his arm, going
tingety-ting
, Jensen making
clangclang
right back. He looked at Laing and said, “She doesn’t want me to leave. I think.”

Laing smirked. “Bring her along, asshole.”

A glance at his ant, a worried look. “But...”

“Look, we’re damned well off-script now. Someone
else
is living our lives. We’re dead. If we don’t go with them,
you
go back to inactive routine status ‘til somebody needs parts for a hero. Think about it.”

“Um. Well. You’ve got a point there.” And
clingety-cling
to the antwife.

Rahman leaned forward slowly, feeling the intensity build. Going forward now, forward into... ? Not exactly the unknown. Forward into another dream? Subaïda Rahman, loose among all the worlds that could ever be? No so much like that other dream, a dream in which I ranged forward in the name of Humanity, but... she said, “How can you leave the story for which you were made? Characters in a book are... fixed.”