The Transmigration of Souls (21 page)

Another bright green explosion on the edge of their sanctuary, rock fragments whining around, making them flinch, though the curtainfields continued to do their job. More tingling inside. Each time, Kincaid would look at her combat monitor, dusty old thing with a crude old battery, clipped neatly to her old web belt. With every explosion, there was a burst of hard gamma radiation.

Curtainfields taking the brunt of it, but... Right. Symbiotes’ll be busy tonight, dealing with the damage. If they get the chance. Enough hard radiation and the symbiotes’ll die. Wonder what the symbiotes’ll do when they wake up inside a giant mantis? Eat it? Remanufacture it into me? That’d be... odd. All sorts of philosophical bullshit welling up.

Bang
. Green fire. Bits of rock rattling around their cage. Strange buzzing behind the eyes, energetic photons going one-two one-two and through and through...

“Jesus, Sarge...” Bokaitis suddenly up on her knees, M-80 poking out through the rocks, going pop,pop, pop, skinny green ant men flying off their mounts, bowling through the air like so many wriggling green pinwheels.

Brucie Big-Dick, mighty hero of the starways, cowering on the ground now, weaponless Brucie, covering his head, uselessly, with his arms. Tarantellula starting to squirm over to the next hole, figuring, maybe, she’d do the same. Maybe, in due course, the ant men would give up and run away. Or maybe we can just kill them all. Clicking her own weapon to full automatic, rising to one knee...

WHAP
.

Bokaitis sitting down suddenly, hard on her backside, mouth hanging open, face full of surprise, ripples spilling around the sides of her curtainfield, ripples crossing over each other like ripples in water, making little crisscross interference patterns of light and dark.

“Corporal?”

Just sitting there.

“
Corky
?”

She fell over, leaning backward slowly, then falling in a little puff of red dust, dust billowing up around the curtainfield, little black dart sticking out of her right eye, keeping the lid propped open, surrounded by slivers of what looked like broken glass.

Silence, then Tarantellula said, “Oh,
shit
.”

Then,
bangbangbang
, green light flaring outside, pouring through the cracks in their rockpile, washing out the silvery screen of curtainfield light, creating a bilious world.

Muldoon made a great, wordless shout, jumped up, banged his head on the rocks above, fell down, groveled, dropping his rifle, jumped up again and squirmed out through the nearest hole.

“God damn it, no!
Muldoon
...”

You could hear him out there for just a moment, hear the thudding of his heavy feet, hear that huge, silly voice crying, “Lilly!
Save
me Lilly...” Scuffle of running feet, praying mantis feet, then silence.

The two of them sitting in their hole, Kincaid feeling ill, suddenly wishing the whole world away, Tarantellula’s alien black face, featureless white eyes, unreadable. The dancer said, “Well.”

Right. Kincaid patted her rifle and said, “You watch a lot of old war movies, do you?”

Impassive stare, then a slow nod. Right. She said, “I... guess that’s why I’m here.”

Kincaid said, “You remember
Back to Bataan
?”

“I remember that guy with the bayonet through his throat...” Right.

“You remember
They Died with Their Boots On
?”

Another slow nod. “
Garryowen
.” Right.

Kincaid put a fresh clip in her M-80, put it on full automatic and... White light flooded through the holes in the rockpile, strobe light, light closing their eyes. White light again. Blink. White light again. Long, slow rumble of fading thunder, far, far away, shuddering across the sky.

“Fuck.” Kincaid got up on her knees and poked her head out the nearest hole, almost wishing her deadly dart would come, would come sailing in through her eye.

Silence. Stillness. Dead praying mantises lying in motionless heaps. Dead green ant men lying scattered all around. Wisps of smoke, pale white smoke, almost invisible smoke, rising here and there, something dead at the base of each wisp. You could see Muldoon out there too, scattered around on the red sand in what looked like six or seven big bleeding pieces.

Tarantellula, crouching at her side, said, “Well fuck, Sergeant.”

Sudden movement, down at the base of the red cliff, Tarantellula lifting her rifle, taking aim, Kincaid putting out a hand to make her hold off. Two small figures walking out onto the desert sand, heading right for them. A smallish man with black hair. Built like a small man, anyway, short legs, long waist, big head with straight black hair, long hair confined by a white headband on which was painted some blood red design. Man in some kind of dark military uniform.

Tall, slender woman beside him, dressed in a neat white pantsuit, the sort of thing a casual-minded woman might wear for a night out on the town, might wear to a nice restaurant, might...

Kincaid lifted her M-80 and looked through the sight. The man appeared to be Oriental, maybe Chinese. That was definitely a Chinese character on his headband. The woman? Oddly familiar looking, also something of the Oriental about her. High cheekbones. Lovely dark eyes...

The woman waved. Waved and called out, “
Mother
?”

Tarantellula whispered, “What the
fuck
...”

Lovely voice calling, “Mother, are you in there?”

Brucie suddenly came out of his fetal cower, kneeling up, bright eyed. “Someone you know?”

Kincaid looked again, feeling slightly dizzy. It was the gyndroid Amaterasu, the little fuckrobot she’d delivered to brother Roddie less than a week ago.

o0o

Back up in the hills, on a cliffside overlooking the crash site, Subaïda Rahman watched what was going on down below and thought, We’ve avoided thinking about it, avoided talking about it too much... thinking about where we are. About what’s
happening
to us. If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s obvious now. Obvious from the things we saw in Dale Millikan’s notebooks, the books filled in by his colleagues. Obvious from this... this...

No handy phrase you could use to characterize it.

Not in English. Not in Arabic.

Down below, the ship was wrecked, smoldering, the fires going out, tower of dense smoke thinning, dissipating, blowing away into that impossible sky. Impossible. What kind of atmosphere scatters white light to bright orange? No atmosphere we can breathe. Dust, like on the
real
Mars? Doesn’t look like it.

The airship was lying more or less on its side, hull crushed in, gaping holes opened on black interior compartments, superstructure twisted and toppled. Swarms of giant praying mantises circling round, things on their backs like huge green ants firing green fire-guns into the ship. Little beings spilling out, much smaller red ant sort of beings, trying to run, trying to fight back with red-fire guns of their own. Every now and again, a mantis creature would burst open, would fall down dead. Mostly, though, it was the red ant men who fell and died. Are those swords they’re wielding?

Big green ant riding down on little red ant, scimitar swinging, little red head rolling in the red, red dust, green ant riding on.

There is a version of the Many Worlds cosmology that allows time travel, the version that says, You Can’t Go Home Again. Travel into the past, you’ve broken a cusp. The past you go to does not lie in the past of the time you left. Travel back to your own time, you’ve broken another cusp. The home you return to is not the home you left, nor does it lie in the future of the past you visited.

So do you come back and find another you living in your house, mothering your children, giving your husband a nice little blowjob on a sweaty weekend night?

Well, no. She left on her own time-trip some time ago, you see.

Do you notice any differences, small or large?

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the nature of the cusp-set you broke.

But her husband is probably expecting his regular weekend blowjob, nonetheless. Men are like that, the pigs.

Go back in time and kill your infant self. Go home. It’s not the same home, of course. And it is not a universe where you were killed as an infant. You can’t get there from here. Or can you?

From every cusp, an infinity of histories spring. Every history is real, even the ones that are impossible. Every time you say, “When pigs have wings,” a cusp opens on a world in which, just then, pigs miraculously begin to fly.

And Many Histories, Many Worlds implies...

No. I don’t believe it
...

I don’t.

Nobody believes it.

Not really.

Down below, the green ant men were just finishing off the red ant men. Men? Alireza, watching through binoculars, said, “They’re not killing all of them. The green ones are... doing something to some of the red ones.” Something odd in his voice.

Rahman took the binoculars and looked. Big green ants, two or three, sometimes four together, holding little red ants on the ground. Green ants squirming, squirming. Red ants held still for whatever it was. She took the binoculars away from her eyes.

So you’ve come to an alternate universe. An alternate universe in which everything is different. Except one thing. Well... Except one class of things. The red ants already dead must be the males.

Scrape of noise. Alireza, with a muttered exclamation, bucking up off the ground, spinning round, aiming his American rifle. Ling bug-eyed, drawing his little pistol with its four little dimetrodon-slaying bullets.

Subaïda Rahman sitting on her heels. Merely staring.

They were a handsome couple, the woman tall and very thin, clad in sleek black leather, leather with that skin-wrinkle buff finish that only real leather can possess. Handsome, smooth white face, dark blonde hair with just the right waviness-property. Blue on blue eyes. Wide eyes. Big girl eyes. The sort of big girl eyes you knew men fell for, even in deepest, darkest Arabia.

She thought, Well. Here’s our fashion model, perhaps...

The man. Rahman could feel her cheeks flush. A squat, muscular white man, a well-tanned Caucasian with curly black hair, curly, black, with sharp red highlights. Mulberry bright eyes. Square jaw, clean shaven of course, but with just the right touch of stubble, stubble that said, My blood boils with manly manly juices...

Muscular man dressed in a leather harness, all rings and clips and carabiners, sandal straps running up his calves almost to his knees, baldric over shoulder, supporting a long, curved sword. A long-barreled pistol here, a short sword there. A jewel-handled dagger.

A lot of hair on his chest. Really a lot of dense, fluffy black pubic hair below his ridged, muscular belly. Scrotum a large, weighty, wrinkled brown bag; thick, circumcised red penis dangling down a good fifteen centimeters... I wonder if I’m blushing? It feels like it. His bright blue, big blue eyes on me now. Probably seeing...

Slight shock. Behind them, three red ant men, slightly shorter than the humans, slimmer than ants of course, their body-plan details really
very
different. But the hard integument, the six jointed limbs. And stiff red faces, humanoid faces, frozen into place, expressionless masks of faces.

The man looked over his shoulder and said something to the ants, a hard, metallic, tone language sort of speech, rising and falling, almost yodeled,
clangclangclangclangclang
...

One of the ants reached out and put an arthropod hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently,
clangclangclang
right back.

Ling stepped forward, fear making his eyes dart back and forth, looking from face to face, looking at the woman, the ant people, down at the man’s genitals, back up at his face. He held out his hand and said, “Hello. Ah... We’ve come from far away and, ah, don’t know this world.”

The man stared at his hand. Stared. Glanced at the woman. “English Three, na? Awdd.”

The woman looked them up and down, curious, obviously mystified. “Nawt herein, but...” A shrug, very pretty. “Are you with the Imperial Terran Navy? There’s not supposed to be anything...”

Interesting. Not the slight Brit accent popular in the scientific world of the twenty-second century. Flat mid-American. Twenty-first century TV American. Rahman said, “Who are you?”

The woman looked her in the face then, hard-eyed, aggressive, speculative. Woman to woman. “I’m Passiphaë Laing. This is Rhino Jensen.” Expectant then, waiting for some standard reaction. Nothing. Puzzled look. “Don’t you follow
Crimson Desert
?” Crackle of gunfire from below, flare of green, green light. Red ant people stirring nervously,
clangclangclang
...

The man, Rhino Jensen? What a peculiar name... said, “We’d better get out of here. Not far to Kanthol. There’ll be another flight to Halian soon...” and
clangclang
to the ants.

The woman, Laing, said, “I don’t know who the Hell you are or what the Hell you’re doing here, but you’re welcome to come along. In fact, you’d better. If the Beanies get hold of you...” Gesturing at the carnage below.

The path led upward, farther back into the hills. Following the man and woman and their ants, Rahman thought, When the answers come, will they make any sense? Somewhere. Somewhere deep inside, a stark fear: What if this isn’t really happening? What if I merely went mad? What if I’m locked in a cell somewhere, in some hospital, maybe in Cairo? Locked in a cell, drugged to make me calm. Calm and ever so tractable.

Image of a disheveled young woman, strapped in a straitjacket, foam on her lips, lesbian hairdo growing out ragged, eyes wide, wide enough for the whites to show all the way around, staring and staring.

What if?

Just follow the ants.

o0o

Sing around the campfire. Then what? Join the Campfire Girls? Or, in my case, maybe the
Kampfeuer Mädchens
? Mädchenen? Hell. Kincaid smiled to herself in the darkness, watching the flames of their little cooking fire, small red and green flames playing with one another as robot Amaterasu took things out of the packs she and... Genda? The packs she and Genda’d stashed back at the entrance to the nearest ravine.