The Transmigration of Souls (34 page)

Still, he watched, wondering, while Aarae touched him and whispered to him and comforted him in vain.

o0o

Kincaid stood looking down on bandaged, unconscious Ling Erhshan, slowly putting away the components of the first-aid kit. Good enough. Just barely good enough.

Memory of Ling’s moans and babbling cries. Not prepared. Not prepared for this at all. I wonder if anyone ever is? Faint memory, raw nerves from the distant past, remembered wounds of her own.

Raving while we treated him, going on and on about the Plant Men of Barsoom, about how John Carter and Tars Tarkas were trapped, battling them in the Valley Dor... he still thought it was all a dream. Thought it was a dream until the teeth began to cut his flesh. Until he began to die.

Maybe everyone feels that way, until the last split second before death.

Or maybe they feel that way until dying is complete. All those old stories about near-death phenomena and out-of-body experiences. Just fantasies the brain makes to stave off recognition of its inevitable extinction. But then, we all wonder,
What if it’s true
? Oh, God, wouldn’t that be... wonderful?

Well, no. Maybe not.

Windrows of green flowers around them now, the Plant Men of Barsoom destroyed. Did they have near-death experiences as we exploded them away into petals and leaves?

Image of a spider’s life flashing before its eyes as the crushing shoe descends.

Who were they really? Warriors in the Eternal Battle? Angels out of Ahriman’s Hell? Does it matter? Why should the world’s motives be transparent to me?

Amanda Grey said, “Edgar, you told me the Guardians were no more.”

The bald man shrugged. “Ahriman,” he said, “is the Father of Lies.”

Kincaid thought,
Ahriman
? No, the Multiverse is the father of lies, if only because it makes all things possible.

o0o

The mountain towered above them, sheer, shattered rock faces reaching upward into the blue-glowing mist, reaching toward that slow-turning moon, magic castle invisible now, hidden by the soft flash of sporadic electrical discharge, by the slow-boiling mist. Ling Erhshan walked, walked as well as the others, walked in their midst, silent, holding onto his pain, holding it close, folding it deep into his heart, making it disappear.

They’d wanted to leave him behind, some of them, leave him with the ship, had been discussing it when he’d awoken to fresh panic, awoken from a horrible nightmare, sitting up, jerking hard, screaming with fear, then again, screaming with agony.

So long as he didn’t look, didn’t look and
see
the bloody wadding of bandage, didn’t see... So long as he didn’t look, he could still feel the fingers of his left hand, could feel the cool, damp air of the mountainside on his skin, could flex his fingers, feel the muscles and tendons of his forearm slide, just like always.

It feels, he realized, just like I have a broken elbow or something. But then he’d look. And see. And the pain would come back for just a moment, savage as ever. It’s not real pain. It’s fear. It’s horror. Imagine how I’d feel now, sitting on the ship, sipping my tea, waiting and wondering, looking out at all those silent green flowers. The pain would be unbearable.

Then Kincaid, saving him: We might not come back this way.

But, said Amanda Grey, gesturing at his stump, When we rescue Ardry Bright-Sky...

Ardry Bright-Sky
, said Squire Edgar, something very bitter in his voice.

They’d walked away from the ship, all together, torn and broken Ling Erhshan among them. It was a while before he’d put away enough of the pain to look at his comrades. To see little Brucie walking alone, eyes hard and dark, and look around, and see who was missing. He’d searched his memory and seen a fresh grave there.

So. The two Arab pilots, whose names I never learned, dying in their ship. Then Chang. Da Chai. Still lying, perhaps, in the Lunar dust. Then Ahmad Zeq, eaten by a dimetrodon under the Permian sunrise. Eaten. A sudden cold crawling. Then the little red-ant woman. Then Colonel Alireza, dead just when the adventure was truly begun. Now...

And, of course, all those others. The American soldiers whose fragments they’d seen outside the closed stargate. We killed them, didn’t we? The red-ants slain by the greens, when that ship was shot down. The ship we struck, when
Baka-no-Koto
came flaming through the last gate...

The nameless ones always die. The faceless ones die. The ones who are... more closed, more silent. They always die. Did I know anything, anything real about Alireza? No. His English was so poor, his character so... bland. Now this Tarantellula. Concealed from me, of course, by her monstrous form. No person there. No woman at all. Merely a nightmare demon, so tall, so black, with eyes so white, eyes devoid of feeling, of humanity.

Brucie, Brucie Big-Dick, walking along silently, hands in pockets, head down. Another monster there. Closed to me. Another... spear carrier.

And, of course... When he looked down at his arm, the phantom fingers disappeared, pain lancing toward his shoulder. He looked up at the mists again. Up where Ahriman’s castle lay hidden. Up where they’d find Ardry Bright-Sky, whoever he might be. And perhaps the gateway to God’s Machine.

Who am I now? What’s waiting for me up there on the misty mountain? Ahriman, the Dark Lord? Or is it only Sauron who awaits me? The Hobbits never got their arms bitten off, did they? Dorian Haldane was injured from time to time, injured badly, required to lie back and heal. Maybe Valetta waits me up there. Maybe she’s undressing for me even now, waiting for me to come and lie upon her and...

His stump throbbed softly, beating in time to his heart, breath quickening as the path before them steepened. Fafhrd. Fafhrd lost his hand. But Fafhrd wasn’t real. I am. I
am
real. Honest to God I am.

o0o

Standing at the edge of the precipice, Astrid Kincaid could look out over the whole of Koro’mal’luma’s valley, out across the Land of Awful Shadow and back into the eternal sunlight of Hesperidia. Seen from its central peak, the caldera spread out, vast, dark and forbidding.

As if it were... waiting for something? Someone? Me?

Am I central to the scheme of things, or only a bit player?

Cold comfort: I still live.

The mist surrounding the top of the mountain swirled overhead, their view of the moon overhead hazy, part of it invisible, hidden by thicker mist, perhaps by the mountain itself, the structure of the castle. Ahriman’s castle. Every now and again, remote thunder would stutter overhead, the sound of distant kettledrums, played with a brush.

Unnatural thunder. Hardly like thunder at all. Serving only to add to the menace of their surroundings. Remember Dale, sitting at his keyboard? One more story, written for one more paycheck. He didn’t like you looking over his shoulder like that. Always made him stop cold, fingers hanging uselessly in the air, waiting for me to leave.

I’m... working, he would say, gritty exasperation poorly concealed.

But... don’t you love me?

Nothing in return but a conflicted glare.

Thunder stuttering again, louder, more like real thunder.

Dale always talked about using the weather for stage-setting. Let the sun shine in. Raindrops falling on my head. Stormy weather. Cultural symbolism so universal it was beyond being trite.

Who wants to die on some lovely, sunshiny day?

How old was I when my grandfather died? Eleven? Twelve. Something like that. I remember he died not long after New Year’s Day, while I was in the sixth grade. Gray, gray weather, wintertime in Boston. Going into the church while the world filled up with cold mist. Like flakes of snow when we came back out, falling on my face, melting.

I let myself cry a little bit then. Cold snowflakes on my face, melting into the tears. My parents noticed. Noticed it was the first time I’d cried for him. Was it the first time I realized what a cold little girl they thought I was? Why were
they
so cold that they could talk about it in front of me, as if I wasn’t even there?

There was a herd of something moving across the open floor of the valley below, thousands of dark green specks moving together against the lighter, shadowed green of the grass. Why does the grass grow here? Light reflected in under the moon?

Beyond Koro’mal’luma, Hesperidia was a landscape of sunwashed mountains, of lovely bright plains, of silvery rivers and bright blue sea. A land of eternal summer, perhaps.

Ling was lying nearby, leaning his back against a dark boulder, cradling the ruin of one arm with his surviving hand, eyes shut. He seems so surprised by what happened. Caught up in his own set of dreams. But now he knows he’s not the hero of his own story.

Brucie the Technician sat beside Ling. They’d been talking earlier, the two of them talking in whispers. I listened, but I’ve already forgotten what they talked about. Personal stuff. Aimless wandering. Comforting each other, in a way. Comforted by the pointless friendship of men.

He’s lost her. Perhaps he loved her already.

I lost my soldier. I was responsible for Tarantellula. I let her volunteer for the mission, let her come along, even though I knew I had no intention of coming back. I was going out to find Dale Millikan. And I led her to her death.

Damn you, Dale. You made me love you, and now I can’t even remember your face!

She turned, intending to look back up at the mountain, intending to stare upward into the mist, looking for the shadow of the castle to come. Instead, she found herself staring into Amanda Grey’s eyes.

The woman said, “You’ve lost your way, haven’t you?”

Kincaid stared. Stared, and said, “Maybe I never knew where I was going.”

“You know what you’re leaving.”

Leaving? Yes. Leaving everything. All the pointless events of a pointless life, a century and a third that added up to nothing. She nodded. Gestured up at the mountain. “Let’s get going.”

A shadow of a smile on Amanda’s face. “Soldier on? It seems like the thing you do best.”

Above them, the mist darkened and the thunder grumbled, all of it full of portent. Some bastard, Kincaid thought, telling my story. Taking it away from me. Making it his own.

o0o

I am, thought Robert Bruce Tanner Davidson the Third, unprepared for this. No. I wasn’t prepared for any of it. No knowledge of how to react, of what to react to, no matter how many years I’d lived. Still smarting at the loss.

Visions of coupling with the black giant, of using that silly pornotool on her. Visions of coupling in the darkness, out under the stars, out among the worlds. She was there in America all along. There for me somewhere, waiting for me. If only I’d found her, we wouldn’t have come. If we’d found each other, we’d be there now, home, together, lying together on some California beach, listening to the surf, making love under the stars...

I don’t believe home is gone. Only that we’ve lost the way back.

Brief memory of a childhood home, somewhere in the Valley, under a dry, clear, sunshot sky. Playing with a little black and white dog. Was it a wire-haired terrier? I think so. Name. Inky, maybe? A long, long time ago. Remember how he used to leap through my hula hoop? Didn’t even ask for a reward, jumping, running, smiling his doggy smile.

Even people’s dogs were immortal in America. Inky just didn’t last long enough... Immortality. Jesus. She lost all that. All I lost was her. Try to remember. Try to remember you’ve lost a thousand friends. You were a dried old husk, the last of the lot, hanging on out of pure cussedness, when they came back from the Moon. Came back, and... and...

Your parents died old. Your first wife died in that car crash, way the Hell back in the 1990s. Second wife just got old and croaked. You lived on because you had nothing better to do.

Remembered images of their final night in Yttria, final night in a big, comfortable bed. Well, not so big and comfortable for her, complaining about the way her legs stuck out onto the floor. Image of that giant black beak of a mouth opening to engulf my made-up self, sucking on me until I was... what? Was I happy?

Image of myself snuggling down between her legs, nuzzling my face into folds of black leather, finding tender tissues, moister tissues, nibbling away on her until... Was she happy then? Were we happy? Maybe. Our truth at any rate.

Image of dead white eyes, featureless eyes, looking up at an empty heaven.

Now, the castle towered over them all. Waiting. Blue mist rose on all sides, blotting out the whole world, blotting out the moon above, hiding the shadowlands without, the bright-lit plains of Hesperidia beyond. Every now and again, violet light would flicker in the mist, thunder would grumble and fade away.

Squire Edgar behind them all, some little distance away, near the edge of the precipice, arguing in whispers with his knight-errant Amanda Grey. Trying to convince her of what? Turn back. Edgar grown increasingly surly. Angry about something. Angry at her? No. Just Angry.

They stood in front of a tall, tall wooden door, door of giant planks reaching upward to disappear into the mist, hundreds of meters above. Door set in a masonry wall of huge, irregular gray stones. Fitted stones. No mortar visible. Stones like blocks stolen from a million billion copies of Stonehenge. Stones from the Giants’ Dance.

Ling sitting, still silent, on the ground nearby, resting, not looking at the ruin of his arm. At least he’s eating now. Nibbling from his ration pack, eating dried meat, chewing bites from some flat, salty brown biscuits. Corn dodgers. Don’t remember where I heard the term. Little Blackie likes ‘em? Corn dodgers and Little Blackie. All I can remember...

Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid said, “All right. Let’s go.” Something heartening to her about being here. She’s in charge again. Closer to whatever it is she’s looking for, silver eyes looking at the door, measuring the meter-tall step of its lintel, the two-meter space between the lintel and the door.

They all started forward, not quite line abreast, some staying behind, others...