The Transmigration of Souls (38 page)

Some of us, she thought, do get our hearts desire.

Me?

Ling, voice hushed: “Or maybe at the River Iss...”

o0o

The two of them were alone now, gone back up into the low hill country above the river, gone away from the mingling crowds at the beach, Bruce facing her, holding her hands in his, looking into her dark eyes most of the time, marveling at their depth, at their... at their humanness? I never minded the blank white eyes. I never did. But this...

Every now and again looking away from her eyes, looking down at her new body. New? No. Her old body. Her real body. Small, pale-coffee breasts with light chocolate nipples. Smooth, slightly rounded stomach. Longish thighs. Fuzz of curly down...

She let go of his hands, grabbed his face between hers, forcing him to look into her eyes again. Smiling. “It’s me!”

You.

We’re the same height now.

Exotic black dancer fading and fading.

“Bruce...” she said, eyes earnest. Looking for something unknown? It’s... only me.

He started to say her name. Stopped. Tarantellula? Hardly. Tarantellula was tall and black, sleek and powerful, with blinding white eyes and teeth and...

She smiled, skin crinkling neatly around her eyes. “Penny.”

A momentary emptiness, then the feeling of the name clicking home. Fitting. Penny? Of course. He put his hand up and touched the coppery skin of her cheek, skin darkening and reddening as she blushed. He said, “I felt bad when you were dead. I missed you.”

Another smile. “Now you’re dead too.”

Dead. Am I? And
is
that the River of No Return Down there?

Penny put her arms around him, held him close and seemed to be trembling softly. She said, “When I woke up here and you weren’t with me...”

Nothing to say at that. Nothing to do but wrap her in your arms, press her to your bosom. Hold still. Wait. Just hold her. Penny leaned away from him a little bit. Looked down between their bodies. Looked back up at his face. Grinned. “I’m going to miss that little mouth of yours.”

I didn’t even notice it was gone. “Not the... other thing?”

A smirk. “Don’t be silly.”

“Why not? Silly’s all I’ve ever been.”

She was holding him now, in a small, warm hand, her blush deepening, giving her a ruddy tan look. “I guess maybe they have sex in Heaven after all.”

“Is that where we are? Heaven?” No streets of gold or anything.

She nuzzled against him. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter where we are.”

He put his arms around her, looking over her shoulder at the empty blue sky, and thought, No. No it does not.

o0o

Somehow, Kincaid thought, I’ve become increasingly a spectator. No one here for me. None of my long-gone lovers, none of my recently-dead friends. Who did I expect? Corky Bokaitis maybe? Reassembled bits of Barney? Heavy-booted Francis Muldoon? Hell, maybe General Athelstan came through for them after all. Maybe they’re back in Festung Amerika, safe and sound, hale and hearty. Laughing over their beer and trying to forget all this.

So who
did
I expect? Anyone at all? Don’t lie to yourself, Astrid Astride. You know what you expected, if only for a moment. And maybe they’re out here after all. Maybe they’ve just gone on ahead, boarded their little boats and gone on down Professor Ling’s River Iss. Or maybe they’re here in the crowd by the river. Maybe they just don’t want to see me again. Maybe they don’t want to know me anymore. I’m the one who got them killed.

Sitting up on a hilltop now, she could look down to the riverbank, where people milled and talked, the long-lost greeting each other, commingled with lost souls wandering alone.

God damn it. I refuse to believe we’re all dead. Nothing in this crazy Multiverse has made sense. Not from day one. Not even in the olden days, when, at least, it all seemed real.

She and Dale then, standing under a lavender sky, walking hand in hand, watching pale blue clouds float by overhead. Lying together at night beside their crackling campfire, looking upward, dreamy after sex, looking upward into a sky spangled with red and yellow stars. Even that seemed real. Even though we were close to the end of our journey.

Scientists huddling together, comparing notes. Dale Millikan forcing them to come through his newfound gate, to a world where the sky was white and the stars were black. You tell me, he’d said, where in
our
universe, there can be a sky like this. Nowhere, they’d said.

By then we were beginning to understand the relationship between the Multiverse and Quantum Holotaxial Dynamics. By then we were beginning the understand, really understand, the significance of Platonic Reality. By then we were beginning to be... afraid.

What if, we said.

What if it’s all a shadow?

o0o

They sat together at the top of a hill, sitting naked on the flat tops of broken gray boulders, stuff like water-smoothed granite warmed by the light of the sun-no-sun, boulders like the sturdy furniture of some open-air living room, looking down toward the River. Boats were setting out now, long, low punts, boats rowed by naked men and women setting out for who-knew-where.

“You get used to seeing people like this,” said Ahmad Zeq. “At first it was... quite titillating. Everybody naked all the time, most of them quite young and pretty.” He grinned at Inbar, sitting more or less glued to the side of the woman-creature Aarae. “After I’d been here a few months, though...” A shrug. A sigh. “I stopped seeing a distinction between, say, penises and noses.” A gesture downward. “Pubic hair started looking like, well, like a beard.”

Inbar was sitting rigidly beside his woman, arms stiffly around her back, fingertips resting on one pelvic blade, visible as a soft ridge under the skin. Legs held just so. Hiding... things. You could see him resisting the urge to... Hide them with a hand? Cross his legs?

The woman, though, Aarae: Untroubled, looking him up at down, inspecting his own well-tanned crotch with evident... expertise? A small moment of discomfort...

Inbar said, “How could you have been here for months? You’ve only been dead for a week or so...”

Memory of that death, blind searing horror, so much more than mere pain. Of lying there under the bright blue sky of an unknown world, feeling that thing worry at him with its jaws, flesh tearing, like lambs’ flesh prepared for the spit. The knowledge, certain knowledge, that nothing could now keep you from falling down into the final darkness. And the realization that you didn’t want to go...

Zeq opened his mouth, started to speak. Stopped. Grinned. “I was going to tell you to remember your
Quran
.”

Inbar flushed, looking away from him. “Well. Surprise.
Shall
the wicked burn in Hell upon Judgment Day? And never escape? Whereabouts do the righteous dwell in eternal bliss? Next hill maybe?” Jews in Europe familiar with the New Testament, perhaps. Jews in the Old Soviet Union sitting down and reading through
Kapital
, hiding out in Nazi Germany, pouring by candle light over
Mein Kampf
.

Zeq said, “I don’t think this is Heaven, Omry.”

“Hell, then? Or Christian Purgatory?”

He smiled. “I’ve met a lot of people since I’ve been here.” Another shrug, sigh built right into it. “There’s a city about 4500 kilometers from here, a place called
Thanáttas
, where they’ve build a great silver arch right across the river. The mayor there is an Italian fellow by the name of Alighieri whose been here for some time. He’s got a theory or two that might interest you.”

Dazed look on Inbar’s face then. “Dante is here?”

“This is where the dead go, Omry Inbar. All of them, from everywhere. Some remain naked Pilgrims, go down the River to... wherever it goes. Others stay behind. Make new lives for themselves. New eternal lives. Mayor Alighieri calls them the Not-So-Virtuous Pagans.”

“What about you? I see you’re still naked.”

“I wasn’t, for a while. I made it to Thanáttas, stayed there for a while. It’s a nice place for a young, healthy homosexual to sojourn.” Almost a smirk on his lips now.

“Why didn’t you stay there?”

“You get tired of being on vacation pretty quickly. I was... ready to move on when Colonel Alireza found me.”

“Found you...” Qamal ibn-Aziz Alireza, who’d been dead for mere hours.

“We’re going down the River, Omry. We’d like you to come too.”

Inbar, staring at him, then turning, looking down at his fairygirl come to life. Brown-eyed girl looking back, steady. Telepathy in their exchange of glances. Do we need Heaven? Or is eternal life enough? Eternal life together.

Zeq smiled, working hard to suppress his own intense longing. Longing for something that can never be... He said, “You can stay if you want, Omry. There’s a nice Greek city about three hundred kilometers away, if you can get there without some barbarian tribe or another grabbing you. How’s your
koinë
?”

“
Zoë mou sas agapo
.” Then looking down at Aarae again. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

A frown. A thoughtful look. She said, “Better than the River, I think. Where will the others go? Down the River? Or are there other choices?”

Zeq said, “You’d all better talk to Smoking Mirror. He knows what’s what in the World Without End. At least as much as anyone
can
.”

“And you?”

 Wan smile. “For me... I think, somewhere, if I am lucky, Allah waits.”

o0o

Sitting in another parlor made of rocks, atop another hill looking down on the River Iss, Subaïda Rahman scowled and, in Arabic, said, “Will you
stop
looking at my crotch...” Blushing with anger and embarrassment. Left unsaid: And, while you’re at it, stop playing with that damned... thing of yours.

Alireza continued to look downward, staring at whatever she couldn’t cover with pressed-together legs, for a moment longer, then looked up, looked into her angry eyes, odd, distant expression in his own, hand still resting on a half-erect penis, thumb gently massaging rubbery flesh. “I haven’t been with a woman since the night before we left for the Moon, months ago now, for me. Not since that last night with my wife...”

Brief, hazy memory of Mrs. Alireza, first name already forgotten, a child clinging to each hand, watching forlornly from behind a rope barrier as six spacesuited astronauts walked down a long red carpet, waving to technicians and 3V cameras, then boarded a van for the short ride to the launch pad. Two weeks ago? No more than that, surely...

And now. Now you come and hit on me, of all people? Come here and grab yourself and smirk at my groin? She could feel her anger sharpen. What about all the other naked women you’ve met, since arriving here? Why...

Alireza said, “When I was a boy, I used to buy French magazines, kept them
carefully
hidden from my parents. Wonderful stuff. After I grew up, found my first girlfriends, got to know what sex was all about, even after I got married, I would sometimes buy one. And keep it hidden from my wife. I suppose her feelings would have been hurt if...”

Anger flattening out, growing stale. Why are you telling me this?

He said, “I find myself wondering if I betray Amîna now, masturbating as I look at live naked women.”

The image was unpleasant and ludicrous. Not the image he’d presented to the world, to all of us, only a short time ago. What would the newfaq services say, presented with the image of Colonel Sir Qamal ibn-Aziz Alireza, hero of the spaceways, hiding in a lavatory somewhere, holding his penis in one hand, a dirty French magazine in the other, drooling at the carefully-exposed genitals of naked whores, groping away at himself like a teenaged boy?

Alireza smiled at her. “Where are you now, Subaïda? Where’ve you gone?”

She only stared at him, still angry, unwilling to answer. What business is it of yours?

He said, “There’ve been plenty of temptations. Being naked seems to bring out the... very best in women. Men too. Even here, where everyone is young and strong, I’m a cut above the average.”

As always, Colonel Sir Masturbating Astronaut. Acidly, she said, “I’m sure any number of women would fall supine at your approach.”

“Prone.”

“What?”

“Prone means lying on your back. Supine is face-down.”

Another long stare, anger at the notion he thought she was misusing her words. For men, sex is predation, sex is power. Power is the ability to use a defeated man any way you see fit. Power is the will to use a woman the same way you’d use a defeated man... Suddenly furious, she said, “Is that all you’ve been doing since you died? Is that all anyone does here?” Anger. Anger that life-after-death turns out to be just more of the same old shit.
Is
there no escape?

“Subaïda...”

Angry: “What?”

“All the dead come here.”

“That’s what they say.”

“If the Earth, our Earth, is gone, swept away by this... Space-Time Juggernaut...” Do not even
suggest
the Name of God in this context. “Then Amîna may be here somewhere already. Waiting for me.” That odd, odd shine in his eyes. That faraway look. He said, “I always wanted us, one day, to be together in Heaven. Not the storytellers’ Heaven of the ever-virginal Houris...” A Heaven like unto Valhalla, “but the real Heaven. The Heaven reserved for families.” Almost a pleading look. “I thought it would be better if, when I found her, I could still be... faithful. Pure?” Searching for just the right word.

Rahman frowned, looking away from him, off into the infinite blue distances of the World Without End, and thought,
Pure
. Pure but for the magazines and masturbations. Pure but for the usual thoughts of men. Men, smiling men, with their fingers in your vagina, groping, anticipating a happy moment of substitution, spinning out their love-words for you on automatic pilot, while their consciousness remained in their fingers...

She said, “Do you really think Heaven is... down the River?”

“That’s what they say.”

“What if it’s not?”