The Transmigration of Souls (27 page)

Kincaid said, “So where do you think the gate leads?” Implicit: anywhere worthwhile? How would you define
worthwhile
, under these circumstances?

Amaterasu came back, carrying something that looked like an oversized bronze briefcase, handed it over to Genda, resumed her seat.

“Well, well,” said Passiphaë Laing. “What’re you doing with a portable Bimus military computer?”

Genda said nothing, orienting the thing across his knees, opening the case to reveal oversized bronze keys, arrayed like a standard keyboard, embossed with miscellaneous, unrecognizable characters, a flat, blank screen...

Ling whispered, “So the Bimus have five-fingered hands, do they?”

Genda looked at him. Nodded. “Quite.” He snapped the lid back against the hinge-lock and the screen lit with a mellow chime, white light scrolling upward, colorful icons placing themselves one by one.

Brucie Big-Dick, sitting in Tarantellula’s lap, snickered. “Two thousand years in the ‘future’ and they still use those things? I haven’t seen a powerbook since I was... Hell, since I was middle-aged.”

Genda ignored him, tapping at this key and that, rolling the little brass trackball around with his thumb, going clickety-click on first this icon, then that one.

Flicker of light from outside. Colored mist swirling out of nowhere, swirling, filling the gate, blotting out the bright glitter of faraway suns. Staring out into space, out into a universe flooded by rainbows, Kincaid said, “Now, we go through this gate and emerge into the Multiverse. Off-skein, out-of-sweater, or whatever term you want to propose. I still do not see...”

Genda smiled at her. “If the Orovar records are correct, it will lead us straight to God’s Machine.”

Ling thought,
God’s Machine
? Lot’s of remember discussion, about the focus of Genda’s Quest. About the possible structure of the Multiverse. But no one’s used the term...

Genda smiled and laid his hands on the controls, tilting the ship, nudging it forward, until they fell through the gate and...

Blink
.

A new view out the control room “windows,” black space gone, stargate and rainbows, replaced by a blue-gray-green field, brilliant, violet-white spark just off center, obviously closer, closer to them than the... backdrop. Distant backdrop, but not infinitely distant. More like “purple mountains’ majesty.”

Ling Erhshan felt the couch vibrate under him, soft, suggestive movement, and heard Rhino Jensen mutter, “What the Hell...” Saw Laing put her hand on Kincaid’s shoulder and say, “Right through the gravity polarizer field?”

Genda seemed aghast, staring down at his instruments, then back up at the view, chattering something, a brief comment in Japanese. Hard shudder now, crockery breaking somewhere in the background, and Amaterasu’s arms became a blur, hands flying over the control console. Her own controls, Genda’s controls.

Outside, the world flared incandescent pink, brightening to white, tinged with purple-red. Kincaid said, “Plasma sheath...” Another hard shudder, something going
clunk
under the floor.

Genda’s voice, a whispered hiss: “This doesn’t make any sense at all. Four thousand kilometers from a planetary surface, under one-gee, but a dense atmosphere...”

Amaterasu looked, said, “In all directions,” kept her hands flying. The brilliant spark ahead of them approached fast, slid to one side, swept on by, going behind them, warping their trajectory, but the view ahead stayed more or less the same, detail on detail, patches of brown and green, silvery patterns like forked lightening, things that looked like broad river systems of white...

Those are mountain ranges I’m seeing. Seeing from far, far above. Old astronaut films... and my one brief moment of glory, looking down from
Ming Tian
as it swept around the world toward TLI. Mountains growing fast, pimpling up into 3-D reality.

Brucie, leaning forward, staring out at an approaching wall of
world
, said, “Good thing we weren’t moving fast relative to the gate.”

Ling looked into the control console, found a set of numbers that seemed to represent some kind of relative velocity. Numbers getting smaller as
Baka-no-Koto
rammed through air. We must look like some vast falling star...

Kincaid said, “What the Hell is that?” Pointing.

A tiny, silvery speck in the... sky? Hard to call it that. Sky is empty space that goes on forever, colored sometimes by scattered light. Here, there was ground everywhere you looked. Silvery thing growing larger:
Aircraft
. Sort of. Cigar-shaped hull with four long outriggers, cylindrical objects at the end of each strut jetting longish orange flames. Silvery thing growing larger, turning, turning, orange flames growing much longer as it turned. Trying to get out of our way.

It suddenly became huge, blotting out the view for a moment, and
Baka-no-Koto
shook, roaring like a gong from the collision. They went on, trailing bits of the whatever it was. In a small viewscreen by Genda’s elbow there was a view aft, a view of that ship, tumbling now, red fire coming out of it in odd directions, falling away, falling away trailing a plume of gray smoke. Sorry. Sorry, whoever you are.

A distant keening sound now, mournful wail from a thousand sorrowing tongues. A familiar sound, rising in pitch. Sound familiar from a thousand old movies. Sound few people live to remember having heard. Ling felt a small, soft regret start up as he realized it was the sound of the air planing across
Baka-no-Koto
’s hull as they fell and fell. Surely, this isn’t how it ends. It’s as if all our lives are a scripted tale. Hero never dies. Hero lives, prospers, gets the girl, lives and loves, while only the spear-carriers fall, only the villains are erased...

 Outside, the landscape grew, mountains rearing, forests passing swiftly underneath. Ling Erhshan watched, entranced as the black shadow of their ship, racing across this strange new world, became larger, keeping pace beneath them, growing from a tiny dot to a big black circle in the twinkling of an eye. Watched it grow vast, a pall of deepening regret, shadow swallowing the light outside, until the ship crashed.

Six. I Am the Only Being.

Opsimath
. One who begins learning late in life.

I learned a lot of words early in life. A lot more toward the end, when I began to understand it was the knowing itself I treasured, rather than the utility of knowledge.

Lots of words flooding out of my many minds now. Omnipotence, the quality of Almightiness, you see. Omniscience, strictly: infinite knowledge, hyperbolically: universal knowledge. In the there and then, I remember puzzling over that one. Did the man who wrote the Official Definition have some basis for thinking
infinite
was more all-encompassing that
universal
? I mean, the Universe is supposed to be
everything
. Maybe he thought there was a limited supply of things and ideas, somehow less than infinity... maybe he’d been listening to Georg Kantor.

Omnipresent? That’s me. Present in all places at the same time. That’s me. God is not ubiquitous, but omnipresent.

One of the bits of me forwarded its favorite word.
Omnify
. To make everything of; to account as all in all. To make universal. Yes, that was what had happened to me, all right.

 Bits and pieces and doppelgängers and iterations, all of them out there, all of them in here. At first, no more than a confused medley, a babble of voices that seemed like it would never settle down. Then, a pattern, imposing order on chaos. Maybe real, maybe no more than illusion. But it was something.

The metaphor of the multiprocessing machine. Turing would have understood. As well as anyone submerged in the technological realities of millennial America. Millennial Earth. The questions go out, the answers come back, as if from a black box. As if from a million black boxes. But the black boxes know of each other, know all about each other, at need. Compare notes, see who knows what and who can do what. Solve the question and pass the answer back on up the line.

Am I the Supreme Being and these my clockwork slaves? No. I am one with the many, all of them within me, with me... legions within? Then, has nothing changed? When I was human, there were legions within as well, all beyond reach, beyond knowing, and yet...

The growing order continues to crystallize, even now, in this place beyond the reach of time. Within me, a sense of being more than just a collective entity composed from all the iterations and branchings that had ever had any connection with the many lifetimes of Dale Millikan. If that was all, I’d be no more than the others, who account themselves Angels.

Somehow, within me now, everything. Across all time. All universes. I see the simultaneity of the Many Histories. And understand what I failed to understand when I was embedded in the flowing event-matrix.

Are all things possible? If something is
possible
, is it
real
, somewhere out in the infinite reaches of the Multiverse?

When I was a child, seven or eight perhaps, I found a game to play with myself. I’d be walking home, from somewhere, playtime with other children, baseball or enacting some cartoon show, on a fine summer’s day, afternoon sun crawling down the deep blue arc of the sky, late as usual, hurrying, fearing my parents’ wrath. I’d come to a fork in the road.

I would stand there, wasting time, mulling things over, wondering which way would be quickest, visualizing how angry my mother would be when I walked in late for dinner.

In the end, unable to pick, I would choose the path I hoped was the best, and would send forth my doppelgänger on the second-best choice. We knew from experience which paths were
good
you see, of the myriad ways home from a myriad starting points.

But not the perfect path home.

And I would walk. Walk along my chosen path. And, as I walked, I would visualize the doppelgänger, that other me, walking along his path. Shadow cast on the ground before him, just as my shadow was cast on the ground before me. Scrupulously visualizing his every footstep, so I could see just who would get home first.

Sometimes, I got there first. Sometimes he did. Sometimes, he waited for me on the steps, and we fused and went on in together. Sometimes, when I was particularly late, I imagined him going on in and avoiding my punishment.

Seemed only fair.

And, one day, walking home, shadow rolling across the tawny ground of burned-brown summer suburban lawns, it occurred to me I had mind to spare for a more sophisticated version of the game. I could, you see, imagine the doppelgänger walking along. Imagine him visualizing me. Imagine him scrupulously visualizing my every footstep so that...

On the path home then, stopping, stock-still, a bright eight-year-old, flooded with novelty. What if, I supposed, the doppelgänger was real, that I was merely the doppelgänger he imagined, a game conjured up to fill the long, boring minutes engaged in walking home to an unwanted supper?

When I got home, I posed the question to my mother. What if? She, fuming over the fact that dinner had been on the table already for twenty minutes, only threatened to take away my library card if I didn’t pull my head down out of the clouds and stop wasting my time on such foolishness.

I sat there and gagged down canned succotash and greasy hamburgers with friend onion, grease soaking into flattened white bread, and thought about it anyway. Went in my room and read a forbidden book. Went to sleep when the sky grew dark. Slept a sleep seemingly without dreams. Woke up in the morning to the stark realization that I
was
the doppelgänger now, that the me who’d lived my life up to now was gone, gone without a trace, other than my memory of his existence, evaporating away with those unremembered dreams.

Never told my parents I was a changeling. Nor any of my friends.

Lived my life. Died. Became God Almighty, you see. Looked up the doppelgänger whose reality I’d stolen. Felt a hard, grinding envy when I saw what life he’d lived.
My
life. The life I’d given up.

Awoke then to the true reality. I lived all of these lives. All of these men came here. Came here in the end. The truth? Where all things are possible, nothing is real. We all existed, and none of us.

And... why me? Why me in particular?

The others used to call that Bob’s Dilemma, in honor of his dismay at not being the One himself. After all, he’d spent his whole career working on the Big Questions, looking at the Why and How of things. Why not
him
?

Why not you? Because you said it was all a game. You insisted, all along that it was an exercise in economics, nothing more. You said,
I do it for money
.

A sneer. And you? Did you do it for something other than money?

A shrug. What choice did I have, after you and your ilk set things up that way?

Miss Mary had the answer, as usual. Stop bickering boys. This solves nothing. In the end, all the why’s have no answers. The Throne of God is no more than a void to be filled, deserted by its previous occupant. The Multiverse is a like one of the coin sorters banks used in my day. Coins roll down the slope and fall through holes. Why? Why this particular coin in this particular hole? Because it’s the right coin and the right hole. Everyone knows that.

Cold comfort.

Probabilistic comfort.

But I still don’t know where God came from in the first place, or where he went, or why.

I have a conjecture about the first question.

And the second?

Only a terrible fear that I will one day find out.

Seven. At the Earth’s Core.

Omry Inbar awoke, still embedded in a dream. I was lying in a soft bed, he remembered. We’d finished making love, Hiba and I. Lying there, snuggled in cotton sheets long ago washed soft. Conscious of my humidity, of our closeness. Comfortable with the softness of energy well spent. Hiba putting her hand on the side of my face, waiting, perhaps, for me to open my eyes and look into hers. Waiting too long, growing impatient. Waiting a while longer, then whispering, “Do you love me?”

I remember feeling a little pang of regret. They always ask. Always. Why do they have to be
told
? What is it about words, words, words... Opening my eyes, looking into her soft brown stare, soft, demanding stare. Tell her the truth. Tell her. Opening my mouth to speak, and... Lying of course. We always lie, just as they always ask. Do they want us to lie? No one knows. They say not. But... then they always ask the unanswerable questions that call forth the inevitable lies...

And then he opened his eyes on reality. Sudden shortness of breath, as if his heart had come to a stop. My God. The starship
Baka-no-Koto
was far enough away he could see all of it, part of it, at any rate, as a whole object. Huge disk sticking out of the ground at an angle, battered, broken, torn open here and there, insides spilled out on the ground, beyond it, that sky...

Eyes rising from the ship, to the expected horizon, then rising again. Then again. Sick, sinking sensation forming in his belly. In the distance, there were mountains. In the distance, was a sea. In the distance was landscape, rivers and grassland and darker green that must be forest, all of it striped and puffed by white cloud and blue shadow.

Mountains nearby, beyond them smaller mountains, colored blue by air, land beyond that, bluer still, bluer and bluer ‘til it was gone. As if I am sitting in the bottom of a bowl. A bowl with no rim. Overhead, a bright spark of sun, standing at high noon.

Something like the Moon, half-moon hanging huge over the non-horizon, improbable moon, something very much wrong with it. What? Long, hard stare. Lighted half pointing up, up at the noonday sun. And... There is pale, faded, faraway blue landscape beyond the moon.

Something wrong with me. Something wrong with my eyes. He put one hand to his head, a gentle touch, already aware of a hard, awakening ache, felt the rough cloth of an old-fashioned gauze bandage. A touch of wet, then there was a trace of red blood on his fingers.

That’s it. I’ve got a concussion. Just seeing a little bit wrong. In a minute, it’ll be right again. Blink. Blink. Still the same. In a minute, it’ll be... Oh, no it won’t. Come to your senses, Planetologist Inbar. Things haven’t been right in the world around you for a long, long time.

Other people around him now. Standing, sitting under the same vast, leafy tree that shaded him now, lying still on the ground. Kincaid bending over this still form, Amaterasu over that one. Over there, the angular black shape of Tarantellula, standing, little Brucie sitting by her feet, arms folded around his knees.

Not far away, the Chinaman, Ling Erhshan, standing by himself, hands on hips, looking up into the sky, looking at that faraway moon, whispering, as if to himself, in singsong Chinese. Inbar tried to move, to sit up, and felt pain go through his head like a thunderbolt. Coughed, almost choking, and said, “Where...”

Ling turned and looked down at him, face lit by a most unreasonable smile. Delight. Incredulity. Something else. Pleasure. Vast, vast pleasure. He said, “I think we’re in Pellucidar.”

Inbar lay back, letting the throb in his head subside. Lay back and frowned. “Pellucidar? And where is that?” No answer.

Images and more images. Ling, hale and hearty, standing, looking at the sky, yes, and me, lying here banged on the head, fighting double vision, but... Tarantellula, and Brucie Big-Dick, arm in arm now, still looking at that wonderful sky. And soldier Kincaid, and robot Amaterasu, bending over the fallen. Who?

Here sits Rhino Jensen, weeping, bereft, clutching red bits of this and that to his sob-wracked breast. Little globes and bits of red shell. Mangled antennae, fragments of spindly arm and leg, whole at the joints, shattered in the limb. Something like an eye here, a bouquet of stalky fingers clutched in one shaking hand. Was this the part that he loved best, or is it that one?

She looks, Inbar thought, like what’s left over from a crab feast.

Amaterasu now bending over Lord Genda Hiroshige, winding white bandage round his head like a fine white turban, murmuring to him, sweet robot nothings, hands on him. Look at that. Does a woman know to comfort a banged-up man with sexual overtures? But she’s not a woman.

Kincaid standing with her arm around Subaïda Rahman’s narrow shoulder, making the Arab woman’s relative smallness stand out. Arm around her, woman to woman. Women always comfort each other. But Rahman’s supposed to be a... and the American woman, much more like a man than any real...

Inbar resisted the urge to shake his head, anticipating yet another terrible splinter of pain. These are silly thoughts. Unreal. Unmotivated. You’ve just been banged over the head and...

Kincaid standing with her arm around Rahman’s shoulders, Rahman, head down, weeping into her hands, weeping silent tears. Injured? Apparently not. And lying at their feet...

Inbar sat up, slowly, very carefully, treating his head with the utmost care, slowly came to his feet, slowly walked over and stood beside the two women. At their feet, Colonel Sir Qamal ibn Aziz Alireza was a mangled ruin. Well. Not so mangled. Not really. Not like Zeq had been mangled. But a ruin, nonetheless. Dark eyes staring at the wonderful sky, blood drying on his brow. One arm bent at an improbable angle. One side of his chest shallow, dished in. Dark places on his uniform, stains from fluids liberated by destruction.

One of his feet was gone, boot and all, foot nowhere to be seen.

o0o

Hours later, when it was still noon, tiny sun blazing high overhead, they ate a somber meal of rations unpacked from the wrecked starship, sat in a little circle on soft, dry greenish-brown grass, not far from two fresh graves. Jensen ate nothing, sat a little distance away, looking away from the group, away from the graves, away from the ship, looking toward some distant mountains, tall mountains so tousled with clouds you could pretend a real horizon, nothing but air and endless space, lay beyond. Rahman sat with them, but ate little, The rest of them seemed... all right.

They sat, and listened, while Ling Erhshan bubbled over with delight, while he told them all about the inside-out world of Pellucidar, told them about David Innes and Abner Perry and the mechanical mole, all about the Mahars and Sagoths, about Ja the Mezop, about Jubal the Harsh One and Dian the Beautiful and...

At some point, Brucie Big-Dick said, “I read that shit when I was a kid. Did you ever wonder if Jubal Harshaw was a literary back-reference?”

A blank stare from Ling, impatient at the interruption.

Brucie said, “You know:
Stranger in a Strange Land
.”

Ling shrugged; no one else knew what they were talking about.

Passiphaë Laing shook her head dubiously. “This Pellucidar of yours only existed in an old book or two, Professor Ling. I don’t think it’s possible for us to actually be...”

He said, “You say that?
You
of all people?”

She sighed. “
Crimson Desert
has some sort of reality, the reality of a perfect simulation. The... software driver for the net can emulate reality absolutely.”

Ling felt a quick pang of impending disappointment. He said, “Then, you think we may still be within your... software universe?” I want this to be
real
. Still, it would be an easy explanation for why they’re still here; why they haven’t simply... vanished.

Brucie said, “There was a theory about that, once upon a time. The notion that the universe itself was God, I guess. The Omega Point.”

Kincaid said, “I remember. At some point in the future, beings possessed of an infinitely sophisticated technology would synthesize all knowledge. This synthesis would have the effect of emulating everyone who ever lived. And since there is no test which can distinguish a perfect emulation from the real thing, we would all be, in effect, resurrected to eternal life.”

Ling was looking at her now, puzzled. Always expecting her to be stupider than she turned out to be, seldom remembering what it might
mean
to be one-hundred-thirty-five years old. I remember a story about a cat, he thought. An elderly cat, whose sentimental master loved her so. Loved her so much that when he went to an alien world and bought immortality for himself, he paid for the cat as well. The cat lived on and on and on and on, gradually, oh-so-gradually, turning into a being who could think and reason and dream and... be. He said, “It was a theory that was only one universe deep. It was a theory that called for a closed universe. This is the Multiverse, isn’t that so?”

Laing only nodded.

He said, “And in the Multiverse, everything that
can
be,
is
.”

Lord Genda put his ration tray aside, stretched, sighed, put his arm around robot Amaterasu, nuzzled her gently, robot reflexes accommodating him perfectly. Finally, he said, “That is correct. But... this isn’t your Pellucidar, I’m afraid, no matter how much charm the idea may have.” He chuckled. “‘Falling into a book.’ What a wonderful phrase!”

“Not original to me, I’m afraid.”

Brucie said, “Where are we, then, if not in the remains of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s imagination?”

 Genda frowned, glanced at Amaterasu, shrugged.

Kincaid said, “It’s definitely some kind of inside-out world. The atmospheric haze makes it hard to judge what it’s shape might really be. Maybe a sphere. Maybe some kind of gigantic O’Neil cylinder? I can’t imagine how they’d arrange for a uniformly-dense atmosphere throughout the interior, though.” Wistful now. “When I was young, back at the beginning of the American Renaissance, we talked about building those, about building Glaser’s SPS stations. I used to imagine myself on the construction crew.”

Genda said, “It’d be nice if that was the case, but... Well.”

Amaterasu said, “Instrument readings from
Baka-no-Koto
suggest that this is a vacuole some 11,000 kilometers across in a space composed of solid matter, to infinite distance and, ultimately, infinite density. There may be other vacuoles. Our technosystems weren’t adequate to...”

Ling: “That’s precisely how the Mahars viewed their universe in
At the Earth’s Core
. Maybe...”

Rahman: “As if this were a tiny opening in DeSitter Space?”

“A universe whose initial rules were substantially different than the ones that led to our own,” said Amaterasu.

“A different
scarf
for sure, maybe a whole different sweater.” Kincaid stood, looking up into the sky, around at the landscape. “Doesn’t that mean we should be experiencing infinite gravity, then?”

Ling thought, Peaks and valleys. Places where she knows so much, other places where she knows so little.

Rahman smiled, and said, “Well, no. The laws of physics require that this space be under zero gee at all loci.”

Laing said, “
Our
laws of physics...”

Ling: “It would be hard to explain away all these anomalies with any theory that did not require something like a fictional reality.”

Lord Genda: “Perhaps all we can do is ask the Multiverse who makes up its rules.” Facetiously said, but...

Kincaid said, “I’m afraid we’re about to find out.”

Ling thought, Afraid, but... yes. I can almost see her thoughts now: Looking forward to it. If all things are possible, you
are
out here. Somewhere. Waiting for me.

o0o

The passage of time, as the old story foretold, was difficult to judge without an objective marker, such as a moving sun, but there were other objective markers. Genda worked in the ship, joined by Amaterasu, by Laing, even by Jensen, who wanted only to stare at his wife’s grave until Laing insisted, tone contemptuous, that he snap out of it and help with the necessary work.

Then it was the four of them, moving in and out of the wrecked ship, salvaging gear, rescuing what could be rescued, what needed to be rescued. Image of Passiphaë Laing looking up at the crashed flying saucer, hands on hips: “Well.
My
ship was wrecked because that’s what was in the damned script...”

Genda got his anomalous Bimus portable computer out, seemed glad that it still worked, working through its memory registers, running all sorts of incomprehensible, pointless-looking software, muttering to himself, muttering to Amaterasu, who waited by his side, acting only when she needed to act.

“... this
is
the right world. I know it is. The final gate is here somewhere.” Odd little maps, like exploded diagrams, like complex collections of interacting canoe-shapes, spread themselves across the screen, images not quite in three-dee.

Brucie, looking over his shoulder: “We had better displays than this by the year 2000...”

Amaterasu said, “I lived on your thread more than a century later. I can’t imagine how I wound up on the
Crimson Desert
audience track fifteen centuries after that, where Genda found me...”

Genda leaned forward, jabbing his finger at a feature on the bright gray display: “There. This place is called
Koro’mal’luma
. That’s where we need to go”

Kincaid said, “And all this is from records you found on an imaginary planet in an imaginary universe?” Shaking her head slowly. I
know
how the Multiverse works, sort of, know from my own old experience, from being out here before. Know it from Scavenger and Colonial records I researched, sitting home alone for year after empty year. Still...

Genda said, “Everywhere I’ve been in the Multiverse, during the last four hundred subjective years of my life, I’ve found clues. Clues based on debris that’s accumulated since the moment of Creation.”