The Transmigration of Souls (7 page)

Alireza stood looking out through the dome, in the direction of the sun. It was a lot easier to see out than in, what they’d thought mist or discoloration apparently some optical coating. The Earth and Lunar landscape were bright enough outside, but you could look straight at the sun, too. Maybe that smudge was a sunspot? “Not yet. Let’s look around.” Up in the sky, maybe ten degrees above the southern horizon, a bright spark suddenly appeared. Company. Somewhere else up there, between Earth and Moon, there would be more company. Or maybe just a warhead. Should we do something? What? Nothing to be done. We don’t even have a pistol among us. Not expecting to meet anyone on the Moon.

All around them, boxes and crates and piles of hardware, little American moonbuggies in various stages of disassembly. Two large, boxy structures that looked, more or less, like late-20th century mobile homes. Rahman was standing by some kind of long bench, looking down at jumbled equipment, silent.

Alireza came up beside her, peering down through faceplate glass. “What is it?”

Rahman turned it over, a complex structure made from what appeared to be thin, thin strands of gold foil. Strands of foil that looped through and through each other, twisted and turned, never seeming to touch one another, never seeming to get closer to one another, even when you put your glove on the object and pushed...

“I don’t know.”

Odd looking, deep inside. Like there were misty places somehow. A little bit like that famous painting of the stairways, stairs leading into one another in impossible ways. “Like,” Rahman whispered, “there are singularities here.”

Alireza turned and looked up at the sky. Felt a slight shock. Minutes had passed and the Chinese ship was coming down, a little metal spider riding a flower of bright flame. Down, down, cloud of dust...

The flame went out and the other ship was sitting out on the plain, much closer than
al-Qamar
. Alireza thought, Whoever it is, he’s a better pilot than me. He looked around at the base. All right. So we’ve found a dome, two housetrailers, and a lot of leftover junk. The equipment in here’s not even as good as our own. Old junk. Antiques. Then why would...

Zeq’s voice in his earphones. “There’s a door here.”

“Where?”

Zeq’s spacesuited figure, waving from beside a humped up place in the floor, near the far foundation wall. Another airlock? Not likely, given they’d already found three, spaced evenly around the walls. They went over and looked.

Zeq shined his helmet light inside. “Just rock, covered with some kind of spray-on sealant.”

Rahman said, “Makes sense they would’ve built underground. In its heyday, this base had over a hundred people living at it. Couldn’t fit that many people under this dome. This is just the construction shack.”

“Why didn’t they take it down?”

“Why bother? It makes a pretty good work area and airlock system.”

Alireza said, “Mahal?”

“Here.”

“Keep an eye on the Chinese. Let me know when they come out.”

“All right.”

He looked at Inbar. “You stay here. We can try to use you as a radio link if the signal gets cut off.”

A nod through the faceplate, a look of almost-relief.

The dark tunnel was short, featureless, without anything that looked like a light fixture, ending in another door, an old airlock door set in a hull frame, frame buried in the rock wall. Alireza stood for just a second, looking at it, then reached out and popped the latch. Light, bright white light, like natural sunlight, came flooding through.

 “What in
Shayol
...” Rahman pushed past him, pulling the door open, stepping into the next chamber.

Silence. The three of them almost huddling together, spacesuits all but touching, looking down off a rough hewn stone balcony, down a long flight of fresh-cut stone stairs, at a vast underground chamber, giant cavern full of sourceless, hazy morning light, with green trees and rosebushes in bright red flower, broad lawns of grassy sward, buildings, like some remote mountain village, clustered in the near distance.

Inbar’s voice crackled in their earphones. “Mahal says you’d better come up. Chinese have broken out their rover. At least one individual is driving your way.”

Zeq said, “I wonder if this is some kind of optical illusion.”

Rahman: “You mean, like the VR art that was popular in America back then?”

Alireza said, “We’ll find out in a few minutes. Let’s deal with this other problem first.” He turned back toward the hatch.

Rahman said, “Are you
kidding
?” Tableau moment, then she turned and went bounding down the stairway.

Zeq looked at him, face framed in his helmet faceplate, then said, “I’ll stay with her.” Turning away as well.

What? Order them back? Military discipline and all that? No. Deal with the problem yourself. Let them do what they came here to do. He watched them go down, watched them disappear into the shrubbery with a twinge of unease, turned back toward the hatch, regretting its necessity.

Turning my back on... What shall I call this? Magic? Or only typical American nonsense? Sell the sizzle not the steak. Magic fountains in a cold gray moonbase. Maybe Ali Baba will come scurrying from the bushes any moment now...

o0o

Rolling across the rugged plain of Peary’s floor, Ling Erhshan felt the makeshift Lunar rover waddling under him, unstable. Unstable, because I’m alone here, an empty seat where my companion should be, but...

Chang and Da Chai working over their consoles, tuning up the particle beam device, charging its capacitors, or whatever. Getting “ready,” whatever that meant.

“You go on over to the base and talk to the Arab commander. The American... missile will be here in no time at all. When... Well. When it’s over, we’ll come over on foot. It’s not far.”

Riding now through a field of debris, crawling up to park beside a newer vehicle. Those squiggly lines must be Arabic...

Sitting there motionless, staring up at a flat black sky, at brightly lit mountains, low, eroded ringwall mountains, dimensionless, as if painted on black glass. Like a movie set. Rubble of artifacts all around him now. Like an abandoned movie set. And then, sudden exhilaration.

Because I’m really
here
. Because I’ve been permitted to
see
this. With my own eyes. Whatever happens next, or doesn’t happen, there will have been that. A magical thrill I can carry with me from now until the moment of my death. Uneasy stirring, glancing over his shoulder in the direction of a bright crescent Earth. Thinking, A moment that may not be so very far away after all... Vision of a missile streaking down out of that starless sky, striking, exploding, bright flare of nuclear fire, then nothing at all. Black eternity.

So. If it comes, it comes. No reason to think about it before that last fearful moment arrives.

He unhooked himself from the seat harness and stood, teetering unpleasantly, getting his footing in the dusty soil, then turning to walk toward the wall, where the outline of a hatchway of some sort was visible. Walking, almost tangling his feet, suddenly remembering patchy old black and white video footage. Kangaroo hop. Use your ankles.

The hatch swung open, bright yellow-orange incandescent light flooding out, spacesuited figures waiting.

Inside the dome, beyond the inner airlock door, Ling stood facing his two Arabs, looking in through their faceplates at swarthy Levantine faces, at beetle-browed, primitive-looking men with round black eyes and enormous noses. Wondering, for an inane moment, how they kept those huge brown beaks from smashing into their helmet glass... But they look more like the heroes from my old American science fiction novels than I do. Why did I never picture Dorian Haldane looking like this? Or lovely blond Valetta with a nose like a ripe banana planted in the middle of her face?

No. My child’s imagination made her a pale northern Chinese woman with long, straight yellow hair and unusually big eyes. And, of course, because I was an adolescent boy, a dense forest of curly yellow pubic hair. Yellow like a grocery-store lemon. And big breasts of course. Breasts the size of cantaloupes. American women always had big breasts. You saw that in all the movies.

Ling sighed, pushing away silly old memories. I am here. It is now. Focus. Because the UAR program had been conducted so openly, their suit radio frequencies had been published, and his own hardware was equipped to transmit on it. “Chang?”

“Here.”

“I’m switching ever now. Will you monitor?”

“Yes.”

“The Americans?”

“The missile is no more than an hour out.”

The missile
. So certain, they are. That cold, cold hand, thoughtfully fingering the spaces of my spine...

He touched the button on his chest-mounted control panel and, in English, said, “I am Ling Erhshan,” careful to subdue the tones, say it low and flat, so they’d hear something other than
ping-ping pong
, “commander of
Ming Tian
.” A gesture, out through the dome.

The narrow-faced man, his English thick and guttural, almost incomprehensible, said, “Alireza, commander
al-Qamar
.” He motioned to the other man, whose face was fatter, paler, sweatier looking. “Omry Inbar, scientist.”

Omry Inbar... recognition. “The author of ‘The Oil Shale-like Properties of Certain Fore-Trojan Asteroids’?”

A surprised look. “The paper I presented at the 2133 IAF congress in Teheran, yes.”

“I was there. But not permitted to ask questions, sadly.”

Inbar, eyes suddenly alight, opened his mouth to speak.

Alireza interrupted, “What of your crew? Why not here?”

Ling looked into his eyes, finally decided they were just too alien to be read easily. All those old American movies. If this was an American, I’d know what he was thinking. “Manning
Ming Tian
. Waiting for the Americans to arrive.”

Inbar said, “So. You think it is manned after all?”

Then they did know about it. Silly to imagine the Arabs would not be tracking objects in near-Earth space. “Perhaps. My companions think not.”

Alireza said, “And if it
is
a missile?”

Long stare. What
are
you thinking, my slim desert chieftain? “Unhappily, my government has insisted that
Ming Tian
be equipped with a collimated particle beam device.”

Inbar muttered, “My
God
...” Spoken as if he were quite used to speaking English. Still the language of science, after all these years, because no one wants Chinese or Arabic or Spanish or Swahili or Hindustani to predominate.

Alireza said, “What good will that do?”

You could see the fear in his eyes after all. But only in his eyes, otherwise, this was some army officer, like army officers the world over. Like Chang Wushi, for instance. Back in
Ming Tian
, calmly preparing to open fire on an unknown vessel, with unknown powers...

Just then, their suit radios crackled and spoke.

o0o

First you watched the Earth grow small, shrinking visibly out the viewports, watched, silent, surrounded by gaping young gargoyles who, perhaps, never once, in all their short, immortal, playtoy lives, imagined they would be here. Then you watched the bright Moon grow larger and larger, faster and faster...

And then, just then, you felt that savage anger grow large as well. 

Hours to the Moon. Days to Mars and Venus and any asteroid you cared to name. A week or two to Pluto...

Why the Hell aren’t we
using
this stuff? Why are we sitting home? Fortress Fucking America...

Because we’re
afraid
.

Afraid that ole Boogeyman goin’ come git us.

But the Gates are shut. Scavengers couldn’t figure out how to build a Colonial hyperdrive and neither can we. And the Space-Time Juggernaut won’t come for us, so long as we keep our noses out of its... business.

We could still have the stars, so long as we’re content to take the long, slow route...

Memory. Hard, sharp memory of standing underneath a dark, blue-lavender sky, looking up at a big bright sun and a small dim sun, dim but still too bright to look at. Of standing in an Arctic parka, breathing through a respirator because the air was way too thin, thinner than the air atop Mt. Everest. But a lot damned better than the air on Mars! Standing there, staring up at a starry sky full of oh-so-familiar constellations, knowing that yellowish first-magnitude star was Home...

But, Sergeant-Major, a starship built with Scavenger technology would take
forty years
to reach Alpha Centauri.

So the fuck what?

We’re fucking
immortal
, God damn it!

But we’re also fucking
afraid
...

Jug might not like it. Might come. Might kill us all.

Brucie’s voice over the intercom: “Forty-five minutes, Sarge.”

 “Right. Thanks.” She picked the old communicator off her belt. Patch me into the comlink.”

“Will do,” bluff, hearty words, little Brucie now in his technohero role. “Through the translator and out, on one freq in Arabic, the other in Chinese.” Unspoken: no sense wasting good English on them gooks. Though, of course, Brucie was probably a gook, most 21st century Americans had been gooks, made up now to fill his fantasy role...

“Thanks.” A moment for thought, then, “This is Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid, USMC Lunar Expeditionary Force,” What a laugh, like Pershing’s Heroes landing in France, come to end the War to End War, “addressing all groups and individuals currently landed on the United States External Territory of Luna. Board your ships now. Begin making preparations for liftoff. If you do so, you will be permitted to depart in peace. If your vessel cannot make trans-Earth injection at this time, lift off to Lunar orbit. You will be taken in tow and returned to low Earth orbit for repatriation.” Long pause, then, “If you attempt to resist, you will be attacked by armed infantry. Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid, USMC, signing off.”

Corky the Neanderthal Girl said, “Way tough, Sarge! Just like in the old TV shows.”