The Transmigration of Souls (42 page)

And a naked woman stepping forward, snapping a salute that made her breasts jiggle. “Astrid Kincaid. Sergeant-Major, USMC.”

The amused look deepened. “Maybe you’d better wait on a uniform before... ah. Well. Welcome home, Sergeant-Major.” A long look around. “All ten of you Americans?”

A shadow falling over them, perhaps? Ling said, “Not exactly.”

Bald head cocked to one side. “Hm. Chinese? Well. We’ll get things straightened out. We’ve made... plenty of exceptions to the Law of the Return.” Then looking around again. Rahman and Inbar, clearly not Caucasians, but then, America was one of those places where...

This Edgar with a curious look in his eye, stepping forward, stepping up to Squire Edgar, of course. “By damn, you could almost be my twin brother...” Reaching out with his hand, reaching out to touch a bemused Squire. Alarm in his eyes. Bigger alarm still in Amanda Grey’s eyes...

BAM
.

The two of them, Edgar and Edgar, embedded in a storm of silver feathers, feathers embedded in a nimbus of shimmering blue light. Feathers falling, falling, cloud of feathers and light seeming to implode, a single figure forming out of the swirling cloud, last few feathers falling to the ground like bits of exploded mylar balloon.

Knight-Errant Amanda Grey starting forward, voice shrill, a shocked scream: “
Edgar
!”

Only one figure standing there. One man in dusty brown flying leathers, standing in a little pile of balloon tatters, looking down at the thick pink fingers of his right hand, then looking at Amanda Grey. Hushed whisper: “I didn’t know such a thing was possible.”

Amanda on her knees now, at the edge of the circle of shards, also whispering: “Edgar?” Looking up at the other one, eyes full of horror.

The American Edgar, wide-eyed, said, “You folks have come a long way, haven’t you?”

A long way? Ling thought, Yes, we have...

And I always wondered what would happen, when and if, if and when, two doppelgängers, wandering the byways of the Multiverse, should meet each other. Apparently, an explosion of silver feathers and... look at this Edgar’s eyes. Is the other one in there? Or... gone? Where would he go? Back into the Multiverse, spun onto some other spacetime track, like a train routed onto a siding? Back to Hesperidia? 

Gone on ahead?

Ahead to where?

No answer yet.

“Well, said this Edgar, seemingly unaffected by what had happened. “Let’s get upstairs, get our asses out of here. We can chat later.”

o0o

From ten thousand meters, the landscape of the world without end was pale blue, everything tinted just so, endless river reflecting silver light, plains and forests and snow-capped mountains edged with a cyanotic tinge. And the sky, thought Ling Erhshan. The sky darkens, faster, perhaps, than the sky of home. Not yet black, but surely slipping away from blue in the direction of indigo.

Nothing up there. No sun, no moon, no stars, but... glimmerings. A hint that there was... something.

Just the two of them up here with Edgar and the crew, he and Kincaid, riding up front in the control gondola, while the others sat back in the passenger lounge, relaxing in their fresh, clean American clothes, stonewashed bluejeans, they were called, soft mock-toe loafers, open-collar, short-sleeve white shirts.

They were flying southwestwards, toward a great hazy mass of hill country, a rolling plateau, perhaps, back by a snowy mountain range. It’d look impressive, bigger than Tibet, mountains rising high above the hills, hills themselves lifted a thousand meters and more above the lowland plains, but... Beyond High America, you could still see those other mountains,
the
Mountains poor Smoking Mirror had called them, rising like a wall of iron.

 Poor Smoking Mirror, reduced to ashes and smoke. I wonder if he’s... reified by now? Just a day or two, Black Bear said. I would’ve liked to stay and watch the process. I imagine him coagulating out of thin air.

Something seem to glimmer above the ragged peaks of the iron-gray mountains, teasing him with its ephemeral presence, a spark of light, perhaps, there then gone, just as he tried to see it. Averted-vision technique? Faint glimmer, hard to catch, eyes hard to hold in position, airship, perhaps, rolling imperceptibly. Yes. Definitely something there. He pointed: “I keep thinking I see something like stars. I don’t know. Something we’d be able to see if the sky were completely dark.”

Edgar, foot resting on a brass rail mounted just under the window frame, smiled. “I’ve been where the sky is dark. You can see them pretty well then.”

Kincaid said, “See what?”

“Not exactly stars. Kind of, well... lights in the sky.”

Ling thought, The lights in the sky
are
stars, but... “Do you know what they are?” Or where, precisely, where
we
are?

Edgar shrugged, broad, rounded shoulders humping up almost imperceptibly. “My buddy Al has this theory that the World Without End is debris fallen out onto the event-horizon of the universe. He says the... sunlight, if you want to call it that, is just the backside of the anisotropic background radiation, um,
blueshifted
...”

Ling: “Blueshifted from
what
? Surely not from the original fireball.”

Edgar laughed. “Murray and Gerry say he’s nuts. They think it’s just the average light from all the luminous matter in the universe, across all time, falling down on us.” Another shrug. “When you get up on top of the mountains, when you can really see the, um, sky... I don’t know. Gerry claims each little sparkly patch of fog is a local-construct universe, each a Quantum Domain, each with its own little sub-Bang...”

Kincaid said, “And this place?”

“They’re all kind of agreed on the event-horizon crust theory. I’m not sure I believe any of it.”

No. Scientific mumbo-jumbo, conjured up by atheistic scientists to cover their theoretical asses. Ling said, “How do they think we all, ah, came to be here?”

A genuinely mirthful burst of laughter from Edgar. He said, “That’s where
I
come in, you know?” He stood erect, feet planted on the tinny deckplates, arms spread wide, taking in the patch of dark sky that showed under the curve of the airship’s hull. “I’m dead! My spirit’s set free! Take me away to Mars, God!”

Ling thought, Of course...

Edgar let his hands fall to his sides, frowning, eyes distant. “Sometimes I
swear
I remember getting up out of that damn bed, seeing my old carcass with the funny papers crumpled on top of it. Then again, the dying often have endorphin-induced fantasies. Bright light at the end of the birth canal and all that.”

Kincaid said, “So you believe in corporeal souls. Why are we
here
?”

Edgar said, “Gravity.”

“It’d take a long time for us to fall to the cosmic event horizon.”

Ling said, “It would take forever.”

Edgar said, “The boys keep having that argument. Lise and Marie got so sick of the whole business we had to declare a moratorium on theoretical discussions during council meetings. Me, I agree with Al. We know so little about the nature of time, whose to say if
forever
hasn’t skipped on by while we were, um, walking with the Lord?”

In the dream time, thought Ling. Ahead of them, the Plateau of the Amazulu, now known as High America, had grown huge, the airship starting to slope downward out of the dark sky, dark sky brightening again, turning back to blue, blue tinge of the landscape dissipating, ground an irregular patchwork of green and brown, the occasional twisting silver serpent a river, the ragged mirror surface of a lake.

And cities. There are cities down there. Here and there, small white cities of stone, brown cities apparently made of wood, colorful cities of buildings slathered in paint. War paint? A world without end. A world clearly made for adventure. He looked at Edgar, and thought, No surprise. No surprise at all.

As they’d flown away from that little Greek city between the two big bends of the River of No Return, no surprise, again, that Edgar here called it the Iss, they’d passed over a massive heard of buffalo, stampeding buffalo, raising a great cloud of brown dust, dust like a sandstorm coming hundreds of meters in the sky.

Down there, somewhere, were all the people that ever lived and died. All the people and... all the animals? Are the rats we killed as children in Shanghai down there somewhere? The spirits of rats? Ah. And the implications. Are there dinosaurs somewhere? What about the dimetrodon that killed Ahmad Zeq? Will he meet it again someday? Will it remember him as an unusually tasty meal?

Vision of Jensen’s red-ant wife, rushing out of the crowd by the River. Yes, another interesting implication about this impossible place. All the others species that ever lived, anywhere in the universe. Or, for that matter, anywhere in the Multiverse...

Wait. The red-ant woman wasn’t even real.

He said, “Why do we humans all fall together like this, together with our familiar animals and plants?” Interesting notion that. Even plants have souls.

Kincaid: “I thought about that too. Why aren’t we all mixed up with everything from everywhere?”

Edgar was laughing again. “You little boys and girls are going to be right at home here, you know?”

Ling said, “I’m fifty-five years old, I think. Hardly a boy now...” Not to mention Kincaid’s one-thirty...

An odd look from Edgar, who said, “So? I was seventy-five when I died. I guess I must be at least three hundred by now, yet...” A gesture down at his sleek, youthful form. “I
like
being a boy. I
like
being twenty-five forever.”

Twenty-five forever... “You weren’t bald when you were twenty-five.”

Edgar put a hand up to his pate, and said, “So. You read the Porges book, did you? That’s the usual one.” Nothing. He sighed. “Well, I guess I’ve just got a bald-headed spirit.”

Kincaid said, “What happened to the Squire?”

Asking again, thought Ling. They’d asked back down in the Agora, again on the plane, again on boarding the airship, Knight-Errant Amanda Grey seeming to hold off hysteria by some iron inner discipline, Edgar frowning, frowning and saying, I don’t know...

“I keep hoping you’ll give up on that one.”

Ling said, “It seemed like you and he were...
doppelgängers
.”

A narrow grin. “Ah, yes. That fatuous ‘going double’ theory. I suppose you think the two of us, having met, simply merged?”

Kincaid: “What would the alternative be, the fate of antiparticles?”

“Heh. That’s a good one. Blow one Hell of a crater in Great Achaea, wouldn’t it?”

Ling said, “If everything in the Multiverse is falling
here
, it seems like this sort of event would be common. By now, you must have met hundreds, even thousands of iterations of yourself...”

Deep shadow in his eyes. “You’re going to have to tell me more about your travels in this... Multiverse. The Unholy Trinity used to argue about that bit a lot, many histories, time shells, all that rubbish.” One big hand rubbing a heavy, rounded jaw. “I always preferred to work with Wormer. A practical man.”

Kincaid: “Wormer? That’s an odd name.”

“Shit.
Vairn-Hair
, all right?” He said, “We’ve been picking up Americans who’ve fallen here for the past two hundred years or so, since Otis and I decided to found High America and get busy trying to figure out what was what. I think maybe you folks don’t
belong
here, which is, quite possibly, the first real break we’ve ever gotten.”

“What about the Squire?”

“I don’t know where he went. He’s not inside me. And, no, it never happened before. You folks are the first indication we’ve had that there even
is
a Multiverse.”

o0o

 We all look the same, thought Subaïda Rahman, in our Yankee bluejeans and boys’ white dress shirts. That brought back a memory of some childhood time in Qahira, boys on their way to religious study classes maybe, in white linen pants and white linen shirts, a red fez on every little round head.

Like an antique time I remember, like ancient history. Things were changing fast in the UAR when I left. Veils gone in my grandmother’s time. Suited Lesbians walking the streets in my mother’s.
Businesswomen
, she used to call them, and the curl to her lip meant scorn.

I used to hear her talking with her friends. They used to imagine things. Imagine terrible things. Things that made them angry at their husbands.
Businesswomen
, my mother would say. I don’t believe they’re...
that
. Don’t believe they’re Lesbians, no. They’d sit and talk over coffee midway through the afternoon, their chores and shopping done, these old-fashioned women. Sit and talk about the
business
women, not really...
that
. They’d say. Mother and her friends imagining those suited-up, jumped-up women, pretending to work, in the offices with the men...

Under the desk
, that was the phrase my mother liked to use, when she sat talking with her friends. Strange that what I remember most about my mother is how she had so many friends. Women talking together. Women just... being together. And my own memories of the workplace, men and women alike. Always doing. Always doing something. Never the time, never the will, simply to
be
.

Outside, the airship began running down an invisible slope out of the dark blue sky, sky brightening, growing hazy perhaps, as they returned to a region where dust from the ground had risen on turbulent winds. Troposphere, if this place even has a troposphere.

They were above low, rolling hills now, hills sloping up to jagged, snowcapped mountains at the edge of the high plateau. High America, she reminded herself. Something going on down there. Little flashes of light. She got out of her chair and stepped up to one of the wide windows, windowpane sloping away from her so that, if she leaned forward, hands on the brass rail, there was a good view more or less straight down. Tiny figures. Flashes of light. Puffs of white smoke, smaller puffs of black smoke.