The Transmigration of Souls (31 page)

Brucie Big-Dick, perched on Tarantellula’s knee, said, “Weren’t Archangels the highest of all the angels?”

Quietly, Ling said, “No. They were the lowest Choir.”

Edgar was looking at him again, looking right into his head.

Amanda said, “The real Archangel Michael is long gone, long ago absorbed, body and soul, back into the Machine, gone where all the dead go.”

“Where,” said Edgar, “even dead spirits must ultimately go.”

She said, “This Michael is the chiefest of Prince Lucifer’s demons, cast in the image of Archangel Michael, imbued with the essence of some dead soul.”

Edgar said, “Some believe it is the spirit of a long-dead emperor, possibly even Harald Fairhair, who led us across Leda’s Land to freedom.”

“Demon.” Ling looked at Edgar, trying to look back through those dark, penetrating eyes.

Edgar smiled and said, “Crafted by the Machine, through the agency of Prince Lucifer, of Lord Ahriman, from the souls of dead men and woman, crafted to do their bidding.”

Robot Amaterasu said, “Demon is not the word I would use.”

Ling thought, Crafted to do someone’s bidding? No, I suppose you’d not call that a
demon
. Rather say demon to the crafter. Does Kincaid look uncomfortable? Perhaps I only imagine it. Men have never been able to read women’s faces well. And when they do, they only use the knowledge gleaned to... compel their will upon them...

Amanda said, “My Commission of Mastery, Order of the Silver Thread, has been to retrieve Ardry Bright-Sky from captivity.”

Rahman whispered, “Just another silly fairytale.”

Lord Genda said, “And where is he being held?”

Amanda pointed to the center of his computer screen, where a small moon hung over a round valley, at what was thought to be the south pole of Hesperidia. “There. In the Heart of Darkness, where Ahriman rules.”

Koro’mal’luma
again. The Land of Awful Shadow. Ahriman and the Heart of Darkness. Of course. For Prince Lucifer is, as he must be, the Bringer of Light. Though that light be the light of evil itself, shining into our hearts.

Rahman said, “Didn’t you say this Michael was crafted by Lucifer? Why would Lucifer carry your Prince Ardry away to his master’s enemy?”

Squire Edgar said, “The War of the Angels continues, if only through their surrogates.”

Suddenly, Ling said, “With God vanished and the Angels destroyed, you’d think some new agency would arise, spread itself through the Multiverse, and resume the work of Creation.”

Edgar seemed to freeze in place for a moment, staring at him out of those dark eyes, then he relaxed and smiled, “Yes. You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

o0o

They were dried beside the pool by ghostly servants bearing fluffy, soft white towels, people yawning and stretching, unselfconscious before one another. Used to the nakedness? Kincaid wondered. Or distracted from their prejudices and fears by... change. Surely that has come over us all.

People yawning, people led away by ghosts in their ones and twos, led away to stony, firelit, fire-warmed bedchambers and soft, spacious, feather-pillowed beds. Left alone, the ones who came alone.

Astrid Kincaid stood naked in front of a bronze-tinted mirror, looking at her gold-haired, silver-eyed self. Not the real me. Not the real me at all. I had brown eyes. Soft, dark brown eyes. I had brown hair. Light brown, a little bit wavy.

Memory of a girl, maybe sixteen, sweaty from her exercises, calisthenics done alone in her room, a long session with the rubber-band weight machine her mother deplored.

Those muscles will make you look like a man, Astrid. Then no man will want you...

Brown-eyed girl looking at herself in the mirror, flexing those sweaty muscles, then relaxing. Golden-eyed girl now, realizing she hardly remembered what she really wanted back then, or why she wanted it. Silence here, flickery fire moving shadows on the wall, making them dance. Silence, walls too thick to hear... Turning away from the mirror, stretching, trying to dismiss those odd feelings.

The closet door opened silently on well-oiled hinges, and there were, of course, clothes hanging in shadow. Fine clothes, local clothes. Sort of like men’s clothes, like the clothes Amanda Grey wore. She took down a soft, tan suede tunic and held it against her, walked back to the mirror.

Just my size. Are those little dimples I see beside my mouth? Silver-eyed, golden-haired girl, trying on a new dress. Everything else in the closet fit too, even those nice little white leather boots. And I’m not tired anymore...

o0o

Outside, the noonday sun stood high overhead, the same bright spark they’d known since coming here, yet the streets of Yttria seemed somehow cast in shadow, in darkness. The light, she realized, has the same quality that well-lit city streets have in the middle of the night.

Remember the streets of Manhattan? Lit bright as day as you walk along the well-populated sidewalks. You look up. The sky between the buildings is black, a sky without stars. Like the sky of the Moon in daylight. You look up. Here is the bright crescent Earth, there the blinding ball of the Sun. But the sky is black, a sky without stars.

That was what I wanted. That bright black sky. It’s what I worked so hard for, in the end. That sixteen year old girl knew the American Renaissance was coming, knew it was about to arrive. I pictured myself up there in the sky, up there astride a changed world. Pictured myself on the Moon. On Mars. Pictured myself out among the moons of Jupiter. Imagined myself standing amid the tarry snows of Titan, pictured myself in the border country of Iapetus, looking up at pale-gold Saturn...

They had enough astronaut girls.

Remember that bitter disappointment?

Remember, watching on TV, on a fine spring morning in 2026, when 57-year-old grandmother Daisy Kaminsky, M.D., Ph.D., put her spacesuited boot down on the dusty Moon and blathered about the second coming?

Soldier girl was good enough, in the end.

Behind her, a soft, deep male voice said, “Can’t sleep, eh?”

She turned and beheld Squire Edgar, dressed in fresh, clean leather clothes, leather cracked and wrinkled here and there, where his arms and legs would bend, where his big belly needed to flex. Edgar, bright eyed, looking as if he never needed to sleep.

She said, “Guess not.”

They started walking.

o0o

It was a tavern, like a tavern in any story, the sort of place where you might imagine Robin Hood gathering his archers so they could vow to help the people of the King. Full of life, fire boiling in a hearth at one end of a sawdust-floored greatroom, candles burning in wooden chandeliers, swinging overhead from ropes. You could just see old Robin putting his sword through one of the ropes, near where it was tied off to a wall cleat, wooden chandelier, candles and all, falling on the Sheriff’s clumsy men.

No bar, of course. Too modern a touch. Lots of beat-up wooden tables. When they were new, they’d probably been full of splinters. Too old now. Wood smoothed by centuries of rubbing hands, splinters long ago carried off in other people’s skin.

The damnedest looking “people” running the place, too. A man, you could see he was a man, though shrouded in a robe of sapphire light, tall, slim man, tending the meat that hung by the boiling fire, moving it this way and that, seeing that the flames licked it just right, taking the spits down, slicing up whole roasts into plates, sliding skewers of vegetables, roasted onions and potatoes and whatnot, down beside them.

 A very similar woman acting as tavernmaid, woman dressed in ruby mist, tapping gray stone steins full of foamy red beer and carrying them to the customers, bringing them the platters of food that her mate prepared. Mate? Surely, for they looked so
right
together. Surely, the way they would sometimes pause to look at each other...

Edgar tilted back his stein, drank, rubbed foam from his lips, looked at her. “Their names are Morgan Bluelight and Ariadne Starfire. Their sort are called werefolk, hereabouts.” He seems so familiar, this Squire Edgar, as if...

She said, “You mean like the Wolfman. Lon Cheney, all those old movies my parents used to watch when they couldn’t sleep at night.”

He shrugged, maybe rolled his eyes a bit. “Maybe that’s what it means in your world. Here... They stem from human stock, they begin as human beings, wherever they begin. In the olden days, when the War was fresh in everyone’s memory, when the Magic Order was new, some who aspired to become
magi
went bad, practiced the dark arts of
goëty
, were banished for their misdeeds.”

“Goëty?”

“Amateur sorcery. The precursor to necromancy. Hardly
ars magica
at all.” He said, “They say the werefolk are their descendants, shape changers, capable of some limited magic, relatively harmless magic. I suppose one could manifest as a wolf, if necessary.”

She watched them waiting at table, tending their tavern, commonplace save for the magic light that spun round their handsome bodies. Descendants of magicians, serving meat and beer. She said, “You seem... familiar to me, Edgar...” Just Edgar. Edgar No-Name.

Dark eyes looking at her now. Eyes that seemed to understand, just like those other eyes. He said, “What was his name?”

She felt a pang, almost of shame. Am I so easy to read? “Dale Millikan.”

No recognition in his eyes. Did I imagine it might be him, cast in some other guise? He’s dead. I know he’s dead. Consumed by the Angel of Death, long, long ago. This is just an old woman’s very silly dream. I came out here, back out among the stargates to... run away.

He said, “You don’t seem like the sort of woman to fall helplessly in love. Certainly not the sort to stay in love with a man whose... gone from your side.”

So much for understanding. So much for those dark, penetrating eyes that seemed able to look right into her head. “You don’t know much about women, do you?”

He shook his head, eyes filling with an almost mournful look. “I suppose not.”

You could see it then. This squire, following his lady love, who goes about her own business, assuming him to be merely... her follower. She said, “Who are you, really?”

He shifted uncomfortably on his bench, squeezing his big hands together, big, broad hands, with thick, blunt fingers. On one finger was a plain silver ring, some kind of writing on it. When she looked, leaning forward, she could see it said, in plain block letters,
I Will Not
. He twirled the ring, watching her watch it, and said, “Someone once told me my hands seemed better suited to wielding a sledge hammer than a typewriter.”

Another faint pang. I remember finding that old, broken typewriter in my grandmother’s attic. Such an incredibly complex machine...

He smiled. “Who am I, really? Just Edgar, squire to her ladyship Amanda Grey, Knight-Errant of the Silver Thread.”

Just that and nothing more? She gestured to the ring. “What’s that mean? ‘I will not.’“

He stared at it, frowning. Finally, he said, “The Priesthood of
Ordo Magica
keeps the magic at bay, of course. The real magic, the terrible magic, the magic imbued in God’s Machine, the magic which runs the world. This other magic...” A gesture at Morgan Bluelight, at Ariadne Starfire. “Children at play in the beach sand beside an ocean so vast they cannot conceive of its other side.”

“And the ring?”

“Our work holds the world in suspended animation, a suspended animation in which the Machine runs down, in which things fall apart. One day it will end, one day it must end. So we send out Agents of Change, agents to pave the way for that end. As I am imbued with infinite magic, so the ring reminds me that I must not... act.”

Infinite magic. She said, “You’re not from this world, are you?”

That long, penetrating stare. Then he took off the ring and carefully laid it on the table between them. “I know who you are, Astrid Kincaid.”

A third pang, from deep within her heart. “You know me? Then...”

Nothing in his eyes. Not even a hint.

She said, “I know you’re not Dale Millikan, though you seem so... similar. Tell me who you are. Affiliated with the Jug perhaps?” Was that what the pang was all about? Fear. Is this the way it ends, this calm-faced, bald-headed old man. How soon does the Angel burn overhead?

He sighed and shook his head. “So soon forgotten... No, I do not belong to the Space-Time Juggernaut, save in the sense that we may all be its creatures.”

“Do you even know who you are?”

He said, “No. Not any more. Once upon a time, perhaps...”

o0o

Omry Inbar lay on his back, naked atop the heavy, velvety covers of his medieval bed, thinking. Just thinking. Little candles, hanging in sconces from the cold, gray stone walls lit his corner of the room with a wan, warm yellow light, candle flames steady, casting dim, diffuse shadows into the corners of the room. The fire, already low when he came here, was down to crackling red coals now, little snakes of red light showing through masses of black ash.

The light from the noonday sun without was effectively erased by the thick, heavy brown drapes that covered the room’s two narrow windows, but tiny slivers of pale white still glowed at the edges. Looking, he realized, almost the way the incandescent street lighting of big Earth cities looked, when you tried to sleep at night in some hotel, far away from home.

Thinking. Too many years spent away from home? And where is home now? Is it really lost? Or is this all just a dream? Too many wandering thoughts, too many lost-soul thoughts, when I should be dazzled by the wonder of all this. Look! Where am I now? In some splendid, magic, faraway, impossible world! In some cosmos where... everything is possible. Someplace no one ever imagined. Where am I now...

Lying alone in bed, naked; lying alone on my back with this same pointless erection that’s manifested itself over and over again, since I was a boy.

Thinking about all the women I’ve stuck it in?

No, that would be too pleasant a pastime. Too rewarding.

No, thinking about how I lay in the bushes of this absurd inside-out world and stared at the sky and remembered some beloved clutch of ladylike genitalia or another, and jerked off. Jerked off while people hid in the shrubbery and watched and waited for me to come...