The Transmigration of Souls (32 page)

What must that have looked like, to Subaïda Rahman? Pathetic, most likely. Pornography remembered. Time spent masturbating to images of beautiful women masturbating while they dream of beautiful men.

Do no women masturbate to images of handsome men masturbating while they dream of handsome women? No. Of course not. Don’t be silly. When women masturbate, it means they’re... sensual. Alive. When men masturbate, it means they’re alone.

Am I alone now?

That God-forsaken prick down there thinks you’re alone.

Go ahead, Omry Inbar. Reach into your head. Pick out any woman at all, or no woman at all. We’ve been remembering Hiba a lot lately, haven’t we? She was a good one. Lively when you wanted her to be lively; quiet, soft, submissive, when that’s what was needed.

o0o

Gray stone castle. Noonday sun. Brilliant sunshine flooding straight down out of the sky. Ling Erhshan filled his lungs with fresh, clean air, filled his lungs and thought, It’s... just the way I always imagined it would be. A faint, familiar whiff of something like gunpowder in the air. The way I imagined gunpowder ought to smell. The smell of fireworks on New Year’s Day. Fireworks crackling around the edges of the dancing parade dragon, fireworks hanging above doorways...

 Why gunpowder? Gunpowder the smell of excitement, of newness, promise of the future to an orphan boy.

Dark buildings all around, bright streets stretching away into the distance, filled with bustling, metallic crowds. This city is just big enough that I can see the roofs of the more distant buildings, tilted slightly towards me. Curvature. I wanted to say, the curvature of the Earth.

Memory of standing atop
Gonggashan
, one icy day, under a blue sky so sharp it seemed to cut right through my eyes. Seven thousand five hundred ninety meters. Oxygen masks for the weak. Weak like me.
Wutongqiao
visible in the distance, far to the east. Tiny city. Like toys on the horizon. Through binoculars, the misty buildings seems to lean strangely, as if they were falling away from me, falling into the east...

Beyond this city, here and now, red landscape rendered indistinct by blowing dust, imaginary horizon line far above the level of the streets, disappearing into pink mist, mist growing weaker and weaker, finally turning blue so very far away.

Out there, somewhere, beyond the blue, was only more land. Would you go home if you could, Ling Erhshan? No. Here I could wear a sword, carry a gun, walk like a man among men. Here I could be everything I’m not...

Image of himself, slack-bellied, flabby-armed, wielding a long sword, wielding it in single combat with a muscleman from the cover of one of those old American paperbacks. Image of a Frazetta hero swinging his shiny blade, blade cleaving Ling Erhshan’s neck. Ling Erhshan’s grimacing head leaping from his shoulders, bouncing off the edge of a wooden table, disappearing with a splash into that famous butt of ale.

It took time, but we finished pissing at last
.

Where was that from?
The Long Ships
. Bengtson. Red Orm and Tokë Gray-Gull’s Son. My Lord Almansur. Thorkel the Tall and Ethelred the Redeless... That’s what would happen to me, if I tried to walk like a man, even here.

But, home? I never had a home. Home was inside the books. Inside the stories. Dale Millikan was my mother and father. I
so
longed to be Dorian Haldane.

Remember how hard it was for Haldane to adapt to the world he found beyond the nuclear singularity? Seasoned combat veteran, armed with early twenty-first century military weapons. And he almost didn’t survive. Haldane facing his first swordsman, responding with bayonet drill. Then lying on the ground, in shock, by the corpse of his vanquished foe, while laughing warriors sewed and bandaged a huge, terrible cut across his shoulder...

What would I do? Wave a calculator in their faces? Make engineering magic? You are trying to make yourself feel bad, Ling Erhshan. Trying to make yourself be no more than the brave little scientist who went to the Moon.

It isn’t working. The blood is pounding in your veins. Look! See where you are! I’m in Heaven, that’s where I am...

He smiled, squared his shoulders, turned and walked inside. Somewhere, the others would be having breakfast. Time to face the new day, if that’s what it was. New day under a noonday sun.

What will happen next, I wonder? Thin smile, pleased smile, almost a fatuous smile. Doesn’t matter. It will be something. That’s all that matters. I’m in a world where
something
will happen.

Remember how Dorian Haldane felt? He said, I’ve come to a time and place where it doesn’t matter that I’m fifty-four years old. Suddenly, somehow, I’ve stopped thinking about the day I’ll die.

o0o

All around her, the pale world rose up toward a misty infinity. Subaïda Rahman stood at the rail, holding on, as the cruiser
Anotar
slid away from the landing stage, slid away from the stone city of Yttria, sliding away into the pale blue Hesperidian sky.

Floating like a soap-bubble, she thought, propellers turning lazily at the stern, driving us upward into nothingness. Somewhere on the other side of the blue... Heart of Darkness. She made it into an Arabic phrase, murmured it to herself. Nothing.
Koro’mal’luma
had a certain air of menace, but...

The Land of Awful Shadow. That was better. The awe of God Himself; Shadows in Shayol.

A short distance away, Ling Erhshan stood at the rail, peaceful, seeming to smile, if only to himself, looking backward, watching the city fade into distance, reddening with shadows as it grew smaller and smaller still. Edgar at the helm of this somewhat larger ship, watching where they were headed, though up there was nothing but blue sky.

What does he see? Nothing? She could imagine the ship following a long chord across empty space, an ingeodesic terminating on this world’s... what? Gateway to some remote Hell? Oh,
Allah
... I was never a religious woman, but I’m afraid now. What if it’s all... true? What if I’m
not
lost in a dream? What if I fall into the fire?

There’d been a popular American VR entertainment released just before the ships had come back from the Moon, just before they’d slammed the door in the world’s face.
Inferno
. Not quite up to the standard of the Orgasm Hat, but still, that one image, that one burst of crude sensation, as she’d waded out into the Lake of Boiling Blood...

Behind Edgar, Amanda Grey and Astrid Kincaid, one bright with metal, the other merely metal-bright, the two of them shoulder-to-shoulder, not holding onto anything, arms folded across sturdy breasts. Sufficient unto themselves. Complete. Is that the word I’m looking for? Something in Edgar’s eyes, when he looks at his knight-errant. Does she see?

What do we expect to find in the Heart of Darkness? The Gateway home? They say it is lost and gone forever. No one really believes that. If we believed it, we’d simply... stop. Maybe we’d all like to stop. We just can’t say it to each other.

By the aft rail, beyond which the propellers spun, Omry Inbar sat, one arm draped lazily overboard, looking downward through turbulent air, downward at the ground. On his knee... She looks like a little goddess, Aarae does. Like a little naked goddess. Inbar stroking her hair gently. Talking to her. Touching her four tiny wings. Little goddess nuzzling against his hand.

Rahman felt sick for a moment, but... It’s only the stories that we tell that make sex a lovely moment lost in eternity. It’s only the stories that make it... love. A man holds you, warms to you, makes you warm to him, and pleasure, and pleasure... Maybe you waken in the night, when the warmth has grown cold and nasty, cold and sticky between your legs.

Toward the bow, looking outward into the empty sky, Lord Genda Hiroshige, standing handsome and stalwart, one arm around Amaterasu’s back, riding lightly, just above her hips. The robot was saying something, speaking to him, gesturing with one hand, out into the vacant blue. Maybe she can see beyond its veil, see what we cannot. Her other hand was on his back, stroking gently. Knowing. Knowing him. 

That faint red fuse of... is it anger or envy? Anger at him for accepting her manufactured servitude? Accepting it as the face of love? Or do I envy her for living the imaginary love the rest of us only long for? How do they
feel
?

Tarantellula sitting not far away, sitting on the deck, muscular back braced against the cabin wall, little Brucie cradled like a child in her arms, chattering away, waving his arms, this and that, one thing and another, while stolid black Tarantellula merely smiled and nodded like an indulgent mother. With her hand gently resting between his legs. What is that all about?

Jensen and Laing? Standing together. Holding hands. Murmuring to each other, leaning close. I remember him holding the shards of his red ant woman clutched to his breast, sobbing like a man who’d lost... everything. How can he forget so soon? Cold voice from somewhere inside her. These are...
imaginary
people. Some creature of the night in some faraway thread on some disconnected skein, some creature sitting before a...
creation
machine, building, building, imagining their souls. Hard to imagine being such a creator, harboring multitudes within my head.

Beyond the ship, here and now, they’d flown so high that the ground beneath them grew pale and misty, until it seemed to disappear altogether, leaving them to drift in a void of endless blue, only the spark of the noonday sun to guide them. That and gravity’s implicit...
down
.

Go down then. Downward to Hesperidia. Downward to the Heart of Darkness. Downward to the Land of Awful Shadow. Downward to the earth below, like the ants we are.

o0o

 Standing at the rail behind the root of the flier’s bowsprit, Kincaid watched it grow out of nothingness. First a sense that there was... something, out in the blue void. Something just behind the featureless shield of the sky. Clouds?

There was a description of something like that in one of Dale’s silly damned books. Mariners lost at sea. Lost on the bosom of one of the Moon’s vast oceans, the Sea of Tranquility, perhaps. Sitting downcast on their raft, drifting, drifting for terrestrial days on end beneath a slow-moving, torrid Lunar sun, Earth hanging motionless in the sky while the Sun slid to zenith and beyond.

Dorian Haldane, ever brooding, standing in the center of the raft, faithful, loving Valetta holding onto his leg, shading her eyes with one terribly sunburnt hand. In the distance, they would see something like the shadow of rounded mountains.

There were no rounded mountains on Dorian Haldane’s Moon, a distant relative of old Bonestell’s Moon, a Moon of immense, vertical peaks... I laughed at him about that. Bonestell expected sharp peaks only because he thought, with no wind and water to wear them down...

Dale grinning at her, a hint of anger in his eyes. What difference does it make? It’s tall, angular mountains that are lovely, evocative...

Sliding a hand up her thigh: Like you...

Silly bastard.

Clouds behind the sky now?

No, a patch of... growing detail. Faraway landscape making itself known below them. Something in the middle of it all, bulging up, dark, blue-black, like the shadow of a bruise, rounded now, reaching... Leaning on the rail beside her, Amanda Grey said, “Koro’mal’luma’s moon.”

As simple as that. Dark body looming out of shadow, growing large, features on its surface, shiny seas, continents, rivers, tiny white clouds, the larger landscape of Hesperidia hanging behind it. Are there ships on those tiny seas? Tiny ships, with little mariners to sail them?

Dale would’ve liked that. Would’ve liked imagining a tiny raft, with tiny Haldane upon it, drifting to nowhere with tiny Valetta by his side. Those amazingly stupid scenes he wrote, of Haldane lying atop her, fucking her, while the sun beat down on his back. She’d shaken the book in his face. Do you know what the Hell that’d be
like
? Image of Valetta with sunburnt thighs, Dorian Haldane with a red-toasted scrotum...

A shrug. What difference does it make? These are stories.

Anotar
swept close to the limb of the nameless moon and Kincaid felt some immaterial force tugging at her, invisible fingers offering to help her slip over the rail and fall, straight down into a tiny silver sea.

“What holds them up?” she said.

Amanda looked at her, puzzled. “What difference does it make? They’re up.”

All the difference in the world. And yet. They slid under the moon, slid down into the space above the Land of Awful Shadow, and Kincaid felt a hard pang grip her by the heart. Heart of Darkness, indeed. Shadowed crater, like some huge Lunar impact crater. Like that nice oblique view of Tycho I had as we orbited in, heading for the first Moonbase.

Gloomy purple countryside, vertical cliffs glittering, as if made from silver or gold, as if studded with jewels. And there, a tall, eroded central peak, reaching up almost to the moon, surmounted by... Castle. Castle shrouded in luminescent silver mist.
Flicker-flash
. A strobe of something like lightening. Amanda called back over her shoulder, “All right. Set her down anywhere.” Squire Edgar, bending to his task, grunting as he hauled on the old-fashioned spoked wheel, ship heeling hard over, sliding toward the ground.

“The castle,” Edgar murmured, “of Prince Ahriman.”

“Quest’s end.” said Amanda Grey.

End? Not just the beginning?

Kincaid, uneasy, opened her mouth, words of caution rising up, but unspoken. A soft, familiar ache in her bowels. Soldiers, everywhere, across time, dropped from helicopters into an enemy-held LZ. Soldiers spilling out of LSTs into water too deep, too far from an enemy held coast, struggling through stormy surf, while the machine guns went flicker-flash, flicker-flash, and mowed them down.

o0o

Watching the ground rise toward them, Ling Erhshan felt the excitement build in his chest. A... tightening sensation, as if I’m nervous. Agitated. It was gloomy here, light of Hesperidia’s noonday sun occluded, leaving a twilight landscape in deep purple shadow. Shadow, he realized, that was about the same shade as the ink you sometimes saw depicting shadow in old comic books.