The Transmigration of Souls (12 page)

Sudden memory of the American “tourist” he’d met one day while wandering the sightseeing places of Agra, the year they held the LPSC in India. What year? The 175th, I think. Tried to talk to him, get some hints about...

Jolly fellow, tall, slim, suntanned, dressed up in white linen, told me his name was Laredo. Shook my hand. Very cold fingers. Cool, despite the summer’s oppressive heat. Referred to our hosts as
Hindudes
. Talked my ear off about nothing at all, classic American bullshit. Told me the declension of special American words:
dude
a male,
doodah
a female,
dudlet
an immature male,
dudette
an immature female. Stories about breeding them as livestock on something called a
dude ranch
, watched over by cowboys known as
doodads
. Treating me like an ignorant child. As if I hadn’t been studying American movies, reading old American books all my life...

Aw, shoot, yew little Chink. Ah’m jest pullin’ yore laig. Making me think of that cowboy bomber pilot in
Dr. Strangelove
.

He glanced at Inbar, standing quietly by his side. An atheist, perhaps. Even in Arabia.

Almost apologetically, the man whispered, “I’m a Jew.”

Ah, of course. Suddenly remembering Alireza’s remark about “Jewish profanity.” Silly and insular of me. Jews. Christians. Plenty of those in Chungkuo too. All of them busy praying to their apocalyptic God.

What if Tao had a face and name? Peasant masses out there even now, in the hills and misty valleys of China. To them it does have a face an name.
Tao-Chiao
not merely the philosophical
Way
. Who am I to judge people’s prayers?

o0o

By the time they finished praying, it was full dark, stars brilliant overhead, night wind cold on their faces. Ling closed his suit vents, felt his body heat start to bring up the temperature inside. Pretty soon, he realized, I’ll be too hot again.

Just as well. Tired. Hungry. And, soon enough, I’ll be thirsty. When the last of the suit’s water bladder is emptied. What will we do? Starvation could take weeks. Dying of thirst only takes days. Arabs slightly better off, of course, with their compact recyclers. Trust a desert people to think of water.

Alireza stood looking up at the sky, dark face shadowy and mysterious in the starlight. He said, “Though, of course, we used inertial guidance units, we were taught celestial navigation at the academy. Bringing home our aircraft at night, with failed instruments. Walking home through enemy country, trackless desert perhaps, after being shot down, bailing out, surviving a crash.” No more then than a gesture up at these stars, here and now.

Ling new the stars as well, stars watched night after night, year after year, through a decade and more out in the Taklamakan. Bright stars over a stone desert. Stars by which I hoped, one day, to navigate my ship to the Moon, maybe on to Mars if I were lucky enough.

Zeq pointed up at a bright spark, down near the horizon. Small, almost showing a disk, not quite. “This thing...”

Rahman said, “Satellite...”

Inbar: “Not a spacecraft, I don’t think. A small moon.”

Small moon
. Sharp pang in the chest.
This is an alien world
! Another planet, not the Earth, not the Moon. And... somewhere else.

Alireza said, “There’s not a constellation in the sky. Just white dots and more white dots...”

Not
, then, some world circling Tau Ceti? How very comforting that would have been.
Close to home
. Ling, very softly, said, “No
Via Galactica
, but...” Looking now at a bright smudge, many times the breadth of a Full Moon, so obviously a spiral galaxy. If it was a normal-sized one, with average surface brightness, it might be no more than twenty or thirty thousand parsecs distant. And no Milky Way, no river of stars... “Perhaps we are in a globular cluster, and that is...”
Home
? Impossible, of course. Quite impossible.

Inbar said, “Those might be the Magellanics over there. And that smaller, much dimmer spiral Andromeda.”

Alireza: “Slim evidence, indeed.”

The nearest building, the one behind the parked car, one of the Americans’ vinyl quonset huts, proved to be unlocked. First discovery: when you flipped the switch just inside the door, the lights came on, little incandescent bulbs filling angular American-style rooms with a warm, homey glow. Second discovery: when you turned the taps in the little galley, water gurgled down the drain. Cold water. Hot water. Even a little sprayer attachment, and this box by the sink would be a dishwasher. Full of clean dishes.

Zeq went into the lavatory and pushed the handle, watched the gleaming white porcelain toilet flush. Turned and looked out through the doorway. Smiled. Started unclamping the waist-ring of his spacesuit. “Rest of you,” he said, still smiling, “can wait in line.” Closed the door in their faces.

Ling opened a kitchen cabinet. Boxes. Cans. Packets of this and that. Jars of spice. He took down a big blue box. “Kraft Deluxe Macaroni and Cheese. Best if used by: Jan 61.”

Inbar said, “Probably nothing but dust inside now.”

Rahman said, “The dried pasta would keep. Might taste a little flat, of course.” She switched on the stove, watched one spiral resistance element start to glow, dull orange, then bright red.

Alireza opened the refrigerator. White walls stained with green and black. A very stale smell. But the little light still came on. The plastic milk bottle looked like it was full of cottage cheese. Would bacteria and mold organisms have survived and prospered in here for more than seventy years? Unlikely. All we see is their mass grave.

He picked up one capped, dark blue can and read the label:
King Kuts
. Picture of a contented-looking tan and white terrier. Sudden, alarming shock, bringing the whole business alive for him: Crazy Americans bringing their pet
dogs
to the Moon, then taking them out to the stars... Further shock.
Stars
. You know the scenario we’ve been imagining. American physicists figured out the secret of teleportation. Came up to the Moon to conduct their experiments as far from home as they could get, just in case it wasn’t so
safe
...

But you know the Americans flew to the Moon, a hundred years ago, in primitive rocket ships. You know they didn’t build those machines. Know they didn’t build this city.

What else do we know?

Not enough.

He said, “Well. At least we won’t die of thirst. Buys us a little time. Let’s... have a look around.”

They got out of their suits then, shivering a little in the dry cold, following Zeq’s impromptu lead, walking around, at first in a little knot, turning on lights, poking around quasi-empty rooms. A mixed bag of offices, living quarters...

The uneasy feeling of looking at people’s unmade beds. Room with a pair of men’s white-cotton underpants abandoned in the middle of the floor. A single athletic shoe, soft-soled, bright red, turned-up toe style popular across the world of almost a century ago, label on its sole “SuperSlipper Deluxe.” Inside, on the white insole, you could see faint dark imprints where someone’s toes had made the shoes home.

They found the thermostat in the hallway, clicked it to “on,” set the temperature. There was a distant hiss, a faint smell of burning dust. After a while, they wandered apart.

When Rahman walked into the little library, she was mainly interested in the antique American desktop supercomputer perched in the corner, next to a little Japanese 3V display unit. Old stuff, old technology, the twentieth century’s last dying gasp. Surely, if the refrigerator still worked, the computer would too, would hold, perhaps, in its crystal memory, some hint as to what had gone on here, all those years ago.

She flipped the switch. Nothing. Checked the connections. Checked the power supply. Made sure the damned thing was plugged into the wall outlet. Switched to another outlet, just in case... Looked at the blue and white “QA Inc.” sigil in the upper left hand corner of the box’s facade with a slight sinking feeling.

The Quantum Access chipset, all the rage worldwide in the 2050s, had turned out to be notoriously unstable. It hadn’t mattered back then. The computers would be long obsolete, long discarded before it would matter. But this computer had simply forgotten how it worked. And the tools I’d use to bypass its amnesia are back aboard
al-Qamar
...

No. Scattered in bits and pieces across the surface of Crater Peary.

She sat back in the chair, looking around the room. Not really a library, just looking like the old image of one. Maybe someone’s office? Shelves above the desk, with rows of bulky 21st century crystal memory cards,
really
old fashioned optical book disks. Even a row of paper books.

Perfect bound, it was called, signatures glued to spine. If I picked one up now, its pages might fall out on the floor. Maybe even turn to dust and ashes, they used such poor paper in those days. But...

A black Christian Bible, bound in something like leather. That would be intact, printed on clean, durable stock. An English translation labeled
The Koran
, published by someone called “Penguin Classics.” She glanced at the optical books again, saw that most of them were references, mostly physics, mathematics. Quantum mechanics and cosmology. A big, slick black book called
The Perennial Dictionary of World Religions
. Seventeenth edition.

A row of what appeared to be three-ring binders, neatly placed, alternating spine and opening out. Someone with a neatness fetish, who wanted them to sit properly, not fall together...

She took one down. Blew dust off its gray, unmarked cover. Set it flat on the desk. Opened it.

A printout of a manuscript. “EkaReferenced Toolbox Calls to the Colonial GateNet OS: Were the Scavengers Kidding?” Several dates written in, in a variety of pen colors, a variety of hands. Dates from the 2060s, near the very end of the American tenure here. She flipped through the pages. Text. Pictures of control panels, variations on the ones she’d already seen. Diagrammatic descriptions of settings. Equations full of integral signs.

Lots of annotation, colored pen marks, some of it neatly printed, others a cursive scrawl, illegible, looking more or less like Arabic script written the wrong way round. The daily working notes of a multi-person research group.

Printout page dated 02/14/59: “...we suspect that if you make a direct call to the Window Manager, using the above setting, you do not
need
to have both gate consoles set the same way. How else could it have worked? Did they telephone ahead and ask someone to tune them in? There’s
no
evidence to support a conclusion there were FTL communications independent of the Colonial transport net. (Unless, of course, it was something the Scavengers simply missed. JB.)”

Above that, in a neat, emerald green hand: “So Beasley thinks the Window Manager is the key? Not if my reversibility algorhythm for MenuBandwidth is even
close
!! DM.”

To one side of that, in small, crabbed black: “You still don’t understand the math. JB.” Someone else had drawn a red smily-face beside that, quick strokes of a delicate pen, emblematic of all that had been 21st century America. Rahman shifted in her chair, staring at the page, at the old notes. All right. The secret is here. Somewhere.

She took down the next notebook. “Imagery of the Space-Time Juggernaut in Late Scavenger Eschatological Literature, by Dale Millikan.” No annotations this time. No dates. Mostly text, a few pictures that looked like exploded diagrams of machinery, decorated with something like Chinese ideograms. Ling... No. She’d seen enough Chinese to know this was something else.

She flipped to the last page, where a final paragraph had been slashed through in a bright green pen. There was a note, strokes heavy, as if the writer had been bearing down angrily, also in green. “What the fuck if this
isn’t
the Scavengers’ version of SF? What the fuck if it’s
real
? Where the fuck are the Scavengers
now
? On fucking
vacation
?”

There was an old-style paperback book on the shelf too, once-garish cover faded, showing a muscular man with a sword. When she opened it, the pages came loose, cracked and smoking under her fingers. Hundreds, thousands of people, writing these things for each other, rather than posterity...

A third notebook, this one bound with a tan plastic spiral, lined paper, full of handwriting. Scribbles. Doodles. Drawings of this and that. Spacecraft. Green ink landscapes. A muscular naked woman. Some of the sketches were rather good, closeups of the woman’s face where you could see it was an attempted likeness. One sketch that seemed to be of the woman’s crotch, a few anatomical omissions implying it might have been drawn from memory, rather than the live model... His lover? Or just a fantasy?

On one page, alone, surrounded by a circle of green that had been drawn over and over: “If it’s real, we’re fucked.” On the next page, startling, a careful drawing of a gate control panel, each control arrowed and labeled in neatly printed English. On the pages beyond, a terse explanation of what each control did. God almighty...

She went back to the first notebook and began looking at the control-setting diagrams, comparing them to the pictures and explanations in Millikan’s notebook, time starting to slide by, unnoticed.

o0o

Kincaid stood in a cavern on the Moon, just inside the yawning Gate, looking out at the nighttime stars of Mars-Plus, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet, almost taking off in low-gee. Muscular tension. A wish she could reach through the antique communicator pressed to her ear and...

Athelstan was saying, “Now you listen to
me
, Sergeant-
Major
.” Arrogant, overbearing, self-inflating tones: the Man In Charge. Listen to me, Sergeant-Major, or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll...