The Transmigration of Souls (4 page)

If this was a
real
rocket, they’d be walking into a fuel tank.

Real rocket. Like the ones we had back then.

Not this magic thing.

I wonder how much this is like the one Ethwÿn Nasóól found, when he came through the stargate on Æghóng and found his first abandoned Colony? Maybe like this, maybe not. Visuals in Scavenger literature were hardly evocative. More like exploded diagrams, interladen with numbers and subillustrations.

Language hard to read too, even when you knew it well. Not like a human language. Even the driest technical literature more like some complex form of poetry, vertical rows of complexly structured pseudo-ideograms, with parenthetical remarks strung out on either side, paragraphs, if it was fair to call them that, more or less like a Scrabble board after the game is done.

The techie, a scrawny man with thin, sparse sandy hair who looked like he ought to have thick glasses covering his washed-out blue eyes, elbowed her hard in the ribs, standing way closer than he needed to, and said, “Sure are glad you folks decided you need this. We’ve had her ready to fly for fifty years.”

Looking up at her, eyes sparkling.

Not looking into my eyes, no. Looking at my tits, the way they push out the front of this old uniform tunic. Well, you little shit...

The man had a habit of ostentatiously pissing in public, too, bellying up to the side of whatever building was handy, unreeling a pecker twice the size it ought to be, looking around to see who was watching.

All right. You can have anything you want, these days, so little Brucie here bought himself a big dick. All right. So why is he still only five-three? My toy soldiers all look like fucking Neanderthals and gorillas and comic-book monsters. Is that any better?

Brucie elbowed her in the ribs again, standing closer still, and said, “Ah, say, Sergeant-Major?” She looked down at him. Sudden thickening of a fake Southern accent. “I wonder if y’all’d like to go off with me fer a quick fuck?” And now, eager like a puppy.

Disbelief. Here I am, standing next to a man who may be a hundred-fifty years old, and he says...

“Come on, Sarge. Be a sport.”

All right. Hundred-fifty-year-old teenager. Sudden memory of Roddie opening up his birthday present. Amaterasu awakening, filling up with ersatz love. And Roddie bending her over the table, mushing her lovely little tits down in the birthday cake, cornholing her right in front of everyone, while his guests clapped and cheered him on.

A whole country full of centenarian teenagers.

Because never dying means you don’t
really
have to grow up.

Brucie reached out, as if reaching for one of her breasts.

“In your fucking dreams, asshole.”

A sudden crafty look. “Yeah? Well, I’m sure your specs are in the net somewhere, Sarge. In my dreams, as you say.”

If this was some old movie, I’d reach down now and rip that pretty little pecker out by its bioengineered roots. Still, no rule says you
can’t
grow up. If you want to. She glanced at her chronometer, and said, “You just get my ship ready, Brucie. You’ve got about four hours left.”

Craft displaced by ingenuousness once again. He said, “That so, Sarge?” A shrug. “Well, we get to fly our toy. That’s all that really matters.” And a serious look, gazing fondly at the little Scavenger spaceship, superimposed against the broad, flat blue Pacific.

Something, Kincaid thought, we have in common. She looked up into the sky, and said, “Yeah. We shouldn’t have stayed home. There’s more to life than living forever.”

Softly whispered: “No shit, Sarge. No shit.”

o0o

Floating. Floating in the softest sea. No weight. No where. No when. Just floating with my eyes closed. Floating on my way to Heaven. God, I could stay like this forever. Just drifting, alone and unafraid...

Soft whisper of machinery somewhere. Faint hum of electronic something. Whisper of a turning motor. Soft tickle of air blowing in my face, just under my arms, coming from somewhere behind me. Faint itch of clinging sweat, drying sweat, hardly there, hardly there at all, just like me...

“All right. I’m ready.” Inbar’s voice, suddenly loud in her ears.

 Subaïda Rahman opened her eyes and felt her insides clench hard. Bright moonscape sweeping by below, no more than twenty kilometers straight down to the lowest plains, corroded, rolling mountains reaching up more than half that. Going by
fast
! No wind here...

Laughter. Alireza’s voice, same volume. “Your heart rate was down below 55. I thought you went to sleep.”

“Um.” Cough. A throat-clearing noise. Smooth, gray-brown plains flying under her now, running north along thirty, Mare Frigoris coming up. Just now over what? Lacus Mortis. She said, “Almost. Not quite.”

“I understand
al-Qahira Journal
ran a big article on you in this morning’s edition. They said you were very... calm, I think was the word they used.”

Inbar’s voice, fatigued, maybe a little out of breath, said, “
I’m
not calm. I’d like to get this
done
.” Though he’d been trained for zero-gee EVA, against just such an eventuality, Omry Inbar did
not
like this business of floating along in naked space. Rahman couldn’t imagine... Maybe he was just afraid. Maybe a little motion sick.

Down below, the plains were ramping up into the north polar highlands as they passed by 70N. That wide caldera coming up to the west would be Meton, meaning in another few minutes they’d be over the rim of mountains separating Peary from Rozhdestvenskiy, where the old American base lay in ruins. We ought to be down there already. Timeline shot to Hell.

She toggled the two little hand controllers on her AMU’s armrests, listened to the little peroxide thrusters stutter, noise transmitted through various structural members until it was inside her suit. Inertial tugging on her harness destroying the illusion of weightlessness for a moment, Moon moving beneath her, getting out from under her feet, going behind her back, featureless black space, starless space, sun-glare-dominated space coming round.

Al-Qamar
’s golden cone was about 200 meters away, floating free, skewed at an angle, nose away from her, foreshortened, broad annular aerospike engine bulging toward her, three landing legs down and locked... and the forth one stuck half open, main joint bent up like a dancer’s knee, Omry Inbar a fat white manikin clinging to the hull beside it, tools in place and strapped down. He said, “I need you to position the jack now.”

“All right. I hadn’t realized I’d drifted so far...” More thruster thudding from behind her back and the ship started to grow. Down near the southern horizon, far beyond the ship, Earth was a tiny blue-white sliver, mostly black and lightless now.

I’ll be almost sorry to be down on the Moon, back in gravity again. This dreamlike dance. Image of a woman, perhaps no more than fifty years old, perhaps no more than twenty years from now, dancing this dance out among the asteroids, out among the flying hills of Saturn’s ring system...

Just the second step, that’s all. Remembering President Morwar’s speech, twelve short years ago. Twelve years since President Morwar and his scientific advisors decided there was only one way out of the world’s inevitable downward spiral. One way for
us
, at any rate, for the desert UAR and its relatively small population.
We
can survive, you see. But the rest of them. They will drag us down. Forty billion people in the world today. Forty billion, of whom the Arabs constitute less than one percent. One percent of the world’s people holding five percent of all the land, holding ten percent of all the material wealth.

Compare that to the five billion already starving in the princely states of Hind, to three billion Europeans in their own patchwork quilt of tiny republics. To the seven billion of southern Africa, to the six billion in South America. To the eight billion of Greater China, Green China, which had expanded to fill Siberia and Central Asia, had come all the way to the Ural Mountains.

To the billions of southeast Asia and Mexico and Central America. Even to the hundred million of isolated Canada, to the four hundred million refugees now crowding poverty-stricken Australia’s dry red deserts...

You could look at all the old graphs and all the old plans, and you could see that no one ever extended them far enough. Far enough to see that, no matter what you did, no matter how draconian your solution, the world would come to an end, some time in the late twenty-second century, or early twenty-third.

President Morwar looking at his advisors. Gentlemen, that time is now. We have perhaps a half-century to do what we must, for, sooner or later, those starving billions will come for what we have. Come and take it, and then we’ll all go down together.

And the Americans? A shrug. Who knows what they’ll do? Waiting for them to save us would be like waiting for... I don’t know. Waiting for the Archangels to come down and wash away our sins.

I was just a graduate-school girl then, trying to pass my courses, make honors, trying to keep grope-handed professors out of my skirt without offending them.

Sharp memory of that skinny, dark Sudanese mathematics professor, the one who held the honors seminar in advanced multivariable topology. Sitting beside her that afternoon in a back corner kiosk at the library, making her suddenly
very
sorry she’d worn that short dress, putting his hand on her thigh, grinning, tucking his fingers between her knees, making that little
prying
motion...

What
now
, little girl? An “honor” mark from this greasy little man is your ticket to the next level. And you do
so
want to be accepted into the astronaut corps. Applications have to be in by the first of Hazirahn, and...

But the image that called up. Lying on her back, dress pulled up, legs spread, his garlicky hummus-breath in her face...

Mmmh. Mmmh. This feels
soooo gooood
, little girl...

Small crunch of revulsion. Not against the act, which had been... rewarding, perhaps, the few times she’d tried it with... suitable boys. No. Against the implication. The implication.

Fingers prying at her thighs now. That other hand stealing up her arm, headed, perhaps, for a breast or two...

All right. Then think of something, little girl.

She’d smiled and taken him by the hand, patted him on the wrist. “I know just how you feel, Professor Wahid. It’s so frustrating when a girl won’t just... go along with it.”

Puzzled look. “What do you mean?” Those fingers between her thighs relaxing just a bit.

“Well. You know I’m a lesbian, don’t you?”

She’d almost laughed at his comic gape. “A lesbian? But...” A gesture, at her body. Sudden quirk of anger. “But you don’t
dress
like a lesbian. You don’t...”

“My parents. My parents are
very
traditional.”

Professor Wahid then, chewing his lower lip in dismay. “Why are we here then?”

Feigned astonishment. “Why, to talk about the seminar. It’s... so seldom I get to talk to such an... intelligent, such a
learned
man.” Push a button, pull the chain...

A soft popping of backpack thrusters and the ship was a golden wall before her, Inbar’s plump face looking out at her through his helmet faceplate. Pale. Fretful. A face that pleaded, let’s be
done
with this...

Pale, fat face. Deep, brilliant, penetrating eyes. He was one of the few who’d tried to bother her, during the years of training, as she moved up and up, got on crew rosters, got up in space on orbital missions, got herself named as American Technologies Specialist on the first flight to the Moon. Bothered me. Though I wore the uniform, walked the walk, talked the talk. Told me, fatuously, insipidly, how much he
liked
women in short hair and trousers...

All right. One of the few...
cosmopolitan
enough to see through the ruse. Well, Zeq of course. But he merely thought it was funny. Offering to get her dates with his female “pals.”

She said, “Let’s go.”

Only gratitude in his eyes now. Let’s go.

o0o

Looking out one of
Ming Tian
’s small portholes from ten thousand kilometers up, the Moon was a vast yellow circle of light, a circle of harshly-lit landscape, mountains becoming
real
mountains, endless circular craters becoming visible on the face of the shadowy maria.

Over the hump now, over the hump into the Moon’s gravitational field and falling straight down.
Ming Tian
was moving slowly, no more than eight hundred kilometers an hour, bare residual velocity. But we’re falling. Falling down to the Moon. Behind them, Earth was a tiny, blue and white crescent. A lost world. I remember staring at the Moon when I was a boy...

Little boy Ling Erhshan, lying out on the orphanage fire escape, industrial stinks from the ruinous slums of Shanghai making the old brick walls of a two-hundred-year-old building seem damp and slimy, smelling the stench of Shanghai’s close-packed sixty million souls, staring up at the old white Moon. White like death. No. Always yellow to me. Warm and yellow like the sun. Yellow like life.

The orphanage had had a little library, mostly children’s primers. A few adult Chinese novels none of us could read. Some books printed in Russian we could do no more than essay, sounding out the Cyrillic characters, getting that Siberian girl, what was her name? Anyushka, to tell us what the words meant.

I remember finding that other book,
Moon Man
, printed in
pinyin
Putonghua
, Chinese language in Romanic letters, a translation of an early twenty-first century story by some writer with an unpronounceable foreign name, Dutch, maybe English, name transliterated into simplified Chinese characters that meant “thimble valley.”

Cover picture showing a muscular Caucasian hero in torn military camouflage, with sword and pistol to hand, beautiful, half-naked blond woman by his side, the two of them standing in an eldritch landscape, facing a red and blue tiger under a dark lavender sky, sky in which hung a blue-white crescent Earth. Realistic-looking Earth, because people had already seen it thus. Like the Earth hanging outside
Ming Tian
just now. The Moon I dreamed of seeing.