The Transmigration of Souls (37 page)

Nine. World Without End.

Cool, cool wind, soft wind, blowing on his face. And no pain at all. Ling Erhshan could feel soft bristles, like short blades of new-mown grass, making a delicate, welcome itch on the naked skin of his back, sensation stretching all the way down, across the softer skin of naked buttocks, down the length of thighs, of calves, round, bare heels resting in beds of stiff, dry grass.

Sunlight on my skin. Warm on my face, especially up by my cheekbones, bright light shining red through my eyelids. Sunlight hot on my chest, burning on my forearms, on the surface of my thighs, the insteps of my bare feet.

He opened his eyes, looking for the sun. Pale blue sky above, cloudless sky. Nothing else to be seen. No sun, though the tingle of ultraviolet light falling on him was no less intense. Where am I? So comfortable though. No will to move. If I move, the pain will come back.

He turned his left wrist, felt the sharp edges of the grass sliding across his palm. Palm of my imaginary left hand. No throb yet from the stump. The wind blew on him again, filling his nostrils with a faint earthy smell, the smell of rich soil, the tang of a well-tended garden, breeze freshening, raising the sensation of goosebumps. Blew cool on his genitals, focusing his awareness there. Moved his right hand. Put it on his flat stomach. Felt a distinct urge to start masturbating. Strange, I haven’t felt like...

Flat stomach. I haven’t had a flat stomach in fifteen years. Too much sedentary labor, not enough good exercise. I...

He sat up suddenly, feeling the smooth pull of long, sturdy abdominal muscles lift him off the ground, sat in the dry grass, looking down at his two whole hands, flat, sleek stomach with no sign of his... wound. No sign, even, of the little gallbladder surgery scar he’d worn for almost three decades. Familiar penis, though, resting in its little nest of hair. Slim young thighs, no sign of a big, fresh cut.

Feet. Those
are
my feet.

Crouching then, one knee resting on the dry grass, looking around, heart suddenly pounding in his chest. Where? The world stretched away in all directions, going out and out and out, growing blue-misty with distance, never coming to anything like a horizon line. Far, far away were tall, crisp, silvery mountains, shining like bright, bare rock in the sunlight, jagged, rising out of the haze.

No clouds anywhere, just blue-on-blue sky. Rolling blue-green hills, yellow-green plains and snatches of dark, dense green forest, and those bright, remote mountains. Are we still in Pellucidar, then? Hesperidia, I mean...

Pang of disappointment. Cast away, then, naked, on one more madcap world, when we thought we’d reached God’s doorstep? No noonday sun. No upcurving landscape. No Pellucidar. Nor even Hesperidia. Certainly not the Valley of the Portal, round dark and dismal Koro’mal’luma.

Standing now, still looking around. There was a big river, a big silver river winding back and forth only a few kilometers away. Big river of bends and loops, a chopped-off oxbow lake not far beyond. Standing now on a grassy hillside, not far from the crown of the hill, looking down the slope. People lying in the grass, people beginning to stir. Nearby, a small, slender, rather handsome young man was sitting up, blond head bowed. Seeming to... Well. Looks like he’s playing with himself. Remember that urge you had when you woke up?

The man looked up at him. Smiled. “Jesus. I paid a lot for that fucking thing.” Looked him up and down, smile broadening. “Hello, Ling. Got your arm back, I see.”

Ling looked down at his restored hand. What has happened to us? Looked back up at the attractive young man.

Brucie Big-Dick, of course. Except now he had a rather ordinary Caucasian penis, reddish, rather darker than the rest of his fair skin, surrounded by a downy clot of straw-colored hair. Not circumcised. Didn’t the Americans, like all savages, cut their male children at birth? Brucie the Technician stood up, dusting bits of dry grass off his bare backside.

A young couple sitting together, not far away, holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes. Laing and Jensen, still more or less the same, the woman still incredibly good looking, the man still muscular and heroic. But... different, somehow?

Passiphaë Laing said, “Why are we still here? Why haven’t we dissipated?”

Rhino Jensen, manly and stern, squinted up at the bright, sunless sky. “Maybe the Creator still has a script for our code to execute.”

Beyond them, Amanda Grey and Squire Edgar, standing, looking around, the woman with a look of panic in her eyes. “He’s... gone.” Who? Ardry Bright-Sky of course. Squire Edgar, still bald, though rather younger, slimmer than he had been, seemed to smile.

Ling found himself looking at the soft red hair of her mons, felt himself growing an erection. Some women, most women, no more than a swatch of hair. Many Chinese women, not even that, just bare abdominal skin, hardly a hint of... With this Amanda Grey, you could see the beginning of... things.

She was staring at him now, obviously angry. He turned away quickly, trying to calm down. You’re a man approaching
sixty
. Try to act like it. But, somehow, I don’t feel like... Yes. That flat stomach. You feel young again, don’t you? Heart in chest going thump-a-thump, like you’re going to live forever.

Lord Genda Hiroshige, naked young Oriental man. Looking, I suppose, not so different from me. Young oriental man kneeling over a young Oriental woman, obviously concerned. Young woman... frightened. Very frightened. Holding her breast, seeming to pull at it. Genda bending down, leaning between her small breasts, putting an ear to her sternum, listening intently. Astonishment. Astonishment on his face. Something impossible going on.

A plump young man with a rather large penis. The only circumcised penis in sight. Inbar? Of course. Whatever happened let him remain a Jew... Good looking young man he is, muscular, yet sleek with fat all the same, round-headed, slope-shouldered. One of those graceful, dancing fat men, whose fat is never a burden, physically or socially...

Facing a slim, foxy-looking young woman, naked young woman with long, lustrous brown hair and big brown eyes. Never saw her before. A stranger in our midst. But the two embraced, threw their arms around each other, man burying his face in her hair, lifting her off the ground.

Ling found himself admiring the woman’s full, muscular buttocks. Can’t seem to keep my eyes off these things, my mind full of thoughts about...

I know who the brown-eyed girl might be. Aarae would be her name.

Two more women, standing together, chatting quietly. Rahman, Subaïda Rahman. Unchanged. Sleek, well-exercised young woman, before and after. How does it feel to be... the same?

And the other brown-eyed, brown-haired girl, young, a bit muscular perhaps? By default, this must be Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid, late of the United States Marine Corps, gone the flowing golden hair, gone the molten silver eyes. She keeps looking down at herself. Reaching out to touch herself, hand on stomach, on brown-nippled breast, smoothing her bush of curly brown pubic hair. Hardly able to believe...

This is the woman her old lovers saw. This is the woman Dale Millikan lay with in the days before my grandfather was born. Disappointed at her transformation? No. Smiling now, whatever she was saying to Rahman. And those eyes. You can see into those eyes, so much better than into empty silver pools.

My, my. There she stands, watching me get another erection.

Ling Erhshan felt himself begin to blush, color suffusing right down onto his chest. Listened as the women began to laugh. Laughed back, a weak sort of sound round a weak sort of smile. “Well. Where do you think we are now? I don’t see a... Throne of God anywhere.”

Brucie said, “Right. If this God’s throne, he must have one Hell of a rear end.”

Misty blue infinity, stretching out forever and ever, in all directions.

Genda, sitting on the ground beside his... woman. Right. Something changed there. Something... Genda held out empty hands, hands shaped as if holding his Bimus combat computer, and said, “There was nothing in the records to indicate... this.” Records lost to them now along with, apparently, everything but their skins. A glance at Amaterasu, at Aarae, at Kincaid. All right. Not even that.

Genda said, “Each successive universe I visited was smaller than the one before. I went from real universes, infinite in scope and scale, to the circumscribed realities of the emulations. It was possible to know
everything
about
Crimson Desert
, to know, at the very least, everything that was set down about the Ohanaic audience track as well.”

Amanda Grey: “And Hesperidia, of course, was no more than a hole in an infinite void.”

Genda nodded slowly. “We didn’t have much time to examine God’s Machine, but it seemed... 
restricted
.”

Here though. All around them they could see nothing but endlessness. An empty blue sky overhead. Solid ground all around, stretching out and out until all the details were lost. There’s no horizon here, thought Ling. Sky and ground converge but... never come together. Like some fancy optical illusion deigned for an expensive virtual reality game. Cold thought. Yes. That is
more
than just possible. And yet...

He said, “Back in the real world. Back before we came... here, we believed in the possibility of Many Histories, of many worlds. Some of us thought the way between them led through the impossibly constricted throats  of Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridges.”

Brucie said, “Black holes, right?”

“Sort of. In any event, the throat of such a passage grows narrow, but then it grows larger again.”

Kincaid said, “So where would this passage lead? We’re already loose in the Multiverse.”

“This could be an illusion,” said Rahman. We’ve not seen anything yet, other than this little hilltop.”

Standing behind her, arms folded across a fat, hairy breast, bald Squire Edgar, eyes somehow in shadow, said, “Better that this be the end of everything, than merely some new beginning. If we are not at some sort of terminus, then, perhaps, we’re wandering on some... unending surface.”

Everything has a beginning and an end, thought Ling. To a being wandering the surface of a sphere, that might seem untrue, but it’s only a matter of perspective. A sphere begins and ends at its surface, everywhere at once.

o0o

Striding down the long hillside toward the broad silver ribbon of the river, Astrid Kincaid watched the others walk before her. Naked as proverbial jaybirds. Same couples together, holding hands just the way they always held hands before... before all this.

Inbar seems happy enough with his little fairy girl, the two of them walking pressed together, walking very clumsily, arms around each other’s waists. If the rest of us weren’t here, he’d have her on her back, on the ground, this instant. Wonder what’s really stopping them? The rest of us must seem... irrelevant.

And, of course, the same ones alone. Save, of course, for the fact that Brucie and Inbar have traded places. Brucie walking with Ling, the two of them easy in each other’s presence, two naked young men, slim, like Greek athletes, walking together and talking, one fair, the other dark. But he misses Tarantellula. I can see he does. I wonder what she would have become?

As they got closer to the riverside, things began to resolve. Things like fishing boats maybe, out on the river, moving beneath dabs of bright sale. Flat-bottomed boats, little barges, punts and rowboats dragged up on shore. Things like people moving around.

Well. Why shouldn’t there be people here? Wherever the Hell we are. I persist in wondering, but the urge to wonder fades. The world goes on and on and... like in real life, we never seem closer to our goals. Where they came down to the river’s edge, there was a bit of white-sand beach, a group of people gathered there, seeming to wait. All very ordinary people, naked people just like us, though the people out on the fishing boats wore clothing...

She heard Ling say to Bruce, “This reminds me a little bit of the Riverworld, you know?”

Brucie the Technician looking around. “Well. There’s a river, but...”

No enclosing mountains? This world, stretching away in all directions, never seemed to end. Ling said, “Not precisely, of course. But the scene at the opening of
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
?”

“I guess.”

Naked people before them, turning to look at them, eyes beginning to widen. Awfully familiar faces on those people...

“
TINGY-TING-TING
!
TINGY-TING-TING
!”

A spindly red thing came scuttling out of the crowd, running forward, clanging and clattering, threw itself on Rhino Jensen, almost knocking him to the ground, Rhino, wrapping his arms around the thing, going, “My God! Oh, my God
clangetyclangclangclang
...”

An alien racket, surprisingly out of place in this particular here and now, Passiphaë Laing standing back, hands on her naked hips, gaping at them, so obviously nonplused.

Fucking Christ.

Kincaid turned to look at the naked crowd clustered at the river bank. Started searching individual faces. No, you don’t expect him to be here. But the others. The others. How the Hell would I know them? How would they know me?

A pair of slim, hook-nosed, dark-eyed Arab boys stepped out of the crowd, walking hand-in-hand. One of them, the taller, thinner one, said, “Well. I never expected to see
any
of you again, much less...”

Inbar, arm around his fairygirl, whispered, “
Zeq
?” Disbelief.

Rahman was staring at the other Arab. “Hello, Colonel.”

“
Asalaam aleikum
,” he said.

Ling’s voice, barely audible: “Does this mean we’re all dead?”

Kincaid turned and looked at him, unwilling to answer. Beyond him, Brucie the Technician was standing still, brow furrowed, concentrating on the faces in the crowd. “She’s got to be here,” he whispered. “Got to be...”

When Kincaid looked back at the crowd, there was a thin, angular, coffee-colored girl, a girl who looked like she might me no more than fourteen years old, walking across the open beach sand between.