The Transmigration of Souls (26 page)

Hmh. “How do
you
know I’m a man?”

“Fair enough.”

“OK.” He put his thumbs under the waistband of his briefs and slid his shorts off over his rump, let that enormous schlong unfurl and lie full length, flaccid on the floor of the drive bay.

One long look, then she said, “What the Hell is that in your pubic hair?
Lips
?”

Brucie Big-Dick looked down and grinned. Opened that extra mouth and extruded his extra tongue, wiggled it around, licked his crotchlips, moistening them. “The first new girlfriend I had after I bought the big dick thought this’d be a nice touch. Turns out she was right. I just have to be careful not to get it pinched between our pubic bones. You’ll like it, I think...”

Were those white eyes, somehow, brightening at the thought? Maybe she’d never met anyone with a decent erotic imagination before. She said, “If you had little eyes down there, it’d make a cute little face.”

He opened his other eyes, grinned from both his mouths, and made the crotchmouth whisper, “Well, I
do
like to watch...”

When she slid off her own shorts, he had the decency to gape before he grinned. Those...
teeth
of hers were a nice touch, too. Yes indeed.

o0o

We are all animals. You may reject that animal self as a personal choice, but doing so does not make you more of a person, or less of an animal
. Dale Millikan’s words. When did he say that? Just to me, whispered, in the middle of the night, maybe whispered while his head was resting on my thigh, just before or after...

Or was it in one of those damned silly books and stories the scientists were always twitting him about? Sophomoric bullshit. Dr. Jessup said that, scaling Dale’s latest opus toward a trash bin. Pissed him off no end. I told him if he was going to say
asshole
so much, he’d need to cultivate a menacing accent.

Sitting on the sofa beside her, Ling Erhshan said, “I didn’t think that’d make you smile. The sketches are supposed to be of you, aren’t they?” Ling’s voice reticent, almost embarrassed. Not too embarrassed to keep on looking.

Kincaid had one of Millikan’s old notebooks, one of the ones the Arabs had stolen from the barracks on Mars-Plus,
from Dale’s room
, open in her lap. Flipping from page to page, reading bits and snatches of his familiar old words in that familiar green ink. Solid, accurate diagrams of gate control systems, Dale’s own speculations about what the gate system meant, where it’d come from, who the Scavengers were, the Colonials. Wild, unscientific guesses about the nature of the Space-Time Juggernaut.

Right now, it was open to a fairly detailed green ink sketch of a woman’s crotch. She glanced over at Ling. Right. Looking at the crotch, not at me, just the way you’d expect any man with the correct gender-orientation to... Kincaid grunted, looking away, exasperated.

More pages turned, more diagrams, more green words. Dale Millikan always scribbling in his notebooks, pen and paper in hand, hardly ever using the palmtop he’d been assigned. Not
real
, you see. Not real at all.

“What was he like?”

Kincaid looked at Ling, at the honest curiosity in his eyes. What was he like? What’s anyone like, when you fall in love? As long as you love them, the sun never sets. When you stop loving them, it shines elsewhere. But what about when you lose them? What about when they go away and love someone else? What about when they die and leave you behind? Sensible people learn to put those things aside. You’re supposed to shrug and say, Life goes on...

She shrugged and said, “Overweight. Middle-aged. Clever. Fun to be with. A surly bastard, sometimes.” No. You can see that’s not what he meant.

Ling said, “I read some of his books when I was a child. Part of the reason, maybe, why I’m here.”

“Which ones?”

“Well.” Eyes far away, searching his childhood, flipping the pages of those lost books again and again. “
Moon Man
, principally.”

Kincaid snorted. “I never liked that one. The women in it were just whores. Mattresses for the men.”

Ling felt a slight breathlessness. A whore? Gothic Princess Valetta? Remembered image of Dorian Haldane, middle-aged white male American soldier, stealing Princess Valetta from the mansion of her Kalksis lord, stealing her, taking her away to the mountains. Princess Valetta so passive, so serene, lying naked upon the lush Lunar grasses, purple grasses, mauve grasses under a dark mulberry sky, sprawled just
so
, while soldier Haldane stared at her nakedness, stared in surrogate for the readers.

Princess Valetta lying just
so
while Haldane and the readers fucked her. I used to read that scene and masturbate. Ling suddenly realized he was smiling. “Well,” he said, “I can... imagine, I suppose, why you might feel that way.”

Kincaid snorted again. “No you can’t.”

Ling Erhshan said, “Perhaps not. I had a girlfriend once who was an avid reader of English Romance novels. I tried to read a few of them once.”

o0o

Clean underwear is a many-splendored thing. Not something you give much thought to, ordinarily; but, like regular sex, something you really miss when you haven’t got it.

Subaïda Rahman sat alone in
Baka-no-Koto
’s ventral gun turret, watching the stars’ silent float, imagining all the worlds out among those silent jewels, imagining herself among them. Worlds of the future in all the stories, worlds of humanity, thousands of worlds scattered all down one long galactic arm; worlds of non-humanity, millions, billions, trillions of worlds, filling up an entire universe of light.

And, yet, here I sit, happiest of all because I’ve got clean panties to wear. That made her smile, looking out at the stars.

Four days to go. Can’t get there soon enough for me. Enough of this. Little cubbies and hiding places not enough anymore, time hanging on all their hands, putting them back in each other’s laps once again. Hard to avoid people, even when you hide. Even when they hide.

Hard to avoid sulking Inbar’s shadowy eyes, watching you, making you remember him coming to you in the night, once again and... Hard to avoid things you never thought you’d do. Slinking about the almost-dark ship in the middle of that “night,” starlight flooding in here and there, making shadows, shadows in which to lurk.

The door irised open and there was a shadow out in the corridor. Shadow just standing there, looking in at her. Alireza’s voice said, “May I come in?”

She felt the urge to say no, to tell him, Just go away. But... “Of course. Come in.”

He came through the door, which closed itself behind him, slid down the curve of the far wall, positioning himself in the little space beyond the gun control console. Not looking at her. Looking out through the transparent. Eyes on the stars. Hers stars.

I feel like he’s... taking something from me. Silly. This has become my space. That view... an integral part of this space.

He said, “You seem upset, Rahman. Subaïda. Is there something...”

Ah yes. The good military commander looks out for the psychological well being of his troops. But he called me by my first name. Not a good sign. Not a good sign at all. “Nothing important. I’m having a little difficulty with the long confinement. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

His eyes were bright, liquid looking, shining in reflected starlight. “It’s hard, isn’t it? If this... if
this
hadn’t happened, we’d’ve been home a week ago.”

A week ago. Does that mean anything now? Where are we now? When? Now? Lost in a place that isn’t even
real
...

He said, “I’ve had a talk with Inbar. He really is sorry he bothered you. This kind of... close confinement is hard on a man.”

But not on a woman, you silly bastard? She said, “I really wish you hadn’t...” Now, when I see him, see him looking at me, I can’t pretend it didn’t happen.

He glanced at her, then back out into the sea of suns. He said, “This is your fertile period now, isn’t it?”

Rahman felt her insides clench, tension, anger welling up, threatening to spill over into the confined space of the turret. What
right
do you have to invade my...

He turned and looked at her, stared, something on his face, almost a supercilious grin. “When I was sitting in the command chair this evening, you came and stood next to me for just a few minutes, with your hips about on level with my face...”

Subaïda Rahman gritting her teeth, almost ready to lash out...

Alireza smiled, and said, “For just a second, I imagined you were naked, that I could see your vulva right there, beckoning to me. I wanted to reach out and...”

“You filthy...”

He held up a hand, palm toward her. “You think I’m just taking a turn vying for the prize of your...
favors
, don’t you? You imagine me telling myself, the fat Jew wasn’t good enough for her, but
I
, a nobleman, military officer, man among men...”

“Colonel Alireza.” Her voice was sharp, very abrupt. Implicit
please stop
unspoken.

Suddenly he was looking out at the stars again, smile faded away to nothing at all. “I wish I could tell you I didn’t feel those things. I wish I didn’t feel them, for my soul’s sake. But the truth is...”

A feeling of dread, a feeling of horrid disappointment. Here it comes.

He said, “The truth is, I love my wife, my children, my home, the service, my country, the world. I love God. I have His Word to guide me. That’s enough to contain all the evil that lurks in every man’s heart.”

The anger continued to build, feeding on itself, confronted now by this
superior
bastard. But the angry words were contained.

He said, “Most of my friends, my close military friends, people I’ve lived with all my life, still don’t want to believe in the reality of human reproductive pheromones. It just seems so... dehumanizing? So out of tune with our culture, with our history. With life itself.”

An understandable truth. If a woman doesn’t want to regard herself as a dog in heat, would a thoughtful man want to see himself as part of a pack of slobbering hounds?
Kalb
. An insult among insults, insult with a long, filthy history. Humanity transcends. Without that transcendence, you are no more than a dog.

Alireza smiling at her again: “Their lack of belief doesn’t stop the pheromones from being real, from reaching out of a woman’s body and putting dirty thoughts in a man’s head.”

Rahman remembered a phrase from a hundred-fifty-year-old American sociology textbook she’d read as part of one of her early courses in the history of technology.

Blame the victim
.

He said, “They’re like atheists, in a way. They think if they don’t
believe
, then the reality will... go away. And yet they understand that our
faith
has nothing at all to do with the existence of God. You’d think intelligent people would be able to make that logical inference, wouldn’t you?”

You’d think that.

She remembered reading about early American attitudes toward the possibility of nuclear war. If we
talk
about it, you see, if we talk about it like it
can
happen, maybe it
will
happen...

An implicit belief in something like synchronicity. As if the effect could somehow invoke the cause. After a while, he left, leaving her to wonder why she hadn’t spoken up.

He’s not a bad man. A good man, a sound man, trying to do what he thinks is right. The rest of it’s in... in me. I have to accept that. People... all of us just people.

For a brief moment, a fantasy image welled up, unbidden, out of some intractable depth. What if he
had
come in, looking for... what if it’d been Alireza, also aware of her silly political pretense, instead of wretched Inbar, come to... proposition her in the night?

Image of herself, for just a moment, grappling with Alireza, the possible thrill of it a creeping buzz somewhere down below. Because it always was no more than just a pretense.

Image of sweaty grappling followed by a sudden, harrowing image of herself cooing over babies, a sudden, intense, horribly undeniable longing. A spark of feral understanding. Hormonally driven desire.

I remember somebody saying it, once upon a time. Was the speaker a man or a woman? I don’t remember. Just remember the notion suggested, that women are horny for babies precisely the same way men are horny for women. All I remember is how angry that idea made me.

No way, in this world, for me to be both a woman
and
a person.

Damn them.

o0o

Outside, the cargo gate was floating superimposed against the velvet black of deep space, no more than a collection of silvery loops and rings and squares of magic wire. No auras. No fields. No spectral surfaces. You could see the distant stars right through it.

Genda Hiroshige said, “When I arrived here, four hundred years ago, I arrived through one of these gates. Came sailing on through while darkness snapped at my heels...” Remember that image: stars falling from the sky, falling into the abyss, like bits of white rice paper fluttering through the night.

Ling Erhshan thought, We have all the pieces at our fingertips now. But we still don’t have any answers. We go through this gate and find... what? Yet another universe? A new world? Another skein, some thread or another? Why?

Amaterasu rising, walking away, going somewhere else in the little ship. Conscious of men’s eyes following her, focused on hip movement? She’s a robot, why should she care?

Genda said, “There’re old ruins down on the
Crimson Desert
set. The planet has been inhabited, according to the baseline script bible, for something like two million years. Terrestrial years, of course.” He glanced at Ling, looking for understanding, perhaps. “We’ve been following a common knowledge thread through these old worlds, out near the edge of what used to be the Parahuan Empire, before humans and Bimus got through with it.”