The Transmigration of Souls (44 page)

I don’t want to be the last one. Mahal and Tariq, exploded on the Moon. Zeq, red ruin beneath Permian jaws. Alireza, broken and dead when it was all... hardly begun. Zeq and Alireza, so briefly, found again, gone now down a hideously false River of No Return...

Ling and that bizarre substitute-Edgar, laughing and laughing together at the truth, the bald man saying, Oh, it’s not
quite
the River Iss, but it’s just as much a lie...

Offering to send a Search and Rescue airship down the River to look for them all, Zeq and Alireza, Jensen and the antgirl, that ancient, idiotic
boy
and his little brown monster...

Long silence. Then Laing: No. Let them be. Then a nod from Kincaid. They’ll find what they’re looking for. But...

Holding Inbar’s hands, facing him, beseeching: “
Why
?”

Face shining with happiness. Pulling his hand from hers, reaching out to put his arm around Aarae, pretty, pretty girl, seeming, somehow, to grow just a little prettier every time I look at her...

A hollow pang of something terribly like jealousy formed in the pit of her stomach.

Inbar said, “Maybe Heaven is just a place where you can be happy, Subaïda. I’m happy now. I don’t have any reason at all to go on.”

Voice very flat: “This isn’t Heaven, Omry.”

A wry smile. “I know that. But it’s a place where you can keep on looking. Keep looking until you’ve found... whatever it is you’re looking for. I think I’ve found that, at least. And maybe that’s all that Heaven means.”

An adolescent boy’s adolescent woolgathering. Happy because he’s found a willing set of female genitals and a bed to lie in. I thought he was... more than that. Maybe none of them are.

“You can stay too, Subaïda. There’s something here somewhere for you, I’m sure of it.”

Frowning, looking down at the ground. Feeling defeated. “I don’t think so.” A gesture then at Aarae, close by his side, holding his hand. “What’s here for you that you can’t take away?”

He laughed. “A whole world. A whole infinite world. This place alone... High America is a nearly circular plateau maybe five thousand kilometers across...”

An immensity, all right. She said, “You’re not an American, Omry.”

A dark look forming. “No. But I’m not an Arab, either. I’m a Jew. Do you know what that means?”

She waited for him to tell her, growing impatient.

He said, “When I was a kid, I used to wonder where dead Jews went when they died. Not to the Christians’ Heaven, surely, with its streets paved in gold. Not to your Muslim Paradise, despite all those tempting little ever-virginal houris.”

Making her angry now. How dare he...

He said, “When I was a kid, I used to wish for Valhalla. Not the cute little Valkyries, I’m afraid, but visions of endlessly linked pork sausages, popping with fat and reeking of thyme...”

“What the Hell are you talking about?”

“I know where dead Jews go now, Subaïda. Dead Jews go to America. America is Heaven.”

Looking into his eyes then, she was certain he’d gone mad at last.

And he said, “We didn’t come out here to find Heaven, Subaïda. Don’t you remember? We just went up to the Moon to save ourselves, our people, our country, and maybe humanity too. That’s all over. Gone. Finished! Let the others go on looking for their imaginary God. I... have what I need.”

Anger, mingling with resentment. So he has what he needs and the rest of us can... go piss in the wind. But what do you need, Subaïda Rahman? The Moon is gone. The past is gone. No road home again. Even if I imagined it was ever
my
home. What am I looking for? What’s my part in this?

A distant, fatalistic shrug.

She said, “Well. Good-bye then, Omry. Nice meeting you, Aarae.” And turned away.

o0o

Standing by the side of the runway, arm around Aarae’s warm shoulders, Omry Inbar watched them board the big plane, this mysterious Edgar and his crew of immortal savants, Subaïda Rahman and the other six survivors of the long quest.

Not many of them left now. Rahman’s the last Arab, Ling the only Chinaman since near the beginning. Kincaid the last of the Americans. Passiphaë Laing the only survivor from
Crimson Desert
’s cast. Amanda Grey no more than the hollow shell of magic Hesperidia...

Lord Genda Hiroshige and his unrobot Amaterasu still walking hand in hand, the last of their kind. Lovers to the end, perhaps. To what end? Why should they go on, if they have each other? Genda’s idiotic quest for God? He should give that up. There’s no God out there. In any event, no God who can give him back his lost universe.

He’s found Amaterasu. The World Without End has made her real. That should be enough. Aarae snuggling close under his arm, arm around his waist, holding him close. It’s enough for me. Looking down at her then: Is it enough for her? I’m not much of a prize, am I? Why should she want the likes of me? She smiled up at him then, eyes dancing, and he thought: With luck, I’ll never know.

But forever, of course, is a lot to ask for a run of luck.

The shadow, cast upon eternity.

Out on the runway, the big airplane’s engines revved up, six backward-facing pusher engines, each with an immense, four-bladed prop, turning over and over, spinning up, seeming to reverse, persistence of vision, rumbling whistle now, sounds overlaid on each other, wheels beginning to roll.

The thing was, they said, originally modeled on something Edgar called an NB-36H. It was, he said, a variant of the giant intercontinental bomber Franklin Roosevelt planned to use on Hitler after Britain fell. Image of those imaginary days, bold American crews crossing the Atlantic with their loads of napalm, firebombing an impotent Germany...

Until, maybe, Hitler’s armies finished off Russia, finished off Russia and crossed the Bering straight, walked across Canada, across all of the vast American heartland, SS stormtroops marching right up Pennsylvania Avenue, taking the old cripple away to meet the Master.

No. It could never have happened that way. Surely there’s no universe where all the Jews in the world became fertilizer and lampshades.

Big airplane thundering on the end of the runway now, having taxied far away. I didn’t even look to see if they were waving to me. Lost in my dreams. Another look down at Aarae. “Are we doing the right thing?”

She looked up at him, and said, “There is no right thing. If there were, there would be no Multiverse.”

No right thing? Another cusp splitting away, even here? Another World Without End, where I
am
aboard, going on with the rest? Airplane rolling smoothly down the runway now, faster and faster, nosewheel coming up, wings lifting, sky appearing underneath now, landing gear retracted up into nacelles under the nose, near the wing-roots, bay doors closing, sound of the engines diminishing. In the twinkling of an eye, it was a speck in the sky, then gone.

Aarae said, “You’re not sorry, are you?”

He looked into his heart. Am I?
Is
this what I want? He said, “No. No I’m not sorry.”

“Come on, then. Our car is waiting...” Taking  him by the hand, leading him away.

Over by the edge of the runway, a gang of black men was digging a ditch, thin, half-naked figures bending over picks and shovels, working, working, their tools making small, wet chopping sounds, familiar butchershop sounds as they cut the earth.

Who? Not American Negroes, of course. The ones that came here were happy, rich people, like the Chinese, the Jews, the whites, all the free folk who’d died and gone to High America, Americans all. No, these were black men with long arms and legs, grayish-black skin and unfamiliar hayrick hair. Who?

Amazulu, of course, the people who’d settled here some time in the late Paleolithic, perhaps, who’d been here when Edgar and his friends arrived. We let them stay, no reason not to. Let them stay and become part of the great thing we were building.

We
?

He was still looking at them, watching them work, out the back window of the big Packard Edgar had given them, as Aarae drove them away, on back to High New York and all those lovely city lights.

o0o

Though it was a lot more comfortable back in the B-36’s main passenger cabin, cabin occupying the space where the big bomb bays should have been, Ling Erhshan found he was happier riding in the cockpit, up where he could look forward, watching the mountains grow huge, or backward, over the top of the broad wings, through the transparent flicker of the spinning props, across the hazy majesty of the World Without End.

Just this little corner of it, of course. Out over the impossibly flat landscape, from a slow-moving aircraft that seemed to float along at 50,000 thousand meters or so, seeming to hang just under the wide canopy of the deep purple sky, you could see all the way back. Past the smeared-out, Bedouin-inhabited wasteland of the Red Desert, past the now tiny gray hump of High America, past the Indian-, Mongol-, and Turk-infested plains of Great Achaea, dotted with little Greek cities, networked by Hanseatic traders, past the twisted lightening bolt of the River Iss to the dark and dank forest country beyond, all the way to a shadowy silver sliver that Edgar told him was the Eastern Sea.

How far? Oh, sixty, maybe seventy thousand miles. Ling converted that to kilometers and felt giddy. How wide is the ocean?

A shrug. Hard to say. Shippers from Novyrom go out to islands as far as fifty thousand miles, say there’s only trackless ocean beyond that. There’s another big landmass out there, though, visible from up on the mountains. Half a million miles away...

Twice the distance, then, that we went to the Moon. A million kilometers and more of fat, flat ocean.

Forward, of course, all you could see was the Mountains. Edgar saying, we call them the Big Cords. Everybody else just calls them the Mountains, in whatever language they’re using.

Isn’t
cordillera
just Spanish for “mountain range”?

A smile. Yep. Little
cuerda
.

Mountains that, seemingly, towered up as far as the eye could see. Not really. Just that overwhelming feeling of immensity, mountains bulking huge, even though they were still many thousands of miles away, green trees barely touching their roots, surmounted by a thin band of snow, then rock and more rock, shining by the light of the nonexistent sun.

How high?

Oh, not as high as they look. Some of the lowest passes are down around 100,000 feet, average peak is no more than 250,000...

Ling stared at them, imagining himself atop a mountain almost eighty kilometers high. How far could I see from up there? Over the edge of the world. Don’t be silly. There is no edge.

That one there’s where we’re headed, Mike’s Peak, 357,000 feet. Edgar pointing the a fat, massive mountain, flat topped, that seemed to tower above its companions, shouldering them aside.

 Ling thought, That’s a mountain well over a hundred kilometers high. He said, “What’s the ceiling of this plane?” He gestured at the dark sky. “The atmosphere can’t be any deeper than Earth’s or...”

Edgar said, “There’s a base about a quarter of the way up. It’s a little tricky landing a plane on a runway that’s up near its maximum cruising altitude, not to mention taking off again, but we’ll manage.”

Ling started to think about old-fashioned superchargers, all the things that had extended the lifetime of prop-driven planes out of the infancy of aeronautics, far into the jet age. Started. Stopped. Well. No. With nuclear electric engines, they could spin the propellers as fast as they had power to do so, as fast as the material could stand. Coarsen the pitch, maybe, increase the bite on thinning air. Rockets and more rockets. It’s been a long time since I had to think about aerodynamics. Just get the rocket up out of the soup as fast as possible...

What an interesting world. Memory of looking back at Inbar and Aarae, two foolish lost souls standing by the side of the runway, watching them slip away, waving, realizing they weren’t watching back. What an interesting world. Maybe I could be happy here after all.

What difference does it make, whether I live forever in an infinite Multiverse, or live forever crawling across the flat landscape of a World Without End. I’m supposed to be dead now. Why don’t I feel dead? Cold memories, fading fast.

o0o

Watching the landing from the cockpit turned out to be a little more nerve wracking than Kincaid expected. Tough, tough, centenarian-plus soldiergirl coming forward, taking her seat beside Ling, Ling staring out the side window, watching the mountainside loom. It looks a lot closer than they say. Scale effects. I’ve never been near a mountain this big before.

Memories of the old days, of flying to the Moon. Old Luna had a sense of bigness to it that the Earth, seen from orbit, did not. Moon like a big, big rock, blotting out the sky. Remember braking into orbit, strapped in by a tiny porthole in the lower bay of TXX-044? Strapped there next to Kathy, looking out the window.

Over the night side of the Moon, coasting lower and lower, waiting for the engines to ignite. Kathy, her corporal, saying, “Good grief, Sarge. You sure as Hell know something’s
out
there, don’t you?” Something big, blotting out the stars.

I haven’t thought about Kathy in... forever. Kathy talking like a man, just like one of the boys. We all did. Why? Because it was expected of us? Little monsters, nursing our hearts in silence. I remember how much I liked her. That’s all. The rest is gone. Even her face.

Edgar pointed at something far down the mountainside, a splotch of white concrete and little buildings, sitting on what looked like a tiny cliff. “That’s as far up as the dirigibles can go, so we had to build the first base there, bring in the materials and... well, the first survey teams went on up by foot to the fifty-thousand-foot site. People got hurt.”

Kincaid said, “Many killed?” The ultimate sacrifice.

Edgar smiled. “You keep forgetting where you are, Sergeant.”

Outside, the mountain was turning into a world-like wall. I could focus hard, shift perspective, and imagine we were landing on the Moon. Craters? Maybe. Pockmarks, at any rate. Stuff falling out of the sky. The souls of dead rocks?