The Transmigration of Souls (20 page)

Here, there was nothing more than red sand and blowing pink dust, dust you could see best down by the horizon, like a layer of distant fog, blowing in the wind. A crashed starship, thought Ling. Confirmation, and yet we learned nothing we hadn’t already known.

Alireza said, “We might as well go this way.” Gesturing to their right, along the cliff-face, in a direction that seemed like south.

Seems like south, because the sun rises in the east. Because we define east as the direction of sunrise. Brief memory. Sunrise over the East China Sea. Dirty gray water. Ramshackle boats, as if I lived hundreds of years ago, rather than in an ever-so-modern twenty-second-century sort of China. How old was I then? Fifteen, maybe? Getting too old for the orphanage. Wondering what would become of me.

Inbar, standing still, frowning, looking uncomfortable, as he had all morning, said, “Why that way? Why not some other way?”

Alireza just stared at him. Stared, then turned and began walking.

Silence. Then Inbar muttered a soft word in Arabic, a single clipped syllable, and started after him. Sigh from Rahman. She said, “There’s nothing to decide anymore...” Started after the others.

Nothing to decide anymore
. Ling began walking as well, thinking about that. We could go back to the gate. Go back and try again. Try again. And again. Maybe, sooner or later...

What? All sorts of possibilities. Maybe, sooner or later, the gate would open onto the surface of some airless world, would open on a Colonial mining station, or some Scavenger techno-resource. Imagine: a ripple of rainbows, a black sky, roaring wind, our shouts of surprise as we’re sucked through, blown out into the void, or onto the surface of a place like the Moon. Sunlight pins and needles on my skin, vacuum a stabbing of knives in my head, my sinuses, my ears...

Old stories. Old stories of trapped astronauts daring their thirty allotted seconds of vacuum, crossing from ship to ship. Remember the scene from
2001
? Should Frank Poole have been bleeding from his nose and ears and mouth? Where were the petechiae on his skin? Where were the bruises?

Soyuz 11
. Three men dead in their couches. Three men who died while they listened to the air whistle out through a malfunctioning valve. Three dead men who’d had more than thirty seconds, a lot more, in which to unstrap, to reach up, to struggle for life, to at least
try
to close that valve. Why were they still strapped in? Maybe you don’t get thirty seconds.

Lot’s of reasons why the Soviet’s Lunar program came to a bad end. Clumsy technology. Insane political system that encouraged bureau managers to wreck each others work.
But Soyuz 11
... if nothing else, that made them think,
Maybe we can’t do it
.

Imagine. Imagine the Russians making it to the Moon in 1974. Imagine the Americans deciding, just maybe, they’d keep that Saturn production line open after all, refund Apollo Applications, build a wee little moonbase maybe, while waiting for that damned crazy Shuttle to come on line. Imagine. Maybe imagine somebody landing up at the pole around 1980, maybe prospecting for a pocket of fossil ice. Would they have found the Gate then? Or does it lie only on our side of that particular cusp?

Rahman, speaking English, said, “What the Hell is that?” Pointing at the sky.

Alireza said, “I’ve been wondering.”

Ling stopped, squinting upward, looking where she indicated. A distant, metallic sparkle against an apricot sky. Inbar said, “How long has it been there?”

“A couple of minutes.”

Fighter pilot. Eyes caught by the barest fleck of light, shiver of motion. Ling shaded his eyes, trying to see. Middle-aged eyes still pretty good, never nearsighted, though he’d be needing corrective surgery for hyperopia sooner or later, a twenty-four-hour nuisance he’d been putting off for years. This thing now...

Rahman said, “You know, it looks like a nineteenth century passenger liner.”

Inbar said, “Yes. Yes it does.”

Still subtending less than a minute of arc, the thing was shiny metal, it’s lower half featureless, long, relatively slim, perhaps six times as long as it was wide. No telling how big. No telling how far away. Above, some kind of superstructure, made of darker stuff, details indistinct. Were those tiny, fluttering bits of color flags?

Alireza said, “Maybe. I think... gun emplacements?” Squinting hard now, hands folded like binoculars around his eyes.

Inbar sighed, unclipped the real binoculars from his belt, put them to his face. Made a slight choking sound.

Alireza snorted, leveled his stolen rifle at the sky, peered through its gunsight. Silence. Then a muttered exclamation, a short Arabic phrase in which Ling thought he could hear the word
Allah
, emerging from a language that sometimes seemed to be little more than strings of ells separated by muddy, half-swallowed vowels. Alireza passed the rifle to Rahman, who merely gasped. Ling stared at distant, glinting metal until Inbar nudged him, handed over the binoculars.

Focusing, and...
Impossible
. Ship sailing through the sky, two broad, six-bladed propellers turning lazily at the stern. Gun turrets. Tiny figures moving about the canted deck, colored flags fluttering from invisibly thin rigging. And a radar dish. That’s a radar dish turning atop the mast.

Sputt
.

Loud, shuddery sound, like some huge gas burner igniting from its pilot light. Ling lowered his binoculars, turned and looked at another part of the sky, the part above the mountain cliffs. Long, thin trail of reddish smoke, smoke hard to make out against bright orange sky, pointing to a dull red flame, small black object racing out over the desert.

Alireza’s voice terse: “
Missile
.”

Sputt
.

Another one rising, chasing the first.

The people on the ship... People? The crew seemed to see them right away, ship slowing, wallowing, seeming to turn. Dots running around up there, tiny mites clinging to their host, turrets turning, turning in their direction.

Flicker-flicker-flash.

Twinkles of bright green light, light almost too bright to look at. Light from the muzzles of those aerial guns.

Bang
.

Missile exploding, falling in a shower of golden sparks. Flicker-flicker-flash. Flicker-flicker-flash. Alireza crying out in Arabic, voice urgent. Telling them, perhaps, to tighten their aim. Red flame merging with the ship and... Gorgeous blossom of silvery fire, an explosion, a gout of incongruous brown smoke. Ship staggering against the sky, turning, turning, moving in toward the cliffs, listing to one side.

Those tiny dots. Tiny dots against the sky. Falling men. You could hear a dull, grinding roar now. The engines struggling perhaps. But one propeller was stopped, the other one whirling faster and faster. Ship still distant, coming closer and closer, lying on its side in the sky, falling... It passed over the cliffs, out of view. A moment later, a plume of gray smoke began to rise.

Silence. Soft wind blowing over the desert sand, lifting tiny particles that stung on the skin of their faces. Alireza was looking around, at all of them. “I’d like to go... see.”

Madness. We should go back to the gate and...

It was Inbar who said, “Yes. Let’s do that.”

They began walking again, following the line of cliffs, watching as the gray plume grew to a tall tower, rising thousands of meters until it was sheared away by high-altitude wind.

o0o

The starship was, somehow, no surprise. Looking at it from the top of the ravine, Kincaid thought, Why is this place so familiar to me? Certainly no place I’ve ever been before. No place I’ve even dreamt about. Something Dale said? Memory of standing with him on a windswept crag. Where? Gilligan. No, that’s just what he called it. A joke. The Stargate Commission’s official name was Gilliken. A joke. Private joke piled on top of a public joke. Gilligan’s Planet. But then, Gillikens, Millikens, Munchkins and Winkies, the names we selected for the four principal Scavenger colony planets. Look, Dale. A planet of your own.

Something though about the design of the ship, the topography of the planet. The topography of the sky. We were standing atop that cliff on Gilligan, surrounded by yellow-green forest, looking out across a plain of grass like ripe wheat, ripe wheat waving in the wind like the surface of some strange yellow sea, looking toward the city. Tall towers surrounded by a light pink mist, city shining against the backdrop of a pastel blue-green sky, tall towers connected by fragile-looking aerial runways, flying roads, pedestrian corridors, whatever.

Dale looking at it through his binoculars, we two, part of the first party to come through, first humans to look down on this vista. Dale whispering, Every dream I ever had. Every God-forsaken dream...

We followed a path down the cliffside, Dale wanting to hold my hand for some reason he couldn’t explain. Wouldn’t explain. You knew that. Wouldn’t. He had a way with words. Said what he wanted to say: I keep hoping, he’d said, that we’ll open a gate one day and find
my
world. One of them at least.

“
Sergeant
!”

Bokaitis, pointing southward, at a point not far above the horizon. Something flaring in the sky, garish green fire, a puff of dark smoke...

She lifted her M-80 and looked through the gunsight. Jesus. What the fuck is that? Like a dirigible, but...

Sharp-eyed Tarantellula said, “I spotted it just a fraction of a second before the explosion. Thought I saw missiles tracking.”

Away on the edge of the world, the thing went down, crash smoke rising into a tall, dense plume. Rising, blowing away on the wind. “Let’s go.” Shouldering her rifle.

Brucie, fascinated technician, scowled and said, “What about this?” Gesturing at the starship.

“Forget it.” Forget about spoiled wonders. Fresh wonders waiting for us. Waiting somewhere. What else is waiting? Are you out here, Dale? Is that really what I’m doing, looking for my lost love, my lost gray fat man, like some silly schoolgirl mooning over a romance novel? Fucking Christ. “Let’s go.”

They made it about half way to the crash site, running along the base of the cliffs, following an obviously fresh trail, before Muldoon, bringing up the rear, eyes behind them, raised the alarm. Kincaid, on point, was looking down at well scuffled sand, surface turned over, lighter than the well-settled sand everywhere else. Obviously just the four of them. The three surviving Arabs. The Chinaman. What the Hell do I do with them when I catch them? Put them in irons and drag them back through the Gate to the Moon? Drag them back, bomb the Gate, go home and face Athelstan’s wrath? Maybe. Or turn them over to Bokaitis. Little cavegirl smart enough to get this silly patrol back home. Probably smart enough to know she should just blow the Gate and get the fuck out of there. Go home. Athelstan’ll pin a fucking medal on your pretty left tit, cavegirl.

Where the Hell would I go? He’s not really out here, you know. And even if he
is
, it’s been a long damned time. We aren’t the same people we were then. Not even in our memories. Just remembering the last time I thought I was in love. Maybe the only time I ever
was
?

How the fuck do I know?

I thought I was then.

So long ago...

Muldoon’s moron voice was urgent, with just the right touch of impending panic. “Sarge?”

She turned and looked. “Holy shit...” Big green things. Dark green. Big bugs, with long, stalky legs. Things like praying mantises the size of dinosaurs. Big bug eyes looking right at them, triangular heads, mandibles opening and closing on squirmy darkness, insectile grins.

Things on their backs, too. Skinny things, also green. Like skinny green ants, standing on their hind legs, holding the reins of their mantis mounts. Skinny green ants holding what looked like guns. Flicker-flicker-flash.

Something thudded into the sand nearby.
Bang
. Brilliant flare of green fire, like a pulse of ball lightening at their feet, grains of sand whispering through the air, sharp grains crackling on their faces and bare hands. There was a brief feeling of static electricity in the air, a familiar ozone smell.

“Curtainfields up!” Silvery shadows forming around them.

Kincaid lifted her M-80, sighted in, quick image of a green ant man in the scope, looking back at her, green ant man with something like a face, impassive. She fired, knocking him backwards off his mantis. Him? It.

Rapid pop-pop-pop as Bokaitis and Tarantellula fired in counterpoint, Muldoon just standing by, rifle dangling from one hand, looking bewildered. Ripple of return fire, flicker-flash, from the ant men, green fire boiling the sand around them. Missed us. Missed. Bad aim? No. Projectiles curving away at the last instant. Curtainfield fucking up their guidance systems. Good.

Pins and needles inside my belly, though. Bad news, I think...

She said, “Let’s get the Hell out of here.”

Muldoon turned and ran, surprisingly light on his feet, in his polio-cripple boots.

They didn’t quite make it to the nearest ravine, the nearest route up into the cliffs, before the ant-men woke up to what was wrong with their aim and started firing on them with unguided solid shot, dumdum slamming into Muldoon’s back, knocking him off his feet, rifle spinning away into the dust. He’d gotten up, bawling wordless terror, and run for a pile of rocks, angular red rubble of big sandstone shards nearby.

Stopped to pick up his weapon, though. Not as bad as he seems.

Crouching down now, shooting through the chinks of their little fortress, watching the ant men ride round and round, ducking the little green explosions, explosive light reflected off the faceted, clear, metallic eyes of their mounts.

Images of what might happen. Of being held in those hard bug hands, of giant mantis heads bending down, so very delicate, you see, bending down, grasping mandibles gaping open, gaping, chewing, chewing.

3V educational video image, of a mantis man continuing to fuck a mantis woman, though his head was eaten away, his arms and shoulders gone. What the Hell was it my friend Jenny said? Look at that. Amused disgust in her voice: Men are all the same.