The Transmigration of Souls (3 page)

Image. That’s me.

A not-quite-bitter thought.

Bitter? Why bother? I am going. That’s all that matters.

This is the historical cusp of all that we’ve worked for, worked already for half a generation. Because we perceived the end of human civilization, the end of history, coming over time’s horizon, we choose now to go to the Moon, then beyond. To save ourselves, and ultimately everyone else. Everyone living outside the invisible walls of Fortress America.

Historical cusp.

Strange notion.

What if we hadn’t decided to go?

What if the UAR’s politicians had squabbled and argued and fought until it was too late? Imagine, for just a moment, some other history, where the world’s population grew while its resources dwindled. Images of war and famine. Green China reaching out with all its might and all its people to take over what’s left of the Earth.

Image of some remote day, only not so remote now, image of a time no more than a century or two down the historical road. Image of squalid survivors, battling desperately for the scraps their ancestors left behind, facing an empty future, looking now at their own images of a dead, empty world. Unless...

Unless the Americans emerge. Emerge with their magical, inexplicable technologies to save us all. Or emerge with brooms of fire to sweep us all away.

The other members of the crew had already gone ahead. Mahal and Tariq, Rahman, Inbar and Zeq, already aboard, already strapped in their seats, running the engineering checks, getting ready for launch.

We keep telling ourselves about the future we imagine. Images of the Space-Faring Civilization to come. Images of escape. Escape from the forces of History. But you know, you just know, that somewhere in the councils of government, there are men who harbor darker dreams. What was it the Americans found on the Moon, three generations ago? What was it that sent them flying home, sent them into hiding?

 When we go to the Moon, first, foremost, we look for the sources of the Americans’ magic. Why else target our first landing for the site of their old polar base? Because we know they found ice there? Hardly.

Grimace of distaste. Like scavengers. After scraps.

Hard for me to concentrate today, despite decades of military discipline, despite years of piloting discipline. Despite the fact that I’ve been to orbit six times before, though I know the rituals.

This is different. Today, I’m going to the Moon.

Hard to imagine...

Head filled instead with memories of the night before. Of taking his two daughters to bed, tucking them in, kissing them good night. Thinking, I’ll already be gone when they awaken in the morning. They’ll see me on TV. See me fly away into the sky...

Memories of taking his fretful wife, of taking lovely Amîna to bed. Of making love to her, then comforting her while she cried. Nothing will happen. You’ll see. It’s just one more flight into space. Almost routine. Every part has been tested. But, if something goes wrong, you’ll be so far away...

He’d smiled and held her and lied to her.

The technicians finished zipping him in, then, smiling for the cameras, he shook hands all around and they opened the door to the catwalk, escorted him across open space to the ship. Searing desert sun, and yet it was cold out here. Would be cold to men not cocooned in spacesuits. Frosty smoke drifting off the sloping sides of the ship, just the way they had on his other launches. He stopped and looked down. Men still on the concrete below, though the ship was full of liquid oxygen and hydrogen now, checking out the first stage’s great annular engine structure.

Al-Qamar
was a brilliant engineering design, snatched from old American books, designs the Americans could have built in the twentieth century. Should have built no later than the twenty-first. The upper stage was a blunted golden cone, not so very different from the experimental SSTO designs the Americans
had
built in the 1990s.

So we went ahead and built a real aerospike engine, complete with a gas-layer heat-shield, so we could descend tail-first all the way from orbit, but it’s still the same design. Little six-man SSTO ship, able to haul a mere 20,000 kilograms to low earth-orbit.

Until we made a much larger one and made this ship its cargo.

The lower stage was chopped off, ending in a frustum on which the upper stage would sit for the ride above the atmosphere. They’d covered that with a temporary faring for the radio-controlled booster’s one ride to orbit, its one test flight.

Almost lost her, too, when we had trouble with the comsat link.

Today, the booster wasn’t going all the way into space. After placing
al-Qamar
on a 12,000-kilometer suborbital trajectory, she’d brake and come down at at-Ta’ïf airfield, not far from Mecca. The Faithful, on their
hajra
, would see her fly overhead, would see her land.

A moment of remembering that other desert, the desert of his childhood, far to the east, the land beyond the sunrise. An adolescent moment, sitting astride his horse, hooves clattering on a rocky stone desert of degraded lava flows, dry gunpowder smell in his nose, smell of the desert wind.

A rich man’s son on a rich man’s horse, on weekend holiday from a rich man’s private school. Pretending. Pretending. And yet... Wind in my face, sharp, abrading skin surface. Brilliant sun glaring in my eyes, beating down on a Bedawi’s
ghutra
, cloth headdress topped with a golden
igal
it was true, but a
ghutra
nonetheless... Surge of the horse between my legs, chuffing bellows of its breathing as we rode along.

Pretending. Pretending. Yet sons of the desert still.

Southern Hejaz, the ancient land, the heartland. Not so very far from where I was born. In the old days, before the Republic, they would’ve called me a prince. He turned and walked toward
al-Qamar
’s hatch, where more technicians were waiting, and thought. Prince?
Wállah
! Colonel suits me just fine.

o0o

Just a memory within a memory, momentary, almost elusive, almost illusory. Ahmad Zeq could recall sitting in a hard wooden chair in the hallway at school. Hallway in the engineering building. Sitting with the other graduates. Mostly silent. Hot, sweaty silence in the hallway. An occasional soft murmur, one sufferer to another. Mostly silence. A stir of cloth, a rustling whisper of linen as someone shifted uncomfortably. An involuntary intestinal rumble, someone trying desperately not to fart. The soft cluck of a dry swallow.

My own thoughts. Desperate. Silly. Childish. Pleading.

If it please you, O God, this poor, unworthy homosexual man would like to pass his Engineering Board Orals.

And then. Back then. Those ridiculous inner words triggering a memory of the previous night. I should have been studying. Or sleeping. So I’d be fresh and rested for the ordeal. Just one thin beer, to put me at my ease. A thin beer, like I was a European or a Christian or a Jew or an Atheist, I said, because a good Muslim’s coffee will only keep me awake. And that fucking Englishman grinning up at me from between my legs, down some dark and stinking alleyway, kneeling there, grinning up at me, smacking his blubbery lips and croaking, “Jism-Allah!”

I should have kneed him right in his weak English chin.

Then back in the hot, stifling hallway. Wishing he’d slept instead of partying the night away. Tired. Tired. Tired. And then the proctor’s voice. “Zeq? Your turn.” Exhausted, unworthy homosexual man, shuffling off to bare his neck for the headsman’s sharp sword. Passing the Oral Boards anyway, examiners seeming to accept his occasional helpless giggle in the midst of some serious problem, as if it happened all the time.

Nerves, they’d be thinking. Just nerves. I passed. Passed, and put my feet on the road that led to
al-Qamar
... Flash to present. Attention to task at hand.
Al-Qamar
...

Ahmad Zeq put his hand on the master switch, let his neck fall back onto the headrest, eyes on his readouts, and listened while Alireza counted down. Counted down like a hero in some old adventure movie, Arabic numbers like sharp little snarls.

It-neyn
.

Wehid
.

Sif
.

He snapped the switch in with his thumb, and muttered, “
Yibtidi
.” Soft, hardly audible, yet seeming to echo through the ship.
Begin
. The mission clock, set to 00:00:00:00, began to advance, red numbers flickering, seconds on the far left, which would lead to minutes, then hours, then days on the far right. Two weeks. Fourteen days. Then we’ll be home again, our little ship setting down on a broad concrete pad off the end of the military runway...

No noise. Nothing so dramatic. Just a faint shivering at first, movement transmitted through structural members, through his chair and into his body. Everything all right so far, sensors from the booster’s annular combustion chamber reporting temperature and pressure, reporting the results of stratified ignition. Thrust stabilizing, pressure building up...

Zeq looked up from his console, looked out through the pilot’s window, and the bright yellow landscape of the Sahara desert just went down, dropped out of sight, as
al-Qamar
rose on its pillar of translucent fire, like an elevator into the sky.

What shall I say? thought Ahmad Zeq. To the world, he whispered, “
Alhamdulilah
.”

o0o

From a little more than 200 kilometers up, the Earth turning below was, for Ling Erhshan, an unbelievable sight. No amount of preparation, the viewing of any number of old films and tapes and VR sensies... Not Mercury-Gemini-Apollo, nor all those old IMAX films, nothing the Russians had done, nothing from the American Renaissance and their return to the Moon in the middle of the last century...

Nothing. That was it. Absolutely nothing.

While Chang Wushi twiddled his pilot’s controls, muttering singsong under his breath, a man caught up in the heavy work of talking to himself, while Da Chai monitored the ship’s systems and struggled with a recalcitrant rendezvous radar, Ling stared out the window, spellbound.

Below, the Pacific was a featureless expanse of shiny blue water. Glittering. Shimmering. Catching sunlight off the wavetops. Not a cloud in sight. How can that be? Not a cloud in sight, and I can see for ten thousand miles. Down by the horizon, where a little band of light blue air separated the dark blue of sea from the black of space, moonrise. Full Moon bulging up from the wall of the world. Somewhere, out there, my Arab comrades are halfway to the Moon. Regret? No. The more who go, the more likely we are to stay. This time.

The image of their ship, seen on the video net just hours before the first Chinese tanker was due to lift off had been... well. “Futuristic” was the word he wanted to use. Though they were all living in the future now, that was certain. A legacy from Twentieth Century America. A legacy from all those pathetic old writers who dreamed of space and more space, of impossible things like time travel and silly things like pills taking the place of food...

Da Chai said, “Professor. I need your help.”

Terse. Sharply spoken. A rebuke.

But the view out the window...

He turned away with a sigh. “The problem?”

Da Chai tapped the radar CRT. “The periodic update is leaving ghosts. Well. I think they’re ghosts. But they also get updated, and now I can’t tell...” Frustration in his voice.

Ling looked at the screen and shrugged. “Yes. We never did solve the sprite problem. If Chen Li were here...”

“But he’s not. Can you fix it? Do we need to get him on the radio?” Tapping on the screen again, angrily. “One of these things is the Tanker. I need to know which one.”

A slow nod, another sigh. Pull yourself together. Transcend. This is an adventure, yes, with so many aesthetic qualities, but... he folded down the radar computer’s hidden keypad and tapped, blanking the image, scrolling numbers, reading stored values, data from error traps they’d left in place when the schedule slipped and the software wasn’t quite ready. Yes. Not quite ready. Just ready enough.

The radar control subsystem had been whipped up from a twenty-year-old Japanese design. You’d think, they could come up with a
new
design, somehow, some time... But, under Chinese tutelage, the Japanese seemed to lose their spark of usefulness.

Tap. Tap-tap. The screen blanked and came up again, this time with only one image of the tanker, bracketed by glowing white numbers. Range. Relative velocity. Offset vector...

Chang Wushi said, “Never mind. I’ve made visual contact.”

A look of repressed hostility from Da Chai. Ling Erhshan smiled and shrugged. I told you, if only Chen Li were along... No point in that. By the living spirits that inhabit everything, we’re going to the Moon! Going last, it’s true, but going. He felt the skin of his face flush, warm with delight as he turned back to the window...

Sudden pang. The unmanned tanker was hanging in space, motionless, a few hundred meters away, sunlight almost blinding on its featureless, white-painted hull.

I can’t believe I am actually here.

Chang Wushi muttered, “We crash into that thing, you’ll believe it.”

If only for just a moment.

o0o

“It looks,” said Kincaid, “like an old MiG-21 standing on its tail.”

The little techie, who’d said his name was Bruce, stood quietly at her side, looking at the Scavenger scoutship, hands in the pockets of his artfully roughed-up blue jeans, hair blowing in the warm, humid Pacific breeze. “Guess so.”

Tall, thin, aerodynamically clean hull. Flat nose inlet with a shock-deflector cone poking out. Smallish triangular wings midway up. Four skewed-vane landing legs around the base. No bubble canopy, though. Little round windows, like the windows on an old-fashioned airliner, arrayed in neat little rows. And sixty meters tall, four meters in diameter. Painted silver. Other techies clustered around that base, doing something to the engine. Men in uniform going up and down a ramp that extruded from between two landing legs, leading to a small, brightly-lit hole near the bottom of the hull.